The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [159]
Reading the transcripts of a sitting was always a poor substitute for attending one. James had heard many scientists express doubts about seances after they had read an investigator’s report. He felt that without personal experience it was difficult, if not impossible, to understand the event. He could try to describe it, that overwhelming sense of intimacy “when your questions are answered, and your allusions understood; when allusions are made that you understand, and your own thoughts are met... when you have approved, applauded or exchanged banter, or thankfully listened to advice you believe in, it is difficult not to take away an impression of having encountered something sincere in the way of a social phenomenon.”
But put plainly, the best writer in the world could not convey that shock of personal recognition.
Even so, and for all those extraordinary moments of connection, there were also extraordinary disconnects, ones that seemed to James anyway, to dispel any certain conclusion. The Hodgson personality—simply called RH. in James’s report—could not accurately describe his own childhood in Australia. Neither could he accurately describe his personal life. When asked to name some of his friends at the Tavern Club, men that he had played pool with, gone swimming with, R.H. gave six names, only one of whom belonged to the Tavern Club, and never showed any awareness of that error.
The best results came from the trance personality’s knowledge of relationships and experiences that Hodgson had shared with people sitting in the room—making telepathy a better answer than spirit communication, suggesting that the medium might be picking up information from her visitors. And, James emphasized, even these were not the best ever sittings with Mrs. Piper. Along with R.H. came “so much repetition, hesitation, irrelevance, unintelligibility, so much obvious groping and fishing and plausible covering up of false tracks... the stream of veridicality [truth] that runs through the whole gets lost as it were in a marsh of feebleness.”
In Mrs. Piper’s trances, James had often seen hints of the supernatural, the blown spark of unearthly powers glinting beyond his reach—but that was less so with R.H. The Hodgson personality, James thought, was not as strong as the irascible Phinuit, the serious-minded G.P., or even the dictatorial Rector. James still believed that some force, some power, was attempting to communicate in these sittings. But, he concluded unhappily, “if asked if the will to communicate be Hodgson’s or be some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await more fact.”
NORA SIDGWICK WAS as fragile in appearance and as tough in mind as ever. As the newly named SPR president, she ruffled her colleagues by agreeing with William James that psychical researchers still must travel over “considerable ground” before they could assume they were conversing with spirits.
She believed that the society had made a powerful case for telepathy—in Mrs. Piper’s sittings, in observations, and in other experiments, possibly including the cross-correspondence work. As Nora put it, “few people who looked into the evidence we [already] have, thoroughly and without prejudice, would fail to be convinced that telepathy is a fact.” The difficulty was, as ever, to overcome prejudice, especially among scientists.
“We must not altogether blame men of science for feeling this prejudice. It is a kind of self-defense,” Nora said. As she saw it, science relied on a carefully defined and validated set of guidelines, which, among other advantages, prevented researchers from chasing wild ideas down dark and peculiar alleys. Frankly, Nora admired such practical efficiency. She reminded her colleagues that the scientific process worked incredibly well, beyond most people’s wildest expectations.
In that very year of 1909, German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich devised the first modern chemotherapeutic