The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [21]
As Charles Darwin promptly warned him, Wallace was sending the wrong message to their critics and lending unwarranted credibility to the concept of spirit powers. Darwin feared that Wallace now gave the impression that one of evolution theory’s founders had abandoned science in favor of superstition.
“You write like a metamorphosed (in retrograde direction) naturalist,” Darwin wrote furiously. “I defy you to upset your own doctrine.” In his outrage, though, Darwin missed a crucial point. Alfred Russel Wallace had not and never would turn away from the theory of evolution. He promoted it and worked to refine it all of his life, even into the twenteeth century, long past the time Darwin—who died in 1882—was around to scold him.
It wasn’t that Wallace rejected his theory. It was that he found it less than satisfying. Basic survival and mechanical evolution, he decided, were not enough.
“I FEEL CONVINCED that English religious society is going through a great crisis now,” wrote a Cambridge University lecturer in 1867. “And it will probably become impossible soon to conceal from anybody the extent to which rationalist views are held, and the extent of their deviation from traditional [Christian] opinions.”
The writer was Henry Sidgwick, a respected member of the classics faculty at Trinity College, Cambridge. Within the following decade he would publish his book Methods of Ethics, hailed as a major work of moral philosophy in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. And in 1882 he would found, along with two friends, Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, the British Society for Psychical Research. Gurney would in turn recruit William James into their cause, as an extension of an easy friendship between the two men.
The movement—some would call it a quest—began first in England, fomented by Wallace, stirred by the kind of hostile debates staged by Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, sought out by those who craved a refuge from the increasingly belligerent stands taken by both religious and scientific leaders. In an era when Darwinians faced off against the defenders of Genesis—neither side allowing for a middle ground—both groups lost a measure of credibility and trust. The psychical research movement rose in response to such rigidity, built by those who believed that objective and intelligent investigation could provide answers to the troubling metaphysical questions of the time—and that those answers mattered.
The son of a clergyman, Sidgwick had reluctantly abandoned Christianity as a system unable to keep up with the present. “God owns the past,” he told a friend, but not the present. Yet, like Wallace, he worried about humankind stripped of faith. Without a religion—without a deity promising punishment and reward—Sidgwick wondered what would bind people to principles of honor and decency.
The scholar Sidgwick pondered great cultures that had relied on religion to set moral standards. The central questions of identity, of how to live and behave in the world, of how to right wrongs and avoid disaster, had traditionally been put to the gods—animal—headed Egyptian gods and the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans. Life’s big questions were laid before Allah and his Prophet. They were addressed in Arab mosques, Buddhist monasteries, Jewish temples, and European churches. Sidgwick wondered where people would turn if they accepted that the only source of Truth, with a capital T, came from modern science, that the only answer was that life arose from random, mechanical, materialistic forces, that it was governed by none but physical principles. He shuddered at the empty silence of what he called “the non-moral universe.”
In personality, Sidgwick seemed an unlikely candidate to rally others to a cause. Slight, with a thin face and wide gray eyes, he had a shy smile and a