The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [42]
William, standing by in the smoky fog of London, learned of his father’s death when he read it in the London Standard. He noted, with slight surprise, a burst of grief for his difficult parent—and an accompanying flourish of possibility. As he wrote to his wife, his father’s death made him feel “as I never began to do before, the tremendousness of the idea of immortality. If only he could be joined to mother. One grows dizzy at the thought.”
JAMES WAS WAITING for his brother’s return, unenthusiastically wrestling with his psychology book, when he received an unexpected invitation from Edmund Gurney to dine with his philosophy club, “the Scratch Eight.” Once a month, Gurney and seven of his friends—hence the group’s name—met to eat and to argue over a different philosophical question.
As Gurney explained, he lived nearby and was an acquaintance of James’s author brother. He politely presumed on that connection to invite William to the December philosophy dinner. James enjoyed the evening—“I felt quite at home among them”—and his feelings were clearly reciprocated. He was invited to the next meeting of the Scratch Eight. But he especially enjoyed the company of Edmund Gurney.
His next letter home sang with enthusiasm about this new friend, “one of the first rate minds of the time, a magnificent Adonis, six feet four in height with an extremely handsome face, voice and general air of distinction about him, altogether the exact opposite of the classical idea of a philosopher.”
Psychical research—and its implications—easily occupied their conversations, continuing in an exchange of letters after James returned to Cambridge in March of 1883. Gurney had accepted greater responsibilities at the SPR and was now honorary secretary. As he confessed to James, he still wondered at the strange enterprise, uncertain if the mysteries the group probed could ever be solved, or should be solved. He wondered, too, whether he was the right person for the quest.
“I doubt its compatibility, at any rate with my upsettable condition and easily fagged brain,” Gurney admitted. And yet he was aware that the project needed someone of his stronger qualities—determination and intelligence—and who was financially able to devote himself to the work. There were hundreds of candidates for solicitor positions. The same could not be said of persons wishful of exploring the occult.
The choice, he knew, would require sacrifice. Gurney anticipated “loss of reputation, or rather (since I haven’t much to lose) a gradual positive reputation for being weak in the head.” Yet his doubts seemed petty when weighed against the possibilities.
In this moment in ontological history, with the aftershocks of the Darwinian earthquake still shuddering across the religious landscape, Gurney saw a chance to calm the tremors, to create a new, integrated worldview. If a scholar could connect science and faith, find the points where they met, a point where perhaps one approach might illuminate the other, Gurney believed that man might be able to make sense of life itself. He might even be able to define when life began—and when it ended. “Risks must be faced, whatever one does,” he wrote, “and I feel no doubt the effort is worth the making.”
Both the personal struggle and the determination to explore further resonated with James. They were natural friends, he declared, and Gurney agreed. In William James, he recognized a “rare and precious kinship, the kind that made one think that Providence had done one a really good turn.
“‘Two lost souls!’ you will say,” James wrote later to a fellow philosopher, describing his bond with Gurney and his own growing interest in psychical research. “But that is what remains to be seen.”
GURNEY HAD AN IDEA about MarkTwain’s dream vision. He and Myers had been talking about what one might call the ordinary occult, experiences that unpredictably shadowed people’s lives. They were interested in dreams and premonitions