DISCLAIMER:

This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only. Copyright by Sarah Gail Sussman 2017

i The Dissertation Committee for Sarah Gail Sussman Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Pragmatic Enchantment: , Psychical Research, and the Humanities in the American Research University, 1880-1910

Committee:

Brian A. Bremen, Supervisor

Robert H. Abzug

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

Martin W. Kevorkian

Hannah C. Wojciehowski

ii Pragmatic Enchantment: William James, Psychical Research, and the Humanities in the American Research University, 1880-1910

by

Sarah Gail Sussman, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2017

iii Acknowledgements

First, I’d like to extend my sincerest thanks to my committee. My adviser, Brian

Bremen, has always been incredibly generous with his time. He has pushed me to clarify this dissertation’s argument in both my writing and my thinking and lent his expertise in integrating challenging critical texts in pragmatism and the philosophy of science into this project. Robert Abzug’s class “The Birth of Psychotherapy” inspired many of the links I was then only beginning to articulate between various threads of late-nineteenth century alternative psychological thought and his own writing has provided an instructive critical paradigm. Martin Kevorkian’s seminar on Melville was one of the most valuable courses of my graduate career and his gift for close reading pushed me to a new appreciation for attention to detail. Linda Henderson’s work on “vibratory modernism,” the ether, and the avant-garde could not have provided a more apt critical model for this project. Finally, I would like to thank Hannah Wojciehowski for her path-breaking work bridging the gap between the humanities and the sciences.

A number of libraries and archives have provided useful material that shaped my argument. I am especially grateful to the Huntington Library for a short term fellowship where I was able to develop these ideas over the course of a summer. Their unparalleled

Jack London collection revealed just how prevalent a topic psychical research was in popular magazines and journals. I am also grateful for the feedback I received on a talk I delivered at the Huntington that was useful in shaping my project in its early stages. The

4 Philadelphia Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine afforded me the opportunity to share my work and visit archives. The consortium’s director,

Babak Ashrafi, pointed me towards the importance of physics to psychical research at a critical juncture in the project’s development. Beth Lander at the College of Physicians of

Philadelphia, Historical Medical Library, which holds S. Weir Mitchell’s papers, was generous with her time in locating documents. George Murnaghan Gordon at the Kislak

Center at the University of Pennsylvania was also incredibly helpful. At the Fisher

Library at the University of Toronto, I am very grateful to Anne Dondertman who arranged for a meeting with Adam Crabtree, another important critical interlocutor in my research.

My friends and colleagues have my sincerest thanks for their input on my work.

At least some of the interdisciplinarity of this project has benefitted from their wide- ranging specialties. Thanks to: Ty Alyea, Meredith Coffey, Kristie Flannery, Heather

Graehl, Matthew Heeney, Mallorie Hendrix, Oscar Vargas Hernandez, Mukaram Hhana,

Molly Hubbs, Corie Hill, Altina Hoti, Kuan Hwa, Emily Lederman, Sean Maguire,

Destiny Preston, Helene Remiszewska, Sara Saylor, Connie Steel, Jenean Vasquez, Laura

Knowles Wallace, Cole Wehrle, Jay Williams, Lindsey Wolf, Rachel Wise, and Nat

Zingg.

Last but not least, I would like to share my appreciation for my family for giving me perspective and support throughout this endeavor.

5 Pragmatic Enchantment: William James, Psychical Research, and the Humanities in the American Research University, 1880-1910

Sarah Gail Sussman, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017

Supervisor: Brian A. Bremen

Pragmatic Enchantment juxtaposes the histories of two intellectual movements from the fin de siècle that could not appear more different on their surfaces: pragmatism, or the philosophical approach that predicates the truth value of a belief or theory based on the success of its practical application, and psychical research, the scientific investigation of and allied phenomena. This study makes the argument that beneath the surface, psychical research was a major formative influence on pragmatism. The intertwinement of the two has been obscured because of the unlikely comparison between what is largely deemed a pseudo-science and the pristine reputation of a cornerstone of American intellectual life. In confluence, this study argues, these two intellectual movements played a contributory role in defending the state of humanistic inquiry in late- nineteenth century research universities. For William James, among the most famous of psychical researchers, I argue that his philosophy of pragmatism as it exists throughout his corpus from The Principles of to Pragmatism was rooted in his grappling with the need for personally meaningful or “live hypotheses” through the field of psychical research. First-generation pragmatists Charles Peirce, F.C.S. Schiller, and Henri Bergson were all involved in psychical research, and an examination of their writings in this arena reveals its influence on their contributions to pragmatism. At the 6 same time, rescaling psychical research’s place in history through a networked view unveils its connection to changes in higher education, particularly its programmatic relevance to American research universities which were swiftly turning towards an emphasis on the STEM fields. The professionalization of psychical research led to the establishment of programs at institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. These programs created lines of scholarly communication through investigations undertaken collaboratively by both science and humanities professors. While the development of research universities would seem to support Max Weber’s popular thesis of secularization and Entzauberung (disenchantment) in the wake of late- nineteenth century scientific progress, this study argues to the contrary: psychical research propounded the very pragmatism of enchantment. It carried a humanistic raison d’etre for bringing “live hypotheses” into the investigative spirit of American research universities.

7 Table of Contents

List of Tables ...... 10

Chapter One - From Margin to Center: The Materialization of Psychical Research25 Chapter One Introduction: The Edifice of Modern Science ...... 25 Literature Review ...... 37 Paths to Psychical Research (1848-1882) ...... 69 Placing the into Scale: ’s Network ...... 70 Swedenborgianism ...... 76 Spiritualism: A Progressive Religious Movement ...... 79 Spiritualism Challenges the Edifice of Modern Science ...... 80 The X Club: Naturalists Against Spiritualism ...... 82 The London Dialectical Society and the Psychological Society: Toward a Scientific-Spiritual Synthesis ...... 84 The London Dialectical Society ...... 84 The Psychological Society ...... 87 Chapter One Conclusion ...... 88

Chapter Two - From the Courtroom to the University: The Emergence of Psychical Research as an Academic Discipline ...... 91 Chapter Two Introduction: : Spiritualist, Criminal, Test Subject91 Martyrs of Modern Science ...... 94 An Ethic of Science: Professionalization Under the Research University Model ...... 102 Reorganized Knowledge: Psychical Research in the Era of Academic Societies ...... 109 Chronology of Principal Disciplinary Associations and Publications...... 113 Professionalizing Spiritualism: The Formation of the Society for Psychical Research and the American Society for Psychical Research ...... 117 Gathering Narratives: Major Undertakings and Findings of the Society for Psychical Research ...... 120 Psychical Research Enters the Ivory Tower: The for the Investigation of Modern Spiritualism at the University of Pennsylvania127 8 Afterlives of the Seybert Commission: From to Hallucinations .....134

Chapter Three - An Open System of Truth: The Role of Psychical Research in the Formation of William James’s Pragmatism ...... 142 Chapter Three Introduction: European Sabbatical, September 1882- March 1883: Scratch Eight and The Trajectory of William James’s Career 142 Chapter Three Literature Review: Pragmatism’s Network ...... 144 James Networks with New Colleagues in Psychical Research ...... 153 Scratch 8 – The Beginnings of James in the Field of Psychical Research ...... 153 Overlaps Between Pragmatism and Psychical Research: Rethinking the Genealogy of Pragmatism ...... 161 Charles Sanders Peirce and the “Mother-Wit” ...... 165 Henri Bergson’s Élan Vital ...... 174 F.C.S. Schiller: Ally to Pragmatism in ...... 178 James and the Method of Personal Inquiry ...... 182 James’s Gifford Lectures: Re-Enchanting Science in the University ...... 198 Chapter Three Conclusion ...... 206

Coda - Afterlives of Psychical Research ...... 208

Appendix ...... 214

Works Cited ...... 216

Vita 229

9 List of Tables

Table 1: Chronology of Principal Disciplinary Associations and Publications ...113 Table 2: Founding Members of the Society for Psychical Research ...... 115 Table 3: Founding Members of the American Society for Psychical Research ..115 Table 4: Members of the Seybert Commission at the University of Pennsylvania116

10 Introduction –William James and Max Weber: Two Responses to the State of Academic Research

“The prophet for whom so many of our younger generation yearn simply does not exist. But this knowledge in its forceful significance has never become vital for them. The inward interest of a truly religiously ‘musical’ man can never be served by veiling to him and to others the fundamental fact that he is destined to live in a godless and prophetless time by giving him the ersatz of armchair prophecy. The integrity of his religious organ, it seems to me, must rebel against this” – Max Weber “Science as Vocation”

“I ought to give a message with a practical outcome and an emotional musical accompaniment, so to speak… I confess that I have something of this kind in my mind, a perfectly ideal discourse for the present occasion…But, do not judge me harshly, I cannot produce it… I have tried to articulate it, but it will not come. Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders…both alike have the same function. They are, if I may use a simile, so many spots, or blazes, blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience” – William James “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results”

Pragmatic enchantment may seem a contradiction in terms, but it will be the work of this dissertation to demonstrate the mutually constitutive affinity between pragmatism and a highly enchanted late-nineteenth century discipline known as psychical research. The affinity between pragmatism and psychical research is best understood as the result of interrelated responses to a pervading late-nineteenth century sentiment that Max Weber described best in 1917 as the “disenchantment of the world,” brought about by the sense that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play,” that “one can master all things by calculation” (Weber 139). As we will see, what Weber referred to as disenchantment, or the growing fetishization for “objective” modes of inquiry, was partly brought about by the rapid growth of research universities and the specialization of knowledge. Yet, as this study will explain, as knowledge became more specialized and science advanced, so, too did mysterious discoveries. Weber was at least partly wrong in that his era was anything but disenchanted. Since psychical research is largely under examined today, it is worth explaining what it was here. At the turn of the century it was 11 a veritable intellectual center of gravity drawing artists, writers, and academics into its orbit. Psychical research encompassed the effort to scientifically examine telepathy (a term coined by psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers in 1882) and allied phenomena. Psychical researchers used new scientific methods, like randomization, to gather thousands of narratives to determine whether telepathy was a legitimate phenomenon. Though existing studies of psychical research have examined the congruence of psychical research and better established sciences like psychology, biology, or physics, this study is unique in focusing on what psychical research can tell us about philosophy, specifically pragmatism, and the state of American research universities. The very work of psychical researchers was predicated on the unknown, and their steadily increasing presence in universities and the public’s interest in their work are both testament to the fact that the fin de siècle was anything but disenchanted. Though largely forgotten today, psychical research was a hot topic among Victorian and modernist intelligentsia. Although this now largely forgotten academic field attracted the interest of many, in this study in particular I focus William James, who dedicated a sizable portion of his career to the scientific investigation of telepathy. I also examine other first- generation pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, and F. C. S. Schiller who all produced writing on the topic of psychical research. Though little has been written about their involvement in psychical research, this study argues that this under examined field –with its openness towards uncertainty and emphasis on personal inquiry—was vital to the development of pragmatism and created a paradigm that allowed for the pursuit of humanistic inquiry within research universities during the fin de siècle. This dissertation opens with an explanation of how psychical research emerged from various forces: interest in physics, in the ether, in the popularity of Spiritualism,

Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, and allied phenomena, in addition to the newly 12 developing discipline of psychology. From there, this study launches into an explanation of how psychical research societies emerged, what their major contributions were, and how they obtained prestigious positions within centers and laboratories in American universities. This study draws parallels between the ascendancy of psychical research into academia and the changing state of higher education under the research university model. Finally, this study comes full circle, offering an examination of the impact of psychical research on pragmatism. In this introduction, I will first explore pragmatism and disenchantment as the terms were introduced through two different college addresses. I will then offer a comparative analysis of Weber’s view with James’s view, ultimately concluding that James’s pragmatism gives license for a sense of enchantment, an embracing of unknown information, which I argue was ultimately shaped by his work as a psychical researcher. Having established that, I offer an explanation of my methodology, particularly my debt to network theory which has allowed me to de-centralize James and pragmatism and re- centralize what is often disregarded as a marginal science like psychical research. From that point, I offer fuller descriptions of the three chapters that compose this dissertation. The best points of entry for understanding the historical importance of pragmatism and (dis)enchantment can be found in two equally iconic speeches delivered on college campuses nearly 20 years apart where the terms “pragmatism” and “disenchantment” (entzauberunge) were first used. William James’s 1898 speech “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” was delivered at the University of California at Berkeley, and Max Weber’s 1917 “Science as Vocation” was delivered at the University of Munich. First, I’ll address what these highly influential speeches had in common: both held a high number of affinities because they were addressing a more or less nested set of issues that revolved around the state of professionalized academic 13 research. Both professors intended to diagnose the spirit of academic inquiry in their age. Weber’s speech was designed to provide some foothold for the “graduate student who is resolved to dedicate himself professionally to science in university life” though in actuality, Weber expressed to the graduate students, “I believe that…you wish to hear of something else, namely, of the inward calling for science,” and in the end, discussed both science’s professional aspects and inward callings in terms of “disenchantment” (129). James, 19 years earlier, had addressed the Philosophical Union at Berkeley to offer his philosophy of pragmatism as a means for them to “start upon the trail of truth” (University Chronicle 289). Both Weber’s and James’s approaches to what might be called enchantment, (even if Weber coined the term, James’s work implied it) were predicated on the acknowledgement of a common problem: what to do with this unprecedented excess of scientific capital? In their day, an overwhelming number of new discoveries and inventions made the world seem either totally enchanted, or disenchanted, depending on one’s view. The excess of information, what I could anachronistically call “information overload,” placed professors in a position completely opposite what Weber describes as “disenchantment.” Even for specialists, there remained many unknown quotients in fields like physics, which, not coincidentally was a field that accounted for more of the members of SPR and ASPR than any other discipline (see tables two and three). At the same time, this information still did not address fundamental, human questions, which James and his psychical research colleagues sought answers for. In Weber’s view, the state of information overload too easily produced the “ersatz” armchair philosopher who represented “mediocrity” in a culture where the youth were overly preoccupied with “the idols [of] ‘personality’ and ‘personal experience’”

(Weber 137). Such an attitude, Weber argued, rubs off on “the man who makes himself 14 the impresario of the subject to which he should be devoted” and, lacking all humility “seeks to legitimate himself through ‘experience’” asking: “how can I prove that I am something other than a mere ‘specialist’” (Weber 137). This is a “crowd phenomenon” of his day, according to Weber, when it is the “task…alone…[which] should lift the scientist to the height and dignity of the subject he pretends to serve” not “the ersatz of armchair prophecy” (137). But in a world of disenchantment, Weber presents the troubling possibility that ersatz prophecy might be all that is available to an academic who seeks to be recognized as an individual for their experiences – the only proper exit Weber offers from this state of affairs is through “devotion to the task, and that alone,” which “should lift the scientist to the height and dignity of the [scientific] subject” (137). This academic status quo is how Weber defines disenchantment – as the product of multiple layers of increasingly complex intellectual outsourcing and specialization. As Weber explains, “the increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives,” in other words, modernization does not equate improvement, but alienation (139). What it ultimately signifies for Weber is that there are simply no mysteries left – “That if one but wished one could learn” about anything “at any time” (139). Hence, for Weber, this “means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (139). For Weber, “this means that the world is disenchanted” (139). 1

1 Another affinity that deserves further exploration, though it is adjacent to my topic, is James and Weber’s mutually shared critique of the tremendous waste of human capital inside of university research systems. James voices this complaint in “Ph.D. Octopus” while in “Science as Vocation” Weber explores these as predominantly American dilemmas in indicting statements such as: “Whether, in principle, one should habilitate every scholar who is qualified or whether one should consider enrollments, and hence give the existing staff a monopoly to teach--that is an awkward dilemma” (130). 15 While Weber’s thesis is ultimately that we live responsibly in acceptance of our position as individuals in an age of total and utter “disenchantment” in order to “work and meet the ‘demands of the day,’ in human relations as well as in our vocation,” James also advocates for the importance of accepting responsibility for the power of one’s own beliefs, but so that we may be able to accept those beliefs if we evaluate them on how they impact our actions (Weber 156).2 In James’s words, “the principle of practicalism [sp. in original] says that the very meaning of the conception of God lies in those differences which must be made in our experience if the conception be true” (University Chronicle 300). The related claim which makes the impact of this idea in academic conduct more clear was one James expounded in the same direction two years earlier in The Will to Believe when he wrote that “there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much…what should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility” (The Will to Believe xi). James’s thesis, this dissertation ultimately argues, is the more apt one for describing the attitude that has prevailed in research universities with their pedagogical adherence to personal experience and inquiry from the fin de siècle forward.3 These two speeches are offered here not as sites for the inception of “pragmatism” or “enchantment,” but as the kind of high-water mark reference points where new terms are coined for ideas that have been forming for some time.

2 While I am aware that some date the speech to 1918, Alex Owen shows that it was 1917 in her book, The Place of Enchantment: “For a discussion of the date of Weber’s lecture, traditionally thought to have been given in 1918, see Wolfgang Schlucter, “The Question of the Dating of ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation,’” in Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, ed. Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schlucter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 113-16. 3 Taken in its totality, however, Weber’s speech is not nearly as negative as his disenchantment thesis might lead one to believe – despite Weber’s referring twice to scientists who found meaning for life in nature as “big children” – he and James do interestingly care about the importance of preserving the integrity of intellectual inquiry within the university. Moreover, readers should bear in mind that Weber was delivering his speech in 1917, in the midst of WWI, which undoubtedly must have impacted his thinking. 16 Pragmatism had already begun taking shape in the works of first-generation pragmatists well before James’s 1898 speech, though that was the first time the philosophy was named in print. In his speech, James attributed the term to his friend and colleague, Charles Sanders Peirce.4 Pragmatism, James explained, was based on Peirce’s method for finding truth, which was scientific by nature. As Louis Menand puts it, “what James was doing was stretching a principle of scientific inquiry to cover thinking generally” (Menand xiii). James defined the pragmatic method, or “principle of Peirce” as such: “to attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object…we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve –what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we are to prepare” (University Chronicle 291). Pragmatism was a method for obtaining enhanced clarity of thought, but with the end goal of practical action. As James put it “the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires…The effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence” (University Chronicle 291). It’s clear from James’s description of pragmatism that this new philosophy weighed truth value according to a practical index as it applied to action in the world, and this is the most readily accessible, shorthand notion of pragmatism. There are many other ramifications posed through James’s definition of the “the principle of pragmatism,” but the branch that this project hinges most heavily upon is actually the implicitly personal index for seeking truth presented in James’s writings. This study demonstrates that James’s philosophy of pragmatism evolves throughout his entire corpus, but pays special heed to James’s interest in the weight of personally meaningful inquiry or, what James had referred to in 1896 as “live

4 As I explore in chapter three, this attribution has been called into question by Louis Menand in An Introduction to Pragmatism. Vintage Books, 1997 (xv). 17 hypotheses.” In The Will to Believe, James explains that too often he has been misinterpreted as giving license to believe “in any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will” (Writings 1878-1899 477). To the contrary – pragmatism is not license to believe whatever one wishes, instead, it is a guide suggesting that one use one’s personal, human concerns as a compass for what one might investigate. As James puts it, “the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider” (Writings 1878-1899 477). On its surface, this question is asked about religion; this is “the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men,” James explains, but as James continues his career in The Varieties of Religious Experience one sees religion is a psychological state for James from which live questions emerge (Writings 1878-1899 477). In The Will to Believe, James later pits the question of belief against the rational world of science: “this command that we shall put a stopper on our hearts, instincts, and courage, and wait – acting of course meaning while more or less as if religion were not true” (Writings 1878-1899 477). James emerges with a shorthand form of Pascal’s wager arguing that such a line of thought prevents us from acting to our own potential detriment. When one realizes that James spent a sizable portion of his career as a psychical researcher, scientifically investigating telepathic and related phenomena, however, James’s claims are cast in a new light. They seem less religious in the strict sense, and more a habit of Victorian thinking set in motion by the sense that we were living on, as James once put it, some kind of “moonlit and dream-visited planet” (Writings 1878-1899 466). As explored in my first chapter, breakthroughs in physics, the late-nineteenth century concept of the ether, radio waves, and light waves all lent James’s era an atmosphere of wonder. Take, for example, the newly invented spectroscope, where one 18 could see for the first time “even the composition of starlight, miraculously bringing distant onto the laboratory table” (Luckhurst 25). Any age that could coin the term “telepathy” and find leading intellectuals from paleontologist Joseph Leidy to Charles Darwin sitting in to study such a phenomenon as “thought transference” was clearly far from what Weber had labeled as “disenchanted.”5 Contemporary scholarship from academics explored in this dissertation’s first chapter, like Linda Henderson, Alex Owen, and Egil Asprem, have shown that to be far from the case.6 Pragmatism was born in an age of “new” occultism that creatively challenged Victorian evolutionists straightforward thesis of a “magic-religion-science march of cultural evolution” (Owen 8). Challenges to the traditional secularization thesis and the notion of disenchantment have been vital for forming this project’s understanding of how pragmatism took shape. Other critical voices guiding this project are those that utilize a networked view, as many psychical researchers were involved in pragmatism and other more well remembered contributions to psychology and science. For example, many would be surprised to know that psychical researchers played a major role in developing the scientific method of testing known as randomization,7 or that psychical researcher and

5 F.W.H. Myers coined telepathy, see: “Report of the Literary Committee by W. F. Barrett et al., E. Gurney and F. W. H. Myers, Hon. Secs.,” Proc. Soc. Psych. Res., 1882, 1:116-155, on p. 147. Myers wrote the report. Joseph Leidy was an investigator as part of Seybert Commission, see: Preliminary Report of the Seybert Commission. J. B. Lippincott, 1920. Darwin sat for part of a medium’s sitting at the urging of his brother before retreating upstairs, see: Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy. Oxford University Press, 2002. p. 39 6 See: Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space,” From Energy to Information, edited by Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Bruce Hunt, Stanford University Press, 2002. pp. 126-149; Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. The University of Chicago Press, 1989; See Egil Asprem’s The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939. Brill, 2014. 7 See: Ian Hacking “Telepathy: Origins of Randomization in Experimental Design” Isis, Vol. 79, No. 3, A Special Issue on Artifact and Experiment (Sep., 1988), pp. 427-451. The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society. 19 classicist F.W.H. Myers’s concept of the “subliminal self” predates Freud’s unconscious, and that Myers was more popularly mentioned that Freud in publications up until 1922.8 A networked view allows us to rescale and reassess the ways in which we view such historical contributions to make better sense of this information. As Bruno Latour puts it, scientific facts are not “beyond the scope of some kinds of sociological and historical explanation” (Latour 106). “Such convictions entail the perception that a fact is something which is simply recorded in an article and that it has neither been socially constructed nor possesses its own history of construction,” when instead, according to Latour, “the facticity of an object is relative only to a particular network or networks” (105, 107). Looking at the construction of facts in a networked view, we are able to see, as author of The Invention of Telepathy Roger Luckhurst astutely argues, that “telepathy is a hybrid object” whose emergence relied on the merging of numerous components of late-Victorian culture relying as much on Spiritualist mediums as it did on neurological theories, mesmerized plebeians, and Salpêtrière patients (3). By replacing margins and centers with a networked view, this study takes part in a growing trend that aspires to emulate path-breaking works from scholars like Roger Luckhurst, Alison Winter, and Adam Crabtree, which refreshingly demonstrate the ways in which cultural history can move us away from our attachment to thinking in terms of “centers” and “margins” that tend to dominate histories of science.9

8 Furthermore, William James was more frequently cited than either of them by what was, for most of the first half of the twentieth century, an astronomical margin. It was not until the 1990s that Freud caught up to and outpaced James in popularity. Psychical research was also a more popularly cited topic than psychoanalysis in all published texts until 1912 when psychoanalysis took off at high velocity. See Google Ngram in appendix. 9 See: Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. The University of Chicago Press, 1998 and Adam Crabtree. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. Yale University Press, 1993, which offers a more recent contextualization of the significance of seemingly fringe movements as central to the formation of the better-known ideas as they survived in Freud’s writings. 20 The chapters that follow will build cumulatively, laying a groundwork first for the emergence of psychical research, then for its establishment in universities, including its main aims, and finally, the last chapter will use the foundation built in chapters one and two to make plain psychical research’s connection to pragmatism. The first chapter lays the groundwork for the dissertation’s overarching argument that the field of psychical research was vital in folding a pragmatic emphasis on personal inquiry via “live hypotheses” into American research universities. The chapter opens with an explanation of the enchanted sense of the fin de siècle brought on by new discoveries, primarily in physics. The first official section of this chapter is a literature review devoted to establishing the claim that psychical research is not as niche a topic as it appears by showing it to be a nexus of interdisciplinary Victorian and Modernist interests and by offering an overview of the specific points of contact where this study enters into academic conversations. The literature review in chapter one addresses how a study of psychical research’s influence on American universities pointedly enters into conversations about the enlightenment, the political impact of irrationalism, the history of psychology, the history and philosophy of science, modernist studies, university studies, and histories on psychical research. The second section of this first chapter, “Paths to Psychical Research,” offers an overview of religious, therapeutic trends: Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Swedenborgianism that led to the emergence of psychical research. This is followed by an overview of three intellectual societies who pursued questions that led to the development of psychical research: The X-Club, the London Dialectical Society, and the Psychological Society. As this chapter explains, the tensions between these three groups created a blueprint for the most famous psychical research organization, the Society for Psychical Research.

21 Chapter two completes this history, showing how Spiritualism moved from the courtroom trials where mediums were accused of fraud, into universities where college English professors and science professors came together to cross-examine their alleged telepathic medium subjects. The first section of chapter two explains how Spiritualists saw themselves as “martyrs” of science and the academic institution. It documents the culmination of this tension through one of the most curious trials of the late 1880s, the Slade trial, which criminalized fraudulent and was among many factors that led to an enhanced concern over providing the public with a proper scientific education. This renewed emphasis on the sciences in education is picked up in the subsequent section that addresses the professionalization of scientific research in higher education that led to the routinization of the Ph.D., and the establishment of academic societies and journals. Psychical research, I argue, made a bid for being taken seriously by also professionalizing itself: from its branding as “research” to its formation in societies with attendant journals. After this, I explain the backstories of the first major psychical research organizations with an explanation of their major undertakings and make the original argument that they deployed methods adapted from literary studies. The chapter concludes with the story of the first psychical research organization to enter a university - The Seybert Commission. Looking to original correspondence, I show how the members of the Seybert Commission shifted the focus of their investigations from materializing ghosts to dreams and hallucinations, hinting at the productively generative directions psychical research would take in both science and philosophy. The third and final chapter of this dissertation brings my argument full circle, revealing the impact of psychical research on the development of pragmatism. This chapter opens on a very fruitful period in James’s career, the sabbatical he took from

Harvard in 1882, which brought him into contact with the psychical researcher Edmund 22 Gurney. Gurney encouraged James to join the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the influence of the members of this society and the work of the society as a whole, as chapter three demonstrates, decisively impacted James’s most important works and I attribute James’s eventual development of a synthesis between personal belief and scientific inquiry in his theory of pragmatism to his involvement with this group.10 On a broader level, this chapter shows the overlooked but formative role of a supposedly irrational science like psychical research on one of America’s most enduring philosophical contributions: pragmatism. By recovering the history of psychical research, I argue, we can better understand the origins of this foundational concept within American philosophy. The chapter reassesses pragmatism’s genealogy by showing that even Charles Sanders Peirce was an active participant in psychical research, and by examining the writings of other contemporaries of James who wrote on the topic of psychical research, like Henri Bergson and F.C.S. Schiller. In James’s work, I trace the influence of SPR on the development of pragmatism through his major publications, from The Principles of Psychology to The Varieties of Religious Experience. Revealing the presence of the irrational at the center of pragmatism, I argue, has wider ramifications for higher education at this time. I explore how James’s iconoclastic Gifford lectures on natural theology were directly indebted to the literary methods of Gurney and Myers that James encountered through his work as a psychical researcher. Through establishing this framework, this final chapter contextualizes William James, pragmatism, and psychical research within ongoing debates that began in the late nineteenth century over academic

10 Richard Noakes points out that studies have been made drawing correlations between “the perceived congruence of psychical research and better established sciences such as psychology, physics and biology” - studies which have tended to focus on “the flow of concepts, models, and theories from the sciences to psychical research” (54). This study makes an original contribution by instead focusing on philosophy, namely the reciprocal influence between pragmatism and psychical research. 23 freedom, and what constitutes a proper area for study – debates that emerged as a consequence of the growing popularity and power of the research university.

24 Chapter One - From Margin to Center: The Materialization of Psychical Research

“I always meant someday to write a scientific treatise about the Ether of Space; but when in my old age I came to write this book, I found that the Ether pervaded all my ideas, both of this world and the next. I could no longer keep my treatise within proposed scientific confines; it escaped in every direction” - , My Philosophy: Representing My Views on the Many Functions of the Ether of Space

“In every department of investigation the tendency is toward the study of the more subtle and refined agents and influences in nature—influences which formerly were not known to exist nor even imagined; and it is the encroachment of students upon this former terra incognita which has transformed magic in all its forms into science, and the supernatural into the reign of law” - R. Osgood Mason, Hypnotism and Suggestion in Therapeutics, Education, and Reform

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE EDIFICE OF MODERN SCIENCE In 1884, architects and contractors put the finishing touches on the Jefferson

Physical Laboratory, one of the first teaching laboratories in the U.S. to be affiliated with both a general undergraduate and research curriculum (Trowbridge 228). When read closely, this brick building on the Harvard University campus, with its various aims and shortcomings, encapsulates the spirit of this transitional period in American higher education and scientific research. The building was completely state of the art: American universities were adopting the research model begun in , and they were determined not simply to emulate, but to outpace their European counterparts. By the day’s standards the edifice would have seemed surprisingly minimalistic in appearance, without the ornate flourishes of research labs in Europe, a deviation that was intentional.

The new physics building was as functionally forward-looking as its aesthetic implied: its sleek design was meant to keep out any external magnetic fields that could interfere with its cutting edge experiments. The new laboratory, which was primarily designed to test 25 for delicate magnetic fields, was carefully isolated from any possible sources of contaminating vibration.11 Set apart from the nearest trees, streets, or other structures by

300 feet, the building was heated with steam pipes custom-made from brass rather than magnetic iron (Trowbridge). There were some tremors, however, which could not be kept out: those created by the footsteps of students who were to be educated in the, at that time novel, laboratory classroom. Scientific education was a requirement that had only recently been added to the undergraduate curriculum. To further protect the sensitive instruments from the vibrations of student’s footsteps and voices, there was a second facility nested inside the laboratory—a tower with no shared walls (Trowbridge 231).

Nearly immediately after the construction of the laboratory, additional unexpected complications emerged. The bricks, which were designed to create a neutral environment, turned out to emit their own radiation. Moreover, the foundation of the tower turned out to be marshy and unstable (Holton “Jefferson Laboratory”).12

11 The Museum of Pure and Applied Science, today known as the Science Museum, in Kensington, England, was similarly a “site protected from threats, [by] blocking new underground trains from running beneath the basement laboratories in the 1890s” (Luckhurst 20). 12 Richard Noakes’s article “Haunted Thoughts of the Careful Experimentalist: Psychical Research and the Troubles of Experimental Physics” draws the original connection that “recalcitrant instruments and other problems of the physical laboratory made British physicists especially sympathetic towards the differences of the spiritualistic séance and other sites of psychical inquiry” (46). In his article, Noakes persuasively illustrates the way in which “psychical research prompted many nineteenth and twentieth century physicists to reflect critically on practices commonly used in the fields with which they were professionally associated . . . more than most professional scientists involved psychical research in the decades around 1900, they [British physicists] volunteered some of the most illuminating insights into the shared problems of experiment in established and psychical sciences. . . They were among those who, in their pursuit of accurate measurement and the stabilization of novel, transient and unruly effects, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid, measure and investigate environmental disturbances, and to master recalcitrant apparatuses (Dörries, 1994; Gooday, 1997, 2004; Morus, 2010; Ramalingam, 2010; Schaffer, 1992, 1995, 2012).” Noakes looks to Henning Schmidgen’s work which adds significance to this reading of the careful, but ultimately impossible, efforts to create an environment of perfect isolation in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory: “Schmidgen (2003) has shown that similar problems were faced by late nineteenth and early 26 In the end, the radiation in the bricks and the instability of the foundation emblematized the contradictory spirit of ambivalence often attributed to the fin de siècle.13 As historian Jackson Lears explores, antimodern sentiments pervaded at the end of the nineteenth century, with Americans seeking “more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience” while at the same time, “antimodernism was not simply escapism; it was ambivalent, often co-existing with enthusiasm for material progress” (Lears xv). As this study demonstrates, antimodern ambivalence pervaded all of the disciplines, including, in the present example, physics. On the one hand, scientific inquiry had reached a new zenith with more precise measurements and calculations made possible through advancing standards of professionalized research, a part of the state of affairs to which Weber attributed a sense of “disenchantment.” On the other hand, each new scientific discovery of the age unsettled the foundations of precedent knowledge creating an overwhelming multiplicity of new possibilities which, curiously, charged mystic inclinations in the minds of scientists and laypeople, alike. Ironically the new discoveries always at the periphery of precedent knowledge created an atmosphere of enchantment.

In this regard, the Jefferson Physical Laboratory can be seen as the very embodiment of what Harvard professor William James referred to as an “open system of truth,” a concept that will be explored more fully in my third chapter. As James explains, twentieth century experimental psychologists who transformed their laboratories to reduce the auditory and other disturbances made by the very instruments used to measure reaction times of the psychological subjects using the instruments” (47). Noakes persuasively argues that while experimental psychologists “believed their use of instruments and techniques of experimental physics helped them make clear distinctions between ‘scientific’ psychology and the ‘unscientific’ approaches of psychical researchers,” that “the physicists analysed [in Noakes’s article] believed some aspects of experimental physics blurred this distinction” (47). 13 See Jackson Lears’s No Place of Grace for his concept of “antimodern ambivalence.” 27 you want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type (Writings 1878-1899 495)

As I explore in my third chapter, James’s response to his era’s exciting new discoveries and theories fed into his work on pragmatism and radical empiricism. “The actual universe,” as James put it, “is a thing wide open” (Writings 1878-1899 498). James could easily have had the Jefferson Laboratory, a building on his campus, in mind when he wrote in 1896 poetically but critically about “the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences” (Writings 1878-1899 461). James entertained careers both quietly monastic and sweepingly creative.14 He knew what it meant to go through the meticulous rigor of training to become a painter, and to live the comparatively more exciting life of one; he spent long hours devoted to textbooks on physiology and medicine, but he also saw wild birds of every color at the mouth of the Amazon while on expedition with Louis Agassiz.

James’s personal methodology echoed this duality in his life — between monastic duty and the vividness of experience, between painstaking research and sweeping intuitive philosophies. In a world of so much richness and potentiality, James was at times frustrated by the painstakingly slow progress of academic research, which for him meant the academic scientific institution’s inability to accept any startling or intuitive new fact.

For James, this was what he referred to as science’s mode of “pessimistic confirmation,” or the traditional Baconian scientific method. James was frustrated by the accepted

14 Ross Posnock describes James as “occupying a pulpit” at Harvard from which “he provided moral guidance founded on the practical value of self-trust, religious belief, and opposition to large institutions” (9). 28 scientific process which arrived at conclusions via the gradual assembling of verified, sequential facts in a brick-by-brick fashion, with each idea or axiom whittled down to an essential truth that leads to the next. James approached the sciences with the personal zeal of an artist. He looked at conventional scientific researchers with something like frustration and pity, comparing them to laborers constructing the Great Wall of China, citing the

thousands of disinterested moral lives of men [that] lie buried in its mere foundation; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar. … science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique, her so- called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. (William James Writings 1878-1899 471) 15

Where could these other truths be sought, and what were they? To find a home for the new scientific facts of the day, James felt that the scientific system would have to change. James was concerned with new data which could unsettle the foundation of the building, which could disturb the very “bricks” of the “edifice of science.” In addition to being at the forefront of the new field of psychology, James was also personally invested in a new field of science known as psychical research which sought to challenge

15 Over half a century later, the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, reminds us that the “edifice” of science is a popular metaphor because the deference to others (and absence of intuition) and slow process of science is one inherently embodied in the academic institution : “One by one, in a process often compared to the addition of bricks to a building, scientists have added another fact, concept, law, or theory to the body of information supplied in the contemporary science text” (Kuhn 140). For Kuhn, the edifice of science is a pedagogical formula that “more than any single other aspect of science . . . has determined our image of the nature of science and of the role of discovery and invention in its advance” (Kuhn 143). In the example Kuhn shares, it is scientific textbooks and a method of pedagogy which occlude any potential for intuition and, most importantly for Kuhn, any potential for discovery. This is precisely what James was frustrated with, the slowness and lack of room for intuitive discovery in the university. As this dissertation argues, James’s dissatisfaction with the status quo “edifice” of science style of pedagogy motivated James to pursue psychical research and develop his theory of pragmatism. 29 traditional assumptions in the scientific community. James, like all psychical researchers, asked: What had happened to intuition? How can the scientific community maintain its integrity in its mission for impartial inquiry when facts with no logical connection to our existing view of reality appear? How do we do justice to ourselves and the truth in pursuing such aberrant scientific potentialities? This pull between dutiful research and these startling facts which some scientists relegated to the realm of mere personal belief was the tension that galvanized interest in the, at the time new, field of “psychical research” that brought together professors from fields as seemingly disparate as physics, English, and psychology. These professors engaged in psychical research were determined to give even the most unexpected of possible discoveries a fair trial. This chapter begins with its lens on the physics laboratory, because the study of energy was elemental in transcending not just time and space, but disciplinary boundaries. Breakthroughs in physics were generative for shifts in education and created tensions between varying “beliefs” in science like those in James’s aforementioned quote. The single scientific idea which provided the now forgotten scaffolding for so many of these changes during the fin de siècle was one physicists in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory tested for: the possible existence of “the ether.”16 The ether composed a unifying field connecting all matter electromagnetically, “physicists hoped the ether would provide a key … that would link literally everything in the universe” (Hunt, “Lines of Force” 99). Elusive to picture or describe, it was referred to as a “jelly” a “liquid” or a “vortex sponge” (Hunt, Maxwellians 103). The ether was said to be “squirming with the velocity of light”—and top physicists of the day believed that it was possible to

16 John Trowbridge published his studies of the ether under the title “The Electrical Conductivity of the Ether.” The American Journal of Science. Series 4, Vol. 3, no. 13-18 (New Haven: Connecticut, 1897) 387. 30 communicate telepathically through it (Goldberg citing Lodge 223).17 For individuals studying the ether, there was an implication that “heat, light, sound, electricity, or magnetism were not seen as substances, or as forces acting at a distance, but as different states or conditions of ethereal tension,” these were communicated by the “little wheels, vortexes, or cogs held to make up the ether” (Luckhurst 87). This concept was especially valuable to psychical researchers because it explained some anomalies of inter- phenomenal effects” (Luckhurst 88). For example, “if electricity not only followed the path of wires, but in some way travelled around wires in a kind of halo effect, then induction could be explained as a transverse effect, communicated by a different ension” (Luckhurst 88). The shift in Victorian physics to the electromagnetic field was the result of an extension of Faraday’s term field by James Clerk Maxwell justified on the grounds that physics was shifting to “the space in the neighborhood of electric or magnetic bodies” (Luckhurst 88). For SPR, telepathy “could be an effect of the field, conceived as a certain ethereal tension” (Luckhurst 88). Maxwell’s 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism was one of the most influential events of the 19th century, with practical uses for radio, telephone, telegraph, and electricity, but it also carried more theoretical applications (Hunt, Maxwellians 1). Other physicists were quick to jump on the applications of Maxwell’s ether in less practical functions. Two years after Maxwell’s Treatise had been published, physicist Peter Guthrie Tait and physicist and meteorologist Balfour Stewart published a book called The Unseen Universe. Tait and Stewart’s book marked the beginning of the still

17 Stewart and Tait’s Unseen Universe propagated this view, and it was used as scientific evidence by Theosophist in Isis Unveiled. Linda Dalrymple Henderson explains in her essay “Vibratory Modernism” that in Stewart and Tait’s hypothesis, “Blavatsky found support for her argument that the ‘ether . . . might also be storing visual imprints or ‘daguerreotype impressions of all our actions’ . . . Such a great picture gallery’ . . . she argued, would explain . . . the transference of thoughts and images.” Stewart and Tait, as quoted in H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. W.Q. Judge, 1877. I. pp.182-185, as quoted in Henderson, 131. 31 popular notion that physics can be used as a means for justifying the existence of an afterlife. As Tait and Stewart put it, “there must be an invisible order of things which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away” (199). Despite the mystical theme of the book, both men helped to establish and were heads of significant experimental physical laboratories in the U.K. Maxwell’s ether created immense ripples far beyond the world of physics. Three younger physicists: Oliver Heaviside, G. F. Fitzgerald, and Oliver Lodge popularized and refined Maxwell’s ideas even further (Hunt, Maxwellians 2). It was Lodge in particular who seized on the use of the field to explain the potential of ether for exploring a concept like telepathy as Tait and Stewart had. Lodge, one of the founders of radio, was one of the most prominent physicists of his time. He wrote over numerous books on the spiritual implications of the ether, referring to it unequivocally as “the living garment of God” (Ether and Reality 179).18 According to Lodge’s philosophy, everyone has two bodies: the body of “gross matter” and another which is connected to all other bodies through ethereal electric and magnetic forces which supposedly survive the breakup of the material body. The ether was used in rhetoric during many Spiritualist séances to describe the afterlife. Lodge’s status as one of the most prominent physicists of his day only lent additional credence to the connections between the ether and certain Spiritualist views. 19 As Richard Noakes explains, British physicists like Lodge were particularly “sympathetic towards the difficulties of the séance and other sites of psychical inquiry” because of their

18 For example, see: Oliver Lodge’s The Ether of Space (1909); Ether and Reality (1925) 19 A Google Ngram search of “Einstein” and “Lodge” reveals that in 1917 Lodge was referenced 80 times more often than Einstein in books and periodicals. This is probably because of the popularity of both Lodge’s own books and Spiritualist publications in general, which represented a tremendous literary market. Just to show how popular Spiritualism and Lodge were, it wasn’t until 1982 that Einstein equaled Lodge’s citation record at Lodge’s peak level of popularity in 1917. The staggering popularity of Lodge was brought to my attention by historian of physics Bruce Hunt, author of The Maxwellians (1984). See appendix for Google Ngram of this data. 32 professional experience with “capricious effects, recalcitrant instruments, and other problems of the physical laboratory” (46). To this end, Lodge, in his later work with the SPR would often counsel them to treat allegedly mediums as “a delicate piece of apparatus wherewith they are making an investigation” (Lodge quoted in Noakes 50).20 Lodge’s philosophy was so innately appealing, that even after it had been challenged by “the mechanical underpinnings” or Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, the ether continued to obscure Einstein’s work in the public’s consciousness “through the 1910s and into the 1920s” (Henderson 126). Possibly Lodge’s work was so appealing because it ultimately opened up a rationale for deferring judgment of allegedly fraudulent mediums – something many individuals wanted to believe in. As Lodge put it, “a bad joint in a galvanometer circuit may cause irregular and capricious and deceptive effects, yet no one would accuse the instrument of cheating. So also with Eusapia [the famous Spiritualist medium]: it is obviously right to study the phenomena she exhibits in their entirety, so far as can be done with such a complicated mechanism, but charges of fraud should not be lightly and irresponsibly made – however justified such charges may have been in other cases” (Lodge quoted in Noakes 50). Lodge’s sympathetic approach to Palladino did not carry weight with all, but it certainly resonated with William James. First begun in his work in The Principles of Psychology, James’s own strong attunement to empirical methods, as I will explain in chapter three, was ultimately shaped into radical empiricism in part through James’s interest in the subtleties of perception in these psychical and physical experiments. James’s interest in the ether makes sense, given his ultimate thesis of radical empiricism that “whirling particles” of physicists should not neglect big picture questions of causality and meaning.

