by Bart Schultz
The experiences which I mentioned to you as similar to those described in your
paper – so far as the mere effects of unconscious cerebration are concerned –
occurred about twenty years ago. An intimate friend of mine who had interested
himself somewhat in Spiritualism, and had read Kardec’s book, discovered almost
by accident that his hand could write, without any conscious volition on his
part, words conveying an intelligible meaning – in fact, what purported to be
communications of departed spirits. He asked me to come and stay with him, in
order to investigate the phenomenon; he had been rather struck by some things in
Kardec’s book, and was quite disposed to entertain the hypothesis that the writing
might be due to something more than unconscious cerebration, if it should turn out
that it could give accurate information on facts unknown to him. The experiments,
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however, that we made in order to test this always failed to show anything in the
statements written down that might not have been due to the working of his own
brain; and at the end of my visit we were both agreed that there was no ground for
attributing the phenomenon to any other cause but unconscious cerebration. At
the same time we were continually surprised by evidences of the extent to which
his unconscious self was able to puzzle his conscious mind. As a rule, he knew
what he was writing, though he wrote involuntarily; but from time to time he used
to form words or conjunctions of letters which we were unable to make out at
first, though they had a meaning which we ultimately discovered.
The report continues with several examples of the peculiar nature of
Cowell’s automatic writing – for example, they once puzzled over an ap-
parently meaningless word before realizing that it was a transliteration
of Greek for “farewell,” the spirit apparently signing off in impressive
fashion. Sidgwick found the experiments intriguing, and – though incon-
clusive on the question of spirit controls – certainly pointing to strong
evidence for unconscious thought processess. Indeed, Sidgwick “had ab-
solute reliance” on his friend’s “bona fides,” and did not suspect him of
trying to mystify or defraud him.
Thus, it is important to bear in mind that all the close introspection of
mental processes and appeal to unconscious belief pervading Sidgwick’s
philosophical ethics was increasingly informed by what he took to be gen-
uine experimental evidence calling for a sophisticated depth psychological
theory of the unconscious. He believed in telepathy, hypnosis, split per-
sonality, and a host of other depth psychological phenomena, and he had
no scruples about their being legitimate objects of inquiry – in this he cer-
tainly paved the way for such pragmatists as James, and for Freudianism.
Myers, like Symonds, was a fellow explorer of the human potential, an
investigator of more or less Whitmanian forms of Cosmic Optimism who
was working the right field. And Sidgwick allowed that with mediums
like Piper, the prima facie case was made. Here was a working philosophy,
reasonable, if not conclusive, evidence. The “blackness of the end” was
turning to gray.
Eleanor Sidgwick in fact went on to publish a good deal on Piper, in-
cluding “A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Mrs. Piper’s
Trance.” Interest in the Piper case could not help but continue, given
the further shock that came in . Hodgson suddenly died, and ac-
cording to Mrs. Piper, his spirit was now directing her trance states.
And this was only one piece of the new and ever more complex evidence
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that the psychical researchers were proclaiming. New mediums, such as
Mrs. Willett, were supposedly in communication with the spirits of none
other than Sidgwick and Myers, who died within a half-year of each other,
as well as with those of Hodgson and Gurney. According to C. D. Broad,
Piper’s
mediumship has been of the utmost importance because it gave results which are
quite certainly supernormal and which seem, prima facie, to be very difficult to explain without going beyond telepathy from the living. It is roughly true to say
that Sidgwick’s death happened at a transition point in the history of the subject. In the past were the comparatively straightforward problems of the experimental and
statistical establishment of the transference of simple concrete ideas and emotions.
In the future lay the subtle and complex problems of cross-correspondences, book-
tests, and so on, in which we are still immersed. Mrs. Piper’s mediumship is the
connecting link between the two stages, and Sidgwick lived only long enough to
participate in the very early phases of the investigation. . . . Mrs. Sidgwick survived her husband for many years and maintained up to the end her active interest in
the Society and her invaluable work on the subject. We have her own authority for
stating that, in her opinion, the evidence as a whole provides an adequate ground
for believing that human beings survive bodily death. One would give a great deal
to know whether the facts which became available after would have caused
Sidgwick himself to accept so positive a conclusion.
