The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [47]
But the founders had chosen an astronomer, Simon Newcomb, who headed the Naval Almanac office, to stand as president, and other scientists, physicists and psychologists, to fill the remaining officer positions. James was especially pleased about Newcomb, whose opinions carried real influence. In addition to his naval appointment, Newcomb was a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins, revered for his painstaking mathematical recalculation of planetary orbits. He was the first president of the American Astronomical Society, and a past president of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematical Society. If Newcomb set the right tone, “he will probably carry the others,” James wrote, hopeful that more mainstream scientists would follow.
NEWCOMB’S TONE, as it turned out, was that of a man who had suddenly realized he had said yes when he meant no.
He began his presidency by writing an article for Science magazine in which he dismissed Barrett’s work on mind reading and all subsequent experiments on the subject by the British society. Real scientists knew, Newcomb wrote, that thought was a mere bodily function, a product of internal chemistry and nervous system impulses, a self-contained product. Newcomb himself had yet to read a single piece of convincing evidence that a thought could be “transferred” from one mind to the other.
Why was it, Newcomb demanded, that if thought reading existed, and presumably had existed for as long as had human thought, “no living person knows any more about the conditions of transference today than men did a thousand years ago?” Why was it that after all his experiments, William Crookes had been forced to go to physicists like Barrett in search of a working theory of action? Why was it that neither chemist nor physicist had been able to provide such a theory?
True, Barrett and his colleagues had produced results suggesting that thought transference did exist, in fact if not in theory. But Newcomb found that easy enough to dismiss. He suspected their findings were simply lucky coincidence, overstated by sloppy research methods. None of the British society’s work impressed Newcomb. He considered Nora Sidgwick’s plan to study reports of haunted houses no more than the process of collecting “very scientific children’s ghost stories.” And he was dismayed that Gurney and Myers had posted ads in the British papers, asking ordinary citizens to write and describe any supernatural experiences. Newcomb didn’t consider that a scientific way to gather information. It made their goal far too public, he scolded. They should have been doing all their data collection by means of private inquiry.
William James had told the new ASPR members that psychical research was “bringing science and the occult together in England and America.” But speaking for science, and speaking as the ASPR’s president, Newcomb hadn’t seen a fact or a study to convince him of that.
Oh, really? replied Edmund Gurney, who was angry enough to fire off a rebuttal letter to Science. Didn’t it make scientific sense to gather a large number of answers and then sift out the silly ones? It was very well to insist only on private inquiry, if one had an unlimited budget and a decade or two to do the work. “It is worrying to think of the stores of authentic evidence which are untapped & which will gradually become unavailable. I believe that the speed with which the subject gets on will depend more than anything else, on the number of cases collected, sifted and classified. It is the unscientific portion of the community that our progress really depends on.”
For all his scientific knowledge, Newcomb seemed unable to understand the research requirements or respect the process of psychical research, Gurney wrote to James, adding that in his opinion the ASPR’s new president had “managed to get considerably