Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life After Death

by Deborah Blum

  The paper neatly outlined major ideas that Darwin had been compiling into his own book. While recuperating from a tropical fever, Wallace had decided to focus on one particular question: In both the human and animal worlds, why do some die and some live? His observations told him that success seemed to foster success. The healthiest tended to stay healthy. “The strongest, swiftest and most cunning” escaped their enemies. The most able hunters avoided starvation. “Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive.”

  One read through Wallace’s manuscript told Darwin that he had to move forward or lose claim to his cherished theory. A year later, Wallace’s paper was jointly presented with Darwin’s at a London scientific meeting. The year after that, in November 1859, On the Origin of Species went on sale at a price of 15 shillings. It promptly sold out its print run.

  Darwin’s genius went far beyond his ability to make a reasoned and researched case. He possessed a gift for combining science with everyday, commonsense observations that could be shared by the farmer, the gardener, and the recreational hiker. Geology reveals our history, Darwin said, and fossils tell of species come and gone. But we can see selection at work now, in the successful breeding of garden flowers and farmyard animals, in the natural variations in life around us in our fields and forests, in everything showcasing the incredible, responsive, ever-changing diversity of life.

  From the planet’s simple beginning, Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful are being evolved.” The evidence is sprawled before humankind: from the traces of dead creatures, cradled in the rock beneath our feet, to the shape-shifting existence of birds and of butterflies brightening the air around us.

  “It is so easy,” he added, “to hide our ignorance under such expressions as ‘plan of creation’ & ‘unity of design.’ ” Darwin feared his own generation would never get past its biblical baggage. He thought it might be too difficult for his contemporaries to abandon the idea that Earth was young, that species arose finished in their nature, that humans stood separate from all else, that a divine intelligence had shaped life to meet its particular standards.

  He saw that reluctance and anxiety entrenched among fellow scientists. “I look with confidence to the future,” Darwin wrote, “to the young and rising naturalists, who could face the realities of life without prejudice.” Darwin was recommended to Queen Victoria as a candidate for knighthood the month after his book was published. But he never became Sir Charles. The bishops of Her Majesty’s Anglican Church made sure of that.

  PERHAPS THE MOST famous of the ensuing debates between a supporter of evolution (a scientist) and a critic (a member of the clergy) took place in 1860.

  The debaters were Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford—who had been instrumental in preventing Darwin’s knighthood—and T. H. Huxley, physician and scientific scholar. This was the same Huxley who would coin the word agnostic to describe himself and his belief that God, or the ultimate reality, is unknowable.

  The bishop decided to tackle evolution on scientific rather than theological grounds. He argued that species were ever fixed, permanent in their shape, “a fact confirmed by all observation” of early man and his domestic animals, such as could be found in the tombs and pyramids of the ancient Egyptians. “The line between man and the lower animals was distinct,” the bishop continued. “There was no tendency on the part of lower animals to become the self-conscious, intelligent being, man, or in man to degenerate” in the direction of lesser species. He then, according to published accounts, asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey.

  By nineteenth-century standards of debate, this was an outrageous display of rudeness. It elevated the exchange to a level of near mythological proportions, told and retold. As recounted in Macmillan’s Magazine, “On this remark, Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose.” Huxley stood there, thin and pale, quiet and very grave, the magazine reported, and replied: “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.”

  The debate helped make Huxley almost as well-known as Darwin, and he took advantage of it in further debates. His ferocity and tenacity in defense of evolutionary theory earned him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog.” Many thought science had triumphed, at least in this instance, over religion. For many others in England and America, however, the painful conflict only intensified a resolve to cling to deeply held beliefs that naturalists with their compiled data—and their clever comebacks—could never hope to explain.

  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE returned to England in 1862 and strode without hesitation into this fray. He lacked Huxley’s ability to turn a wicked phrase but he brought his own gifts: energy, enthusiasm, and sincerity.

  Wallace traveled the country in support of Darwin and natural selection. He fearlessly affirmed that humans shared common ancestry with other animals, that our species was as easily explained by adaptation, by the selection of survival traits, as any other. Wallace had lived among the tribes along the Malay Archipelago. He assured his audiences—playing to their Victorian sense of self-superiority—that primitive societies represented humans in an earlier stage of development, less evolved than technologically advanced westerners.

  While Wallace camped in a simple hut, foraging for food in the tropical forests, modern society had continued its industrial advances. The mass-produced paper bag, the photographic slide, the safety elevator, and the machine gun were all recent inventions. The blazing, impossible speed of light had been measured, emphasizing that even the golden aura of a late afternoon was a matter of physics, a calculation to be mastered by man.

