The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [171]
James Hervey Hyslop would lead the American Society for Psychical Research—almost single-handedly keeping it in the public view by force of personality—until his death in 1920. His passion for evidence and argument would remain unabated. As he wrote in the year of Palladino’s death, “Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject.” His longtime secretary would later write her own book, James H. Hyslop X: His Book, describing the return of his spirit, distinctive in its crisp personality and outspoken demeanor.
Leonora Piper would return to work as a medium (and outlive almost all her investigators, dying in 1950 at the age of ninety-three). She would not, however, outlive the debate over matters of life and death, science and religion, a debate that the pronouncements of even the great Thomas Alva Edison could not begin to resolve.
Among Christians there would be a growing, militant opposition to a reality defined only by secular values—growing in strength after World War I, as many, especially Americans outside of the major eastern cities, longed for a return to prewar innocence. (Warren G. Harding, promising a “return to normalcy,” won the U.S. presidency in 1920.) Fundamentalist creationists would begin their battle against the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the U.S. public schools, a battle highlighted by sensationalistic media coverage of high school biology teacher John T. Scopes’s 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The charge: violating a Tennessee state law banning any teaching that contradicted the divine creation of man as described in the Bible.
Far from disappearing in favor of scientific materialism, spiritual values would endure and even seem to gain ground in the aftermath of the Great War, even in intellectual circles—as evidenced, for example, by the devout Christianity of twentieth-century authors J. R. R. Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis, both of them battle veterans and Oxford dons.
In 1926, Everard Feilding would review the very human needs and experiences that kept spiritual beliefs—or perhaps hopes—alive, criticizing both the establishments of science and religion for failing to recognize their importance.
Most people, Feilding would write, were “unwillingly children of the time in which they live.” They lived surrounded by new knowledge, inundated by facts; they were told absolutely that such information was the only route to certainty about the universe. They were given no guidance as to how religious feeling, faith, or intuition might fit into that world; they were given less guidance if they experienced a supernatural event—saw a crisis apparition, had a premonition, or simply felt an inner sense of belief in something more. “If but some link could be established between the two, some stepping-stone laid on which they could venture out into the dark stream, their confidence would be restored,” Feilding would insist. And he would mourn the past, grieve for the loss of that moment when he and his friends had thought they might reconcile science and faith after all, and find that elusive path, as faint and as real as moonlight, leading to a universe in which all things were possible.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’VE NEVER HAD premonitions, eerie dreams, heard voices, saw ghosts, or possessed any sense beyond the basic five, and I’ve never wished to acquire such talents. I was always the kid who pushed the Ouija board pointer out of sheer boredom, and to this day, I believe that it would never have moved without a helpful shove.
So when I started this book, I saw myself as the perfect author to explore the supernatural, a career science writer anchored in place with the sturdy shoes of common sense. In the way that books do—or that one hopes they do—this one changed