20 In this particular footnote he was referring to . 33 James was among these fin de siècle intellectuals who recognized the ether as a force which could contribute greatly to his work in two newly developing and related fields: psychology, which survived and flourished, and the focus of this dissertation, which has largely been forgotten, psychical research. In 1875, William James reviewed Tait and Stewart’s Unseen Universe praising the authors for developing a concept which implied “a continuity of being, both conscious and material, between the worlds” – a powerful idea which could “explode the notion that science debars the supposition of such a continuity” (James, Essays 292). The very idea that there were bands of energy undetectable to our eye created all sorts of sublime, imaginative possibilities. In analogy alone the idea had psychological potency: just as there were waves of energy only recently made perceptible, so, too, were there states of mind, and even, perhaps, invisible states of disembodied existence. Across town, in , on the 23rd of September 1884, the same year that the Jefferson Physical Laboratory was constructed, nine American professors gathered to discuss these possibilities. Though the group consisted predominantly of physicists, they were nevertheless a remarkably interdisciplinary assembly. Most unusually, they had gathered to discuss new ways to test for a possibility which the medium of the ether implied: thought transference (“Formation” 1-2). If the ether, or a non-corpuscle model of matter dominated, then what was to stop the energy of thoughts mingling and transmitting messages from afar, like the relatively recent 1836 invention, the telegraph? The group called themselves the American Society for Psychical Research, in affiliation with an organization of the same name, the Society for Psychical Research, which had been founded two years prior, in 1882. The Society for Psychical Research, or SPR, consisted mainly of academics including professors of physics, classics, and moral philosophy (see chapter two, table two for a full list of founding members of SPR and 34 their academic affiliations). These professors were all either directly or adjacently affiliated with Trinity College, Cambridge, in England. In their flagship journal, SPR coined the word “Telepathy” as a term used “to cover all cases of impression received at a distance” (“Report of the Literary Committee” 147). The ether was the medium through which those impressions traveled, like waves across water. Over the years that followed the formation of this society, psychical researchers (most of whom were physicists led to SPR and ASPR through their keen interest in the ether) would conduct thousands of experiments, even at times using the same tools employed in physics laboratories to test for the ether, experimenting with magnetism and electricity. In addition, psychical researchers ran these tests on so called Spiritualist mediums, people who claimed to be like “human telegraphs,” able to tap into other worlds and contact the spirits of the dead through the ether. Belief in ghosts and telepathy was by no means a fringe fad. The American branch of the Society for Psychical Research’s first members and leading officers hailed from institutions devoted to reshaping higher education in the United States, like Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Rather than discarding these eminent physicists’ interest in psychical research as an embarrassing aberration, this dissertation reads these psychical research organizations as a microcosm of the broader spirit of experiment that would grow to pervade American research universities as the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth. Psychical researchers contested what could be counted as a valid form of intellectual inquiry before the hierarchical description of the so-called “soft” and “hard” sciences would sink in to our academic nomenclature—in other words, what philosophers of science refer to as the “demarcation problem,” or the question of how to distinguish between science and non- science (non-science may include pseudo-science and products of culture like literature) 35 within university studies in a manner that elevated personally meaningful, humanistic inquiry. Moreover, psychical researchers did work that provided a now overlooked infrastructure informing nearly all of philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher William James’s work, including his highly influential take on pragmatism. Because psychical research is such an infrequently examined topic, this first chapter is devoted to giving the reader bearings on where the topic of psychical research fits in current academic conversations, and accordingly, where this study fits in those conversations. This literature review section will demonstrate the relevance of psychical research in current academic discussions, and establish this dissertation’s place within those exchanges. Next, the section “Paths to Psychical Research” will offer a less theoretical, more straightforward look at the history of movements like Spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and Mesmerism for the reader who might be unfamiliar with them, or the way in which these spiritual, therapeutic movements were crucial in the formation of psychical research and psychology. The chapter concludes with an overview of organizations with differing purposes which were, in many ways, forerunners to psychical research organizations: The X Club, a group of naturalist skeptics openly hostile to Spiritualism, and the London Dialectical Society and the Psychological Society, two groups friendly towards Spiritualism and the first of their kind to have professional scientists examine mediums. The second chapter offers a closing installment in the story of psychical research’s emergence. Focusing on the court trials which made Spiritualism a public fear, the second chapter will chart how rising concerns over the gullibility of the public contributed to the instantiation of a scientific education in the general undergraduate curriculum which coincided with the professionalization of academic research. These changes are explored in so far as they co-evolved with the first psychical research societies, ultimately leading to the emergence of these societies in American 36 research universities starting with the University of Pennsylvania’s Seybert Commission. As chapter two explores, once these societies entered the university, they began to morph towards studies of dreams, and the unconscious.

LITERATURE REVIEW

If psychical research seems like a highly niche topic, this appearance could not be more deceptive. In its heyday it was actually a nexus of modernist interests, and everyone from Charles Darwin to George Eliot had participated in the scientific investigations of

Spiritualist mediums, and these individuals held strong opinions on this new, contested science (Eliot was all for it, Darwin, not surprisingly, was less enthusiastic). The interdisciplinary nature of psychical research necessarily opens any study of its history to a wide terrain of critical interlocutors. This literature review section serves as a preface to the scholarship engaged with throughout this chapter and dissertation. Although these works, and others, will inform the background of this study and will reappear at various points, they are discussed upfront in depth in this section for the sake of enhancing clarity. Additionally, for the sake of the reader, I will highlight this dissertation’s most significant original contributions to the academic conversations I am about to describe. This study links, for the first time, William James’s pragmatism and other ideas to his work in psychical research; it focuses on the value of psychical research to discipline formation in research universities; and it connects psychical research to the defense of the humanities in research universities which increasingly emphasized professionalization and the STEM fields from the 1870s on. At the same time, this analysis enhances existing studies: within the philosophy of science this project addresses the demarcation problem, verificationism, and paradigm shifts; in modernist studies it enters into scholarship on the

37 occult; relatedly, it also grapples with the controversial political power of irrational beliefs. Other fields imbricated with this study include new histories of the research university, the history of psychology, and of course, scholarship on psychical research itself. Moreover, this project offers engagement with primary material from American psychical research group the Seybert Commission, which is usually relegated to a single footnote in other studies of psychical research.21 This is because studies of psychical research have historically favored a focus on the United Kingdom, where psychical research first emerged as a proper discipline by a margin of two years, even though parallel academic interest always existed in the U.S. By entering these critical conversations, this work resists the impulse to diagnose psychical research as a fad in its own time, instead, this study uses psychical research as a lens to look outward to better understand this field’s impact on intellectual culture during the turn of the twentieth century. To begin, newcomers to the history of psychical research are likely to need some fundamental prefacing on the seemingly weird anachronisms in the way that psychical researchers described their position within academe. Psychical researchers investigated allegedly psychic mediums from a popular faith of American origin known as Spiritualism wherein, according to the most popular conceptions of the faith, the dead live on after death exactly as they had in life. What made matters complicated was that many psychical researchers also attended séances, and Spiritualist meetings, and had joined the psychical research movement as a means for affirming the validity of their pre- existing interest in Spiritualism’s religious-scientific nature. Because many Spiritualists co-opted talk of Darwinian evolution and used scientific methods like weighing and

21 One exception to this rule is Laurence R. Moore’s In Search of White Crows. 38 photographing ghosts, there was an element of scientific cross-examination built into their faith. In addition, there was an element of martyrdom in the faith -- Spiritualists, described themselves as ‘persecuted witches burning at the stake of scientific skepticism.’ At the same time, many psychical researchers saw themselves as academic martyrs of sorts, in tendentious conflict with their Spiritualist believer colleagues. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the philosophical problems broached by psychical researchers are the intellectual descendants of a much earlier line of questioning set into motion during the Scientific Revolution (1550-1700), most often dated from Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the universe (1543) up to Isaac newton’s Principia (1867), which formulated the laws of motion and of gravity. For an idea of how deep the roots of psychical research go, in physics, even Maxwell’s ether model, which inspired so much religious awe and reverence, could be traced back to Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer’s theory of an all pervading magnetic fluid, formulated at the end of the 18th century, could in turn also be traced still farther back to concepts of all-pervading energy fields like Qi and Prana from 500 B.C.E. In other words, if the debates posed by psychical research sound timeless, it’s because they draw from very old, yet persistent scientific inclinations towards a “theory of everything.” Physicists thought that “by laying bare its [the ether’s] mechanical substructure they would be able to explain and link together literally everything in the universe” (Hunt “Lines of Force” 99). Though even Aristotle had a concept of a world-filling substance, and Newton had posted an “aether he described as ‘exceedingly more rare and subtile than air, and exceedingly more elastic and active” the ether of the late nineteenth century was somewhat similar, but rooted in the advent of the “wave theory of light” from the early nineteenth century (Henderson “Vibratory Modernism” 129, Hunt “Lines of Force 100). James Clerk Maxwell was among the first to declare that the charge around a magnet was “not empty, but…filled 39 with activity and energy” which he speculated could subsist “only in the motion and strain of a material medium” (Hunt “Lines of Force” 100). Even after the ether was challenged by Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity, it continued to have defenders among scientists (Henderson “Vibratory Modernism” 126). The ether’s impact on culture was arguably just as powerful. Art historian Linda Henderson has coined the term “vibratory modernism” to refer to the wide impact of the ether on the arts, noting that as different as artworks inspired by the ether may be, they carry “shared, if differing, responses of their creators to the ether, an entity largely forgotten during the later course of the twentieth century” (“Vibratory Modernism” 126). There exists, throughout these imaginative responses to the ether, a general sense of enchantment. This generalized sense of enchanted possibility stands in direct contradistinction to the secularization thesis that we usually use to describe modernity which emphasizes the inevitability of religious decline in the face of scientific advancement. It was during the Enlightenment that the Western world relied on Protestantism even more than science and cast any heterodox superstition as backward and dangerous. (Barett 45). The secularization thesis has its roots in a vision of the post-Enlightenment West as modern because of its perpetuation of the Enlightenment ideal of reason above all else and a general diminishment of spiritual beliefs in professional and academic institutions. Most of our ideas about the “intellectual rationalization” that engendered the secularization thesis come from Max Weber’s famous 1917 speech discussed in the introduction of this dissertation -- “Science as Vocation” -- in which he asserted that the “fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (Weber 155). Weber’s thesis “spelled the end of the possibility of ‘living in union with the divine’” (142). This, of course, implies an ambiguous freedom in a way that signals the roots of existentialism that we find within 40 pragmatism’s assertion of the value of belief to an individual. This is especially true since at the same time, it creates a vacuum and foists a need to create “unifying ethical values traditionally established by the great world religions” onto the public (Owen 11). But as many scholars have since asserted, among them Owen Chadwick, Alex Owen, and Egil Asprem, the secularization thesis in no way superseded the undeniable sway of interest in occultism in the Victorian mind. Instead, psychical researchers, like many others in their day, approached the numinous rationally, renegotiating rationalism without sacrificing the value of belief for its value as a cohering source of personal and social meaning. Phrased this way, the re-enchantment of the world sounds tame and straightforward: it preserved the value of belief and paved the way for the emergence of pragmatism. The road there, however, was certainly paved with a number of strange and colorful Spiritualist characters, bizarre demonstrations, court trials, and séances. Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “a particular kind of occultism flourished” marking a “revised mode of an Earlier European magical tradition and ‘Eastern’ spirituality operating in a modern urbanized culture in the grip of change” (Owen 7). This “new” occultism poses a challenge to “the contemporaneous picture formulated by James Frazer and the Victorian evolutionists of a straightforward magic- religion-science march of cultural evolution” (Owen 8). Spiritualists were overwhelmingly popular and their public performances were often of a pseudo- anthropological, entertaining nature. The process of re-enchanting the world meant, most often, restaging the scene of the Enlightenment for these Spiritualists and taking the side of peoples in the global south, first peoples of Europe, and others who were persecuted during the inquisition for practicing witchcraft. Spiritualists frequently sensationally compared themselves to witches. In chapter two, I explore examples of Spiritualists claiming that they were 41 “persecuted” by scientists, in which these Spiritualists compared the scientific institution to the Inquisition of the Catholic Church when it would torture dissenters. 1880s Spiritualists also commonly compared themselves to the wrongly persecuted of the Salem witch trials (1692-1693). Ever with their finger on the pulse of the age, they saw their scientific-skeptic detractors as engaging in a hostile “mob mentality” – a phenomenon that the new fin de siècle concept of crowd psychology could explain. America and Europe’s large Spiritualist community, as well as an international academic cross-section of professors who believed in the potentiality of spirit communication and telepathy, created a pressing need for productive boundaries. What areas were appropriate for academic study? To make matters more complicated, many psychical researchers belonged to the related discipline of psychology. Psychology and psychical research were only fledgling disciplines at this time, so for these two overlapping fields, the creation of boundaries became a particularly tendentious but intellectually generative issue. Psychical research’s outlandish proposals were seen as the biggest threat to psychologists. In particular, Sigmund Freud found these ideas especially dubious, although in his own time, he was not even as popular a figure as most psychical researchers. This dissertation focuses on psychical research because it is premised on the idea that the popularity of an intellectual juggernaut like Freud tells us more about the way opinions have been shaped over the interceding century than about what opinions were in the 1880s. Readers in the twenty-first century would be surprised to know that until 1922, a man they have possibly never heard of, psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers, was actually more commonly mentioned in printed texts that Sigmund Freud. Furthermore, William James was more frequently cited than either of them by what was, for most of the first half of the twentieth century, an astronomical margin. It was not until the 1990s that 42 Freud caught up to and outpaced James in popularity. Psychical research was also a more popularly cited topic than psychoanalysis in all published texts until 1912 when psychoanalysis took off at high velocity.22 Because James and psychical researchers are the focus of this dissertation, it is worth explaining the context of Freud’s relationship to them up front. Freud was, in his own words, “unenthusiastic and ambivalent” about psychical research. Throughout his published work, he seems to find a number of excuses for not addressing what was to him an inappropriate, unscientific topic. When assembling his collected writings after his death, editor and translator Strachey found the talk “Telepathy and Psychoanalysis” published in German with a note that said that it “was written for the meeting of the Central Executive of the International Psychoanalytic Association” held in the Harz Mountains in 1921 (175). After some investigation, however, Strachey found that there had been no such meeting; that it was, in fact, a talk given to an inner circle of Freud’s closest acolytes. Freud always wrote about telepathy as a kind of limit to what he could not touch upon as a proper scientist. When addressing his colleagues in the Harz Mountains on the topic of telepathy, he explained that he had forgotten his third and most persuasive case on telepathy in Vienna, joking that it was really “omitted due to [his own] resistance” (181). His own jokey diagnosis certainly does accurately encapsulate Freud’s relationship to psychical research. The Interpretation of Dreams, for example, mentions psychical research via F.W.H. Myers once, where Freud passingly notes that Myers has also written on “hypermnesic dreams in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which are unfortunately inaccessible to me” (Freud, Dreams 9). Considering that the cost of membership to the society was one guinea, and that many of his

22 See appendix for Google Ngram of this data. 43 colleagues were involved in it, Freud’s comment that Myers work was “inaccessible” seem potentially like a way to express his distaste for SPR’s work. As I will explore later in chapter two, Myers’s concept of the Subliminal Self made incredibly probing insights about the unconscious, and for Freud to treat his work in such a cursory manner seems calculated. Ironically, the logic that Freud used to explain why psychical researchers were flawed in their approach was the same logic that they used to claim that normal science was flawed in its approach. Both Freud and psychical researchers levelled the criticism that the other was too eager to be convinced of what they already believed to be true. In “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” Freud criticized psychical researchers for being too keen to find the mystical in ideas like Einstein’s theory of relativity, comparing their magical notions of physics to a regression to “primitive” beliefs (Complete 178). Freud argues that psychoanalysts alone, are “ready, for the sake of attaining some fragment of objective certainty, to sacrifice everything—the dazzling brilliance of a flawless theory, the exalted consciousness of having achieved a comprehensive view of the universe” (179). In the Freudian tradition, psychoanalysts refused to put a bow on things, so to speak, even if it might temporarily make one feel “exalted.” Freud’s implication is that psychoanalysts have the courage to be uncomfortable, and would rather be grimly headed towards truth, if there is such a thing, than to live with the pathetic insult to their intelligence of pretending to have found answers that simply are not there. Disenchantment is less a diagnosis of culture and more a raison d’être in Freud’s case. Sweeping “comprehensive views” (like psychical researchers love for the ether, a “theory of everything”) must be sacrificed to obtain hard-won, individual and often minor truths on the path to assembling a fuller view of a grander theory (the psychological equivalent of those bricks in James’s “edifice of research”). But was this really antithetical to the 44 spirit of psychical research? Not to sound overly reductive, but in the terms more fully outlined by Popper and Bourdieu momentarily in the text below, the crisis seems partly manufactured. Psychical researchers said much the same thing about normal science. Members of SPR showed a willingness to endanger their reputations and careers. Alfred Russel Wallace died in relative poverty with a tarnished reputation for his adherence not simply to Spiritualism, but to the argument that it deserved a chance to be studied. What could be more uncomfortable than that? Part of the reason Freud was undoubtedly wary of psychical research is that psychology and psychoanalysis were fledgling scientific disciplines. Both psychoanalysis and psychical research were under equal, competing pressures to prove themselves to be legitimate, rigorously scientific, and rational so as not to jeopardize psychoanalysis’s status. Freud, who would later himself become an actual refugee, described his field of psychoanalysis as being trapped between two warning nations. Psychoanalytic research clearly belonged to the same “nation” as psychical research, Freud explained, but it could only survive when fighting for normal science. I am borrowing the term “normal science” here from Thomas Kuhn who uses it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to denote the organized practice of scientific research within an already settled scientific paradigm. Psychical Research and psychoanalysis were both in precarious positions for two reasons. For one, they were not normal science because they represented new paradigms. For another, while Freud tended to work to heal the mentally ill, he was also committed to a better knowledge of the human psyche. The practical use of the medical angle was slightly less direct than what one finds in something like Jean-Martin Charcot’s neurological experiments at the Salpêtrière Hospital during the same era. Neurology would be the “normal science” for studying the human mind in this era. As with all soldiers who are refugees of a land that is hostile to them and fight for their adoptive 45 countries, the situation is a catch 22: “It was their [psychoanalysts] fate to be treated as enemies by the first side [psychical researchers]” Freud writes, “then, if they were lucky enough to escape, [as an enemy] by the other [normal naturalism]” (180). What stands out more than anything from Freud’s writing on psychical research is that he saw psychoanalysis as equally endangered, equally unclassifiable, as psychical research. As a result of his anxiety over psychoanalysis’s own unclassifiable nature he developed, in his own words, a “resistance” to the academic study of telepathy. This difficulty in classifying psychical research, and the related difficulty of classifying psychoanalysis brings up what philosophers of science call the demarcation problem. The demarcation problem refers to efforts to distinguish between science, and all other related fields which claim to be scientific, but may not be. Today the sciences studied in this report: Mesmerism, Telepathy, and Spiritualism, have, in the eyes of most, not lived up to the expectations set by the demarcation criterion, the philosophical vetting process that has been responsible for deeming which beliefs are epistemically warranted, and are thus thought of as pseudo-sciences. As this study explores, however, passing these ideas through various tests was a hot activity for even the most respected scientists with Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin attending séances to test so-called psychic Spiritualist mediums (Report of the Seybert Commission; Darwin 187). The term “problem of demarcation” emerges in the writings of philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper (Conjectures 51). It should be noted, however, that the effort to distinguish science from non-science can be traced all the way back to Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, which insisted that above all, a true science would have apoditic certainty, meaning it would offer a self-evident solution to a problem provable by evidence, such as 2+2 =4, as opposed to a problem open for debate, with multiple possible answers (Laudan 112). Another characteristic of true science, even in Ancient 46 Greece, was that science would present its argument in the simplest terms possible, in a clear, unequivocal style without any imagery or analogy. Using excessive imagery and analogy to illustrate a scientific point was associated, even in Ancient Greece, with older ways of producing a scientific proposition (Lloyd 213-214). The most significant contemporary debates about the demarcation problem today, however, are rooted in the work of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. Logical positivists of the early 20th century would take this commitment to logic shown by the Ancient Greeks in defining science to extremes, seeking to create an all unified field of science which encompassed even philosophy as a science via logic. Logical positivists wanted to route the meaning in all sciences, from economics to physics, into logical formulae, including philosophy, as a way to create unity between all sciences. Through verificationism, logical positivists of the Vienna Circle argued that only statements verifiable through empirical observation which are capable of being broken down into logic are cognitively meaningful, and thus, sufficiently scientific, while most other intellectual pursuits were relegated to the non-scientific realm of metaphysics, which verificationism also implied was devoid of meaning. Logical positivists used the term metaphysics widely for any statements that could not be logically broken down. Though their goal was to create a unified science, in doing so, they obliquely entered verificationism as the new criterion for solving the demarcation problem. In contradistinction to the logical positivists, philosopher of Science, Sir Karl Popper, posed his own criterion to the demarcation problem, one which would get away from verificationism’s fixation on confirmation and meaning versus meaninglessness by instead focusing on refutation and drawing a productive line between science and pseudo- science. For Popper, his desire to categorize these theories as non-scientific was rooted in

47 personal experience. While a college student, during the revolution in Austria, Popper had classmates – Marxists, who had been killed while protesting for their cause:

After the collapse of the Austrian Empire there had been a revolution in Austria: the air was full of revolutionary slogans and ideas, and new and often wild theories. Among the theories which interested me Einstein’s theory of relativity was no doubt the most important. Three others were Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler’s so-called ‘individual psychology.’ (Popper Conjectures 44). Later, Popper wrote about what he perceived as the dangers of the violence implicit in Marxism in The Open Society and Its Enemies, “Now I wish to make it quite clear that it is this prophecy of a possibly violent revolution which I consider, from the point of view of practical politics, by far the most harmful element in Marxism” (140). Were the violent sacrifices of Marxism worth it? For Popper, they were not because Marx’s theories were too imprecise. Everywhere Popper looked, he saw people who were saturating themselves in their own self-confirming prophecies. “A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation—which revealed the class bias of the paper” (Popper Conjectures 46). For Popper, this was a kind of theoretical quicksand: the more anyone identified with these ideas, the more convinced they became. All around him, Popper saw people claiming new sciences with a cult-like reverence: “Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory” (46). As a young man, Popper also worked for the psychologist Alfred Adler. He served as a social worker helping “children and young people in the working-class districts of Vienna where he [Adler] had established social guidance clinics” (45). One day, Popper found a young man with mental ailments that seemed to defy Adler’s theories. When he asked Adler about it, Adler quickly proceeded to identify the young 48 man in Adlerian terms. Surprised, Popper asked Adler how he could be so sure, to which Adler reportedly replied: “Because of my thousandfold experience,” Popper ironically notes that he thought to say to the doctor, “And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold” (Conjectures 45). Popper was only 17, when, in 1919, he said he began to ask himself, “What is wrong with Marxism, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology? Why are they so different from physical theories, from Newton’s theory, and especially from the theory of relativity?” For Popper, the great problem with the three main thinkers he attacks, Freud, Adler, and Marx, is their “explanatory power,” their “theories [that] appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred” (Conjectures 45). It should be noted that Popper admired and respected Einstein and was affected as a young man by learning of Eddington’s expedition which tested the veracity of Einstein’s gravitational theory by measuring the brightness of a star during an eclipse to determine if light had shifted, which would indicate that light could be attracted by heavy bodies just as matter is (Conjectures 47). Gradually, the idea began to form in Popper’s mind that Einstein’s theories were true science by virtue of “the risk involved in a prediction of this kind” (Conjectures 47). To weed out Marxism, Adlerian, and Freudian analysis from Einstein’s scientific discoveries, Popper began to construct his own theory to the demarcation problem. He worked directly against logical positivists, deciding that seeking confirmation was the heart of the problem. In Popper’s words, “Confirmation should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory—an event which would have refuted the theory” (Conjectures 48). This line of thinking led directly to the development of Popper’s solution to the demarcation criterion: falsificationism. His theory of falsificationism flew 49 directly in the face of what logical positivists had proclaimed for decades “that science is distinguished from pseudo-science—or from ‘metaphysics’—by its empirical method, which is essentially inductive, proceeding from observation or experiment” (Conjectures 44). Popper would push back against the all-pervading impulse to seek confirmation in his day. Falsificationism defines science by focusing on refutation instead of confirmation. Popper’s falsification argues that there is no number, degree, or variety of tests one could perform to prove something untrue. Only through “scientific realism” can one approach something like a verisimilitude or “truth likeness” in science, but never perfect certainty (Conjecture 542). Under falsifiability, if a statement is to be true, “that statement or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable, observations” (Conjecture 51). Under such circumstances, “Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it” (Conjecture 48). Philosopher Theodore Schick adds a caveat to Popper’s theory of falsification by saying that for Popper, the success of a scientific test “does not entail the truth of the hypothesis under investigation” but at the same time, “the failure of a test does entail its falsity,” in other words, some hypotheses can still always be wrong (“The End of Science?”). Focusing on refutations completely sidesteps the problem of induction altogether and “creates a new demarcation criterion: a theory is scientific if it is falsifiable. If there is no possible observation that would count against it, it is not scientific” (Schick “The End of Science?”). It is comically easy to understand why under these guidelines a Spiritualist medium would not seem to be a true scientist. Victorian mediums specialized in always seeming right via ambiguous pronouncements. In this way the medium’s predictive power can be likened to a non-science like astrology which may always be correct by 50 virtue of the vagueness of its hypothesis – astrology is, coincidentally, the pseudo-science Popper uses most often to disparage the impact of explanatory power on a believer. The late-nineteenth century allegedly telepathic mediums, like , who really puzzled psychical researchers, however, were different. They tended to make very specific claims: calling deceased family members by name, knowing intimate details of private, interpersonal conflicts, and so on. In this sense, even along Popper’s guidelines, some of the mediums that psychical researchers investigated were worth studying because their hypotheses were riskily specific, formulated with only one correct answer available. As SPR put it, they aimed to conduct their work “Without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated” (“Objects” 4). SPR aimed, in every way, to be scientifically appropriate, and in so doing, they knowingly culled a state of scientific crisis, by attempting to show that a heterodox opinion could be the truly “unimpassioned” scientific one. Interestingly for this study, Popper acknowledged that even pseudo-sciences held meaning (recall that falsifiability is not a test of meaningfulness, but is about drawing a line between science and pseudo-science), and that, moreover, they might eventually yield a breakthrough scientific discovery but their hypothesis might not be testable yet. In this way, Popper’s theory carries some friendliness to the imaginative world of speculative fiction with its dreams of worlds and breakthroughs not yet realized, but imagined. Though Popper calls Freud’s theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego a “myth” on par with The Odyssey, he acknowledges that “At the same time . . . such myths may be developed, and become testable; that historically speaking all—or very nearly all— scientific theories originate from myths, and that a myth may contain important anticipations of scientific theories” (Conjectures 50). Popper’s project is, in other words, 51 not about vilifying pseudo-science by any means. As he puts it, “I wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudo-science may happen to stumble on the truth” (Conjectures 44). This is certainly what psychical researchers hoped for. By his acknowledgment that some “mythic” ideas might be the scientific breakthroughs of tomorrow Popper does find some affinity with psychical research. In 1896, nearly four decades before the publication of Popper’s theory of falsification, James, in his Presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research, shared that he had been a “‘rigorously scientific’ disbeliever,” (which Popper would have applauded) but that he could no longer pretend that the “decisive thunderbolt” of the Spiritualist medium whom believed to be legitimate, Leonora Piper, had not “fallen,” clearing the “baffling darkness” – a revelation that probably would have made Popper uncomfortable because of James’s clear eagerness to believe (Presidential 80-81). Nevertheless, James famously referred to Piper as his “white crow,” a predecessor of and chromatic inverse to Popper’s black swan, and insisted that psychical researchers must search for the exception to the rule, for the “white crow” amidst the black crows.23 At the same time, James acknowledges some Popperian self-awareness, conceding that the scientific method requires a “dispassionate method” and that to cling to scientific “facts” and “hug” them is truly to act in the religious manner of a “sect” and not a science (81). James’s swift takedown of detractors of psychical research, the way that he implies that they were

23 It is worth noting that Popper’s theory of “Falsifiability” was later struck down by the Duhem-Quine thesis which stated that falsifiability is not reliable because any experiment takes place within such a large set of auxiliary assumptions that scientists can never say whether it is true or false. Popper’s theory is still of value, however, in its challenge to the traditional, Baconian scientific method and for the way it contributed to the demarcation problem as well as its affinities with James’s thoughts on psychical research. 52 the ones clinging to their skepticism like a religion, was admirable if only for his rhetorical and philosophical dexterity. Among psychical researchers, William James stands out as scientist in the Popperian sense because he tried to resolve a crisis in science by going out of his way to prove himself wrong, even if Popper would not have considered Spiritualism scientific. Interestingly, both James and Popper drew the analogy between Galileo and marginalized sciences. In Popper’s words, mainstream scientists who missed the “black swans” of the scientific world were like those who “refused to look through Galileo’s telescope” (Popper, Philosophy 983). James, meanwhile, compared psychology to a science akin to “physics before Galileo’s time” giving the person daring enough a chance to “make a name greater than Newton’s” (James, Letters vol. II 1). Popper would not consider a psychic a scientist due to overwhelming evidence to the contrary established by his time, nevertheless, in the 1880s, in Popper’s and James’s senses, psychical researchers undertook work that carried the potential to be scientific. Though as we know it today, James’s ideas on psychical research are still myths which haven’t panned out scientifically, what mattered at the turn of the century, was the sense of tremendous potential that they could. Scientific revolutions, according to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, completely alter our worldview, and they are the only way we scientifically progress. Science does not gradually accrete and steadily improve, instead, in Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he points out that progress happens in the gaps between normal science, through the creation of new paradigms. All that happens in between is categorized as “normal science.” “Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments” (Kuhn 6.) Within normal science we have paradigms which an anomaly 53 (like evidence that telepathy works) could violate, leading to a state of crisis. According to Kuhn,

normal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science (6).

In other words, unexpected findings can lead to a paradigm shift, or alteration in the way we do science, and finally, if the paradigm shift is significant enough, a scientific revolution occurs, where the shift alters the global worldview of everyday people. In The Structures of Scientific Revolution, however, Kuhn points out that reaching the point of a paradigm shift is difficult for many scientists because they are “immune” to borrow Popper’s words, to seeing a different kind of science. It’s not that they won’t look through “Galileo’s telescope,” it’s that they’re psychologically incapable. To illustrate this, Kuhn uses the example of a psychological test conducted by J.S. Bruner and Leo Postman where they showed different subjects images of decks of playing cards for a short period of time (63). Some decks were ordinary, others had anomalous markings which never appear on a deck of cards, like a “black four of hearts” (as most know, the heart suit is always red) (64). Being asked what they’d seen, some subjects were simply unable to process the anomalous information. The potential finding here is that the subjects were too persistently projecting their own expectations upon the cards. In other words, their minds made the black hearts red, or into spades, and so on. In describing the process of laboratory study, Pierre Bourdieu notes the same phenomenon. He saw a gradual transformation of data from experiment, to notebook, to publication, noting that

54 “even the best scientists dismiss unfavorable results as aberrations which they exclude from their official accounts” (Bourdieu, Science 21). In both of these examples, the cards, and the laboratory notebooks, science becomes like a game of telephone where scientists insert socially formed biases and expectations along the way so that published data is not necessarily an accurate reflection of a result from the lab, but a mirror of the scientific community’s pre-existing consensus. This tendency towards confirmation bias will become even more significant in the next chapter, as psychical researchers collected vast amount of data, and it was critical for them to not impose their own views and maintain the integrity of that data. Psychical research is interesting from an epistemological standpoint because it forces a person to re-evaluate what is normal, and what they thought they knew. With this re-evaluation comes a potential redrawing of traditional paradigms. At its peak, psychical research programs drew together practitioners at the top of their fields in psychology, philosophy, physics, anthropology, and literature. According to Kuhn, a paradigm shift can transform a group into a profession or, at least, a discipline (Kuhn 19). An early sign that a new paradigm has formed, asserts Kuhn, is the development of specialized journals (see table one, chapter two) “addressed only to professional colleagues, [those] whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read the papers addressed to them” (Kuhn 20). I will discuss the role of journals in professionalization in the section on higher education in chapter two. Along these lines, psychical research was a paradigm shifting event as the Society for Psychical Research (as well as its American branch) had membership fees and a regular journal as well as a record of its proceedings. But did it ever fulfill the most grandiose pinnacle; did the paradigm shift ever reach a Kuhnian “scientific revolution” altering everyone’s worldview the way that Copernicus did in proving that the Earth moved around the ? 55 Though it certainly had widespread cultural influence, it would be disingenuous and unhelpful to compare it to a major scientific revolution and not very interesting, anyway. What makes psychical research most interesting is that these researchers created new methodologies and potential paradigms through their assiduous efforts, and that these efforts, as I explore in depth in chapters two and three, contributed to other arenas of thought, like pragmatism. The revolution of psychical researchers has been a revolution perpetually deferred. Due to its inherently interesting nature, psychical research can never be fully abandoned and private and public institutions still maintain programs affiliated with psychical research. There will always be an inexhaustible well of human interest in telepathy and the afterlife. Because of this, it will always haunt universities: something too important not to be examined, and yet something so difficult to gather substantial evidence for that it will always be a bit of an outlier. For these reasons, psychical research programs across the world have always held a controversial status, and are more often than not privately funded, but will never completely disappear. Psychical research naturally implicates a reflexive examination of universities because it calls into question which topics are deemed sufficiently academic and which are not. Psychical research asks us, along lines of reflexivity laid out by Pierre Bourdieu, to recognize the biases of our own scholarly positions that we bring when evaluating a phenomenon like the study of telepathy. In Bourdieu’s words, this reflexivity is an instance of a time when a field “taking itself for its object, uses its own weapons to understand and check itself” (Bourdieu, Science 89). Scholars, in other words, have a chance to learn more about their own position through understanding their knee-jerk biases against a study of psychical research.

