by Deborah Blum
VACATIONING IN THE Adirondacks, thinking his position at Columbia was well secured, James Hyslop had the misfortune to encounter a fellow guest who reminded him all too well of his nemesis, James McKeen Cattell. The astronomer Simon Newcomb, the difficult first president of the ASPR, was relaxing at the same resort.
Newcomb made the mistake of rather mockingly inquiring about the latest in spiritual study. Hyslop, seething with suppressed outrage, allowed himself to vent for nearly three hours. As he wrote to Hodgson, “I poured experimental telepathy into him and then the Piper incidents until he was ready to cry enough and at last told him that he could choose between accepting telepathy or something worse.” The argument ended when Newcomb—to Hyslop’s frustration—merely walked away.
The ill will stirred in that encounter seemed an omen of events to follow. Hyslop’s wife, Mary, returned from the vacation with meningitis. She was dead in three days, “a terrible shock,” Hyslop said, as he grappled with being the single father of three children.
Now, at the worst time, Hyslop began to again feel backlash from the antipsychical research camp at Columbia. Cattell still wanted his dismissal. Out of patience, the university president attempted a compromise. He shifted Hyslop out of his accustomed classes and into an intensive schedule of teaching advanced metaphysics. The shift, with the extra preparation time involved, greatly increased Hyslop’s workload. By fall’s end, he was staggering with weariness. He’d developed a racking cough, which “I soon discovered ... was tuberculosis and that it had been precipitated by nervous prostration.”
Hyslop requested and was granted a leave from Columbia. He sent his children to stay with relatives and checked himself into a sanatorium for consumptive patients in Saranac Lake, New York. To his surprise and relief, he found the cure effective—not just in restoring his health, but also in improving his outlook. He took long walks, did deep breathing exercises, and gave up both coffee and alcohol. He even tried a recipe—sent to him by the sympathetic Hodgson—for making pine-bark tea from tree scrapings.
By the fall of 1902, he thought himself well enough to take up his duties at Columbia. Once again, though, he was given a grueling schedule, and once again Hyslop tumbled into illness. He dropped eighteen pounds in six weeks—pounds that he could ill afford—and coughed his way through classes. When the semester ended, Hyslop resigned from Columbia. He believed that he needed a physically active, outdoorsy life to keep the tuberculosis in check. He decided to join some friends who were starting a gold-mining company in the Green Mountains of Vermont. He sent his regrets to only one person, writing to Richard Hodgson and expressing his sorrow at abandoning psychical research and a friend.
WHY ARE SOME people’s minds so open to faith and belief, and others locked tight against those ideas? Why does a god appear necessary to so many cultures? To William James these were fundamental questions, and he asked them directly in his 1902 book Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature.
To the question of individual differences in faith, James applied Myers’s concept of a subliminal self. Some people might be almost entirely focused on the conscious world, unable to detect any sensation of an otherworldly reality. Such individuals might well become scientists or pursue other fields based in logical deduction. Perhaps other people, more naturally open to subconscious experiences, would be more inclined to accept miracles or spiritual powers. Perhaps the varieties of religious experience were based in a kind of scientific reality, in the varied ways that people’s minds operated, the alternate realities that they perceived in forming their worldviews.
By this analysis, a Leonora Piper might be unusually receptive to psychical phenomena and ready to accept the notion of powers beyond human control. A James McKeen Cattell might be unusually closed to any such experiences, thereby finding the supernatural or any spiritual notions to be unfounded and illogical. James defined himself as a “piecemeal supernaturalist,” demanding better evidence of the spiritual realms but finding “no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and real worlds together.”
From that perspective, James went on to raise—and to challenge—a theory popular among Darwinian scientists, which argued that “religion is probably only an anachronism, left over from an earlier stage of human evolution.” Known as “the survival theory,” it stated that primitive man, in order to cope with a hostile environment, needed explanations that gave reason to life with its all its grief and struggle, denied that tragedies were merely random events, soothed with a promise of personal interest by the powers above.
But as the survival theory had it, civilized man now knew better, and godly explanations were no longer required. The new science found ridiculous the notion that a God capable of creating a universe would cater to the needs of each short-lived individual occupying one meager planet. As James described this modern version of a deity, “the God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.”
Thus, both traditional religions and unorthodox ones such as spiritualism could be seen as vestiges of an earlier stage in human evolution. The theory predicted that the human race would eventually cast off that primitive need entirely. It reflected the hope of many modern scientists that John Tyndall’s assertion—that science would supersede religion as the way to understand life and its limits—was on its way to being a twentieth-century reality.
