The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [44]
As James wrote to a fellow philosopher that year, “I confess I rather despair of any popular religion of a philosophic character & I sometimes wonder whether th[e]re can be any popular religion raised on the ruins of the old Christianity?” He wished that his own community of science was working to reduce such hostility. Instead, researchers tended to imply, if not declare, that those who clung to Christian beliefs simply lacked the intelligence to understand the rational view of life. It seemed to James that scientists were missing an opportunity to be included in a discussion that could well shape the future. “Are the much despised ‘spiritualists’ and the Society for Psychical Research to be the chosen instruments of a new era of faith?” he asked. “It would surely be strange if they were, but if they are not, I see no other agency that can do the work.”
At James’s invitation, the charismatic William Barrett arrived in Boston in September 1884, en route to a science conference in Montreal. He was there to explain the psychical research being done in Europe—and to encourage the Americans to surpass it. With the blessing of the Sidgwick group, Barrett hoped to stimulate interest in a psychical research organization in the United States that would complement the British one.
Squeezed in among scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Harvard’s Divinity School and area churches, Barrett described the research projects of the British Society for Psychical Research. He explained the SPR’s goal—to explore those “remarkable phenomena, which are prima facie inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis” and which had yet to be credibly investigated.
He warned his audience to expect ridicule if they took up his challenge. But that was true, Barrett, said of most new sciences. And yet given a chance, alchemy had developed into chemistry, and the star mappers of the past had become the astronomers of today. Barrett believed, and he would repeat this throughout his long career, that “sooner or later psychical research will demonstrate to the educated world, not only the existence of a soul in man, but also the existence of a soul in Nature,” and he hoped that the Americans would also see the golden promise of that ambition.
LABORING IN CAMBRIDGE, Henry Sidgwick had formed one solid conclusion: that he was a terrible psychical researcher.
Everything seemed to flatten out when he appeared; knocks faltered, raps halted, spirits faded away. He always seemed to “paralyze the phenomena,” he told his colleagues, and, depressingly, they agreed with him. He’d racked up hour after hour observing nothing happen. “I’m going to a haunted house,” he wrote gloomily to Myers on a properly dark fall afternoon, rich with shadows. “Where I shall see no ghosts.”
The fault belonged to him, Sidgwick wrote in his diary; he lacked the skills of his fellow investigators. Nora was more talented an observer, Myers more tireless, Gurney more acute in his judgment. No wonder they were doing more interesting work. But Sidgwick did have a few strengths he thought he could bring to the cause. He wrote them down too: He believed in justice. He was fair-minded. He was a good listener. And when he looked with satisfaction at his colleagues, Sidgwick had to note another talent: the ability to recruit excellent people. In point of fact, he’d recently persuaded another philosophy student to join their ranks, a cheerful cynic named Richard Hodgson, and he thought it might be one of his best actions to date.
Hodgson was a big, burly, vigorous man with a fresh, ruddy face and a shock of