The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [120]
James could handle vitriol like this with ease. He replied mockingly that he enjoyed Cattell’s “amiable persiflage” and feeble attempts at insult. It bothered him, though, that he could not persuade his peers to see the value in psychical research. Further, both Hodgson’s report and the SPR response conformed to scientific principles. Hodgson had offered a theory and the supporting evidence for it. His SPR colleagues had reviewed it, criticized it, and demanded more substantial evidence.
James himself tended to side with Sidgwick in terms of the report’s shortcomings. He didn’t deny that G.P provided some startling moments; but the personality also showed the same “vacancy, triviality and incoherence of mind” that so often plagued the spirit messages from Mrs. Piper and, indeed, those from all mediums. Hodgson’s attempt to excuse such meanderings by extreme difficulty of communication struck James as inadequate, as he made clear, again writing in the SPR journal, “Mr. Hodgson has to resort to the theory that, although the communicants probably are spirits, they are in a semi-comatose or sleeping state, while communicating, and only half-aware of what is going on and Mrs. Piper’s subconscious is then forced to fill in the gaps of whatever they say.” This seemed at best an imperfect cover story. Even worse, the explanation discounted the best sittings in an effort to excuse the poorer ones. What about those apparently pitch-perfect days? Did the spirits suddenly wake up? Did Mrs. Piper’s hearing improve? Could she briefly understand the ghostly communicators better?
If Mrs. Piper didn’t cheat—and no evidence yet existed that she did—then it was still unclear to James how she accessed the information revealed in her trances. He continued to believe that she possessed some exceptional power; he continued to have no idea exactly what that power might be.
“If I may be allowed a personal expression of opinion at the end of this notice,” James said, “I would say that the Piper phenomena are the most absolutely baffling thing I know.”
DESPITE THE DOUBTS of his colleagues, mostly thanks to his reputation as “an expert in the art of unveiling fraud,” as the Saturday Review put it, Hodgson’s latest Piper report received exactly what Columbia’s Cattell had feared, serious attention.
At the Review, famously hostile to psychical research, the editors wrote to acknowledge that Hodgson’s account of G.P provided strong evidence in favor of survival after death. Still, the Review emphasized, it was unclear exactly what survived, whether it was a soul, a spirit, or merely some sort of imprint of a personality. As the editorial noted, “So far as we can see, all that is proved is that some record of the life on earth is laid up in some unearthly archives, and that under some circumstances, this record is accessible to the minds of the living.”
G.P.’s knowledge of his life on Earth, especially his previous relationships, seemed remarkable. But the “spirit” continually failed to provide any real detail about life after death. His descriptions, “while free from the nauseous sentimentality mingled with Swedenborg which forms the bulk of so-called spirit communications,” were either vague or comfortably Christian, adding nothing new to the knowledge of immortality.
In conclusion, the magazine raised a point of elegant metaphysics: “The question is not whether something survives death, but whether that is a living something; whether it grows? Time may give us an answer to the question; but it has not been given yet.”
That unearthly archive—or at least the possibility of something like it—was an idea that William James had considered, hoping that