56 Tangled up in the question of academic value is the question of how we write about the history of education and the humanities, particularly rejected ideas within that history. This study seeks to show that the assumed binary between science and pseudo- science is a manufactured one, an easier story to tell than the more complicated version of the way that so-called “pseudo sciences” are actually linked to relevant ideas, major figures, and prominent discoveries. As Bourdieu points out, “the logic of academic institutions helps to perpetuate false alternatives” (Science 6). The academic system’s interest in false alternatives is rooted in the system’s investment at all levels in rewarding difference. From sociology, where the sociologist can attempt to take their lack of knowledge of hard science and act as “‘lab ethnographers’” turning their “handicap into a privilege,” or in philosophy “bracketing off . . . opposing theories . . . in the fictitious pursuit of difference” (Bourdieu 7). The best one can do in such circumstances, is to dissolve a large part of the conflicts,” to devote one’s career to “destroying false problems – false problems socially constituted as real ones, especially by the philosophical tradition, and consequently very difficult to destroy” (Bourdieu 7). By dissolving these fabricated conflicts by looking to their history, this study seeks to take part in a larger conversation happening now, shown by scholarship that asserts a false dichotomy between enchantment and reason.24 Indicative of this trend, Wouter Haanegraaf’s panoramic history Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in

24 See studies like: Egil Asprem. The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939. Brill, 2014; Wouter Hanegraaff. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2014; Linda Dalrymple Henderson. “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space,” From Energy to Information, edited by Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Bruce Hunt, Stanford University Press, 2002. pp. 126-149; Alex Owen. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 57 Western Culture, argues that academics have been too quick to look upon “magic” and “occultism” with contempt, ignoring that an esoteric tradition like Hermeticism is a philosophical tradition which has had a profound impact on ideas which we might more frequently pull from our critical toolboxes. Such philosophies might not be in as much use today, but they are worth examining because they are still the hidden scaffolding within the philosophies that have survived. Though Haanegraaf’s focus is on the Renaissance moving forward, he does mention obscure fin de siècle scholars who worked outside the academy to document and create histories that ran concurrently with, but apart from, the work of psychical researchers to create a kind of genealogy for occult phenomena like telepathy. His study does not address (to be fair because it is in the tail- end of a sweeping chronological range) that the age of psychical research marks a boiling point for the debates on “rejected knowledge” within universities that this study takes as its focus. Actual histories of the American research university throw the disciplinary tension over psychical research into even clearer, less theoretical focus. Lawrence Veysey Roger I. Geiger have both written valuable studies in this regard. Veysey, who coined the idea of the “academic boom” of the 1890s wrote about higher education in the midst of the student revolution of the1960s in a way that made the spirit of the 1890s more tangible. This “academic boom” at the turn of the century was a period of academic, social, and intellectual revolution, where universities were feared as “godless” zones, English departments were torn between serving as partisans of “culture and devotees of philological research” with shifts in tuition, admissions, teaching structure, and subject matter (Veysey 59). While popular culture may focus on the 1960s as the ultimate era of change and revolution on college campuses, the 1890s was the original period of campus unrest in fighting for civil rights and access to higher education for 58 women and people of color, of socialist demonstrations on campus, an insistence upon policies that made college accessible regardless of class standing, and with it, a reassessment of what subjects mattered. College campuses, as we will see in chapter two, were torn between professionalization and the liberal arts. Geiger’s book, with its detailed information on the history of professionalization brings home how psychical research organizations, with their journals and subscription memberships, were vying for a seat at the table alongside groups established at the same time, such as the Modern Language Association, which themselves had to adapt to fit into these new, professionalizing research-focused American universities (see table 1 in chapter 2). Scholarship like Geiger’s and Veysey’s, show the radical potential of campus and departmental politics at the end of the nineteenth century in shaping curricula. Re-approaching psychical research through the lens of its place in the university leads this study, even further, to find that psychical research was often objected to by college administrators on the ground that it was “dangerous,” in an era when “facts” gained new prowess as “sledgehammers that shatter introspective theories” (Veysey 137). Psychical research challenged the supremacy of these established “facts” by testing for new, unsettling ones. James and his colleagues took these seemingly fragile inward looking theories and gave them new life, By protecting the role of intuition, and of enchantment, psychical researchers protected academic freedom and the humanities from a university that was beginning to become STEM-centric and hostile to the more introspective humanities. This violent tension between enchantment and reason is one that forms the fundamental “dialectic of enlightenment,” as Horkheimer and Adorno put it. These crises that absorbed psychical researchers over superstition and reason were interestingly prescient of many cultural trends that would later be blamed for the global rise of fascism at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 59 cornerstone of critical theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors reflect on WWII as the dark endgame of the Enlightenment, which, locked in a Hegelian dialectic with its antithesis – irrationalism – could only plummet Western Civilization to the doom represented by National Socialism, capitalism, Stalinism and “the culture industry.” By trying to shake off superstition, Horkheimer and Adorno point out, we became more enslaved to it than ever: “The proscribing of superstition has always signified not only the progress of domination, but its exposure. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment; it is nature made audible in its estrangement” (Horkheimer and Adorno 31). The Hegelian master-slave dialectic asserts that it is impossible to escape a thing if you have built your identity based on your opposition to it. If the sense of persecution displayed by Spiritualists and psychical researchers reveals anything, it is that depriving people of their superstitious theories only makes them want them more. The more people are exposed to a strict social-scientific norm, the more they delight in reading their own horoscope — as Adorno argues in his essay against authoritarian irrationalism, “The Stars Down to Earth.” The essay, which tackles the popularity of the Los Angeles Times astrology column, taps into the fact that historically, as much as today, people tend, with the zealous rebelliousness of children, to thumb their nose at the establishment and dive headfirst into the pseudo-empowerment of irrational beliefs, and that any fascist regime can, in turn, benefit itself from hijacking the power of such beliefs.25 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, Horkheimer and Adorno are not vilifying enchantment itself, but the dialectic through which the Enlightenment positioned itself as counter to enchantment. For Horkheimer and Adorno, Enlightenment science, which eschews superstition, is to blame. Science, they argue, has become like a

25 E.g. the disavowal of scientific fact and zealous shirking of so-called “political correctness” in the 2016 presidential election. 60 “dictator to human beings . . . he knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them” (6). In their book, Horkheimer and Adorno compare a shaman, or healer, to a scientist in an extended metaphor about enchantment. Unlike the scientist who “shrinks” the “unified cosmos” into a hunting ground with “prey,” they assert that the Shaman operates in a world divided into various magic “forces” which safeguard it from any dominating impulse. While a scientist has specimens, a Shaman has talismans. In an enchanted worldview, there is no representative distance. In the magical worldview there are no “specimens”: a rabbit is all life, an atom is all matter, and so on (Horkheimer and Adorno 7). In this light, psychical researchers created a kind of floodgate that undid the fundamental tension of the dialectic of enlightenment: simultaneously reducing the pressure on science to be “immune” and enchantment to be verboten. Psychical research, then, represents the undoing of the dialectic of enlightenment: science enchanted. It would be unfair, then, to polarize psychical researchers as sitting on one end or the other of the dialectic of enlightenment. This project, instead, sees them as actors in a class outside of “authoritarian irrationalism.” Though psychical research might seem superstitious on its face, it is, if anything, an antidote to mindlessly consuming superstitions. It provides a valid means for exorcising irrationalism via scientific vetting, and thus protects an enchanted worldview from becoming a branch for any authoritarian regime. Horkheimer and Adorno were not the first to note the political significance of irrational beliefs, the disavowal of irrational beliefs is an Enlightenment-era part of the making of a rational, democratic citizen. Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, wrote that reason, not government, could cure a person of irrational beliefs. “Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite . . . It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them [superstitions]” (170). Invoking Galileo, just as James and 61 Popper would later, Jefferson warns science and reason proved Galileo right even though Galileo was sent by his government to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth was round. “Reason and experiment have been indulged,” goes Jefferson’s famous aphorism, “and error has fled before them” (Jefferson 170). The fin de siècle psychical research debates mark a pivotal point, then, when the logic of the first amendment, that reason naturally triumphs and therefore all beliefs must be free to compete with reason, was called into question by those opposed to psychical research. The persecution faced by psychical researchers was not totally exaggerated: there were de facto and de jure attempts made to censor their work, explored in the second chapter, where actual court cases and similar “trials” in universities are examined. Contemporary scholars have argued that, far from being harmful, irrational, religious beliefs like Spiritualism, particularly in its American incarnation, have often been major engines of progress in American politics -- vital to the democratic spirit.26 Robert Abzug’s Cosmos Crumbling, for example, demonstrates that we can only understand “reformers if we try to understand the sacred significance they bestowed upon these worldly arenas” as they took part in antebellum reform movements, like abolitionism (Abzug viii). While the emphasis in Abzug’s book is on liberal versus conservative Christianity, mention is given to other promulgators, like , and two religious movements, Spiritualism and Mesmerism, which were primary engines behind a progressive worldview (Abzug 228). Laurence R. Moore’s In Search of

26 In this section and throughout this dissertation, I am primarily referring to American Spiritualism. I am, however, aware that Spiritualism was a major international movement, and that a number of these political claims do not map onto all adherent of Spiritualism, and that Spiritualism in Europe, where it was particularly popular throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire and in France, had a different relation to politics and culture. For more information on Spiritualism in Europe, see studies like Sophie Lachapelle’s Investigating the Supernatural: From and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metaphysics in France, 1853-1931 (2011) or Corrina Treitel’s A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (2004). 62 White Crows also casts Spiritualism as a movement of progressive individuals who were sick of the authority presented by mainstream Christianity, who were seeking a Spiritual practice that reflected their intellectual and politically progressive views. During the late nineteenth century, “progressive Spiritualism” became synonymous with Spiritualism of the non-Christian variety (Oppenheim 43). In the last 20 years a number of scholars have engaged questions of race, nation, and activism among Spiritualists and favored a recuperative view in uncovering what they read as countercultural activist sentiments.27 Anne Braude, Jill Galvan, and Alex Owen have also document the myriad ways in which Spiritualism was a boon to first-wave feminists, providing them with a platform to express themselves openly, allowing them to challenge legal and medical establishments. This pursuit was carried forward in the work of women like psychical researcher Eleanor Sidgwick, a principal (dean) of Newnham Women’s College who challenged the sexism of the higher education system at Cambridge. Spiritualism, or an enchanted worldview, enabled these activists to imagine license for social change. This exciting sense of change that the revolutions in physics and a re-emerged interest in occultism generated has most thoroughly been explored for its impact on avant-garde artists. Such studies of the occult and the arts broach a necessary question about modernism: is modernism all about “making it new” as we have been taught? Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s “Vibratory Modernism” shows another way of examining this narrative, examining occult influences on works of art, like Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) where sinuous, seemingly endless lines depict a figure walking in the ether. As Henderson points out, in addition to

27 For examples of studies that address the progressive valences of Spiritualism from an American angle, see: John Kucich’s Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Molly McGarry’s Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth- Century America and Robert S. Cox’s Body and Soul: A sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. 63 contemporary scientific theory, Boccioni drew on “occult literature on the exteriorization of thought and medium materialization” to inspire his craft (Henderson 135). New studies which emphasize the radical influence of the occult on the avant-garde, like Henderson’s, are especially influential in rethinking how we describe modernism as a historic movement. While often characterized as being forward looking, the modernist fascination with occultism suggests a different narrative. Psychical research was born out of this merger of interest in occultism and energy physics, and like Boccioni, psychical researchers also wrote and lectured on the occult influences on their work. Their connection to occultism and the distant past are there if we shift our scholarly framework to be able to take it in. We can understand this if we look to the histories that psychical researchers made for themselves, and see where their own histories of psychical research mesh with, and depart from, existing, dominant narratives about modernism. Like most modernists, psychical researchers wrote their own genealogies, but the presence of iconoclastic genealogies does not mean that they broke with history – to the contrary: they delved deep into the past for an understanding of where their new science fit in the grand scheme of things. For Eliot, tradition, an ideal characteristic for a poet to possess, involves an active curation of the past in a way that is perpetually modern. The vision of the talented “traditional” poet Eliot conjures is like a Spiritualist medium who culls the best of the past to make art in the present. “The most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (“Tradition”). The divining process of the great writer, for Eliot, is the mark of his success or failure:

you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. . . what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really 64 new) work of art among them. . . the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. (“Tradition”) In his essay, Eliot here uses a kind of metaphysical conceit of the Spiritualist medium to create a much bigger vision of the status of American culture. That the psychic medium was such a profitable vessel for literary expression shows just how rich and pervasive the era’s sense of antimodern ambivalent connection to the past was, with the figure of the medium weaving its way through science, through art, through literary study, and through religion. Newer research delves further into the modernist’s tendency for carving out their own sinuous, idiosyncratic genealogies, in line with what psychical researchers did. As Michael North has uncovered, the origin of Pound’s famed expression used to describe the Modernist era: “Make It New,” can actually be sourced back to “a historical anecdote concerning . . . first king of the Shang dynasty (1766–1753 BC), who was said to have had a washbasin inscribed with this inspirational slogan” (North 162). After all, Pound’s own interest, blending Flaubert with Mussolini, are clearly (and thankfully) more an advertisement for being cultured via eccentricity than a mandatory summer reading list. Perhaps the best encapsulation of the modernist spirit, then, can be found in literary radical Van Wyck Brooks edict, in his 1918 Dial piece, “On A Usable Past,” that American literature should be defined by a stepping away from the canonicity presented by professors, and specifically towards a selective and pragmatic and personally meaningful culling of the past:

our historians . . . have held over the dark backward of time the divining-rods of their imagination and conjured out of it what they wanted and what their contemporaries wanted . . . The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of desire; it yields up, now this treasure, now that, to anyone who comes to it armed with a capacity for personal choices. If, then, we cannot use the past our professors offer us, is there any reason why we should not create others of our own? The grey conventional 65 mind casts its shadow backward. But why should not the creative mind dispel that shadow with shafts of light? The answer becomes not to leave the past behind, but to use it selectively, eccentrically, personally. The grey conventional mind of the professor this passage describes is not wrong to look backwards – according to Brooks this is how we do all intellectual work: by looking back. The mistake here would be on the implied figure of the student dissatisfied with their teacher; the onus of their dissatisfaction rests on themselves if they fail to look backward and find better, because the precedent generation is a warehouse of endless potential to draw from, not a haunted house we’re all stuck in. All of this Modernist work on canonicity and personal meaning is directly relevant to the work conducted by psychical researchers because it speaks to the broader spirit of the age. In their new science, psychical researchers also created highly idiosyncratic genealogies for themselves. Though they predominantly conducted first- person interviews, one of the many activities of the “literary committee” of SPR was the archival plundering of historical narratives for instances of psychical phenomena in past novels, stories, plays, and histories. The general trend in these genealogies of psychical researchers has been to pick up the metaphorical ley lines that our scholarly confirmation biases have forced us to ignore. Instead of looking for ruptures, psychical researchers looked for the kinds of personally meaningful continuities Brooks suggests scholars should go “divining” for (literally, in their case). In so doing, these psychical researchers were taking part in a recovery practice that resulted in the same sort of scalar reconfiguration of the myopic literary canon that we see in women’s, minorities, and LQBTQ literatures in contemporary fiction –- again, a progressive and humanistic methodology. As discussed in the third chapter, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience is directly indebted to the idiosyncratic genealogical style of the major works

66 of SPR: using a compendium of minor experiences to highlight major themes of human experience. At the same time that they influenced the genealogical mode of works by William James and others, psychical researchers were also masters at documenting their own history, and thus creating their own scientific canon of reference books. A more recent psychical research history, ’s 1968 The Founders of Psychical Research, has been invaluable for the intimate portraits that Gauld creates through the diaries and notebooks of psychical researchers. Gauld’s book is itself an object worthy of study for the way it continues SPR’s tradition of meticulously documenting its own position within academia. There are a handful of outsider (by which I mean written by individuals from a purely academic perspective) histories of psychical research, and the first among them was historian Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World. Her impressively comprehensive study creates an implicit argument that differs from more recent studies of psychical research in a few key ways, mainly revolving around her timeline which obscured her from the use of network theory. She operates from the foundational assumption that psychical research was a pseudo-science which snared shockingly gullible, but otherwise apparently intelligent, men and women in the nineteenth century before being relegated to the margins of academe. More recent studies that rely on a networked view like those by Richard Noakes, Roger Luckhurst, Ann Taves, and Pamela Thurschwell take a converse view to “margins” as highly influential on “centers.” Because Oppenheim’s study was much earlier, it’s understandable that it takes on a different shape lacking a sociological, networked view. Nevertheless, this study widens the scope of psychical research’s implications by a networked view seriously in the tradition of the newer studies by Luckhurst, Noaks, Taves, and Thurschwell just mentioned. Rather than seeing psychical research as part of a “crisis of faith,” my argument, like the more recent ones 67 just mentioned, asserts that it’s not a matter of viewing science as diametrically opposed to pseudo-science, or the 1870s as some inevitable march towards secularization, but as an era of great possibility characterized by an increasing curiosity about the potentially spiritual nature of matter marked by the occasional climax of tendentious conflict between naturalists, like members of the X Club, and those who favored a synthetic approach to science and religion, like members of the London Dialectical Society. The field of psychical research emerged from these conflicts not as a shutting down of debate, but as a broadening of humanistic interests into traditional scientific arenas. Theoretically, this study shares the highest number of affinities with Luckhurst’s impressive study, The Invention of Telepathy, which also relies on a networked view of the phenomenon, drawing on Bruno Latour's edict that a scientific concept can be regarded as a “knot” in a net of heterogeneous resources. Luckhurst astutely argues that “telepathy is a hybrid object” whose emergence relied on the merging of numerous components of late Victorian culture relying as much on Spiritualist mediums as it did on neurological theories, mesmerized plebeians, and Salpêtrière patients (3). The supporting architecture of a study like Luckhurst’s and also of this one is a blend of Foucauldian historical analysis, sociology of science, and literary theory, added to a surfeit of primary material that psychical researchers presciently furnished precisely so that they would not to be relegated to the status of a pseudo-scientific Victorian oddity – as too many studies, such as Oppenheim’s, have ironically made them. My study fills in gaps not covered in Luckhurst’s. While his study makes mention of James in passing, my study is grounded on his work and on the entrance of psychical research specifically into American universities. In general, the emphasis on margins and centers, as this chapter is titled, is part of a growing trend, following in the line of path-breaking works like Alison Winter's 68 Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain that refreshingly demonstrate the ways in which cultural history can move us away from our attachment to thinking in terms of “centers” and “margins” that tend to dominate histories of science, towards more networked views. Henri Ellenberger’s incredibly impressive history of psychology, The Discovery of the Unconscious, pulls us away from thinking in terms of margins and centers through its sheer comprehensiveness, which devotes minor, though definitely not inconsequential airtime to psychical researchers, by giving them major credit in their formulation to bigger concepts in the history of psychology like hypnotism. By the same token, Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud, which offers a more recent contextualization of the significance of seemingly fringe movements as central to the formation of the better-known ideas as they survived in Freud’s writings has also served as a valuable reference. In the process of following the more networked path presented by scholars like Luckhurst, Winter, Ellenberger, and Crabtree, this study makes a number of unorthodox moves. In this argument, usual centers of gravity like Margaret Fox, are assumed to be slightly more incidental (she emerges in this narrative 30 years past the peak of her fame, in chapter two). Some convenient origin stories are necessarily re- scaled into minor events, and seemingly minor events are re-scaled into major ones, so that the constellation of the “psychical research” narrative is drawn differently, and different stars are given different magnitudes.

PATHS TO PSYCHICAL RESEARCH (1848-1882)

This second section of chapter one offers a chronological overview of the religious and scientific movements that led up to the development of psychical research as a distinct academic field. First, I will cover the way in which Spiritualism is usually explained: as originating with the Fox sisters. Then, this history which emphasizes the

69 Fox sisters will be shown to be one which obscures the therapeutic valences of Spiritualism. Its real origins are explored in the next subsections which explain what Mesmerism was and how it came to be popularized in the U.S. before filtering into its sister science, Spiritualism. After that, there is an explanation of Swedenborgianism and the importance of its separate world systems on psychological and Spiritualist thought. After that, I return to an idea first explored in the literature review: the argument that Spiritualism and Mesmerism were inherently politically progressive and walk through the evidence for those claims from Andrew Jackson Davis’s speeches, to instances of feminists and abolitionists who adhered to Spiritualism as a revolutionary emblem of other progressive ideals. After that, I will address the relationship of Spiritualism to modernity, with the emergence of Theosophy, and increasing efforts among Spiritualists to distinguish themselves as properly scientific. The argument that Spiritualism was scientific engendered pushback from the X Club, a group of naturalists fighting against the social ills of a gullible public. Finally, I offer an overview of the formation of the London Dialectical Society and the Psychological Society, the first groups of academics and writers to realize that the age called for a spiritual-scientific synthesis – a way to soften the stubborn approach of both the X-Club and devout Spiritualists toward a more pragmatic way of approaching the unknown. The London Dialectical Society and the Psychological Society, I argue, were prototypes for the psychical research societies that would crop up in Europe and the United States at the close of the nineteenth century.

Placing the Fox Sisters into Scale: Spiritualism’s Network

Histories of Spiritualism often begin with the Fox sisters in 1848 – the teenaged sisters from Hydesville, New York, a small town east of Rochester, who sparked the Spiritualist religious movement in American after they claimed to have heard the

70 “rappings” of a wrongfully murdered peddler. The young women toured the country as mediums who could allegedly contact the dead for sold-out crowds. This section, however, will explain why we should only touch on them briefly, before looking back to the influences that made their work possible (Weisberg 20). A religion started by two teenaged girls who rose to international fame makes for an irresistibly compelling feminist history, at the same time the fall from grace of these guileful young women marks them out as the potential dramatis personae of a realist novel a la Henry James’s Verena Tarrant. Their story is worth telling, that psychical research ever existed as a field at all is due to the profound popularity of Spiritualism in the United States and Europe from the 1850s onward. One New York Times article by M.M. Mangassarian cited over 8 million adherents of Spiritualism worldwide by 1897 but in too many histories the Fox sisters themselves become a metonymic stand-in for the entire Spiritualist movement in a way that can ironically serve to eclipse the very richness of this movement that their stories should convey. If we zoom out from their specific story, we can re-approach these women as actors among many others on an even grander cultural and scientific stage. The Fox sisters were catering to an audience and performing in a genre already made familiar by equally popular itinerant mesmeric healers like Andrew Jackson Davis, and speaking the language of double worlds popularized by Swedenborgianism. Mesmerism: Touching at a Distance Before Telepathy When the Fox sisters stood before packed houses and claimed to be able to communicate with the dead, they were tapping into a discourse of telepathy first set into play in the medical field by Franz Anton Mesmer in France in the late 1700s. Mesmerism never disappeared from the cultural or medical lexicon; in fact, the Fox sister’s audience was well-prepared for somnambulist performances from mesmeric healers with radical political “divine” messages like those from Andrew Jackson Davis whose book The 71 Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations conveys some sense of the autodidactic speeches which blended talk of mesmeric “universal tides” with ideas about curing “diseases of the great social body” – taking a mesmeric angle on curing ills the political and social realm. Because such healers had been circulating the nation since the late 1830s, to understand the history of mediumship and its popularity, an understanding of Mesmer and his work is foundational. Though Franz Anton Mesmer’s beginnings were rather inauspicious, during his education he turned out to be a bit of an iconoclast like the psychical researchers who followed in his footsteps. Mesmer’s early education was typical for his era: he studied philosophy, Theology, mathematics, and physics (Crabtree 3). It was during his education, at the Jesuit-run University of Ingolstadt where he diverged from the traditional path, however, becoming interested in esoteric scientific systems like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry (Crabtree 3). These societies, though frowned upon at the time, were popular for the way they interpreted modern science through the lens of occult thinking from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Crabtree 3). Soon, Mesmer was reading his university lessons in physics through the cosmic scope of his private studies in esotericism. When one reads Mesmer’s writings, they do not at first appear occult, or esoteric. He offers a straightforward Newtonian depiction of planetary motion, centrifugal force, gravity, and tides. It is with his discussion of tides, though, that Mesmer veers off the beaten track. In his view, “a tide takes place also in the human body, thanks to the same forces which cause the expansion of the sea and also the atmosphere” (Mesmer 15). This force, for Mesmer, was “so subtle he hesitated to call it ‘matter” (Mesmer 4). Animal magnetism, for Mesmer, was the magnetic force unifying all animals. To disrupt the flow of this force, was to cause illness or the end of life itself.

Concomitantly, at this point in the mid-18th century, a Jesuit priest who also served as a 72 professor of Astronomy at the University of Vienna, named Maximillian Hell, had begun healing ailments with the aid of an iron magnet. Mesmer procured some of these magnets to cure a Francisca Osterline of her “hysteric symptoms” by creating a magnetic tide within her body (Ellenberger 59). Osterline swallowed a preparation of iron and Mesmer placed Dr. Hell’s magnets on her legs and stomach. This process (though painful) allegedly cured her. The manipulation of the alleged magnetic tides within a subject’s body eventually led to the discovery of “‘magnetic sleep’ (later called hypnosis),” a state which inspired the trance state of mediums at a séance (Ellenberger 45). In 1784 in France, Armand Marie Jaques Puységur found that a man dwelling on his estate (who Puységur refers to in his narrative as a “peasant”), Victor Race, had fallen ill (Crabtree 38, Ellenberger 45). Puységur began to use magnetism on Race just as Mesmer had (Mesmer’s successes then being quite famous) and soon found that after seven or eight minutes, Race had fallen into a strange sleep-like trance state in his arms. In this state, Puységur noticed Race muttering his worries aloud, and so he tried to make him believe he was “dancing at a party” to which Race “moved around a lot in his chair, as if dancing to a tune” (Crabtree 38). Soon Race’s spirits improved, and after leaving the trance he was able to sleep and eat well again. Race could not remember his trance state once awakened, but in his trance state his memory was completely intact—Puységur had unwittingly stumbled upon evidence of a divided consciousness (Ellenberger 42). Puységur soon shared his exciting findings with Mesmer and began training under him. Puységur had more clearly articulated an idea Mesmer had already been onto: that physical ailments could have their roots in the mind, and that a form of non-invasive therapy could cure a patient (Ellenberger 63). By the end of the 18th century, the new healing cure known as

Mesmerism was popular throughout Europe amongst all social classes, though individual 73 and group therapies for the upper classes were separated from group therapies offered to lower classes. Puységur famously magnetized a tree on the grounds near his castle where he would lead group therapy sessions with the people living on the castle’s grounds wherein they would link hands, and hold ropes tied to the tree which they believed would cure their ailments (Ellenberger 71). As overwhelmingly popular as this therapy was in Europe, it would take several more decades before this new healing therapy arrived in the U.S. Mesmerism came to the United States from France in 1837, when a number of translations of the works of Franz Anton Mesmer were made available in English for the first time in the U.S., where it faced new challenges from conservative religious sects (Ellenberger 219). The first advocate for Mesmerism in the U.S. was Philadelphia area physician Charles Caldwell, who began writing in favor of the therapeutic practice in 1842 (Ellenberger 219). Caldwell had to fight against “antimesmerists” of the day who feared that the practice was a kind of unholy and unsafe sacrilege. Like psychical researchers Mesmer faced great professional trials in the scientific community for his heterodox views. He had his reputation tarnished by a number of French academic societies, including the French Faculty of Medicine and an international group of scientists, including Benjamin Franklin, who found that Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism could not be proven and that its benefits were the result of mere suggestion. A step in the direction of recognizing it for its therapeutic value, though this recognition was of no consolation to Mesmer in his lifetime (Ellenberger 65). Ellenberger describes the end of Mesmer’s life in terms of tragedy and enchantment: he died unknown, in a small village, where the locals told stories of his power to control flocks of birds (Ellenberger 65-68).

74 Telepathy, the ability to transmit thoughts, but also, literally to “touch at a distance,” is something most readers might associate with the Victorian age, but the idea of telepathy is in fact directly rooted in Mesmer’s eighteenth century theory of animal magnetism. In his book From Mesmer to Freud, Crabtree relates an incident where a magnetizer recorded that he was able to distantly “touch” his magnetized patient, causing “movement in the members of his somnambulist—not with the same facility as in his own, but in the same manner” (175). Crabtree notes that Puységur trusted the cures that somnambulists came up with for themselves in a trance state, following them to the letter. He also notes that Puységur trusted the advice somnambulists came up with for use on his other patients, as well. (173). From medical clairvoyance, it was a short step towards general clairvoyance, and many patients of mesmerism reported full out of body experiences (173). Washington Irving Bishop, an American medium who traveled and performed extensively throughout England and the U.S. playing the popular “willing game” where participants in a parlor try to “will” a selected party to perform telepathic feats was criticized for using mesmeric techniques. In Luckhurst’s book, he recounts that George Romanes wrote a letter about Bishop in Nature in 1881 citing that Bishop touched his participants and used faint muscle movements to answer questions about localities, names, and so on. This prompted a number of officials to write in. “The nerve doctor George Beard, when discussing Bishop in 1877, noted that American performers and audiences alike resorted to vague notions of magnetism. ‘It is a tyrant that rules over the whole realm of the seemingly mysterious,’ he remarked” (Luckhurst 69). William Carpenter also wrote in to Nature to weigh in on the medium Bishop’s alleged powers, this time in more psychologically innovative terms, “reading muscular indications as a

75 valuable confirmation of his view that elements of human behavior were directed ‘by influences of which we are ourselves unconscious’” (Luckhurst 67). The breakthrough discovery that led to hypnosis was Mesmer’s last contribution, as his ideas were enacted not just in the mediums studied by psychical researchers, but in intentionally creating hypnotic states. In 1876, the French Doctor Victor Burq “demonstrated at the Salpêtrière asylum transfers of paralysis around the body of hysterical patients by the application of a magnet to their bodies” (Luckhurst 93). Burq called this “metallotherapy” and he claimed it could even transfer simple sensations between patients. One can easily see the mark of Mesmer on this supposedly more orthodox medical practice. Similarly, Charcot and Janet benefitted from using hypnotism which would have been impossible without Mesmer and Puységur. In tandem, psychical researchers like were expounding on the therapeutic potentialities of hypnotism even as Charcot boycotted the 1889 Congress of Experimental Psychology in rejection of the views espoused by psychical researchers (Hamilton 135). Ironic, that this rift should have existed when hypnotism could not have existed without Mesmer, whose ideas were also boycotted by the medical establishment in his own time.

Swedenborgianism

In the 1830s and 1840s, while antimesmerist ministers were moving to separate science from any claims to the sacred, another group, American Swedenborgians, sought to do the opposite. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was an aristocratic Swedish scientist who, during the last quarter of his life, found himself overwhelmed by repeated transcendent mystical hallucinations that he believed were legitimate messages from God. In 1745, he resigned from his post on the Board of Mines to devote himself to documenting his dreams and visions to share with the general public. His first multi-

76 volume treatise, Arcana Coelestia (1749) was not a publishing success until he shortened it into the much simpler Heaven and Hell (1758). In Heaven and Hell Swedenborg created outlines of Heaven, the realm of the spirits, and Hell. Swedenborg’s ideas were revolutionary in part because they went against Calvinist doctrine in attributing a physical body and material possessions to the spirit in the afterlife. As Swedenborg put it, when a person dies it “is as if he has passed from one place into another; and he carries with him all things which he possessed in himself as a man, so that it cannot be said that the man after death, which is only the death of the earthly body, has lost anything” (Swedenborg 282). This aspect of sameness which Spiritualism adapted from Swedenborgianism might seem to the rational and esoterically-minded alike as somewhat naïve: families were reunited wearing their same clothes. Their houses were the same. Even their clothes down to the last buttoned detail were the same. These were the kinds of details fin de siècle occultists would condescendingly reject. As the scientist T.H. Huxley put it, “if anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women . . . in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do” (Gauld 83). Huxley’s anti-Spiritualist witticism is one echoed by many in eschewing such literalism to a concept of the afterlife. At the same time that Swedenborg’s vision of heaven may have seemed crassly literal to occultists, they embraced it for the double-world system that it presented. As historian of Western Esotericism, Wouter Hanegraaff, has pointed out, Swedenborg’s “system of ‘separate-yet-connected-planes’ of reality became a bedrock assumption of Spiritualism and occultism, because . . . it protected spiritual realities from scientific falsification and disenchantment” (Hanegraaff 126). Science can never invalidate one’s beliefs if it is impossible to test for those beliefs, at the same time, by protecting

Spiritualism from scientific falsification, Swedenborgianism held it in the status of a 77 religion, and prevented it from ever becoming an official science, though many Spiritualists sought scientific recognition. Mediums would often hide under this convenient cover, arguing that they could not be tested because spirits were uncomfortable, or the time was not conducive for the spirits to emerge. Historian of Western Esotericism Egil Asprem adds that the value of the Swedenborgian system was also a not entirely hermetically sealed system of double worlds for Spiritualists. It was very much about bridging those worlds, as well. Spiritualists in the nineteenth century used séances to “empirically demonstrate the presence of continuous contact between the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’” (Asprem 428). In the late-nineteenth century, science was frequently perceived to have “wounded” the bridge between the material and Spiritual. As demonstrated in this William James quote from “What Psychical Research Accomplished” where James suggests that “the Society’s best claim to the gratitude of our generation” is in bridging “the chasm” and in healing “the hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into the human world” (761). Through Swedenborg’s principle of “double worlds”, the “shot” of science that had divided the world, as William James put it, could now be used to unify it—so long as it was at the behest of the spirits, when the timing was right. The double-world system of Swedenborgianism, then, was double-edged: on the one hand it protected Spiritualist mediums from being found out. On the other hand, the double-world system gave these Spiritualists motivation to enter the scientific arena because their religious faith was premised on the importance of identifying evidence for the connection between the material and the spiritual.

78 Spiritualism: A Progressive Religious Movement

The history of Mesmerism and Swedenborgianism leads us, finally, back to Spiritualism and the world of Margaret and Katie Fox, the sisters who defined a religious movement, but who had a rapt audience already primed for them by itinerant Mesmerist preachers like Andrew Jackson Davis, and who were furthermore, preaching to those already converted to a worldview in which they thought they were going to appear in the afterlife with the clothes on their back per Swedenborg’s prophecy. Nevertheless, it was remarkable that the Fox sisters were able to gain such notoriety and sway over the public as teenage girls. This subsection offers more concrete examples of Spiritualism’s social power in more depth than the literature review which gives an idea of the types of political convictions that psychical research absorbed through its engagement with the Spiritualist movement. Some of the most prominent feminists of the day were attracted to Spiritualism because, as Ann Braude argues in her classic feminist history of the movement Radical Spirits, the movement provided women with a new means for voicing their autonomy in marriage, health matters, and political causes like abolitionism, for the sake of a society that now lent a sympathetic ear to healing any sort of “discord.” Perhaps the best representative of the networked, feminist world of Mesmerism and Spiritualism can be seen in the life of Elizabeth Blackwell. Blackwell first discovered her vocation for healing through Mesmerism, was the first woman to graduate as a medical doctor in England, and became a highly vocal proponent both of women’s rights and Spiritualism (D. Basham 123). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s outward advocacy of abolitionism was also privately fed by an interest in Spiritualism, the bestselling author travelled to England with one of the first mediums to visit the country, a Mrs. Hayden. (Stowe 123). Janet Oppenheim additionally points to the popularity of Spiritualism with socialist reformers 79 like , one of the founders of Utopian socialism and the cooperative movement in England. Owen led many of his followers, called “Owenites” into the Spiritualist fold, citing Spiritualism as “a great moral revolution . . . about to be effected for the human race” (Oppenheim 40). Certainly, Spiritualism had been popular in the 1840s, as it promoted a variety of progressive social causes, but the role of war, especially the Civil War and WWI, both led to spikes in the interest of Spiritualism, as well. In 1865, books and articles citing “Spiritualism” were up by 40% from what they had been before the war, in 1860.28 In her authoritative study of this phenomenon, This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust persuasively argues that Spiritualism attracted such widespread interest in the U.S. after the Civil War because it appealed to bereaved family members of veterans who, “were unwilling to wait until their own deaths reunited them with lost kin” (180). The death toll of the Civil War exceeded 620,000. A number, as Faust points out, greater than the combined death tolls of soldiers during “the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII and the Korean War” combined (Faust xi). At this point in history, then, Spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and Mesmerism had three primary social functions: they were used to promote progressive political change, to therapeutically process trauma, and to satisfy intellectual and spiritual curiosity for the unknown.

Spiritualism Challenges the Edifice of Modern Science

By the 1870s, the emphases of Spiritualism shifted from mourning the Civil War to channeling everything that was new: technology, culture, and scientific ideas. Mediums increasingly emphasized their connection to both technology and science. The

28 Google Books Ngram Viewer “Spiritualism” (1840-1930). 80 Fox sisters had always communicated in Morse code, but Mediums now routinely referred to themselves as “spiritual telegraphs” and “spirit photos” gained popularity. The way that these Spiritualists hijacked technology in their séances could be likened to a kind of modern-day “cargo-cult science” in philosopher of science Richard Feynman’s terms.29 At the same time, Spiritualism did provide genuine contributions to the emerging discipline of the psychology of religion as it expanded its view to incorporate other faiths via Theosophy. When co-founder of Theosophy, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky arrived on the American séance circuit from what she referred to as a self-guided tour of the world’s religions through the Caucus Mountains. Her book, Isis Unveiled, a compendium of information about world’s religions, was subtitled “A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology.” Her first séances in the U.S. was practically a convention of alternative doctors and mesmeric healers. With the emergence of Theosophy, many prominent Spiritualists saw themselves branching off towards a new, occult, autodidactic science. Even more excitingly for Spiritualists, Fellows of the Royal Society – chemist and physicist and co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection Alfred Russell Wallace – had joined their ranks in the mid 1860s, creating their own scientific investigations into Spiritualism, delivering talks at the British Science Association, and publishing studies of Spiritualism in scientific journals (more on those in chapter two). Henry Steel Olcott, Blavatsky’s partner in founding Theosophy, dedicated his first book, People from the Other World (1875) to Crookes and Wallace. Olcott was interested in a trade science, agronomy, the

29 Feynman defined a cargo cult science as a practice that appears scientific but does not follow the scientific method. Feynman was drawing on the earlier anthropological term of “cargo-cult” applied retroactively to people in Melanesia who built airline strips and went through other elaborate rituals in an effort to procure goods following contact with westerners. The idea behind this is that not understanding production processes and not having the means to produce western goods, they assumed them to be derived via spiritual means. See Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! 81 role of which would be crucial in the reshaping of American higher education through initiatives like the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. At this time, it was common for agronomists to see themselves as divided or alienated from more esoteric impractical sciences, as the very divide between “practical” and “impractical” was instrumental in the re-shaping of American universities. In his book, Olcott admonished the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founded 1848 for focusing on “lobsters, dung beetles, and fly- catching flowers . . . as excuses for declining to observe and analyze the facts of modern Spiritualism!” (vii) For Crookes and Wallace to make this critique was one thing, but for their cause of psychical research, the Theosophist’s outcry was somewhat of an embarrassment. The entrance of Fellows of the Royal Society into the realm of Spiritualist inquiry sparked a tug of war over reputation, the fallout of which was an ever-shifting class stratification that placed occultist scientists at the top and populist Spiritualists at the bottom. The process of this class stratification is evidenced in the way that believing Spiritualists with no proper academic, scientific affiliation wanted to claim men like Crookes, and Wallace for their own. One popular science writer asked, “Are we destined to see the revered letters F.R.S. lowered to mean nothing more than ‘Followers of rampageous Spiritualism’”? (Earwaker 358). The entrance of actual scientists into the Spiritualist movement would bring tensions between religion and science to a head, with some rising to defend these prominent scientists for their courage in studying religion, and others out to tarnish their professional reputations entirely.

