by Colin Wilson
*For accounts of Reichenbach, Buchanan and Denton, see my book The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry (1984).
CHAPTER FOUR
Psychical Research Comes of Age
Looking back over the history of spiritualism, it certainly looks as if the ‘spirits’ made a tremendous and concerted effort to convince the Victorians of their reality. If that is the case, it seems equally clear that they made a miscalculation. The leaders of Victorian public opinion — politicians, intellectuals, churchmen — remained indifferent. And most scientists were intensely hostile. In the decade after the ‘Hydesville rappings’, they made a determined attempt to destroy spiritualism by ridicule.
They were hardly to blame. If they had behaved in any other way, they would not have been Victorians. It was their very best qualities — their sense of excitement about the future, about the tremendous scientific and technical advances, and the possibilities of humanitarian social reforms — that made them turn their backs on the ‘supernatural’. T. H. Huxley expressed this spirit in a burst of magnificent exasperation when someone tried to persuade him to attend a seance: ‘If anybody could endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do.’
But when the less waspish investigators could be persuaded to listen to the ‘chatter of old women and curates’, they often found it unexpectedly interesting. When he started his career as a schoolmaster, Alfred Russel Wallace was a sceptic and a disciple of Voltaire; but when he went to listen to a lecture on mesmerism, he was sufficiently intrigued to try it out on his students. One boy proved to be an unusually good subject. When placed in a trance, he seemed to ‘tune in’ to Wallace’s mind. When Wallace pricked himself with a pin, the boy cried out and put his hand on the same part of his own body; when Wallace sucked a lump of sugar, the boy also went through sucking motions. Fifteen years later, Wallace became famous as the man who had, together with Charles Darwin, discovered evolution by natural selection — and who, moreover, had allowed Darwin to take priority. In 1865, Wallace attended a seance at the house of a sceptical friend, and witnessed a heavy table moving and vibrating — in broad daylight — while raps resounded from around the room. That convinced him. A year later, he met an enormous young lady named Agnes Nichols, and watched with incredulity as the elephantine girl floated up into the air. Agnes could also produce ‘apports’ — objects that fell from the air — and when Wallace asked if the spirits could produce a sunflower, a six-foot sunflower with a clod of earth round its roots fell on to the table. Agnes’s spirits never did things by halves; on another occasion when someone requested flowers, what looked like the whole contents of a flower shop cascaded from the air. But their most spectacular feat occurred in 1871, when Agnes herself (now married to a man called Guppy) became the ‘apport’. She was seated at the dining-room table doing her accounts when she vanished as if the ground had swallowed her. Four miles away, some ardent spiritualists were seated at a table with their eyes closed, begging the spirits to vouchsafe some small manifestation. There was an almighty crash that caused screams, and when someone struck a match, the mountainous Mrs Guppy was found lying on the table, still clutching her account book. But again, the spirits had miscalculated. The story of Mrs Guppy floating four miles certainly caused widespread hilarity, but it didn’t bring thousands flocking to the Spiritualist churches.
Wallace had no doubt that Mrs Guppy could convince the sceptics, so he invited three of the most hostile — Professor W. B. Carpenter, Professor John Tyndall and G. H. Lewes, the husband of novelist George Eliot. Carpenter came, sat silently through a cannonade of raps, then went away without comment; he never came back. Neither did Tyndall, whose only comment was ‘Show us something else.’ Lewes simply refused to come, as did T. H. Huxley — this was the occasion when Huxley remarked that he simply could not ‘get up an interest in the subject’.
Yet in spite of the refusal of scientists to believe their own eyes and ears, psychic phenomena remained a thorn in the flesh of Victorian intellectuals. After all, it was the business of science to explain mysteries, not ignore them. Some scientists — such as William Crookes, discoverer of the element thallium — developed a bad conscience about it, and decided to conduct their own investigations. When Crookes saw a concertina in a cage playing music of its own accord, while Daniel Dunglas Home held it up by one handle, he knew that he was dealing with unknown forces. His ‘credulity’ caused much headshaking among his colleagues. And later, when he decided that a young lady called Florence Cook — whose guide, Katie King, materialised and walked round the room — was genuine, some of them whispered that Florence had become Crookes’s mistress as the price of his cooperation.
