'scuse me if I butt in -- I admired the way in which sociology would have us interpret Crowley's "Scientific Illuminism" in terms of "previously discredited" Theosophical dogma. However, I think we need to be careful to avoid using the same broad brush in discussions here.
Crowley's "science" would have the experimenter experiment on himself, which poses a verifiability problem. However, the justification for the untold experimental error by the subject-object in the course of its own experiments on itself is, in fact, the very thing about which it hypothesizes: samadhi, which is (according to the dry description) the uniting of subject and object. In other words, there is no other way of doing it. The contention that Scientific Illuminism is incapable of classification under a 17thC empiricist heading is largely due to misunderstanding of this and of the question of the A.'.A.'. grade tasks and examinations, which are independently moderated and which do provide a framework for verifiability (key to which is replicability).
Once we get over the subject-object problem, it becomes a matter of specific method. In this regard, Crowley is well ahead of his time, suggesting the diarization of results even when doing practices like dharana. It's not some quackery we need to be ashamed of -- it's science at its most practical and, therefore, paradoxical. In other words, Crowley's science is at an extreme end of which parapsychological research is somewhere near the middle. Crowley used to say that cavillation is down to laziness: after all, it's not as though one could be building a machine to answer these questions of the human soul for us; but one can go to work on the machine one has.