  But as he traversed England, Wallace gradually perceived dark spots in this polished progress. It seemed to him that the moral evolution of Western society did not match its intellectual development. He could easily enumerate examples. The slums of London stank with raw sewage; brothels catered to the deviant (some specialized in “birching,” or whipping their customers); uneducated children stole for fun as well as for need. After more than a decade away, Wallace found his homeland version of civilization more violent, less compassionate, less decent, than that of supposedly “less evolved” tribal societies. “The mass of our populations have not advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it,” he complained to a friend. It was possible, Wallace thought, that science was precipitating a loss of faith. And it was also possible that a faithless society might find itself in a state of backward evolution. It might be that without a God—or at least the belief in one—there could be no reinforcement of right and wrong, no bracing assurance of punishment and reward.

  Although he found organized Christianity’s way of explaining the world to be antiquated and unconvincing, Wallace began to reconsider the possibility of a moral force at work in the universe. He worried that if science denied even the possibility of such a higher power, the result could be a widespread amorality that would rip the social fabric. Wallace began to think that he and his colleagues bore a responsibility that they had thus far shirked. He became compelled by the idea that it was the duty of scientists to study not only the “physical parts of our nature, but the moral ones.”

  Uplifted by this new and growing sense of purpose, Wallace attended his first seance in 1865. As he would explain, Wallace thought of this as a scientific expedition into the dark jungles of spirit phenomena, worth the risk of giving ammunition to critics eager to discredit him. Pondering a dizzyingly radical new theory, he thought he might find the way to an integration of science with spirit.

  Wallace’s new idea was that natural selection had its limits, at least with regard to human beings. It could account for the physical body, yes, for skin, hair, muscles, the thump of the he
art, flex of the lungs, shape of the hands, curve of the spine. These, he continued to believe, all evolved according to Darwinian (or Wallacean) principles.

  But the mind, he proposed, was different. Perhaps intelligence, morality, that ephemeral thing called the human soul, developed along other lines. Perhaps our better nature was crafted by direction, by a power yet to be discovered; perhaps the design of the universe was such as to encourage spiritual development. Perhaps, Wallace proposed, even “the material imperfections of our globe” were not random at all, but purposeful, planned by a higher power. Perhaps “the wintry blasts and summer heats, the volcano, the whirlwind and the flood, the barren desert and the gloomy forest, have each served as stimuli to develop and strengthen man’s intellectual nature; while the oppression and wrong, the ignorance and crime, the misery and pain, that always and everywhere pervade the world, have been the means of exercising and strengthening the higher sentiments of justice, mercy, charity, and love, which we all feel to be our best and noblest characteristics, and which it is hardly possible to conceive could have been developed by any other means.”

  It occurred to Wallace that evidence for such an artful planner could only be found by investigating the supernatural realms. As he saw it, his first move should be a feasibility study, an exploration into whether evidence could be gathered at all. He needed to know, for instance, if one could reasonably expect to gather information about spiritual powers. In his first sittings with London mediums, Wallace saw nothing that approached the level of scientific proof. But the seances were just weird enough to be encouraging. If nothing else, he could argue that he’d seen inexplicable things happen, things that had not—and perhaps could not—be explained by the laws of science.

  In his notes, Wallace said he was particularly impressed by one tabletilting demonstration in which “a curious vibratory motion of the table commenced, almost like the shivering of a living animal. I could feel it up to my elbows.” He was several times startled by the information provided by mediums. For example, a medium spelled out the names of a visitor’s deceased relatives, backward and forward, even though the visitor had arrived at the seance anonymously. The cleverness of the spelling seemed to Wallace to be evidence of survival of intelligence after death. And, like so many before him, he found a seance with Daniel Dunglas Home particularly unsettling. A few of the phenomena “give me a solid basis of fact,” he concluded, urging his fellow scientists to continue with him in this inquiry. After all, Wallace said, other intelligent men must be troubled, as he was, by mysteries “which science ignored because it could not explain.”

  As Charles Darwin promptly warned him, Wallace was sending the wrong message to their critics and lending unwarranted credibility to the concept of spirit powers. Darwin feared that Wallace now gave the impression that one of evolution theory’s founders had abandoned science in favor of superstition.

  “You write like a metamorphosed (in retrograde direction) naturalist,” Darwin wrote furiously. “I defy you to upset your own doctrine.” In his outrage, though, Darwin missed a crucial point. Alfred Russel Wallace had not and never would turn away from the theory of evolution. He promoted it and worked to refine it all of his life, even into the twenteeth century, long past the time Darwin—who died in 1882—was around to scold him.

  It wasn’t that Wallace rejected his theory. It was that he found it less than satisfying. Basic survival and mechanical evolution, he decided, were not enough.

  “I FEEL CONVINCED that English religious society is going through a great crisis now,” wrote a Cambridge University lecturer in 1867. “And it will probably become impossible soon to conceal from anybody the extent to which rationalist views are held, and the extent of their deviation from traditional [Christian] opinions.”

