The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [115]
James’s talk would become the title essay in one of his first, and most famous, collections of philosophical musings. In The Will to Believe, he carefully explored the ways that humans can choose to understand—and to live in—the world. He gave a simple comparison: “Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things,” and religion says that the best things are eternal, “an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.”
This matter of choosing to live upon a foundation that could never be verified appeared to set science at odds with faith. James suspected that many scientists dealt with that challenge in the simplest possible way—by denying religious precepts entirely, without always asking themselves which intellectual pitfall was the greater evil: “Better risk loss of truth than chance of error—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.”
He argued that pursuit of truth, even when it might seem illogical by the rules of science, was always worth the risk. For himself, James had decided against “agnostic truth-seeking”; he couldn’t suppress his belief that to reach the stubborn mysteries of the universe, one had to be willing to believe that the most unlikely paths might lead in that direction.
FOR ALMOST TEN YEARS, William Barrett had held tightly to his grudge against the Society for Psychical Research. He refused to forgive either the late Edmund Gurney’s exposure of some of Barrett’s favorite telepathy subjects or Sidgwick’s insistence on striking some of his favorite experiments from the SPR record.
He had remained a member of the organization, but a sulky and uncooperative one. Fred Myers had further stoked Barrett’s resentments. Myers was forever writing notes demanding that Barrett better document his private psychical research. Barrett disliked everything about those notes—their chastising tone, the way that Myers underlined his criticisms with an insulting slash of black ink, the fact that they were written by a philosophy major. He might have abandoned the whole cause if he wasn’t even more irked with his colleagues in orthodox science.
“About the narrowest minded, most intolerant & least sympathetic minds at present,” Barrett wrote to Oliver Lodge, “are those whose eyes are forever glued to the microscope of their own special branch of science.” Lodge agreed. He also saw an opportunity in the Irish physicist’s evident exasperation. He suggested to the Sidgwicks that if approached nicely, Barrett might be ready to work directly for the SPR again.
Henry Sidgwick had just the project in mind. He wanted someone to investigate the never-ending claims about dowsing or “divining” rods and their users. As the SPR had gained visibility, Sidgwick found himself fielding a stream of letters concerning dowsers and their supposedly eerie spirit powers. Many of these letters originated in Cornwall, where the rods were thought to be especially responsive to pixies. Sidgwick wrote to Barrett, offering to personally finance an objective investigation of such claims. Barrett recognized this as Sidgwick’s notion of an olive branch.
After he’d agreed to do it, even after he’d completed the investigation, Barrett confessed to personal doubts about the task. “Few subjects,” as he admitted in the resulting 1897 report, “appear to be so unworthy of scientific notice.”
Divining rods seemed carved equally from wood and from