The X Club: Naturalists Against Spiritualism

By the 1870s, Spiritualism was an overwhelmingly popular cultural phenomenon, and this was cause for alarm to some. A Times article from December 26, 1872, shared

82 the startling statistic that Spiritualism had adherents estimated “at ‘twenty million’” and lamented the fact that “scientific men” had “failed to do their duty by the public, which looks to them for its facts” (Gauld 84). The scientific men who would bother to respond to the crisis of gullibility of the day would not merely attack Spiritualism, however, but also decry the mythology of religion at large which contrasted with the rising philosophy of Naturalism, the idea that everything that exists arises from scientifically testable natural phenomena. Their presence and opposition would radically alter the dialogue around Spiritualism as its adherents responded to scientific attacks suggesting that Spiritualism present itself in verifiable, scientific terms. In 1864, a group of Victorian naturalists founded the famous “X-Club” to pursue science “pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogmas” (Luckhurst 13). Members John Tyndall (physicist), Thomas Hirst (mathematician), Edward Frankland (chemist), Thomas Huxley (biologist), George Busk (surgeon, zoologist, and paleontologist), and Joseph Hooker (botanist) were all from “Non-conformist, backgrounds, and, as secularists, suffered degrees of ‘social and religious marginality” (Luckhurst 13). In their minds, they were in a world beset by foolish religious dogma and superstition. In a speech first delivered in Edinburgh as part of a larger non-theological lecture series on the basis of life, Huxley “nailed the soul to the body” with his assertion that all forms of life derived from the same source: protoplasm. Huxley argued that “if . . . protoplasm is essentially identical with . . . that of any animal, I can discover no logical halting-place between the admission that such is the case, and further concession that all vital actions may . . . be the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it” (Luckhurst 14; Huxley 140, 143). Moreover, religious beliefs, especially poorly defined and cohered Spiritualist beliefs, were mocked by the “X-Club” and many members of the scientific community—often in a lingo wrapped up in that of hostile colonial takeover. 83 For Huxley, the progress of science was tantamount to “the extension of the province of what we [scientists] call matter and causation, [with] the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit” (143). Perhaps even more unforgivingly, anthropologist Edward Tylor, in his racist work, Primitive Culture (1871), which compares Spiritualism to a vestigial holdover of “savage religion” in the public unconscious, cautioned that via Spiritualism: “The world is again swarming with intelligent and powerful and disembodied beings” (129). This didn’t stop Tylor, the “armchair anthropologist” from attending séances himself, however. Beginning in 1867, and especially in 1872, he attended séances with mediums Daniel Home, Kate Fox, and Stainton Moses—recording an unpublished field diary (de Vries 663). Somewhat contradictorily, Tylor adamantly defended the academic value of his “field work” at the séance table on the grounds that it revealed new truths about the human psyche, arguing that observing these séances offered him “an instance of the directness with which antiquity and savagery bear upon our modern life” – an argument that psychologists and psychical researchers would bring up again in explaining their own connection to the occult (Tylor 159).

The London Dialectical Society and the Psychological Society: Toward a Scientific- Spiritual Synthesis

The London Dialectical Society

While the X-Club sought to use science to shake off the dogma of superstition once and for all, other groups, like the London Dialectical Society and the Psychological Society, emerged to defend the scientific pursuit of Spiritualism. They thought it was worthwhile to at least try to find scientific evidence for religious mythology. While the X-Club had its share of heavyweight names in science, the London Dialectical Society

84 (1867-1869) and the Psychological Society both had equally, surprisingly impressive rosters. The London Dialectical Society, which consisted of 33 members, counted the brightest stars in the Victorian scientific firmament on its register. As already mentioned, there was the famous scientific defender of Spiritualism, Alfred Russell Wallace, FRS; Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, FRS; J.S. Bergheim (an optician and photographer who designed a camera lens popular in his own time), Charles Bradlaugh (who later became a major leader of the burgeoning atheist movement), and Charles Maurice Davis (an Anglican clergyman), among others. Correspondents included Robert Chambers, FRSE, and French astronomer, artist, and psychical researcher Camille Flamarrion. Most of these individuals, particularly Flammarion, became active in the Society for Psychical research during the following decade. Though Huxley was invited to participate in the London Dialectical Society’s investigations he declined, claiming that even “supposing the phenomena to be genuine, they do not interest me” (“Huxley Letter” 146). The LDS committee was really the original iteration of what would become the Society for Psychical Research in the sense that, for the first time, educated individuals gathered together to investigate Spiritualist mediums by attempting to use the scientific method. The LDS focused their energies on one of the most famous mediums of the age: D. D. Home. Though the LDS only began with eight espoused believers, when all tests were concluded, the majority of group members voted in favor of the validity of Spiritualist phenomena. These members of the LDS testified that they had seen furniture move, séance audience members levitate, pencils write with no hand visible, and received predictions of future events delivered by Spiritualist mediums, which proved to be correct. Their findings were privately self-published in 1871 as the Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society.

85 That the findings of the London Dialectical Society were positive may not have been the most persuasive since the meetings of the London Dialectical Society, like most séances of the day, took place in people’s private homes. Luckhurst makes the astute observation that these early Spiritualist committees were slowly gathering a scientific knowledge base “in the shadow of the British Museum” marking them “rival ‘centres of calculation’” as Bruno Latour would put it – a center, in other words, which expands the scientific network and further abstracts or theorizes scientific ideas (Latour 215, Luckhurst 29). In contrast to Latour and Luckhurst’s vision of “rival centers,” Oppenheim, in The Other World, argues that in this era, the notion of “professional outcasts” is not useful in understanding the organization of the British scientific community, saying that due to “meager amounts of state support available for scientific research, there was no central source of patronage for aspiring scientists” (393-394). Despite a claim like this, the insider-outsider distinction holds, this study argues, because it was one that scientists themselves created through the professionalizing process. Because this was the beginning of the creation of hierarchical public systems of knowledge, the way that these private societies determined insiders, outsiders, and rankings can be very telling. In the 1860s and 1870s the attention of Fellows of the Royal Society to the cause of Spiritualism was a great victory for Spiritualists, who, partly in reaction to the growth in power of a naturalist worldview, were always seeking to have their cause taken seriously by scientists. Spiritualist magazine founder W.H. Harrison noted that he created his magazine because he hoped to promulgate more legitimate investigations of Spiritualism (“Opening Address” 5). Harrison was disappointed in the failure of proper scientific institutes in Britain, like the Anthropological Institute, to adequately scientifically pursue the ‘spiritual’ aspect of humanity (Luckhurst 47). In 1871, Harrison 86 handed his publication over to “Messrs. [Cromwell] Varley and [Edward] Cox, who wish to see a psychological society formed.’” (“Psychological society” 177; Luckhurst 47). This society was among the first bids to professionalize the study of the soul in the academic world.

The Psychological Society

In forming the new Psychological Society, Varley and Cox were careful to ensure that not all of the members were believing Spiritualists in order to create a legitimately scientific environment (Spiritualist 213). The name of the society might throw off contemporary readers—at the time that Cox formed the Psychological Society, the term “psychological” was still very much affiliated with “psyche” or the broad realm of the spirit. That this was the state of the field can be seen in a critical review of the discipline from Nature: “psychology, in being the science farthest removed from the reach of experimental means and inductive method, is the science which has longest remained in the trammels of . . . metaphysical thought” (“Charles Darwin V.” 169). In their group, Cox and Varley attempted to wrest the nascent field of psychology from the theological implications which kept it from being taken seriously. Though Cox was a Spiritualist, he also was interested in seeing psychology lifted up as a respectable field and he was more partial to the experimental psychology of William Wundt than to the séances of the Fox sisters (Luckhurst 50). Papers published by Varley and Cox’s Psychological Society reflected the course that psychology would take moving towards the mid-twentieth century. Their publication Proceedings of the Psychological Society carried titles like: “On Some Phenomena of Sleep and Dream,” “The Psychology of Memory,” or “Primitive Psychology of the Aryans.” The most important concept for them was an idea which the Spiritualist and Fellow of the Royal Society William Crookes had tried to

87 popularize on his own, that of “psychic force”—the idea that thoughts in themselves could create actions. Before forming the psychological society, Cox wrote a pamphlet Spiritualism Answered by Science, in part to elucidate Crooke’s hypothesis of psychic force. Luckhurst argues that more than any of those who contributed to psychical research before the founding of SPR, it was Cox who accomplished most. Cox’s crucial step was in decoupling “psychic force” from any theological implications, placing it into a discourse of scientific naturalism, binding it to the network of legitimate science (50). In other words, Cox’s promotion of Crookes’s idea of “psychic force” presented a secular way of looking at the mind which would not just be useful to psychical researchers. This decoupling was a crucial step in the formation of the sciences of psychology, neurology, and neuroscience as we know them today.

CHAPTER ONE CONCLUSION

This chapter has introduced the terrain necessary for orienting a reader with the surprisingly influential but infrequently studied field of psychical research. First, this chapter introduced the spirit of antimodern ambivalence in the fin de siècle, arguing that contrary to Weber’s disenchantment thesis, all the world seemed highly enchanted. This was especially the result of scientific theories, like the ether, which carried with them the implication of a confirmation of religious ideas: the existence of the afterlife, the ability to communicate telepathically, and so on. This chapter demonstrated that in its heyday, psychical research was more popular than psychoanalysis, and top scientists from Alfred Russell Wallace to Oliver Lodge, firmly believed in its potential. As discussed, the ardent interest of the general public in this, now considered pseudoscientific topic, created the need for productive boundaries. The literature review section offers an explanation of the demarcation problem, and Karl Popper’s work as it pertains to influences on psychical

88 research. At the same time, that section offered an exploration of where psychical research fits into Kuhn’s ideas of paradigm shifts versus normal science, of irrational ideas in the political realm via the Frankfurt school, and in the roster of studies of enchanted modernity. Finally, the literature review section offered a recap on where psychical research fits into modernist literary and cultural history. In the section on the history of psychical research, I have created a trajectory from Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, and Spiritualism, along with the theoretical and critical conversations that studies of those topics engender, to better explain how psychical research fits into this broader constellation of scientific ideas. Finally, this chapter offered an example of two organizations that hinted at the shape of psychical research organizations to come: the X Club and the London Dialectical Society, both featuring scientists, authors, and other highly-regarded public intellectuals of the late nineteenth century who became engrossed, like most people in their day, in the effort to test the new claims being made about telepathy and related topics. The next chapter will explain how the growing stratification between populist Spiritualism, superstitious occultists, and the Fellows of the Royal Society who studied phenomena resulted in the invention of psychical research as an academic pursuit. The second chapter opens with a point of crisis, the trial of Henry Slade, a fraudulent medium. Wallace and Crookes will re-appear, this time to cross-examine Slade. The Slade case covered in the next chapter marked a crisis point, signaling that Spiritualism had become an epidemic endangering a gullible populace who needed to be educated to protect themselves from being misled. In the late 1870s and early 1880s we have, for the first time, legal and educational institutions approaching the demarcation problem as it applies to Spiritualism. With the addition of science laboratory courses to the undergraduate curriculum, the general populace is becoming more scientifically 89 savvy and the first academic study of Spiritualism is commissioned by a bequest from philanthropist Henry Seybert to be carried out at the University of Pennsylvania and its results are published and shared with the general public in a book put out by J.B. Lippincott. Chapter one set the scene for psychical research’s emergence, showing the climate of Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and Swedenborgianism that contributed to its rise. Chapter two concludes with the first instantiation of a psychical research organization in a university, the Seybert Commission at the University of Pennsylvania, and will focus on psychical research as a hybrid product of institutional and social change. The next chapter will explore the rich output from this new discipline, and argue that it drew from literary studies in developing its methodology as it shifted terrain from the study of ghosts to the study of dreams and hallucinations.

90 Chapter Two - From the Courtroom to the University: The Emergence of Psychical Research as an Academic Discipline

“Bear in mind, and learn humility from the fact, ye scientists of the year 1975, that, even in our day the four leading professors at Harvard University tried to put a stop to these astounding and now established phenomena by denouncing ‘any connection with Spiritualistic circles, so called,’ as ‘corrupting the morals and degrades the intellect.’” – American playwright and Spiritualist, Epes Sargent (1813-1880)

CHAPTER TWO INTRODUCTION: HENRY SLADE: SPIRITUALIST, CRIMINAL, TEST SUBJECT

In the summer of 1876, London was buzzing with news of a new medium who could produce “spirit writing” on chalkboard slates. Like many Spiritualist mediums who assumed false academic and medical titles, this man referred to himself as “Doctor” Henry Slade. There were many variations by which the “doctor” produced his slate writing: at times he would ask a sitter to join him in holding a slate firmly against the underside of a table, other times a slate would be placed face down on the table and then reversed, still other times a slate would be placed inside a box and later retrieved. In each case the allegedly miraculous would have occurred: the blank slate would suddenly appear with mysterious writing (Gauld 124). In the archives of the University of Pennsylvania’s Seybert Commission – the first academic group to study Spiritualism in affiliation with a university — “Dr.” Henry

Slade’s slates are preserved. Over a century old, they still hold their original chalk marks. These messages, what mediums in the day called “spirit writing,” are all different: at times they appear in a mysterious logographic script designed to emulate Chinese, in other instances they are in loopy cursive, and still other times in blocky capital letters – different penmanship and languages to invoke the “different spirits” inhabiting the medium’s body. The circuitous scrawls on these nineteenth century school slates bear

91 testament to Slade’s zigzagging journey as he slipped through the cracks of a hard-labor sentence handed down in a British courtroom, only to resurface as a test subject in an American university. On the surface, the Seybert Commission could not come close to rivalling John Edgar Coover’s psychical research laboratory at Stanford, set up twenty years later, or J.B. Rhine’s laboratory set up forty years later. For one thing, it was only a temporary commission, lasting three years. Yet, the Seybert Commission was the first of its kind and remains highly significant because of the precedent it set in establishing a reciprocal influence between psychical research and the fields of literature, philosophy, and psychology. “Dr.” Slade’s story appears at the beginning and resurfaces at the closing of this chapter because his trial and subsequent examination by university professors tells the story of the evolution of psychical research: from the investigation of fraudulent mediums, to its contributions to philosophy, psychology, and neurology. This chapter will begin by first unpacking the significance of what it means to be a “martyr on trial” as Slade and many other Spiritualists called themselves, so that the cross-examination Slade endured in the courtroom is more evident for what it was: a public exhibition of a much larger trend that makes plain the significance of Spiritualist’s descriptions of themselves as martyrs of modern science. From there, I will recreate the scene of Slade’s trial, including key players who would re-emerge in the field of psychical research. After this, I will argue that there is a connection between this culture of Spiritualist martyrdom and changes in higher education where university administrators and educators began speaking on the dangers of superstition to an uneducated public, and of the moral values of a scientific education. The need to have a well-educated populace was made even more apparent by the uncovering of frauds like Slade. The surprisingly 92 vexing problem of distinguishing between science and non-science pushed the practice and philosophy of science forward, bringing us closer to a better solution to the demarcation problem. Next, I will touch down upon changes at the end of the nineteenth century in higher education where research was professionalized, the Ph.D. became the standard road to academic professionalization, and academic societies and journals became a pre- requisite for the formation of any new academic discipline. Having established that, I will recreate the conditions of the emergence of the first academic societies devoted to psychical research, highlighting these organizations’ major contributions. Finally, through an examination of the Seybert Commission, we find Slade and others at last officially drawing the study of Spiritualism into the university system and completing the circuit: what was once deemed illegal becomes in some sense inoculated through its encapsulation in the university. Ultimately, what cuts through the potential absurdity of the materializing mediums explored in this study is a deeper implication for the work of those involved with the Seybert Commission, the first commission for the investigation of Spiritualism inside a university. Henry Slade’s slates might have been a hackneyed, amusing parlor trick, but that is only the shallow end of psychical research. As this chapter will make plain, buried in the archives of Victorian slates with spirit writing is also a solid, still living line of inquiry that has persisted in psychology, in literature, and in more advanced forms of psychical research today. While the study of slate writing seems intellectually backward, it ironically moved intellectual progress forward in remarkable ways through contributions to neurology, psychology, and the method of randomization. I will suggest in this chapter that in the process of trying to de-legitimize these fake Spiritualist

“doctors” like Slade, new fields and contributions emerged, like the scientific method of 93 randomization, or testing cross-sections of the population at random (more on that in this chapter’s section on SPR). Gurney, Myers, and Podmore improved on the method of randomization falteringly and as I explore at the end of this chapter, it influenced psychical researcher S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell adapted the method for use in his studies on dreams and hallucinations. Moreover, psychology grew and flourished as a field, nurtured by concepts like Myer’s Subliminal Self. This, however, is not the end of the story, as I argue, the Seybert Commission and Society for Psychical Research created viral methodologies drawing from literary studies as they investigated the paranormal and productively shifted their psychical research from a focus on ghosts to a focus on dreams and hallucinations.

MARTYRS OF MODERN SCIENCE

One aspect of Spiritualism crucial to understanding psychical research is that Spiritualist mediums frequently posited themselves as actual martyrs of the academic institution. Though psychical research programs have existed in American universities since 1884 (the first being the Seybert Commission, 1884-1887, at the University of Pennsylvania) it was a contentious journey to the formation of psychical research as a discipline from the first Spiritualist “rappings” heard in Hydesville in 1848. As early as 1857, the faculty of Harvard University warned against the dangers of investigating Spiritualism. Spiritualists painted themselves as Christ figures in a cosmic saga bearing a “crown of thorns” and walking in the footsteps of the accused “witches” of old. Mediums were described as having received a power of mediumship, which, operating as a recessive gene, was inherited from one’s “ancestors” (Olcott 33). American playwright, Epes Sargent, who is quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, continued his warning:

If learned professors . . . in the latter half of the nineteenth century . . . try to blot out the facts [italics in original] of Spiritualism surely [we can] find charity in our 94 hearts for . . . authorities who advocated the slaughter of witches, but little more than a century ago! (125). However parodic the logic of this comparison may seem today, Spiritualists seem to have been in earnest in their sense of being persecuted a la “witches” during the Inquisition. Mediums in 1860s America felt so persecuted that they formed a protective Mutual Aid Association in Boston, and in 1900, in Great Britain, mediums launched the Lancashire Mediums’ Union, also devoted to their equitable treatment (Moore 119-121). For the believing Spiritualist, the acceptance of this alternate worldview meant entering into a space of constant cross-examination and duress. Though they were not literally tortured and murdered like accused witches of the Inquisition, they were certainly subjected to bizarre and abusive rituals. Mediums at the turn of the century were frequently bound by their hands and feet, locked in chests or closets, blindfolded, and subjected to other odd forms of restraint for the sake of proving that spirits were not created via cracking of knuckles, use of their toes, and so on. In an effort to bilk audiences out of money, mediums would actually be the first to suggest these bizarre torturous tests as a sign that even the greatest skeptic could not accuse them of dishonesty if, for example, their hands were tied. It was scientific skepticism, they would argue, that had forced them to torture themselves by binding themselves with ropes and locking themselves in cabinets in order to prove to their audiences that they were honest. Later psychical researchers most definitely picked up the practice of restraining mediums to verify their powers. That mediums would never go through the degradation of the restraint voluntarily was often cited as proof of their veracity (Olcott 34). Their status as victims frequently came in handy as it prevented anyone from stating the obvious: that their audiences who they were charging large sums of money, were, in fact, the real martyrs. Despite the cultural and cathartic value that

95 Spiritualist mediums arguably held, in their own time there remained the problem that mediums offered little in the way of tangible or measurable value to their audiences, whom they charged money, sometimes large sums, for public and private performances. From the perspective of skeptical scientists of the day, like Thomas Huxley, it was not “martyred” Spiritualists who were the victims, but a gullible, often working class public—swindled out of their earnings. In 1876, the suspected fraudulent Spiritualist mediums would see themselves as martyrs in a new arena – the courtroom. It is important to explore the courtroom trials here, because court proceedings set the precedent for the manner of investigation of mediums that would continue in universities throughout the 1880s and into the early twentieth century. The most high-profile trial of the era, the Slade Trial, at last brought the brewing public war between Naturalists and Spiritualists to a very public boiling point. Although Henry Slade, Spiritualist medium, and , FRS, will be remembered as the two most famous names from the Slade trial, it was emblematic of a bigger sign of unrest within Victorian society. A month before the Slade trial the Spiritualist ran the following challenge from the medium Stainton Moses: “Bring Huxley, Tyndall, Carpenter, Clifford, I care not which of them, face to face with Slade, and I maintain that the scientists will be ‘beat” (Spiritualist; Luckhurst 45). The Slade trial was one of the most bizarre yet significant courtroom cases in Victorian England. It offered a public arena for science to publicly attack superstition by aligning it with criminality. In the process, it drew forth two emergent fields: psychical research and professional magic.30

30 The magician was notoriously obsessed with debunking Slade and other mediums, and his act, like other magicians of the era, which involved being tied up, and escaping elaborate bondages, drew elements directly from the popular spectacle of the Spiritualist medium. See: Harry Houdini’s A Magician Among the Spirits (1924). Janet Oppenheim points to a reciprocity of influence in England due to 96 Earlier in 1876, a few months before his trial, Slade was investigated by “the Sidgwick group” which included Trinity College, Cambridge classmates, friends, and soon-to-be Society for Psychical Research co-founders Frederic Myers, Henry Sidgwick, and Edmund Gurney. They deemed Slade’s “psychography” or spirit messages on slates dubious, but before they could conduct more tests, court proceedings were initiated by Edward Ray Lankester and Charles C. Donkin (Gauld 124). In the years leading up to the Slade trial, professional scientists had become increasingly annoyed with the growing popularity of professional mediums. Recall, for example, Huxley, the member of the X-Club who had declined to join Cox’s Psychological Society on the grounds that it was not scientific enough. Huxley was especially keen on debunking mediums, and he instilled his distaste for the Spiritualist fad in his student, Edwin Ray Lankester. Lankester would become a famed scientist in his own right, eventually earning a doctorate in zoology, serving as director for the Natural History Museum, and holding chairs at the University College of London and Oxford. In 1876, however, Lankester was a graduate student earning his Master’s degree and studying under Huxley. Perhaps because he was eager to impress his adviser, Lankester picked up Huxley’s interest in debunking mediums (Milner). In April 1876, Lankester contacted Edward Cox (founder of the Psychological Society) to locate the most impressive medium in London, and settled on the man who referred to himself as “Dr. Henry Slade” (Luckhurst 45). Slade had recently come to London “to prove the truth of communication with the dead” and claimed that his wife’s spirit wrote him messages on slates (Milner). It was at 8 Upper Bedford Place in October of 1876 that Slade would find his undoing (Phillips and Witchard 54). Slade was only

the popularity of magic acts in Britain in the 1840s where peddlers with names like “The Wizard of the North” or “The Mysterious Lady” wowed local audiences. The Other World p. 25 97 stopping through London while on a tour coming from America to St. Petersburg, where he had been invited by aristocratic supporters (Phillips and Witchard 54). Lankester and his classmate, a medical student named Horatio Donkin, went to Slade’s séance under the guise that they were believers and that Lankester was grieving his own recently deceased widow (a pain Slade would allegedly have been able to relate to seeing as it was Slade’s widow communing with him who alerted him to his “latent powers”) (Phillips and Witchard 54). Once the séance was underway, Lankester suddenly turned to Slade and intercepted the slate from Slade’s hands. On the slate, he found the written answer to a question that no one had asked. Slade had been found out (Milner). Thanks to charges brought against him by Lankester, Slade was arrested the next day and charged with violating the Vagrancy Act, a law established in the UK in 1824 to protect the public from fraudulent palm readers, quacks, and other traveling con-artists. Throughout the fall of 1876, all of London was focused on the Slade trial. The courtroom was packed with Slade’s supporters and detractors and the Times of London carried trial transcripts almost daily (Milner). More than anything, it is clear from the reports of local papers that this trial offered the chance to curb growing interest in Spiritualism among the educated. It drew class lines between rational scientists and Spiritualists through the paternalistic shaming of “naïve” Spiritualists. The Saturday Review commented: “Fortune-telling is allowed to be a groveling superstition of the lower-classes, for which there is nothing to be said. It would appear, however, that similar practices may be openly carried on in higher circles, with impunity” (“Fortune Telling” 384). It was a chance, in other words, for the intelligentsia to weed out Spiritualists from among their own ranks and punish them. , one of the intelligentsia who was simultaneously a devout

Spiritualist, felt the slight of this logic, and characterized the trial as “the persecution 98 [rather than prosecution] of Slade” (Milner). There was a sense of the Inquisition about this battle which practicing Spiritualists picked up on. The Spiritualist press railed that, “the Slade case has had no parallels since the days of Galileo” (“The Prosecution of Dr. Slade” 110, Oppenheim 23). Janet Oppenheim taps into the antimodernism of this sentiment in her book The Other World when she notes that these believing Spiritualists were mourning a world in which magicians had replaced what in the 16th and 17th century had been “charmers, blessers, sorcerers, wise women,” individuals with names that connoted something “more than an ability to perform clever tricks,” individuals with a deeper knowledge of nature, and forces both natural and supernatural (Oppenheim 24). This is one persuasive reason why these trials became such heated battles, because Englanders were in part mourning an enchanted way of life. Luckily for Slade, all ended (somewhat) happily. Although he was sentenced to three months in jail with hard labor, Slade’s conviction was overturned due to a technical problem with the wording of the statute that was to find him guilty (Oppenheim 23). Though Slade escaped trial, his “trials” would continue nearly a decade later in Philadelphia. Slade’s courtroom interrogation brought up the question of the ethics of swindling the public, and it also garnered the attention of prominent scientists. Moreover, the cross-examination of a Spiritualist medium by scientists set a precedent that only grew in popularity over the years, finding its fullest expression in universities through commissions like Penn’s Seybert Commission, discussed towards the end of this chapter. What made the Slade trial extra emblematic of this rift between educated believers and skeptics was that Charles Darwin, the ultimate materialist, aided the prosecution, while Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, and a sincere Spiritualist, became “the defense’s star witness” (Milner). Wallace had, for some time, been courting controversy within the BAAS (British Association for the Advancement of 99 Science, now the BSA) by repeatedly introducing Spiritualist topics to the agenda, to the chagrin of most members. Wallace also had a fair amount of power since he served as the president of the association’s “Section D” and chair of the subsection in Anthropology. In September of 1876, at a meeting of the BAAS held one month before the Slade trial, Wallace “used his section address to promote his view that human evolution was ‘due to distinct and higher agencies than such as have affected their development.” (“Rise and Progress” 410). Wallace was fine in applying evolutionary theory to animals, but he felt there was something special, a higher power at work, in the production of humans.31 Wallace then allowed the soon-to-be founding member of SPR, Dublin physicist William Barrett, read a paper “On Some Phenomena Associated with Abnormal Conditions of Mind,” which was, in fact, on “community of sensation” – the germs of the idea of telepathy (Luckhurst 44-45). After this, Wallace ultimately opened the floor to “the discussion of modern Spiritualism” (Wallace “Rise”). Both his presence in the Slade trial, and Wallace’s lifelong dedication to Spiritualism cost him greatly. By 1879, Wallace had fallen in status dramatically. He was making a living grading exams, and Darwin was circulating a petition to arrange for him to receive a modest government pension to subsist on (Milner). Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens, declined to sign the petition to offer government aid to Wallace. Hooker’s snarky reply to Darwin was, “Wallace has lost caste terribly,” adding, “the government should be informed that the candidate is a public and leading Spiritualist!” (Milner). Wallace had been a Spiritualist, but also many other things in his life: an incredibly hard-working and gifted biologist, a zoologist, botanist, discoverer of new

31 Although Wallace’s intentions were basically good, his view became a dangerously common one. He was the first to cling to this idea that created a slippery slope that would be carried away by Theosophists, and for the worse, by racist biologists like Ernst Haeckel. Both groups would use this logic to create a racist caste system of alleged evolutionary biological sacredness, allotting varying levels of humanity based on ethnicity. 100 species, and the first European to study apes in the wild. Not to mention that, unlike other leading biologists of the day, like Darwin, Wallace had come from a working-class background. It is a testament to how unpopular Spiritualism was, and how wedded Spiritualism was to progressivism, that Wallace was treated so punitively by the more conservative factions of the scientific establishment for his views. Reading about Wallace’s life, one is tempted to see the Spiritualist’s point, that they were, in some sense, martyred merely for refusing to ignore what was at the time a persuasively plausible and innately intriguing area of study to many. If Harvard warned academics against studying Spiritualism in 1847, and Spiritualism was “put on trial” with the Slade case and others, how did Spiritualism ever make its way to becoming a topic for investigation in colleges? How did so many respected professors become psychical researchers and practicing Spiritualists against these odds? The reason Spiritualist views found their way into academe are twofold: for one, as previously explained, Spiritualism was never merely Spiritualism. It was anchored in the ambient logic of the day: Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, psychology, theories of evolution that differed from Darwin’s, and ethics in an increasingly secular world. Spiritualism was indivisible from conversations already happening in universities. For another thing, Spiritualism had grown too popular to ignore. It had become a sort of social ill – any institution of higher education could see that they should prepare the public with the information needed to protect themselves from such deception. Lastly, it was a popular cause among the wealthy as much as the poor, and private endowments gave the movement the initial boost it needed to enter academe.

101 AN ETHIC OF SCIENCE: PROFESSIONALIZATION UNDER THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY MODEL

How could one disabuse the public of their gullibility, to protect them from popular mediums like Slade who even psychical researchers acknowledged as fraudulent? It seemed the answer was through a proper education in science. Spiritualism was so popular in part because it offered anyone unsettled by the theory of evolution the chance to pursue spiritual themes under the auspices of scientific validity. This led to a shift in the moral order in both the popular and academic spheres. Historian of American intellectual history, David Hollinger, has written that academics in the late-nineteenth century appropriated the idea of religious virtue and began preaching scientific education as a form of moral uplift. The argument held by fin de siècle professors of science and administrators was that students, even those who did not intend to become professional scientists, should still have a proper background in scientific training because those who learned to think scientifically would indirectly absorb good moral habits through the rigor of their training. Administrators and professors of the era created an “ethic of science” where the ideal scientist is propelled forward by “a passion for knowledge, the love of truth, honesty, patience, single mindedness . . . simplicity of character, humility, reverence, [and] imagination” preaching that these were attributes which science tends “to develop in all her followers” (Nicholas 425). Modern readers might mistakenly view this transfer of the moral curriculum to science as a victory for the atheist movement, yet the newfound “morality” of science was interposed into a religious moral framework, not established as an alternative system to Christian theology. In this sense, it was a silent folding of theological questions into science where they became a tacit, uninvestigated raison d'être for scientific inquiry.

102 The proponents of science as a source of moral edification saw the United States as advanced because it was both “scientific, Christian, industrial and democratic— characteristics that were both the cause and consequence of progress” (Reuben 137). For most, the idea was that material betterment and ethical betterment naturally went hand in hand with advances in knowledge and science. Sociologist Franklin Giddings articulated this sentiment when he wrote that “the assumption that we can have material betterment without mental and moral progress is absurd” (358). The most important engine of progress, by far, was perceived to be science. It was seen by many as science’s greatest project to lead religion, industry, and democracy forward. Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins, who brought the research university model to the United States, waxed poetic about science describing the new research university as “rapidly lifting the mist upon which the conditions in which the human race is placed,” adding that, “every new and fundamental discovery is fraught with worldwide benefits, sooner or later to be developed” (Sunday School). Gilman would go on to found the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and become a president of the University of California. He had helped to bring a system, the American research university, into being which would permanently change the course of American intellectual life and culture. All of this is not to say that scientific advancement was not by and large incredibly socially beneficent. It was and is. It is merely to say that the unchallenged presence of science as moral, and the simultaneous entry of Spiritualism into university studies, were both the result of the shuffling of religion in the national educational curriculum. What this chapter focuses on, the scientific investigation of Spiritualism, is an artifact of the age that has largely been forgotten. At the same time, the sense that science is somehow ethical through the rigor it requires, remains more or less intact.

103 Because of the “rigors” associated with science, academics in all fields, especially the humanities, began to describe their work as similarly scientific in order to cash in on growing scientific capital. William Gardner, professor of Latin at Cornell and later Chicago, “declared that ‘the investigating mind’ was essential for all advanced students in the classics” (Veysey 173). Professors of pedagogy began referring to the training of teachers as “a noble science . . . a mixed science, like medicine, deriving its presuppositions from other sciences, as psychology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, and sociology” (Veysey 173). Even a professor at Princeton gave an entire lecture on “Scientific Method in the Study of Art,” maintaining that, “the interpretation of paintings was analogous to physiology” (Veysey 174). Some scholars in literature vied for scientific credibility by arguing that literature should be “examined” and thoroughly “tested” in the vein of philological work (Veysey 182). Even Harvard’s athletic director gave a speech in which he said, “I aspire to be considered a scientific man,” highlighting just how virtuous the position of the scientist within the university was. He added that he saw his gymnasium “as a laboratory” (Veysey 174). Laboratories, not surprisingly, were emphasized as the new critical site for this moral inculcation. The broader shift to these new research institutions “were based on the model of the experimental laboratory as opposed to the older museological collection” (Luckhurst 18). The laboratory was emblematic in itself of these disciplinary changes in higher education. Experts were ushered in to teach students across all disciplines, who were encouraged to enter and train in laboratories of the new research university. Famed education reformers Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University, and Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell University, emphasized changes to undergraduate education, and one of their key additions to the undergraduate curriculum was the teaching laboratory (Veysey 95). The Jefferson Laboratory mentioned at the 104 outset of chapter one was one of the very first science labs to be devoted to both teaching and research because it was apparent that educating young people about science, and with cutting-edge research, was a public good. Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard from 1869-1909, had reformed the undergraduate curriculum to include instruction in science with the usual courses in classics and theology. It was professor of physics, John Trowbridge, however, who urged Eliot to improve laboratories in order to use them in both graduate research and undergraduate instruction. At the time, the only research laboratories were in separate technical schools like Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School (1847). The Jefferson Laboratory discussed in the beginning of chapter one was a landmark metaphorically and physically for the new course that academic teaching and research would take. It was Daniel Coit Gilman, however, who first helped to establish the cutting-edge research laboratory in the United States by working alongside the chemist who would later become the second president of Johns Hopkins, Ira Remsen. Ira Remsen, Gilman’s successor, envisioned these new laboratories as sites of academic, ethical, and spiritual instruction. Insisting that the new science courses include laboratory instruction, since “that special mental and moral discipline which is appropriate to . . . science can be secured only by wrestling . . . with problems as they actually present themselves to the investigator” (“Scientific Education”). Educators from Charles Eliot to John Dewey to Arthur Hadley all held that science amounted to a sort of social good, and all described it in terms scientist and philosopher William James would use—this “wrestling” with a truth is at the very heart of James’s descriptions of both psychical research and pragmatism, explored in the next chapter. Another major change in universities at this time was the turn towards two types of professionalization. One was the emphasis on practical trade subjects like agronomy 105 and mining and the other was the resultant professionalization of academic research. The professionalization of academic research ultimately resulted in the normalization of doctoral programs. In his history of higher education in the U.S., Veysey describes how universities were adding a professional component with courses in agronomy, mining, and similar subjects to increase their utility and attractiveness to middle-class undergraduates and to please policy makers who saw universities as a necessity for the well-being of the nation. The major universities of states like California were the result of this professionalization and gathered federal funds through the Morrill Land Grant Acts. As a result of these changes, professional schools emerged within universities for training in medicine, agriculture, and mining, and the heads of these schools would find themselves in clashes with the main college presidents who were worried that the Bachelor’s degree was becoming “compromised by allowances in the direction of professional course work” (Veysey 68). On the other hand, advocates of studies in the liberal arts that encouraged habits like “book collecting” and “elegant conversation” were regarded as “cultivated aimlessness” (Veysey 70). The tension between professionalization in fields like mining and agriculture on the one hand, and the professionalization of research through the Ph.D., on the other, ultimately created a hallowed aura around research. The world of professionalized doctoral research emerged, in part to “protect” this increasingly unpopular “cultivated aimlessness” against college training in more practical, blue-collar fields. Professors rose up to defend education from the “hackney professional” studying trades like farming and mining in the new state universities (Veysey 150). The president of Johns Hopkins, the first American research university to pattern itself after the German research model, insisted that his educational mission was to provide instruction that was advanced, but

“not professional” in the sense of blue-collar utility (Veysey 149). This protective barrier 106 around intellectual pursuits soon came to possess “the emotional characteristics of a religion” (Veysey 149). Thorstein Veblen also complained of the “Worldly spirit that pervades the gentleman’s college” (150). During this era of sacrosanct research, stories of graduate students embracing their “sacred” research proliferate: One of Stanley Hall’s students wrote the motto “INVESTIGATION” on a poster and hung it above his desk. In another (perhaps apocryphal) anecdote, one student at Johns Hopkins allegedly “arrived in such a state of anticipatory ecstasy that he maintained a night-long vigil in the laboratory where he expected to do his work” (Veysey 150). This sense of enchantment with research far surpassed any first-day-of-school feelings, and the very fact that such stories have been maintained highlights that they were socially encouraged behaviors built into the very structure of the research university system. The synthesis of the tension between trades like mining and agriculture versus the liberal arts was that academic research became professionalized in its own right in order to preserve research. In a world where universities were turning into a finishing step towards professionalization, a Ph.D. became the palatable routinized form for turning a life of research into a career. As historian of education Geiger puts it, professionalization created “awareness of the need for formal modes of training . . . met first by European study, and then by the American Ph.D.” (Geiger 21). Before the 1890s, Ph.D. granting programs “existed at only a handful of institutions;” the first Ph.D. was granted by Yale in 1861 (Geiger 4, 27). During the 1870s and 1880s, however, it was Hopkins that produced a larger number of Ph.D.s than Harvard and Yale combined (Geiger 8). Geiger describes Hopkins Ph.D. graduates as emerging from an institutional factory: “By the 1880s these made-in-America scholars were carrying the Hopkins spirit into all the major universities of the country” (Geiger 8). The influence of Hopkins’ German model, shows how this present culture of academic professionalization grew exponentially. By 1900, 107 the Ph.D. had officially become “the credential expected for academics in basic university disciplines” (Geiger 20). At the close of the nineteenth century, research afforded, above all, protection and status. Veysey jokes that with the Ph.D., the professor became like a “magician … shielded by his books or his test tubes” (Veysey 355). A patina of “professionalism and expertise” made the American university professor like a “sorcerer,” not consistently trusted, but still, “half a charm has proved better than none” (356). No wonder Spiritualists fought for authoritative titles like “professor” even if they had not earned any sort of legitimate degree, and no wonder investigators of psychical phenomena referred to themselves as “researchers.” Not all humanities professors were as pleased with this new reverence for scientific research as their colleagues. In the reverence for research they saw a sort of blasphemous myopia. Irving Babbitt complained that the Ph.D. degree led to a “loss of mental balance,” and that the German style of doctoral dissertations produced an “intellectual nausea” (Veysey 200-201). English professor Hiram Corson warned that scientific reason had imperiled faith: “those spiritual instincts and spiritual susceptibilities … through which many may know without thought, some of the highest truth, truths which are beyond the reach of the discourse of reason” (Veysey 200). Paradoxically, out of this cultural foment, a reliance on the scientific potential of intuition became one of the hallmarks of psychical researcher William James’s thought. The tension between intuition, liberal mindedness, and professionalization is what created psychical research as a field. Remembering the significance of this sacredness that permeated research is especially important when approaching psychical research. It reconstructs a picture that can help researchers in the twenty-first century to understand why William James and his compatriots picked up a task that was in itself, technically sacred. As explained in the 108 following section, they had been primed to package SPR and ASPR this way by an academic culture that saw scientific research itself in a holy light. By proxy, the study of the soul in a laboratory makes sense even as a cargo-culture style zeitgeist that pantomimes the way that academics were looking at universities as consecrated ground. At the same time, during the turn of the century, studying something impractical was a radical political act because it meant resisting a culture that insisted upon the commodification of knowledge. Knowing all of this, the members of SPR and ASPR took up a topic that could not be commodified the way that a degree in agriculture or even English could be, something increasingly rare in American universities with their fixation on professionalization beginning in the 1890s. Yet, these psychical researchers also had to think strategically about maintaining their field, which brings us to the next step of academic professionalization. By the end of the nineteenth century, all fledgling disciplines and major ones were gaining professional academic status by forming a society and attendant journal.

