by Bart Schultz
and was now “specially anxious, for Edmund Gurney’s sake, that his six
years’ labour should not be lost” (M –).
It was thus partly as a tribute to Gurney that the Sidgwick Group de-
cided on their next big project: the Census of Hallucinations. This ambitious project was directly aimed at supplying the evidence that Gurney had so
wanted concerning the statistical occurrence of apparitions. The work be-
gan in April of and carried on, through a series of publications and
partly under the auspices of the International Congress of Experimental
Psychology, until the final massive report appeared in , as Volume X
of the Proceedings, written mostly by Eleanor Sidgwick and Alice Johnson.
Although the investigators had set out to collect some , answers, this
turned out to be a bit impractical, and they had in the end to content them-
selves with some , answers. As Broad summarizes the conclusion:
About one visual hallucination in sixty-three occurs within a period of twenty-four hours round about the death of the person whose apparition has been ‘seen’. If such
death-coincidences were purely fortuitious concurrences of causally independent
events the proportion would be about one in nineteen thousand. There is a most elaborate and careful discussion of the fallacies to which such statistics are liable, and a very clear and detailed statement of the precautions which the committee
took to avoid them. . . . [This is] a uniquely and meticulously careful contribution to an important branch of their subject.
According to Eleanor Sidgwick, the work “fully confirmed” the claim of
Phantasms: “that between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a
connection exits which is not due to chance alone.” Indeed, this was
the conclusion endorsed by the entire Sidgwick Group.
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It should be stressed, however, that this piling on of case after case does
not fully do justice to the sense that the Sidgwick Group had that there
was clearly something to telepathy. In a letter to William James, Gurney
had explained:
I cannot describe to you the effect on my own mind which my hundreds of personal
interviews have had. It has only been in a very small number of cases . . . that a case which seemed genuine and sound on paper has not been strengthened by
the impression (& often by the details) which conversation and careful cross-
questioning added. . . . The viva voce account has consistently struck me as just what you or I might give of a singular experience, which did happen, but which was wholly isolated & inexplicable.
Such sentiments were often echoed by Sidgwick – for example, when he
confessed to the SPR that “part of my grounds for believing in telepathy,
depending, as it does, on personal knowledge, cannot be communicated
except in a weakened form to the ordinary reader of the printed state-
ments which represent the evidence that has convinced me.” Hence,
his abiding conviction that he had to put his character on the line in this
form of research, just as he had had to do on all those Apostolic Saturday
evenings. Such conclusions about the nature of personal knowledge
ought to be kept in mind when considering Sidgwick’s epistemology and
his criticisms of empiricism, idealism, etc. – recall the very personal nature
of his rejoinder to Gizycki, his flat confession that he found the rejection
of egoism “impossible.” Moreover, his sense of the possibilities of sym-
pathetic unity, a true mingling of minds, must be understood as in part
involving this quite literal way of achieving it, which was of course the
work of special, sensitive minds.
Still, whatever sense of the uncanny was shared by Gurney and
Sidgwick, their more straightforward similarities had to do with the critical
faculties that they brought to bear on their work. Sidgwick’s disparage-
ment of his own abilities, in comparison to Eleanor’s quite pronounced
scientific abilities, has become rather famous:
[I]n Psychical Research the only faculty that I seem able to exercise is the judicial; I feel equal to classifiying and to some extent weighing the evidence – so far as it
depends on general considerations – but I do not feel the least gift for making a
legitimate hypothesis as to the causes of the phenomena, and I am too unobservant
and unimaginative about physical events generally to be at all good at evaluating
particular bits of evidence. For to tell whether a ‘psychical’ experiment or narrative
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is good or not evidentially requires one to imagine with adequate accuracy and
exhaustiveness the various possibilities of ‘natural’ causation of the phenomenon,
and judge the degree of improbability of each. Nora is much better at all this than
I am: and I mean to give her the work to do, on this ground, so far as she will take
it. (M )
As for Sidgwick, had he not felt duty-bound to be pursuing psychical
research, he would, circa the mid-eighties, have preferred to give himself
over to the luxury of working on “the evolution of political ideas,” since
his mind was
adapted for seeing things – relations – for myself in the history of Thought: when
I read what other people say, I seem to see that they have not got it quite right;
and then, after an effort, what seems to be the truth comes to me. This is as near
the sense of original production as I ever get, and only intellectual work that gives me this experience really takes hold on me. (M )
This is an intriguing gendering, given how often the Victorians are
presented as linking scientific rationality to manliness and character, and
how often the various forms of spiritualism are interpreted as historical
constructions of the private and feminine. But spiritualism was in fact an
arena for the contestation of gender roles, as the career of the redoubtable
Madame Blavatsky might suggest.
