The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [143]
What he could not have foreseen when he composed Human Personality was that the evidence that Myers considered strongest—the seances in which Annie Marshall appeared, his many sittings with Rosina Thompson—would not give support to his published argument. His wife had many pertinent records destroyed; more than that, she had refused to allow Hodgson to mention them in his edited version of the book.
In his review of the book for the Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research—one of the more positive published assessments of Human Personality—James acknowledged that the “ill-defined relations of the subliminal with its ‘cosmic’ environment” undermined Myers’s case for immortality. At best, he thought, Myers had just managed to demonstrate that possible supernatural events ought “just like other events to be followed up with scientific curiosity.” But James emphasized that Myers’s willingness to tackle contradictory and confusing subjects should be considered a strength rather than a weakness: “Nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other and untidy.” It was only by acknowledging the messiness of the life itself that a picture of reality could be drawn.
Perhaps others preferred their view of the world to be more orderly, the universe to be delivered in a quantifiable package. James didn’t believe in that tidy view of existence for a minute. By accepting the wonderful complexity that Myers sought to portray, he would write, “although we may be mistaken in much detail, in a general way, at least we become plausible.”
11
A FORCE NOT GENERALLY RECOGNIZED
ON AN ICY NIGHT late in the fall of 1905, Dick Hodgson hurried with friends across the Boston Commons. The ground crunched underfoot; the night glittered around them, silver-frosted with stars. Suddenly, Hodgson stopped, tilting his head back to study the shimmering sky.
“Sometimes, I can hardly wait to get over there,” he said, his right hand tracing a route across the starry pathways. It was so difficult to prove immortality—or at least to convince others that one had—while here on Earth; he now thought, he might accomplish more when he arrived in the spirit world. “I am sure that when I do, I can establish the truth beyond all possibility of a doubt.” For a moment, his voice sounded almost wistful: “But I suppose I’m good for twenty years or more at least.”
“At least,” his friends agreed, laughing, eyeing his bright face and muscular stance.
As always, Hodgson seemed to thrive on his high-energy life. Although he obsessed about the work, he tempered it with leisure pursuits that included his reading, games of handball, socializing, vigorous vacations. Over the previous summer, he’d fished with friends in Maine and hiked in the Adirondacks. In the early fall, he’d spent a happy vacation with the Jameses at their country home in New Hampshire.
“Hodgson left us this morning after a visit of ten days,” James wrote to Flournoy. “It is a pleasure to see a man in such an absolute state of moral & physical health. His very face shows the firmness of a soul in equilibrium—another proof of the strength which a belief in the future may give one!”
Mrs. Piper, though, seemed to be faltering. Her husband, William, had died early in the summer. She’d withdrawn into sadness; her sittings had acquired a strangely dreamlike quality. James thought