by Deborah Blum
The clutter of life and material necessity crowded into James’s mind, into his work. He felt so unwell that he’d resorted to consulting a “mindcure doctress.” He had visited her eleven times for relaxation therapy: “I sit down beside her and presently drop asleep, whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my mind. She said she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated, so restless, etc. She said my eyes, mentally speaking, kept revolving, like wheels in front of each other, & in front of my face, and it was 4 or 5 sittings ere she could get them fixed.”
Mind healers, faith healers, patent medicine salesman, all and more were the bane of the American Medical Association, which had been working to eliminate all such “quackery” since its formation in 1847. The AMA’s first official action was to forbid its members to refer patients to lay practitioners and anyone claiming to use homeopathic remedies. Its position was that only “scientific medicine,” the stuff taught in universities and practiced in hospitals, had any claim to legitimacy.
James was among many intellectuals, although few of them physicians, who found that view too restrictive. Another was Mark Twain, who characterized the medical establishment’s efforts to eliminate alternative cures as pure economics: “The objection is, people are curing people without a license and you [doctors] are afraid it will bust up business,” wrote the humorist. Twain contended that he could never get an honest answer from a licensed physician about alternatives, that it was “equivalent to going to Satan for information about Christianity.” He was cynical enough himself to discount many claims as exaggerated, even dangerous. But Twain argued that patients should have access to all choices of treatment: “I want liberty to do as I choose with my physical body.”
The insistence on scientific medicine, the ruthless effort to eliminate faith-based healing and other alternatives, paralleled the efforts of scientists to dust religious beliefs out of their methodology. James had never been easy with the idea that science should be so pure as to exclude all considerations of morality and philosophy. Neither did he embrace the “purification” of a single-approach practice of medicine.
Mind cures of the time featured a mix of relaxation techniques, hypnosis, and something then called “the talking cure,” which would later be adopted by psychiatric followers of Freud and win a reinstated legitimacy as “psychotherapy.” Mind healers might lack scientific rigor, James thought, but they were capable of insight: “The mind curers have made a great discovery—viz. that the health of soul and health of body hang together, and that if you get right, you get right all over by the same stroke.”
He suspected that the mind-body connection was far more potent than nineteenth-century medical practice was willing to acknowledge. James had mixed feelings about his own particular mind-cure regimen, especially its failure to ease his insomnia. “What boots it to be made unconsciously better, yet all the while consciously to lie awake o’nights as I still do?” he wrote. Yet he opposed efforts to turn practitioners like his “doctress” into criminals. As Massachusetts moved to outlaw unlicensed medicine over the next decade, James infuriated his fellow medical school graduates by arguing eloquently—if unsuccessfully—on behalf of mind-body therapy. He followed by proposing that his own field, psychology, should study the power of mind over physical health and the “mystical stratum of human nature.”
JAMES GAVE Phantasms of the Living one of its first positive reviews, and the only endorsement to appear in a mainstream research journal. His account appeared in Science on January 7, 1887, and began, “This is a most extraordinary work.” James went on to praise the intellect of the authors, their “untiring zeal in collecting facts,” and their efforts to make sure that those facts were accurate. The book, he said, embodied “learning of the solidest sort.”
Gurney’s fear had been that the book would be ignored or underestimated, and when it appeared, he thought himself right. The book received only passing attention in the fall of 1886, mostly newspaper reviews by journalists who found the subject of apparitions to be an amusing topic. But by the next year, the research community had taken notice of Phantasms’ claim to be legitimate science. Now the book received plenty of attention—excepting James’s review and a polite notice in the philosophical journal Mind, all of it negative.
Perhaps the most publicized attack in England appeared in the magazine Nineteenth Century in August 1887, in a lengthy article devoted to discrediting the documentation that Gurney and his coauthors had used to establish their ghost stories. And perhaps the most painful challenge came from the United States in December 1887, in an article published by the ASPR and written by one of William James’s close friends, Charles S. Peirce (the son of one of the Harvard professors sent to debunk the Davenport Brothers). Peirce had hardly bothered to read the book before declaring that he found every case of crisis apparition unbelievable, and Gurney’s rebuttal showed that the critic had both misquoted and misrepresented the cases cited.