At any rate, Sidgwick did devote an enormous amount of time to ex-
ercising his judicial faculties on the case for psychical phenomena, and
Phantasms and the Census were very obviously deeply indebted to him for their more sensible aspects. After all, the work was being subjected to
different interpretations. Myers was clearly not as circumspect in inter-
preting the telepathy explanation as Gurney or Sidgwick, favoring instead
the possibility that clairvoyance might be invoked to explain various cases,
and that there was somehow an actual externalization or materialization of
the dying person’s conception of himself. Against this, Gurney wrote to
James that Myers’s argument was “a hopeless attempt to present a frankly
&n
bsp; material view of ghosts with elimination of the material element,” against
which he had made decisive objections.
Later chapters will further consider just how Myers continued to argue
for ghosts, communications from the other world, and so on, and for their
religious significance. In the s, psychical research took another turn,
and work on the so-called cross-correspondence cases provided Myers
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with the kind of material on which he believed he could build a case.
At this point, however, what calls for emphasis is the way in which the
Sidgwick Group turned out to be rather divided internally, what with the
more orthodox Balfour element and the more spiritualist Myers. Much
as Sidgwick may have loved Myers, one suspects that his refrain about
how he was as dear to him as the “dearest of brothers” is some sort of dry
comment on his relationship with Arthur, and perhaps on the emotional
nature of their attachment, more brotherly than intellectual. Intellectually,
at least, Sidgwick and Gurney were somewhat more alike, and with the
latter’s passing in , the Sidgwick Group would never be the same.
When in that year Sidgwick again took over the presidency of the SPR, it
was with a heavy sense of responsibility for maintaining the respectability
of their endeavors.
Here it is important to accent just how destructive the Sidgwick Group’s
research had been during the eighties – disposing of mediums, spiritu-
alists, Theosophists, and so many others. The entire intellectual context
was now harsher; as Sidgwick would explain when discussing the shifts in
the significance of Tennyson’s In Memoriam – that Bible of the Apostles –
from the sixties to the eighties:
Hence the most important influence of In Memoriam on my thought, apart from
its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in a region, if I
may so say, deeper down than the difference between Theism and Christianity:
it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehen-
siveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather
than diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between Agnos-
tic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In the sixties
I should say that these deeper issues were somewhat obscured by the discus-
sions on Christian dogma, and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. . . . During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of
a historical religion: and perhaps what we sympathised with most in In Memo-
riam at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of ‘honest doubt,’ . . . Well, the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call ‘Hebrew old clothes’ is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to? It
brings us face to face with atheistic science: the faith in God and Immortal-
ity, which we had been struggling to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to
be in the air: and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the ‘fight with death’ which In Memoriam so powerfully describes.
(M )
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Tennyson, for Sidgwick, had not only captured the intensity of the feelings
provoked by atheism, the refusal to “acquiesce in a godless world,” but
also expressed them in conjunction with “a reverent docility to the lessons
of science which also belongs to the essence of the thought of our age.”
But Sidgwick’s experiences in such venues as the Metaphysical Society, an
illustrious intellectual setting during the eighties, had not left him much
doubt about the spirit of the age, or about the direction of the various
inquiries on which he had pinned his hopes back when he was concluding
the first edition of the Methods.
