Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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invisible world. I believe, – paradoxical as it now sounds, – that the day will come
when the small problems of this earth – population, subsistence, political power –
will be settled and gone by; when Science will be the absolutely dominant interest,
and Science will be directed mainly towards the unravelling of the secrets of the
Unseen.
The closed, materialistic world of the nineteenth century, he prophesied,
would be hard to imagine in future ages.
Thus, the longing for immortality that his literary interests suggested,
coupled with what by all accounts was an overly eager willingness to
believe, eventually, along with other sources, led Myers to this “Final
Faith,” an eclectic mix of elements tending to cosmic optimism. The
“drawback” of Christianity was
the growing sense of unreality, of insufficiency; the need of an inward make-
believe. The Christian scheme is not cosmical; and this defect is felt so soon as
one learns to look upon the universe with broad impersonal questioning, to gaze
onward beyond the problem of one’s own salvation to the mighty structural laws on
which the goodness or badness of the Cosmos must in the last resort depend.
Thus, although he has no wish to contrast his views with Christianity,
Myers regards them as a “scientific development of the attitude and teach-
ing of Christ,” who was “a Revealer of immortality absolutely unique,” but
whose work “grows more and more remote,” so that it is harder “to fol-
low along that legendary way.” Religion in “its most permanent sense” is
rather “the adjustment of our emotions to the structure of the Universe,”
and what is needed for moderns “is to discover what that cosmic struc-
ture is.”
Myers’s various early efforts to hang on to or revive his belief in higher
realms, after his first painful bouts with agnosticism, took some forms that
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Sidgwick found hard to swallow, such as an infatuation with the piety of
Josephine Butler. Apparently, his early interest in spiritualism was also
given a boost by his relationship with the future Lord and Lady Mount-
Temple, who “lived as Lord Palmerston’s heirs at Broadlands, one of the
stateliest of English homes.” But for all their differences, both early
and late, Myers and Sidgwick shared, at some crucial junctures, a cer-
tain similar pattern of disillusionment with orthodoxy – “from increased
knowledge of history and of science, from a wider outlook on the world.”
During the sixties and early seventies, Myers’s bleak outlook and “cynical
preference of the pleasures of the passing hour” led Sidgwick to write to
him that “it would delight me much to know that you were prosperously
betrothed . . . in order that Cupid may ‘Get his sop and hold his noise’
and leave room for other enthusiasms and impulses of self-development.”
Myers, it seems, needed stability, and Sidgwick was none too sure that
in this case egoism would prove enlightened and self-limiting. Eventu-
ally Myers would fall utterly in love with Annie Marshall, the wife of
a cousin, and the effort to contact her after her premature death would
animate much of his later research, even when he was married to Eveleen
Tennant.
And in the end, it was Myers who, with disarming simplicity, put the
question that, above all, animated the efforts of the Sidgwick Group: is
the universe friendly? Ultimately, this was the basic concern behind the
manifold activities of the Sidgwick Group, their investigations into every-
thing from table turning and spirit rapping to hypnotism and the source of
the creative imagination. By “friendly” they meant in effect well-ordered
ethically, and in a theistic way. This is important to bear in mind, when
thinking about how Sidgwick’s psychical research was addressed to the
dualism of practical reason as presented in the Methods. Sidgwick rather
clearly hoped that Myers would turn out to be right in some fundamen-
tal way, and this put him at some distance from those agnostics, such as
George Eliot, who sought a substitute for religious reverence in reverence
for ethical duty in and of itself. Myers recalled how Eliot had once asked
him if he realized that “the triumph of what you believe would mean the
worthlessness of all that my life has been spent in teaching?”
If there was any member of the group who was less than preoccupied
with the question of his own personal survival, it was Edmund Gurney.
