by Deborah Blum
THAT SAME STORM-CLOUDED FALL, an essay by William James appeared in the American Magazine. Called “The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher,” it had been intended as a retrospective but served, serendipitously, as an eloquent answer to his critics.
James began by recalling Henry Sidgwick, with his shy stutter, his “liberal heart,” his rare combination of “ardor and critical judgment,” and his complete frustration over the elusive nature of psychical phenomena. “I heard him say, the year before his death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty years he would be in the same identical state of doubt and balance that he started with, he would have deemed the prophecy incredible.
“My own experience has been similar to Sidgwick’s.”
After twenty-five years working with some outstandingly good psychical researchers, conducting experiments, studying the literature, sitting with mediums both gifted and fraudulent, James found himself stymied. He could accept some of the phenomena as real, but he could not explain them.
“I confess that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions, all in equal measure, so that, although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits, are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they also can never be susceptible of full corroboration.”
James deplored the apparently incurable dishonesty associated with spiritual endeavors and the way that it continually obstructed progress. Psychical researchers routinely wasted valuable time exposing cheaters rather than studying legitimate phenomena. From Richard Hodgson’s dissection of Madame Blavatsky to Everard Feilding’s hilarious encounters with spirits of the still-living, the potential for fraud appeared infinite.
Frank Podmore, who sometimes sardonically referred to himself as the SPR’s “skeptic in chief,” had published a two-volume history of spiritualism, suggesting that against such a background all mediums must be considered suspect, dismissing Eusapia Palladino as a bad joke played on his colleagues and Leonora Piper as a woman with some telepathic skills and an excellent memory for facts shared casually by her sitters. He had no proof of the latter, Podmore said, but her overall record, although impressive, failed to convince.
Perhaps this was too cynical, Podmore allowed. “The accurate appreciation of evidence of this kind is an almost impossible task,” he wrote in his book Modern Spiritualism. “Mrs. Piper would be a much more convincing apparition if she could have come to us out of the blue, instead of trailing behind her a nebulous ancestry of magnetic somnambules, witchridden children, and ecstatic nuns.”
The same ancestry made Eusapia Palladino impossible to defend, Podmore said flatly, although Hereward Carrington was willing to try. Drawing on his own talents as a magician, Carrington had tried to repair her reputation—and his—by holding a New York stage show to illustrate the difference between conjuring—which he knew well—and real magic.
As reported in city newspapers, he began by stepping onto the stage of New York’s Berkeley Theatre and placing a wax hand atop four glass tumblers sitting on a wooden table. He then retired to a corner of the stage and “asked” the hand questions. In response, the wax fingers had rapped on the glasses. The audience was mystified, reporters declared, until Carrington revealed a fine black thread attached to the hand, and an assistant attached to the thread, hidden behind a curtain, busy tugging on the line.
Carrington levitated tables using wires and hooks that were concealed in his sleeves, materialized a floating baby’s hand (attached to his foot), generated from a cabinet a misty figure which turned out to be a piece of cheesecloth dusted with phosphorus. He knew the tricks, Carrington said, and he’d checked for all of them with Eusapia Palladino. “I have always said that she will resort to trickery if she can, but if she was carefully watched she still performs the most marvelous acts and some of these acts I can explain only on supernormal grounds.” He saw, belatedly, that he had underestimated his opposition, that unsympathetic researchers had deliberately ignored his warnings, wishing only to see the medium exposed.
At Carrington’s request, Everard Feilding returned to Italy to retest Eusapia after the American tour. He found her sick, demoralized, viciously bitter, and unable to produce a single decent result: “Everything this time was different,” he said. If she had ever possessed an unpredictable power, it had abandoned her.
Neither Hyslop nor James rejoiced that their warnings against her American tour had proved true. They would much rather have been wrong.
PERHAPS, James wrote in his last essay on psychical research, it was unfair to expect anything resembling purity in the endeavor. All human enterprises contained some fraud; James accepted that it was an integral part of human nature to sometimes prevaricate, to wander that fine line between true and false, right and wrong.
“Man’s character is too sophistically mixed for the alternative of ‘honest or dishonest’ to be a sharp one,” he said, noting that despite its attitude of superiority, science itself was not immune to deceit. “Scientific men themselves will cheat—at public lectures—rather than let experiments obey their well-known tendency toward failure.” He recalled a well-known physics demonstration using an apparatus intended to show that whatever the outer stresses, its center of gravity remained immovable. When a colleague borrowed the device, though, he found it wobbled through his demonstrations. Well, explained its owner, “to tell truth, whenever I used that machine, I found it advisable to drive a nail through the center of gravity.”
