The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [43]
They proposed to treat such accounts—from Twain’s dream to Catherine Crowe’s tales of ghostly footsteps—as cumulative, as pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, broken and scattered, needing to be reassembled into a picture of ... well, they weren’t sure what it would show, but Gurney and Myers thought the image would somehow convey a greater truth.
As William James would emphasize, such stories arose in every book of human history: “No matter where you open its pages, you find things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and products of disease.” Supernatural events seemed to string together like a message, a secretive code that so far remained undecipherable.
The SPR ran newspaper ads soliciting personal stories of encounters with the otherworldly. Gurney spent hours each day sifting through them, replying to personal accounts of apparitions, asking for confirmation, witnesses, documents. “I have been tremendously busy all winter,” Gurney wrote to James in early 1884, explaining his recent lack of friendly correspondence. By his own calculations, Gurney had written something like sixteen hundred letters in the past two months, fifty-five already that day, aside from his quick note to James, which was for pure pleasure: “I wish you were not severed by the intractable Atlantic.”
It was addictive work, despite the tedious clerical demands. Gurney found himself almost unable to think of anything else:
One lives in a whirl of sporadic interests & small excitements—whether A will answer this question satisfactorily, and B that, whether C’s mother really died the night he saw her appear at a distance, or a night or two earlier, so that he might have heard the news between-&c&c&c,
I find it difficult, almost impossible very often, to sit down & read anything, & feel as if I was not improving but rather the reverse. It is a bore that there are not more hours in the day, & more Energy to be got out of one’s “grey matter” between waking & sleeping.
Even across the dark, glimmering distance of the ocean, James found Gurney’s enthusiasm infectious. Psychical research “is as worthy a specialty as a man could take up,” he wrote back encouragingly.
There was no assurance, of course, that Gurney would be able to assemble the puzzle into something connecting this world and the next. But at least he was making an effort to study the pieces. James was increasingly persuaded that for religion and its moral convictions to remain a center of Western culture, its teachings needed a new foundation, built on both traditional theology and the newer realities of the scientific universe. He failed to understand why more intellectuals—humanists and scientists alike—weren’t actively working toward that link, as Edmund Gurney was trying to do.
Theologians and religious leaders, James wrote to a fellow philosopher, mostly resisted the idea that faith, in light of modern science, should include “belief in new physical facts and possibilities.” Not all churches could be judged as one, of course, but James found himself dissatisfied with so many aspects of Victorian religiosity. The Catholics, steadfast in faith, seemed to him determined to pretend that scientific discoveries were meaningless. At the other end of the spectrum, however, he deplored the “bloodless pallor” of the Unitarians’ careful open-mindedness. “Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God,” he complained.
A few religious leaders, such as James McCosh, president of Princeton University, were attempting to integrate evolution into their teachings. McCosh proposed that the Darwin-Wallace theory served “to increase the wonder and mystery of the process of creation,