The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [3]
One philosopher, a supporter of the endeavor, recalled being given a very direct warning against the effort, having a colleague direct his attention to a “once eminent chemist” with the comment that the man “had been a brilliant scientist but that recently he had unfortunately gone off his head” and begun investigating the supernatural. And yet investigating the supernatural—using the techniques of science to explore the occult—was exactly what William James and his friends wanted to do, in fact, considered a necessary part of science and its mission to understand the world. It was James who wrote up the story of the drowned girl for publication, neatly sifting the evidence for answers. His report cited interviews with everyone from the Boston diver to George Titus, from the mill owner to the blacksmith’s wife. In his conclusion, James ruled out fraud, any chance that Mrs. Titus had been lurking around the lake in the frosty dawn. He ruled out any relationship at all between the dead girl and the woman who helped find her. His report included the diver’s first reaction—“I was stunned”—and the Huse family’s baffled gratitude for help from a stranger with a “God-given power.”
Like the once-acclaimed chemist, William James had a reputation to lose. He was a heralded professor at Harvard University, the author of the most respected text on psychology yet published, a founder of the American Psychological Association. He’d developed an innovative approach to philosophy, rattling elitist traditions by linking everyday, real-life experience to intellectual exploration. He’d become famous even beyond academic circles, almost as well known as his novelist brother, Henry James Jr. The timing, in terms of personal credibility, was absolutely terrible. He said what he thought anyway: “My own view of the Titus case consequently is that it is a decidedly solid document in favor of the admission of a supernormal faculty of seership.”
James and his companions in this scientific ghost hunt were famed for their intellectual brilliance—their intellectual courage gained them less admiration. Yet they possessed both qualities in abundance. James’s fellow ghost hunters included the codiscoverer of the theory of evolution, a physiologist from France who would win the Nobel Prize in Medicine, an Australian who became a founding member of the American Anthropological Society, a female mathematician who became principal of Cambridge University’s first college for women, a pioneer in British utilitarian philosophy, and a trio of respected physicists.,
All of them had reputations that would suffer as a consequence, and all of them, like William James, would refuse to abandon the search. For all the risks, the work had its rewards as well—participating in what would become the best ghost hunt in the history of science, conducting studies that would frequently startle and sometimes convert skeptics into believers. All of them believed that they were working toward an understanding of life that could help bridge the chasms between science and faith, between what people see and what they imagine.
“Hardly, as yet, has the surface of the facts called ‘psychic’ begun to be scratched for scientific purposes. It is through following these facts, I am persuaded, that the greatest scientific conquests of the coming generation will be achieved,” James would write. The requirements for achieving that goal were both simple and almost impossibly complex. They included patience, a belief in infinite possibilities—and a willingness to accept that a dead girl could rise, as ephemeral and as real as mist, above the black lake of a dream.
1
THE NIGHT SIDE
WILLIAM JAMES sensed his own life growing short that year of Nellie Titus’s haunted dreams, having celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday the previous January. His cropped dark hair and short beard were rimmed with gray. Smile lines radiated like sunbursts around his eyes. But his eyes remained sharply blue, his body wiry and compact, and