The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [97]
The once awkward Sidgwick had surprised himself and his friends by growing into rather a charming man. Despite his shyness and his stammer—still with him, if less pronounced—he’d learned how to disarm others with his self-deprecating discourse and diffident humor. His gentle wit had even gained a nickname: Sidgwickedness. He was a good listener, a man who obviously considered the opinions of others. Sidgwick became the SPR’s chief diplomat, working to smooth its way to the next International Congress of Experimental Psychology. His formidable task was to dispel resentments still lingering from the previous session, at which some scientists had felt pressured into allowing the touchy subject of psychical inquiry. Sidgwick paid courtesy visits to the influential university psychology departments in Berlin and Paris, assuring scientists there that at the upcoming congress, he planned to organize a small “orthodox” session on hypnotism only. He also tried to make his case that the SPR’s subject matter was not an aberration and that telepathy, as “a law of nature,” should be considered a legitimate subject for science.
The meetings with French and German scientists didn’t exactly encourage him. He encountered rigid resistance from what he called “stubborn materialists, interested solely in psychophysical experiments on the senses.” They weren’t in the least impressed by Henry Sidgwick, a philosopher whose whole experience in experimental techniques was with telepathy.
“Water and fire, oil and vinegar, are feeble to express our antagonism,” he said gloomily to Nora.
IN THE FIRST WEEK of a gray and blustery March, a dying Alice James asked her brother Henry to cable her good-byes to her family in America: “Tenderest love to all farewell. Am going soon.” The next day, Henry cabled again: “Alice just passed away painless.”
To Henry’s annoyance, William promptly wired back to ask if their sister was really dead. She could, after all, have slipped into a trance state: “her neurotic temperament & chronically reduced vitality are just the field for trance-tricks to play themselves upon.”
Henry had been every day to the sickroom to comfort his beloved sister. “My patient Henry,” she called him. He was not in a mood to put up with his older brother’s transoceanic speculations. “If you were here,” the novelist snapped back, “you wouldn’t have thought your warning necessary.”
“What a relief!” William replied, sobered. Their sister was at peace, the “task” of her life completed. For this once, for the sake of Alice and for a peeved and grieving Henry, the eldest James sibling dropped the subjects of trances and spirits in favor of a simple good-bye.
“GOD (OR THE UNKNOWABLE) bless you,” James wrote to Hodgson, referring to Huxley’s agnostic ideals.
As the summer of 1892 approached, the James family prepared to sail for Europe. Harvard had granted William another sabbatical leave, and he intended to use it for a good year of travel, study, and visiting friends. This time his wife and children would come with him to the Congress of Experimental Psychology. But they would also visit his brother in England and go to France, Switzerland, Germany, and any other place that might appeal to them.
Before he left, James wanted to make sure that the American part of the Census of Hallucinations was ready. The tireless Nora had sent him a “skeleton paper” so that he could see her methodology and an outline that he could use, showing how to organize the American cases along similar lines. He left her correspondence in Hodgson’s room along with his “hallucination book,” containing a fair number of analyzed crisis apparitions, and two boxes of unanalyzed cases. He feared it would be up to Hodgson to finish the analysis and was sorry to leave so much work.
Hodgson was also polishing the final draft of his Piper report. James hoped that, using Nora’s guide, the ASPR secretary could largely “fill in the blanks” for Mrs. Sidgwick and turn the whole pile of ghostly accounts around in a month or so. But he knew