Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
Page 140
. And, to be sure, Millians.
Chapter . Spirits
. Quoted in Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
. Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational
in Culture, ed. S. Crook (London: Routledge, ), p. .
. This chapter is deeply indebted to C. D. Broad, “Henry Sidgwick and Psy-
chical Research,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (), pp. –, and Lectures on Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, ); Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken Books, ); Oppenheim, Other World; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of the Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); and Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: The
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Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Although my own interests are more con-
genial to the concerns of Winter and Dixon, who address the links between psychi-
cal research and the history of gender/sexuality and the culture of imperialism, the
other works just listed are standard reference guides for anyone working on these
topics and represent highly valuable research efforts. Roger Luckhurst’s valuable
study, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), appeared just as I was preparing the final version of this manuscript for the press, but it appears to comport well with the analysis of this chapter. Although Luckhurst’s
book contains surprisingly little on Sidgwick, it goes far to fill in the cultural
context of the psychical researchers and is particularly valuable on such figures as
Myers.
. See also Oppenheim, Other World, pp. –, for some discussion of Sidgwick’s early efforts.
. This is one theme of Dixon’s insightful work, Divine Feminine.
. Quoted in Oppenheim, Other World, p. . This statement was made by William Crookes, to be discussed.
. I am grateful to R. L. Bland, a recent headmaster of Clifton, for calling this poem to my attention and explaining its possible authorship.
. See the discussion of this passage in the previous chapter.
. Eleanor Sidgwick, “On the Development of Different Types of Evidence for
Survival in the Work of the Society,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
(), p. .
. In Sidgwick’s December , , address to the SPR (CWC); this first appeared
in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research ().
. This first appeared in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research ().
. Myers quoted the relevant testimonial at length at the end of his own obituary
to Sidgwick, included in his posthumously published Fragments of Poetry and
Prose, ed. Eveleen Myers (London: Longmans, Green, ). This work contains a somewhat abridged version of Myers’s autobiography, “Fragments of Inner Life,”
the excised portions of which are available in the Myers Papers, Wren Library,
Trinity College, Cambridge. What follows draws heavily on the latter.
. Myers, Fragments, pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –. Sidgwick doubtless would have regarded Myers’s passionate
idealization of him as rather characteristic.
. Gauld, Founders, p. .
. Ibid., p. . Sidgwick rather clearly took a certain delight, however mixed with
disapproval, in Myers’s sensual side. One of his more intriguing letters to Myers
has him moving directly from admiration of Kant to admiration of flirtation. On
Nov. , , he wrote to Myers: “Each day I have wished to write to you how
delightful and salutary your visit has been to me. You always do me good, though
you make me feel more deeply the perplexities of conduct. I wish I had more
wisdom to impart to those whom I love: it is not for want of seeking it. Sometimes
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I console myself for fundamental scepticism by the feeling that it is necessary, if we are to choose Good per se: if we were too sure of personal happiness, this unselfish
choice would be impossible. I do not think with Kant that Noble Choice is the
only good thing in man: but I do think it a great good. However at other times this seems to me a very over-drawn and metaphysical consolation. Now as I write it is
real to me.
Your narrative is of thrilling interest: I have no doubt you were the right man for
the situation – (see Testimonial). I confess I tremble a little at the thought of the amount of emotional Electricity generated by your passage through these feminine
atmospheres: but I rely on you: if only you will not so systematically court danger.
Please regard me henceforward as thoroughly convinced of your power. I will
idealize you if you like into a sort of Genius of Flirtation: with ‘loving eyes a little tyrannous,’ leonine splendour of countenance. . . . ” A marginal note beside “the situation” reads: “Something about a Schoolmistress who had got into a mess,” and
Sidgwick notes that the phrase in quotation marks is from an unpublished poem
of his. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c., pp. –.
. Indeed, at this point, Symonds was far closer to Arthur Sidgwick, who along with
Henry Graham Dakyns formed his most intimate early group. In a letter of ,
Symonds wrote of Myers: “He is a scapegrace: but he will be a considerable man:
and a turbulent, even a presumptuous & criminal, youth may be ignored in silence
when there is hope of so great a manhood” (Symonds, Letters, vol. , p. ). This was an improvement on his still earlier judgment; when he first met him in
he was fairly aghast at Myers’s conceit and anti-intellectualism. But it was Myers
who would first and fatefully introduce Symonds to the poetry of Walt Whitman,
and who would continue to stimulate his psychological – if not parapsychological –
interests, as the discussion in the following chapter will demonstrate.
. This passage is taken from the original proofs of Myers’s memoir – Myers Papers,
Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, .(). The published
version is more carefully censored, delicately dropping the word “lust” from the
line about “no check for lust or pride.”
. Myers Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, ..,
p. .
. Myers, Fragments, p. .
. Gauld, Founders, pp. –.
&n
bsp; . F. W. H. Myers, Introduction to Phantasms of the Living (New York: Arno Press,
), pp. xxiv–xxv.
. Myers, Fragments, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Myers Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, ..,
p. .
. Myers, “Fragments of Inner Life,” pp. –.
. Myers, Fragments, p. .
. Myers, “Fragments of Inner Life,” pp. –.
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. Myers Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, ..,
p. .
. Myers, Fragments, p. .
. Ibid.
. Ibid., p. .
. Sidgwick, journal entry for October , (CWC); the manuscript of Sidgwick’s
journal is in the Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge
University, Add.Ms.c...
. Myers, Fragments, pp. –.
