The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [40]
Henry Clemens died that night with his brother sitting beside him. In the morning, Sam walked numbly down to a room where the bodies of the dead were awaiting burial. Henry lay in a metal casket, balanced across two chairs.
As Sam Clemens stood, blinking against the memory of his dream, a volunteer nurse stepped up to the coffin and gently laid across it a bouquet of white roses with a single red bloom in their midst.
A DREAM, a coincidence, a premonition, a horrifying glimpse into the future? The older brother had wondered for years. Now, Clemens hoped, the time had come, the commitment was there—and he would finally get an answer.
4
METAPHYSICS AND METATROUSERS
THE AIR WAS CLOUDED black that fall of 1882, when William James came to London, barely six months after the Society for Psychical Research first convened. A miasma of fog and the smoke of tens of thousands of chimneys shrouded the city. It was, James said, like living in “the inside of a coal mine—and a coal mine in the process of combustion at that.”
He arrived on a Harvard-approved sabbatical, taking a break from teaching and family to focus on his ambitious plan for a new textbook in psychology. James had signed the contract to write the book in 1878, the same year that he’d married a dark-eyed, soft-voiced Boston schoolteacher, Alice Gibbens Howe, and begun family life in a small Cambridge home.
In that autumn of 1882, the couple already had two sons—three—year—old Harry, whom his father liked to refer to as “my domestic catastrophe,” and three-month-old Billy. But for all that—or perhaps because of all that—William was frustrated with his work. Psychology was a slippery field to catch hold of, a science just defining itself. James liked to joke that “the first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.” He’d started teaching psychology at Harvard in 1875, inventing the coursework as he went along.
The idea of a science of the mind had been gaining power since the turn of the nineteenth century, built on early studies of brain anatomy, dissections of the spinal cord and nerves, and awareness that brain damage could directly affect behavior. In 1848, a French neurologist had offered 500 francs to anyone who could show him a brain from an individual who suffered from speech disturbance and did not have damage to the left frontal lobe. By the next decade, the first books proposing psychology as a science—rather than a study of the soul, as philosophers and theologians saw it—began to be published.
And the great Charles Darwin himself added impetus to the notion that behavior was foremost a product of biology. Once started, Darwin seemed unstoppable. In 1871 and 1872 respectively, he’d published two books—The Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals—both of which explored comparable behaviors in humans and other species, suggesting an evolutionary explanation for the development of the brain and how it processed everything from logic to love.
It was, in its way, Darwin’s answer to Wallace’s proposal that an intelligent designer was required to explain the capabilities of the human mind. James’s first course at Harvard—The Relationships between Physiology and Psychology—drew directly on the Darwinian view, exploring the ways that that chemistry and anatomy could explain the inner workings of the brain.
Although this new science of the mind fit into Tyndall’s view of a mechanical universe—from the gas-fed engines of the stars to the chemically driven responses of living brain tissue—it prompted no contentious public debates, no warnings of a breakdown in cultural morals. Psychology’s effect on nineteenth-century thinking was more insidious. By its very existence,