Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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Professor, a Fellow of Trinity College, and president of the economic
section of the British Association. Chastened by his experiences with
fraudulent mediums and spiritualists, he threw himself into the work of
the Society with an uncompromising demand for rigor and with zero tol-
erance for fraud. In his first presidential address to the Society, delivered
on July , , he urged
the point which is chiefly characteristic of the method of investigation which
our Society will, I hope, in the main use. Though it would be a mistake to lay
down a hard and fast rule that we may not avail ourselves of the services of
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paid performers or paid mediums, still we shall, as much as possible, direct our
investigation to phenomena where no ordinary motives to fraud, – at any rate
I may say no pecuniary motives, – can come in. There has, of course, always
been a mass of evidence of this kind. In fact, I think every one who has become
convinced of the reality of the phenomena, or has become strongly and persistently
convinced that there is a primâ facie case for investigation, has had his attention first attracted by narratives of what has gone on in private families or private
circles, where none but relatives or intimate friends have been concerned.
Now, the great gain that I hope may accrue from the formation of this Society
is that the occurrence of phenomena – primâ facie inexplicable by any ordinary natural laws – may be more rapidly and more extensively communicated to us who
desire to give our time to the investigation, so that in the first instance we may
carefully sift the evidence, and guard against the danger of illusion or deception
which even here may, of course, come in; and then, when the evidence has been
sifted by accumulation of personal experiments, make it more available for the
purpose of producing general conviction. (CWC)
To be sure, Sidgwick did strike a positive note in this address, speaking
far too highly about the prima facie evidence, the work of Crookes and
Wallace, among others. He allowed, too graciously, that he did not presume
to be able to offer evidence of better quality than that offered by such
colleagues, but only recognized on behalf of the Society that “however
good some of its evidence may be in quality, we require a great deal more
of it.” He did not voice his own more pessimistic views, which he had
expressed so often in correspondence, but instead urged that
the important point to bear in mind is that every additional witness who, as De
Morgan said, has a fair stock of credit to draw upon, is an important gain. Though
his credit alone is not likely to suffice for the demand that is made on it, his draft will help. For we must not expect any decisive effect in the direction at which we
primarily aim, on the common sense of mankind, from any single piece of evidence,
however complete it has been made. Scientific incredulity has been so long in
growing, and has so many and so strong roots, that we shall only kill it, if we are
able to kill it at all as regards any of those questions, by burying it alive under a heap of facts. We must keep ‘pegging away,’ as Lincoln said; we must accumulate fact
upon fact, and add experiment upon experiment, and, I should say, not wrangle
too much with incredulous outsiders about the conclusiveness of any one, but trust
to the mass of evidence for conviction. The highest degree of demonstrative force
that we can obtain out of any single record of investigation is, of course, limited
by the trustworthiness of the investigator. We have done all that we can when the
critic has nothing left to allege except that the investigator is in the trick. But when
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he has nothing else left to allege he will allege that. . . . We must drive the objector into the position of being forced either to admit the phenomena as inexplicable,
at least by him, or to accuse the investigators either of lying or cheating or of
a blindness or forgetfulness incompatible with any intellectual condition except
absolute idiocy. (CWC)
What such statements so nicely illustrate is simply another facet of
Sidgwick’s obsession with hypocrisy. Throughout his work as a psychi-
cal researcher, he was engaged in an investigation that ran parallel to his
worried writings about conformity and subscription, as well as his other
ethical concerns. So much depended on defining what counted as expert
opinion and trustworthy testimony, on formulating a better definition of
the “consensus of experts” than he had ever had to do, and on finding a
place for the contributions of nonexperts. Just as he would still be strug-
gling with the question of religious hypocrisy in the last decade of his
life, so too, in such late pieces as “Disinterested Deception,” he would
continue to try to come to terms with the general nature of deceit and
credibility. As we shall see, many of his claims about the human condition
and potential – claims directly related to his concern about practical rea-
son as a chaos – would directly or indirectly reflect his experiences as a
psychical researcher. Furthermore, as in the religious case, he would find
himself caught in the dilemma of how to deal with the potentially unfor-
tunate social effects of the negative results of his investigations, which,
he feared, could very well be used by the more aggressive enemies of
religion.
