by Deborah Blum
In the twentieth century, Myers said, the only way to verify immortality was through the way of modern Science—“dispassionate, patient, systematic,” careful, and much to be admired: “Science works slowly on and bides her time,—refusing to fall back upon tradition or to launch into speculation, merely because strait is the gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.”
The only problem was that science, thus far, had chosen not to investigate the question of immortality. Myers believed this omission could be laid to the “resolutely agnostic” view of scientists of the day, which he summed up, “We do not know and will not know.” But this recalcitrance, he believed, would be overcome as psychical researchers like himself found inarguable evidence to the contrary. “It is my object in the present work—as it has from the first been the object of the Society for Psychical Research, on whose behalf most of the evidence here set forth has been collected,—to do what can be done to break down that artificial wall,” he wrote shortly before his death.
What he could not have foreseen when he composed Human Personality was that the evidence that Myers considered strongest—the seances in which Annie Marshall appeared, his many sittings with Rosina Thompson—would not give support to his published argument. His wife had many pertinent records destroyed; more than that, she had refused to allow Hodgson to mention them in his edited version of the book.
In his review of the book for the Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research—one of the more positive published assessments of Human Personality—James acknowledged that the “ill-defined relations of the subliminal with its ‘cosmic’ environment” undermined Myers’s case for immortality. At best, he thought, Myers had just managed to demonstrate that possible supernatural events ought “just like other events to be followed up with scientific curiosity.” But James emphasized that Myers’s willingness to tackle contradictory and confusing subjects should be considered a strength rather than a weakness: “Nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other and untidy.” It was only by acknowledging the messiness of the life itself that a picture of reality could be drawn.
Perhaps others preferred their view of the world to be more orderly, the universe to be delivered in a quantifiable package. James didn’t believe in that tidy view of existence for a minute. By accepting the wonderful complexity that Myers sought to portray, he would write, “although we may be mistaken in much detail, in a general way, at least we become plausible.”
11
A FORCE NOT GENERALLY RECOGNIZED
ON AN ICY NIGHT late in the fall of 1905, Dick Hodgson hurried with friends across the Boston Commons. The ground crunched underfoot; the night glittered around them, silver-frosted with stars. Suddenly, Hodgson stopped, tilting his head back to study the shimmering sky.
“Sometimes, I can hardly wait to get over there,” he said, his right hand tracing a route across the starry pathways. It was so difficult to prove immortality—or at least to convince others that one had—while here on Earth; he now thought, he might accomplish more when he arrived in the spirit world. “I am sure that when I do, I can establish the truth beyond all possibility of a doubt.” For a moment, his voice sounded almost wistful: “But I suppose I’m good for twenty years or more at least.”
“At least,” his friends agreed, laughing, eyeing his bright face and muscular stance.
As always, Hodgson seemed to thrive on his high-energy life. Although he obsessed about the work, he tempered it with leisure pursuits that included his reading, games of handball, socializing, vigorous vacations. Over the previous summer, he’d fished with friends in Maine and hiked in the Adirondacks. In the early fall, he’d spent a happy vacation with the Jameses at their country home in New Hampshire.
“Hodgson left us this morning after a visit of ten days,” James wrote to Flournoy. “It is a pleasure to see a man in such an absolute state of moral & physical health. His very face shows the firmness of a soul in equilibrium—another proof of the strength which a belief in the future may give one!”
Mrs. Piper, though, seemed to be faltering. Her husband, William, had died early in the summer. She’d withdrawn into sadness; her sittings had acquired a strangely dreamlike quality. James thought them vague and anemic, as if she’d lost interest, was no longer concentrating.
Even the G.P personality seemed to be slipping away. In a recent sitting, G.P. had warned Hodgson that their time together in the lamplit quiet of Mrs. Piper’s parlor would not continue long. Some days, James told Lodge, he longed for the croaky voice and conniving ways of Dr. Phinuit. Both he and Lodge worried that Hodgson hovered over the Boston medium, over-managed her so that she functioned in a kind of permanent stress state. Her primary controls these days—new personalities who went by the names of Rector and Imperator—seemed to function entirely to protect her from strenuous demands, making her “inaccessible,” as Lodge put it.
James had steered a raft of alternative investigations in Hodgson’s direction—a magnetic healer, a teenage girl who practiced “automatic piano playing,” an Irish-American dwarf who left streaks of light on any paper he touched—but, to his frustration, none of them had served to lure the investigator away from Mrs. Piper and her mysterious ways.
HAVING RETURNED FROM Egypt determined to pick up her life again, Nora Sidgwick stacked her plate high. She started on a book about her late husband, a combination of memoir, collected letters, and biography. She went back to her duties at Newnham College. She accepted an invitation from her brother-in-law, Lord Rayleigh, to do some tricky mathematical calculations needed for his research.
