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not at all surprised at men of science declining to have anything to do with it. On
the other hand, no one who has not read Crookes’s articles in the Quarterly Journal of Science, or some similar statement, has any idea of the weight of the evidence in favour of the phenomena. As a friend of mine (who is a dis believer) says: ‘There are only three alternatives – Crookes is either affirming a tissue of purposeless lies, or a monomaniac, or the phenomena are true,’ and we seem to me to be driven to
one of these conclusions. And then there is the startling fact that while all this is going on Crookes is exhibiting before the Royal Society experiments of novel and
great interest on the motive force of heat. Altogether I am surprised that the thing
is not attracting more attention. We have had tremendous heat in London, which
has made me almost unable to work; I am now going back to Cambridge for a few
days to finish my book, which I shall put into the printer’s hands (I hope) before
very long. It is a book too technical to give me any general reputation; indeed it can scarcely be said to belong to Literature, but I hope it will at least show that I am
not altogether idle – as most of us academic residents are supposed to be. I shall
be very glad to have it done, as then I shall be able to have a little real rest. . . . If you say anything to the Bishop about Spiritualism, please say that no one should pronounce on the primâ facie case for serious investigation – this is really all that I maintain on behalf of Spiritualism – who has not read Crookes’s Researches.
Sidgwick to his mother, July
In writing thus to his mother, in the summer of , Sidgwick nicely
brought together the way in which the completion of the Methods was
entwined with his growing concern to investigate the claims of spiritual-
ism, which Myers had done so much to stimulate. Of course, as early as
he had written to Dakyns that although he had “not yet investigated
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Spiritualism,” he was “bent on doing so” as soon as he got the opportu-
nity. After all, the spiritualists were the ones who seemed to speak most
directly to the concern for a reformed religious outlook, making sense of
the “miraculous” as a universal and continuing phenomenon. If they were
too eager to believe, at least they often pointed to the kinds of beliefs that
Sidgwick thought were needed, after the havoc that had been sown by
biblical criticism, biology, and geology. Although officially he was simply
advocating the case for investigation, he was certainly hopeful in what he
dreamed the investigations would succeed in revealing.
Sidgwick was much impressed by the work of Sir William Crookes, who,
in Oppenheim’s sharp words, “followed no prescribed paths to success,
and blazed his own highly individual trail to knighthood in , the Order
of Merit in , and the presidency of the Royal Society from to
.” In the early s, Crookes, already well on his way to becoming
an eminent chemist, published a number of accounts of his experimental
research on spiritualism, claiming that he had witnessed genuine spirit
materializations with the help of the medium Florence Cook. Crookes’s
scientific reputation for close and accurate observation apparently lent
great credibility to his accounts of the evidence he claimed to derive from
his séances with Cook and a long list of other famous mediums, including
Daniel Douglas Home, Kate Fox, and Stainton Moses.
In retrospect, the only real mystery in his work was how it could have
so impressed Sidgwick, since the “experiments” were completely unrig-
orous. In any event, the shocks and disappointments came quickly for the
Sidgwick Group. Their initial investigations concerned two professional
mediums, a C. Williams and a Mrs. Annie Eva Fay, from the United States.
There followed investigations of various mediums celebrated by the bur-
geoning Spiritualist Association in Newcastle, including Miss C. E. Wood,
Miss Annie Fairlamb, and the Petty family. Most of these made claims to
be able to materialize various spirits. While sitting with their hands and
feet tied, or bound up in some sort of cabinet, in a darkened setting, they
would purportedly summon up the spirits, who would move about the
room in a ghostly way, play musical instruments, or perform other acts
to demonstrate their presence. As Gauld has remarked, the next quarter
of a century saw a rather tiresome repetition of the same pattern: “Myers
would become enthusiatic about such-and-such a medium; the Sidgwicks
would acquiesce far enough to support or participate in an investigation;
and everyone would in the end be more or less disappointed. . . . Myers
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sat, often several times, with practically every famous medium, public or
private, of that time; and the Sidgwicks sat with many of them.”
