The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [85]
Almost simultaneously, James and Hodgson came up with the same idea. They would send her to England, put Gurney’s “intractable Atlantic” between her and any regular sources of information and support. They would see what happened to their “Yankee girl,” as James affectionately called her, in a place not her home.
7
THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY
T. H. HUXLEY—among the most intellectually confident of nineteenth-century men—had no difficulty, was proud even, to confess that he felt ignorant in one notable area. He first made his confession at an 1869 meeting of the Metaphysical Society, a club of Britain’s leading intellectuals, with membership dominated by theologians, scientists, and philosophers, spanning John Tyndall to Henry Sidgwick.
The Metaphysical Society held discussions ranging from “The Scientific Basis of Morals” to “Has a Frog a Soul?”. Huxley’s talk was titled “Is God Unknowable?”, and in it he described his perspective on religion as “agnostic” (from the Greek agnostos, “unknowable”). Where the gnostic writers of Christian history claimed spiritual knowledge as essential to salvation, this champion of scientific materialism claimed no knowledge. There could be no knowledge, Huxley believed, when there was no proof.
The more nineteenth-century science illuminated mysteries of the universe, the less likely it appeared to Huxley that solutions to those mysteries lay beyond physical reality. Besides that, his labors on behalf of Darwinian science had left him less than impressed with the intellectual powers of his fellows. Was it even possible that this meager species, saddled with finite perception, finite intelligence, could comprehend a reality unbounded by physical limits? He doubted it. Huxley insisted that the rational mind must investigate, must seek hard evidence. But in the absence of such evidence, he viewed doubt, not belief, as the responsible stance.
Twenty years later, in 1889, Huxley took that confession of unbelief even further, in a widely read book, Christianity and Agnosticism, which made it clear that the intervening time had reinforced his doubt, intensified his impatience with those who refused to join him in doubting.
Agnosticism, Huxley wrote, should not be considered a creed. It was a method, or if one preferred, a scientific principle: nothing is certain unless it is proved. Thus, if one could not confirm the literal existence of angels, spirits, gods, they must be doubted. The agnostic did not close his mind to possibility; he simply set the standards of reality high. Very high. No supernatural agency had met Huxley’s burden of proof.
Indeed, Huxley saw science as directly contradicting supernatural explanations. Astronomers had thoroughly overturned the concept of an Earth-centered universe, once essential to Christian thought. Throughout the nineteenth century, Earth’s importance—and correspondingly, mankind’s place in the universe—had further diminished. This planet was one of eight in our solar system (the most distant, Neptune, having been discovered in 1846). Our sun was one of millions, if not billions, of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which now appeared to be itself one of countless galaxies. Rather than the center, God’s favorite, one of a kind, Earth appeared but an insignificant part of a vast material universe. Each glimmering star, each celestial object found, Huxley wrote, revealed another “world in course of development or retrogression hanging out its light signal in the ocean of infinity.”
Physical man, Huxley continued, was “mere dust in the cosmic machinery, a bubble on the surface of the ocean of things both in magnitude and duration[,] a by-product of cosmic chemistry.... He fits more or less well into this machinery, or it would crush him. But the machinery has no more special reference to him than to other