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By Root 1600 0

sandy brown hair. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1855, the son of a wool importer, he’d considered becoming a lawyer, graduating from the University of Melbourne with a law degree—but decided practicing law didn’t seem intellectually stimulating enough. He decided, instead, on graduate work at St. John’s College, Cambridge, choosing the school because his favorite poet, William Wordsworth, was an alumnus. Hodgson had read nothing better than Wordsworth’s lyrical odes to nature, the poet’s assertion that “One impulse from a vernal wood/may teach you more of man/of moral evil and of good/than all the sages can.” He hoped, eventually, to hear and learn from nature as Wordsworth did. In fact, he scheduled time for it in his daily plans. Hodgson was—as Sidgwick had noted—ever disciplined in his habits, always determined in approaching his goals.

He got up at 7:30 every morning. He had breakfast at 8:00 a.m.: “one raw egg in one half pint milk, one slice of bread, one and a half cups of tea.” He read till nine, worked on essays and letters until noon. He had bread and tea for lunch. He lounged and read “fiction or light poetry” till 3:45. He played lawn tennis until dinner. He went to a gym where he boxed three times a week, or fenced, or worked out with dumbbells. At 9:00 p.m. he had a supper of bread, eggs, and tea. He read poetry until bedtime, usually by 11:30. He allowed himself one cigarette before sleep. “Regularity for the organism is everything,” he wrote his best friend in Australia, a fellow law student named James Hackett who had decided to remain there and become a lawyer.

Only nature and poetry, his two abiding loves, could cause Hodgson to slip a little from his standards of activity. “I do enjoy a leisurely walk home from lecture these days,” Hodgson wrote to Jimmy Hackett. “The sunlight goes right through me.” He read Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson; he snuck in some hours to write his own doggerel verse, which betrayed a lurking, ironic sense of humor and a keen interest in ongoing debate over Darwinian evolution:

The Bishop knows better; for Huxley and Tyndall

Have shown him that man goes away like a fly;

And seeing the soul’s such a regular swindle,

He’ll eat and he’ll drink and tomorrow he’ll die.

We’ll prove you and I by a laudanum potion

The body is just what we always have thought her

A middling arrangement of molecule motion

Ammonia, and carbonic acid and water.

Hodgson worried about Hackett’s lack of mental stimulation, mired in the dull practice of the law. He promised to write his friend about all the interesting philosophical questions that came up at Cambridge and the personal ones. “Thy brain shall not be dormant while I live, O Jimmy!”

HODGSON KNEW he lacked the proper philosophy student’s attitude, which he described as sitting at the professor’s feet, and he knew he annoyed Sidgwick. “I was rather amused,” Hodgson wrote home, “because he seems a goodly fellow and I thought I detected a feeling that he had better be rough with me with the intention of diminishing my confidence.”

But in this, he underestimated his philosophy professor. Sidgwick saw in the young Australian much more than an inflated ego. He saw a smart, decent, hardworking man—and a natural investigator. He’d been looking for someone like Hodgson. He had a project in mind, the SPR’s most ambitious investigation to date.

As had so many others, Richard Hodgson found himself persuaded by Henry Sidgwick. By December 1884, the young Australian scholar was in Bombay, India, on an expedition financed by his philosophy professor, in pursuit of an elusive but influential psychic.

On the surface, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was an unlikely target. A fat, middle-aged Russian with a puglike face dominated by enormous, bulging eyes, she had the chain-smoker’s habit of scattering herself and her listeners with cigarette ash. Yet Blavatsky carried such a reputation for mystical powers that she had been able to create her own religious group, the Theosophical Society.

Madame Blavatsky, as she liked to be called, had once lived