Still, Gurney admitted that Peirce had raised some valid points, notably that people are more likely to forget dreams or hallucinations that do not coincide with death, which could tend to inflate the statistics involved, and he repeated that he himself thought the statistical sample far too small. As he had tried to make clear, Gurney saw the book as only a beginning for psychical research—as did William James, who also noted that limited statistics and unanswered questions made it obvious that much more work needed to be done. James emphasized, though, that “any theory helps analysis of the facts.” He encouraged Gurney to continue developing the theoretical relationship between telepathy and apparitions, despite its imperfections, and he pointedly stated in his review that in their combination of careful research and penetrating analysis, the authors had made a strong enough argument to finally draw the research community into the discussion.
“The next 25 years will then probably decide the question,” James wrote. “Either a flood of confirmatory phenomena, caught in the act, will pour in, in consequence of their work; or it will not pour in—and then we shall legitimately enough explain the stories here preserved as mixtures of odd coincidence with fiction.” He knew from conversations with Gurney that investigations of crisis apparitions had persuaded his friend he was studying scientific reality rather than science fiction. Despite the hostile response, James believed that as others explored the same territory, they too would recognize its genuine nature. He made that also clear in Science: “I feel that I ought to describe the total effect left at present by the book on my mind. It is a strong suspicion that its authors will prove to be on the winning side.”
6
ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
TWO THINGS ONLY ELICIT AWE, said the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in 1788: “der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir” (the starry sky above and the moral law within). To experience the former, one had only to gaze upward on a clear night. The moral law within required more effort. Kant suggested that morality could not survive unless people worked at it, stayed determined to maintain belief in three essential ideas: freedom, God, and immortality. There was a warning implicit in his declaration: one could rely always on a starry night; human morality was built of far more fragile material.
When Henry Sidgwick began studying philosophy, he found Kant’s moral reasoning as powerful as if it had been said that day, as solid as the ground beneath his feet. As Sidgwick wrote in 1887, as a young philosopher he’d accepted completely Kant’s doctrine, believed without question that “we must postulate the continued existence of the soul, in order to effect that harmony of Duty with Happiness which seemed to me indispensable to rational moral life.”
Sidgwick’s admiration for Kant and for the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, one of the most eloquent advocates of philosophy in service of society, illuminated his early writings. In his first book, The Principles of Ethics, published in 1874, Sidgwick explored the ways society might achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number of its members. His next book, The Pr
inciples of Political Economy, published in 1883, was more pragmatic, exploring the ways philosophy might guide a society being reshaped by technology and commerce. There was less of Kant’s higher morality in his work, more of Mill’s utilitarianism.
Sidgwick found the years had eroded his ability to share Kant’s acceptance of God as a premise, immortality as a postulate. By 1887, as he painfully acknowledged, Sidgwick needed some form of proof to support his faith. He knew that Kant himself had searched for evidence, as indicated by the German philosopher’s investigation of the mystical claims of Emmanuel Swedenborg. But as far as Sidgwick could judge, even a century later, factual support for the God theory remained insubstantially thin.
Troubled by personal as well as philosophical doubts, Sidgwick found himself wishing for, at least, some sign of a “friendly universe.” Perhaps this was what the psychical researchers could prove, that the star-spangled web of the skies was organized under some kind of greater moral governance, directed by “a Sovereign will that orders all things rightly.” If the universe was only a machine, after all, what determined the rules of morality? What enforced them? Sidgwick found himself increasingly in agreement with Myers about the necessary nature of their search for proof of immortality. But he lacked his friend’s natural buoyancy. He worried that they would fail. And he worried about the consequences if that happened.