Secretly stabilizing the device did not undo the laws of gravity, James pointed out; in fact it helped audiences understand the scientific point rather than subverting it. By the same token, fraud among professional mediums did not undo the possibility of real supernatural phenomena. Perhaps, curiously, fraud might serve to corroborate truth. “If we look at human imposture as a historic phenomenon, we find it imitative”; tricksters were only able to garner attention because they faked something that did exist, fraudulent mediums only persuasive by taking advantage of the reputation earned by the few legitimate psychics. “Those who have the fullest acquaintance with the phenomena admit that in good mediums there is a residuum of knowledge displayed that can only be called supernormal; the medium taps some source of information not open to ordinary people.”
That also seemed to be Podmore’s opinion, that “even the extravagances of mysticism may contain a residuum of unacknowledged and serviceable fact.” It was an idea culled from Gurney and Myers’s original calculation that perhaps 5 percent of all the occult claims they studied were real, and all these years later, their old colleague continued to push against “scientific rejection” of the legitimate phenomena. So did William James make a stand on that narrow ground.
“Either I or the scientist is of course a fool,” James wrote, “with our opposite views of probability here.... I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor; I am willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is my truth, as I now see it.”
First, he believed that these odd, these occult, these so-called supernatural phenomena occurred with remarkable frequency, despite scientific claims that they were “so rare as to be unworthy of attention.” Second, James believed in “the presence, in the midst of all the humbug, of really supernormal knowledge, beyond the ordinary senses.”
And finally, regretfully, James believed he and his colleagues had been “too precipitate in their hopes,” had trusted too much in the ability of science to solve all mysteries. The answers would not come in his lifetime, he suspected, and perhaps not in his children’s lifetimes either.
MARK TWAIN WAS born in 1835, a year in which Halley’s Comet had blazed like God’s own lightning across the night skies. Now, in 1910, the comet was scheduled to make its return, even closer to Earth, and, so the stories went, dragging death in its glowing wake.
And Twain, now seventy-five years old, was thinking not only of the cycle of the comet, but of the cycle of his life as well: “I came in with Halley’s comet.... It is coming again... and I expect to go out with it... the Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’ ”
Twain died on April 21, 1910, one day after Halley’s comet reached its closest point to Earth, while “comet parties” danced on rooftops around the world, while reformers preached that the comet was a warning, a judgment on the godless twentieth century. When King Edward VII died on May 6, following a series of heart attacks, newspapers noted that the comet’s path was exceptionally erratic that day.
The comet’s reputation as a harbinger of death shone so brightly that Pope Pius X felt required to reassure the world’s faithful. As the pope would remind his followers, the comet’s tail had missed Earth by almost 200,000 miles. He trusted in the judgment of astronomers when they called Halley’s Comet an interesting celestial phenomenon, not evidence of God’s disappointment with the modern world.
ON AUGUST 19, 1910, Frank Podmore, the last of the three authors of Phantasms of the Living, was found dead, floating in a small pond in the resort community of Malvern Wells.
Maintaining his role as in-house skeptic for the SPR, Podmore had recently infuriated his colleagues by suggesting that Eusapia Palladino’s dazzling performance in Naples, so different from the American tour, undoubtedly occurred with the help of an accomplice. After sending Carrington, Baggally, and Feilding into a frenzy of outrage and denial, Podmore had left for a golfing holiday. He’d spent a relaxing week at Malvern Wells and on a mild Sunday night gone out for a late-night walk, stopped for a cheerful conversation with a friend, and vanished. His body was found five days later in a small pond; at a same-day inquest, the coroner gave a simple verdict of “found drowned,” calling the death an unsolved mystery.
“Suicide has, of course, been suggested,” John Piddington wrote to James Hyslop, “but there is no proof of it and I see no hope of the mystery ever being cleared up.”
The previous year, Podmore had separated from his wife and resigned his longtime job as postal inspector amid a flurry of whispers that he’d been caught in a homosexual relationship. Piddington warned Hyslop to watch out for any references to such “grievous trouble” in séances yet to come, and begged him not to publish anything sexually revealing that “may be said about him or purport to come from him in script or trance.
“At the same time, I must not let you get the impression... that there is warrant for connecting his death with his troubles. There may have been a connection but there is absolutely no evidence of any. I know I can rely upon you to regard this letter as absolutely private and confidential and I think you would do well to destroy it after reading it.”
Hyslop kept the confidence. But he kept the letter too.
No ONE FROM the SPR’s office came to the small private burial for Podmore; as his friends noted resentfully, the association didn’t even send a wreath. But Nora Sidgwick wrote a heartfelt appreciation in the society’s Proceedings: “Ignorant criticism we can get plenty of, but when not harmful it is usually quite useless. What is not easy is to find a man with unflagging energy in keeping his knowledge up to date, unflagging belief in the importance of the investigation, who yet can put himself outside it.