But the initial burst of enthusiasm was always followed by the exposure
of imposture or at least the serious suspicion of such. The only positive re-
sult in these early efforts, a number of which took place at Arthur Balfour’s
London home at Carlton Gardens, was that Henry apparently got to do
a lot of scientific hand holding with Eleanor, while they were serenaded by
the spirits in the darkened séance settings. “She is not exactly perfect,” the
ever judicious philosopher wrote to his mother, “any more than other peo-
ple, but it is true that whatever defects she has are purely negative: all that is positive in her is quite quite good. I cannot even imagine her doing anything wrong.” (CWC) He married his vision of integrity on April , .
Few harbored any doubts about the uniquely appropriate nature of this
pairing of minds. William James would later describe them, in a crit-
ical tone, as “the incarnation of pure intellect – a very odd appearing
couple.” Clearly, Eleanor was as rarefied a being as Henry, if not more so.
As her biography records, she once confessed to her friend Alice Johnson
that “mathematics especially appealed to her in early youth because she
thought a future life would be much more worth living if it included
intellectual pursuits.” Johnson speculated that mathematical abstraction
probably struck her as “adapted to a disembodied existence.” The tacit
suggestion is that she began her preparations for this at a very early age.
Theirs was a union with a mission. In June of , not long after their
marriage and honeymoon trip to France, Sidgwick writes to Dakyns, “On
July th I go back to London for another bout of ghosts. When your letter
came I was just going in for three weeks of experiments, all of which
failed,
or nearly so; the ‘phenomena’ would not occur under the conditions we
wished to impose. I do not know what to say now about the thing.” (M )
The next month, he writes to Dakyns that it is probably not worth his while
to come to Newcastle to learn about spiritualism:
We are applying . . . a test which seems to us as conclusive as any that can be devised; we had seven seances, nearly altogether unsuccessful, and on Friday and Saturday last we had two which were even more suspicious in their partial success than the
previously unsuccessful ones, so much so that two members of our circle have
announced their intention of withdrawing, as from a proved imposture. (M )
In , the Sidgwicks also began their investigations of the celebrated
Dr. Slade, an American medium who supposedly could invoke the spirits
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to answer questions from the audience by writing that appeared inside a
locked double slate, and of the still more successful slate-writing medium
William Eglinton. Of the former, he wrote “I went to Slade several times,
and, as far as my own experience goes, should unhesitatingly pronounce
against [him], but there is a good deal of testimony for him, quite un-
touched by any explanation yet offered” (M –). Another remark was
inspired by the fear that he would be subpoenaed to appear in a court
case charging Slade with fraud: “I want to keep out of it, being anxious
not to appear before the public in connection with Spiritualism until I
have a definite conclusion to announce” (M ). Yet such investigations
of the so-called physical phenomena of spiritualism would carry on for a
long time, and by Eleanor Sidgwick’s later account would remain the least
successful of the SPR’s endeavors. In fact, the exposure of Eglinton by the
amateur conjurer S. J. Davey, in the mid-eighties, provides an excellent
example of how the SPR, under Sidgwick’s leadership, actually set the
stage for the debunking work of such recent conjurers as “The Amazing
Randi.” This exposure utterly alienated the spiritualists in the SPR.
In any event, it seems fairly plain that the spirits of the Sidgwick Group,
at least, were kept up during these tedious and disappointing investigations
mainly by Myers’s enthusiasm, and that, after the summer of , things
took a rather more desperate turn. As already remarked, Myers had fallen
deeply in love with Annie Marshall, the wife of a troubled first cousin of his.
His autobiographical accounts always discreetly refer to her as “Phyllis,”
when they are not celebrating the “sea-like sapphire of her eyes” or how
she was a “fountain of vivifying joy.” She “wrought upon” him an effect
“which neither Mrs. Butler’s heroic Christianity nor Henry Sidgwick’s
rightness and reasonableness had ever produced. . . . I knew in the deep
of the heart that Virtue alone was safe, and only Virtue lasting, and only
Virtue blest; and Phyllis became to me as the very promise and earnest of
triumphant Virtue.” But in the spring of , Annie’s husband, Walter,
was certified insane, and the strains that the family situation caused her
over the course of the summer led to her suicide in September. Myers later
responded in verse: “Then came the news that, on me hurled, / At once
my youth within me slew, / Made dim with woe the reeling world, / And
hid the heaven that shone therethrough.”
