Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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But by this time, suspicions were gathering about Madame Blavatsky,
and Sidgwick reports that “what I hear is rather too mixed: in at least
one case there is well-grounded suspicion of her trickery – though she
again has no obvious motive as she is giving money to the cause.” Indeed,
Sidgwick’s confidence in his estimate of people and their motives was to
be very quickly and very badly shaken. In November of , he records
in his journal how
Psychical Research is growing dark & difficult: I am shaken in my view of telepathic evidence by the breakdown of Sir E. Hornby’s narrative in the XIXth Century.
Here is a man tells an elaborate story of what happened to him less than ten years
ago, and his wife (who was an actor in the drama) confirms it, and her mother
bears witness that the wife told her next morning: and yet the story is altogether
inaccurate in fundamental points – it is indeed difficult to understand how any
of it can be true. And yet Gurney who has been to see them says that he and his
wife are thoroughly good witnesses, and clearly believe every word they say! This
is much worse for us than if they were bad witnesses, as tending more to lower
one’s general confidence in human testimony. This one case seems to me to make
a great hole in our evidence. (CWC)
Worse was to come. The SPR appointed a young Australian member,
Richard Hodgson, to travel to the Theosophical headquarters in Madras,
India, in order to do a thorough investigation of the purported Theosoph-
ical marvels, and when he returned to England, in April of , his report
was utterly damning.
It would have been difficult for Sidgwick to ignore Hodgson’s work even
if he had wanted to, since Hodgson had in taken an honors degree in
the moral sciences from Cambridge, and Sidgwick himself had encouraged
(and paid for) him to abandon his post as university extension lecturer
in order to go off to investigate Theosophy. Eventually Hodgson would
become a leader of the American SPR and a full-time psychical researcher,
for which his work on Theosophy proved to be sobering training. While
in India, he had managed to recruit a couple, the Coulombs, who were
disgruntled former assistants to Madame Blavatsky and who had in their
possession various letters from the founder detailing just how to perform
the “marvels” under investigation. Thus, the letters-out-of-thin-air stunt
was revealed as requiring no more explanation than a porous ceiling and
a long piece of thread with a confederate on the other end of it, safely
out of view. The mahatmas were revealed as Blavatsky’s own fictions,
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whose communications had been lifted out of various obvious sources. And
Hodgson even suspected that Blavatsky was in the pay of the Russians,
who wanted her to foment discontent in India.
As Oppenheim shows, the report did not move the true believers:
They accused Hodgson of undertaking his Indian inquiries, not in a mood of
impartial research, but as prosecutor, judge, and jury all at once. The integrity
of the Coulombs was, with justice, assailed, and Blavatsky complained that she
had never even been shown the incriminating letters which, she insisted were
largely fabrication. Sinnett accused the SPR of pandering to public opinion in
its denigration of Theosophy and triumphantly concluded that Hodgson’s logic
served no purpose, because Blavatsky’s complex character was not explicable ‘by
any commonplace process of reasoning.’
But the Sidgwick Group took this sobering lesson to heart. Some time
later, Myers, in the Introduction to Phantasms of the Living, would note
the importance of this lesson in cultural anthropology:
Acting through Mr. Hodgson . . . a committee of the Society for Psychical Research has investigated the claim of the so-called ‘Theosophy,’ of which Madame
Blavatsky was the prophetess, to be an incipient world-religion, corroborated by
miraculous, or at least supernormal, phenomena, – and has arrived at the conclu-
sion that it is merely a réchauffé of ancient philosophies, decked in novel language, and supported by ingenious fraud. Had this fraud not been detected and exposed,
and had the system of belief supported thereon thriven and spread, we should
have witnessed what the sceptic might have cited as a typical case of the origin of
religions.