Rayleigh had retired from his teaching position at Cambridge but was continuing to run experiments in a laboratory he’d built at the family seat, Terling Place in Essex. He was focusing on electric and magnetic problems, the traveling of electric currents and the ways certain materials stubbornly refused to carry those currents. His reputation for nonstop investigation was so established that King Edward VII greeted him at a reception with: “Well, Lord Rayleigh, discovering something I presume?” For his illuminating work on atmospheric chemistry, including the discovery of argon, Rayleigh had received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904, the fourth year that the awards were given.
Rayleigh still maintained an interest in occult experiments as well, keeping his membership in the Society for Psychical Research (and eventually becoming president in 1919). For Rayleigh, it was less a matter of conviction than principle. Like other physicists in the SPR—Oliver Lodge and William Barrett—he believed that science was the best tool known. It should always be used for exploring difficult questions, even questions of spirit life and supernatural powers.
Theirs could safely be called a minority view in the research community. Barrett, who followed Lodge in assuming the SPR presidency, noted that prejudice against the society’s work seemed to be dying down except among scientists, citing two primary reasons for that resistance. First, occult phenomena were not replicable; “the phenomena cannot be repeated at pleasure (any more than a shower of meteorites can).” Second, the strangeness of the subject and the peculiar personalities involved acted as an abrasive on the ordinary scientist’s sense of sanity.
THE WORD peculiar, indeed, could be applied to almost anyone who dabbled in the occult. One needed only to observe the latest rage in New York mediums, the Reverend May Pepper, who presided over the Church of Fraternity of Soul Communion in Brooklyn.
Pepper charged 25 cents for entrance to the temple. Once the pews filled, she ascended a platform, her long dark hair flowing over her black robes, and asked her assistants to tie a linen bandage over her eyes. She would then “read” letters brought forth by those in the audience.
One memorable evening, described in mocking detail by attending journalists, a young man stumbled up to the lectern bearing not a letter but a whole roll of paper covered with writing.
“Your coming was heralded to m
e,” the medium proclaimed. She’d seen a vision of an Indian reaching out toward him. “Tell me, was there ever an Indian in your family?”
“My great-great-great grandfather fought Indians,” the young man answered. “His name was Montcalm.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Pepper. “I see an old man in Continental uni- , form. There is an Indian beside him. The old man is reaching out for you. He says his name is Gen. Montcalm. Tell me, did not Gen. Montcalm leave something which was lost and which you have never found?”
“Yes, yes,” the man replied; his mother had been searching for years, following the rumor of a hidden family treasure.
“Never mind about mamma,” Mrs. Pepper replied. “The General says he wants a man to do the hunting.”
From the journalistic point of view, the story only got better from there. The Anti-Fraud Society of Manhattan had stationed members in the church, who began to make fun of Pepper’s visions. Her supporters then came to her defense, detonating an explosion of fistfights that spread across the church.
When the melee ended, spectators discovered that pickpockets had been busy while the battle raged around them, and a multitude of wallets and purses had gone missing. The event was front-page news. Pedantic reports of the psychical research community, meanwhile, rarely merited a mention in the popular press.
William Barrett might complain that scientists couldn’t see past the peculiar nature of the subject. Yet the antics of Rev. May Pepper and her comrades defined the subject for a far wider audience. It was all too easy to see the supernatural as a circus exhibit rather than a topic for serious investigation.
JAMES HYSLOP decided that a bolder approach was required to improve the image of psychical inquiry. He admired what the American branch of the SPR—and Richard Hodgson, in particular—had accomplished, but Hyslop, on his own, conceived of a program that would cleverly combine psychical research with traditional studies. He wanted to encourage scientists to see connections that seemed apparent to him—links such as those between abnormal psychology and medium abilities, hypnosis and trance states. Flournoy’s study of Helene Smith certainly provided an illustration of such intersecting fields of study. Hyslop wanted to create a research center that would accommodate both psychical and psychological studies. Once he’d settled on a suitably neutral name for his venture—the American Institute for Scientific Research—he got busy promoting it.
Hyslop wrote to the New York Times, describing his new institute as one that could easily become a “research organization of a national character,” and revealing that he hoped to raise an endowment of $1 million for its support. He bolstered his claim of national potential by boasting that some of the country’s best researchers already endorsed the plan and that the board of trustees already included such eminent men as Professor William James of Harvard. “It is certainly high time that this field should receive the attention of the scientific world in some other manner than mere recognition,” Hyslop continued. “The scandal of science is that it has not been endowed as many less worthy causes have been.”
William James admired Hyslop’s courage and dedication, but found his new associate deplorably lacking in the necessary social skills and graces. Hyslop had “all the heroic qualities of human nature and none of the indispensable ones,” James once complained. As a case in point, Hyslop had given James no warning that his name would be used for public fund-raising, leaving the Harvard professor to discover his new role via the newspapers. The result was a stiff letter in which James asked to be excused from the institute’s board of directors. He assured Hyslop that the plan was admirable, but “I didn’t at all foresee the newspaper campaign and I have enough to carry in the way of reputation for crankiness without shouldering that.”
