The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [164]
Hyslop felt no sympathy at all, only alarm. Everybody knew that Eusapia had to be tightly managed, or she resorted to cheating. As far as Hyslop could tell, this tour promised none of the control and all of the opportunity for her to make a complete fool of herself, and of psychical researchers as well.
Although he had refused money to Carrington earlier, Hyslop now anted up for a stenographer in an effort to at least make records of the sittings. He also did his best to lower expectations for Eusapia’s visit, warning newspaper and magazine reporters that this was an exhibition rather than a scientific project. Hyslop wished she’d stayed in Italy. He wished he was still giving interviews about the cross-correspondence studies. He had an idea that their small set of credible findings was about to disappear in the uproar of an ectoplasmic circus.
A former colleague of James, Harvard psychologist Hugo Munsterberg, was among the first scientists to wangle an invitation to observe Eusapia. He was chosen to attend one of those select seances that Eusapia was giving to wealthy donors.
Munsterberg and James had once been good friends, and James had helped arrange the German scientist’s move to Harvard in the late 1890s. He’d also endorsed Munsterberg as president of the American Psychological Association in 1898.
But their friendship had eroded over differences in personality, philosophy, and attitudes toward psychical research. Munsterberg possessed an orderly and applied view of psychology. The philosophy of it didn’t appeal to him as much as making it a useful science. He researched eyewitness testimony with an idea toward improving criminal investigations; he studied the ways in which doctors could use psychology to help patients, such as encouraging them to believe that they were getting well.
As James moved deeper into metaphysical questions of philosophy, Munsterberg responded with disdain and accusations that his colleague was turning away from real science. He’d disliked the books James published since retirement, Pragmatism in 1907 and A Pluralistic Universe in 1909. Both of them discussed philosophy’s potential to explore truth and reality in a way that science—even good applied science—could not.
The philosophy of pragmatism had gained a following among young philosophers who saw it as way of shedding nineteenth-century romanticism for twentieth-century realism. Among other things, James’s philosophy raised the idea that real-life experience might be as important to interpreting life as scientific absolutes: “On pragmatic principles,” James explained, “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”
Munsterberg made a point of mocking James’s new philosophy when he spoke publicly. He was so antagonistic that James’s wife, Alice, began taking the attacks personally. Alice would barely speak to Munsterberg—she was “pure ice,” as her husband described it—when she met their former friend at Cambridge social events. James himself wrote to Munsterberg in dismay: “Were it not for my fixed belief that the world is wide enough to sustain and nourish without harm many different types of thinking, I believe that the wide difference between your whole Drang in philosophizing and mine would give me a despairing feeling.... I am satisfied with a free wild Nature; you seem to me to cherish and pursue an Italian Garden, where all things are kept in separate compartments, and one must follow straight-ruled walks.”
Like so many in the American psychology community, Munsterberg deplored James’s detour into psychical research, and felt compelled to respond and protect the profession from the taint of such pseudoscience. When Carrington issued him an invitation to one of the first sittings with the infamous Italian medium, Munsterberg accepted with pleasure—and