Quotes:Cox, Edward William

Zirkoff, Boris

Cox, Edward William. English Serjeant-at-Law, b. at Taunton, 1809; d. November 24, 1879. Eldest son of Wm. Charles Cox, manufacturer at Mill Hill, Middlesex, and Harriet, daughter of William Upcott of Exeter. Educated at the college school of his native town; called to the bar at the Middle Temple, May 5, 1843, but practiced little as a barrister. Recorder of Helston and Falmouth, 1857-68, and recorder of Portsmouth from the latter date to his death; chairman of the second court of Middlesex sessions, from 1870 to the end of his life. Established the Law Times, April 8, 1843, to which he thereafter devoted the greater part of his time. Became proprietor of The Queen, a Lady’s Newspaper, started in 1861, and later established a journal known as Exchange and Mart. Issued several other papers, and was the author of a large number of legal works, the most important of which, The Law and Practice of Joint-Stock Companies, ran to six editions.

Cox married first, in 1836, Sophia, daughter of William Harris, surgeon in the royal artillery; and later, 1844, Rosalinda Alicia, daughter of J. S. M. Fonblanque.

On February 22, 1875, Cox founded in London the Psychological Society of Great Britain, for the systematic investigation of mediumistic and related phenomena, which were included under the term “psychological.” Its membership included W. Stainton Moses, Walter H. Coffin, C. C. Massey, Hensleigh Wedgwood, all of whom later served on the first Council of the Society for Psychical Research. When Cox died, his Society was dissolved, Dec. 31, 1879. Members of this body of “rationalists” ascribed the phenomena of the seance-room to unconscious action of the normal faculties of the medium, not to the work of the spirits of the dead. Cox, well known as a leading English investigator of these phenomena before founding his Society, suggested the term “Psychic Force” to designate the origin of the mediumistic and related phenomena. He regarded spirit and matter as basically one, with interchange from one to the other; and the soul as a composition whose substance “is vastly more refined than the thinnest gas.” The Psychic Force was the faculty of the soul which is the effective agent of all mental and physical spiritualistic manifestations.

In the interest of his Society, Cox published several treatises of originality and vigor, such as: What Am I? (1874). - The Mechanism of Man (1876).-Spiritualism Scientifically Examined; etc., a booklet issued in 1872.

Together with A. R. Wallace, Chas. Bradlaugh, Dr. James Edmunds, Cox had been a member of the Committee deputed by the London Dialectical Society to investigate the phenomena of Spiritualism in January, 1869. The work of Cox and of his Society represented a reaction against the prevailing passive acceptance by believers of the notion that spirits of the dead were the prime agents in the phenomena.

(Sources: Times, Nov. 26, 1879, p. 8; Law Times, Nov. 29, 1879, pp. 73, 88; Illustrated London News, March 5, 1859, p. 221; and Dec. 6, 1879, pp. 529, 530 (with portrait); S. C. Hall’s Retrospect of a Long Life, 1883, II, 121-26; Hatton’s journalistic London, 1882, pp. 208-11; Proceedings, Psychological Society, 1875-79.)

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 1, p. 454

Cox, Edward William (1809-79). *The Mechanism of Man: an Answer to the Question: What Am I? London, 1876; 3rd ed., 1879. Vide Vol. I, pp. 453-54. of present Series for biogr. sketch.

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 2, p. 526