The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [165]
He seated himself next to Eusapia at the December 18, 1909, seance, holding her left hand and with her left foot resting on top of his polished shoes. He did not try to hold her foot down; she quickly slipped out of the shoe and wiggled her foot backward to move a small table behind her. Another guest grabbed her toes; she began to screech and halted the seance. Munsterberg promptly contacted the New York papers, claiming that he arranged for the medium to be caught cheating. When the other sittings with American-based scientists proved equally disastrous, Munsterberg told the New York Times that the gullibility and susceptibility of the previous investigators explained, entirely, her reputed ability to do magic.
“There is no limit to his genius for self-advertisement and superficiality,” James fumed to Flournoy. “Mendacity too!”
In a follow-up article for the Metropolitan Magazine, titled “My Friends, the Spiritualists,” Munsterberg lamented the delusions of otherwise intelligent men, naming Ochorowicz and Richet as spiritualists in the most credulous sense, and, as James wrote, in another angry letter to Flournoy, attempting to “insinuate that I also am one.”
The irritating thing, Flournoy replied, was that all of these cheats had been demonstrated before; anyone who knew Eusapia knew that she liked to cheat when she could. “Fraud with the feet, which Munsterberg allowed to take place (if indeed he didn’t intentionally encourage it in order to support his preconceived ideas) does not explain the innumerable other happenings which occur when she is controlled in all 4 limbs, and the séances take place in sufficient light.”
Agreed. And yet James feared that Hyslop’s warnings had been proved correct, that nothing good would come of this particular expedition. “Eusapia’s trip to the U.S. will simply have spoiled her, and discredited everyone else,” he predicted. His own reputation had suffered already. An editorial in the Times made that more than clear in its concluding sentences: “We are not so much concerned about Eusapia Palladino as we are about the psychical researchers.... The time has almost come when to be a psychical researcher is to confess unsoundness of judgment.” - The editors seemed to question the judgment of two people in particular, both of whom were named in the editorial: Hereward Carrington—who should have known better than to bring over this ludicrous fraud—and William James, who should have known better throughout his career.
THAT SAME STORM-CLOUDED FALL, an essay by William James appeared in the American Magazine. Called “The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher,” it had been intended as a retrospective but served, serendipitously, as an eloquent answer to his critics.
James began by recalling Henry Sidgwick, with his shy stutter, his “liberal heart,” his rare combination of “ardor and critical judgment,” and his complete frustration over the elusive nature of psychical phenomena. “I heard him say, the year before his death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty years he would be in the same identical state of doubt and balance that he started with, he would have deemed the prophecy incredible.
“My own experience has been similar to Sidgwick’s.”
After twenty-five years working with some outstandingly good psychical researchers, conducting experiments, studying the literature, sitting with mediums both gifted and fraudulent, James found himself stymied. He could accept some of the phenomena as real, but he could not explain them.
“I confess that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions, all in equal measure, so that, although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits, are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they also can never be susceptible of full corroboration.”
James deplored the apparently incurable dishonesty associated with spiritual endeavors and the way that it continually