From this point on, Myers could no longer abide even a whiff of his
earlier agnosticism, and he began the pattern of responding to grief with
belief that would eventually characterize so many members of the SPR.
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He first began receiving supposed messages from Annie in July of ,
in sittings with a Mme. Rohart; in due course, especially during the s,
he was absolutely convinced that she had communicated with him and
that therefore survival was a reality. The reputation of the Society, in the
twentieth century, would suffer greatly from the general impression that
it was basically a vehicle for collective, sublimated mourning for both lost
religion and lost loved ones, since virtually all of the original members who
survived until became similarly converted, including Arthur Balfour
and Eleanor Sidgwick.
In the late s, however, and despite Myers’s hopes, things looked
very different. In June of , Sidgwick could write to Roden Noel that
“I have not quite given up Spiritualism, but my investigation of it is a
very dreary and disappointing chapter in my life.” Had their research
continued in this vein, Sidgwick would quite probably have ended up
devoting much more of his life to philosophy. But at this crucial juncture,
fresh enthusiasm was brought to the Sidgwick Group by William Barrett,
who must be counted the actual proximate cause of the SPR. As Gauld
reports:
The foundation of the Society for Psychical Research was not primarily the work
of those who afterwards became its leaders. Those chiefly responsible were Profes-
sor W. F. Barrett and certain prominent Spiritualists. Barrett had for many years
been interested in the question of thought-transference, and in he had of-
fered the British Association a paper on his experiments. The paper was accepted
by the Anthropological sub-section, by the casting vote of its Chairman, Alfred
Russell Wallace, but it was not published. It was none the less reported in detail
in the Press and caused much talk. Barrett was also interested in the phenomena
of Spiritualism, and during the eighteen-seventies had become acquainted with
Myers and Gurney, who assisted him in some of his later experiments on thought-
transference. He conceived the idea that if a group of Spiritualists, who would join
forces in dispassionate investigation with a group of scientists and scholars, who
would possess the funds and the training to conduct proper experiments, the phe-
nomena might perhaps be elucidated. Accordingly he convened a conference of
persons likely to be interested. The conference met in London at Great Russell
Street on th and th January . The foundation of the Society was proposed,
and a committee (of which Myers, Gurney and Sidgwick were members) was
set up to consider the question. The committee met at Hensleigh Wedgwood’s
house on th and again on th January. Myers and Gurney were not hopeful
about the prospects of such a Society, and made their support conditional upon
Sidgwick’s accepting the Presidency. Sidgwick, remembering the many dreary
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hours which he had already passed to no avail in psychical investigations, was
likewise pessimistic; but he felt that recent experiments in thought-transference
gave fresh grounds for hope, and he agreed to become President. The conference
met again on th February, and the Society for Psychical Research was formally
constituted. Its stated aim was ‘to investigate that large body of debateable phe-
nomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and spiritualistic,’ and
to do so without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit
of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many
problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.’
The Council of the SPR began further sorting out the subjects to be
investigated. Thought reading – or, in Myers’s terminology, “telepathy” –
was certainly a high priority, but so too was hypnotism, which had long
been one of Gurney’s chief interests, and of course such things as the
physical phenomena of spiritualism, apparitions, and haunted houses.
Curiously, Eleanor Sidgwick’s name is not listed with the Society until
January , and she would later state: “I do not distinctly remember the
cause of this delay, but I think it was due to my holding in a responsible
position in another youthful institution – Newnham College (for Women)
at Cambridge. It was probably not thought desirable to risk associating the
College in the public mind with what was likely to be regarded as a cranky
Society.” Still, she also admits that though “not technically a Member I
was entirely cognizant of the doings of the Society and its Council from the
beginning,” which is hardly surprising, since many of them took place at
the Sidgwicks’ new home, Hillside, on Chesterton Road in Cambridge.
Apparently, there were few fears for the reputation of Sidgwick, the
author of The Methods of Ethics and the soon-to-be-published Principles
of Political Economy and Outlines of the History of Ethics, who during the eighties would reach the height of his prestige, becoming Knightbridge