Sidgwick himself would later contribute a prefatory note to another exposé
of Theosophy, Solovyoff’s A Modern Priestess of Isis (), in which he
would strike a similar note:
[S]uch English readers as were likely to be interested in learning anything more
about Madame Blavatsky would not so much desire additional proof that she was
a charlatan – a question already judged and decided – but rather some explanation
of the remarkable success of her imposture; and Mr. Solovyoff ’s vivid description
of the mingled qualities of the woman’s nature – her supple craft and reckless
audacity, her intellectual vigour and elastic vitality, her genuine bonhomie, affectionateness and (on occasion) persuasive pathos – afforded an important element
of the required explanation, such as probably no one but a compatriot could have
supplied. Whether the Theosophical Society is likely to last much longer, I am
not in a position to say; but even if it were to expire next year, its twenty years’
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existence would be a phenomenon of some interest for the historian of European
society in the nineteenth century.
Especially illuminating, on this score, is the way in which the experi-
ence with the Theosophists led the Sidgwick Group to think about the
nature of evidence and credibility. In a draft of a letter to Lord Acton
that Myers apparently wrote in , he explained the nature of the
criteria used by the Society to determine untrustworthy evidence. In
addition to evidence that was “other than first-hand,” or that involved
“persons apparently hoping to receive therefrom money, fame, or rev-
erence,” or that was not written down for more than ten years after the
fact, or that came from informants about which nothing more could be
determined, there was: “All evidence depending wholly on the testimony
of () uneducated persons, () persons with a s
trong bias in favour of
the supernatural, () Asiatics, () the lower races, () children.” Of this,
he explains that the “exclusion of Asiatics, & the addition of the expec-
tation of reverence to the causes of suspicion, were forced upon us by
Mr. Hodgson’s exposure of Mme. Blavatsky’ frauds, & of the gross
credulity of some even able & educated Hindoos. Mme. Blavatsky (one
may say) was within an ace of founding a world-religion merely to amuse
herself & to be admired.”
Now, lamentably, Myers is presumably speaking for the Sidgwick
Group, at the very least. Certainly Sidgwick, in a variety of writings,
had consistently urged the “Society to accumulate testimony, to overcome
opposition by the gradual accession of witnesses of good intelligence and
character.” In his exchange with C. C. Massey, Sidgwick had explained
that he wanted “evidence obtained in private circles of relatives or friends,
where no professional medium was employed,” and that he certainly
wanted to exclude consideration of mediums “whose trickery was proved
and admitted.” As always, he was uniquely impressed with the testimony
that emerged in small societies of close friends. The sweeping bigotry of
Myers’s statement, with its wholesale discounting of the experiences of
the “uneducated,” the “lower races” and “Asiatics,” does not quite seem
to capture Sidgwick’s views, at least insofar as there is any extensive record
of them. But, as later chapters will show, Sidgwick did harbor such preju-
dices, at least in a weaker form, which may explain why he did not actively
protest Myers’s policy. And surely, if this was the policy of the Sidgwick
Group, it would suggest that his notions of credibility and expertise could
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be appropriately described as part of a “Government House” utilitarian-
ism, in which the “lower” classes and “lower” races are put on a level with
children. After all, Sir E. Hornby apparently did not fit the above cate-
gories, yet there was no move to exclude the testimony of knights. Was this
the type of thinking that lay behind, for example, his views on the value of
colonization?
This is a matter of vital importance. But a further discussion of it must
await a fuller treatment of the other dimensions of psychical research and
politics, and of the further shocks that Sidgwick’s notions of “good in-
telligence and character” were to be dealt. As the following chapters will
show, Sidgwick’s notions of race and class ended up being rather worse,
and certainly no better, than J. S. Mill’s. The best one can say is that he
did a great deal to defend some of the accomplishments of other histori-
cal civilizations, that he thought nurture far more important than nature
in determining human differences, and that he was mainly impressed by
European achievements in science and constitutional government, while
always remaining ready to remind the reader of the evils of religious bigotry
and slavery that Western civilization had also produced. On the whole, his
writings reveal someone who, like Mill, had a decided Eurocentric bias
in his understanding of “civilized” education, but who was also poten-
tially receptive to the claims of the other world historical civilizations.
In these ways, at least, his skepticism served him well, though not well
enough.
