Metaphysics is the term proposed by Professor charles Richet for the phenomena and experiments of psychical research. Richet suggested the term in 1905, when he was elected President of the Society for Psychical Research. Meta means “higher” or “beyond.” In his inaugural address, Richet said that metaphysics was “a science dealing with mechanical or psychological phenomena due to forces which seem to be intelligent, or to unknown powers, latent in human intelligence.” He divided it into objective and subjective metaphysics, the former dealing with external, material phenomena and the latter with internal, psychic, nonmaterial facts.
The term actually derives from a title posthumously given to a treatise written by Aristotle after he wrote Physics. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the word metaphysics then came to be used as a label for the sorts of topics dealt with in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, or rather, as these topics are very heterogeneous, for the topics in it which have seemed most important.” Whatever the historical origin of the term, metaphysics has come to have the connotation of some sort of antithesis between physical and non-physical exploration.
Although metaphysics is a generally accepted term, in Germany the word “parapsychic” is used more often, with metaphysics applied to those phenomena proved supernormal in character. The term parapsychic was suggested by Emil Boirac, rector of Dijon Academy and noted French psychical researcher.
Bletzer says that metaphysics is “a philosophical doctrine that all things are a part of one main source (intelligence and energy), and that each thing, animate or inanimate, should be respected for its particular form of this one main source.”
Sources:
(1) The philosophical “science” that deals with the supersensible principles of being. The term “metaphysics” is an invented one. In his classification of the works of Aristotle, the Alexandrian librarian Andronicus of Rhodes (first century B.C.) entitled Aristotle’s book on the first kinds of being Meta ta physika (“subsequent to physics”). Aristotle himself referred to the science set forth in these books as first philosophy, theology, or simply wisdom. In contemporary Western bourgeois philosophy, metaphysics is often synonymous with philosophy.
(2) The philosophical method opposite to dialectics and based on a quantitative understanding of development that rejects self-development.
The second of the two definitions of metaphysics proceeded historically from the first. Originally the principal philosophical science of the source of all being, metaphysics was reinterpreted by 17th-century mechanistic natural science as a general antidialectical method. This reinterpretation brought with it a negative attitude toward metaphysics as a speculative philosophy to which the method of the exact sciences (mechanics and mathematics) was opposed as a truly scientific method. G. Hegel was the first to interpret metaphysics idealistically, as a method of thinking opposed to dialectics. K. Marx, F. Engels, and V. I. Lenin demonstrated the scientific groundlessness of the metaphysical method of thinking. It was within Marxist philosophy that the above meaning of “metaphysics” became firmly established.