“If I decide that this search is a failure, shall I finally and decisively make this postulate [to believe in God anyway]?” he worried to himself. “Can I consistently with my whole view of truth and the method of its attainment? And if I answer ‘no’ to each of these questions, have I any ethical system at all?”
IN EARLY 1887, as predicted by William James, the American Society for Psychical Research self-destructed, unable to withstand the hostility of its own scientific membership. James was keeping the remnants of the organization together, but he wrote unhappily to Edmund Gurney that as a Harvard instructor and author of a still unfinished psychology book, he really hadn’t time to do so.
Gurney replied sympathetically. Of course, he understood that the “more legitimate, or at any rate, respectable work must oust the other.” He had no doubt that James was keeping his priorities in the proper order. But the British society was not prepared to give up on its American counterpart. Sidgwick had received a cable from a wealthy American spiritualist. The man was a great admirer of Richard Hodgson’s take-no-prisoners approach to investigation. The telegram indicated a willingness to pay Dick Hodgson’s salary for a year, if he would come to America and put the psychical research program back on track.
Gurney didn’t mention that Hodgson had refused when Sidgwick first told him of the offer. Or that Sidgwick, quietly relentless as ever, had persuaded his former student to go to Boston for the year only. He wrote only that James and the ASPR were about to find themselves lucky: “He [Hodgson] combines the powers of a first-rate detective with a perfect readiness to believe in astrology (Don’t quote this as it might be misunderstood.) I should pity the astrologer whose horoscopes he took to tackling.”
BUT ASTROLOGERS were not in Richard Hodgson’s sights when he stepped briskly onto the Boston docks in May 1887. Leonora Piper was.
First, though, he had to restore some order to the ASPR shambles. Hodgson began by renting office space—two small, rapidly overflowing rooms on Boylston Place in Boston’s bustling Back Bay—and hiring a part-time secretary. He planned to quickly reduce Mrs. Piper to the ranks of exposed impostors and, his American year thus well spent, return to England.
Although he had no way of seeing it, instead the move to the United States—and his investigations there—would be the most influential of his life, changing Hodgson, changing the essential nature of how he viewed reality. He was a man in a hurry when he arrived in Boston, with no sense of the supernatural mysteries—and the eerie possibilities—that would seduce him into remaining there.
In fact, Hodgson reminded James of a perpetual motion machine. The new ASPR secretary wrote letters; answered inquiries; met with callers; attended committee meetings; researched “remarkable stories”; lectured on hypnotism to the Massachusetts Medical Society; attended unsuccessful thought-transference experiments by the surly, remaining ASPR scientists; and visited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave to pay his personal respects.
“Well, I am happy enough,” Hodgson wrote to his friend Jimmy Hackett. He liked the rocky New England shoreline, the curving green of the nearby Adirondacks. He liked Boston’s sportsman culture, was already making friends at the Union Boat Club. He had his books of poetry and philosophy ; he’d invested in a smart-talking green parrot for company. But he still dreamed of a wife and family.
He had moved around too much for that. “I should like to be married, if the fates permit, but have no one in my eye ... if I am stirred profoundly by any woman, I expect I shall go for her like thunder, but I don’t fancy I shall until then.” In the meantime, he was concentrating on only one woman, an overrated medium with a reputation that needed exploding.
Leonora Piper shared with other mediums one particular convention of the time, a spirit guide. As was the custom, her “control” served as kind of spirit business manager, relaying messages, summoning other ghosts into conversations. Hodgson had never cared for spirit controls; from Madame Blavatsky’s misty mahatmas to Florence Cook’s astonishingly solid Katie King, they seemed to him implausible at best, fraudulent at worst.
Mrs. Piper’s guide claimed to be a Frenchman named Dr. Phinuit, who had lived from 1790 to 1860. Shortly after Mrs. Piper went into a trance, her voice would change into his—deep, rough, flavored with a country French accent. Her personality would change too, from eager-to-please to abrasive, from gentle to forceful.
