The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [142]
But they were alike in their single-mindedness; “It was hard to say which of them had a greater hatred of sham, hypocrisy and academic cowardice.” Hyslop and Hodgson shared thoughts and ideas and complaints, letters between them going from Boston to New York discussing fraudulent mediums, pig-headed scientists—and the mistakes made by the British and American societies for psychical research.
Hodgson thought the SPR’s British leaders were too willing to believe. They’d stumbled badly with Eusapia Palladino; he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t fall again without his help. Recently he’d written several stiff criticisms of Rosina Thompson, only to have them edited out of the British journal. “In fact, the more I come to think of it, the more I feel like that old woman who has been so often quoted, who said that she ‘wasn’t sure that anybody at all would be saved but herself and her husband Sandy, and there were times when she was nae so sure of Sandy!”’
The Americans stood at the other extreme. They were “morbidly afraid” of belief, as Hodgson put it. The ASPR had turned away countless interested supporters on the grounds that they weren’t skeptical enough. No wonder the organization had stayed small and poor. Hodgson now owed his secretary, Lucy Edmunds, almost $900 in back pay, which had accumulated over four years, and he himself had spent $600 of his own money just to keep the office supplied with up-to-date publications.
He wasn’t complaining on his own behalf. True, he was still unmarried, still living in two small rooms on Charles Street, but the rooms were stacked, floor to ceiling, with his greatest indulgence: books—poetry, philosophy, novels, science. For fun, he talked to his pet parrot, which he also occasionally brought with him to the Tavern Club, where he went almost every night for dinner and company. He played handball, fished, hiked, swam in the Atlantic whenever he could. He didn’t want for money himself—just to fund the work.
Perhaps, Hyslop suggested, the psychic investigators should stop doing inadequate, underfunded investigations. Perhaps they should save, build up an endowment, wait till they could afford to do it right.
It would be wonderful to have the money, Hodgson agreed, but he didn’t think they could afford the time that would take. He didn’t want to lose even the small momentum the group had achieved. They had lost Gurney, then Sidgwick, then Myers; they couldn’t spare a single warm body. Hodgson would work harder, that was all.
WILLIAM JAMES HAD hoped that Fred Myers’s book on subliminal consciousness would be “epoch making.” But Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published in late 1903, almost two years after Myers’s death, proved more complicated than that—and less successful.
Myers’s ideas had stretched beyond his fundamental concept of the subliminal mind to a far grander proposal, that the connections between conscious and subconscious, subliminal and waking mind, were coordinated by the immortal soul. This meant, as Myers ruefully acknowledged, that to accept his bigger theory, one had to accept the notion of a soul and of its survival after death. In the modern age, simple acceptance would not do, he continued; the question at hand was whether the existence of an immortal soul could be proved. “In this direction,” he wrote, “have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.”
In the twentieth century, Myers said, the only way to verify immortality was through the way of modern Science—“dispassionate, patient, systematic,” careful, and much to be admired: “Science works slowly on and bides her time,—refusing to fall back upon tradition or to launch into speculation, merely because strait is the gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.”
The only problem was that