Myers observed that “Gurney had not a strong personal craving for a
future life – had not even that kind of confidence in Providence, or in
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evolution, which leads most of us to take for granted that if that life exists,
then for us and for the universe all must in the end be well.” Even so,
as Myers allowed, Gurney reasoned “not that if there were a future life
the universe must be good, but that if there were a future life the universe might be good; and that without such a life the universe could not be good in any sense in which a man moved with the sorrows of humanity ought
to be called upon to use that word.” Thus, his approach was begotten
“neither by cravings nor by fears” but rather was the “deliberate outcome
of a penetrating survey of the possibilities of weal for men.” Indeed,
Myers was always eager to praise Gurney for his “disinterestedness,”
his “readiness, in Plato’s words, ‘to follow the argument whithersoever it
leadeth’ – a genuine, instinctive delight in the mere process of getting at
truth, apart from any consideration of the way in which that truth might
affect his own argument.” But it was Sidgwick who gave the shrewder
summation, when in he commented on how the SPR had benefitted
from “the peculiar combination of reckless impulsive independence of
thought & action with laboriousness which characterises Gurney, & the
passion for immortality which rules Myers.”
Gurney was certainly a fascinating personality. Born in , he too
had a father in the church and, after receiving a somewhat spotty private
education, went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and an extremely suc-
cessful study of classics. His great passion in life, however, was not classics
but music. As Myers remarked,
Called upon to choose between classical and mathematical studies, he chose classics
almost at hazard, and worked at them, one may say, in the intervals of his practice
on the piano. In spite of this divided interest . . . his singular acuteness in the analysis of language, hi
s singular thoroughness in leaving no difficulty unsolved,
secured him high honours and a Trinity Fellowship. Few men have attained that
position by dint of studies which formed so mere an episode in their intellectual
life.
Although he had a modest independent income, Gurney sought, espe-
cially after his marriage in , to cultivate a career. Rather tragically,
he was denied the one object in life that he most desired: he proved to
be insufficiently talented as a composer or performer to pursue a musical
career. As this became clear, he turned to medicine as a possible alternative,
but his successful studies in this department were not matched by an apti-
tude for the clinical side – he could not bear the messy part of the clinical
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setting and practice. He followed with a spurt of legal studies, though this
also faded. His gifts were apparently consistently of a scholarly and ana-
lytical nature. Eventually, he would turn these to his first love, producing
a pathbreaking piece of aesthetics entitled The Power of Sound () and
many essays of a philosophical, literary, and aesthetic bent, some collected
in Tertium Quid (). The preface to the second of these works contains
some illuminating remarks on his cast of mind:
The subjects treated being too various for any brief comprehensive description, the
uniting idea had to be found, if at all, in the method of treatment. Now it happens
that most of the papers deal with matters of contemporary controversy, as to which
two antagonistic opinions have been strongly entertained and enforced, each with
distinct and direct reference to the other. Thus, the Positivist view of life has had to reckon almost exclusively with the view of more or less orthodox Christianity; the
aim of ‘Natural Religion’ has been simply to refute and supplant Supernaturalism;
those who doubt whether life is ‘worth living’ have directed all their weapons
against the fallacious confidence of the Materialistic school; Vivisectionist and
Anti-vivisectionist have thrust and parried each as if his only possible critic or
accuser were the other; ‘evidence in matters extraordinary,’ devoured or rejected
en bloc, has been used as the gauge alike of popular credulity and of scientific arrogance.
Or to turn to aesthetic subjects. The most conspicuous artistic creator of our
time [Richard Wagner] has been either worshipped as a prophet or decried as a
charlatan; in Music, the issues between classical form and free romanticism have
been contested with none the less earnestness and conviction for being totally
unreal; and the same may be said of a good deal of the chronic disputes as to the
relative greatness of poets, and the relative value of form and content, sound and
sense, in Poetry.
In most of these questions I am conscious of ‘a great deal to be said on both
sides,’ and also of a strong aversion to saying it in the ways which have chiefly
attracted the public ear. In most of them the truer view seems to me to depend
on taking a standpoint, or in recognising facts and principles, other than those
which partisans have usually recognised or taken. And this truer view, if such it
be, is not one that would extenuate differences, or induce lions to lie down with
lambs, or generally tend towards compromise in the ordinary sense; its immediate
tendency, on the contrary, is rather to make each of the duels triangular. In short,
it is a tertium quid.
Yet even these works do not do justice to Gurney’s wide-ranging mind.