For he was not immune to the pervasive and offensive – often offen-
sively casual – racism of his environment, the prejudice that far too few
of his Cambridge colleagues even thought to question. He entertained, as
serious hypotheses, the views of such figures as Charles Henry Pearson
about the “yellow peril,” and he occasionally used the (generic) deroga-
tory term “nigger” in his correspondence. One cannot confront this side
of Sidgwick without worrying deeply about just how limited his notions
of “educated common sense” and social verification might have been,
and about whether Theosophy – which he certainly hoped would turn
out to be true – might have resonated with him in part precisely be-
cause of its elitism and orientalism. And as Dixon has noted, Theosophy
was engaged in a very paradoxical effort: “to proclaim publicly occult or
esoteric truths, truths that by definition are secret, hidden, and known
only to the initiated.” This was a paradox after his own Apostolic
heart.
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V. Their Finest Hour
When I was young and “erotion” (cf. Clough) I used to repeat to myself
the end of Iphigenia’s prayer (Goethe, favourite play of mine) for wholesome
warning –
Ye Gods, . . .
in calm repose,
Ye listen to our prayer, that childishly
Beseeches you to hasten, but your hand
Ne’er breaks unripe the golden fruits of heaven.
And woe to him who with impatient grasp
Profanely plucks and eats unto his death
A bitter food.
Sidgwick to Myers, May or June
So far, one might think that the Sidgwick Group, for all its hopefulness
about personal survival of death and gullibility about prima facie evidence
calling for investigation, partly redeemed itself through its critical de-
bunking of spiritualists and Theosophists, and by its fashioning of such
tactics as the deployment of conjurers to expose conjuring as just that
and nothing more. Their fascination with hypnotism turned out to be
productive and indeed the most enduring of their positive contributions,
and no doubt there are some who would make a similar claim on behalf
of their work on telepathy. If their research reflected various forms of
prejudice and bigotry, that, given their time and place, is unfortunately
to be expected. They were part of the culture of imperialism, and their
images of truth, expertise, evidence, progress, and so on could not help
but reflect and project this to varying degrees. It was, they really felt, the
solid English who were going to discover the “secret of the Universe.”
This would, of course, be altogether fitting in their eyes, given that it was
the solid English who largely ruled the Universe. The opacity of the other
world was related to the opacity of other regions of this world; both called
for penetration through sympathetic unity. How else could consensus and
reconciliation come to pass?
One thing that can be safely said is that the SPR followed Sidgwick’s
command to pile testimony on top of testimony, and it is worth considering
in greater detail jus
t what the nature of that testimony ended up being,
since it does not seem to comport with Myers’s strictures.
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For most of the s, the Sidgwick Group was engaged in compil-
ing the material that would go into Eleanor Sidgwick’s “Phantasms of
the Dead” and the remarkable joint production of Myers, Gurney, and
Podmore, Phantasms of the Living. In helping with the former, Henry had
gone out to interview some persons who had contributed ghost stories,
but he had concluded that not more than twenty or thirty were any good,
and that “[i]t looks as if there was some cause for persons experiencing
independently in certain houses similar hallucinations. But we are not at
present inclined to back ghosts against the field as the cause.”
Phantasms of the Living was in another category, with its massive array of
case studies selected to prove the reality of telepathy, and to demonstrate
that “phantasms (impressions, voices, or figures) of persons undergoing
some crisis, – especially death, – are perceived by their friends and rela-
tives with a frequency which mere chance cannot explain.” C. D. Broad
insisted that this “is undoubtedly an epoch-making work, in the strict
sense that it laid the foundations of a new subject and still remains a clas-
sic indispensable to all students in its own field.” Despite the official
authorship, the Sidgwicks were very much involved in the production,
and Eleanor would later produce an updated (and abridged) version of the
study.
As Myers explained the title:
[U]nder our heading of ‘Phantasms of the Living,’ we propose, in fact, to deal
with all classes of cases where there is reason to suppose that the mind of one
human being has affected the mind of another, without speech uttered, or word
written, or sign made; – has affected it, that is to say, by other means than through the recognised channels of sense.
To such transmissions of thoughts or feelings we have elsewhere given the name
of telepathy; and the records of an experimental proof of the reality of telepathy will form a part of the present work. But, for reasons which will be made manifest