The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [114]
That dichotomy, Myers proposed, probably held true for most people, including himself The average person’s brain focused entirely on handling life’s obvious challenges, allowing little scope for developing telepathic skills, or any talents beyond the five senses. The few that did exercise their brains in such areas—perhaps developing a skill in subliminal communication—might find that it cost them in other areas, organized their mind in a way that left them with less potential for an academic style of intelligence. Such people might even appear peculiar in the everyday sense. They might be prone to trances, subject to developing odd trance personalities. Those with a strong subliminal life might, fairly or unfairly, be considered abnormal. They might become mediums. Such a one might become a Leonora Piper.
THESE Days, William James found ideas like Myers’s more interesting, or at least more original, than those put forward by his fellow practitioners of scientific psychology. His dissatisfaction spilled into a letter to Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, assessing the field of psychology as stodgy and depressingly lacking in innovation, especially for such a young science.
He cited the University of Wisconsin’s James Jastrow as an example. Jastrow, who had been so argumentative about psychical research, did some good experimental work, James wrote, but he had “a narrowish intellect ... and uncomfortable peculiarities of character.” James hadn’t quarreled yet with Edward Titchener at Cornell University, but the man was unoriginal in his thinking and “although from Oxford, quite a barbarian in his scientific and literary manners and quarrelsome in the extreme.” The best psychologist at Yale was shallow; the University of Chicago had one promising psychologist, but he was too young to have done anything interesting.
James admired James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University for his ef forts to pioneer human intelligence testing. But Cattell’s closed-mindedness on the subject of psychical research frustrated James, especially when the Columbia professor publicly chastised James for his support of the field. Recently, Cattell,had compared the SPR’s work to a swamp, incomprehensible through the murk of superstition.
Cattell heightened his aggressive stance after reading a copy of James’s farewell address as president of the SPR. In an essay in the Psychological Review, which Cattell had founded, the New York scientist expressed his dismay that a respected psychologist such as William James could be so fooled by the shoddy evidence and inadequate experiments offered up by his fellow psychical researchers. As Cattell put it, there could never be real evidence for the supernatural because evidence could not exist for a fantasy. Stung, James replied to the Review that his critic clearly hadn’t bothered to read the work: “The concrete evidence for most of the ‘psychic’ phenomena under discussion is good enough to hang a man 20 times over.”
James was angry enough to add that such prejudice seemed unfortunately characteristic of the whole profession. Cattell’s objections were typical of those raised by traditional researchers: shallow on their face, and, “shallow by further investigation.”
In an 1896 address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, James further challenged the claim that the world could—or should—be understood only by application of logic and material evidence.
By taking refuge in “snarling logicality” James said, by insisting that the only believable god was one who meekly appeared when asked to prove himself, a person might “cut himself off forever from his only opportunity