REORGANIZED KNOWLEDGE: PSYCHICAL RESEARCH IN THE ERA OF ACADEMIC SOCIETIES

The next stage of development in the research university called for the founding of an association and an accompanying journal for the purpose of putting out all of the newly produced research, and also for defining the aims of the societies. It was in these final two decades of the nineteenth century that all of the basic academic disciplines in the arts and sciences as we know them, such as the Modern Language Association (1883), were organized into their current forms. Out of this matrix of exciting new academic growth, the Society for Psychical Research (1882) and other, similar psychical research organizations, asserted themselves. They were just as established as groups like MLA in the sense that they had rosters just as impressive (see tables), as other academic 109 professional associations from the same era that have persisted. British Historian Harold Perkins’s The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 cites this decade as the decisive one for professional, academic life. Though American historian Roger L. Geiger points out that there were professional academic societies in the U.S. as early as 1840, Geiger’s results confirm Perkin’s claim within the U.S. insofar as the fact that professional societies reached an unprecedented apex of growth during the 1880s. Geiger corroborates, “If there is a single crucial point in the process of academic professionalization, it would be the formation of a national association with its attendant central journal” (20). According to Geiger, “The growth and specialization of knowledge created bodies of increasingly esoteric doctrines” (20). In this new world of subjects that had risen to such heights that they required a specialist to decipher, the development of “associations, meetings, and journals” was necessary in order to form “community structures of authority and legitimacy” (Geiger 20). The characterization of these societies as creating sovereignty over “increasingly esoteric doctrines” is vital to note. It is no coincidence that there was an upwelling of occult organizations during the Victorian era, just as academic, professional societies emerged to defend their “increasingly esoteric doctrines,” as Geiger has put it. These occult societies in some cases predated many professional societies. As academia reached a critical mass of complexity via research and professionalization, specialized societies of all sorts began to pantomime their professionalized formation process in order to both challenge the university as a site of cultural authority, and to infiltrate it.32 As historian Alex Owen explains, erudition was critical to the formation of occult societies in this period. Owen writes that the tremendous vogue of Victorian occultism

32 It should be added that both professional and occult societies also drew inspiration from the earlier, fascinating world of nineteenth century American fraternal societies. For examples, see: Lynne Adele and Bruce Lee Webb’s As Above So Below: Art of the American Fraternal Society, 1850-1930. 110 marked a shift away from the more pluralistic Spiritualism of the 1840s and 50s, with esoteric occult groups like Theosophy or the Order of the Golden Dawn emphasizing “the ‘higher’ import of arcane ‘Eastern’ teachings” (Enchantment 5). This emphasis on arcane teachings, she argues, implied “that it was learning, rather than the less predictable mediumistic ‘gifts,’ that underwrote the new spirituality” (5). The hierarchy of the research university, as Geiger points out in his own surprisingly congruent occult language, placed its own premium on the “esoteric doctrines” produced by research. The transition of esoteric occult organizations to psychical research becomes clear when one observes the overlap in belief, and individuals involved who were a mixture of scientists and devotees of esotericism. Most persuasively, psychical researchers openly wanted access to, and to be taken seriously by, the research university. As mentioned, most members of SPR and ASPR were professors at elite academic institutions. When they created their society and its attendant journal, there is no mistake that they were intentionally emulating professional, academic trends. Not only that, but occult societies of the day, as Owen mentions, were becoming more intellectual. We should read SPR and ASPR and all occult organizations at this time on a two-way continuum between sacred, personal beliefs, and the new higher education system. This continuum between the personal and professional becomes more significant with James, as I will discuss further in the next chapter. Like all professional academic societies, psychical research organizations created a system of tiered access to the production and distribution of research. This ultimately was an exercise in class power that separated the highly educated and elite psychical research professors who founded SPR and ASPR from uneducated, or self-educated Spiritualists. Straightaway, in their “Objects” section of their Proceedings the SPR expressed that “The Council desires to conduct their investigations as far as possible 111 through private channels” in order to filter out undesirable public, performing mediums (“Objects” 1). The hierarchy was further entrenched through SPR and ASPR’s system of charging membership fees: one guinea per annum for associates, two guineas for full members. True, these barriers were common in all societies and par the course for professionalization, but when one remembers the abhorrence with which many psychical researchers treated working-class Spiritualist mediums, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that SPR was trying to keep the riff raff out and establish their research as a proper science at the same time. Ironically, as individuals, most of them already were well- established scientists, even if their new chosen area of study was not respected. Members of SPR and ASPR, including William James, frequently expressed their disgust with “materializing mediums” meaning those who claimed to be able to make physical otherworldly phenomena appear, favoring “spiritual mediums” who dealt with the “other world” via more esoteric, immaterial means. This was certainly class consciousness to a degree, but as explored in the section on the Seybert Commission, the rejection of vulgar material mediums was also a necessity for psychical research to make a leap into the more respected terrain of psychology, and neurology. The formation of these societies was, above all, their bid to enter the professional academic arena. To illustrate the overlap between the psychical research groups and other professional academic organizations of the fin de siècle, I have provided a table below which maps out some of the major societies of the last half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth. This table was adapted from Geiger’s To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940. To it, I have added in bold text major psychical research organizations which made their way into academic institutions, or which professionalized themselves in a manner patterned after academic societies.

112 CHRONOLOGY OF PRINCIPAL DISCIPLINARY ASSOCIATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS. * From Geiger (23-4). *To illustrate how psychical research organizations contributed to, and reflected these changes see my own additions to Geiger’s table in bold, ellipses indicate periods of relative inactivity.

Table 1: Chronology of Principal Disciplinary Associations and Publications

Year Society Journal

1842 Am. Oriental Society* … 1848 Am. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science* … 1865 Am. Social Science Assoc.* (Transactions . . . ) ⱡ 1867 The London Dialectical Society The Spiritual Magazine; Spiritualist Newspaper; Medium and Daybreak; The Year-Book of Am. Philological Assoc. Spiritualism 1869 Nature British National Association of Spiritualists 1873 (BNAS) 1876 Am. Chemical Society (N.Y.) (1892a)Ɨ (Proceedings…) ⱡ Am. Journal of 1878 Mathematics Journal of the Am. 1879 Archaeological Institute of Am. Chemical Soc. (1892a) Ɨ (Journal…) Ɨ ; Am. Chemical Journal; Am. 1880 Soc. For Biblical Literature and Exegesis Journal of Philology 1881 Light Am. School of Classical Studies at Athens (1879) Ɨ The Society for Psychical Research Founded 1882 (Cambridge, England) 1883 a) Am. Soc. of Naturalists* Science b) Modern Language Assoc. (Publications…) ⱡ a) Am. Historical Assoc. b) Chemical Soc. of Washington (1892a) Ɨ c) The American Society for Psychical 1884 Research founded

113 d) Seybert Commission founded at the University of Pennsylvania (1884-1887) e) London Spiritualist Alliance (LSA) today exists as the College of Psychic Studies Am. Journal of 1885 Am. Economic Assoc. Archaeology Political Science 1886 Quarterly Am. Journal of Psychology; Two Worlds; Quarterly Journal of 1887 Economics 1888 a) Am. Mathematical Soc. (Bulletin . . . ) ⱡ b) Geological Soc. of Am. (Bulletin . . . ) ⱡ 1889 Am. Academy of Political and Social Science 1890 Am. Soc. of Zoologists Spiritualists’ National Federation (SNF) this became the Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) by 1891 1913 a) Am. Chemical Soc. Philosophical Review; 1892 b) Am. Psychological Assoc. (…Review) ⱡ Physical Review (1899a) Ɨ ; Journal of Geology; Journal of Political 1893 Botanical Soc. of Am. Economy Am. Journal of Sociology; Am. Historical Review; 1895 Am. School of Classical Studies at Rome (1879) Ɨ Astrophysical Journal; Journal of Physical 1896 Chemistry a) Am. Physical Soc. b) Astronomical and Astrophysical Soc. of Am. 1899 c) Am. Soc. for Microbiology 1901 Am. Philosophical Assoc. 1902 Am. Anthropological Assoc. (…R eview) ⱡ ; Modern 1903 Am. Political Science Assoc. Philology Journal of Experimental 1904 Assoc. of American Geographers Zoology (Publications and 1905 Am. Sociological Soc. Proceedings . . . ) ⱡ 114 John Edgar Coover establishes first academic 1911 parapsychology program at Stanford University *Mother society. Ɨ Subsequently united with the association listed at date in parentheses ⱡ Publication of the association founded in that year.

Table 2: Founding Members of the Society for Psychical Research

Founding Members of the Society for Psychical Research (1882- )

Name Field or job Academic Institution Henry Sidgwick Professor of Moral Philosophy Cambridge University Frederic W. H. Lecturer, Classics, Philology and Myers Poetry Cambridge University Psychologist, musician, wrote The Power of Sound (1880) a well- Edmund Gurney regarded philosophy of music book Cambridge Royal College of William Barrett Physicist, Professor Science of Ireland conservative politician and nobleman educated at Trinity Gerald Balfour College, Cambridge Cambridge Eleanor Sidgwick Mathematician and Principal Newnham College Edmund Dawson Founder of the National Press Rogers Agency Journalism Arthur Balfour Prime Minister of England British Parliament

Table 3: Founding Members of the American Society for Psychical Research

Founding Members of the American Society for Psychical Research (1884- )

Name Field or job Academic Institution Simon Astronomer and Applied Johns Hopkins Newcomb Mathematician University Johns Hopkins G. Stanley Hall Psychologist University Harvard College E.C. Pickering Astronomer and Physicist Observatory 115 Harvard Medical Henry Bowditch Physician School George S. University of Fullerton Philosopher and Psychologist Pennsylvania Harvard Medical Charles S. Minot Anatomist School William Watson Assistant Boston, MA N. D. C. Hodges Mathematician and physicist Harvard Biologist (President and Professor Boston Society of S.H. Scudder Alpheus Hyatt) Natural History Professor of Philosophy and William James Psychology Harvard

Table 4: Members of the Seybert Commission at the University of Pennsylvania

Members of The Seybert Commission at the University of Pennsylvania (1884-1887) *

Name Field or job Academic Institution University of William Pepper University provost; physician Pennsylvania Director of the biology department; professor of comparative anatomy University of Joseph Leidy and zoology Pennsylvania Horace Howard Shakespeare scholar; professor of University of Furness literature Pennsylvania Silas Weir Physician and writer; trustee of the Mitchell College of Physicians College of Physicians George Augustus Professor of mineralogy and University of Koenig metallurgy Pennsylvania Calvin B Knerr Physician College of Physicians University of James W. White Professor of dentistry Pennsylvania George S. University of Fullerton Professor of philosophy; clergyman Pennsylvania Robert Thomas Professor of English literature and University of Ellis History; clergyman Pennsylvania Coleman Sellers *A committed Spiritualist and close friend of Henry Seybert, Thomas Hazard, served as counselor, suggesting particular topics and mediums to be investigated. 116

PROFESSIONALIZING SPIRITUALISM: THE FORMATION OF THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH AND THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

The first of these official, professional, specifically psychical organizations was the Society for Psychical Research, or SPR, based in England. The initial nucleus of the organization lies in the lifelong friendship of two seemingly polar opposite Cambridge undergraduate classmates: Henry Sidgwick and Frederic Myers. Fittingly, the two were members of the Cambridge University Club when they were undergraduates. The Ghost Club was an organization devoted to the investigation of Spiritualism (Gauld 88). It was Myers who influenced Sidgwick to continue his investigations of Spiritualist mediums (Gauld 89). The Cambridge University Ghost Club was formed in 1851 and was essentially an early version of SPR in that its main objective was the investigation of potentially fraudulent mediums (Basham 123). As the two grew older, after a hiatus, their old undergraduate friendship deepened as they found they both still shared a deep interest in conversations about science and religion. The two frequently exchanged letters debating agnosticism (Gauld 99). Sidgwick brought Myers into the company of other intellectuals interested in spiritual questions, like George Eliot, and fellow “earnest agnostics” (Gauld 102). Gauld’s richly detailed biographical account recalls the two friends as complete opposites: Sidgwick was ambitious, rational, “cool-headed and ascetic” while Myers was a “sensuous” poet who could never replicate the fame he received after winning a national poetry contest during his undergraduate studies, though his whole life he continued to live in the “spirit” of a romantic poet. As Gauld puts it, Myers “was endowed in the highest degree with that capacity for delight” but his upswings also resulted in difficult bouts of depression documented in Myer’s journals and letters (Gauld 90).

117 Despite their deep-seeded temperamental differences, both friends were unified in their dual interests in Spiritualism and the movement for women’s education, which remained lifelong causes for them. Sidgwick’s partner Eleanor, who became the Principal (Dean) of Newnham, Cambridge’s historic women’s college, was obviously another powerful force in this movement. Myers also showed dedication to the fight for women in higher education, resigning his lectureship at Trinity to work for the movement in 1869, after which he became a Cambridge district school inspector, a position he maintained until his death (Gauld). Perhaps it was Myers poetic inclination that caused him to rally together what came to be known as the “Sidgwick Group” to investigate mediums. His passion for the unknown and life’s mysteries led him to gather Henry Sidgwick, his wife Eleanor Sidgwick, her brother Arthur Balfour, and their friends: Edmund Gurney, , John Hollonds, and Lord Rayleigh (Gauld 104). From 1874 on, the “Sidgwick Group” met at various member’s houses investigating the most prominent Spiritualist mediums of the day: C. Williams who claimed to take the form of “John King,” and the American Annie Eva Fay who claimed to summon spirits to play instruments that she strategically positioned around herself (Gauld 104). Gradually, a pattern took shape, with Myers as the ringleader always identifying the newest medium and the group leaving “disappointed” by artifice again and again (107 Gauld). The idea for turning the Sidgwick Group into a legitimate, professional society was first proposed by physicist and Spiritualist W.F. Barrett, who had testified in the Slade trial, and had for many years been involved in studies of thought transference. In 1876, he had shared a paper at the British Association on his experiments in thought transference. Though he had the support of scientist and Spiritualist Alfred Russell

Wallace, president of the British Association’s Anthropological sub-section, Barrett’s 118 paper never made it to publication – it did, however, cause a bit of a scandal in the mainstream British presses (Gauld 137). Not one to be deterred, in January of 1882, Barrett convened a conference at 38 Great Russell Street, London, to discuss the formation of SPR. Myers and Gurney agreed to join if the well-connected, respected, and famously skeptical Sidgwick would serve as president. After subsequent meetings at Hensleigh Wedgwood’s home, Sidgwick agreed, and on the 20th of February the first formal meeting of the Society for Psychical Research was constituted. Its aim was

to investigate that large body of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic . . . without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated. (“Objects of the Society” 4)

In the society’s early years it underwent exponential growth, from 150 members in 1883, to 946 members in 1900. The 1887 members roster reads like a who’s who of Victorian culture: it included future prime minister Arthur Balfour and eight F.R.S.s – Alfred Wallace, Couch Adams, Lord Rayleigh, Oliver Lodge, A. Macalister, J. Venn, Balfour Stewart and J.J. Thompson; as well as two bishops. This is not to mention the literary celebrities who joined: Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin, and Lewis Carroll. The organization’s core members shared one thing in common: all had come from “deeply religious households” (Gauld 141). Gauld astutely notes that it wouldn’t do justice to their spirit of curiosity to merely say that these were individuals traumatized by Darwinian materialism. An answer that seems extremely ill fitting when considering the tremendous devotion to science by most of the society’s members, especially its high number of members who were Fellows of the Royal Society. The dialectical Darwinian materialism versus Christian spirituality approach is too simple to explain away the spirit of deep curiosity within these Spiritual scientists who “were intensely interested in

119 religious and philosophic questions” and went searching for “optimistic answers to them” (Gauld 141). Perhaps no member exhibited the spirit of intellectual curiosity so greatly as William James, who helped to found the American iteration of the organization, ASPR. In 1884, psychical researcher William F. Barrett next set out on a tour to share SPR’s findings and speak about psychical research, giving an address at James’s own Harvard (Luckhurst 55). In Boston, with its large Unitarian following, Barrett’s talks on SPR found an enthusiastically receptive audience. Later that year, the ASPR formed under the presidency of Simon Newcombe, although William James quickly replaced him as president (Gauld 147). The American society generally served as an auxiliary to the original, assisting in SPR’s main task which was collecting vast amounts of data in their impressive censuses.

GATHERING NARRATIVES: MAJOR UNDERTAKINGS AND FINDINGS OF THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

The three largest undertakings of the first psychical researchers of the turn of the twentieth century were their Census of Hallucinations, Phantasms of the Living, and Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. The output of the society was beyond impressive: between their founding and the year 1900, they published 11,000 pages collectively in their in-house publications: Proceedings and Journal (Gauld 313). Not to mention the fact that their publications were maximalist records of human experience: Phantasms of the Living was 1,416 pages and Myer’s Human Personality was 1,360. They were revolutionary for gathering such large samplings of first-hand, personal testimony, and for deploying a new scientific method in trying to obtain results: randomization. According to historian of science Ian Hacking “psychic research may seem an implausible place to study the emergence of a new kind of experimental methodology. Yet it is there that we find the first faltering use, by many investigators, of 120 a technique that is now standard in many sciences . . . randomization” (Hacking 427). Randomization, or the study of random samples of the population as made most popular by trials like those using the “placebo effect” did not become popular until the 1930s (Hacking 427). As I’ll explore further in the next chapter, the randomization experiments of psychical researchers became more significant for its shortcomings: in never being able to produce the certainty of a final answer, it ultimately contributed to the development of the philosophy of pragmatism. Psychical research posed questions which could not be ignored, but even new methods like randomization could not answer the research questions posed by psychical research. Thus, pragmatism emerged as a kind of middle ground allowing for the continued investigation of questions with no immediately available answer. The undertakings of psychical researchers were monumental in scale. Of all of this work, more than half of it could be attributed to a core group of friends within the society: the Sidgwicks, Hodgson, Gurney, and Myers (Gauld 313). The SPR was able to tackle research on such a prolific scale because they handled their work as a fully legitimate scientific operation. Barrett, who headed one of the new physics laboratories in Dublin was able to arrange for a proper facility at Dean’s Yard which SPR treated like their laboratory, dividing all endeavors between six task force committees devoted to the following projects:

1. An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another, apart from any generally recognized mode of perception. [Committee on thought-reading.]

2. The study of hypnotism, and the forms of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain; clairvoyance and other allied phenomena. [Committee on mesmerism.]

3. A critical revision of Reichenbach’s researches with certain organisations called ‘sensitive’, and an inquiry whether such organisations possess any

121 power of perception beyond a highly exalted sensibility of the recognized sensory organs. [Committee on Reichenbach’s experiments.]

4. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on strong testimony, regarding apparitions at the moment of death, or otherwise, or regarding disturbances in houses reputed to be haunted. [Committee on Apparitions, haunted houses, etc.]

5. An inquiry into the various physical phenomena commonly called Spiritualistic; with an attempt to discover their causes and general laws. [Committee on Physical Phenomena.]

6. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects. [Literary Committee.] (PSPR I 3-4).

Of these six committees, the first would undergo a strategic rebranding: “thought reading” would become “telepathy” –a term coined by Myers. Part of the motivation for changing the name “thought reading” was in the fact that it sounded too close to the popular parlor game called “the willing game” in which one person would be selected to perform tasks one could only do with telepathic abilities: guessing other party guest’s thoughts, etc.33 By the second meeting of the “Committee on Thought-Reading,” a new term, to dissociate it from the parlor game, was suggested. The committee thereafter changed its title and its object of investigation to thought transference” (Luckhurst 68-9). There was also a more scientific reason for the name change: it interposed thought reading into the physiological world of ‘muscle-reading’ as in studies by Carpenter, Beard, or Romanes. “Telepathy” was meant to describe a distant yet physical touch in tele + pathos (sympathy had the same Greek root in physiology). This new term implied a break with materialist accounts, while propping itself on them: the “touch” referred to in ‘muscle-reading’ was in the very name of “telepathy” (Luckhurst 71).

33 This type of thinking was re-adopted in J.B. Rhine’s Duke laboratory where Zener cards were used to test for E.S.P. 122 While it was the committee on thought reading that might have had the most scintillating breakthroughs, it was the Literary Committee that actually did the bulk of the work. Though headed by Myers and Gurney, Eleanor Sidgwick did the bulk of the work (according to Myers) and it was exhaustive enough to require numerous assistants and volunteers. Gurney and Myers frequently traveled for their work to interview witnesses, visit libraries, and check Record Offices, in addition to soliciting responses via mail through advertisements placed in publications like The Times (Gauld 153). Their labors, now in the society’s archives, fill 42 boxes and were the most exhaustive of any of the six committees (Gauld 153). Their first major work from the literary committee, Phantasms of the Living (1886) was an investigation of “crisis apparitions.” The two-volume, over 1,300-page work contained 702 such cases. A crisis apparition was defined by SPR as an event wherein a percipient (witness) hears the voice or sees an agent (usually someone known to the percipient) within 12 hours of a severe crisis, usually one that resulted in death. Though Myers, Gurney, and Podmore all contributed, it was Gurney who authored the bulk of the book, while Myers wrote the introduction and Podmore assisted investigating a large number of the cases (Gauld 161). The main argument of Phantasms was that the agent (or sender) had sent the percipient (or receiver) a telepathic message. In a typical incident, a person would be in bed or “looking up from a book” (this phrase occurs so frequently I find it interesting that the researchers did not connect the hallucination to the act of reading itself) when, they would see an old friend, only to find a “day or so” after that their friend had somehow perished. The sheer volume of hundreds of nearly identical cases was not enough, however, to convince some readers. Many critics wanted to know: if a crisis apparition had been seen, where were letters stamped from the time it occurred, or why hadn’t witnesses been informed? Presuming that if something like this happened, 123 the first thing a person would do would be to inform a friend (Gauld 172). As discussed in depth in the third chapter, Charles Sanders Peirce was a major leader in this rallying cry against the obvious flaw of the book, writing a criticism of Phantasms in the December 1886 issue of the society’s in-house journal, Proceedings, which faulted them for their lack of a third party as back up (Gauld 173). Three years later, in the spring of 1889, a new, stronger project, this time with an international scope and stricter guidelines, shaped in part by the critiques of Peirce, was underway. The Census of Hallucinations was an improved version of what Phantasms had been. Mainly composed by Eleanor Sidgwick, it took five years to create and consisted of thousands of first-hand accounts (Heywood). Eleanor Sidgwick worked with the International Congress of Psychology, and with the aid of colleagues in other countries totaling 410 volunteers, including James, Gurney, Myers and Podmore, they circulated a new questionnaire to local papers around the world posing the following question:

Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause? (Proceedings vol. x 33).

These were all to be waking hallucinations, and excluded dreams (Proceedings vol. x,

33). 17,000 responses were gathered by these volunteers, 2,272 persons answered that they had experienced such hallucinations, a number reduced to 1,684 persons once dream and delirium had been ruled out. Many of these people had experienced more than one hallucination, leaving 1,942 hallucinations, 80 of which coincided within 12 hours preceding a death of a close loved one (Gauld 183). Of these cases, taking Peirce’s critique into view, only 32 remained as cases in which the hallucination had been reported to a third party prior to the committee’s investigation. (Gauld 183). Their 124 ultimate conclusion was that “anyone familiar with chances” would see that these 32 cases signified a genuine phenomenon and amounted to more than mere chance. James, in his review of the Census of Hallucinations, noted that though not all would believe, it deserved a “patient and respectful hearing before the scientific bar,” a perspective James would continue to voice in his essays on psychical research (James, “Review”). While Phantasms had been published and released as a book, the Census was more of a living, ongoing project that was most widely discussed at the International Congress of Psychology where many volunteers contributed to its methodology via conference papers and meetings. The results of the survey, which showed that a large majority of the public experience hallucinations, were finally published in an extensive, detailed report of nearly 400 pages (pages 25-422) preceded by commentary from Oliver Lodge, and others, titled “Report on the Census of Hallucinations” in volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1894. The next major work of SPR, published posthumously two years after his death, in 1903, was Myer’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death which presents one of the most significant contributions of psychical research to mainstream psychology: his concept of the Subliminal Self. This prototype of the unconscious was used by Myers to address psychological topics like dual personality and somnambulism in addition to parapsychological phenomena. Some readers may find his account of the unconscious mind even more accessible than Jung’s or Freud’s given his poetic inclinations and lengthy, but plainspoken descriptions. William James lauded praise on the work and used it in developing his own theories –readers of The Varieties of Religious Experience will find Myers frequently cited, and to a lesser extent in The Principles of Psychology, as well. James cited Myers’ work on as a way of explaining “agraphic diseases” or diseases which prevented or altered a person’s ability to write, and the 125 hemispheres of the brain in his Principles of Psychology, remarking that during a mediumistic performance the hemispheres of the brain, perhaps the right, is dominating and that there is an interplay between them, showing, again, that psychical research was truly a frontier of psychology (James, vol. I 400). Another remarkably innovative portion of Myer’s Subliminal Self was also the mythopoetic function. This term refers to the subconscious mind’s ability to invent all kinds of romances and narratives perpetually, and explains why and how mediums could create such elaborate alter egos, from Native Americans to deceased celebrities, to inhabit their being. Henri Ellenberger rightfully cites the mythopoetic function as undervalued and under examined for its rich potential. Ellenberger also used Myer’s book, Human Personality as a reference point in constructing his chapter on “The Emergence of Dynamic Psychiatry” which covers various responses in the psychological community, from Flournoy’s rejection of such phenomena to the way SPR embraced it and worked it into psychological theories (85). Human Personality, published 1913, also expressed ideas very similar to Jung’s concept of an anima mundi or “collective unconscious” even though Jung’s first essay to mention the idea, “The Structure of the Unconscious,” was not published until three years after Myer’s work, in 1916. Myers argued that the Subliminal Self had an ethnographic component, claiming that this subliminal self is ‘inherited’ from “earthly ancestors” and constitutes a “multiplex and ‘colonial’ organism – polyzoic and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree” (Human personality, I 34.) In Human Personality Myer’s wrote about these phenomenon as existing in every culture and religion: “the medicine man . . . enters as truly into the spiritual world as St. Peter or St. Paul” (Human Personality II 260). Myers claimed that all religions incorporated some kind of trance state in which the soul leaves the body. Human Personality like all of the psychological censuses of psychical researchers was foundationally structuralist, and in 126 that regard, was really ahead of its time in presaging the kind of thinking we see increasingly into the twentieth century.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ENTERS THE IVORY TOWER: THE SEYBERT COMMISSION FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF MODERN SPIRITUALISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Though SPR was clearly a Cambridge endeavor in the sense that its founding members were mainly professors, several of whom were highly active in education reform, it was nevertheless an extracurricular endeavor. The Seybert Commission, however, was the first psychical research organization to be formally affiliated with a single university. The Seybert Commission was instated as part of a bequest from Henry Seybert, a wealthy man with a tragic life: his mother died in childbirth, and his father, a mineralogist and chemist, died in 1825, when Seybert was 24. Seybert never resumed his scientific studies after the loss of his only remaining parent, devoting himself fully to philanthropic efforts and Spiritualism. City directories listed him only as “Gentleman” and like a number of wealthy individuals in his day, he served as a benefactor to popular Spiritualist mediums who he believed enabled him to contact his departed parents (Moore 108). The bequest endowed a professorship in moral philosophy in his father’s name — a post that still exists to this day –in addition to a commission of academics to investigate Spiritualism, to commence in 1883. The Commission's final report, published in 1887 found no scientific evidence to support the doctrines of the Spiritualist movement, but did uncover numerous examples of fraud carried out by the mediums they investigated. Their work in the Seybert Commission, as will be argued momentarily, also vitally influenced (and was influenced by) their respective academic labors, in literary studies and neurology. In the Seybert Commission, I will argue, we see the complete transition from materializing mediums to psychical research’s next phase: studying the unconscious

127 beyond the realms of ordinary psychology. This is a transition revealed through the personal and unpublished letters of H. H. Furness and S. Weir Mitchell, which I will share below. The Seybert Commission was a remarkably interdisciplinary organization with professors from both the humanities and the sciences. A full list of the committee members and their titles can be found in table four, above. The participants, though supposedly all neutral, varied markedly in their levels of receptivity to Spiritualism. The most skeptical participant was the paleontologist Joseph Leidy who attended meetings and met all obligations professionally, but minimally (Warren 199). Silas Weir Mitchell, who will be discussed at the end of this section, was converted by the methodologies of SPR even if he could not stomach its beliefs (Furness). As discussed at the end of this section, Mitchell continued gathering narratives via a survey very similar to SPR’s for studying dreams and predormitum hallucinations (“predormitum” referring to hallucinations occurring on the threshold of sleep).34 Of all members, by far the most emotionally and intellectually involved participant was the Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness, who served as the committee’s chairman. Furness made an excellent candidate for the position of chairman for a number of reasons. For one, Furness was friendly to Spiritualists, who, perhaps even more so than the typical nineteenth century audience, especially adored Shakespeare35. It was not uncommon for the ghosts of famed writers, especially Shakespeare, to be summoned at séances in the day. Furness attended a séance in the early1880s before his Seybert days

34 Mitchell has been made infamous for his “rest cure” which he prescribed to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among other women for neurasthenia or nervous exhaustion which prompted Gilman to immortalize him for his medical malpractice in her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 35 Spiritualists frequently invoked Hamlet’s famous line: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” to persuade skeptics. 128 where he was reportedly “visited” by the ghost of the Bard himself (Kahan 92). However, I would also like to make the case for a second, more oblique reason why Furness made such an excellent chairman for this sort of committee: he was an absolute devotee when it came to gathering various narratives and interpretations, a vital skill if one considers how SPR created their studies. Furness used to stay awake all night with the Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia discussing different interpretations to single passages of a play. Oftentimes, they would realize by dawn that their efforts at originality had been in vain because another scholar in some obscure article or book had already stumbled upon the same interpretation that they had. So, Furness set out to compile all known Shakespeare commentaries to prevent further intellectual backtracking. The result was the Furness Variorum. This tedious labor was a joy for Furness, as Shakespeare scholar Kahan puts it, Furness fell in love with “the teeming mass of clarification and interpretation generated by scholars worldwide” (90). Recalling Myer’s Human Personality, one realizes that this teeming mass of clarification was at the heart of psychical research. Psychical research was at its core a scientific endeavor spearheaded by humanists with humanistic aims. Like Furness, Myers of SPR, as I have mentioned, was also a humanist: a poet, classicist and philologist whose life was similarly devoted to the compilation and analysis of narratives. The work of Furness and these Seybert Commission psychical researchers was not that different from their humanist professor counterparts in SPR. There is even evidence that they exchanged correspondence and Furness also became a member of SPR (Furness). The final results of the Seybert Commission were published in a book deal with J. B. Lippincott, and even then, read like a series of stories about what happened with each medium investigated. In the first of the Seybert Commission’s investigations, we have the reappearance of a medium decades past her star’s zenith. The Seybert Commission’s main weakness 129 was most certainly in their tendency to go for the biggest names in mediumship, who were usually already thoroughly vetted as fraudulent by the time the 1880s had rolled around (recall that the Spiritualist movement is said to have begun over 34 years earlier, around 1848). On March 31, 1884, Furness wrote to solicit a meeting with none other than Margaret Fox, who co-founded the Spiritualist movement with her sister while both were in their teens. She was now 51, married and Margaret Fox Kane, suffering from “neuralgia,” and drifting between her sister’s apartment and public housing in New York. On the evenings of November 5th and 6th, 1884, Fox Kane finally had an official meeting with the committee in which she claimed, very accommodatingly, to be inhabited by the spirit of Henry Seybert, the man who had been generous enough to pay for the commission (Preliminary Report 38). At this meeting she sat at the end of a long, oak wood table with her feet obscured from view and began the typical process of answering questions via her own occult version of Morse code (Preliminary Report 35). Unsatisfied with her hidden feet, the professors suggested Fox Kane prove somehow that there was nothing beneath them or in her shoes to produce noise, after which Fox Kane herself suggested procuring four water glasses for her to stand upon and re-perform all of the tricks. The committee humored her, eliciting continued responses from the late Henry Seybert, including some spirit writing in which Mr. Seybert chose to quote Ovid in Latin.36 This was somewhat unremarkable practice for a medium, to quote common aphorisms in Latin in order to further solidify their credibility as learned authorities of sorts. At least, it was impressive because Fox Kane claimed no knowledge of Latin (Preliminary Report 46).

36 “Princiipia obsta sera medicina paratum” an incomplete iteration of “Resist beginnings; the remedy comes too late when the disease has gained strength by long delays.” 130 Anyone who has read enough histories of Spiritualism will not find much new in these antics reported by the Seybert Commission. Fox Kane, who had learned to survive through con artistry from a young age, can hardly be faulted for trying to continue to practice a trade she learned as a child. Soon after their first meeting, Fox Kane appears to have begun to attempt to manipulate Furness into becoming her benefactor. He was himself from a well off family and married the heiress of an iron fortune with a pre- existing interest in Spiritualism, so he must have made an attractive target to her (Kahan 93). On October 30th, 1884, Fox Kane wrote to him asking for help rescuing “two pieces of diamond jewelry … [a bracelet] … made by Tiffany … and [a] ring” collectively valued at $450. A few weeks later, assumedly upon hearing no response, or a lackluster one, she wrote to apologize for asking a “comparative stranger” such a large favor (Fox Kane). The next month, she asked the assistance of Furness again for “an honest man who would engage a place in Philadelphia and who would be able to give a short lecture” where “I would come on and give an exhibition [trance] and show upon what ground Spiritualism has its origin” (Fox). Sounding like The Bostonians Verena Tarrant, Fox wanted to re-establish herself as a Spiritualist, since there seemed now to be professional, academic interest. A total lack of correspondence from Furness might be taken to imply that he did not reciprocate Fox Kane’s interest in a business arrangement. If Fox Kane seemed an uncreative choice for investigating fraud, their Commission’s next selection was nearly as obvious. Here, we find the reappearance of the notorious Henry Slade, of the 1873 Slade trial fame covered at the beginning of this chapter. In the intervening years after escaping his court sentence in Britain, Slade had quietly resumed his career as a medium in America. When explaining their rationale for calling on him, the Preliminary Report of the Seybert Commission gives no mention of the famous trial, only mentioning that Slade, living in New York, was the nearest “Slate- 131 Writing Medium” to Philadelphia, and therefore, they sent for him (7). Ever up to his old tricks, Slade insisted that no more than two members of the Seybert Committee observe him at a time, and even then, he requested that they sit on either side of him (72). Another remark in the report was that he wore slippers to “readily slip his feet” out, presumably in order to grip the chalk in his toes to write on the slates (59). The group devoted numerous sittings and many pages of their study to Slade, and that the group would even care to make these observations, restating the obvious which had already been said about Slade by the Sidgwick group, Lankester, and the British court system seems odd. Why did the Seybert Commission pick such obvious con artists, or skilled magicians (depending on how you want to look at it), like Henry Slade and Margaret Fox Kane for their study? For one thing, the Seybert Commission was a transitional enterprise, the first psychical research program of its kind within a university, and as a result, it was both backward and forward looking. First, the way in which it was backward looking: it was backward in the sense that it was no different than the Slade trial. For an example of how completely un-innovative it was, in examining Fox and Slade the committee fell back on what critics have pointed to as kind of scandalous tactics Spiritualists had used to accuse skeptics of persecution before: tying them up, suggesting and threatening a strip search on Fox (though not carrying it out as Kahan points out, 93), poking and prodding them, and so on. The most common criticism of the Seybert Commission was that they always investigated known frauds like Margaret Fox Kane and Henry Slade and showed no interest in mediums whom SPR and the press had not been able to debunk, like Leonora Piper. Most significantly, the Seybert Commission seemed to have missed the bigger picture behind psychical research. An article in the Yale Review criticized the Seybert

Commission for failing to see the potential for Spiritualism to teach us more about 132 “hypnotism, hallucination, and various neurological conditions,” advising the committee to “magnify their office and enter this larger field.” In other words, they were accused of a stubborn adherence to an old incarnation of 1850s Spiritualism that obscured their path to real scientific gains moving towards the twentieth century. One can only surmise that they did not actually want to find anything that would shatter their preconceived notions so they picked straw men who they could easily inoculate with their “conventionalist stratagems,” as Popper would put it (Logic 59). Yet, The Yale Review was too literal and premature in their condemning the members of the Seybert Commission for ignoring neurology and psychology, even if the Commission’s initial report seemed tone-deaf and un-nuanced. In the end, the greatest impact of the Seybert Commission did end up following the model set by other psychical researchers. Furness began exploring dreams, and Mitchell began exploring dreams and hallucinations. From the letters of both Mitchell and Furness, it is clear that even after their time in the Seybert Commission, they retained contact with the world of psychical research. When Furness’s son began claiming to have visions (perhaps angling for some of the attention his father was lavishing on mediums) William James became personally involved, asking Furness to please record his experiences. James wrote to him that it was so important to retain these various narratives, as Gurney had done with Phantasms of the Living. Furness, having created his Variorum, needed no outside prompting. He already understood the value of this scientific methodology that was in fact, largely literary. In other words, the individual members of the Seybert Commission were not as blind to the potentialities of psychical research as they might have seemed. Like most psychical researchers, their savviness to, and reciprocity with, developments in mainstream psychology is greater than some might assume.

133 AFTERLIVES OF THE SEYBERT COMMISSION: FROM GHOSTS TO HALLUCINATIONS

Of all the members of the Seybert Commission, it was S. Weir Mitchell, in the end, who made the most interesting evolutionary leap. Mitchell adopted the method common among psychical researchers in SPR made popular through works like Phantasms of the Living of the method of randomization. Mitchell began using this method of randomization, where the “population is stratified into blocks with different social characteristics, and then selections are made within the strata” (Hacking 430). Unlike psychical researchers, however, Mitchell offered a more productive twist: he replaced the study of hallucinations of ghosts like the one conducted by Podmore, Gurney, and Myers with a strict study of hallucinations occurring on the verge of sleep. Mitchell started gathering the data for this study around 1910. As though ghosts and spirits were a sort extraneous apparatus no longer needed, Mitchell started assembling narratives about hallucinations directly – specifically about predormitum hallucinations, the medical term for hallucinations occurring on the threshold of sleep. Mitchell inaugurated the study by sending a general survey out to all of his medical and professional friends on the nature of their dreaming. The structure and the style of the question nearly mirrored SPR’s Census of Hallucinations. The two can be seen here, side by side for comparison:

SPR: Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause? (Proceedings 33).

