The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [70]
Gurney’s fear had been that the book would be ignored or underestimated, and when it appeared, he thought himself right. The book received only passing attention in the fall of 1886, mostly newspaper reviews by journalists who found the subject of apparitions to be an amusing topic. But by the next year, the research community had taken notice of Phantasms’ claim to be legitimate science. Now the book received plenty of attention—excepting James’s review and a polite notice in the philosophical journal Mind, all of it negative.
Perhaps the most publicized attack in England appeared in the magazine Nineteenth Century in August 1887, in a lengthy article devoted to discrediting the documentation that Gurney and his coauthors had used to establish their ghost stories. And perhaps the most painful challenge came from the United States in December 1887, in an article published by the ASPR and written by one of William James’s close friends, Charles S. Peirce (the son of one of the Harvard professors sent to debunk the Davenport Brothers). Peirce had hardly bothered to read the book before declaring that he found every case of crisis apparition unbelievable, and Gurney’s rebuttal showed that the critic had both misquoted and misrepresented the cases cited.
Still, Gurney admitted that Peirce had raised some valid points, notably that people are more likely to forget dreams or hallucinations that do not coincide with death, which could tend to inflate the statistics involved, and he repeated that he himself thought the statistical sample far too small. As he had tried to make clear, Gurney saw the book as only a beginning for psychical research—as did William James, who also noted that limited statistics and unanswered questions made it obvious that much more work needed to be done. James emphasized, though, that “any theory helps analysis of the facts.” He encouraged Gurney to continue developing the theoretical relationship between telepathy and apparitions, despite its imperfections, and he pointedly stated in his review that in their combination of careful research and penetrating analysis, the authors had made a strong enough argument to finally draw the research community into the discussion.
“The next 25 years will then probably decide the question,” James wrote. “Either a flood of confirmatory phenomena, caught in the act, will pour in, in consequence of their work; or it will not pour in—and then we shall legitimately enough explain the stories here preserved as mixtures of odd coincidence with fiction.” He knew from conversations with Gurney that investigations of crisis apparitions had persuaded his friend he was studying scientific reality rather than science fiction. Despite the hostile response, James believed that as others explored the same territory, they too would recognize its genuine nature. He made that also clear in Science: “I feel that I ought to describe the total effect left at present by the book on my mind. It is a strong suspicion that its authors will prove to be on the winning side.”
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ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
TWO THINGS ONLY ELICIT AWE, said the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in 1788: “der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir” (the starry sky above and the moral law within). To experience the former, one had only to gaze upward on a clear night. The moral law within required more effort. Kant suggested that morality could not survive unless people worked at it, stayed determined to maintain belief in three essential ideas: freedom, God, and immortality. There was a warning implicit in his declaration: one could rely always on a starry night; human morality was built of far more fragile material.
When Henry Sidgwick began studying philosophy, he found Kant’s moral reasoning as powerful as if it had been said that day, as solid as the ground beneath his feet. As Sidgwick wrote in 1887, as a young philosopher