by Bart Schultz
February ,
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
more than egoistic ropes of sand, be they ethical or epistemic. It is here,
in his construction of notions of consensus and authority, that one must
search for Sidgwick’s deeper views about publicity as they bear on matters
of sex, class, and race.
How, then, to reconcile the demands of inquiry with the esotericism
of the utilitarian method? Of the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of the
greatest happiness? And both of these with one’s own happiness? What
kind of culture hero did Sidgwick think the times demanded, and what
kind did he conceive himself to be? How could he even talk about an
ideal community of enlightened utilitarians while avoiding the “illimitable
cloudland” of utopian conjecture? What could even an eager politician do
when confronted with such complexity? How many selves needed to be
sacrificed?
With such problems before him, what was an Apostle to do? For
Sidgwick, the answer was clear: hunt ghosts. Harmony and esotericism of
a rather literal sort had not yet failed.
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I. Preliminaries and Cautionaries
The battle is to be fought in the region of thought, and the issue is belief or disbelief in the unseen world, and in its Guardian, the Creator-Lord and Deliverer of Man.
W. E. Gladstone
Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.
Theodor W. Adorno
Whatever one may think of parapsychology, it is impossible to appreci-
ate Sidgwick’s worldview without recognizing his commitment to such
investigations. Like Gladstone and so many others who feared that
dogmatic materialism was on the rise and orthodox religion in serious
peril – which in the s and s, especially, it seemed hard to deny –
Sidgwick regarded these studies as the vital avenue by which to meet the
challenges thrown down by the likes of T. H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog.”
Just as the Idealism of Green and Bradley was a reaction to the growing
climate of unbelief, so too Sidgwick’s parapsychology was a bit of philos-
ophizing with strategic intent, a return to the concerns of Swedenborg to
parallel the return to the concerns of Kant (though of course, one could
also view it as carrying forward certain forms of Romanticism). It certainly
proved to be a happy vehicle for the poetic imagination, as both subject and
object.
As noted in Chapters and , Sidgwick appears to have been fasci-
nated by ghosts for practically his entire life, quite possibly as a result of
being exposed to so many deaths in his early years. He would sometimes
refer, in his letters, to his “ghost-seeing” tendencies. Even his mentor,
Benson, had shared this fascination, helping to found the Cambridge
“Ghost Society” during his time there, an institution that Sidgwick then
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participated in when he was a Cambridge undergraduate. By the time of
his graduation, he was already a fund of tales about supposed paranormal
happenings, though these were more or less held in check by his orthodox
religious views and skeptical doubts about the quality of the evidence.
Anglican orthodoxy for the most part disapproved of any untoward inter-
est in ghosts.
Again, as recounted in Chapter , it was the battering dealt his Anglican
beliefs during his years of “storm and stress,” when he came to struggle
so with the entire issue of the evidence for miraculous happenings, that
pushed him to accord a truly cosmic significance to these interests, the-
ological and ethical, and to surround himself with a circle of (mostly
younger) friends of similar disposition willing to seek firmer support
for such claims. Quickly becoming known as the Sidgwick Group, after
their researches took systematic form in the s, they became the re-
spectable core of the official Society for Psychical Research, which was
born in , with Sidgwick as its first president, the others serving on
its Council, and a membership list of some one hundred names, many
of them highly respectable. By the mid-eighties it had members and
associates – everyone from Gladstone to Tennyson to Lewis Carroll –
and Sidgwick was confident that it could “run without further nursing.”
When it crested, in about , it had , members and associates as
well as a respectable endowment fund, the result of various bequests. Its
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research were very widely read;
it had an in-house Journal; and it was busy assembling a fine library to
support its researchers. After , there was also an American version,
which, though not as flourishing as the original, attracted such leading
intellectual figures as William James and worked in close collaboration
with the British organization, of which it was officially a branch from
until .
As a piece of cultural and social history, therefore, psychical re-
search is clearly a fascinating development, affording a wealth of insights
into the assumptions and practices governing knowledge, expertise, and
inquiry during this period. In Sidgwick’s case, this endeavor to reenchant
the universe was of course bound up with his worries about the chaos of
the dualism of practical reason and the grounding of egoism; as indicated
in the previous chapters, such concerns were absolutely crucial to him,
and he regarded the empirical investigation of the paranormal as a form of
theological study that could help to vindicate belief in the moral order of
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the universe, the harmony of duty and interest. Also noteworthy, however,
is the way in which this line of inquiry took the same form as so many of
his other Apostolic quests, becoming in large part an intimate fellowship
of seekers revealing to each other their deepest concerns. Thus, Sidgwick’s
parapsychology happily illuminates the larger social dimensions of his
epistemology as well as his metaphysical views, extending even to his
political concerns. The “failure” of The Methods of Ethics had only
strengthened his interest in “psychological experiments in ethics an
d in-
tuitive Theism,” and in the “miraculous” as perhaps a permanent element
in human history – the defining interests of his years of storm and stress.
How curious that it fell to ghosts to prove that the wages of virtue were
not dust.
Of course, given the subsequent record of inconclusive and fraudulent
research in parapsychology, which in recent times has been so mercilessly
exposed by such critics as Martin Gardner and a professional magician,
“The Amazing Randi,” it is difficult to recapture anything like the rec-
titude and intellectual aspirations of the early psychical researchers. And
to be sure, even at the start, the Society had its divisions, with the “scien-
tific” contingent on one side and the séance-loving “Spiritualists,” led by
Stainton Moses, on the other. One could safely say, however, that it was
largely because of the comparative sobriety that Sidgwick early on brought
to the Society that their work enjoyed the long period of respectability that
it did. And still more importantly, the work of the psychical researchers
proved to be a very fertile breeding ground for many different forms of
psychological research; their work on such topics as hypnosis and the var-
ious forms of unconscious thought was entangled with the developments
that would later be absorbed into various regions of clinical and exper-
imental psychology. Although these investigations remain controversial,
they are not usually placed in the same category as attempts to commu-
nicate with the dead. It is also important to stress that psychical research,
perhaps because of its novelty, provided an important vehicle for the work
of independent, intellectually motivated women – for example, Eleanor
Mildred Balfour, whose marriage to Sidgwick in only reinforced
her commitment to a life of research and educational activity. Ironically,
however, the SPR has also been described as a highly gendered (and
orientalist) effort, reinscribing male authority and at odds with some of the
very movements that were, albeit in strange ways, empowering women –
notably, the Theosophical movement.