For the present, it is sufficient to simply note one of the more obvi-
ous commonalities. Sidgwick went further than any of the other psychi-
cal researchers in insisting that once a medium or subject was seriously
suspected of fraud, no further use could be made of that person or any
evidence gathered therefrom. This was very far from the attitude of most
of the psychical researchers, though some of those who came on board in
the late seventies, especially Frank Podmore, did develop in due course
something of Sidgwick’s acute skepticism. It is instructive to compare
William James’s attitude, when he wrote:
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, once a cheat, always a cheat, such has been the motto of the English psychical researchers in dealing with mediums. I am disposed
to think that, as a matter of policy, it has been wise. Tactically it is far better to believe much too little than a little too much; and the exceptional credit attaching
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to the row of volumes of the SPR’s Proceedings,
is due to the fixed intention of
the editors to proceed very slowly. Better a little belief tied fast, better a small
investment salted down, than a mass of comparative insecurity.
But, however wise as a policy the SPR’s maxim may have been, as a test of truth
I believe it to be almost irrelevant. In most things human the accusation of deliber-
ate fraud and falsehood is grossly superficial. Man’s character is too sophistically
mixed for the alternative of ‘honest or dishonest’ to be a sharp one. Scientific
men themselves will cheat – at public lectures – rather than let experiments obey
their well-known tendency towards failure. I have heard of a lecturer on physics,
who had taken over the apparatus of the previous incumbent, consulting him
about a certain machine intended to show that, however the peripheral parts of it
might be agitated, its center of gravity remained immovable. ‘It will wobble,’ he complained. ‘Well,’ said the predecessor, apologetically, ‘to tell the truth, whenever I used that machine I found it advisable to drive a nail through the center of gravity.
James was also speaking from experience, and went on to relate how he
had cheated in such demonstrations.
No doubt James made about as strong a case as anyone could for believ-
ing that fraud in one instance does not mean a person is always defrauding,
and that mediums might resort to trickery in order to serve what they hon-
estly held to be the truth about psychic phenomena. But he allowed that he
looked on nature with “more charitable eyes” than the scientist. For James,
there “is a hazy penumbra in us all where lying and delusion meet, where
passion rules beliefs as well as conduct, and where the term ‘scoundrel’
does not clear up everything to the depths as it did for our forefathers.”
The psychical researchers were, for their part, perhaps not much better
than their subjects, though against the charge that “dabbling in such phe-
nomena reduces us to a sort of jelly, disintegrates the critical faculties,
liquefies the character, and makes of one a gobe-mouche generally,” he
would respond by
thinking of my friends Frederic Myers and Richard Hodgson. These men lived
exclusively for psychical research, and it converted both to spiritism. Hodgson
would have been a man among men anywhere; but I doubt whether under any other
baptism he would have been that happy, sober and righteous form of energy which
his face proclaimed him in his later years, when heart and head alike were wholly
satisfied by his occupation. Myers’s character also grew stronger in every particular for his devotion to the same inquiries. Brought up on literature and sentiment,
something of a courtier, passionate, disdainful, and impatient naturally, he was
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made over again from the day when he took up psychical research seriously.
He became learned in science, circumspect, democratic in sympathy, endlessly
patient, and above all, happy.
It is noteworthy that Sidgwick got classed rather differently, given how
the “liberal heart which he possessed had to work with an intellect which
acted destructively on almost every particular object of belief that was
offered to its acceptance.” And it was Sidgwick who was at the helm
of the British SPR from to , and again from to , and
he made it clear that he had, if anything, less tolerance for fraud in this
department than in religious matters, even if the fraud might be construed
as a kind of pious hypocrisy in the service of a good cause. This was not
because he was altogether insensitive to human foible and peculiarity. In
fact, in some of his earliest examinations of spiritualism, in , he had
heard Mazzini tell a story of how in Italy he had once encountered a
group of people who were all mysteriously staring up at the sky. When
asked what they were doing, one replied “The cross – do you not see it?”
