The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [111]
The debacle had done nothing for the reputation of psychical research in the United States. Donations had dropped, and James was now paying Hodgson’s salary out of his own pocket; so far it had cost him $300. “I fear the Eusapia business may prove a blow to our prosperity for a while,” James told Sidgwick, “although Hodgson’s withers are unwrung.”
The lesson of the Palladino affair—the only lesson agreed upon by the investigators, anyway—was that the Italian medium possessed a genuine gift for causing trouble.
“THE PRESIDENCY OF the Society for Psychical Research resembles a mouse trap.”
So began William James’s farewell address, at the end of 1895, after two years of transatlantic presidency. He was gladly turning the mousetrap over to William Crookes who had accepted in advance. A good decade of solid scientific work had restored Crookes’s sense of invincible self-confidence, and his attitude toward the importance of psychical research.
In recent years, Crookes had invented the radiometer, to measure particles in light; he would later invent the spintharoscope, which counted the alpha rays emitted by radium. He’d continued refining his Crookes tubes as well; they would prove useful not only in Thomson’s experiments with electrons but also in the study of Roentgen rays (later to be known as X-rays).
Crookes’s virtuosity with instruments kept him constantly in demand; most recently he’d collaborated with Lord Rayleigh, investigating a mysterious element in the atmosphere. Rayleigh’s longtime interest in atmospheric studies had led to the isolation of the gaseous element that Rayleigh named argon, from the Greek word argos, “idle.” Argon was a passive kind of gas, basically inert, which made it hard to tease out of the frothing chemical soup around it. But Crookes had done a spectrographic analysis that caused argon to glow like fire against its background; he’d labeled more than 200 lines of light associated with the gas. For his contributions to science, Queen Victoria would confer a knighthood on Crookes in 1897.
With his reputation for science and sanity more than restored, Crookes now chose to declare that he still believed in the supernatural. He stood by his earlier investigations of D. D. Home, he said, and he stood by his convictions. In accepting the presidency, he had only one new goal. He wanted to convince his fellow scientists to try for a little more humility, to let go of their “too hasty assumption that we know more about the universe than we can possibly do.”
William James also spoke of the need for humility in his address-but in psychical research itself. While his colleagues had definitely made progress in establishing telepathy and crisis apparitions, they had yet to find a mechanism that would explain them, that modus transferendi that Sidgwick longed to discover.
Their real accomplishment, he thought, was to establish psychical research as a field whose questions merited answers. That success came mainly through the steady work of the British society and its building of theoretical connections between telepathy and apparitions; and, he thought, the work of Richard Hodgson and others, including himself, in doing a case analysis of Leonora Piper. Through that sharp focus on mediumistic powers, James thought they were learning lessons that might be applied in a much wider sense. “If you will let me use the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
In the case of admitting the supernatural, he continued, “My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction