The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [28]
Tyndall was Faraday’s successor at the Royal Institution; he had been elected to the association’s presidency in 1874. He was an extraordinarily gifted scientist—and an equally formidable personality. Over the course of his career, Tyndall showed that gases could both absorb and transfer heat (a fact that would underlie theories of global climate change a century later); he demonstrated that ozone was a cluster of three oxygen molecules (others had mistakenly thought it was made of hydrogen); and he invented breathing devices for firemen and instruments to measure air pollution—notably the smoky fogs that too often enveloped London in choking darkness. His scientific prowess, combined with his new office, made Tyndall’s a particularly persuasive voice as he evangelized for science and against any notion of a reality beyond the physical.
It was the age of scientific miracles, after all. Over the past decade alone Louis Pasteur had invented pasteurization, Alfred Nobel had invented dynamite, and Thomas Edison had invented the stock ticker. Tyndall’s peers had in a few short years advanced civilization beyond anything, in his opinion, that religion had accomplished over many centuries. The new president of the British Association found it easy to dismiss biblical teachings as the explanations of yesterday. Any concept of an afterlife he jettisoned as unwanted, unwarranted dreaming—an illusion perpetrated on “the weak mind of man.”
In his 1874 presidential address in Belfast, Tyndall urged spiritual leaders of all sorts—including the mainstream Christian clergy—to step aside:, “The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.”
THE THIRD OF the founders of the psychical research movement, Edmund Gurney, was, at first, the most reluctant. Gurney possessed the outward appearance of a man lavishly blessed by life. He stood nearly six feet four inches tall, blue-eyed and fair-haired. He had an elegantly chiseled face, adorned by high cheekbones and a drooping handlebar of a mustache. He wore his top hats high and his tailored suits with style.
Born in Surrey in 1847, Gurney had inherited enough money to enable him to live in luxurious idleness—if he chose. He was as impatient with that prospect as he was with those who assumed his ambition reached no higher, among them the pretty woman who would become his wife.
He possessed “a mind as beautiful as his face,” said the British novelist George Eliot, who belonged to Gurney’s wide circle of friends. The rumor in London society was that the often-imperious Eliot had modeled the sweet-natured hero of her last novel, Daniel Deronda, after Edmund Gurney. She didn’t deny it.
He could seem almost annoyingly perfect, until one got to know him better—and found the shadows under the gloss.
Gurney met Sidgwick and Myers while studying law and philosophy at Cambridge, a career he’d chosen after giving up his dream of becoming a concert pianist. They bonded over a shared love of philosophical arguments and of poetry, especially for that reigning poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Hostesses of university parties spoke of them as an inevitable threesome—quiet Sidgwick, talkative Myers, and charming Gurney.
Myers was the only one of them who really enjoyed the circuit. Sidgwick was too shy to relax at parties, and Gurney, for all