The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [139]
To the question of individual differences in faith, James applied Myers’s concept of a subliminal self. Some people might be almost entirely focused on the conscious world, unable to detect any sensation of an otherworldly reality. Such individuals might well become scientists or pursue other fields based in logical deduction. Perhaps other people, more naturally open to subconscious experiences, would be more inclined to accept miracles or spiritual powers. Perhaps the varieties of religious experience were based in a kind of scientific reality, in the varied ways that people’s minds operated, the alternate realities that they perceived in forming their worldviews.
By this analysis, a Leonora Piper might be unusually receptive to psychical phenomena and ready to accept the notion of powers beyond human control. A James McKeen Cattell might be unusually closed to any such experiences, thereby finding the supernatural or any spiritual notions to be unfounded and illogical. James defined himself as a “piecemeal supernaturalist,” demanding better evidence of the spiritual realms but finding “no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and real worlds together.”
From that perspective, James went on to raise—and to challenge—a theory popular among Darwinian scientists, which argued that “religion is probably only an anachronism, left over from an earlier stage of human evolution.” Known as “the survival theory,” it stated that primitive man, in order to cope with a hostile environment, needed explanations that gave reason to life with its all its grief and struggle, denied that tragedies were merely random events, soothed with a promise of personal interest by the powers above.
But as the survival theory had it, civilized man now knew better, and godly explanations were no longer required. The new science found ridiculous the notion that a God capable of creating a universe would cater to the needs of each short-lived individual occupying one meager planet. As James described this modern version of a deity, “the God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.”
Thus, both traditional religions and unorthodox ones such as spiritualism could be seen as vestiges of an earlier stage in human evolution. The theory predicted that the human race would eventually cast off that primitive need entirely. It reflected the hope of many modern scientists that John Tyndall’s assertion—that science would supersede religion as the way to understand life and its limits—was on its way to being a twentieth-century reality.
William James had no such hopes, nor any fondness for this rational future that so many of his academic peers eagerly anticipated. The survival theory, he wrote, ignored the fact that civilizations come and gone had also been arrogantly sure that they possessed the one Truth above truths. He thought it a mistake to dismiss the ideas of history simply because they didn’t fit current scientific methodology.
As Myers’s concept of subliminal consciousness emphasized, people didn’t fully understand yet what was inside their own brains, much less the world without. Even as an accredited academic, James couldn’t make himself believe that “the boundless universe” was so simple as to be easily measured by mortal men. Even the supreme scientific confidence of the new century could not alter that position: “Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds.”
EVIE MYERS WANTED every trace destroyed, every scrap of evidence, that her husband had been infatuated with a spirit. In that hated autobiography, “Fragments of an Inner Life,” Myers had actually counted the days with and without his beloved Annie. “Only on 426 days of my life—now numbering