The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [65]
THE TWO FAT volumes of Phantasms of the Living were at the printer. Its publication date was set for October 1886. Not soon enough. Too soon. Everyone concerned suffered nervous jitters.
Sidgwick worried that no one would read it. Then he worried that people would read it and “select the weak stories to make fun of.” Then he worried that such selections would diminish the book’s influence. “It will have one advantage—hard to get in these days—that there never has been a book of the kind.”
Gurney worried over the volume’s imperfections, “the monotonous assortment that calls itself a cumulative proof.... It is a ragged affair. Things that have taken days of dull inquiry will look no better than if they had been picked up in 3 minutes.” Still, he wrote to James, “to be sincere I am glad to have done with it, & feel sure that the time, being my time could not have been better spent. And life, which has been for many months a petty fever, will now assume its more normal ditch-water aspect.”
Myers worried that they would fail to make people think. Despite Sidgwick’s cautions and admonitions, he’d maintained his challenge to organized religion. But he had shifted his primary attack. Religious dogma was irritatingly, willfully blind, Myers thought. But scientific dogma was worse. He sought to counter efforts by traditional researchers to marginalize the work of psychical research. “We conceive ourselves to be working (however imperfectly) in the main track of discovery,” he wrote, pointing out that the SPR’s investigations had already repelled “the crazy wonder-mongers.” The difference was that he and his friends did not choose to limit scientific scope—or to define reality—within the narrow boundaries that the “ruthless hand of science” allowed. They hoped to persuade the research community to be more intellectually adventurous and “to lay the foundation-stone of a study which will loom large in the approaching age.”
Science’s tight rein on reality, Myers said, reduced the universe to a large machine and people to small ones. Scientists declared human free will to be an illusion, and emotions like love to be vestigial instincts. “Our vaunted personality itself is seen to depend on a shifting and unstable synergy of a number of nervous centres, the defect of a portion of which may alter our character altogether.” Research was stripping people of complexity and the world of promise and reward, he argued. “The emotional creed of educated men is becoming divorced from their scientific creed.”
Given that scientists did not yet know everything—at least, so Myers believed—he deemed it far too soon to declare questions of immortality and spirit off limits to rational men. If scientific leaders were to be honest, they would acknowledge that they didn’t hold a monopoly on the important questions of human existence. Rather than discouraging those questions, they would seek to help answer them.
As well as issuing a sweeping challenge, though, Myers could also offer some very specific ways in which researchers might join the investigation. The SPR offered some conclusions and some theories on which to build:
1. Telepathy, by which Myers meant the transfer of thoughts and feelings from one mind to another—was a fact in Nature.
2. Phantasms, by which he meant impressions, voices, or figures of the dead and dying, were seen by their friends and relatives with a frequency beyond chance.
3. Telepathy might explain these phantasms, since clearly they represented action of one mind on another. The “second thesis therefore confirms, and is confirmed by the first.”
To borrow a historical analogy, Myers compared launching a new science to geographical exploration at its most world-changing. He invoked the explorers Magellan and Columbus, feeling their way through unknown waters, “ploughing through some strange ocean where beds of entangling seaweed cumber the trackless way.”
The seaweed itself might “foreshadow a land unknown”; the peculiar