The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [167]
Secretly stabilizing the device did not undo the laws of gravity, James pointed out; in fact it helped audiences understand the scientific point rather than subverting it. By the same token, fraud among professional mediums did not undo the possibility of real supernatural phenomena. Perhaps, curiously, fraud might serve to corroborate truth. “If we look at human imposture as a historic phenomenon, we find it imitative”; tricksters were only able to garner attention because they faked something that did exist, fraudulent mediums only persuasive by taking advantage of the reputation earned by the few legitimate psychics. “Those who have the fullest acquaintance with the phenomena admit that in good mediums there is a residuum of knowledge displayed that can only be called supernormal; the medium taps some source of information not open to ordinary people.”
That also seemed to be Podmore’s opinion, that “even the extravagances of mysticism may contain a residuum of unacknowledged and serviceable fact.” It was an idea culled from Gurney and Myers’s original calculation that perhaps 5 percent of all the occult claims they studied were real, and all these years later, their old colleague continued to push against “scientific rejection” of the legitimate phenomena. So did William James make a stand on that narrow ground.
“Either I or the scientist is of course a fool,” James wrote, “with our opposite views of probability here.... I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor; I am willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is my truth, as I now see it.”
First, he believed that these odd, these occult, these so-called supernatural phenomena occurred with remarkable frequency, despite scientific claims that they were “so rare as to be unworthy of attention.” Second, James believed in “the presence, in the midst of all the humbug, of really supernormal knowledge, beyond the ordinary senses.”
And finally, regretfully, James believed he and his colleagues had been “too precipitate in their hopes,” had trusted too much in the ability of science to solve all mysteries. The answers would not come in his lifetime, he suspected, and perhaps not in his children’s lifetimes either.
MARK TWAIN WAS born in 1835, a year in which Halley’s Comet had blazed like God’s own lightning across the night skies. Now, in 1910, the comet was scheduled to make its return, even closer to Earth, and, so the stories went, dragging death in its glowing wake.
Pharmacists began selling “comet pills” to protect against poisonous gases that might accompany Halley’s Comet. In New York and other big cities, stores sold out of telescopes needed to track the fire in the sky. Churches held prayer services, people gathered on rooftops to watch for the comet’s approach.
And Twain, now seventy-five years old, was thinking not only of the cycle of the comet, but of the cycle of his life as well: “I came in with Halley’s comet.... It is coming again... and I expect to go out with it... the Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’ ”
Twain died on April 21, 1910, one day after Halley’s comet reached its closest point to Earth, while “comet parties” danced on rooftops around the world, while reformers preached that the comet was a warning, a judgment on the godless twentieth century. When King Edward VII died on May 6, following a series of heart attacks, newspapers noted that the comet’s path was exceptionally erratic that day.
The comet’s reputation as a harbinger of death shone so brightly that Pope Pius X felt required to reassure the world’s faithful. As the pope would remind his followers, the comet’s tail had missed Earth by almost 200,000 miles. He trusted in