. Gurney, Tertium Quid (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, ), p. .
. Oddly, Gurney receives scant attention in Winter’s important study, Mesmerized.
. Gurney, “The Stages of Hypnotism,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research (), pp. –.
. Gauld, Founders, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Though the evidence for any such conclusion is scarcely compelling, and gains
force mainly from the fact that a number of Gurney’s friends and colleagues feared
as much. The psychical researchers, as we will see, thought there was some evidence
for Gurney’s personal survival of death and communication from the other side.
A full account, and one appropriately skeptical of the suicide hypothesis, is in
Gauld, Founders, pp. –. Gordon Epperson, The Mind of Edmund Gurney
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, ), is an admiring overview of
Gurney’s work, and very dismissive of the suicide hypothesis, but does not really
engage the thoughts of the psychical researchers on this score. Oppenheim’s The
Other World also suggests that the evidence for suicide is inconclusive and likely to remain so. The main argument for the suicide hypothesis is Trevor Hall’s The
Strange Case of Edmund Gurney (London: Duckworth, , nd ed. ), which
holds that Gurney committed suicide because he was depressed by various events,
particularly the discovery that G. A. Smith, his secretary and one of the subjects
from whom he had gained positive evidence for telepathy, had been engaged in
fraud and thus that his evidence was discredited. Smith always denied this, but an
early partner of his in the experiments later claimed that they had tricked Gurney
and Myers. Even if this were so, however, the specific links to Gurney’s death
in the St. Albion’s Hotel in Brighton are all purely speculative, since there is no
sound evidence that Gurney had discovered any such thing.
. Gauld, Founders, p. .
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Quoted in Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Ibid.
. Oppenheim, “A Mother’s Role, a Daughter’s Duty: Lady Blanche Balfour, Eleanor
Sidgwick, and Feminist Perspectives,” Journal of British Studies (April ), pp. –. I am much indebted to this essay, which suggests how valuable
Oppenheim’s planned biography of Eleanor Sidgwick would have been, had she
lived to complete it.
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. Oppenheim, “A Mother’s Role,” pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c..
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Gauld, Founders, p. .
. Quoted in Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, ), p. . The wedding was held at St. James Church, London.
. In Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, ), p. .
. Myers, “Fragments of Inner Life,” excised sections, Myers Papers, .().
. Ironically, given the role of the SPR and Myers in calling attention to Freud’s
work, one could do a very interesting Freudian interpretation of their form of
mourning and melancholia. For suggestive arguments about how to apply this side
of Freud to some such social analysis (though not with specific reference to the
psychical researchers), see Peter Homans, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment
and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
).
. Gauld, Founders, pp. –.
. The house still stands, and some of its older neighbors can recall hearing, when they were growing up, that it was haunted. But its recent residents, mainly Cambridge
students, have not to my knowledge reported any difficulties with apparitions.
. William James, “The Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher,’” in William James: Writings – (New York: Library of America, ), pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. He recounted it in Phantasms of the Living, though the same account is reproduced in the Memoir, pp. –.
. Henry Sidgwick, “The Society for Psychical Research: A Short Account of Its
History and Work on the Occasion of the Society’s Jubilee, ,” Proceedings of
the Society for Psychical Research (–), p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Gauld, Founders, pp. –.
. See Sidgwick’s essay on “Involuntary Whispering” (CWC); the original appeared
in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research ().
. Eleanor Sidgwick, “On the Development of Different Types of Evidence,” p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. The best attempt to situate the Theosophists in their proper historical contexts is Dixon, Divine Feminine.
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. It is worth noting here that another of the accomplishments of F. D. Maurice
was to have given a comparatively sober account of Hinduism and Buddhism, in
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Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, and that Sidgwick would have been familiar with this.
. Dixon, Divine Feminine, p. .
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Sidgwick’s correspondence with Bryce is in Bryce MSS, Modern Political Papers,
Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. . Remarkably, the Theosophical Society would long continue to publish rebuttals of Hodgson’s report.
. Myers and Gurney, Phantasms, p. xviii.
. “Prefatory Note” to V. Solovev’s A Modern Priestess of Isis, abridged and translated by W. Leaf for the APR (London, ).
. Quoted in Gauld, Founders, pp. –.
. Henry Sidgwick, “The Possibilities of Mal-Observation (discussion with C. C.
Massey),” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (), pt.
Sidgwick’s exchanges with Massey – another stalwart of the SPR – are extremely
illuminating, and deeply suggestive of his Apostolic faith in the truth-promoting
properties of discussion among intimate friends.
. On Mill, see various works by Georgios Varouxakis, including “John Stuart Mill
on Race.” See also the essays in Schultz and Varouxakis, eds., Classical Util-
itarianism and the Question of Race; and the cogent essay by Graham Finlay,
“John Stuart Mill on the Uses of Diversity,” Utilitas , no. (July ),
pp. –.
. Dixon, Divine Feminine, p. xii.
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c..
. Journal entry for August , (CWC).
. Myers and Gurney, Phantasms, p. xxxii.
. Broad, “Sidgwick and Psychical Research,” p. .
. Myers and Gurney, Phantasms, p. ix.
. Ibid., p. xix.
. Ibid.
. Ibid., p. xx.
. Ibid., p. xxv.
. Ibid., pp. xx–xxi.
. Myers, “Fragments of Inner Life,” p. .
. Compare the remarks at the conclusion of the previous chapter concerning the
evolution of sympathy.
. Myers and Gurney, Phantasms, p. .