The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [169]
An autopsy, requested by Alice James, showed that the cause of death was acute enlargement of the heart. But even so, she believed that his will had played a role. “He wanted to go,” Alice said, “and departed swiftly as he always has when he made up his mind to move on.”
In the United States and Europe, newspapers announced James’s death with ceremony, reporting the loss of “the most distinguished and influential American philosopher of our day.” His family and friends simply grieved for the man, “the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful presence of him,” as his brother Henry wrote in memoriam.
In the months after William’s death, Alice and Henry met with several mediums, she, particularly, hoping for a message that he lived on. They did not have a sitting with Leonora Piper, who had declared a retirement after her painful encounter with Stanley Hall. Their sessions with other Boston mediums conveyed nothing, Henry said, but the grim refusal of the dead.
Alice was disappointed, but her faith was unshaken. She had always liked William’s idea that “a will to believe” was the most important part of living in a spiritual universe. “I believe in immortality,” she wrote to a friend. And she also believed that William was “safe and living, loving and working, never to be wholly gone from us.”
The spiritualist community, however, wanted more, or at least wanted more of a demonstration. Within days, newspapers carried multiple claims of contacts with the spirit of William James.
A Boston businessman told the New York Times that James had “sent a message to his friends from the spirit world” during a seance with a most respectable medium. The message was rather vague: “I am at peace, peace—with myself and all mankind. I have awakened to a life far beyond my highest conception while a denizen of earth.” But the “spirit” promised to contact Henry James shortly with more explicit details.
The pastor of Boston’s Unity Church announced that he had felt “spiritualist vibrations” which he thought came from James because they were intense and rapid, indicating “a genius wishing to communicate rather than a common soul.”
James Hyslop reported that one medium had relayed some messages from James, in one case concerning a private conversation between Hyslop and the late psychologist, which was correct in all details, right down to the garments they’d been wearing. But this was suggestive only, Hyslop added; he hadn’t seen anything in the way of satisfactory proof. He hoped that the fascination with whether William James could come back from the dead wouldn’t obscure the more important facts at hand: that psychical research had lost one of its best friends, that there was much work yet to be done.
The Times decided to ask an expert to settle the matter, the famed scientist-inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, currently working to turn silent motion pictures into talking ones.
Edison’s name was almost synonymous with the power of modern science and technology, and as the newspaper proudly revealed, this was his first and only interview on the subject of survival after death. “The occasion was the recent death of Prof. William James, Harvard’s distinguished psychologist, and the alleged reappearance of Prof. James’s soul on earth. The newspapers have been teeming with the subject. The psychic researchers are even now quarreling bitterly over it. The public is puzzled.
“Therefore I turned to Edison,” the reporter explained, “who has solved for us so many puzzling problems.”
Edison saw no particular puzzle here. He didn’t believe in immortality because he didn’t believe in the human soul, he told the Times briskly. Or as the headline said: “Human Beings Only an Aggregate of Cells and the Brain Only a Wonderful Machine, Says Wizard of Electricity.”
It was the mechanical universe that formed the basis of Edison’s belief—planets spinning, winds blowing, people born and dying-all simply carried onward by that well-oiled machinery of creation. There was no reason to believe that the human brain would continue