S. Weir Mitchell: When on the threshold of sleep do you recall having dreams or visions? Have these dreams or visions changed from childhood to today? Do you

134 ever have “waking dreams” [lucid dreams] where it seems as though you are awake? How closely do your dreams correspond to waking life?37 The most enthusiastic responses saved in Mitchell’s archive at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia come from his old Seybert Commission colleague, H. H. Furness. In a very interesting twist, Furness and Mitchell tend to make references to works of art in trying to make their scientific claims. Furness writes that lucid dreaming or “dreaming true” is a concept he is already familiar with from du Maurier’s 1891 novel Peter Ibbetson, and that this subject has been a longstanding fascination of his. Peter Ibbetson is in itself a great demonstration of the transition Mitchell’s questionnaire represents. As I’ll explore in chapter three, James also used a method like randomization, but relied on literary texts like the poems of Whitman and novels of Tolstoy to make his claims about the human psyche. Written in 1891 on the cusp of the very shift it depicts, du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson replaces a Spiritualist longing for a deceased loved one with the psychological terrain of dreams and memory searching for a lost love. Peter Ibbetson declares that memory, above all, is the only key to maintaining contact with a deceased loved one, “To see them with the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad, to become such a self- conjurer as that” (194). The magic of revisiting a lost love is, for du Maurier, not to be found in the séance circle, but in the “conjuring” powers of one’s own memory. Like mediums accused of heretical insanity, he decides that the possessor of such expert powers of dreaming and memory will inevitably also be treated as insane (as his protagonist was) but their visions will be their own reward. With du Maurier’s novel, it is finally the mind itself that is acknowledged to be the thing truly enchanted. The recipe for

37 This is a paraphrase reconstructed from responses Mitchell received from W.D. Howells, Louisa S. Minot, and others which rephrase Mitchell’s original question in making their responses. 135 “dreaming true” Furness mentions is presented in Peter Ibbetson through the story of two childhood loves who reconnect as adults on the street one day and afterward find themselves vividly able to communicate in each other’s dreams. In a chance meeting Ibbetson’s love confirms that she has been having the same dreams, and that they are, in effect, real. In the interceding years their lives have both become desperate, and, in a plot adapted many times over, they live in dreams with each other rather than face their unhappy realities.38 Furness laments that he and his friend have tried “dreaming true” but to no avail, and worries “that it was merely a fancy of the novelist.” Then, in his old habit, part Varorium crafting, part SPR, of gathering as many personal narratives as possible to reach a consensus, Furness notes that he and his dinner party guest, Agnes Irwin, had discussed having hallucinations on the verge of sleep before and discovered a unifying principle: they had both witnessed a parade of caricatures who they could change at will with their minds. Furness describes his predormitum hallucination as a melting pot of cultural reference points:

As well as I can remember, this predormitum visualization, when in health, has come upon me only within the last fifteen or twenty years. In childhood it occurred only when I was ill . . . I am not sure that even now, a slight fever does not force the procession upon my attention, more importunately, than when “my pulse doth temperately keep time and makes as healthful music,” to quote Hamlet. I think this visualization is still under my control and will come at will. I tried it last night. I was, however, extremely tired, and just as the faces were beginning with a grotesque caricature of Disraeli, I must have dropped off to sleep for I remember nothing more. The faces and expressions are quite often smiling and benignant. Sometimes, they are extremely grotesque and recall the dwarves of Velázquez, but they are, oftenest of all, with the stern expression and war-like accoutrements of Roman soldiers; I cannot always retain them, but sometimes I can look at them for a long while when their expression becomes either more benignant or more malignant, and then they slowly vanish, and the procession,

38 Jack London’s 1915 The Star Rover tells a similar story and was probably a partial adaptation. 136 mingled with faces of all description begins again, and grows fainter and fainter until I am lost in sleep. Sometimes these processions begin of themselves; but I think I can always call them up. I have never seen yet any face that is dear to me.39

It should be added that this description of drifting off to sleep before a stream of caricatures is actually remarkably similar to the early symptoms du Maurier describes as part of the “dreaming true” process in his novel Peter Ibbetson. Peter is described as seeing “deadly dwarf” prison guards who he believes mean to harm him, shortly before entering the “waking true” portion of the dream where he encounters his childhood love, who tells him not to fear these “guards” of sleep, so perhaps Furness was more influenced by the novel than he knew (du Maurier 202). For Furness, it is telling that the attempt to reach some kind of a medical consensus about what his hallucination was is routed almost entirely through familiar cultural objects: Conservative Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, a du Maurier novel, Velázquez paintings – all of which begins to suggest a shift away from a literal reliance on ghosts and an increased reliance on the new methodology of randomization coupled with literary study to reveal psychological breakthroughs. In the afterlife of psychical research there is still room for the paranormal and ghosts, but we also find psychical researchers with a new vocabulary for discussing dreams and the unconscious. Furness’s visions here are not of spirits, but the result of a complicated feedback loop of what his waking consciousness has seen, drawn from a rich storage bank of impressions, not unlike Myer’s concept of the mind’s mythopoetic function.

39 It’s not very perceptive for Furness to refer to Velázquez’s dwarf paintings being “grotesques.” As art Historian Betty Adelson uncovers in her excellent study The Lives of Dwarfs: Their Journey from Public Curiosity toward Social Liberation Velázquez is frequently cited as one of the few artists to paint people with dwarfism in an intelligent, subversively defiant, and dignified manner. Adelson points out that there has, however, been an old tradition of treating people with dwarfism as “fantasy” in folklore that coincided with their “disappearance from courts” (139). This seems to be what Furness and du Maurier are drawing on. 137 This study of Mitchell’s on waking dreams and predormitum hallucinations comes a decade after the 1899 publication of Freud’s groundbreaking Interpretation of Dreams, which as I mentioned in chapter one sidestepped parallel but relevant works of SPR and ASPR, and Mitchell’s survey is inspired by this work at the same time that it diverges from it in critical ways. The story of psychical research is about adaptation through these very types of divergences and coalescences. In Freud’s study he successfully moved the study of dreams from the world of palmistry and fortune telling to science. Yet here, in the study of dreams, their two paths converge again and psychical research returns to the same subject with some of that sense of its usual enchantment. The focus of Mitchell’s survey, and even more so on Furness’s answer, is not on the interpretation of dreams, but still on the paranormal possibilities that something might actively be done with them – that travel in such dreams might be real or useful—hence Mitchell’s emphasis on “waking dreams” and Furness’s emphasis on the du Maurier novel’s concept of “dreaming true. Mitchell’s research into predormitum hallucinations leaves us in the terrain of telepathy, but a study of telepathy grown more mature, away from Spiritualist mediums, and towards a secular analysis of the human mind. Mitchell was not just a neurologist, he was also a writer of novels which covered topics clearly influenced by his work in psychical research and medicine. Perhaps he was even thinking of Slade when he wrote a humorous tale about another con artist in The Autobiography of a Quack (1900). But Mitchell’s interest in dreams as shown in his dream survey also carries through his prose. In his 1905 novel, When All the Woods Are Green, two young men, Carington and Jack, are camped out in the woods one night when Carington cries out “Rose” in his sleep. The next morning, Jack teases Carington, suggesting it was a woman that he was dreaming about, but Carington, in tones

138 reminiscent of Spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes40 explains very coolly and rationally, that “often dreams like this of mine seem to be the outcome of some quite trivial event rather than of the larger things of life” (359). The minor event in question was pricking his finger while trying to get a rose. “I didn’t get the rose but . . . that thorn stuck into some pincushion of the mind” (360). It is this ability of reality to pierce through dreams, and likewise of our memories to pierce through us when we see a work of art, like Barthes’s mid twentieth century concept of “punctum,” that creates meaning and experience. In the end, the thing that shoots through the potential absurdity of the materializing mediums of Spiritualism is this deeper implication which seeps through into the work of those involved with the Seybert Commission: the new revelations it brought about dreams, hallucinations, and consciousness. “Dr.” Henry Slade’s Slates might have been a hackneyed, amusing parlor trick, but that is only the shallow end of psychical research. Buried in the archives of Victorian slates with spirit writing is also a solid, still living line of inquiry that has persisted in psychology, in literature, and in more advanced forms of psychical research today. This chapter has demonstrated that while the study of a slate writing medium might have seemed backward, it was actually something that moved intellectual progress forward in remarkable ways. In the process of trying to de-legitimize these fake Spiritualist “doctors,” new fields and contributions emerged. Through psychical research the method of randomization was introduced and falteringly improved upon in the scientific world. S. Weir Mitchell found a new method and inspiration for studying dreams and hallucinations. Psychology grew and flourished as a field, nurtured by concepts like Myer’s Subliminal Self and methodologies like

40 Holmes himself was very much a kind of psychical research stock character, always relying on the scientific process and careful deduction to address the seemingly implausible. 139 randomization were tested by SPR. The need to have a well-educated populace was made even more apparent by the uncovering of frauds like Slade. The surprisingly vexing problem of distinguishing between science and non-science pushed the practice and philosophy of science forward, bringing us closer to a better solution to the demarcation problem. The next chapter will pick up where this one has left off, further examining the way psychical research left behind its Spiritualist apparatus and broadened out into psychology and pragmatism through the innovative work of William James. James, who was in contact with the Seybert Commission, is the individual who most fully highlights psychical research’s ability to transcend its superficial side. Chapter three, in addition to exploring psychical research’s impact on James’s philosophy, will also map out the far- reaching influence of psychical research on all of the first-generation pragmatists. As this next chapter will explore, important figures in the first-generation of pragmatism like Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, and F.C.S. Schiller were all involved in the investigation of psychical research to varying degrees. SPR’s and the Seybert Commission’s tests via randomization may have left them with their questions unanswered, but the line of questioning persisted. In Max Weber’s sense, the world is allegedly disenchanted because “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (Weber 139). Yet, the indefinite and persistent nature of psychical research shows us that this couldn’t be farther from the case – that we are, in fact, very far from having all of the definitive answers to any question that we wish, and in this sense, the world is, in fact, highly enchanted. Pragmatism, as I explore in chapter three, offers a functional middle ground which allows scientists to keep looking for answers to these questions even when those answers are not easily forthcoming. Through allowing for the continued pursuit of 140 the unknown, chapter three will argue that pragmatism facilitates an enchanted worldview.

141 Chapter Three - An Open System of Truth: The Role of Psychical Research in the Formation of William James’s Pragmatism41

“The freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider” (The Will to Believe; William James Writings, 1878-1899: p.477)

CHAPTER THREE INTRODUCTION: EUROPEAN SABBATICAL, SEPTEMBER 1882- MARCH 1883: SCRATCH EIGHT AND THE TRAJECTORY OF WILLIAM JAMES’S CAREER

On September 2, 1882 William James was in his room on a steam liner sailing from Canada for England. In the adjoining room he heard nuns “prattling innocently together” (Correspondence V. 237). He was grateful for the “declining sun, shining . . . like enamel & jewelry” (Correspondence V. 5 237). With a pang of self-conscious irony, he noted “how different the long looked for vacation kommt einem vor [comes on] when it’s actually begun” (Correspondence V. 5 237). It was a transitional era for James. He had recently been appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard but still taught in the newly developing field of psychology. His family had recently moved homes, and what would become his landmark work, the Principles of Psychology, was to be vitally influenced by the journey he was about to undertake. James set out for Europe willing the experience to be a transformative one: “With the rushing of the water audible through the port holes, and the gentle tremor of the table” he wrote, “Cambridge with its terra firma conditions of solidity seems far enough away . . . For me that chapter is closed” (Correspondence V. 238). The nearly seven-month long sabbatical would lead James to

41 This chapter heading is a play on James’s criticism of closed systems of truth throughout his writings. As in: “the reader will in vain seek for any closed system in this book” (vii) The Principles of Psychology. Dover, 1950. Or James’s critical declaration against the status quo: “The idea of every science is that of a closed and completed system of truth” (680) when psychical research and his theory of pragmatism both argue for the opposite: an open system of truth. Quote originally from: “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” William James: Writings 1878-1899 The Library of America, 1992. In a personal letter to a friend James similarly laments “I never have received a harder blow than from the discovery that you too were dominated by the passion for possessing truth in a closed form” (213) The Correspondence of William James Volume 5. The University Press of Virginia, 1998 . 142 the acquaintanceship of Edmund Gurney, who would place James squarely in the midst of the newly forming Society for Psychical Research and alter the trajectory of James’s thinking, influencing the works that would come to define his career from The Principles of Psychology to The Varieties of Religious Experience. This chapter presents evidence that psychical research’s scientific investigations of spiritual belief formed a crucible that decisively shaped James’s philosophy of pragmatism -- the backbone of his entire corpus and his most enduring contribution to American philosophy. Relatedly, this chapter makes the argument that psychical research was instrumental in shaping the ideas of other philosophers associated with American pragmatism in James’s network: Charles Sanders Peirce, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, and Henri Bergson. Psychical research and pragmatism both emerged from modernizing developments in science that led to both transformations in religious culture and changes in higher education. As discussed through the works of historians of education, Veysey and Geiger in chapter two, during the close of the nineteenth century, the curricular emphasis in American universities was trending towards the sciences, with new social sciences like psychology hanging in the balance and humanities disciplines shrinking. Psychical research and pragmatism both reflect this disciplinary tension, and mark an effort to maintain a balance between STEM fields, newly emerging social sciences, and the humanities. Psychical research’s use of personal testimony is one that I argue influenced James’s increasingly strong interest in using personal and literary narratives to illustrate his claims. James’s pragmatic insistence that individuals must pursue problems that are genuinely meaningful to themselves, “living options,” as James puts it, was born out of his engagement with psychical research. Moreover, this chapter asserts that James’s work on pragmatism did not flow through the genealogy from Peirce to James, but was formed conversationally over the “living options” that Peirce, James, 143 Bergson, and Schiller all engaged with intellectually through discussion of the concepts posed by the field of psychical research. This chapter is structured in three main sections, each composed of two to three subsections. The first, this current section, offers this brief introduction and an overview of where this chapter stands in relation to other studies of William James’s involvement in psychical research and American pragmatism. The second major section concerns the overlapping networks of researchers who formed both pragmatism and psychical research. The first part of section two tells the story of how James was drawn into psychical research. It establishes that James was led to SPR by pre-existing intellectual affinities as evidenced by the essay he began developing in 1879, “The Sentiment of Rationality.” James’s interests led him into contact with the London Philosophical Society, more commonly known by its eight members as the “Scratch Eight” where James met Edmund Gurney and eventually became involved with SPR. The second section of part two explains how pragmatism evolved from individuals with overlapping interests in psychical research: Charles Sanders Peirce, F.C.S. Schiller, and Henri Bergson. From there, the third section shows James applied his work in psychical research to quandaries in higher education through the Gifford Lectures in natural theology. This third section draws affinities between the Gifford Lectures and psychical research programs and explores the evolution of James’s scientific use of works of literature as I suggest it was inspired by his work with SPR.

CHAPTER THREE LITERATURE REVIEW: PRAGMATISM’S NETWORK

The connection between pragmatism and psychical research can only be drawn via investment in two critical trends. First, there has been a recent inclination in the past decade to pay scholarly attention to marginalized sciences (as discussed in chapter one);

144 influential examples have been: Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy and Alison Winter’s Mesmerized. Second, the older but still influential development of understanding scientific facts as developing through scientific networks as presented by Bruno Latour. As Latour puts it, scientific facts are not “beyond the scope of some kinds of sociological and historical explanation” (Latour 106). “Such convictions entail the perception that a fact is something which is simply recorded in an article and that it has neither been socially constructed nor possesses its own history of construction,” when instead, according to Latour, “the facticity of an object is relative only to a particular network or networks” (105, 107). Looking at the construction of facts through scientific networks reminds us that scientists are human, and in the case of a scientist like William James, the influence of their scientific network carries over into all of their work. Seeing the scientific process more holistically, as a network, allows us to fill in a number of gaps in research. The particular gap in research that this chapter bridges is in showing that discourses around two seemingly tangentially related scholarly networks – psychical research and American pragmatism – have, in fact, a shared points of origin. But, if these two things, psychical research and pragmatism, co-evolved, so to speak, why is there a gap between them in scholarship today? Or, why has this shared point of origin been obscured over time? One reason is the way in which histories of disciplines can be divided by national borders. Psychical research is generally regarded as a British phenomenon. Even studies whose thoroughness this work aspires to emulate on the topic of psychical research by those like Roger Luckhurst, Richard Noakes, and Janet Oppenheim have been conducted from a British angle, and thus, James usually only receives passing mention even though his contributions to both American and British psychical research were major. On the other side of the coin, because pragmatism is most 145 often remembered as America’s greatest original contribution to philosophy, British historians have little reason to delve into it, when the movement was, in fact, more internationally influenced than it’s often given credit for, with individuals like Henri Bergson, F.C.S. Schiller, and members of SPR like Edmund Gurney and F.W.H. Myers exerting prominent influence. Widening the critical chasm between psychical research and pragmatism, American scholars working on pragmatism, with its connection to more respectable-sounding concepts like democracy, seemingly have little to gain from delving into any affiliation with the more illegitimate-sounding topic of psychical research. Added to the aforementioned fact is the other issue, that detailed histories of allegedly marginal sciences are also a relatively recent phenomenon from the past decade stemming from work like Latour’s writings on networks. By the same token, studies of James usually leave out psychical research altogether, or approach it as an embarrassing aberration in his otherwise respectable oeuvre, not a fundamental connective tissue shaping pragmatism. Ironically, the lack of transatlantic interchange and the continued presence of scientific stigma have continued to snow under the very history that psychical researchers, an international group, spent their entire academic careers working to preserve. While chapter one already covered this study’s relation to existing works on psychical research, where this study stands specifically in relationship to other studies on James, and on pragmatism, requires some unpacking. The recovery of James’s connection to psychical research has received steady but scant attention from scholars, dating back to professor of American Studies Laurence R. Moore’s 1977 work, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture. When Moore’s book was published in the seventies, academic criticism in this terrain was so new that Moore’s book did not make one specific argument, but was novel simply for presenting an array of mini-arguments. Moore, for 146 example, suggests that Spiritualism’s emphasis on the individual and the unfettered ability it offered to speak one’s mind with divine authority authorized feminism (117). Moore also argued that Spiritualism contributed to the transformation of Christian Orthodoxy (73). These generative sub-arguments were carried into more focused, full- length studies by the next generation of scholars of American and Religious studies.42 The work that recovers William James’s connection to SPR and ASPR that is most useful to this study is Eugene Taylor’s 1996 book, William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin – margin being the operative term here. Taylor explains how James’s most path-breaking essays on the subconscious, such as “The Hidden Self,” have been omitted from popular collected volumes of James’s work, leading to an incomplete view of the significance of James’s work on psychical research to his work on abnormal psychology:

James’s various essays and reports have remained scattered throughout a wide expanse of literature from the period not readily accessible . . . Their recovery shows the inextricable relationship between abnormal psychology and psychical research during this period; they indicate a climate of psychotherapeutic practice that was at once thought to be scientifically legitimate while remaining rich in religious overtones . . . they point to a psychology of character development that incorporates the iconography of the transcendent into a scientific model of personality (Taylor 42).

Taylor’s reason for wanting to recover this history is to reveal James’s “contributions to experimental psychopathology and to practical psychotherapeutics” (41). Taylor’s bigger argument, that there is value in recovering this history, is one this study wholeheartedly agrees with. Taylor also argues that in the 1890s James was at work evolving a new, wider psychology than what is presented in The Principles of Psychology. According to

42 See, for example, Robert Abzug’s Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. Oxford University Press, 1994 or Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. University of Indiana Press, 2001, both discussed in chapter one. 147 Taylor, James was seeking to use metaphysical discussion to guide psychology away from a physicalist emphasis towards a more humanistic, pluralistic concept of experience. Because Taylor was a psychologist himself, his emphasis tends to be on the outcome for the profession of psychology. This study agrees in spirit with Taylor with one major caveat: namely that Principles was not subtly creating an expanded view of psychology, but was opening the field of psychology through the development of pragmatism, a philosophy that did the work of guiding psychology away from mere physicalist discussions by making space for belief. In The Principles of Psychology, we see a number of instances where psychical research inspires James’s thought on the psyche, and guides him towards pragmatism. These instances are mainly concentrated in the first volume’s chapter “The Consciousness of Self.” Take, for instance, Pragmatism’s idea of the “tender-minded” and “tough-minded” where pragmatism was supposed to offer some guiding middle ground in philosophy’s epic “clash of human temperaments” (Writings 1902-1910 488). James had already begun fleshing out the clash between these psychological- philosophical types in The Principle of Psychology’s “The Consciousness of Self.” James predicates the entire section on “The Sense of Personal Identity” in that chapter to the inevitable impossibility of pleasing either philosophical Spiritualists or adherents of Hume, and interposes a middle ground as solution. As James puts it,

If, with the Spiritualists [in the philosophical sense of the word] one contend for a substantial soul, or transcendental principle of unity, one can give no positive account of what that may be. And if, with the Humians, one deny such a principle and say that the stream of passing thoughts is all, one runs against the entire commonsense of mankind, of which the belief in a distinct principle of selfhood is a distinct part (Principles vol 1 330). James explains that this chapter “The Consciousness of Self” is an inherently doomed effort to please people who hold these two differing views, exclaiming “whatever 148 solution be adopted in the pages to come, we may as well make up our minds in advance that it will fail to satisfy the majority to whom it is addressed” (Principles vol 1 330). In Principles we see James beginning to explore the sense of personal identity through religious belief as the source of this clash. Though he primarily explores personality through a study of associations and neurological means, he also openly dabbles in the value of Spiritualist planchette writing for identifying these different traits (Humian versus Spiritualist) in the human psyche. James quotes psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers in Principles citing Myers’ work with the planchette as being quite sophisticated. As James relays Myers’ work, he explains that using the planchette, according to Myers, allows “the usual inhibition” to be “removed” showing something far more complicated than “the crude explanation of ‘two’ selves” and in fact revealing a complex “brain systems. . . interpenetrating each other in very minute ways” (Principles 400). While psychical researchers are not referenced with frequency, they are mentioned with respect, as having offered contributions which, when analyzed closely, are clearly vital to the overarching trajectory of James’s thought, as we see in this example from Myers with the inner workings of the unconscious and James’s understanding of belief and types. James’s biographers mention psychical research but refer to it as something James played down to protect the status of psychology as a natural science, and as a field of value only insofar as it carried connections with developments in abnormal psychology, like multiple personality disorder.43 Biographer Gerald E. Myers, for example, refers to James’s research into “telepathy, mediumship, clairvoyance, and even demonic possession” as “simply an extension of abnormal psychology” (10). Myers also claims

43 Examples of biographies following this trend include: F. O. Matthiessen’s The James Family, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947; Howard M. Feinstein’s Becoming William James, Cornell University Press, 1984; Linda Simon’s Genuine Reality: A life of William James, The University of Chicago Press, 1998; and Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Mariner Books, 2007. 149 that there is “scant reference in Principles to psychical research (the topic is not even mentioned in the book’s index)” which “must have resulted from the fear that the topic, judged disreputable by most of his colleagues, would jeopardize his credibility in presenting psychology as a natural science” (G.E. Myers 370). Myers’ perception is widely held and a fair point. Psychical research was derided, as frequently mentioned by James himself, but this is not to say that James did not quietly champion pragmatism in Principles. Additionally, James may not list “psychical research” in the index, but he does make repeat references to psychical researchers Edmund Gurney and F.W.H. Myers. Moreover, the sheer amount of time he spent on psychical research and the amount that he published on it shows that it was by no means a secret venture. Overlooking the full influence of psychical research in James’s corpus is a trend often continued in studies of American pragmatism. Assessments of pragmatism have left out the connection to psychical research for pragmatic reasons: psychical research is hardly a “living” quandary in most people’s lives or on most university campuses today, even if James’s method of pursuing “living options” via personally meaningful inquiry does live on in our modern pedagogy. Meanwhile, pragmatism has remained increasingly relevant in four main areas. Louis Menand maps these four strands of ongoing pragmatic thought: The first strand is the development of theories of cultural pluralism, forged in “response to the xenophobia induced by the turn-of-the-century waves of immigration and exacerbated by America’s entry into the first world war” for which Menand cites Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, Randolph Bourne, as prime influences (Menand xxvii). One could add Cornel West’s 1989 The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism to Menand’s

150 grouping of the original authors in the pragmatic-democratic tradition.44 The second strand of thought on American pragmatism revolves around “a revolution in law and legal thinking” started by first-generation pragmatist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who served on the Supreme Court from 1902 until he was 90, and pragmatically called the constitution “an experiment” adding that “all life is an experiment . . . every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge” (Menand xxix). Holmes inspired the legal pragmatism of Roscoe Pound and Benjamin Cardozo, among others (Menand xxix). The third consequence of pragmatism is the educational philosophy that one learns by doing, credited to John Dewey and revived in the 1960s by Bruce A. Kimball (Menand xxx). Meanwhile, the fourth strand of thought associated with pragmatism is its anti-formalist tendencies where pragmatism “cannot help acting the role of termite” undermining the distinctions and abstractions of philosophy departments while suggesting that the real work of the world “lies elsewhere” (xxxi). Pragmatism’s

44 Here I mean that West is working primarily in the pragmatic democratic tradition. West cites a preference for Dewey over James because “the thoroughgoing historical consciousness and emphasis on social and political matters found in Dewey speaks more to my purposes [than the works of James or Peirce]” (6). That being said, West actually does seem to share a larger number of affinities with James than he acknowledges. For example, where West says that “prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past” with a “visionary outlook,” one could easily read a Jamesian pragmatic melioration of the “tender” and “tough” via these “alternative ways of life” (West 229). Most Jamesian of all and most relevant to this project is West’s assertion in which he sounds like a throwback to 1880s Spiritualist or psychical researchers in claiming “no longer are humanistic scholars content with a historicizing of science, morality, and art that shuns the way in which sciences, moralities, and the arts are inextricably linked to structures of domination and subordination” (West 3). West’s energetic momentum to do work that moves beyond confines of scholarly roles and impassioned critique for greater transparency in the way in which university systems shape knowledge is fascinatingly similar to the revolutionary spirit that propelled psychical research in the 1880s. It echoes the complaints of Spiritualists like Epes Sargent, Henry Steel Olcott, and others quoted throughout this work where a critique of the sciences was always meshed with a broader working-class critique of the university, knowledge, and power. In this sense, West’s interdisciplinary call to action is a sort of fascinating evolution of pragmatism’s originally interdisciplinary spirit and pragmatism’s productive frustration with the academic institution’s power to shape knowledge. Of course there are also myriad other 20th century influences shaping West’s 1989 book and doing them justice would stretch this particular project beyond its chronological scope by roughly a century, but the interdisciplinary, iconoclastic affinity with 1880s Spiritualists and psychical researchers, like James, is worth noting.

151 anti-formalist impulse has been carried forward by works like Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which challenged analytic philosophy and “the very notion of . . . philosophy itself” (Menand xxxii). Because this project is a history of the emergence of pragmatism as it relates to psychical research, it seeks, unlike the aforementioned studies, to show the genesis of pragmatism. This project’s inclination, to better understand the culture of the fin de siècle through pragmatism’s emergence, finds strongest affinity with Joan Richardson’s 2007 book A Natural History of Pragmatism. Though Richardson does not address Spiritualism or psychical research, her study shares a kinship with this one in that she takes up the subject of naturalism’s role in shaping pragmatism. She crafts her argument by “tracing the conceptual framing of America’s native philosophy out of an earlier form of thinking brought to the New World by seventeenth-century Puritan ministers” (Joan Richardson ix). Creating a pragmatist genealogy of figures far predating pragmatism, she identifies Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James as the “priests of the invisible” for their efforts to intuit from nature something both spiritual and scientific, something like a “natural history of the soul” on a “ministerial mission to fashion an instrument more adequate to describe the situation in which they found themselves, stranded on the edge of a new world of physical and spiritual experience” (Joan Richardson 102, xi). William James becomes especially important in Richardson’s study, as he becomes a “priest” of the invisible in a long legacy descending from Edwards, to Emerson, showing the natural evolution of mind that Richardson draws out through a series of inspired comparisons between The Origin of Species and James’s Principles. While Richardson focuses on normal science’s influence on pragmatism, my project focuses on the types of non-normative scientific inquiries that have been more or less

152 debunked today, but which persisted in their own era via psychical research. It is in reckoning with these overwhelmingly popular ideas that pragmatism was born. Ultimately, what the literature surrounding the overlapping topics of psychical research and pragmatism show us is that pragmatism and psychical research both emerged out of a zeitgeist in an otherwise enchanted world. Though Max Weber characterized the spirit of the early 1900s as the “disenchantment of the world” (Weber 155), contemporary scholarship from academics explored in this dissertation’s first chapter, like Owen Chadwick, Alex Owen, and Egil Asprem, have shown that to be far from the truth. Pragmatism was born in an age of “new” occultism that creatively challenged Victorian evolutionists straightforward thesis of a “magic-religion-science march of cultural evolution” (Owen 8). Victorian scientists from Sir Alfred Russell Wallace to Oliver Lodge to William James were earnestly engaged in both the new Victorian occultism and science. In 1882, when James began his sabbatical, he was entering a world that was very much enchanted, a world of mediums, séances, ghosts, and telepathic ties.

JAMES NETWORKS WITH NEW COLLEAGUES IN PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Scratch 8 – The Beginnings of James in the Field of Psychical Research

When James boarded the ocean liner for Europe he was still in search of a clearer way to articulate his growing interests in the merger between belief and scientific inquiry. In order to bring home the significance of what psychical research meant for James philosophically, it is necessary to observe the germ of his interest in science and faith in his early essay, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” which had been culled together from his work in the preceding three years, including a journal article in the July 1879 issue of

Mind and an 1880 lecture to Harvard’s Philosophical Club. James’s “The Sentiment of

153 Rationality” develops a line of argument friendly to the growth of both psychical research and pragmatism. The crux of the essay, an assertion of the value of belief in the role of scientific processes, stipulates that we can know things through our sentiments, emotions, or beliefs, and that in fact, those are the only way we know things. In making his case, James methodically linked emotion with certitude: “Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their rationality,” (Writings 1878-1899 514). In James’s view, we use feelings of peace and contentment coupled with our dislike of blurred perceptions to settle on a concept of truth. Settling on a notion as fundamentally “true” is no different for us, according to James, then “coming ‘to feel at home’ in a new place,” with “novelty” being inherently “irritating” and all “curiosity” having a “practical genesis” in creating a sense of ease (Writings 1878-1899 515). From recognizing that what puts us at “ease” is clearly what feels true, it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that James suggests that there is some emotional component to settling on a truth. James conceived of knowledge and truth in this way, as a sense of feeling “at home” that one must arrive at. Knowing that James conceived of truth in this way, we may better consider how he embarked upon his year-long sabbatical by self-consciously following an instinctive center, one which, as we will see, was premised on an enchanted worldview (a spirit of saintliness, perhaps, to borrow a phrase he would later use in Varieties). James’s momentous description of his own journey with the “closing of chapters,” the “mood of the ocean,” the pseudo-medical, poetic way he promised his wife in letters that they would remain connected via an invisible “ligament” despite the “ominous” eyes of other women on the ship – all signal an enchanted worldview (Correspondence vol. 5 239). More than that, it is James’s own interest in belief which

154 led him to undertake this journey with an outlook towards his very enchanted inner goal: gaining intellectual inspiration. In “The Sentiment of Rationality” James argues that our faith can change the outcome of any experiment, or experience, for that matter. In one of his characteristically illustrative examples -- and James very intentionally favored lively, relatable examples over lifeless, analytic descriptions -- James asks his reader to imagine climbing in the Alps. If one encounters oneself in a scenario where one must fling oneself to safety through “a terrible leap” across a mountainous abyss, he cannot afford to hesitate. If he does, he will launch himself exhausted, in despair, and miss his foothold. But if this person believes, their “faith creates its own verification” the individual leaps quickly and that sense of certainty creates their own fate: they clear the chasm and reach safety (Writings 1878-1899, 514). This was certainly James’s mood as he moved almost instinctively towards the next chapter of his life, and, as will be explained further, this lively, literary example would become James’s hallmark and integral to his philosophy of pragmatism. The first few months of James’s trip were largely a sightseeing and writing vacation. He traveled through Cologne, Nürnberg, Vienna, Venice. In Venice, he wrote to his son “instead of streets there’s nothing but water” (Correspondence V. 261). The next leg incorporated Austria, Berlin, and Paris, before he finally settled down to network in London. In London, in December of that year, Edmund Gurney, a friend of Henry James, reached out to William in a letter. The letter mentioned that Gurney was an acquaintance of William’s brother Henry, the writer, and asked William to join himself and seven others for dinner. The group of eight referred to themselves as the “Scratch Eight.” Gurney assured James they would be focused on talking “shop” about philosophical matters, mainly addressing the question “how our knowledge of minds outside our own is 155 related to our knowledge of other external things” (Epperson 49). This rich, ambiguous opening leaves room for much discussion at the meeting. One can imagine the topic being telepathy – certainly telepathy involves knowing how one mind can see the world through another. A bit like the paper SPR President Barrett wrote “On Some Phenomena Associated with Abnormal Conditions of Mind,” which was, in fact, on “community of sensation.” James attended and was pleasantly surprised by how much he enjoyed the company of the Scratch Eight. For one thing, Gurney and James, as it turned out, had a great deal in common. Though most of James’s letters to Gurney have been lost, Gurney’s warm and detailed responses give some sense of the intellectual friendship that developed between the two who were both at the start of promising careers when they first met -- Gurney was 35 and James was 40 (Epperson 48). It makes sense that the two would get along, as both had spent years finding their vocation, and both had originally pursued the arts -- Gurney trained to be a musician whereas James trained to become a painter – before pursuing medical degrees which neither used in the conventional sense. Gurney had just finished his law degree and James was teaching philosophy when the two converged via their interests in objective inquiry and psychical research. Gurney’s treatise on music, Power of Sound, offers some insight into his creative mind which approached scientific questions, like James did, with an artist’s vision. Both were as caring and empathic as they were sensitive and prone to mood swings (Epperson 48). Both shared the ability to work prodigiously. Above all, both shared a “passionate objective curiosity allied with the capacity for objective observation” (Epperson 48). James was clearly enamored with Gurney, describing him to his wife back home as too “handsome” to fit the “idea of a philosopher” (Correspondence V 332). The description of Gurney was also an apt one – it was SPR’s and Gurney’s iconoclasm rendered by the 156 magnetic physicality they lent to the immaterial realms of mind and spirit that made them intellectually appealing company for James. After his first meeting with the Scratch Eight, James reported back home with delight to his wife that “there was a great opening for psychology” in the matters under discussion (Epperson 50). James was already closely acquainted with one of Scratch Eight’s members, George Croom Robertson, and after 1882, he became lifelong friends with three other Scratch Eight members: the soon-to-become psychical researcher Edmund Gurney as well as Shadworth Hodgson and the psychologist James Sully. James knew Robertson, who worked at University College, London and edited Mind (which published parts of James’s1879 “The Sentiment of Rationality”) because he had already helped James with the revision and publication of a number of articles (Epperson 51). Sully, who was a psychology professor at University College, London, and James became lifelong friends, and even after James’s death, Sully described him as “one of the strongest supporters of my life” (Epperson 51). Meanwhile, Shadworth Hodgson was an English philosopher and first president of the Aristotelian Society (Epperson 51). An empiricist who “emphasized the dynamism of human life,” Hodgson’s crowning work was The Metaphysics of Experience (1898) (Epperson 51). James would later cite Shadworth Hodgson as among the English philosophers who served as a key inspiration in developing pragmatism. The less psychically inclined members of Scratch Eight were still nonetheless esteemed in their own right, and presented views that would have been undoubtedly influential for James. Among them there was the biographer Leslie Stephen, representing the purely humanistic perspective. Stephen wrote biographies on great English authors like Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and others. The logician and professor at

University of London, Carveth Read, was perhaps the least “known to fame,” 157 nevertheless his expertise on Darwinian theory, which inspired his book, The Origin of Man, brought a necessary Darwinian angle, especially when we bear in mind Darwin’s influence on psychology and pragmatism (Epperson 52). Read also remained critical but interested in psychical research later in his life. Then there were those purely involved in law, the lawyer and Oxford professor of jurisprudence, Frederick Pollock and historian and lawyer William Frederick Maitland, who later co-authored A History of English Law (1895) – significant when recalling that one of pragmatism’s main afterlives has been in legal studies. The group was, undoubtedly, generative and productive – an assemblage of academics on the cusps of the greatest contributions of their careers. Nevertheless, it was the psychical researchers and psychologists who most directly impacted James. James knew that these meetings with the Scratch Eight were significant, and he himself memorialized them as the beginnings of pragmatism. In Varieties James mentions Shadworth Hodgson pivotally influencing to the birth of pragmatism and providing a foundation for even Peirce to build upon. James does this by pointing out Hodgson’s connection to the Utilitarian tradition of the British Isles over that of less practical European philosophy: “The Continental schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man’s thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view,” James writes (Varieties 443). According to James, “the best method for discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true” (Varieties 443). When weighing possibilities, what tips the scales is “the cash-value of matter” (Varieties 443). It was “Shadworth Hodgson” James explains, whom he ranks among other “English thinkers,” who first introduced the “‘critical method” into philosophy, that a “man’s thinking is organically connected with his conduct” and it is Hodgson’s, and others’, 158 emphasis on action, the idea that every theoretical difference must also make a “practical difference” that makes “philosophy a study worthy of serious men” (Varieties 442-444). James then proposes the hard-hitting rhetorical question “what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action?” (Varieties 444). James himself then comes full circle, creating the lineage in Varieties from Shadworth Hodgson and the other philosophers of the British Isles with their attunement to the practical “cash value” of truth straight into American pragmatism. James’s own telling of the emergence of pragmatism is interesting and an object worthy of study in itself. Without missing a beat, James in the next paragraph picks up Charles Sanders Peirce, whom he credits with the invention of pragmatism, an idea he cites as being built on the foundation established by British philosophers like Hodgson. “Peirce, has rendered [philosophic, human] thought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application the principle by which these men [Hodgson et al] were instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and by giving to it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of pragmatism” (Varieties 444). James referred to the principle of pragmatism and of scientific inquiry as “the principle of Peirce” (Writings 1902-1910 399). In his 1898 lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, James carefully develops the idea for his iteration of pragmatism, adapting it from Peirce’s writings on the importance of clarity in identifying scientifically verifiable principles, eventually carrying that idea over to beliefs. In 1898, James defined the “the principle of Peirce, the principle of Pragmatism,” as a concept he adapted from Peirce’s 1878 essay “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” as such:

To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object . . . we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve—what 159 sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. (Writings 1902- 1910: 399)

Along this theory as outlined, we find that for an object to be meaningful and scientifically useful in the real world, it has to be “practical” in order to be clear. In Peirce’s own famous example, in order to define something as “hard” we have to show that it resists bending, is capable of scratching glass, and so on (paraphrasing of Peirce in Menand xiv). This “hardness” is not an abstraction, but is simply defined in the object, or in this case, the theory’s practical action. We remember James’s unique idea as being the application of Peirce’s scientific principle to the sphere of belief. James took Peirce’s idea about “hardness” and scientific principles and applied it to philosophy, suggesting that philosophers basically take their ideas and scratch them against the glass of the world, so to speak, to test their effect in action. According to James, a philosopher should ask of all of their ideas “what special difference would come into the world according as it were true or false?” (Writings 1902-1910 543). In Pragmatism, James put it most succinctly: “The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite and assignable reasons” (Writings 1902-1910 520). James’s understanding of his own connection to Peirce’s ideas illustrates a clear picture of pragmatism, and James’s own account of how it emerged. In James’s example, he offers a streamlined narrative about the emergence of pragmatism, offering, generously, its inception to Peirce, Hodgson, and others. A question that remains to be asked is: how accurate is James’s own account of pragmatism’s genealogy? Is Peirce’s principle the “principle of pragmatism” and is James really the one who carried this study over into the realm of belief singlehandedly? As the next section will explain, both Peirce and James were involved in the study of

160 belief and science, and there were others, like Edmund Gurney, F.W.H. Myers, F.C.S. Schiller, and Henri Bergson who were more influential to James’s pragmatism than even Peirce was. More than being formed by any single influence, the next section will demonstrate, pragmatism was constituted gradually through conversation among the network of scientists and philosophers engaged in psychical research.