The mathematician Charles Dodgson — who wrote Alice in Wonderland — was another who felt that the phenomena ought to be explained, not dismissed. He wrote to a friend in 1882:
That trickery will not do as a complete explanation of all the phenomena … I am more than convinced. At the same time, I see no need as yet for believing that disembodied spirits have anything to do with it … All seems to point to the existence of a natural force, allied to electricity and nerve force by which brain can act on brain. I think we are close to the day when this shall be classified among the known natural forces …
That was the ideal aim: to track down this unknown force and stick a label on it. This was the truly Victorian way of banishing this revival of witchcraft. The only problem was that the spirits often converted the sceptics who were trying to disprove their existence. There was, for example, the embarrassing case of the American Congressman Robert Dale Owen, son of the great social reformer Robert Owen. The latter had been a lifelong freethinker — until he encountered the American medium Mrs Hayden. And then, at the age of 83, he declared himself a Spiritualist. His son, another freethinker and social reformer, was furious, and decided that the old man was senile. He was, at the time, American chargé d’affaires in Naples. In 1856, the Brazilian ambassador persuaded him to attend a seance in his apartment, and there Owen saw the table moving without human agency. It was, he decided, merely an ‘electro-psychological phenomenon’. But he wanted to know how it worked. So he spent the next two years reading books on mesmerism and ‘animal magnetism’, and attending seances. He met Home, who had lost his powers at the time; but the stories of Home’s powers made him feel that he should at least consider the possibility that spirits were responsible for the phenomena. As a result, he became convinced, and wrote a book called Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World that achieved the same popularity as Mrs Crowe’s Night Side of Nature. Footfalls deserved its popularity; it was an exhaustive, carefully argued book, full of the latest discoveries in modern science, and of some highly convincing cases of clairvoyance, precognitions, poltergeists and ‘phantasms of the living’. But it is doubtful that it convinced a single scientist.
What finally turned the tide in favour of spiritualism was not scientific evidence, but the deep Victorian craving for religious certainty. Nowadays the chief affliction of the intellectuals is angst, a kind of free-floating anxiety. In the Victorian age, it was Doubt with a capital ‘D’. One of the great Victorian bestsellers was a novel called Robert Ellesmere by Mrs Humphry Ward, about a clergyman who experiences Doubts and feels obliged to resign his living. We find the idea slightly comic — Evelyn Waugh poked fun at it in Decline and Fall — but that is because we take doubt for granted. We can scarcely imagine what it was like to be born into the blissful certainty of a respectable Victorian household — certainty about salvation, about the inspiration of the Bible, about the truth of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Victorian children were brought up to believe that Adam was created in precisely 4004 BC, and that any kind of doubt on religious matters was as disgraceful as being a drunkard or a prostitute. So when Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) argued that the earth was millions of years old, Victorians felt as shocked as if an active vo
lcano had appeared in Trafalgar Square. It was from that point that they began to be undermined by Doubts.
One of these unhappy questioners was Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Trinity College, Cambridge. Doubt tormented him like a nagging tooth all his life. In 1869, at the age of thirty-one, he even felt obliged to resign his fellowship at Trinity because he could no longer subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. His fellow dons sympathised, and the moment the religious tests were dropped, reappointed him. He went on to write a celebrated book on ethics that ended with the statement that all man’s attempts to find a rational basis for human behaviour are foredoomed to failure.
Sidgwick’s pupils regarded him as a kind of Socrates. There were many brilliant young men among them, including Arthur Balfour, a future Prime Minister, Edmund Gurney, heir to a Quaker fortune, and Frederick Myers, the son of a clergyman. Myers, another Fellow of Trinity, also felt obliged to resign because of Doubts.