At least Phinuit didn’t trail around in filmy garments flirting with visitors, but neither William James nor associates in France nor anyone else had found any records showing that the imperious Dr. Phinuit had ever existed. The control didn’t even speak very good French. In conversations with James, who was fairly fluent, the doctor tended to rapidly fall into a baffled silence.
James suspected that the control was a creation of Mrs. Piper’s subconscious, a fascinating mental process that seemed to serve to buffer her from the strangeness of the trance life.
Hodgson found Phinuit a silly complication and a “freak personality.” Still, with the personality’s voice grumbling away during a trance, it was hard to ignore him. So Hodgson decided to simply confront the mess, interrupting to tell “Phinuit” that he was an obvious fake. The ever-irritable Phinuit promptly ended the sitting, announcing that he didn’t want to talk to “this man” any more that day.
Hodgson rode the train back from the Pipers’ suburban home to his downtown apartment, brushing cinders from his clothes and fuming about the whole deceptive, impossible profession of so-called mediums. But he returned, and so did Phinuit, this time prepared to put Hodgson in his place.
He had a message for Hodgson, he said, a personal one. The message came from a cousin, long dead, who was, according to Phinuit, the son of Hodgson’s mother’s brother. His grumbly voice continued: The cousin’s name was Fred. He and Hodgson had gone to primary school together, played all kinds of rough-and-tumble games, of which leapfrog was Fred’s favorite. As an adult, Fred had still loved gymnastic and athletic games: “He was swinging on a trapeze when he fell and injured his spine, finally dying in a convulsion. You were not present at his death.”
Hodgson sat silent. But when he returned to his rooms, a small apartment he’d rented on Charles Street, he jotted down some notes. “My cousin Fred excelled any other person I knew at the game of leap-frog. He took very long flying jumps, and whenever he did so crowds of school-mates gathered round to watch him. He injured his spine in a gymnasium in Melbourne, Australia, in 1871 and was carried to a hospital, where he lingered for a fortnight, with occasional spasmodic convulsions, in one of which he died. I was not present at either accident or death.”
There was more. Phinuit told him of quarrels he’d had while traveling in Europe, of another lost friend, a slim, dark-haired woman—“she was much closer to you than any other person”—who had died in Australia, some years after Hodgson had moved to England. The woman wanted to be remembered to Hodgson’s sister, who had been a close friend. And she had her own message for Hodgson. She wanted to make sure he kept a book of poems that he had given her and that her family had returned to him after her death.
Again Hodgson said nothing, although, in fact, the book sat on a shelf in his apartment, and he did plan to keep it. That night he contemplated a new set of problems. It seemed impossible to reconcile the extremes of Mrs. Piper’s trance—the Phinuit that she must have created, the information that seemed drawn from the air. The conclusion was obvious. She must be spying on him—and most probably on her other visitors as well. Hodgson decided to hire a private detective firm. He would have both Mrs. Piper and her husband followed for the next month. Just in case, he would tell no one of that decision, not even William James, and definitely not Leonora Piper.
ALMOST FORTY YEARS had passed since the bright-faced little Fox sisters first startled the country by demonstrating a new way of communicating with the dead. In the more sophisticated 1880s—the decade of the electric motor and the discovery of radio waves—Kate and Maggie Fox were long past their heyday as darlings of the spiritualist movement.
Kate lived in New York City now, after many years in England, where she had married a sympathetic barrister named H. D. Jencken and even befriended Daniel Dunglas Home. Now widowed, she had a small apartment on the Upper East Side, where she conducted slate-writing seances. In the 1850s, Maggie had become the common-law wife of a naval officer and explorer named Elisha Kent Kane, famed for his expeditions into the Arctic and his discovery of a channel that would eventually lead other explorers to the North Pole. Kane had spent five years trying unsuccessfully to wean her from spiritualism before his death in 1857. All these years after his death, she still called herself Margaret Fox Kane. Like her sister, she had worked as a medium throughout her life and still gave sittings in her Manhattan apartment.