Continuation of Mike Tymn's review

Myers appears to have been motivated, Blum observes, by a feeling that science was reducing the universe to a large machine and people to small ones. Other scholars and scientists were similarly motivated. “He was an educated man; he understood and even appreciated the arguments for a purely mechanical universe,” Blum describes Edmund Gurney, one of Myers’ research associates. “Life lived as a cog in a cold, godless, indifferent machine, however, had come to seem to him unbearable.”

The research was primarily with mediums. “Mediums were peculiar creatures; there was no denying it about even the best of them,” Blum explains. “How could they not be? They spent hours of their time surrounded by people desperate to talk with the dead. They fell into trances reputedly inhabited by ghosts. They agreed to be hogtied by investigating scientists. Skeptics mocked them; journalists parodied them; former friends feared them. One had to wonder why anyone would choose to become a medium.”

The most credible and intriguing of all mediums was Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife, who was discovered by James and studied for some 18 years by Richard Hodgson, an Australian who was recruited to head up the American Society for Psychical Research. Hodgson had a reputation as a debunker of fraudulent “mediums,” but became convinced that Mrs. Piper was the real thing, what James called the “white crow,” the one that proved all crows weren’t black.

The researchers were often frustrated by charlatans as well as by their arrogant scientific colleagues who assumed the subject was too absurd for educated men. One such haughty professor was James Cattell of Columbia University. He sneered at his fellow professor, James H. Hyslop, when Hyslop became interested in psychical research, and when Hyslop published articles that strongly supported nonmechanistic theories, Cattell tried to have him fired. In his defense, Hyslop, noting scientific efforts to find a species of useless fish to support Darwin’s theory, asked “why it is so noble and respectable to find whence man came, and so suspicious and dishonorable to ask and ascertain whither he goes?”

Other researchers, including Alfred Russel Wallace, cooriginator with Charles Darwin of the natural selection theory of evolution, William Crookes, a brilliant chemist and physicist whose invention led to the Xray, Oliver Lodge, a pioneer in electricity and radio, and William Barrett, a Dublin physicist knighted for his scientific work, came under attack by their peers when they dared report on evidence that did not fit into the post-Darwin scientific paradigm. “Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name,” James lashed out as the cynics, “and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds.”

While some of the researchers, including Wallace, Crookes, Barrett, Lodge, Hodgson, and Hyslop were able to satisfy themselves that a spirit world exists, and, concomitantly, that consciousness does survive bodily death, James was more guarded and would remain warily perched on the “fence” separating believers from nonbelievers, seeing that position as the only way to reconcile the differences between science and religion. Moreover, James recognized the difference between the subjectivity of proof and the objectivity of evidence. “The concrete evidence for most of the ‘psychic’ phenomena under discussion is good enough to hang a man 20 times over,” James once admonished the scientific fundamentalists.

The closing chapters of the book deal with the famous crosscorrespondences – messages coming through different mediums in different parts of the world, which in themselves meant nothing but when collected by the researchers formed coherent messages. The best of these messages were said to have come from Frederic Myers after his death in 1901. Hodgson also began offering convincing messages through Mrs. Piper after his death in 1905.

In the end, it is a matter of what James called the “will to believe” versus the “will to disbelieve.”

Blum examines the work of the psychical researchers with respect, objectivity, and understanding. She apparently spent three years researching the subject. I thought I knew the subject pretty well from over 10 years of study, but I learned a lot from this book. As I consumed the book over mochas at Starbucks, I delighted in my initial false assumptions and continually marveled at the accuracy and detail of the stories as well as at Blum’s prolific writing. In my humble opinion, she should get a second Pulitzer Prize for this work, but, unfortunately, there are probably a few judges who are of the same warped mindset as James Cattell and would not deem the book worthy of being read. The loss is theirs.