Overlaps Between Pragmatism and Psychical Research: Rethinking the Genealogy of Pragmatism

The purpose of this study is not to determine who invented pragmatism, and not to unveil influence in the most obvious sense, but instead to reveal the subtler picture of how the idea emerged conversationally through a large, international network of academics engaged in psychical research. By James’s own account in numerous speeches and essays, the story goes that pragmatism emerged with Peirce, but Louis Menand plants the seed of doubt that this trajectory is accurate, suggesting that pragmatism existed in James’s thoughts as early as 1872.45 According to Menand, in crediting Peirce with originating pragmatism, James was merely being generous, “characteristically, doing a favor for a friend” (xv). In his younger years Peirce’s future had looked bright: he and James both attended Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in the 1860s. Peirce also came from an academic family. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was a distinguished professor of mathematics at Harvard. Peirce himself was a professor at Johns Hopkins University with a reputation for being a prodigy of mathematics, science, and logic,

45 Menand traces the origin of pragmatism in James’s thought to an 1872 diary entry in which James, analyzing the French philosopher Charles Renouvier writes that he has found a way to navigate his own depression through realizing that it is “not in maxims . . . but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation . . . Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into: now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power” (The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920, vol. 1, 147-8. Quoted in Menand xviii-xix). 161 when, as Menand puts it, Peirce’s “career unfolded disastrously” (xv). He lost his academic appointment due to a scandal involving his marriage (Menand xv). Soon after that, he lost his job working for the U.S. Coastal Survey. In 1898, he used inheritance money to settle on a “dilapidated estate called Arisbe, which he had purchased in an ill- considered moment of financial optimism” (Menand xv). James, conversely, could not have had a brighter decade. The 1890s saw James emerge as something of a global academic celebrity after the publication of The Principles of Psychology and being generous as he was, it seems only natural that he would use his fame to help his old friend Peirce who was now severely down on his luck. When James announced a new philosophical approach on the heels of his masterwork, Principles, when he already had the public’s attention, it was bound to receive widespread critical notice. In his lectures on pragmatism, James credited Peirce’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” as the origin point for his concept of pragmatism, though the word “pragmatism” does not appear in Peirce’s article. Menand asserts that the word “pragmatism” appears nowhere in the philosophical writings of Peirce or anyone else in James’s network before James’s use of it in 1898 (xvi). All we have is James’s account that he “first heard him [Peirce] enunciate it [pragmatism]. . . at Cambridge in the early ‘70s” (Menand xvi). Peirce seems to have latched onto James’s attempt to help him, and subsequently played up the role of a conversation group (made famous by Menand’s book), known as the Metaphysical Club. In some of his unpublished papers between 1905 and 1908 Peirce wrote “It was in the earliest seventies . . . that a knot of us young men in old Cambridge, calling ourselves half-ironically, half-defiantly, “The Metaphysical Club . . . used to meet, sometimes in my study, sometimes in that of William James” (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce vol.5 par. 12 as cited in

Menand xvi). Peirce listed the other participants in the Metaphysical Club as being 162 William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph Warner, Nicholas St. John Green, Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, and Frances Ellingwood Abbott. A letter from Henry James adds a year for the club’s formation – 1872. In January 1872 Henry writes “my brother has just helped to found a metaphysical club, in Cambridge, (consisting of Chauncey Wright, C. Peirce etc.)” (Henry James Letters Vol. 1 1843-1875, 267 as cited in Menand xvi). It’s possible the Metaphysical Club continued to meet, as in November of that year Henry wrote again to William that Peirce “read us an admirable introductory chapter to his book on logic the other day” (Correspondence I. 177, cited in Menand xvi). Yet, as Menand points out, in Peirce’s own writings, none of his recollections of the Metaphysical Club match with the descriptions of the other group members’ lives. If the group did convene starting in 1872, Menand explains, “it could not have been a very regular affair” (Menand xvii). That entire year, Abbott was in Ohio, Peirce himself was in Washington working at the Coastal Survey office, Holmes was engrossed in a revision of Kent’s Commentaries on American Law, and Chauncey Wright went to Europe from July through November (Menand xvii). Still, Henry did say they met in November, when Wright would have been back from Europe. D.C. is not an insurmountable distance from Cambridge, and even a professor writing a book has to take breaks sometimes. Certainly, being down on one’s luck, as Peirce was, is not mutually exclusive with having intellectual insight, and everyone has encountered more than one brilliant but troubled or unproductive person in their lifetime. Even if the Metaphysical Club only did meet twice, couldn’t a single conversation redirect the path of a person’s life or thinking? Perhaps a more persuasive means for understanding the emergence of pragmatism, then, lies in realizing neither Peirce nor James can be wholly responsible. This ambiguity over the origin of pragmatism leads us to an even simpler angle: that these ideas were just par the course of 163 the ambient logic of the day, and not sprung fully formed from Peirce’s or James’s brow – an argument that Joan Richardson’s entire study of the influence of naturalist discourse on pragmatism is prefaced on. As she puts it, “pragmatism’s identifying notion that truth happens to an idea did not spring fully formed from mind of Peirce or James, but germinated and grew in a particular environment of fact” (2). While Richardson refers to naturalism, the debates over psychical research which frequently invoked the naturalist discourse of evolution were intrinsically related to Darwinian concepts Richardson focuses on. Clubs for debating naturalism and philosophy like the Metaphysical Club were an incredibly common social enterprise, with the kind of conversation societies mentioned throughout this study (X-Club, the Scratch Eight) and all of the societies listed in Table One being only a few examples. As discussed in chapter two, a number of these clubs and societies were formed out of broader professionalizing impulses that were prevalent in academia at this time. These clubs all tended to debate typical fin de siècle concerns: evolution, secularization, and the supernatural. The most logical conclusion, then, is that Peirce and James were not passing the pragmatism baton through a lineage, even if James might have written the history that way. The section that follows will demonstrate that the Metaphysical Club was not nearly as important a guiding force as the larger conversation around psychical research happening in the day that nearly all first- generation pragmatists took part in. In particular, the upcoming section focuses on Peirce, Henri Bergson, F. C. S. Schiller, and James’s engagements with pragmatism. By bringing psychical research into pragmatism’s narrative, it is not just the case that the network we associate with pragmatism changes, but that the writings of existing figures in that network, like Peirce, make more sense. Though this portion of his oeuvre is little studied, a number of published papers did emerge from Peirce's interest in 164 telepathy. At the same time, the role of psychically inclined philosophers like Bergson and Schiller, become more prominent in the narrative of pragmatism’s genealogy.

Charles Sanders Peirce and the “Mother-Wit”

As a former Johns Hopkins University professor and scientist for 32 years for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, Peirce might not seem the most likely candidate to write on telepathy. Peirce, however, was drawn to the subject by two interrelated intellectual commitments. One was his pragmatic commitment to the anti-

Cartesian impossibility of pure doubt. The other was his scientific interest in abnormal psychology. These interests led him to author a study on abnormal psychology with the American psychologist that sought to explain telepathy as a result of abnormal psychology, to write a review of Phantasms of the Living, and to write papers on telepathy like “Telepathy and Perception,” among other essays on related topics like mortality, miracles, and hallucinations, over the course of his career.46 When addressing a subject like telepathy, one’s opinions on doubt and belief are necessary because such an object of inquiry defies accepted scientific boundaries. On the question of doubt, Peirce contends that one must hold a doubt genuinely, acknowledge when one is not in a state of doubt, and avoid rote research, pursuing queries that are personally meaningful. Peirce writes, “Cartesianism … teaches that philosophy must begin with universal doubt,” but Peirce astutely points out that beginning with complete doubt is inherently impossible, and that any “initial skepticism” undertaken by any scientist will be “mere self-deception, and not real doubt” (Philosophical Writings of

46 Peirce’s writings on these topics include: “Telepathy and Perception,” “Logic and Spiritualism” (1905). Peirce also wrote a small piece called “Science and Immortality” in 1887, published in the Christian Register as well as a 1901 article called “Hume on Miracles,” which connects to comments made in his 1906 work entitled “Answers to Questions Concerning My Belief in God.”

165 Peirce 228). In “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce explains that it is only through a genuine struggle with doubt that real intellectual progress is made. As Peirce explains, “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else” (Philosophical Writings of Peirce 10). Belief, in other words, is a precursor to intellectual laziness. As Peirce’s essay title implies, belief carries a stagnant “fixity” about it that is opposite the active nature of scientific inquiry. For Peirce, holding doubt was a matter of courage, and the clinging to belief a weakness: “the instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind,” Peirce explained, “exaggerated into a vague dread of doubt, makes men cling spasmodically to the views they already take” (Philosophical Writings of Peirce 12). This was the line of argumentation shared by Spiritualists in the 1870s, discussed in chapter two, who repeatedly referred to the scientific institution’s disavowal of Spiritualism as cowardly anti-intellectualism. As in the example given by playwright and Spiritualist Epes Sargent, “professors at Harvard University tried to put a stop to these astounding and now established phenomena by denouncing ‘any connection with Spiritualistic circles, so called,’ as ‘corrupting the morals and degrades the intellect’” (125). Peirce was certainly no believer in telepathy, but his writings indicate that he saw the importance of examining Spiritualism and allied phenomena. Peirce was far from being an epistemological pessimist. For Peirce, it was very important that scientists not merely test anything in a rote manner simply for the sake of testing -- it was important that a person genuinely care about what they were researching because he held the view it is in the struggle for belief that real scientific inquiry occurs. He argued, “the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real and living doubt, 166 and without this all discussion is idle” (Philosophical Writings of Peirce 11). If a research question is not personally meaningful, in other words, discussion of it will be weak. Spiritualists were the first ones to carry forward this line of thinking and it carries an implicit attack on the research university model, whether Peirce intended that or not. So while Peirce was himself in a genuine state of doubt with regards to Spiritualism, his critique was not in investigating the matter whatsoever, merely in the fact that its investigators seemed too impartial to him towards the side of belief. Peirce, as his body of work shows, was completely open to the asking of any question that was personally meaningful in a scientific forum. The fact that he made his first principle of reason “Do not block the way of inquiry!” is a testament to the spirit of psychical research, and not in conflict with scientific skepticism by any means since psychical researchers were avowedly skeptics. (Philosophical Writings of Peirce 54). While Peirce was unconvinced by tests of telepathic phenomena, he did find them scientifically indispensable in another arena: abnormal psychology -- a point supported by works like Taylor’s Consciousness Beyond the Margin. In Peirce’s eyes, it was in the field of abnormal psychology that psychical researchers were unwittingly making their greatest breakthroughs. Peirce was fascinated by the “unconscious or semi-conscious” mind --- that great reservoir of instinct he believed to be our “mother-wit” which, through her evolution, had “learned” to follow nature’s laws (Writings of C. S. Peirce lxxix). One can see this interest developing in Peirce’s 1884 paper, co-authored with psychologist Joseph Jastrow, titled “Small Differences in Sensation” in which Peirce and Jastrow found that even when subjects “claimed to detect no difference between two sensations of pressure, they correctly guessed which of the two was greater in three cases out of five” (Stephen Braude 206). For Peirce the subtle perception shown in this test held “highly important practical bearings” 167 (Stephen Braude 7.35), because it offered scientific insight into the seemingly unknown regions in the development of the human brain, showing that our “mother- wit” or instinct is not so mysterious at all, but is merely better at gathering information than our conscious mind could ever imagine. Peirce wrote,

It gives new reason for believing that we gather what is passing in one another’s minds in large measure from sensations so faint that we are not fairly aware of having them, and can give no account of how we reach our conclusions about such matters. The insight of females as well as certain “telepathic” phenomena may be explained in this way. Such faint sensations ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assiduously cultivated by every man. (Peirce as quoted in Hacking 434)

Though the Peirce-Jastrow experiments sound like a historical oddity to some today for their examination of telepathy and so-called “feminine intuition,” they were actually using a method known as randomization to do their testing, a groundbreaking approach for the 1880s. Randomization is important to understand because it was used in the testing ground battles between belief and science as pragmatism was emerging. Philosopher of science Ian Hacking describes the Peirce-Jastrow experiments in randomization as at the genesis of randomization becoming a dominant process. Hacking helpfully defines randomization as a process where the “population is stratified into blocks with different social characteristics, and then selections are made within the strata” (428). This includes testing methods like the placebo effect, which seem obvious today, but which, as Hacking points out, didn’t have textbooks devoted to them until R.A. Fisher’s 1935 work The Design of Experiments and didn’t actually fall into popular formalized use until the 1930s (Hacking 430). According to Hacking, “psychic research may seem an implausible place to study the emergence of a new kind of experimental methodology. Yet it is there that we find the first faltering use, by many investigators, of a technique that is now standard in many sciences . . . randomization” (Hacking 427).

168 Peirce and Jastrow received praise for their work. One reviewer exclaimed that theirs was the first “where the experimentation was performed according to a precise, mathematically sound randomizing scheme!” (Hacking 432). In 1884, when Peirce wrote about the results in “Small Differences in Sensation” the word “telepathy” had been coined by F.W.H. Myers only two years prior (“Report of the Literary Committee”). That same year, , who conducted extensive work on psychical research, split-personality disorder, and automatic writing, also published work on telepathy conducted via randomization trials.47 Richet had been reading the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research with enthusiasm since they came out in 1882, and, like Jastrow and Peirce, wanted to apply this new statistical method to the examination of telepathic powers in the population at large. Richet, however, was far less of a skeptic than Peirce. Richet’s trials read like an elaborate version of the Victorian parlor game, the “Willing Game,” where participants play at being telepathic, guessing what is on one another’s minds, and so on. In Richet’s experiment, an “agent” would draw a playing card at random and concentrate upon it for a short time, after which a “reagent” would attempt to guess the suit (Hacking 438). Approximately “2,927 guesses were made by various reagents in sequences of various lengths. In each sequence the expected number of successes was compared with the actual number, and a rather primitive statistical inference was drawn” (Hacking 438). Richet’s conclusions were rather sensational: “Among adult persons in good health who are not hypnotized, it is possible that mental suggestion [i.e., what the SPR was calling telepathy] can be experienced. This mental suggestion is even, in a small measure,

47 Though this study has not emphasized the work of Charles Richet, he was a prominent psychical researcher whose work James would have been familiar with. In Thirty Years of Psychical Research, he synthesizes his own work, and the work of James, Myers, Lodge, Barrett and others, offering an overview of the psychical research movement. 169 probable, but with a probability that scarcely exceeds 1/16 [a misprint for 1/10]” (Richet quoted in Hacking 438). Richet continued his studies in a mode that James and SPR later gravitated towards, focusing on “sensitives” over the population at large. Nevertheless, in the early years of the society, statistical testing via randomization was most popular. Perhaps inspired by Richet and Peirce’s 1887 works, SPR’s Phantasms of the Living was also (allegedly) conducted via randomization, though Peirce was highly critical of SPR for their shortcomings in using the same method of randomization that he had used in his study with Jastrow. Perhaps he was protecting the science of randomization, or perhaps it was his pragmatic allegiance to doubt as a principle for inquiry, but Peirce’s review of Phantasms of the Living could not have been harsher. As explained in chapter two, Phantasms of the Living was the survey conducted by Gurney, Myers, and , a “census” of persons who had hallucinated the presence of a person known to them within twelve hours of the latter’s death without any awareness that the person was in any danger. It is true that actual references to randomizing in Phantasms are scant.48 In Peirce’s view, the results were completely botched by the three authors’ own collective will to believe. Peirce accused the trio of trying to “cipher out some very enormous odds in favor of the hypothesis of ghosts,” creating impressive numbers “which captivate the ignorant, but which repel thinking men, who know that no human certitude reaches such figures of trillions, or even billions, to one” (Peirce quoted in Hacking 445). The debate between Gurney and Peirce carried on for some 74-odd pages in the Proceedings of SPR. They clearly were not forgotten by Peirce when he continued his work on Telepathy and Perception published in 1903.

48 There are references here and there to their method like this one, “Out of 2,624 trials, where the most probable number of successes was 29, the actual number obtained was no less than 275.” (Phantasms vol. 1 34). 170 Peirce’s later work from 1903, his most direct commentary on telepathy, “Telepathy and Perception” deftly weaves together his earlier thoughts on the nature of perception, the difference between raw sensorial data, and our perceptual judgments of that data. In an argument about the subtle perceptions of change, Peirce writes that science must pursue these ever finer gradations of sensitivity before giving up and determining them to be an instance of “telepathic” powers. In his work on telepathy as in his study conducted with Jastrow on abnormal psychology there is something of Zeno’s Paradox about the way that Peirce views perception. For Peirce the answer to these unsolved mysteries lies in the ability to zoom in on an instant in which subtle changes are occurring. Recalling the scientific climate described in chapter one where the recent discovery of radio waves and X-ray led even ordinary laypeople to view reality as existing on invisible spectra, Peirce’s interest in fine-tuning observation to pick up subtleties makes added sense. Behind all of Peirce’s thinking was an overriding tendency to regard the human mind or “mother-wit” as having its own evolutionary instinct for the truth. Peirce acknowledges that potentiality of telepathy because “Science no more denies that there are miracles and mysteries than it asserts them” (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 362). For Peirce, though, he finds it impossible to adequately study telepathy at this time for two reasons. One is that we have no way of ever separating our “mother-wit” or instinctive subconscious from the moment which contains our memories and infinite minor cues which might help us to “appear” to receive a telepathic answer, which we could have only appeared to intuit when in reality it came to us via imperceptible cues (as argued in the study with Jastrow, “Small Differences in Sensation”). The second is that scientific processes are always arrived at via conjectures and so it is impossible to parse whether we’ve made a lucky conjecture or experienced a genuine telepathic phenomenon. Peirce’s 171 “Telepathy and Perception” is lengthy and complex, but I will sketch his position as it relates to psychical research and the development of pragmatism. First, Peirce cautions that “there is no such thing as an absolute instant, there is nothing absolutely present either temporarily or in the sense of confrontation” (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 384). Instead, Peirce asserts that the present is always a mixture of past and future with our experience of it also tainted by our own memory and sense of anticipation no matter how much we might narrow our focus. Peirce calls any sensory data “percipuum.” Percipuum is any new data which “forces itself upon your acknowledgment . . . so that if anybody asks you why you should regard it as appearing so and so, all you can say is ‘I can’t help it. That is how I see it’” (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 379). According to Peirce, in parsing out data there is no distinction between this new, external “percipuum” data and the pre-existing internal data of our own memories and anticipations such that “there is no percipuum so absolute as not to be subject to possible error” (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 393). In the simplest terms, Peirce is saying that our own memories and anticipations are always getting in the way, making it impossible for us to perceive anything in the present moment with perfect accuracy. In asserting the impossibility of telepathy based on our consciousness’s hazy mixture of memory and anticipation that obstructs our ability to accurately perceive pure data or “percipuum,” as he calls it, Peirce comes full circle to his 1868 writings on pragmatism, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” We can’t perceive any data accurately in the same way that we can’t pursue any question without prejudice. In science, Peirce asserts that it would be “mere self-deception” to pretend to exist in a pure Cartesian state of doubt when conducting an experiment in a scenario where we hold pre- existing beliefs that conflict with our experiment. The true science recognizes her doubts 172 and beliefs and grapples with them. By the same token, in these psychic experiments, Peirce returns to the pragmatic assertion that we can’t escape our beliefs, and can’t escape the detritus of our stream of consciousness to ever achieve certainty about something like “telepathic clarity.” What we can do, for Peirce, is predicated on his firm adherence to evolution, though like many late-nineteenth century thinkers he used creative license in his concept of evolution. It makes sense that evolution played a role in particular in Peirce’s understanding of telepathy and scientific progress. In Peirce’s day, three of the thinkers who loomed largest all predicated their intellectual developments on evolution. Hegel in philosophy, Lyell in geology, and Darwin (along with Alfred Russel Wallace) in biology. Peirce maintained that most instances of telepathy had a probable organic explanation within abnormal psychology, yet they remained “a question to be investigated as soon as we can see our way to doing so intelligently” (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 396). Why is it, Peirce asks, that we have been able from the first humans to the present day to guess rightly and to progress forward? Peirce explains that “no length of time . . . would have been sufficient to educate . . . primitive man . . . even to the state of mind of Aristotle” without some sort of ineffable ability to progress forward (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 394). As Peirce puts it, we have had “some decided tendency toward preferring truthful hypotheses such that . . . it is absolutely necessary to admit some original connection between human ideas, and the events that the future was destined to unfold” (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 394). Yet then Peirce immediately cautions: “But that is something very like telepathy” (Collected Papers of Peirce VII 394). Peirce then acknowledges that telepathy is so unlikely, that a physicist is just as likely to accidentally “hit upon the truth” as anyone is to prove that telepathy is real

(Collected Papers of Peirce VII 394). Yet despite his skepticism, Peirce was no stranger 173 to mystical, sentimentalist portrayals of evolution. Written while he was down on his luck financially, Peirce’s 1893 work “Evolutionary Love” condemns the nineteenth century’s “gospel of greed,” which he blames, incorrectly, partly on Darwin’s Origin of Species, arguing for a return to the “Gospel of Christ” and of the “Sensible Heart.” Despite his skepticism with regards to telepathy, Peirce’s pragmatist view of the evolution of truth as seen in his conception of the instinctual center of “mother wit” is clearly a quasi-mystical one. Interestingly, Peirce’s mystical depiction of evolution is, at the same time, not so different from another figure influential in the implementation of James’s pragmatism, Bergson, with his concept of élan vital.

Henri Bergson’s Élan Vital

In Peirce’s writings and the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson there exist a number of affinities, particularly an important common principle in evolution: intuition. Intuition, for both philosophers, is a vital impulse that regulates the divide between sentiment and rationality, a mental faculty whose development remains mysterious. It has just been demonstrated that for Peirce, the evolutionary role of intuition was in shaping the subtle structure of what Peirce called the “mother-wit” or ultimate instinctual center of mind which on a broader, meta level, Peirce believed guided all scientific inquiry. For Bergson, the heart of intuition is quite similar functionally, though guided by a mystic principle Peirce would have not have leapt to – that is, Bergson’s concept of élan vital, or, an essential creative living energy guiding all of evolution. Published the same year as James’s Pragmatism, Bergson’s 1907 work Creative Evolution describes élan vital, often translated as “vital impulse,” as a force guiding all living matter, and at the highest level, guiding human intuition. As Thomas A. Goudge explains, the process of evolution via élan vital is not linear. For Bergson, “the

174 history of living forms on the earth reveals three distinct evolutionary lines. One of these led to the vegetable kingdom . . . the second gave rise to arthropods . . . the third line produced the vertebrates and eventually man” (18). “Through human beings, intellect became a powerful means,” affording our species “a position to cultivate the fragile and flickering power of intuition through which ultimate reality is revealed” (Goudge 18). Like most late nineteenth-century views of evolution posing alternatives to Darwin’s, Bergson’s puts humans in a special rank above and beyond animals, a position afforded to them, according to Bergson, by their intuition. The unities between Peirce and Bergson’s thought were quickly and elegantly assembled by James in A Pluralistic Universe. James exceled at marshaling all thinkers and trends of his day together. In the appendix to the series of lectures that compose A Pluralistic Universe James elaborates upon the significance in the overlap between Peirce and Bergson’s views in that both offer an explanation of how novelties change our perception over time to create scientific progress. “Mr. Peirce’s views, tho [spelling in original] reached so differently, are altogether congruous with Bergson’s” (William James Writings 1902-1910 815). The similarity in Bergson’s and Peirce’s views lie in their insistence upon change and novelty being processes which work gradually in confluence with the human intuitive, creative instinct. The process of change is so gradual that “To an observer standing outside of its generating causes, novelty can appear as only so much ‘chance,’ while to one who stands inside it is the expression of ‘free creative activity’” (Ibid). James explains that:

The common objection to admitting novelties is that by jumping abruptly in ex nihilo, they shatter the world’s rational continuity. Peirce meets this objection by combining his tychism with an express doctrine of “synechism” or continuity, the two doctrines merging into the higher synthesis on which he bestows the name of “agapasticism” (loc. cit., iii, 188), which means exactly the same thing as Bergson’s “évolution créatrice.” Novelty, as empirically found, doesn’t arrive by 175 jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datum being both a coming and a going . . . if such a synechistic pluralism as Peirce, Bergson, and I believe in, be what really exists, every phenomenon of development, even the simplest, would prove equally rebellious to our science should the latter pretend to give us literally accurate instead of approximate, or statistically generalized, pictures of the development of reality. (William James Writings 1902-1910 815-819)

The two terms that James mentions here that Peirce coined, “tychism” and “synechism,” were ideas of Peirce’s working in tandem to explain the mystery of human consciousness in the midst of evolution. Tychism, for Peirce, is the generative drive behind growth, the element of absolute chance in the universe. According to Peirce, “tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth” (Philosophical Writings of Peirce 339). So, tychism’s generative randomness grows a world, and the world it grows across is one in a state of eternal fixity, or as Peirce terms it, synechism, encompassing elements like space and time which are eternally fixed.49 Synechism and tychism, for Peirce, exist together to create a synthesis: agapasticism, an idea explored by Peirce in his essay “Evolutionary Love” whereby evolution can occur in a positive light, in a “doctrine of love he [Peirce] regards as opposed to the ethical individualism (the ‘gospel of greed’) springing from nineteenth-century political economy and given expression by [common din de siècle misinterpretations of] Darwinism” (xiv Buchler).

49 In an 1893 manuscript “Immortality in the Light of Synechism,” Peirce applied his doctrine of synechism to make a case for the possible immortality of the human soul. He argued that due to fallibilism, the idea that “no experiential question can be answered with absolute certainty” we must remain open to various conceptions of the afterlife, be it social, physical, or spiritual. Because for Peirce truth is “embodied by the universe as a whole” what he calls “eternal truth” “as an archetypal idea can never fail; and in the world to come is destined to a special spiritual embodiment” (Collected Papers of Peirce Vol. VII 346). Peirce was characteristically non-committal about the afterlife, but implied that his principle of synechism could potentially unify religion and science. 176 What Peirce and Bergson find about novelty or the emergence of new ideas and datum, James is saying, is that science has thus far given us no truly accurate way to measure it. As James puts it quite strongly in the aforementioned quotation, it would be nice if science could even “pretend to give us literally accurate instead of approximate, or statistically generalized, pictures of the development of reality,” but it can’t (William James Writings 1902-1910 819). Scientific progress and evolution are, in the view presented by James, mysterious and not always governed by accepted scientific forces, nor are they currently accurately measured by scientists, according to James. There is, in the accounts of James, Peirce, and Bergson, an element of spiritual mystery in all scientific discovery that works through intuition. For Peirce, it is not yet possible for scientists to explore novelty, but for Bergson and James, it is merely neglected work remaining to be done by organizations like the Society for Psychical Research. The admission of novelties over time, the mysterious way in which one’s consciousness lands intuitively upon a correct hypothesis which was described as a scientific-mystical process by both Bergson and Peirce, is one Bergson explored more in depth in his role as President of SPR. In his 1913 address, “Phantasms of the Living and Psychical Research” (“Fantômes des Vivants et Recherche Psychique”), Bergson explained that we live in a world of newly discovered mysteries – that we now know: “We produce electricity at every moment, the atmosphere is continually electrified” (Mind Energy 80). By the same token, Bergson analogizes, “if telepathy be real, it is natural, and . . . whenever the day comes that we know its conditions, it will no more be necessary to wait for a ‘phantasm of the living’ . . . than it is necessary for us now, if we wish to see an electric spark, to wait until it pleases the heavens to make it appear during a thunderstorm” (Mind Energy 80). According to Bergson, “The more we become accustomed to this idea of a consciousness overflowing the organism, the more natural 177 we find it to suppose that the soul survives the body” (Mind Energy 97). In Bergson’s poetic speech one finds repeated references to the notion of consciousness as something extra, beyond the body. Like many popular concepts of the fin de siècle, the concept of the élan vital – is characterized by an interest in a sense of superfluity, of an overflowing life-force that animates and unifies all life. In shaping pragmatism, it was Bergson’s openness to the superfluity of consciousness as rendered through his concept of élan vital that most inspired James, given James’s own adherence to an “open system” of truth. In assessing the relevance of Bergson’s work, James praised Bergson in A Pluralistic Universe, writing that he had inspired him “to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be” (Pluralistic 225). It had induced him, he continued, “to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably” as a method, for he found that “reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it” (Pluralistic 212).

F.C.S. Schiller: Ally to Pragmatism in England

In 1907, the year that Bergson published Creative Evolution and James published Pragmatism, another often-forgotten first-generation pragmatist, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller published Studies in Humanism. As scholar of Schiller’s work and life, Mark Porrovechio writes, in the 1930s, as pragmatism was at its zenith and books were being written about what the movement was and had been, Schiller was being “largely written out of pragmatism’s history” (“Flowers in the Desert” 5). Schiller was perhaps left out of early histories of pragmatism because he was an outspoken and at times difficult and highly misunderstood person. In Robert D. Richardson’s biography of James, he notes that James “stuck up for” Schiller, in spite of criticism from many (453).

178 According to Richardson, G.H. Palmer found Schiller “insufferable,” Santayana “hated Schiller and his thought,” and Münstberg flat out refused to invite Schiller to his Congress of Arts and Science because Schiller had abandoned his doctoral studies at Cornell and “the Congress was not made for men who are unable to pass a Doctor’s examination in Cornell” (Richardson 453). Nevertheless, James never gave up on his friend, who became a fierce advocate of pragmatism (which he called “humanism”) in England, where he eventually ended up working as a tutor at Corpus Christi College in Oxford. Schiller’s difficult personality may have caused him to be lost from view in the first wave of studies of pragmatism from the 1930s, but exploring the first-generation pragmatists’ overlaps with psychical research brings Schiller back into focus. Schiller’s interest in psychical research and his engagement with psychical researchers dates back to the early years of SPR. F. W. H. Myers, for example, writes about “experiments with the planchette conducted by Oxford philosopher F.C.S. Schiller and his siblings” in an article he published on automatic writing in 1887 (Taves “Religious Experience” 312). Schiller’s Studies in Humanism was praised by Scratch Eight member Carveth Read for the way that it aimed to “reconcile science with religion” in true pragmatist fashion (Read 393). Read called the book’s tackling of the subject of psychical research “courageous” (Read 393). In it, Schiller had “advocated psychical research as a hopeful method of verifying the doctrine of immortality” (Read 393). This was important work according to Read, as he put it, “comparing the postulates of science and religion, is it not plain that, unless science is to be overthrown, some way entirely different from popular religion must be found for the redemption, or moral strengthening and consolation of mankind?” (Read 393) – This way should be found, according to Carveth, by the pragmatists, those with “power both of philosophy and literature -- of whom there are 179 eminent examples amongst the Pragmatists -- to devote themselves to discovering and preparing such a way of peace” (Read 394). Studies in Humanism tackled the divide between science and religion via psychical research. In the chapter “The Progress of Psychical Research,” Schiller offers an overview of SPR’s significance within the world of science. He begins by challenging facts, “Facts, in short, are far from being rigid, irresistible, triumphant forces of nature; rather they are artificial products of our selection, of our interests, of our hopes, of our fears” (Studies 371). For Schiller, facts are arbitrary because “facts bearing on the subject [of]. . . ghosts, trances, inspirations, dreams, fancies, illusions, hallucinations, and the like” have always been (Studies 372). “Divergent prejudices,” according to Schiller, “have always been strong to emphasise (sic) whatever told in their favour . . . Of such interpretations the two extremes have always been conspicuous. The one is often called the superstitious and the other the scientific” (Studies 372). It is only via psychical research, Schiller argues, that we have begun to see some headway in the dividing line between science and superstition, belief and fact. Along with Myer’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Schiller cites James’s 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience as one of the “notable books proceeding from the inner circles of the Society for Psychical Research,” praising the book for having “signally shown the psychological significance of much that from the pathological point of view would seem sheer excesses of spiritual morbidity” (Studies 373). While James investigated religion for its therapeutic and psychological valences, Schiller advertised the scientific investigation of religion as a means for strengthening the church, the “church could be indefinitely strengthened,” Schiller wrote, “if it could obtain further verification of the evidence on which its claims are based” (Studies 389).

180 Perhaps not surprisingly, Schiller, like Peirce and Bergson, was adamantly interested in a teleological view of evolution. Schiller began exploring his views in his first book, The Riddles of the Sphinx. In the book, Schiller argued that the point of evolution, or, “the world-process” was that it “will come to an end when all the spirits whom it is designed to harmonise (sic) [by a higher power] have been united in a perfect society” (Riddles 435). Schiller’s quasi-religious views led him to articulate the importance of belief for the outcome of the individual even before James’s 1897 “Will to Believe” again, highlighting how much James’s thought was not his alone, but a conclusion others came to in the same era. As Schiller puts it, “in action especially we are often forced to act upon slight possibilities. Hence, if it can be shown that our solution is a possible answer, and the only possible alternative to pessimism, to a complete despair of life, it would deserve acceptance, even though it were but a bare possibility” (Riddles 5). The admiration between James and Schiller cut both ways. The two became lifelong friends after first being mutual admirers of each other’s writings, and would stick up for each other in the midst of philosophical debates. In his 1907 preface to Pragmatism James recommended that any reader interested in the topic of pragmatism should further consult Schiller’s Studies in Humanism and went to great lengths to defend Schiller’s conception of pragmatism which Schiller called Humanism. Schiller’s humanism asks us to accept that we live in a man-made world of man-made beliefs. Schiller’s humanism refers to “the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products” and that “Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist.” James explained that Schiller’s humanism had opened Schiller to “attack” and vowed to use his lecture to defend “the humanist position” – a position characterized by the pragmatic 181 need to exist in a world that is open to the possibility of human belief (William James Writings 1902-1910 592). James first came into contact with Schiller’s writing while in the summer of 1897, when on a three-week trip to the woods of Keene Valley, New York he brought along Schiller’s Riddles of the Sphinx. James wrote an encouraging note to Schiller, who was at the time working on his doctorate at Cornell, congratulating him on the book. Schiller wrote back enthusiastically, “Need I say that you may count on me in every way in your prospective campaign against the Absolute” (Schiller quoted in Richardson 367). The two quickly became academic colleagues in the pragmatism venture. On a 1906 trip to Maine, as pragmatism was taking off, James wrote excitedly to Schiller, “things are drifting tremendously in our direction . . . it reminds me of the Protestant reformation!” (James quoted in Richardson 482). Like all great changes, however, the reformation that pragmatism brought had been decades in the making. As just explored, psychical research influenced all of the first generation pragmatists in dramatic ways. For Peirce, psychical research influenced his concept of subtle, gradual change in our ultimate intuitive center, what he called the “mother-wit.” Peirce shared an interest in a spiritual concept of evolution with Bergson, whose élan vital was similarly predicated on an ultimate, sacred, intuitive force governing evolution. At the same time, Schiller, sharing these views, contributed a number of practical arguments challenging the facticity of the division between the superstitious and the scientific.

James and the Method of Personal Inquiry

When reading James’s work on pragmatism without knowledge of his background in the fin de siècle psychical research, it’s much easier to miss something very significant

182 about what pragmatism does: it suggests a protocol for engaging our beliefs. There are a number of misapprehensions about pragmatism, but among the most common is the misconception in how it relates to belief. A better understanding of James’s work in psychical research can help to clarify that misunderstanding. Pragmatism does not dictate that one may simply adhere to a belief out of the “cash value” of happiness that such a belief may bring. Such intellectual passivity held no interest for James. Pragmatism was by no means advocating any manner of ambivalent “agnostic rules for truth seeking,” although James rightly predicted that his philosophy would be misunderstood in that manner (William James Writings 1878-1899 477). According to James, the detractors who see pragmatism in this narrow light tend to dismiss it by saying that any “rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truths if those kinds of truths were really there, would be an irrational rule” (William James Writings 1878-1899 477). James exclaimed that those people are right. Such a rule of thinking would be like an ostrich burying its head in the sand, if that was what pragmatism was, but it wasn’t. A better understanding of pragmatism emerges from considering its function as an active way of problem solving, owing to its origins in debates between religion and science that emerged during the fin de siècle and were tested through psychical research. In The Will to Believe, published eleven years before Pragmatism, James was already sketching out the most fundamental aspect of pragmatism: that it means one must pursue “living options.” As James puts it:

Experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink radically from saying with me, in abstracto, that we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will. I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious hypothesis which for you is dead. The freedom to “believe what we 183 will” you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, “Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true.” I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider. (William James Writings, 1878-1899: 477)

As a psychical researcher, James was adamantly anti-superstition, although the most common misperception about psychical researchers and about pragmatists is that both authorize superstition. Psychical researchers were for eradicating superstition, for leaving no stone unturned in a scientific quest to actively engage superstitions, to ask why superstitions are so prevalent in our consciousness and in our culture, and to see whether their “cash value” lay in real, quantifiable bizarre phenomena in the world, or in the equally underexplored world of abnormal psychology. In the passage quoted above, James is proselytizing the psychical research agenda: to undo all dogma and superstition. For James and his psychical research colleagues, true belief is never the result of an inherited indoctrination. The ultimate consequence of this, the root of pragmatism, for James, is that one’s beliefs must galvanize one to think and to act and the only way for one’s beliefs to create that galvanizing spark in an individual is if they come from a genuinely personal inward questioning. “Living options” for James, are the questions which must always come from the individual themselves, and although this seems like a call to a revolution in religious thinking, in the afterlife of James’s work, it has rippled out to have the broadest impact in pedagogical thinking in that it calls for the importance of research that holds personal meaning. Part of James’s genius lies in his ability to weave the same principles throughout his entire career to all scales, applying ideas at once to the research laboratory for graduate students and to a classroom for primary school students. James’s lecture “Interest” from Talks to Teachers, expresses the pedagogical angle of this view, where he 184 suggests that teachers should blend the student’s personal interests into their lesson plans because, “the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing” (Writings 1878-1899 768). Teachers, James says, must locate these natural points of interest and integrate them into their existing curricula so that the student’s concentration “suffuses the entire system of objects of thought” (Writings 1878-1899 768). The real heart of Jamesian pragmatism, then, lies in understanding our very personal motivations for why we seek what we seek, and in continually asking ourselves whether the thing we seek has any authentically private meaning for us. James’s idea of the self, that center of personal meaning which James held to be sacred, translated over into his work on abnormal psychology and psychical research, both of which led him to the “subjective method,” or introspective psychology (Richardson 195). The subjective method involved listening to the patient and treating the patient, not merely as a brain, but as a total system. James began articulating this emphasis on the subjective method and the functional uses for psychology in his 1878 Lowell Lectures for the general public, focusing on the physiology of the brain and its relation to the mind. James explained that he rejected psychophysics, because of psychophysics’ assertion “that the only sound psychological science is that founded in physiology” (Manuscript Lectures 34). James preferred instead the “subjective method” which involved carefully listening to the subject. In other words, as James put the subjective method into words, “When a man tells you he is cold, cold he is, however little cause you might see for it” (Manuscript Lectures 34). This introspective or subjective method was one James credited “for almost all of our permanently secure psychological knowledge” (Manuscript Lectures 34). By treating the whole patient, James was drawing a line in the sand in a battleground between “the old views of mental action all based on a 185 priori speculations and metaphysics” on the one hand, and “the most brutal materialism” on the other (Manuscript Lectures 30). James’s synthesis between metaphysics and brute materialism finds expression through the evolution of his concept of radical empiricism. The emergence of radical empiricism can be seen evolving from The Principles of Psychology to later essays on radical empiricism like “Does Consciousness Exist?” and “How Two Minds Can Know the Same Thing.” In The Principles of Psychology James paved the way for his theory of radical empiricism by establishing a rich precedent for a holistic view of temporal and spatial relations. James posits this view in opposition to the atomist view that “our mental states are composite in structure, made up of smaller states conjoined” (Principles 145). While the atomist theorizes a simple, discrete view of sensorial events, James pictures the mind as a unified suffusion of past memories and present experience. He describes this through an analogy drawn between the consciousness of an individual and the transitory experience of observing the meteorological phenomena of a thunderstorm:

Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder (Principles 240).

