The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [23]
Years later, describing his part in building an organization dedicated to psychical research, Myers put his role in self-deprecating perspective. He was the dreamer of the group: “Edmund Gurney worked at the task with more conscientious energy; the Sidgwicks [Henry and, later, his wife, Nora] with more unselfish wisdom; but no one more unreservedly than myself... staked his all upon that distant and growing hope.”
FOLLOWING HIS SPIRITUAL insights, Alfred Russel Wallace in the late 1860s invited a series of respected scientists—including a noted physiologist and rather brilliant physicist named John Tyndall—to attend private séances at his home and investigate the phenomena. As he explained to another invitee, T. H. Huxley, Wallace hoped that his colleagues would consider such study “a new branch of Anthropology.”
As might be expected, Huxley’s response was more barbed than the other rejections. Huxley had been to a few seances earlier in his life, and he’d found them ridiculous. Wallace might be onto something, but Huxley wasn’t impressed by whatever it was: “It may all be true, for anything I know to the contrary,” he wrote in reply to the invitation, “but really I cannot get up any interest in the subject.”
Undaunted, Wallace pressed him again; many of the scientists had flatly refused, and Tyndall had stayed but a few minutes before stomping out the door. Wallace knew Huxley from their mutual labors in favor of natural selection; he hoped that collegiality would persuade him. Huxley’s second refusal was more pointed. As he explained, he’d heard enough of spirit communications to know that they were so much nonsense. He didn’t need to bore himself senseless by sitting through a seance in person: “The only good argument I can see in a demonstration of the truth of ‘Spiritualism’ is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better to live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a séance.”
Finally, Wallace accepted that his circle of acquaintances seemed more likely to ignore his new science than advance it. He decided to give his ideas a more public airing, and in April 1869 published a paper laying out his view that natural selection might have limits, that an “overruling intelligence” might be responsible for the development of mental and moral behavior.
Wallace undoubtedly felt driven to be combative. He complained that a scientist seeking to explore the supernatural found himself instantly demoted, “set down as credulous and superstitious, if not openly accused of falsehood and imposture, and his careful and oft-repeated experiments ignored as not worth a moment’s consideration.” But it wasn’t just exasperation that prompted Wallace to air his argument. It was his sense of rightness, his conviction that understanding supernatural events could help illuminate “the nature of life and intellect, on which physical science throws a very feeble and uncertain light.” Wallace believed, he said, that all branches of science would suffer until such inexplicable happenings were seriously investigated and “dealt with as constituting an essential portion of the phenomena of human nature.”
His colleague’s righteous tone further alarmed Darwin. After reading an early version of the manuscript, he wrote to Wallace, “If you had not told me, I should have thought they [the comments] had been written by somebody else. As you expected, I differ grievously from you and I am very sorry for it.”
But Wallace wasn’t sorry. He had failed to win over Darwin or his illustrious group of allies, but he was moving on to better prospects. At long last, Wallace had persuaded another of Britain’s more acclaimed scientists—the chemist