Hyslop had taken James’s wholehearted support for granted, never dreaming that James would deny so worthy an endeavor. “I have had a hard enough task to fight this battle,” he wrote back. “I ought to find some moral courage in those who have spoken on this subject as you have done. I should expect you to assist in the task.” Hyslop had heard from one pledged donor that James had been telling people of his refusal; the woman had promptly withdrawn her pledge. “It is worse still than that, just, when I am at the point of success, failure should be traceable to an act of yours.”
James recognized some justice in the accusation. It was reminiscent of what Fred Myers said years earlier, that James failed to lead because he deliberately pulled back from full engagement. He wrote to reassure Hyslop that, even though he was withdrawing from the board, they were indeed on the same side: “My Excellent Hyslop—I am sorry that the rumor of my leaving the society you are founding should cause any donation to cease. I thoroughly believe in endowing research in the psychical direction and had I money to spare I would make over to you several thousands.
“Please show this letter to the friend in question [and previous correspondence if it will help] ... I repeat my position. I believe in psychical research and its endowment. I disbelieve in ... the substitution of ‘audiences’ for investigators, ’popular interest’ for investigation and newspaper tattle for facts.”
THE NIGHT HELD too many shadows; Leonora Piper could not summon sleep. It was December 20, 1905, in the last bright days before Christmas. She’d gone to bed early, tired by some shopping chores. There was no reason why she should feel so chased by darkness.
She tossed, turned, got up about midnight to make warm milk, returned to bed, but found herself listening for footsteps, troubled by a sense of someone walking around her room. Finally about 1:00 a.m. she fell asleep, only to wake three hours later, still half caught in a dream.
She’d been trying to enter a tunnel, walking toward its entrance. As she approached, she saw a man ahead of her. She could tell that he was bearded, but a slouch hat hid most of his face. She got closer; he raised a hand to block her way. As his fingers reached toward her, she startled awake.
The room was black in the early morning. She went to the window. The casement stood partly open; the rain was beating in. She closed it and went back to bed, tumbling into dreamless sleep. At half past seven, her daughters came into her room. She blinked awake, and the memory of the dream came back in such detail that she immediately began telling them of it.
The hand had looked remarkably like Richard Hodgson’s, she told Alta, with its strong long fingers and callused palms. She wished she’d stayed in the dream a little longer, just to be sure, but she was quite certain. It made no sense to her, the hand raised in denial, the shadowed face, the tunnel stretching away into darkness.
Exhausted and still oddly troubled, she decided to stay in bed. An hour later, she heard Alta’s feet scrambling up the stairs. Her daughter came in crying, carrying the morning paper’s news, which told of the death of Richard Hodgson.
He had gone to one of his favorite hangouts, the Tavern Club, for lunch before a game of handball. An increasingly loud argument occupied the clubroom just then, with one man defending an unpopular cause against angry disagreement.
Hodgson leaned over the stair railing, jokingly emphasizing the unfair, one-sided nature of the fight. “Go for the scoundrel,” he boomed. “Don’t give him a chance to speak! Down with him, don’t let him be heard.”
The quarrel broke up in laughter.
“How can anyone be heard when you’re in the room, Dick?” countered a friend.
Hodgson had continued on to the Union Boat Club for his regular game. It had barely begun before he’d collapsed on the court, dead of a massive heart attack.
“Absolutely sudden, dropt dead while playing violent handball.... All his work unfinished,” James lamented. “No one can ever learn those records as he knew them—he would have written certainly 2 or 3 solid books. Too bad, too bad!” That was only part of it though. James mourned more than the loss of yet another of psychical research’s best workers; he mourned the loss of “the manliest, unworldliest, kindliest of human beings. May he still be energizing somewhere.”
Hodgson’s funeral was held three days after his death. The ceremony took place at his beloved Tavern Club. His coffin was decked in ivy, violets, and white roses. Flowers were heaped around the room. After the formal service, his friends gathered round and sang the club song.
James marveled that the bachelor Hodgson, with no family nearby, no group of office colleagues or co-workers, could draw such a crowd: “Everyone was there from simple personal affection for the man in the coffin. I stood at the foot of the stairs and saw everyone come down. All the women, and many of the men, were crying.”
The rain that had begun earlier that week was still beating down, gray and cold against the windows.
IN THE MIDST of a written message from her trance personality “Rector,” Mrs. Piper’s pencil dropped onto the paper. Her fingers trembled convulsively, clutching whitely around the pencil when it was returned to her.
“What is the matter?” the sitter asked.
Her hand, still shaking, wrote the letter “H” on the paper, pressing so hard that the point broke. It then continued the word, wrote “Hodgson.”
“God bless you!” exclaimed the sitter.
“I am ...” and then the writing tailed away into wild scrawls.
“Is this my friend?”
The most dictatorial of Mrs. Piper’s trance personalities, Rector intervened: “Peace, friends, he is here, it was he but he could not remain, he was so choked. He is doing all in his power to return.”