The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [112]
Given such accomplishments, James then pondered, why had their work been so steadfastly dismissed and belittled? As he saw it, the answer lay not with them but in the nature of nineteenth-century science, its reliance on fixed laws, and its “belief that the deeper order of Nature is mechanical exclusively.”
A Harvard-educated scientist himself, William James believed in rules; he believed that the scientific worldview provided enormous benefits to humankind. From nineteenth-century science had come vaccinations, a new treatment for diabetes, pain-soothing anesthesia, the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph, the newly designed internal-combustion engine, electricity in homes and businesses, and a future filled with the promise of more and better. The benefits of science were unquestionably great, James said, and “our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be correspondingly immense.”
But to return to the theme of humility, even such a string of successes didn’t mean that scientists held the universe and all its secrets in their hands. The real shortcoming of science in the dawn of the twentieth century, James said, was its rejection of all experiences and insights not generated by the priesthood of science itself.
In the short term, he thought, such arrogance would allow the research community to establish a new level of power and influence. But in the future, James wondered if those who were now awed by innovation and cowed by superiority would continue to be so malleable. It might be that those so summarily dismissed by scientific leaders might someday dismiss those leaders just as conclusively. “It is the intolerance of Science for such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of their existence or of their significance except as proofs of man’s absolute folly that has set Science so apart from the common sympathies of the race.”
James warned that future generations of scientists might pay a price for the intolerance of his time, that respect and admiration for research could not continue indefinitely without some respect given in return. He wondered if scientists of the twentieth century would regret the lost opportunity to share in a societal discussion. Some day in the future, James concluded, a more enlightened society would mourn that determined blindness in “our own boasted Science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”
9
THE UNEARTHLY ARCHIVE
AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY drew closer, gleaming with all the bright sheen of well-polished metal, Fred Myers found himself looking away, back toward his past and his youth. He recalled gentler times, softer days, and the vanished music of Annie Marshall’s voice.
Myers turned fifty-three in 1896; in the looking glass, he saw a middle-aged man with a silvered beard and a level dark gaze. He was steadier now, more serious in his outlook, more determined to help resolve the philosophical contradictions of the world around him.
His wife tolerated his psychical obsessions, he knew, but she did not share them. Evie didn’t pretend to be an intellectual or a seeker. Her life turned around their children, her photography, and cherished social functions. She depended, as she told him, on his superior intelligence and strength. Myers didn’t tell her that sometimes he longed to be less of a mainstay He didn’t tell her either that what he missed most from his more impetuous days was another love, a woman with sad blue eyes and a smile like sunlight.
“Do not allude to all this in any letter,” Myers wrote to James, because “my wife likes to see your letters.” The previous year, when he’d come over for the Chicago meeting, Myers rode the train to Boston so that he could ask Mrs. Piper to try to find