The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [119]
As Hodgson considered the issue, he’d come to believe that some things might be easier for spirits to communicate than others. Emotional connections—with their pure, personal power—might survive fairly intact through the translating mechanism of the medium. Intellect and sophisticated knowledge would be unlikely to fare so well, especially if the translator were uneducated, or if the medium lacked the language and training to understand what was being said in the first place.
He reminded Sidgwick of all the obstacles that must be overcome for any spirit communication, even of the most primitive type, to occur. If one considered the difficulty of communication between two living people in the same room—the way one person interprets or misinterprets another’s thoughts during a conversation—how much more difficult to conduct that conversation with someone speaking from another dimension, using the awkward device of an entranced medium to relay messages? “The conditions of communication must be kept before the mind,” Hodgson insisted, and expectations for fluency should be lowered as a result.
JAMES McKEEN CATTELL, the Columbia professor who had so vehemently disparaged James’s SPR presidential address, read Hodgson’s affirmation of spirit life and hated it from first paragraph to last.
The life-after-death insinuations in Hodgson’s report struck him as simple spirit-mongering, and its conclusion—that even skeptics such as Richard Hodgson could be converted—infuriated him. Cattell didn’t really care if Hodgson wanted to make a fool of himself. But given the author’s reputation as a savvy investigator, Cattell did worry about the report’s influence on the beliefs of other scholars. What if a reputable scientist were to conclude that since the previously far-from-gullible Hodgson had crossed the line to credulity, it had become an intellectually permissible, even a respectable ideological crossing? The prospect horrified Cattell.
He fired off an essay to Science magazine, titled “Mrs. Piper, The Medium” (in homage to Browning’s cynical portrait of D. D. Home), to make sure that the real scientific point of view was understood. Cattell took aim not only at Hodgson’s analysis but at what he considered the bigger target, William James’s support of the SPR studies. Referring to James’s earlier description of Mrs. Piper as “the white crow” that helped persuade him of supernatural realities, Cattell wrote: “The difficulty has been that proving innumerable mediums to be frauds does not disprove the possibility (though it greatly reduces the likelihood) of one medium being genuine. But here we have the ‘white crow’ selected by Professor James from all the piebald crows exhibited by the Society.” Her credibility was due not to her own talents, Cattell continued, but to being endorsed by one of the country’s premier psychologists.
Psychical research was clearly costing William James academic prestige and political capital among his fellow scientists. Privately, he confessed some regrets over it. Publicly, James responded as if he didn’t care. He wrote back to Science, characterizing Cattell’s position as a childishly simple argument that “mediums are scientific outlaws and their defendants are quasi-insane,” going on to suggest that the magazine’s readers might prefer more intelligent, sophisticated criticisms. For the discriminating reader, James recommended Sidgwick’s dissection of the G.P. case, which could be found in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
Continuing that acerbic exchange, Cattell dismissed the opinions of nonscientists, and especially those belonging to the SPR, which he said was doing active harm, encouraging people to cling to the mysticism of the past. The role of science, he said, was not to pander to superstition but to help eliminate it. And when a leading psychologist such as William James failed to live up to