But before considering Sidgwick’s death and possible posthumous writ-
ings, a little more needs to be said about the esotericism of his inquiries
and his morality. For the nineties witnessed a great many Sidgwickian
communications marked “Private.”
IV. Pious Fraud
But again, I admit cases in which deception may legitimately be practised for the
good of the person deceived. Under a physician’s orders I should not hesitate
to speak falsely to save an invalid from a dangerous shock. And I can imagine a
high-minded thinker persuading himself that the mass of mankind are normally
in a position somewhat analogous to that of such an invalid; that they require for
their individual and social well-being to be comforted by hopes, and spurred and
cured by terrors, that have no rational foundation. Well, in a community like that
of Paraguay under the Jesuits, with an enlightened few monopolizing intellectual
culture and a docile multitude giving implicit credence to their instruction, it
might be possible – and for a man with such convictions it might conceivably be
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right – to support a fictitious theology for the good of the community by systematic
falseh
ood. But in a society like our own, where every one reads and no one can
be prevented from printing, where doubts and denials of the most sacred and
time-honoured beliefs are proclaimed daily from house-tops and from hill-tops,
the method of pious fraud is surely inapplicable. The secret must leak out; the net
of philanthropic unveracity must be spread in the sight of the bird: the benevolent
deceiver will find that he has demoralized his fellow-men, and contributed to
shake the invaluable habits of truth-speaking and mutual confidence among them,
without gaining the end for which he has made this great sacrifice. The better
the man who sought to benefit his fellow men in this strange way the worse, on
the whole, would be the result; indeed, one can hardly imagine a severer blow
to the moral well-being of a community than that that element of it which was
most earnestly seeking to promote morality should be chargeable with systematic
unveracity and habitual violation of solemn pledges, and be unable to repell the
charge.
Sidgwick, “The Ethics of Religious Conformity” (PE )
P.S. I really think that the power of combining sympathy and lumen siccum does belong to me – and the unpleasant is as human (um) as the pleasant.
Sidgwick to H. G. Dakyns, summer of (CWC)
Sidgwick’s work with his various discussion societies and the SPR was
very much a part of his own experimentation, a psychological exploration
of his own possibilities as well as those of the general human condition. The
old Apostolic ideal was ever-evident: frank, unfettered bearing witness, an
encounter group for the parts of the soul. Sidgwick’s worries about Father
Tyrrell suggest just how much he continued to prize creating an intimate
environment for the free expression of thought and feeling. The sympathy
needed to get the spirits to speak applied to this world as well as to the other
world, and it consequently makes perfect sense that Sidgwick should have
moved effortlessly between the séance, religious counseling, educational
counseling, and sexual counseling. The sincere expression of sexual doubt
was on a par with the sincere expression of religious doubt – or for that
matter, with the sincere expression of paranormal mental happenings in
one’s hidden depths. Certainly, there was a form of esoteric morality at
work here, but with a strange aura of therapeutic confidentiality about it,
intermingled with fear both of the “dim, common masses” and of what
might materialize from within. Candor always seemed, for Sidgwick, to
carry explosive consequences. Irresistible, but dangerous.
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No doubt this did, in its way, comport very well with the spirit of the age
insofar as it reflected the social construction, as it were, of intimacy and
domesticity, the birth of the novel and the discovery of the unconscious,
all mixed with notions of national and individual character building. The
end of the Victorian era was the age of identity, as well as of empire. The
two went together, becoming pressing issues in fine Hegelian fashion,
just when they had become deeply problematic. The Boer War spelt the
beginning of the end of empire. The spirits were speaking, but where was
the soul? As always, Sidgwick was worried.
