The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [71]
Sidgwick’s admiration for Kant and for the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, one of the most eloquent advocates of philosophy in service of society, illuminated his early writings. In his first book, The Principles of Ethics, published in 1874, Sidgwick explored the ways society might achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number of its members. His next book, The Principles of Political Economy, published in 1883, was more pragmatic, exploring the ways philosophy might guide a society being reshaped by technology and commerce. There was less of Kant’s higher morality in his work, more of Mill’s utilitarianism.
Sidgwick found the years had eroded his ability to share Kant’s acceptance of God as a premise, immortality as a postulate. By 1887, as he painfully acknowledged, Sidgwick needed some form of proof to support his faith. He knew that Kant himself had searched for evidence, as indicated by the German philosopher’s investigation of the mystical claims of Emmanuel Swedenborg. But as far as Sidgwick could judge, even a century later, factual support for the God theory remained insubstantially thin.
Troubled by personal as well as philosophical doubts, Sidgwick found himself wishing for, at least, some sign of a “friendly universe.” Perhaps this was what the psychical researchers could prove, that the star-spangled web of the skies was organized under some kind of greater moral governance, directed by “a Sovereign will that orders all things rightly.” If the universe was only a machine, after all, what determined the rules of morality? What enforced them? Sidgwick found himself increasingly in agreement with Myers about the necessary nature of their search for proof of immortality. But he lacked his friend’s natural buoyancy. He worried that they would fail. And he worried about the consequences if that happened.
“If I decide that this search is a failure, shall I finally and decisively make this postulate [to believe in God anyway]?” he worried to himself. “Can I consistently with my whole view of truth and the method of its attainment? And if I answer ‘no’ to each of these questions, have I any ethical system at all?”
IN EARLY 1887, as predicted by William James, the American Society for Psychical Research self-destructed, unable to withstand the hostility of its own scientific membership. James was keeping the remnants of the organization together, but he wrote unhappily to Edmund Gurney that as a Harvard instructor and author of a still unfinished psychology book, he really hadn’t time to do so.
Gurney replied sympathetically. Of course, he understood that the “more legitimate, or at any rate, respectable work must oust the other.” He had no doubt that James was keeping his priorities in the proper order. But the British society was not prepared to give up on its American counterpart. Sidgwick had received a cable from a wealthy American spiritualist. The man was a great admirer of Richard Hodgson’s take-no-prisoners approach to investigation. The telegram indicated a willingness to pay Dick Hodgson’s salary for a year, if he would come to America and put the psychical research program back on track.
Gurney didn’t mention that Hodgson had refused when Sidgwick first told him of the offer. Or that Sidgwick, quietly relentless as ever, had persuaded his former student to go to Boston for the year only. He wrote only that James and the ASPR were about to find themselves lucky: “He [Hodgson] combines the powers of a first-rate detective with a perfect readiness to believe in astrology (Don’t quote this as it might be misunderstood.) I should pity the astrologer whose horoscopes he took to tackling.”
BUT ASTROLOGERS were not in Richard Hodgson’s sights when he stepped briskly onto the Boston docks in May 1887. Leonora Piper was.
First, though, he had to