One evening in December 1869, Myers paid his old master a visit, and they went for a walk under the stars. It was the year in which Sidgwick had resigned his fellowship, and inevitably, the subject of religion came up. Although neither of them could still call themselves Christians, neither of them could accept that the universe is a great machine and that human beings have been created by pure chance. It was Myers who asked, with a certain desperation, whether, since philosophy had failed to solve the riddle of the universe, there might be just a chance that the answer lay in the evidence for ghosts and spirits. Neither of them felt much optimism, but Sidgwick went on brooding about the idea — particularly when, in the following year, Crookes announced that he intended to investigate Daniel Dunglas Home. The attacks on Crookes outraged their sense of fair play, and in 1873, they formed a loose association for the investigation of spiritualism and the paranormal. Myers became a school inspector, which left him time to attend seances. But at first he found it discouraging work; he began to wonder whether there was something about him that made the spirits stay away. Then he had an experience that convinced him. He attended a seance with a medium named Charles Williams — at one of whose seances Mrs Guppy had landed on the table — and a hand materialised in the air. Myers held it in his own, and felt it grow smaller and smaller until it faded away, leaving nothing behind. That could not be trickery. Myers now began seeking actively for more evidence. Together with Edmund Gurney, Arthur Balfour, Sidgwick and Lord Rayleigh — the scientist who discovered the element argon — Myers became a dedicated ‘psychical researcher’. They were joined by a remarkable clergyman, Stainton Moses, who was also an automatic writing medium. His obvious genuineness reinforced Myers’s conviction.
A new impetus came from an Irish professor of physics, William Barrett, who taught at the Royal College of Science in Dublin. Like Alfred Russel Wallace, Barrett had become interested in ‘mesmerism’, and when he was staying with a friend of County Westmeath, he persuaded some of the village children to subject themselves to hypnosis. Two proved to be excellent subjects, and with one of these, Barrett observed what Wallace had experienced with his schoolboy two decades earlier, ‘community of sensation’. When his friend placed his own hand over a lighted lamp, the girl snatched hers away as if afraid of burning. When he tasted sugar, she smiled; when he tasted salt, she frowned. She also proved to be able to read Barrett’s mind. The sceptical Professor Carpenter had explained such phenomena by saying that people under hypnosis become abnormally sensitive, so they can recognise almost undetectable sounds or smells. But that would not explain how this girl could hold against her head a book containing a playing card, and describe the card exactly.
Barrett wrote a paper about the case, and sent it to the British Association in London. It would probably have been ignored, but it happened that Wallace was chairman of the committee that decided which papers to publish. He threw his weight behind Barrett, and although the committee eventually overruled him, Wallace made sure that Myers saw the paper.
By this time, Barrett had found another case that excited him — the family of a clergyman called Creery, who lived at Buxton, in Derbyshire. Creery’s daughters were unusually good at playing a favourite party trick called the ‘willing game’, in which a person went out of the room while the others decided what he ought to do; when he came back, everyone had to try to ‘will’ him to do it. In Barrett’s presence, Creery’s four daughters demonstrated the ‘willing game’ again and again, with hardly a single failure.
Barrett met Myers and his fellow ‘psychical investigators’ in London, and suggested that they ought to form a society for investigating these mysteries. Myers and Gurney were dubious; they felt they were already doing their best. But Barrett’s enthusiasm prevailed, and the result was the formation of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which met for the first time in February 1882. Its original members were the ‘Cambridge group’ — Myers, Gurney, Sidgwick (and his wife Eleanor), Balfour, Barrett, Rayleigh and Wallace. Soon They were joined by distinguished Victorians such as Tennyson, Gladstone, J. J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron), Mark Twain, William James, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), John Ruskin, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the painters Frederick Leighton and G. F. Watts.
The Society had no objection whatever to sceptics, for its aim was to bring the methods of science to bear on the ‘psychic world’, and try to prove or disprove it once and for all. One result was that Myers and Gurney accepted with pleasure the services of a sceptical post-office employee named Frank Podmore, whose original faith in spiritualism had been badly shaken in 1876 by the trial and subsequent flight of a ‘slate-writing’ medium named Henry Slade. (The anti-spiritualist Sir Ray Lankester had managed to grab the slate before the ‘spirits’ had had a chance to get to work, and found a message already on it. In spite of strong evidence in his favour, Slade was found guilty on the curious grounds that writing by spirits was a violation of the laws of nature, so he had to be a fraud). The three-way collaboration produced the classic Phantasms of the Living (1886) which took four years to compile. The Society also produced a vast Census of Hallucinations, which showed that one person in every ten had experienced some kind of hallucination.
