The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [118]
Hodgson’s paper illuminated beautifully—if unintentionally—the inherent difficulties of producing persuasive results in psychical research. To accept that G.P. was a spirit, one had to believe in immortality. Further, one needed to believe that the exchanges between this modest American medium and a self proclaimed spirit proved the reality of life after death, trumped all other explanations.
Henry Sidgwick had longed for the day that his society showed the skeptics wrong, delivered up indisputable proof that the soul survived. But he could not convince himself that this was it; he’d spent too many years picking apart evidence, and he could see ways to pick apart Hodgson’s report as well.
The G.P. sittings were remarkable, Sidgwick agreed, but they did not entirely exclude telepathy. True, it seemed unlikely that all G.P.’s friends were strong telepathic communicators, delivering mental information to Mrs. Piper. But it was not impossible, and therefore thought reading could account yet for recognition and revelations about the dead man’s friends. Further, Sidgwick was troubled by the fact that while G.P. recognized others so readily, he retained so little knowledge of himself, at least of his former intellectual pursuits. Pellew had been an avid student of philosophy; the trance personality barely recognized the subject.
In one interview, a visitor asked G.P. about the American philosopher of science Chauncey Wright, who had been one of the earliest defenders of Darwinism and who had warned that theology should expect little support from the laws of science. Wright had written, for instance, that the idea that “the universe has a purpose” could be believed on grounds of faith only. It could never, he said, be “disclosed or supported” by scientific investigation. Until his death in 1875, Wright had worked in Cambridge, and his philosophical essays were widely read by northeastern intellectuals, Pellew among them.
Asked whether G.P.’s life after death shed light on Wright’s views of natural laws, the session went as follows:
G.P.: Yes, law is thought.
Sitter: Do you now find that law is permanent?
G.P: Cause is thought.
Sitter: That doesn’t answer it.
G.P.: Ask it.
The sitter asked if G.P. agreed with Chauncey Wright and was first told “most certainly” and then told, “He knows nothing, his theory is ludicrous.”
Surely, Sidgwick argued, the real spirit of George Pellew could have handled simple questions about a philosopher whose work he knew well. Did such hard-earned knowledge just leak away, sand trickling from broken glass, once a person died? Sidgwick found it hard to accept that the mind might survive but only as an empty container, bare of the knowledge that once filled it.
If Hodgson had hoped for better support from his colleagues, he did not chastise them for their doubts. Instead, he set about answering the criticisms. Sidgwick, he said, had raised one of the more interesting and complicating aspects of spirit communication, the difficulty of communicating through a medium. It called to mind the challenge of the “ghost of clothes” question, the way that one mind may alter information received from another. As Hodgson pointed out, Mrs. Piper knew nothing of philosophy. She was unlikely to understand it or relay its finer points with any grace. Her ability was to receive these flickers of communication but she wasn’t necessarily a competent interpreter. “If