Mazzini plainly saw nothing at all, and when he took one of the gazers
by the arm and gave him a slight shake, saying “There is no cross at all,”
the man awoke as if from a dream and admitted that there was nothing
there. This story made a lasting impression on Sidgwick, as illustrating the
power of group suggestion and the problem of determining the credibility
of witnesses. He was forced, against his instincts, to accept the idea that
people might deceive on a grand scale for trivial or weird reasons, and that
they might, even when testifying in the best of faith, be subject to mistakes
and delusions of which they had no inkling and that were largely invisible
to an investigator.
What was it, then, about the research on telepathy that so impressed
Sidgwick, encouraging him to take on the burdens of leading the SPR?
According to Eleanor Sidgwick, this early concentration on telepathy
was not
the result of any deliberate plan on the part of the Council. Telepathy forced
itself on the Society rather than was sought by it. In far the greater part of the
spontaneous cases sent to us which seemed to afford evidence of some super-
normal process, the process was apparently telepathic, or at least a telepathic
explanation was consistent with the facts as reported; and opportunities of ex-
perimenting in telepathy presented themselves more than they have done in later
years.
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Interestingly, she recalled that the “idea of thought-transference was, as it
were, in the air, in this country at least, in the early eighties, because of an
amusement called the ‘willing game’ which was in vogue both in private
drawing-rooms and on public platforms.” Some action, perhaps fairly
complicated, was decided upon, to be performed by a participant who
was out of the room. When the person returned, the “willer” would place
his or her hands on the “percipient,” perhaps on the forehead, and, while
avoiding any overt indication of what was being willed, would concentrate
on getting the percipient to perform the action – often, it was claimed,
with great success, the nature of which stimulated much debate.
But as Eleanor Sidgwick’s recollections make clear, it was not the popu-
lar parlor games that impressed the SPR, but the work done by Barrett and
various others, including the highly regarded Professor Charles Richet in
France. At the time that the Society was founded, Barratt had already done
work with the Creery family, work that would quickly be further pursued
by the SPR’s “thought-transference” committee. Many of these investi-
gations are presented in excelle
nt thumbnail descriptions in Appendix A
of Gauld’s The Founders of Psychical Research, which also make it clear just
how much the “experiments” had in common with the popular game. As
Gauld summarizes it:
The first subjects with whom members of the SPR conducted extended and
seemingly successful experiments on thought-transference were the family of the
Rev. A. M. Creery, Buxton. The percipients were various of Mr. Creery’s five
daughters, acting singly. The agents generally acted in a group, and at various
times included Mr. Creery himself, members of his family, Barrett, Professor
Balfour Stewart (the SPR’s second President), Professor Alfred Hopkinson,
Gurney, Myers, and other members of the thought-transference committee.
The usual procedure was as follows. The daughter who was to act as percip-
ient would leave the room, whilst the group of agents selected a target. This
would be written down rather than spoken. The girl would be called in, and the
company would concentrate on the target. Targets might be a name chosen at
random, an object from the house, a two-figure number, or a playing card out of a
full pack.
The girls achieved some startling successes, even when members of their family
were not among the agents. They succeeded not merely in their father’s home
(where the first experiments were carried out in –), but at Cambridge (July
to August ) and Dublin (November ). For instance at Cambridge they
between them guessed correctly out of playing cards; and at Dublin out
of .
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As Gauld observes, however, their “ability began to wane in ; and
in some further experiments . . . two of them were detected in the use of
a rather weak code. Though of course it could have been effective only
when one of the sisters was amongst the agents.”
Many other experiments also took place during this period, includ-
ing the “Smith–Blackburn” ones that brought G. A. Smith into contact