– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
It is also important to note that the category of telepathy emerged from the data of dreams and mediums, and that it was originally a category of suspicion, that is to say, it was developed in order to refute the older objectivist model of spirits. In essence, it “reduced” the phenomena of spirit-communication to a human psychical potential theoretically present in everyone. It thus practiced a form of reductionism, but finally found the human nature to which the religious phenomena could be reduced to be ironically spiritlike. Which is not to say that all of the researchers rejected the spirit thesis. They did not. Some of them at least were forced to conclude that telepathic communications could occur either between two living minds, or, more rarely, between a departed spirit and a living one.
P. 81