Now, at last, it should have been possible for the ‘spirits’ to win over the great majority of the British public. We have seen that mediums like Home, Mrs Hayden and Mrs Guppy had no problem convincing scientists once they were given a fair chance. In fact, the Society did some very impressive work, establishing the reality of apparitions, telepathy, clairvoyance and out-of-the-body experiences beyond all reasonable doubt. This early work culminated in Myers’ masterpiece, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, which will be examined more fully in the next chapter.
But, astonishingly, all this did little or nothing to influence public opinion. The vast audience that had bought The Night Side of Nature and Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World could not be bothered to read huge works full of signed statements and detailed examinations of the evidence. And sceptics such as T. H. Huxley and Sir Ray Lankester felt there would be no point in reading them anyway, since anyone who could believe in such nonsense must be a gullible idiot.
Regrettably, there was another factor that prevented the public taking the SPR seriously. In its first two decades, a whole series of ‘exposures’ provided the sceptics with all the ammunition they could wish for; the result was that, by about 1902, the Society had become a kind of joke, rather like the Flat Earth Society.
One of the most damaging of the ‘exposures’ had taken place in 1880, two years before the Society was formed. The medium Florence Cook, with whom William Crookes had worked, was caught cheating by Sir George Sitwell — father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. Florence was a ‘materialisation medium’. She sat in a cabinet with drawn curtains in a dimly lighted room, and after a few minutes, a figure in white would emerge from the cabinet and talk to people in the audience. The ‘spirit’ called herself Marie, and claimed that she ‘materialised’ herself with substanc
es taken from the medium’s body. As she passed by Sitwell’s chair, he grabbed her and held her tight until someone produced a light. Then it was found that ‘Marie’ was Florence Cook in her corset and petticoat; Florence’s other clothes were found in the cabinet.
That looked conclusive, although spiritualists accepted Florence’s explanation — that she was in a trance at the time and had no knowledge of what had happened. Sir William Crookes immediately came to her defence. He pointed out that in 1873, a man called Volckman had suddenly grabbed the ‘spirit’ as it walked around the room — in those days, a woman who called herself Katie King. One person present claimed that ‘Katie’s legs and feet had dissolved away and that she had escaped from Volckman’s clutch with an upward movement like a seal’. The audience rushed to the cabinet and found Florence still there, dressed in black, her knots and seals intact. No trace of the white gown in which ‘Katie’ had been dressed was found in the cabinet.
Crookes also described how he had once been allowed to hold ‘Katie’ in his arms at a seance, and found her to be quite solid, like a normal woman. Naturally suspicious, he asked her if he could see Florence in her cabinet. ‘Katie’ agreed, and Crookes entered the cabinet and found Florence in a trance. As far as Crookes was concerned, that was conclusive. As far as the sceptics were concerned, it proved one of two things: either that Florence had an accomplice — perhaps her sister Katie, also a medium — or that Crookes was a liar.
After the Sitwell exposure, an authoress named Florence Marryat sat with Florence in the cabinet, tied to her with a rope; ‘Marie’ appeared as usual and walked out amongst the audience. But Florence’s reputation had suffered badly, and she soon went into partial retirement.
Crookes was undoubtedly deceived by a personable general’s daughter named Rosina Showers. He had no reason to suspect her, for she refused all payment for her seances, at which a figure dressed in white appeared. Crookes had devised a simple test to prevent Florence Cook from cheating; he had made her dip her hands in a coloured dye before the seance, then examined ‘Katie King’ ’s hands. ‘Katie’ passed the test without difficulty. But Rosina’s ‘apparition’ had dyed hands. Crookes allowed himself to overlook this — after all, the ‘spirit’ drew its substance from the medium, and might have borrowed the dye too. But Rosina was unable to keep her secret to herself, and told the American medium Annie Fay that she had cheated. Mrs Fay immediately passed this on to Crookes, who demanded a private interview with Rosina. She confessed her deception, and promised never to do it again. Crookes, in turn, promised not to expose her. This promise was to cause him some embarrassment. Rosina’s mother found out about the secret meeting, and put the worst possible construction on it. Having promised Rosina to keep silence, Crookes had to endure stoically while Mrs Showers spread scandal among her friends and accused him of being a Casanova who habitually seduced his mediums. It was already general gossip that he had slept with Florence Cook when he was ‘investigating’ her in his own house. Crookes finally decided that psychical research was more trouble than it was worth, and gave it up.