James here is effectively explaining that an individual can never perceive an object (here the thunder) in isolation, but, rather, that one must always observe all phenomena in relation to all of the other elements that existed in that individual’s consciousness at (and before) that time. The thunder and clouds here are meant to signify the once-and-never- again state of each unique moment experienced – an experience that is always indivisible from its constituent parts. Given this state of affairs, James makes the Heraclitan assertion that it is “a physiological impossibility” to have the same experience twice

186 (Principles 233). James writes, “Experience is remoulding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date” (Principles 234). As James explains in Principles “No one ever had a simple idea . . . Consciousness . . . is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple ideas are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree” (Principles 224). James’s interest in attention is worth noting here because it resonates with his experiments in psychical research and the related field of physics as they would eventually come to influence his essays in radical empiricism. As discussed previously, Richard Noakes has argued that some British experimental physicists, like Oliver Lodge, due to their “recalcitrant instruments” and related problems in the laboratory, were moved to a position of sympathy towards psychical inquiry and Spiritualist séances. Noakes’s article is important because it establishes a fundamental problem among psychical researchers of the late nineteenth century – that they existed on a continuum with professional scientists in reassessing what could count as a valid experiment, especially as this relates to the potential flaws inherent in human perception. Noakes illustrates Lodge’s commitment to the openness of psychical research through Lodge’s work with N-rays, a form of radiation that René Blondlot brought to the public’s attention in 1903 with the claim that it could increase “the brightness of electric sparks and phosphorescent screens” (53). Just like the séances of the Spiritualist mediums James studied, N-rays were “best seen under dim lighting and many of those who did see the effects ascribed them to subjective impressions” (Noakes 53). Many physicists used the curious experiment of squinting to see the quasi-imperceptible N-rays to illustrate “how sensory hallucinations could occur in established sciences such as physics” yet Lodge took this same logic and went in a different direction: turning it into “an argument for the 187 experimental virtues of experienced physicists . . . Skilled physicists better understood how deceptive their own senses and instruments could be . . . and thus had the very qualities needed in the psychical researcher” (Noakes 53). In “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” printed two years after the discovery of N-rays in 1905, James extrapolates on the relation between experimental physics and radical empiricism, revealing that his interest in this arena was at least helpful in shaping radical empiricism. Interestingly, James explains how something as complex and unrepeatable as experience can “conceivably enter into two” minds using illustrations from experimental physics, and the concept of the ether. James returns here to his original rejection of atomism and praise of holism of the mental faculties first expressed in Principles which are responsible for experience by drawing an analogy to the ether. “So an air particle or an ether particle ‘compounds’ the different directions of movement imprinted on it without obliterating their several individualities. It delivers them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several ‘receivers’ (ear, eye or what not) as may be ‘tuned’ to that effect” (Writings 1902-1910 1187). This grandiose metaphor of the ether then leads James to his explanation of how two minds can know the same thing. As we know from James, “experience comes on an enormous scale, and if we take them all together, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations” (Writings 1902-1910 1190). The trick, for James, is in recognizing that the way in which two minds can know the same thing is via what James refers to as “an Absolute, a ‘pure’ experience on an enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable [sp. in original] into thought and thing” (Writings 1902-1910 1191). The way, for James, in which we think we know two different sets of thought experiences “yours” and “mine” is through staking out a portion of that Absolute possessively as “one undivided estate is owned by several heirs” (Writings 1902-1910 188 1191). Thus, according to James, speculations of collective unconscious style concepts like Fechner’s Earth-soul, “of wider spans of consciousness enveloping narrower ones throughout the cosmos, are, therefore, philosophically quite in order” (Writings 1902- 1910 1192). James’s radical empiricism then begins with a reassessment of temporal and spatial relations in Principles of Psychology but is routed through concepts in experimental physics like the ether to more speculative terrain. The storm cloud perceived by one mind passes and we move onto the idea of an overlying absolute, a reservoir in which all minds are unified. This stream of thought is clearly one James linked to his work in psychical research. As he writes in “Confidences of a Psychical Researcher,” just as “islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences” (Writings 1902-1910 1264). From the practical examination of the human psyche, James’s work on radical empiricism opens his philosophy out onto the broad, pluralistic terrain of shared experience via what James calls the “Absolute.” It makes sense that James, an expert in ideas so wide ranging would also work on the more grounding world of pragmatism. James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism are linked in tandem, because in order to aid the development of psychology, James had to work in this pragmatic middle-ground between metaphysical speculation and brute materialism. As James later put it, pragmatism, as a philosophy “can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with the facts” (William James Writings 1902-1910 500-501). In the preface to The Principles of Psychology, James articulated his task most eloquently as a striving to create a new kind of “metaphysics alive to the weight of her task” (Principles vii). Though James acknowledged that such a time when such a metaphysics may emerge may be “centuries hence,” he asserted that in the “meanwhile the best mark of health that a 189 science can show is this unfinished-seeming front” (Principles vii). Psychical research, for James, was vital in creating this messy middle ground that wrested psychology away from mere metaphysics and “brutal materialism.” James wrote, “almost all the fresh life that has come into psychology of recent years has come from the biologists, doctors, and psychical researchers” (James quoted in Richardson 331). James’s reference to breakthroughs “centuries hence” was a clear nod to his work as a psychical researcher. It was in working with psychical researchers that James had first began to evolve his complex idea of the self. In his talk given to Scratch Eight members in London in 1883, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” James began developing his idea of consciousness as a Heraclitean stream, but his emphasis was on the way this idea, the importance of the inner world, had been overlooked, “What immense tracts of our inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities” (Essays in Psychology 143). That which had been overlooked for James was the hidden, mystical element of consciousness. During the late 1880s, he would continue to explore this element and develop it more fully through a concept coined by the French psychologist Pierre Janet, that of the “hidden self.” In the 12-year process of assembling The Principles of Psychology, James’s theory of the self as a sacred, mystery-bound entity came to be most fully articulated via his engagement with Janet’s “hidden self.” In January 1894 James read Janet’s L'état Mental des Hystériques with enthusiasm. As James informed a friend, Janet’s work “seems to outweigh in importance all the ‘exact’ laboratory measurements put together,” and “opened an entirely new chapter in human nature” inaugurating “a new method of relieving human suffering” (Richardson 335). James had already met Janet at the August 1889 First International Congress of Physiological Psychology and had seen Janet present his thesis work at the overlapping Congress of Experimental and therapeutic Hypnotism. 190 Janet’s idea of the “hidden self” was one he developed while working with various women then deemed “hysterics” at the Salpêtrière. James described Janet’s experiments at length in his 1889 publication for Scribner’s, simply titled, after Janet’s work, “The Hidden Self.” James was perhaps so excited by the work because Janet had used the then popular methodologies of psychical research – hypnosis and automatic writing – to achieve remarkable results. The patient whom Janet describes most in depth is the young “hysteric” woman Lucie. In her conscious day-to-day life, Janet explains, Lucie suffers from a nearly total sense of anesthesia, partial deafness, and blindness. Yet Janet found that when he hypnotized Lucie once, she was nearly entirely cured of the waking problems, and that with each subsequent “pass” of hypnosis, Janet found a more thoroughly salutary version of Lucie, such that Janet concluded it was as though there were three distinct Lucies: Lucie 1, Lucie 2, and Lucie 3 (“The Hidden Self”). The illness was only a psychological one attaching itself to the first iteration of Lucie. Janet had begun to uncover what we today call “multiple personality disorder.” In the “Hidden Self,” James explained that the methodologies used by Janet had been previously utilized by psychical researchers. James mentioned Janet’s use of automatic writing on Lucie. James and his own psychical research colleagues had already found that the “method of automatic writing proves that their [the hypnotized individual’s] perceptions exist, only cut off from communication with the upper consciousness” (“Hidden Self”). The stratified nature of consciousness shown by hypnotism and automatic writing was taken as proof of the existence of the unconscious. Janet’s ultimate thesis, that there can be “This simultaneous coexistence of the different personages into which one human being may be split,” is one James was quick to categorize in a lineage of work done by his psychical research colleague Edmund

Gurney. “Others,” James notes, “as Edmund Gurney, Bernheim, Binet, and more besides, 191 have had the same idea, and proved it for certain cases” (“Hidden Self”). Janet’s claim to fame, according to James, was in that he had “emphasized and generalized it, and shown it to be true universally” (Heart of James 91). James was deeply influenced by Janet’s concept of the “hidden self” and expounded upon it in his own writings throughout his career. In The Will to Believe, meshing Janet’s “hidden self” with late nineteenth century’s fascination with geology and anthropology at once, James labels the “hidden self” as something concealed in the evolutionary recesses of human consciousness:

The deepest thing in our nature is this Binnenleben [hidden life, hidden self] . . . this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingness and unwillingness, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns whose waters exude from the earth’s bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things. (The Will to Believe 62)

In the train of James’s rich interpretation of Janet’s work lie many other interrelated interpretations of selfhood and instinct. In the “Hidden Self,” again, one can identify the threads of influence from Peirce’s “mother wit,” an evolving organ, or the life force of Bergson’s élan vital through James’s depiction of this slow-moving geologic force. Read closely, James’s description of the hidden self, or human consciousness, is parallel to Darwin’s naturalist language of evolution via natural selection. Note that one of the great puzzles left unsolved by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and which gave rise to so many of these creative and unscientific descriptions of evolution was one fundamental question: how did consciousness emerge? James’s use of evolutionary metaphors to explain consciousness parallels the naturalist’s language that Darwin uses to expound evolution via natural selection. In The Principles of Psychology, James engages an early version of his concept of radical empiricism in explaining that thanks to new

192 breakthroughs in psychical research viewing the human psyche in “insulation” would be “rash, in view of the phenomenon of thought-transference, mesmeric influence, and spirit-control, which are being alleged nowadays on better authority than ever before” (Principles 350). James concedes that for him, the most persuasive vision of this “hidden self” is one that the anima mundi represents. James carries the geologic metaphor further in “Confidences of a Psychical Researcher” to suggest that our psyches are like islands and just as “islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences” (Writings 1902-1910 1264). Similarly, in Principles, James “confesses” that he finds, “the notion of some sort of anima mundi thinking in all of us to be a more promising hypothesis, in spite of all its difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual souls” (Principles 346). This may seem a surprisingly mystical declaration to some coming from The Principles of Psychology but the book was far friendlier to a pragmatic sense of the mystical than one might imagine. Though Principles was James’s most serious psychological work, there was still a sense even in Principles that the human mind needed something like companionship that only a concept of a higher power could provide, as James put it: “in spite of all that ‘science’ may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time” to satisfy their social need for higher companionship (Principles 316). The “impulse” to pray, according to James, will always exist because it is a “necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world” (Principles 316). The isolation that the self feels, the seeming “islands” of our consciousness are best bridged, for James, in this life via personal narrative. 193 For James, as for other psychical researchers, literature became the ideal storehouse for collecting these aberrant facts which science did not know what to do with. This works in the pragmatist conception of truth, where literature can fill in gaps in human experience that science in James’s time had not yet been able to explain. As James explains in Pragmatism through Dewey and Schiller’s pragmatic account of truth, “ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of experience” (Writings of William James 1902-1910 512). We can think of James’s use of literature in this way, as anecdotes which help us to better understand the (at that time) scientifically unexplainable portions of our experiences. James’s literariness manifested in two ways: both in James’s humanistic approach to scientific topics and in his actual use of literature to make scientific claims. The literary quality of James’s writing is apparent in even the driest chapters of Principles where James shows his penchant for the creativity of language, coining phrases like “stream of consciousness” and “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” James’s colleague, George Santayana, described Principles as a “work of imagination” written in a “lively style” (Richardson quoting Santayana 305). Rebecca West described James’s method as even more literary than his brother Henry’s, citing the two boys, “one of whom grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction” (West 11). In 1907, James’s colleague from the English department, Allen Nielson, wrote that “It has been one of the glories of the Harvard Department of Philosophy that it contained more men who write with distinction than any other department in the university” (Nielson quoted in Richardson 305). James’s whole corpus is literary in some way in its content, though James became increasingly bolder and more heavy-handed in in his reliance on actual works of literature 194 as his career progressed. where, for instance, in Pragmatism published in 1907 three years before his death, James reprinted portions of Walt Whitman’s (one of his favorite writers) poem “To You.” The poem, with its ending so analogous to the pragmatic conception of truth -- “what you are picks its way” -- must have clearly leapt out and caught James’s attention. James uses it for nearly all of the first fourth of his eighth lecture, “Pragmatism and Religion,” briefly turning the book into a literature lecture to illustrate his philosophy on two ways of perceiving the world which pragmatism respects equally: “the monistic way . . . of quietism, of indifferentism” of a spiritual security, in juxtaposition with “the pluralistic way” which views one’s actions collectively, as “Your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself and others” (William James Writings 1902-1910 608). James’s literary inclination, a hallmark of his style, was built into the framework of his conception of truth. As previously mentioned, according to James “ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of experience” (Writings of William James 1902-1910 512). Yet how did this pragmatic vision of truth, where personal meaning and live questioning lead one to seek relational narratives emerge? An interesting precedent to James’s use of fiction can be found in his earlier collaborations with the Society for Psychical Research, who developed their own inquiries through a similar method of gathering narratives and pursuing live questions with James’s assistance even before James had honed his literary method to its full potential. James, Gurney, and Myers all had in common that they used personal narrative as evidence for their claims. As discussed in chapter two, the first major work of SPR’s literary committee, Phantasms of the Living (1886) was an investigation of “crisis apparitions.” The two-volume, 1,300-page plus work contained 702 such cases. A crisis 195 apparition was defined by SPR as an event wherein a percipient (witness) hears the voice or sees an agent (usually someone known to the percipient) within 12 hours of a severe crisis, usually one that resulted in death. The main argument of Phantasms was that the agent (or sender) had sent the percipient (or receiver) a telepathic message. The method for assembling Phantasms was to have various participants within SPR (including James himself) circulate questionnaires to be run in local publications. Their questionnaire asked: “Since January 1st, 1874, have you ever had a dream of the death of some person known to you, which dream you marked as an exceptionally vivid one, and of which the distressing impression lasted for as long as an hour after you rose in the morning?” (Phantasms 304). The survey was incredibly far-reaching thanks to psychical research’s international network of scholars, and ended up being “put to 5,360 persons” (Phantasms 304). Gurney was utterly exhausted but nervously enthusiastic about the venture. He wrote to his colleague and friend James, “I … have written something like 1,600 letters in the last two months … I cannot regret this as the work must be done … One lives in a world of sporadic interests and small excitements—whether A will answer this question satisfactorily and B that” (Correspondence V. 491). The whole process was so overwhelming that Gurney found himself lamenting “that there are not more hours in the day & more Energy to be got out of one’s ‘grey matter’ between waking & sleeping” (Correspondence V. 491). It was a hallmark of SPR to gather staggeringly maximalist compendiums of personal narrative in order to make a point (for comparison, Phantasms was 1,416 pages long while James’s better known Principles was not quite as long at 1,377 pages). After Myers’ death, Oliver Lodge wrote an obituary in memory of Myers, asking “did any philosopher ever know the facts of the mind . . . with more detailed and intimate knowledge, drawn from personal inquiry . . . than did Frederic Myers?”

(Proceedings vol. XVII 3). According to Lodge, Myers “laid under contribution every 196 abnormal condition studied in the Salpêtrière, in hypnotic trance, in delirium, every state of the mind in placidity and in excitement” (Proceedings vol. XVII 3). SPR was truly devoted on a highly organized and professional level when it came to gathering data. Thus far I have focused on the personal narratives gathered by SPR’s literary committee as featured in works like Phantasms of the Living although the committee did also gather books and works of literature. SPR’s literary committee was generally responsible for “The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on the history of” any subjects pertaining to haunted houses, the apparition of spirits, mesmeric phenomena, and other paranormal occurrences (PSPR I 3-4). In the first issue of their Proceedings, SPR announced that they were attempting to build a library of books from “the last two centuries” in order to create the “nucleus of a valuable library” (PSPR I 116). “Stories of the kind we want,” they explained, “are often to be found scattered through biographies and the general literature of all countries” (PSPR I 116). The Proceedings lists a catalog of their library which ultimately did include a wealth of books on what they perceived to be scientific topics: Spiritualism, psychography, mesmerism, and other usual suspects. There were, however, also works of literature dealing with spiritual questions and the topic of altered states of consciousness, from the voluminous, twelve-part 1839 poem Festus by Philip James Bailey addressing humankind’s relation to God to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (PSPR I 307). Nevertheless, SPR recognized that the majority of their narratives, like the first- hand testimony collected in Phantasms, were not meant to be literary in the sense of thrilling novels. Instead, SPR’s narratives would inevitably appear to any reader as “not only dull, but of a trivial and even ludicrous kind; and . . . quite unspiced for the literary palate. Our tales will resemble neither the Mysteries of Udolpho nor the dignified reports of a learned society” (PSPR I 117). They recognized their goal as primarily in identifying 197 the facts surrounding the “everyday tissue of human existence” (PSPR I 117). Both Gurney and Myers were accomplished poets and humanists in their own right, so they understood what it meant to create and study a fascinating narrative. They recognized that even when literature was used, its appearance would be tedious because it was being mined for data, not creatively explicated. On the same token, their goal was not to embellish the thousands of accounts they received for points of interest, but rather, to view them in composite for similar plot points, so to speak. In other words, SPR’s work in Phantasms and all related projects, like their Census of Hallucinations, were done in the mode of the subjective method of introspective psychology favored by James, a method which was not identical, but which shared clear affinities with James’s style, wherein he used texts as illustrative examples of psychological states and philosophical positions. The use of literature in describing psychological phenomenon was utilized by SPR, but it was most effectively developed by James in his writings to illustrate otherwise complicated ideas.

JAMES’S GIFFORD LECTURES: RE-ENCHANTING SCIENCE IN THE UNIVERSITY

Using a work of literature to illustrate a scientific, psychological claim in an academic institution when universities were increasingly focused on lab work was a truly iconoclastic maneuver, although James himself did fulfill his obligations to do lab work. By his biographer Richardson’s account, he was doing nearly four hours a day at one point -- and he did it dutifully and effectively, teaching laboratory classes to undergraduates every day of the week (Richardson 163). James said on at least one occasion that he resented the work, and was especially disgusted by the disturbing practice of vivisection (Richardson 163). In James’s publications he showed far greater interest in examining human personality through personal narratives. Though James’s

198 masterwork, Principles, was his most thorough, the work that has been most enduringly popular by James has undoubtedly been The Varieties of Religious Experience, which remains a staple among undergraduates even in the 21st century. The enduring popularity of Varieties is due undoubtedly in large part to a realization James had hit upon earlier, published in Talks to Teachers, namely that “the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing” (William James Writings 1878-1899 768). James exploited this principle of personal interest to its fullest degree in Varieties by illustrating psychological concepts with easily relatable examples drawn from works of literature to argue that religion was an intimate matter of psychological types. Because of his revolutionary nature, it is especially fitting that James chose to deliver his work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Gifford Lectures. As will be explained momentarily, Edinburgh’s lectures had a reputation for friendliness towards the kind of path-breaking spiritual-scientific thinking James was interested in, having been established in order to “promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God” (Gifford website). With Varieties, James uses literature to aim most expansively for a natural theology characterized by pluralistic inclusiveness. He describes the whole terrain of religious experience by citing as many varied authors as possible. In these lectures one finds writers in juxtaposition with each other one would otherwise never expect to find between two book covers: George Fox and Margaret Fuller, Sophocles and Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Edwards and Annie Besant, Walt Whitman and Marcus Aurelius, Henry Thoreau and Havelock Ellis. Walt Whitman is used to explain the “once born,” so perennially happy that his soul is a tint of “sky blue” while John Bunyan and Leo Tolstoy are used as examples of the “twice born.” “Neither 199 [John] Bunyan nor [Leo] Tolstoy, could become what we have called healthy-minded,” James warns, “They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two-stories deep” (Varieties 187). In his lecture on “Saintliness,” James turns to the lifestyle of American author Henry David Thoreau to discuss not actual saints, but a natural theological view of how one can use one’s physiological habitual center to build a sense of peaceful unity with one’s environment. For James, anyone can become saintly because saintliness is predicated on habit and a saintly person is one who has made their “spiritual emotions” into “the habitual center of . . . personal energy” (Varieties 271). In Varieties, Thoreau, for example, becomes the ultimate specimen of Jamesian saintliness owing to his very intentional way of living coupled with his own initial resistance and eventual welcoming into a sense of a broader community within the ecosystem of Walden Pond:

Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods for an hour, I doubted if the neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But in the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. (Varieties 275)

The sense of the “friendliness” of nature James describes here is in literary harmony with another pragmatist and Gifford Lecturer – Bergson, whose pragmatic concept of the élan vital matches Thoreau’s notion of a mesmeric life force suffusing everything in the whole scene right down to each individual pine needle.50

50 In 1914, Bergson himself would later become a Gifford lecturer, lecturing on “The Problem of Personality” in the spring, before being forced to abandon his fall lectures due to the outbreak of WWI. 200 James’s selection of Thoreau’s spiritual encounter with Walden Pond perfectly meshes with the theme of the Gifford Lectures. According to historian Egil Asprem the

Gifford Lectures in natural theology “might be called a ‘romantic’, non-mechanistic, ‘enchanted’ refashioning of evolutionary thinking” (“Blind Spots” 17). One example of this Asprem cites is “Bergson’s ‘creative evolution,’ propelled by the mysterious élan vital.” As Asprem explains, “going back to Enlightenment and Romanticism, intellectuals of the early 20th century played a central role in shaping this type of interpretation of evolution, through channels such as the Gifford Lectures” (“Blind Spots” 18).51 The “enchantment” Asprem describes here, is in contradistinction to Weber’s reading of the world as “disenchanted.” Weber “stated that those who sought to possess ‘genuine’ religion in a disenchanted world were forced to undergo an ‘intellectual sacrifice’” (Weber as quoted in Asprem “Blind Spots” 18). In Weber’s view, he “saw ‘[r]edemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science’ as ‘the fundamental presupposition of living in union with the divine’” (Weber as quoted in Asprem “Blind Spots” 1). “Redemption,” is here meant by Weber to imply “giving up.” Weber was suggesting that in the modern world, one had to give up science in order to exist in union with the divine, and vice versa. Psychical researchers, of course, refused to do that. In Weber’s view, anyone who refused to acknowledge that rationalism and religion were simply incompatible were merely self-deceivers (Weber quoted in Asprem “Blind Spots”). As Asprem’s work points out, magic has historically been the bridge between religion and science. “In terms of the classic trichotomy of ‘religion, magic, science,’ Entzauberung [disenchantment] primarily meant that ‘magic’ had to go” (Weber as quoted in Asprem “Blind Spots” 2). As Asprem points out, however, magic “is a highly problematic

51 See Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 158-168, 462-481. 201 category which, historically, has been tied to polemical struggles to define both ‘correct’ religion and ‘correct’ science” (“Blind Spots” 2). Through this tension, Asprem contends that disenchantment has created “certain blind spots for the history of religion and the history of science. These do not only hide, but also delegitimize, some very significant cultural developments in Weber’s own day” (Asprem “Blind Spots” 2). It’s certainly true that historians have too often overlooked psychical research, and as Asprem points out, Weber overlooked work being done to unify science and religion even in his own era. Psychical researchers and Spiritualists alike saw themselves as remedying that “blind spot.” As James put it, psychical research had “bridged the chasm, healed the hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into the human world” (“What Psychical Research Has Accomplished” quoted in The Will to Believe 326). The rift between religion and science in the late nineteenth century, was, as we have seen, privately worked out by individuals who worked against any sense of disenchantment. This reaction is evidenced most persuasively in the development of special programs devoted to psychical research within universities. In their mission to heal this religion- science rift, the Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology hold a nearly identical purpose to psychical research programs. Like psychical research programs, the Gifford Lectures maintain an interesting place within academia and pragmatism because they were designed by an individual to promote the investigation of personally meaningful inquiry. As James explained it best in The Will to Believe, “the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider” (Will to Believe 29). The Gifford Lectures, like psychical research programs, were established to ensure the robust investigation of such living options. 202 At the close of the nineteenth century, the pursuit of living inquiry was a popular cause with considerable financial backing from wealthy patrons who were interested in leaving their eternal mark via the instantiation of programs devoted to spiritual questions. Programs, in other words, which would challenge the status quo of disenchantment within the academic institution. Both the Gifford Lectures and psychical research programs were created through large bequests from wealthy individuals who wanted to be at the vanguard of another world that they believed remained to be discovered. Take for example the Seybert Commission, at the University of Pennsylvania, or Stanford’s first parapsychology laboratory.52 Like the Gifford lectures, psychical research committees and laboratories were created as part of bequests designed to challenge the general drift of the university’s scientific research program to force it to include a scientific approach to religion. As discussed in chapter two, the Seybert Commission was instated as part of a bequest from Henry Seybert, a wealthy man who turned to Spiritualism after the death of his only remaining parent, his father, when Henry was 24. Seybert’s bequest endowed a professorship in moral philosophy in his father’s name — a post which still exists to this day –in addition to a commission of academics to investigate Spiritualism, to commence in 1883 (Moore 108). By the same token, Stanford’s psychical research laboratory was instated in memory of the loss of 16-year- old Leland Stanford Jr. for whom the university was dedicated. In 1911, the deceased boy’s uncle, Thomas Welton Stanford, donated $50,000 for the study of psychical research, a cause that Leland Jr’s parents also supported financially (Price Fifty Years). Adam Lord Gifford, who was a Scottish judge and advocate, similarly created the Gifford

52 Preliminary Report of the Seybert Commission. J. B. Lippincott, 1920 and Experiments in Psychical Research at Leland Stanford Junior University by John Edgard Coover, Stanford University, 1917. 203 lectureship or chair in for the purpose of “Promoting, Advancing, Teaching, and Diffusing the study of Natural Theology” (Gifford website). Psychical research programs, which bear an institutional resemblance to the Gifford lectures in funding and purpose, may have been made possible through donations, but it should be kept in mind that during this era, those donations were the tip of the iceberg of already pervasive public and academic interest in the scientific approach to religion. The same went for the Gifford lectures, which attracted robust, enthusiastic audiences. It is especially fitting that James would participate in the iconoclastic Gifford Lecture series, which in itself posed a challenge to the pervasive view in research universities at the time that the humanities and sciences should be divided. In the rapidly changing academic climate, an aptitude for being critically savvy to educational trends affecting one’s own discipline, as James naturally had, was an asset. James’s colleague Royce in his 1910 “Address to Graduates” urged that all academics should study “‘the philosophy of your own subject” (Royce quoted in Veysey 203). As Veysey explains Royce’s view, “exposure to scrutiny would give renewed leverage to humanists in a campaign against science that had only entered its early rounds in the decades before 1910” (Veysey 203). James’s criticism of the university was partly the source of pragmatism’s genius. James jokingly referred to Harvard as “the old collegiate treadmill” (Richardson 241). Ever a keen observer, James was forever reluctantly in but not of the university. As historian of education, Veysey, puts it, James “remained in many ways a stranger to the institutional role that was expected of him” (Veysey 110). In 1892, James jokingly declared, “The professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear . . . what an awful trade that of professor is” (James quoted in Veysey 110). Even thirty years into his teaching career, James still loved to identify himself among the “outsiders” at Harvard

(Veysey 110). Also according to Veysey, “In Santayana’s eyes, William James seemed 204 almost the model of Philistine contentment” (421). In his letters James notes that he feared Eliot’s policies at Harvard squashed both his own time for reflection and student originality. He refused to sit on Ph.D. exams starting in 1900, saying he simply didn’t believe in them” (James Correspondence as summarized in Veysey 420). All of these qualities led James’s intellectual sparring partner, Joseph Jastrow, fierce proponent of academic freedom, to declare that “the un academic qualities of William James made him our leading academician” (Jastrow 29). Psychical researchers were up against a culture which insisted on reifying the lines between sciences and humanities in a way that only an iconoclast like James could break down. As Gilman put it in his1903 work, The Launching of a University, “While the old line between the sciences and the humanities may be as invisible as the equator, it has an existence as real” (Gilman 239). Gilman presented a common oppositional view to pragmatism, arguing, “Earth and man, nature and the supernatural, letters and science, the humanities and the realities, are the current terms of contrast between the two groups and there are no signs that these distinctions will ever vanish” (Gilman The Launching of a University 239). James and his colleagues, however, saw the shortsightedness in this rigid adherence. James remained loyal to his ideas and interested in his position insofar as it helped him to do the work of de-concretizing the absolute, and softening the boundary between sciences and humanities. In his essay, “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” James wrote that when our science becomes outmoded or “old fashioned” it will only be because of “its omissions of facts” and not any “fatal lack in its spirit and principles” (William James Writings: 1878-1899 700). James showed psychical research’s strongest criticism of this spirit presented by Gilman in the aforementioned quote, and it was a

205 defense written in the spirit of both pragmatism and the humanities in its investment in the personal. As James puts it:

The only form of thing that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life . . . And this systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes ‘round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short (William James Writings: 1878-1899 700).

Ultimately, for James, it is the concrete importance of our “personal life” which creates the still center amidst the “whirligig of time.” In taking part in the debates over psychical research James shaped pragmatism and found his own sense of personal meaning, the struggle to establish pragmatism elevated his work beyond “a game of private theatricals” (The Will to Believe 61).

CHAPTER THREE CONCLUSION

Ultimately, this chapter has explored the way that James created an open system of truth specifically as it related to his work in psychical research. Pragmatism, it has been argued, was forged in the crucible of psychical research via debates over science and belief. One of the main and most significant facets of pragmatism to emerge from this was James’s emphasis on personal inquiry, an idea that, it has been argued, was vital in defending humanistic inquiry from the encroachment of an increasingly strict research agenda in American research universities in the late nineteenth century. This final, concluding chapter arrived at these conclusions through a re-analysis of the first generation pragmatist’s network for its overlaps with psychical research. Peirce has been re-examined, not as the originator of pragmatism, but as a valuable interlocutor who was more invested in psychical research than previous studies of Peirce

206 of pragmatism have accounted for. Peirce was shown to share a number of philosophical affinities with the psychical researcher Henri Bergson, in their mutual fascination with alternative, mystical views of evolution, and their work on instinct. Schiller, it has been argued, was a vital ally to James whose role both in pragmatism and psychical research remain under examined. Finally, it has been demonstrated that James’s method of personal inquiry, his emphasis on living questions, and his valuation of the subjective method and personal narrative were all inspired by his initial work from the mid-1880s onward with his colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research. These ideas came together in James’s Gifford Lectures, later published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, and to this day remain the most popular example of James’s enduringly influential scientific-literary pragmatic work.

207 Coda - Afterlives of Psychical Research

Two decades after William James’s death, the medium Jane Revere Burke claimed that she began receiving messages from his spirit.53 She published these alleged messages and conversations with James as a full-length study titled Let Us In.54 The thrust of Burke’s book was that we now live in a world where the dead vastly outnumber the living.55 The dead, according to Burke, ask only that we listen to their many pleas, demands, and ideas. As the book’s title implied, James would urge us to “let in” the myriad ghostly promptings and suggestions of this unseen world. Burke, if not an actual medium, was certainly gifted at intuiting the gist of James’s thought. Ever the pluralist, James’s radical “democratic openness” caused him to, as his biographer Richardson points out, “let into his life a parade – like the finale of a Fellini film – of healers, reformers, and visionaries” (160). James forged his psychology through his contact with these countercultural healers and icons of the late nineteenth century, like Annie Payson Call, author of under-examined books on relaxation; S. H. Hadley, whose writing on his conversion experience prefigure Bill Wilson’s of Alcoholics Anonymous; Clifford Beers whose own experience in mental health institutions led to his work on reform; and Gustav Fechner the psychophysicist who “woke to see the entire universe as alive” (Richardson 160). More importantly for this study, James generously entertained the queries of Spiritualists, and even though many of his psychical research colleagues were themselves respected academically, like F.W.H. Myers and Edmund Gurney, their ideas were anything but mainstream. These individuals who James kept company with,

53 The idea to use the book Let Us In drawn from Robert Richardson’s biography of James 54 Such studies for the day were fairly common fare for mediums, who frequently claimed to speak for deceased authors, especially those engaged in the field of psychical research. 55 Interestingly one can see shades of early twentieth-century fears of population growth in Burke’s ghostly vision of a world overcrowded with ghosts. 208 both in this life and allegedly in the next by Burke’s account, seem outliers, but as this study has shown, such allegedly marginal figures were also fundamental to James’s foundational works like The Principles of Psychology and Pragmatism. These fringe characters composed the “strong, roiling black-eddies along the edges of the great river of mind, but they [were] just as much a part of the river as the main channel, and James knew it” (Richardson 160). When it comes to discussions of margins and centers in the history of science, James is an ideal subject to route such a discussion through because James opened himself at all times to even the most far-fetched of trends, like psychical research, and his receptivity to this array of diverse influences was the source of both his idiosyncratic genius and the sweeping effectiveness of pragmatism. As explored in chapter one, Spiritualism, which led to the development of psychical research, had a pluralistic bent to it. Spiritualism attracted idiosyncratic reformers and thinkers of all walks in the late nineteenth century. One of Spiritualists’ prime targets for reform was the university, which they felt dangerously neglected their quandaries, as Henry Steel Olcott, for example, admonished the American Academy of Science for “declining to observe and analyze the facts of modern Spiritualism!” (vii) In response to a perceived lack of respect from scientific institutions, Spiritualists mobilized and promoted research in their topic through alternative publications and journals forging their own countercultural approach to science. At the same time, as explored in chapter one, new discoveries of the age like the ether, and the vogue of occultism in the Victorian era including interest in mesmerism, meant that there were also a number of professional academics, artists, and writers who became involved in studying Spiritualism which as a result of these high-profile individuals ultimately turned into more of a source of popular contention than a fringe fad.

209 As chapter two explained, the overwhelming prevalence of alleged psychic mediums created a crisis in the seemingly gullible public, leading to the trial of Henry Slade who was charged on the Vagrancy Act after years of swindling people around Europe out of their money. Members of the X-Club rushed to cross-examine him in court, while members of Spiritualist-friendly groups such as the Metaphysical Society defended Slade, while still insisting on his proper investigation. The emergence of this penchant for courtroom style cross-examination among Spiritualists led to a scientific turning point among them. They began to seek scientific recognition from research institutions, which, as I have explored, were also taking shape. Just as the public was being overtaken by swindlers, and frauds, and “bad” ideas, the moral and social relevance of a proper scientific education for the average undergraduate was folded into the curricula. As explained in chapter two, an “ethic of science” emerged in universities where science education was said “to develop in all her followers” moral qualities like “simplicity of character, humility, reverence, [and] imagination” (Nicholas 425). The newfound “morality” of science became a tacit raison d'être for scientific inquiry. At the same time, private interest in Spiritualism had not diminished, and by the 1880s, in part due to donors leaving large bequests, actual psychical research programs specifically devoted to the scientific investigation of Spiritualist mediums began to emerge – the first being in the University of Pennsylvania. As I have explored in depth in chapter two, the Seybert Commission at the University of Pennsylvania was illustrative of the way that psychical research brought together humanities professors like the Shakespeare scholar H. H. Furness with science professors, like the paleontologist Joseph Leidy. Together, like other psychical researchers, they made breakthroughs in the newly developing field of psychology in their studies of dreams and hallucinations in the process of searching for more “ghostly” elements. 210 Psychical research sounds a dubious and unfamiliar intellectual trend today, but as explored in chapter three, it vitally shaped pragmatism, a major cornerstone of American intellectual thought. As this study has shown, the interrelated histories of pragmatism and psychical research have only been obscured by a tendency in the field to emphasize national boundaries leading to the false reading of psychical research as distinctly British and pragmatism as distinctly American. As demonstrated through analysis of the writings of first-generation pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, F.C.S. Schiller, and Henri Bergson, grappling with incorrect but popular scientific fads both in the U.S. and Europe led directly to the development of pragmatism. Pragmatism, this chapter has argued, was launched in part as a defense for explaining why some questions are worth asking when they come from a person’s intuitive interests. As James put it, “living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider” (Writings 1878-1899 477). The right to pursue personal questions in a university, I contend, is one that came full circle starting with the first Spiritualists discussed in chapter one fighting to be taken seriously by scientists and ended with the psychical researchers of chapter two. No wonder, then, that all of the first-generation pragmatists were engaged with psychical research – they were interested in the question of what motivated an individual to study a subject, and what marked an appropriate area for inquiry in a university. The ramifications of psychical research’s speculations were immortalized in their own day in the novels and short stories of the early twentieth century. Scores of writers in the late-nineteenth century broached the topic of psychical research either obliquely, or directly. In a version of this project for publication as a book, I would integrate author’s explorations of psychical research, like Jack London and Pauline Hopkins, into new chapters. These chapters will focus on the figure of the psychical research professor who looms large in fiction from the late-nineteenth century onward and William James, who 211 undoubtedly was the inspiration for the wayward psychical research professor stock character. The figure of the psychical research professor in fiction is sometimes maniacal, sometimes heroic, always ambitious and at odds with the university they sit within. This tension is emblematic of the larger struggles at work between the academic system and questions of enchantment that promise to address an individual student’s need to feel valued and free to examine questions that are personally meaningful. William James was undoubtedly such an influential archetypal professorial figure for the late-nineteenth century literary imagination because of his books and theories, but in his own actual life as a professor he impacted a number of important writers and thinkers who he had as actual students, from Gertrude Stein to W.E.B. DuBois, as well. James reflected on education often in works like Talks to Teachers, “Ph.D. Octopus,” “The Social Value of the College-Bred.” James was perhaps so popular with his students because he offered students a sense of redemption in the sense of compensation, not just for the tuition and time spent in a university’s halls, but for their time out in the world. The idea that a humanities classroom provides an important space both for discussion, and a model to be carried out for investigating life is a commonplace notion of education today, but in the early twentieth century it was new and contentious. In “Science as Vocation” Weber railed against this “leader” professor figures in America like James, who had created, false expectations for “something more than mere analyses and statements of fact” from a college instructor (149). According to Weber “The error is that they [students] seek in the professor something different from what stands before them” (Weber 149). In a disenchanted world where “if one but wished one could learn it at any time,” the only way to recreate some sense of enchantment is through self-knowledge and exploring the unresolved questions posed by individuals like psychical researchers

(Weber 139). The undergraduate acolytes of James come across as the result of a very 212 enchanted desire in Weber’s sense of enchantment, to exist in a world where intuition and subtler forces are more important than the disenchanted state, where there suddenly are “mysterious incalculable forces” (Weber 139). Within the otherwise bureaucratic university, educators like James stand out as oases, for having forged a container for personal inquiry and for bringing some sense of enchantment to an otherwise disenchanted system. In the usefulness of James’s two intertwined philosophical undertakings for his students and students of his work, James’s career epitomizes the sense of pragmatic enchantment.

213 Appendix

Google Ngrams

Albert Einstein and Oliver Lodge, referenced in chapter one. Lodge, who wrote a number of popular books on Spiritualism, exceeds Einstein in popularity until the late 1930s.

Sigmund Freud, William James, and F.W.H. Myers, referenced in chapter one. James is consistently the most popular of all three before being outpaced by Freud in the 1980s. Most significantly for my argument, Myers is more popular than Freud until the mid- 1920s.

214

Psychoanalysis and psychical research, mentioned in chapter one. Until 1912, psychical research is actually more popularly cited than psychoanalysis, after which time psychoanalysis takes off at high velocity.

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228 Vita

Sarah Sussman earned her bachelor’s degree in American Literature and Culture from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. She wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on late-nineteenth century literature and the Spanish-American War. Upon coming to The University of Texas at Austin she continued to study American literature of the late- nineteenth century, but became interested in its relationship to psychology. She earned her MA en route to her Ph.D. in 2012 and completed her doctorate in 2017. Permanent e-mail: [email protected] This dissertation was typed by the author.

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