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Nicolas Camille Flammarion : Skeptics And Characteristics

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There are many skeptics and believers of psychics and the powers they possess. According to Cambridge Dictionary, a psychic is “a person believed to have abilities, especially involving a knowledge of the future, that cannot be explained by modern science”(Cambridge University Press 2017). The word psychic is derived from the Greek word ‘psychikos’ meaning pertaining to the soul and also refers to the word, ‘psyche’ meaning the human mind. The word, psychic, is founded on a bit of history and stories from Greek mythology and is still present in today’s culture.
There’s two possible people that coined the term psychic. It is believed that the term could have been created by either astrologer and spiritualist, Camille Flammarion or chemist, William Crookes. Nicolas Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer born in the mid 1800’s. Flammarion was exposed to two significant movements, the concepts by Darwin and Lamarck, and was here during a time when spiritism was becoming extremely popular. He was believed to be “obsessed by life after death, and on other worlds, and [who] seemed to see no distinction between the two” (Herrick). Flammarion attempted to approach spiritism from a scientific viewpoint. Flammarion felt that psychic was a great term to describe the abilities present within clairvoyance as they have the ability to see into the human soul. In other words, to be psychic was to see the story of the human soul and it’s long path to perfection, and that

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