  The writer was Henry Sidgwick, a respected member of the classics faculty at Trinity College, Cambridge. Within the following decade he would publish his book Methods of Ethics, hailed as a major work of moral philosophy in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. And in 1882 he would found, along with two friends, Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, the British Society for Psychical Research. Gurney would in turn recruit William James into their cause, as an extension of an easy friendship between the two men.

  The movement—some would call it a quest—began first in England, fomented by Wallace, stirred by the kind of hostile debates staged by Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, sought out by those who craved a refuge from the increasingly belligerent stands taken by both religious and scientific leaders. In an era when Darwinians faced off against the defenders of Genesis—neither side allowing for a middle ground—both groups lost a measure of credibility and trust. The psychical research movement rose in response to such rigidity, built by those who believed that objective and intelligent investigation could provide answers to the troubling metaphysical questions of the time—and that those answers mattered.

  The son of a clergyman, Sidgwick had reluctantly abandoned Christianity as a system unable to keep up with the present. “God owns the past,” he told a friend, but not the present. Yet, like Wallace, he worried about humankind stripped of faith. Without a religion—without a deity promising punishment and reward—Sidgwick wondered what would bind people to principles of honor and decency.

  The scholar Sidgwick pondered great cultures that had relied on religion to set moral standards. The central questions of identity, of how to live and behave in the world, of how to right wrongs and avoid disaster, had traditionally been put to the gods—animal—headed Egyptian gods and the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans. Life’s big questions were laid before Allah and his Prophet. They were addressed in Arab mosques, Buddhist monasteries, Jewish temples, and European churches. Sidgwick wondered where people would turn if they accepted that the only source of Truth, with a capital T, came from modern science, that the only answer was that life arose from random, mechanical, materialistic forces, that it was governed by none but physical principles. He shuddered at the empty silence of what he called “the non-moral universe.”

  In personality, Sidgwick seemed an unlikely candidate to rally others to a cause. Slight, with a thin face and wide gray eyes, he had a shy smile and a hesitant way of speaking, made more so by a faltering stammer. But he was respected on campus as an unusually fair-minded man, and a decent one. Under the intellectual reserve, he was compelled by a desire to overcome his personal failings and by a steadfast determination to make a difference.

  “When I found out how selfish I was,” Sidgwick wrote to his sister, shortly after he moved to Cambridge, “I used at first to try and alter myself by conscientious struggles, efforts of Will.” He made a “golden rule” for himself not to think about himself more than half an hour out of every twenty-four. He deliberately hunted for good causes without enough support, making a priority of women’s right to education and everyone’s right to seek answers to questions they cared about, even those dismissed as nonsensical or the stuff of superstition.

  His cousin Edward White Benson (later archbishop of Canterbury) first enlisted Sidgwick in the latter cause. Having helped found a “Ghost Society” at Cambridge, the outgoing Benson drafted his quiet cousin to visit some local mediums and psychics. From the first, Sidgwick approached the subject with characteristic tough-mindedness, easily detecting the use of mechanical devices and sleight of hand, writing to his sister, “I gained nothing but experience in the lower forms of human nature.”

  But the idea of being able to prove that there was something more, a spirit existence, a power beyond that of human grasp, intrigued him. And as he continued to investigate, he thought he glimpsed, only occasionally, a glimmering spark of something unexpected. In another letter to his family he wrote of his sense of grasping at handfuls of smoke while somewhere within the billows burned a genuine flame.

  One of Sidgwick’s students, Frederic Myers, was quick to see the real purpose in his forays into the occult—and to follow. Born in 1843, Myers was, like Sidgwick, the
son of a well-to-do Yorkshire clergyman and an unusually clever child. Myers expressed his first doubts about his qualifications for heaven at the age of two, wrote his first sermon at five, and entered Cambridge when he was seventeen, still fired with faith, praying to be stronger, wiser, to “have a strength not my own infused into me.” , Yet the more Myers studied, the more he learned of science and history, the more heaven seemed to slip from his grasp—or his sense of reality. The Anglican Christianity of Yorkshire and Cambridge began to look frail and dusty. It seemed to him more suited to the static past than to the dynamic present. Darwinian science troubled Myers, but it troubled him more that the church was so resistant to new ideas, even ones that might improve lives.

  The cause of women’s education first brought Myers and Sidgwick together. The Anglican Church insisted that God intended women to be subservient to men. So did most of society. Their own university, as most others, barred women from obtaining degrees. Queen Victoria herself was adamant on the subject: “Were women to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”

  Most of Sidgwick’s friends, his peers at Cambridge, saw only trouble in his argument that women should be allowed the “immense educational influence” of training for a profession. Sidgwick called it a matter of “simple justice.” Such “justice,” he was warned in turn, would lead to further demands by women, further concessions by men.