One of his primary fascinations, which made him receptive to the call of
Myers and Sidgwick, was hypnotism – or mesmerism, as it was then often
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called – and his contributions to that field put him in the same league as
Charcot, Janet, and Richet. Much of this work was done in collabora-
tion with Myers, on whom he, like Sidgwick, acted as something of an
intellectual brake, though it is astonishing how fertile and philosophically
suggestive their collaboration turned out to be. For instance, in anticipa-
tion of recent discussions of the nature of personal identity, Gurney would
suggest that hypnotism might illustrate “the spontaneous alternations in
cases of ‘ double consciousness,’ where a single individual lives in turn two
(or more) separate existences.” Hypnotism was thus early on linked to
questions of identity, the unconscious, and split or multiple personalities.
Gurney’s writings, which in due course won him the friendship and ad-
miration of William James, thus reflect what Gauld has called his “general
love of speculation and enquiry” and “complete disrespect for conven-
tional lines of thought.” Moreover, he was noted for another “leading
feature” of his personality – “his extreme sensitivity to pain; not just to
physical pain, but to grief and suffering of all kinds,” which made him
“excruciatingly aware of the predicaments of his fellow-men.” His deep
aversion to “hopeless suffering” played a key role in his philosophical
outlook. Small wonder that he could not pursue medicine beyond the
textbook, or that for all his triangulation, he ended up being considered
an early advocate of animal rights. He was perhaps the most lovable of
all the members of the Sidgwick Group, and served George Eliot as a
model for the title character in Daniel Deronda. But he also suffered from
cycles of depression (was, indeed, quite possibly manic-depressive), and
his premature death in , from an overdose of chloroform prescribed
for insomnia and neuralgia, has been interpreted by some as a suicide.
Sidgwick himself confessed to “painful doubts.” His depressions had
been seriously worsened by a tragic boating accident on the Nile that had
killed three of his beloved sisters in .
However, it was just before this terrible blow to his family that
Gurney took up with Myers in an especially fateful development. As
Gauld describes it:
On th May there occurred an event which decisively influenced the whole
course of Myers’ life. Accompanied by his friend Edmund Gurney, another of the
younger Trinity Fellows, he went to the home of his aunt, Lady Mount-Temple,
to meet Stainton Moses. Moses, a man of university education, gave them a first-
hand account of the strange phenomena of which he was the focus; and they could
not but feel impressed by his ‘manifest sanity and probity’. ‘He spoke frankly and
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fully; he showed his notebooks; he referred us to his friends; he inspired a belief
which was at once sufficient, and which is still sufficient, to prompt to action.’
On his return Myers persuaded Sidgwick to join him in organising a ‘sort of
informal association’ for the investigation of the phenomena; into this association
were sooner or later drawn Edmund Gurney, Walter Leaf and Lord Rayleigh
(all Fellows of Trinity); Arthur Balfour and his sisters Eleanor and Evelyn (Lady
Rayleigh); the John Hollands; and various others. Up till this time Sidgwick’s
investigations of Spiritualism and related phenomena had been fitful, waxing and
waning as his opinions vacillated; but for much of the rest of his life he was to be
constantly prodded into action by the eager and relentless Myers.
One could say, then, that the two camps that would later produce so
much divisiveness within the SPR began in a more symbiotic, cooperative
relationship. Spiritualism was the issue, communicating with the spirits
of the dead, and the Sidgwick Group was truly born at this point. Myers
was the ringleader, and Gurney was at first reluctant – as Sidgwick wrote
to Myers, Gurney “will give us – his warmest sympathies (but no more),
in spiritualistic investigation.” Eleanor Sidgwick would comment on this:
“It is interesting to find that Edmund Gurney, who soon after became, and
remained to the end of his life, one of the most important collaborators
in the movement, hesitated at first about joining it” (M –). But it
appears that Gurney was simply for this stretch still struggling with his
problematic career opportunities.
Clearly, the Balfours and Rayleighs were also there at the creation. In-
deed, as a set, they formed an extraordinarily important part of the group,
what with Arthur Balfour, Gerald Balfour, Eleanor Balfour, and John
Strutt (later Lord Rayleigh, husband of Evelyn Balfour and, as noted,
a winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry) all taking an active part in
the research from the very start, and all in due course taking their turns
as president of the SPR. The members of this set would weave through
Sidgwick’s life in manifold ways, beyond his marriage to Eleanor. Most