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Yet Sidgwick and his group apparently regarded all such work as an open
and fair field. Again, he embarked on it in the same spirit of Apostolic truth
seeking that characterized his work on religion and ethics, insisting that
however potentially important the results might be, the method had to
be one of impartial, disinterested inquiry rather than advocacy. And on
the whole, his views of the results were rather measured: he did think that
there was sound evidence for telepathy and unconscious thought processes
(as demonstrated by hypnotism), but he did not think that the results of his
other parapsychological inquiries had been very successful. Such modest,
mostly negative results would in due course mean that all of his anxieties
about the corrosive impact that his skepticism might have would return
with renewed force. Indeed, the people involved in psychical research
were often uniquely subject to the force of Sidgwick’s skepticism, and
they did not always react very appreciatively: another eminent member of
the SPR would comment, after Sidgwick’s death, that “[t]here are some
people so constituted that nothing psychic will take place in their presence.
Prof. Sidgwick was one.” Mediums were apt to complain that he was too
“fidgety.”
Still, unpopularity with the spirits may have served Sidgwick well, and
it was in this region that he did the most to spell out his philosophy of mind
and the moral psychology that informed his other efforts. And his more
philosophical criticisms of empiricism, materialism, and idealism make
much more sense when read with the example of his psychical research
in mind. Here, surely, he had found the “deepest problems,” for which a
solution had to be sought.
II. The Fellowship
After Death
I have been buried for seven long days;
Here in the cold deep grave I lie:
Dark, all is dark! tho’ the sun’s warm rays
Slumber above on the earth close by.
For seven more days shall I wait fast bound
In coffin and shroud, tho’ I seem but dead;
While the spirits of those whom I wronged flit round,
And fill me with torture and horrible dread.
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What men call wicked was I on the earth,
What men call lost am I here below:
For twice seven days ere I have new birth
Shall the souls that I wronged flit to and fro.
I am theirs for a while: they may do what they will
With my poor body and pitiful soul,
While I lie in the vault where all life is still,
Where dank air sickens and far sound roll.
Where the stones seem heavy and like to sink
With the weight of the woe that I wrought in my life,
And crush me, or hurry me over the brink,
Down, down, to a pit of unending strife.
But I know that ere long I shall find release;
When twice seven days and nights are sped
I shall change. Shall I soar to the realms of peace?
Or down shall I fall to the place of the dead?
Poem, signed “,” published in The Cliftonian,
November (believed to be by either Arthur
or Henry Sidgwick)
As we have seen, Sidgwick’s skepticism was only heightened by his work on
the Methods, which failed to vindicate an independent, justifiable ethical
system and consequently aggravated, if anything, his anxieties about the
future of religious belief and, correlatively, the future of civilization.
Again, his early inclination to “provisionally postulate” the “continued ex-
istence of the soul in order to effect that harmony of Duty with Happiness
which seemed to me indispensable to rational moral life” had involved,
as he later explained, “setting out on the serious search for empirical ev-
idence” (M –). This retrospective suggests just how his concerns
became so focused on psychical research, during the period from to
, and what his priorities were. Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, née Balfour,
whom Sidgwick first met and began working with during this period, was
also quite clear about the formative interests of the Sidgwick Group and
the SPR:
The question whether good scientific evidence of survival – as distinct of course
from philosophical or theological reasons for believing it – could be obtained, is
probably one which from the foundation of the Society in �
� has interested the
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majority of the members more than any other branch of our enquiries, because of
the far-reaching consequences its solution would carry with it. One consequence
would be a decisive argument against materialism, and it is this that leads some
of those who hold dogmatically a materialistic view of the universe to oppose, not
only any conclusion that survival can be proved, but any enquiry into the subject,
with a virulence resembling that of medieval theologians.
This was to be a common theme of the Sidgwick Group – namely,
the dogmatism of so many of those who professed to be representing sci-
ence. Much of their initial energies went into simply trying to persuade
people that the evidence was not all in yet, one way or the other, and
that empirical inquiries were a promising alternative to the inconclusive,
question-begging answers coming from theology and philosophy, or from
those spiritualists who regarded all such experimental investigations of the
paranormal as wrong “because they must be the work either of the devil or
of familiar spirits, with whom the Bible forbid us to have dealings.” Still,
the fiercest opposition was from the scientists, not from the religiously in-
clined. As Sidgwick retrospectively put it, in his SPR presidential address
of :
We believed unreservedly in the methods of modern science, and were prepared to
accept submissively her reasoned conclusions, when sustained by the agreement
of experts; but we were not prepared to bow with equal docility to the mere
prejudices of scientific men. And it appeared to us that there was an important
body of evidence – tending primâ facie to establish the independence of soul or spirit – which modern science had simply left on one side with ignorant contempt;
and that in so leaving it she had been untrue to her professed method, and had
arrived prematurely at her negative conclusions. (CWC)
This attitude was shared by most of the important founding members
of the Sidgwick Group. Myers, for example, many of whose insights into
Sidgwick’s early Cambridge years have been appealed to in early chapters,