“The Society will be fortunate indeed if it finds another critic equally friendly, learned, painstaking and accurate... to put the brake on where there are signs of running too fast.” As she reminded the membership, skeptics were as important to making a convincing case as optimists were. Perhaps more so.
WILLIAM AND ALICE JAMES left England near the time of Podmore’s death. They had arrived in the spring to stay with his brother, Henry, who had fallen prey to illness and depression and wanted company.
The Jameses had barely settled into Henry’s comfortable home in Rye, where he had moved from London, when a telegram arrived bearing bad news. Their youngest brother, Robertson James, was dead of a heart attack in his sleep. William’s reaction was partly grief, partly envy. His heart disease had worsened; he could hardly bear to take a step, even to breathe. He wished he would go out so easily, he said.
By August, William was so sick that he begged to go home. Alice and Henry, who had returned to good health, booked a voyage back to the United States and, once there, headed directly to Chocorua. William immediately took to bed, and the doctors they consulted predicted that he would gradually recover.
Within the week, though, William was so weak he couldn’t eat, could barely keep down a few swallows of milk. Early on the afternoon of August 26, Alice came into the sickroom and found her husband unconscious. She climbed into the bed and held him against her, listening to his painful breathing until there was no sound at all.
An autopsy, requested by Alice James, showed that the cause of death was acute enlargement of the heart. But even so, she believed that his will had played a role. “He wanted to go,” Alice said, “and departed swiftly as he always has when he made up his mind to move on.”
In the United States and Europe, newspapers announced James’s death with ceremony, reporting the loss of “the most distinguished and influential American philosopher of our day.” His family and friends simply grieved for the man, “the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful presence of him,” as his brother Henry wrote in memoriam.
In the months after William’s death, Alice and Henry met with several mediums, she, particularly, hoping for a message that he lived on. They did not have a sitting with Leonora Piper, who had declared a retirement after her painful encounter with Stanley Hall. Their sessions with other Boston mediums conveyed nothing, Henry said, but the grim refusal of the dead.
Alice was disappointed, but her faith was unshaken. She had always liked William’s idea that “a will to believe” was the most important part of living in a spiritual universe. “I believe in immortality,” she wrote to a friend. And she also believed that William was “safe and living, loving and working, never to be wholly gone from us.”
The spiritualist community, however, wanted more, or at least wanted more of a demonstration. Within days, newspapers carried multiple claims of contacts with the spirit of William James.
A Boston businessman told the New York Times that James had “sent a message to his friends from the spirit world” during a seance with a most respectable medium. The message was rather vague: “I am at peace, peace—with myself and all mankind. I have awakened to a life far beyond my highest conception while a denizen of earth.” But the “spirit” promised to contact Henry James shortly with more explicit details.
The pastor of Boston’s Unity Church announced that he had felt “spiritualist vibrations” which he thought came from James because they were intense and rapid, indicating “a genius wishing to communicate rather than a common soul.”
James Hyslop reported that one medium had relayed some messages from James, in one case concerning a private conversation between Hyslop and the late psychologist, which was correct in all details, right down to the garments they’d been wearing. But this was suggestive only, Hyslop added; he hadn’t seen anything in the way of satisfactory proof. He hoped that the fascination with whether William James could come back from the dead wouldn’t obscure the more important facts at hand: that psychical research had lost one of its best friends, that there was much work yet to be done.
The Times decided to ask an expert to settle the matter, the famed scientist-inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, currently working to turn silent motion pictures into talking ones.
Edison’s name was almost synonymous with th
e power of modern science and technology, and as the newspaper proudly revealed, this was his first and only interview on the subject of survival after death. “The occasion was the recent death of Prof. William James, Harvard’s distinguished psychologist, and the alleged reappearance of Prof. James’s soul on earth. The newspapers have been teeming with the subject. The psychic researchers are even now quarreling bitterly over it. The public is puzzled.
“Therefore I turned to Edison,” the reporter explained, “who has solved for us so many puzzling problems.”
Edison saw no particular puzzle here. He didn’t believe in immortality because he didn’t believe in the human soul, he told the Times briskly. Or as the headline said: “Human Beings Only an Aggregate of Cells and the Brain Only a Wonderful Machine, Says Wizard of Electricity.”
It was the mechanical universe that formed the basis of Edison’s belief—planets spinning, winds blowing, people born and dying-all simply carried onward by that well-oiled machinery of creation. There was no reason to believe that the human brain would continue after death, Edison pointed out, any more than to think that one of his phonographic cylinders would be immortal. No machine—no cog in the works, as humans appeared to be—would live forever.
“No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life—our desire to go on living—our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not dread it though. Personally I cannot see any use of a future life.”