The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [126]
Once again, James took up the cudgels for his friends and his beliefs. He wrote to remind the readers of Science—and Titchener—that the original author had backed down from his first assurance that fraud alone could explain the SPR results. “Even in anti-telepathic Science accuracy of representation is required, and I am pleading not for telepathy but only for accuracy,” James said, expressing his regrets that Titchener was unable to meet that basic standard.
Insulted, Titchener replied that he had been accurate. Perhaps the author had backtracked a little, but at least he was a good scientist, as opposed to the slipshod variety found in the psychical research community. Further, the basic point that “ordinary channels of sense,” such as hearing a whisper, could account for so-called telepathic results was by far the preferred explanation.
Titchener and James had been leaders in American psychology for years. Both had studied under the great German experimentalist William Wundt; both had persuaded their universities to establish their first psychology laboratories. It was true that Titchener’s idea of psychology looked nothing like James’s. He was a founder of structuralist theory—that the mind was composed of structures, such as thought and emotion, just as a water molecule was composed of structures, such as hydrogen and oxygen. He saw no place in the mind for a telepathy structure or a spiritual communication center.
But out of respect for their long-standing relationship, Titchener also wrote to James directly, trying to explain his viewpoint, providing an eloquent defense of his own position and of the stance taken by traditional psychologists. “I think that there is a great deal in your general position,” Titchener began. “That is, I think that these topics have been boycotted, and should not be so.” Still, he accused James and his SPR colleagues of constantly claiming persecution as a means of countering criticisms: “A minority is not always or necessarily in the right,” Titchener pointed out. “And, together with many others, I rather resent the airs of martyrdom that psychical research puts on.
“You are perfectly free to work: you have a lot of big names on your side to back you up; your society is very flourishing. Suppose that Sidgwick and Balfour and the rest had done as much for psychophysics as they have for psychical research! Then there would be English laboratories worth the name.” (Established earlier in the nineteenth century by German physicist-philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner, psychophysics was the study of correlations between psychological sensations and the physical stimuli that trigger them.)
It was true that Titchener didn’t plan to read SPR studies or conduct his own investigations into psychical phenomena. He would certainly never visit a medium, even Mrs. Piper, due to his “personal repugnance.” If by fairness, James meant that Titchener needed to take a serious look at psychical research, he was afraid that they would never agree. “But I am as keen for fair play as anybody—meaning thereby that you have your right to fight for your side, and that I have an equal right to fight for mine.”
AS IF TO ANSWER the worrying impression that only one decent medium existed to be studied, in the pages of the spiritualist journal Light appeared notice of a new trance medium, the twenty-nine-year-old wife of a London merchant. At first read, she seemed nothing special. Her spirit guide was reputedly a child, her daughter Nelly, lost years before, who spoke in the soft lisp of a toddler.
With Nelly came Eusapia-like effects—blowing curtains, flickering lights, the occasional levitations of furniture. The SPR would have ignored her except for one fact: Rosina Thompson didn’t charge for the sittings, and they had agreed to