The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [22]
“When I found out how selfish I was,” Sidgwick wrote to his sister, shortly after he moved to Cambridge, “I used at first to try and alter myself by conscientious struggles, efforts of Will.” He made a “golden rule” for himself not to think about himself more than half an hour out of every twenty-four. He deliberately hunted for good causes without enough support, making a priority of women’s right to education and everyone’s right to seek answers to questions they cared about, even those dismissed as nonsensical or the stuff of superstition.
His cousin Edward White Benson (later archbishop of Canterbury) first enlisted Sidgwick in the latter cause. Having helped found a “Ghost Society” at Cambridge, the outgoing Benson drafted his quiet cousin to visit some local mediums and psychics. From the first, Sidgwick approached the subject with characteristic tough-mindedness, easily detecting the use of mechanical devices and sleight of hand, writing to his sister, “I gained nothing but experience in the lower forms of human nature.”
But the idea of being able to prove that there was something more, a spirit existence, a power beyond that of human grasp, intrigued him. And as he continued to investigate, he thought he glimpsed, only occasionally, a glimmering spark of something unexpected. In another letter to his family he wrote of his sense of grasping at handfuls of smoke while somewhere within the billows burned a genuine flame.
One of Sidgwick’s students, Frederic Myers, was quick to see the real purpose in his forays into the occult—and to follow. Born in 1843, Myers was, like Sidgwick, the son of a well-to-do Yorkshire clergyman and an unusually clever child. Myers expressed his first doubts about his qualifications for heaven at the age of two, wrote his first sermon at five, and entered Cambridge when he was seventeen, still fired with faith, praying to be stronger, wiser, to “have a strength not my own infused into me.” , Yet the more Myers studied, the more he learned of science and history, the more heaven seemed to slip from his grasp—or his sense of reality. The Anglican Christianity of Yorkshire and Cambridge began to look frail and dusty. It seemed to him more suited to the static past than to the dynamic present. Darwinian science troubled Myers, but it troubled him more that the church was so resistant to new ideas, even ones that might improve lives.
The cause of women’s education first brought Myers and Sidgwick together. The Anglican Church insisted that God intended women to be subservient to men. So did most of society. Their own university, as most others, barred women from obtaining degrees. Queen Victoria herself was adamant on the subject: “Were women to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”
Most of Sidgwick’s friends, his peers at Cambridge, saw only trouble in his argument that women should be allowed the “immense educational influence” of training for a profession. Sidgwick called it a matter of “simple justice.” Such “justice,” he was warned in turn, would lead to further demands by women, further concessions by men.
Myers, on the other hand, agreed with Sidgwick without hesitation—so readily that it caught the professor by surprise. He had known Myers largely as one of his brighter students—a tall, gray-eyed young man with carefully elegant clothes and smoothly waved brown hair. Sidgwick was pleased to find behind the stylish exterior a classics scholar with the heart of a crusader.
It was natural that their conversation should drift to Sidgwick’s other unpopular cause. In his spare time, Sidgwick continued to investigate for the Ghost Society, sifting for evidence of spirit