Most importantly, Sidgwick himself regarded the massive investiga-
tions of telepathy as mainly a negative result, a matter of winning a battle and losing the war. This is evident from some of Myers’s own writings,
bits that he had composed for his autobiography but that were excluded
from the published version. Speaking of the evidence for survival, he
wrote:
Gurney, up to the time of his death, was quite uncertain on this capital point. He
still held that all proved phenomena were possibly explicable by new modes of
action between living men alone. Sidgwick often thought this too; and his wife,
though more steadily inclining to a belief in survival, was averse to pronouncing
herself on the matter. I had therefore often a sense of great solitude, and of an
effort beyond my strength; – ‘striving,’ – as Homer says of Odysseus in a line
which I should wish graven on some tablet in my memory, – ‘striving to save my
own soul, and my comrades’ homeward way.’
It was as late as November, , that these doubts reached their worst intensity.
The group who had consulted over Phantasms of the Living, – the group whom
some regarded as facile in belief, – were certainly then in no credulous mood.
Sidgwick’s natural scepticism and self-criticism asserted themselves more strongly
than ever before. The collapse of Madame Blavatsky’s so-called Theosophy, – a
mere fabric of fraud, – had rendered all of us severer in our judgment of the
human evidence on which our own conclusions depended. Sidgwick urged that
all that we had actually proved was consistent with eternal death. He thought
it not improbable that this last effort to look beyond the grave would fail; that
men would have to content themselves with an agnosticism growing yearly more
hopeless, – and had best turn to daily duties and forget the blackness of the end.
His words touched many a latent doubt in my own bosom. As I have implied,
the question was for me too vital to admit of my endeavouring for a moment to
cheat myself into a false security. My mind had been ever eagerly on the watch
for indications telling either way; and for a few days I was now overshadowed by
Sidgwick’s loss of hope.
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It is at this point, one might say, that one finds Sidgwick himself really
and truly coming to terms with his work as “the negative result of a the-
ological investigation,” as Schneewind described the Methods. Psychical
/> research fifteen years on was beginning to take the familiar, patiently self-
undermining shape of most other Sidgwickian inquiries – the “deepest
problems of human life” were turning out to be quite deep and not at
all congenial to the English mind. On March , , he writes in his
journal: “I feel, however, that the natural drift of my mind is now towards
total incredulity in respect of extra-human intelligences; I have to remind
myself forcibly of the arguments on the other side, just as a year ago I had
to dwell deliberately on the sceptical argument to keep myself properly
balanced” (M ).
What was the value of all these forms of thought transference, if all
they amounted to were the desperate communications of all-too-mortal
human beings, fragments of psychic e-mail that carried little real meaning
or larger significance? Supplemental modes of communication between
meaningless lives was not the answer he had sought. Nor was it a comfort
to be handed so many Jamesian lessons in the stranger warps of human
nature, blurring the lines between hypocrisy and good faith, error and
evidence, irresponsibility and responsibility. The “true self ” was disinte-
grating under scrutiny.
The pain of this experience, for Sidgwick, can scarcely be overestimated.
The filiations between his psychical research and his religious and ethical
concerns – including, indeed, his deep commitment to Apostolic inquiry –
were so strong and extensive that this later crisis of faith was about as
stormy and stressful as his earlier one. The mode of inquiry, the very
language of truth, had all the same confessional aspects. Consider how,
in an undated letter to Myers, Sidgwick put the question of whether to
include their friend Henry Graham Dakyns in their efforts: “Dakyns, with
whom I am staying, would like to come to about half a dozen seances –
the first four and one or two afterwards. Should he be let in? He is a
sympathetic person, and would I should think be good – but possibly
there is no room.”
Curiously, psychical research, like Mauricean Apostolic inquiry and
utilitarian moral maturation, demanded the same extension of the sym-
pathetic tendencies, the same receptiveness to and willingness to learn
from others, albeit in a rather extreme form. In this sense, the evolu-