In a way, it scarcely does justice to Sidgwick to label him a “Government
House” utilitarian or advocate of esoteric morality. Somehow, as we have
seen in so many different ways, esotericism was virtually second (or per-
haps first) nature to him. Even his vision of science, carrying all his plans for
professionalization, involved the sincere testimonial, and therapeutic wit-
nessing, of high-minded seekers. If he did not believe in “idle fellowships”
and mere donnish erudition, he did somehow manage to transmute many
of the gentlemanly ideals of seventeenth-century science into the idioms
of the late nineteenth century. It was one thing to train people’s faculties,
to overcome the rift of the two cultures – humanistic and scientific – and
to strengthen the societal role of forward-looking educational institutions.
All this was well enough, but there was still the need of a clerisy, of leading
thinkers on the cutting edge, and these might need protection from the
public gaze.
And of course, when it came to the “deepest problems,” paths of in-
quiry of a yet more intimate and esoteric nature were required. One
simply did not get at the “true self,” its buried roots, without Apostolic
inquiry, hypnosis, the analysis of dreams and hallucinations, and all the
techniques that would shortly become clinical psychology. Sidgwick’s own
explorations were meant to be mind-altering, as transformative as any ther-
apeutic experience could be. To mingle one’s thoughts with others’ was
to be at risk, open to discovery and change of the most fundamental sort.
As he had confessed in his diary, he was eager to “plunge into the tide
of self-formation” (CWC). Moreover, literature, including classical liter-
ature, had a very important role to play, even if “the intuitions of literary
genius will not avail to reduce to scientific order the complicated facts of
psychical experience” (EP ); his was the old Apostolic vision reworked
in light of Mill and then again in light of parapsychology, Myers, and
Symonds. In the age of scientific specialization, literature might help to
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give “the kind of wide interest in, the versatile sympathy with, the whole
complex manifestation of the human spirit in human history,” and might
help to produce a “harmony of feeling in our contemplation of the world
and life,” even if it falls to philosophy to try to deliver a “reasoned har-
mony” (PE ). Either way, such soul craft required the right form of
discussion.
Was it secrecy or confidentiality that mattered so to Sidgwick? As noted
in previous chapters, Sidgwick and Cowell were caught up in an early
controversy about the very issue of Apostolic secrecy, and they had been
advised by Lord Houghton, who thought that “little good would come
from talking about the Society ‘to the general world who are more likely
to mistake its objects & misunderstand its principles’, and urged a policy
of secrecy.” Cowell’s letter to Houghton read:
I was anxious to know whether in your time in Cambridge the Society was kept
a secret, or whether the brothers openly talked of it. According to all traditions
in my time, it was considered that the Society ought not to be talked about by
its members and that much of its utility depended upon its being kept to a great
extent sec
ret. This seemed to me so obvious that I had always supposed it was
the rule from the earliest times of the Society; until about two years ago some
brothers started a new practice and told all about the Society to their friends
and acquaintances at Cambridge. . . . The innovators maintain that they are only reverting to the primitive system which prevailed till twelve years ago. Would you
tell me whether:
st. publicity or secrecy was the rule?
nd. the rule varied, and, if so
rd. when? and with what results?
th. whether publicity or secrecy was the rule during the years preceding
and when the Society was nearly coming to an end.
John Burwell Payne, elected in , had complained that “Past indis-
cretions by members of the Society have caused some members to wish
to keep our thoughts underground. May they be defeated.” Sidgwick had
some real sympathy and regard for Payne, with his hatred of hypocrisy. But
on this issue he appears to have gone with the Angel’s advice. As Deacon
argues, the “sudden passion for secrecy in this period” was surely a result of
the mission of the Apostles at that time: “Some members wanted to use the
Society as a spearhead group to undermine the Church of England’s domi-
nation of University life, and especially to remove the statutory obligations
of the Thirty-Nine Articles.” Thus, an excellent reason for secrecy was
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“to prevent victimisation by the Church.” This appeared to be the only
road to free and frank inquiry.
Again, the connection with Lord Houghton, Richard Monckton
Milnes, is telling. An Urning, a “defender of Keats, lately the patron
of young Swinburne,” and apparently a sometime collector of pornog-
raphy, Houghton was one of the chief protectors and resources for the
Apostles, facilitating their social position and efficacy. According to Allen,
he “became a father figure to the younger Apostles[,] . . . and he used his
very considerable social influence to benefit the Society and its members in