The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [134]
Hyslop found himself in a fight for survival. He had some support from the younger faculty, but several told him they were afraid of Cattell’s influence on their own careers. He decided to court more established professors and administrators to gather more support against “Cattell’s insolent interference with me.... I shall make a very fight if it comes to the point where it is necessary and Columbia will not forget it for 50 years,” he wrote to Hodgson.
Hodgson encouraged him to stay calm. “It would be pretty absurd for the authorities of the college to make any move on the ground of newspaper reports about what you said at meetings.... be sure and take everything quite coolly.” But Hyslop had never been cool-natured, and he couldn’t help but worry. He was a married man. He had two children. He hadn’t expected that a scientist at his own university would regard a difference of opinion as something to be suppressed and punished.
Columbia’s administration, anxious to avoid a public fight, suggested that the whole affair would blow over if Professor Hyslop would practice more discretion. It seemed his only option. Hyslop told Hodgson that he’d canceled scheduled talks on psychical research and planned to immerse himself in classroom duties.
Hodgson expressed sympathy, but he was angry as well, dismayed by the vindictiveness of scientists in general and Cattell in particular: “He hasn’t a true scientific spirit at all, nothing but veneer, and it has always seemed to me extraordinary that he should have got to the positions he occupied.”
If Cattell had done an objective investigation of events, or even shown the slightest interest in the truth, he would have realized that the stories were simply journalistic exaggerations, Hodgson continued. Someday, Hodgson hoped, Hyslop would be able to expose Cattell’s own “unscientific attitude” regarding psychical research and turn the tables around.
HENRY SIDGWICK HAD not been not quite well for the last few months. Tired and achy, he had at the urging of his doctor gone to London in early May to consult a surgeon.
The diagnosis shocked him beyond measure; Sidgwick had all the signs of a fast-spreading cancer. The surgeon wanted to operate quickly but warned that surgery would only delay death briefly. For two weeks, Sidgwick quietly stayed home with Nora, seeking and giving comfort. By late May, though, the surgery was scheduled, and he began telling friends and family members.
“A terrible day,” Sidgwick’s brother wrote in his diary after their conversation.
Sidgwick wrote to Myers in France, apologizing for sending the bad news by mail, letting him know that he hoped to survive the surgery but not the year: “Life is very strange now: very terrible: but I try to meet it like a man, my beloved wife aiding me. I hold on—to try to hold on—to duty and love; and through love to touch the larger hope. I wish now I had told you before, as this may be farewell. Your friendship has had a great place in my life, and as I walk through the Valley of Shadow of Death, I feel your affection.
“Pray for me.”
Sidgwick’s doctors operated in mid-July, on his sixty-second birthday, removing as much of the cancer as they could. As soon as he was able, Nora took him to convalesce at the country home of the Rayleighs.
In late August, Nora summoned other family there. It was time to say good-bye: “We now have no hopes for Henry, but that the growing weakness, which he bears with unbroken patience and simplest unselfish fortitude, may soon reach the natural end he so desires,” his brother Arthur wrote to a friend.
Sidgwick died on August 28, 1900. He was buried in the village church-yard near the Rayleighs’ home. To the end he cherished his doubts about God, his sorrow that he’d failed to prove the existence