1 A critical examination of the methodology and evidence of the first and second generation elite leaders of the Society for Psychical Research with particular reference to the life, work and ideas of Frederic WH Myers and his colleagues and to the assessment of the automatic writings allegedly produced post-mortem by him and others (the cross- correspondences). Submitted by Trevor John Hamilton to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Publication (PT) in June 2019.This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and no material has been previously submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature…………………………… 2 Abstract This thesis outlines the canons of evidence developed by the elite Cambridge- based and educated leaders of the Society for Psychical Research to assess anomalous phenomena, and second, describes the gradual shift away from that approach, by their successors and the reasons for such a partial weakening of those standards, and the consequences for the general health of the SPR .It argues that, for a variety of reasons, this methodology has not always been fully appreciated or described accurately. Partly this is to do with the complex personality of Myers who provoked a range of contradictory responses from both contemporaries and later scholars who studied his life and work; partly to do with the highly selective criticisms of his and his colleagues’ work by TH Hall (which criticisms have entered general discourse without proper examination and challenge); and partly to a failure fully to appreciate how centrally derived their concepts and approaches were from the general concerns of late-Victorian science and social science. Their early achievements (given the base from which they started) were considerable but the methodology they developed was gradually eroded in some fields by their successors. This was partly because of the nature of the material; partly because of the shared, subjective elite networks of the group; and partly because of the impact of the affair of Gerald Balfour and Winifred Coombe-Tennant on the assessment and interpretation of the cross- correspondence automatic writings. This led to some neglect of experimental work and to an almost cultish atmosphere within the leadership of the SPR itself, particularly damaging in the interwar period. 3 Table of Contents 3 Summative statement 4 Context (edited version of the introductions from both books) 30 Myers and the SPR in the 1880s 34 Myers as psychologist 111 Myers, science and the SPR 133 Were the cross-correspondences unambiguous? 164 Were they a psychological artefact? 184 Did they occur above chance expectation? 203 Were normal avenues for acquiring information ruled out? 212 Were they the product of wishful thinking? 222 Were the aims of the communicators fulfilled? 249 Archival material consulted 269 Select bibliography and references 270 Appendix 1 The flow of scripts 1901-1936 331 Appendix 2 The Hope Star Browning complete scripts and the Latin Message 332 Appendix 3 Types of symbols in the scripts 337 Commentary and personal reflection 341 4 Summative Statement I am submitting the following sections from two books of mine for the Doctor of Philosophy in History by Publication. They form a coherent thesis which I outline in this summative statement below. They are: context (an edited version of parts of the introductions from both books); three chapters from my first book (Hamilton, T.2009. Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and The Victorian Search for Life After Death. Exeter: Imprint Academic). They are: Myers and the SPR in the 1880s; Myers as Psychologist; Myers, science and the SPR. Material from six chapters in my second book (Hamilton, T. 2017.Arthur Balfour’s Ghosts: An Edwardian Elite and the Riddle of the Cross-Correspondence Automatic Writings. Exeter: Imprint Academic). The sections are (the chapter headings have been simplified): Were the cross-correspondences unambiguous?; Were they a psychological artefact?; Did they occur above chance expectation?; Were normal avenues for acquiring information ruled out?;Were they the product of wishful thinking?;Were the aims of the communicators fulfilled? In essence, these nine chapters and the contextual statement form a coherent argument and narrative: first, outlining the canons of evidence developed by these elite Cambridge-based and educated investigators to assess anomalous phenomena, and second, describing the gradual shift away from that approach, by their successors and the reasons for such a partial weakening of those standards, and the consequences for the general health of the SPR. Together with this summative statement of 10,000 words they meet the criterion of around 100,000 words for the award of the Doctor of Philosophy by Publication. Harvard referencing is used with regard to the bibliography but references to different parts of the submitted material is by page number (in brackets) only. The chapters submitted are original work in at least five ways. First, they are from the only published biography of Myers and also from the first book to evaluate the cross-correspondences in detail. Roy’s book (2008) had a wider focus and did not sufficiently concentrate on assessment issues. Nor did he access Winifred Coombe-Tennant’s archive at Harvard or Myers’ personal archive in Cambridge 5 (see Hamilton 2009). Second, this research has revealed that contrary to the standard view, the automatic writers were not as isolated from each other as claimed (Carter 2012; Hart 1959; Oppenheim 1985; Saltmarsh 1975). This picture has emerged from original research in a number of archives (see list of archival material consulted). Third, the summative statement re-frames the methodological work of the early SPR in the broader disciplinary context of late - Victorian academic and institutional life. Fourth, it examines and challenges the use by some cultural historians of the work of TH Hall (1980a; 1980b) in order to create a more balanced view of the SPR activities. Fifth, computer technology has been deployed to make the assessment process of the cross- correspondences manageable. All 3,500 plus scripts were individually scanned into a searchable PDF format which allowed a rapid comparison of scripts widely dispersed across a number of automatists over thirty-six years, to see if the patterns alleged to appear in the scripts actually did so. The approach taken has followed a broadly social constructionist approach (Berger and Luckmann 1991; Burr: 2003). The scripts have been treated with respect, acknowledging the original assessors’ excitement as remarkable content unfolded, but also with detachment, pointing out the psychological and historical filters that could condition their interpretations. The history of psychical research and parapsychology is a fiercely contested one and, obviously, no claims are made, outside of the context of this study, about their ultimate ontological status. This summative statement will make explicit the argument that runs through this thesis and the evidence on which it is based. The overall thesis is that the work of the Cambridge co-founders (middle-class Spiritualists have an equal claim as founding fathers) of the SPR has been partially misunderstood and devalued by two main factors: a failure to fully appreciate both the central empirical methodology from which the SPR sprang which was part of the general disciplinary debate at the time and, second, the complexity of the documentary records and the controversies they generated. The elite leaders of the SPR (Myers, Gurney, and Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick) developed in very difficult circumstances a methodology for investigating anomalous phenomena that has not always been described accurately or evaluated fairly. As Gurney (1887e) put it, the real issue was the nature 6 of evidence in matters extraordinary. Criteria to assess such were thought through and tested in practice in the early years of their investigations: in Sidgwick’s presidential addresses from 1882-9; in Gurney’s systematic and pioneering experimental work in hypnotism; in Myers’ investigation of automatic writing and mediumship; in his speculative synthesis of this work in his book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death ; and in the great SPR surveys of anomalous phenomena, Phantasms of the Living 1886 and the Census of Hallucinations 1894. This statement further argues that due to a variety of circumstances some (though not all) of the second-generation leaders of the SPR moved away from the canons of evidence developed by the Sidgwick group and invested too much in one major psychical research project, the cross-correspondence automatic writings, to the partial detriment of the SPR and its reputation. In essence then, this thesis has a dual rebalancing purpose: first, to argue that the methodology of the SPR was not a bizarre desperate epistemological aberration but in the central tradition of intellectual enquiry of the late-Victorian period and second, that the cross-correspondences, though intriguing and containing much ostensibly ‘paranormal’ material, do not deserve their reputation as the outstanding evidence for post-mortem survival in the first third of the twentieth century, partly because of the assessment