The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [64]
The ASPR’s committee on haunted houses and apparitions had reached a similar conclusion regarding mental illness. Unlike Gurney and his colleagues, they saw no pattern of reality in haunted moments. They perceived instead a pattern of insanity or instability. Even the strongest mind could falter, the ASPR researchers pointed out; the perception of a ghost could be no more than a moment of mental fragility.
A general diagnosis of mental illness was, in fact, the first conclusion that a significant number of the American scientists liked. It suggested, at least, that psychical research might be of some use in the study of human psychology, that belief in the supernatural might be used as a tool, helping to identify aberrant brains. It allowed the researchers to quit dabbling in the occult, make their way back toward more respectable pursuits. It suggested that the marriage of scientists and psychics had been ill conceived.
William James gloomily mailed the report to a friend, calling it “a rather sorry ‘exhibit’ from the ‘President’s’ address down.” The society seemed to prefer attacking evidence of the supernatural to exploring it. “I suspect it [ASPR] will die by the new year.”
DID THE PSYCHICAL research community plan to do anything beyond debunking mediums and discrediting supernatural claims? That was Alfred Russel Wallace’s rather plaintive question. Could a positive result be seen in their future?
For all his interest in spiritualism, Wallace had remained one of the more innovative and productive scientific thinkers of his time. In the years since he’d published his first paper on natural selection, he helped pioneer the study of color vision and its development. He’d researched alpine corridors, glaciations, and island environments, describing what would come to be known as the Wallace effect of reproductive isolation. He’d also practiced what he preached about scientists upholding ethical standards for the betterment of society. In 1885 Wallace had supported a minimum wage for workers and proposed the unheard-of idea that manufacturers should be required to label goods, specifying their contents.
His fellow scientists fell short of such scrupulosity, he thought—especially those investigating spiritualism. While traveling in the United States on an 1886 lecture tour, he’d become particularly irate with the ASPR’s apparent insistence on exposing every medium that passed before them. He was even angry with William James, who, despite his qualified support of Leonora Piper, had helped discredit some of the more popular physical mediums in Boston.
It seemed to Wallace that the scientists were missing the point of parlor seances and the bedazzlements in which professional mediums dealt. He didn’t deny that floating furniture and slate writing were trivial. But he thought such demonstrations were “the only means of compelling attention to the subject, and this is more particularly the case with those imbued with the teachings of modern science.”
Wallace complained that scientists were impossible to please. If they observed physical effects, they characterized them as fraud. If they were asked to study telepathy or other mental demonstrations, they responded that it wasn’t worthwhile, since there was no measurable physical effect. He knew that even the SPR leaders considered him too gullible. Oliver Lodge said that the self-educated Wallace lacked the objectivity he might have gained from formal scientific schooling. More charitably, Fred Myers thought Wallace too fundamentally decent to comprehend the base dishonesty of the medium trade. “There are natures... which stand so far removed from the meaner temptations of humanity that those gifted at birth can no more enter into the true mind of a cheat than I can enter into the true mind of a chimpanzee.”
But Wallace took the position that his critics should first accomplish something. “I think your constant allegation of fraud on mere suspicion unreasonable & unscientific,” he wrote James, angry at the latter’s dismissal of some of Wallace