William James had no such hopes, nor any fondness for this rational future that so many of his academic peers eagerly anticipated. The survival theory, he wrote, ignored the fact that civilizations come and gone had also been arrogantly sure that they possessed the one Truth above truths. He thought it a mistake to dismiss the ideas of history simply because they didn’t fit current scientific methodology.
As Myers’s concept of subliminal consciousness emphasized, people didn’t fully understand yet what was inside their own brains, much less the world without. Even as an accredited academic, James couldn’t make himself believe that “the boundless universe” was so simple as to be easily measured by mortal men. Even the supreme scientific confidence of the new century could not alter that position: “Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds.”
EVIE MYERS WANTED every trace destroyed, every scrap of evidence, that her husband had been infatuated with a spirit. In that hated autobiography, “Fragments of an Inner Life,” Myers had actually counted the days with and without his beloved Annie. “Only on 426 days of my life—now numbering more than 18,000 days—did I look upon her face; but that was enough.” Even worse, following his epiphany during the Mrs. Thompson sittings, Myers added euphorically that “love has surmounted the sundering crisis” and that he could hardly wait to view that beloved face once more.
Myers had given privately printed copies of “Fragments” to a few close friends. Evie wanted James, Lodge, Hodgson, and anyone else in possession of the humiliating document to turn his copy over to her. She asked William James to oversee the recall, beginning with Hodgson, who was such a difficult person; and she also asked that he please visit Lodge when he was next in England.
She couldn’t talk to Lodge herself. She didn’t trust him; she didn’t trust his wife; she didn’t even trust his children. She hoped James would persuade Lodge to give up his copy in the name of his friendship with her dead husband, who would have been “the last person to wish to harm his wife and children—and this would be the inevitable result,” if the autobiography gained wider circulation.
Lodge was in an assertive mood. In early 1902, King Edward had knighted him for his scientific achievements. While waiting at the palace to officially become Sir Oliver, he’d struck up a friendship with a writer also awaiting the knighthood ceremony, Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. L
odge and Conan Doyle had continued their acquaintance, and their discussions of spirit communication. The talented mystery writer would eventually become a notable spiritualist and author of a two-volume history of the subject, which he dedicated to Lodge as “a great leader in both physical and psychic science.”
Sir Oliver Lodge now headed the physics department at the newly established University of Birmingham. He’d made five demands before taking the Birmingham job: a research laboratory, the retention of his secretary and two assistants, an endowment fund, protection from “mundane” aspects of research projects, and no interference with his interest in psychical research, “although I knew it would be unpopular.”
In his spare time, Lodge was engaged in a patent battle with the Marconi Radio Company, demanding (ultimately successfully) that the company honor his early work on radio receivers. He’d taken to tinkering with automobile mechanisms and invented a new kind of spark plug for internal combustion engines—the power behind the horseless carriage. Two of his sons were drawing up plans for a Lodge Motor Plug Company.
As Myers’s friend, Lodge wasn’t willing to abandon his friend’s autobiography. He thought the book a lovely, eloquent thing, laced with some of Myers’s best poetry. True, many of the poems were love songs to Annie Marshall, but in Lodge’s opinion, Evie’s actions would only serve to erase Myers from his place in history. The best Lodge was willing to offer was a compromise. The society would, for now, publish only a few of the better poems, as a booklet called “Fragments of Poetry.” But, Lodge insisted, Meyers’s friends would also save the manuscript as a record of a friend, of a love affair, of faith in the possibility of life after death.
IN FEBRUARY 1903 the publisher Isaac Funk—famed for the Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary, less well known for his ongoing curiosity about spiritualism—decided to visit a private medium in Brooklyn.
At first the woman, a sixty-eight-year-old widow, seemed unimpressive, maybe a little unstable. In trance, she seemed to represent a veritable crowd of spirits—male, female, drawling southerner, twangy westerner—and Funk, bored, decided that he was observing some kind of strange split personality disorder. As he wrote later, the idea of mental dysfunction was fixed in his mind, “up to the time that I had the singular experience which I give below.”
The medium suddenly announced that a spirit had come who was concerned about an ancient coin, called the Widow’s Mite for its tiny size and minimal value during its day.
“This coin is out of its place and should be returned,” the Brooklyn medium insisted, adding sharply that the visiting spirit looked to Dr. Funk to return it.
“What do you mean by saying that he looks to me to return it?” Funk demanded irritably. He possessed no coin belonging to any spirit.
The woman repeated the demand.
Funk fumed for a while and then, gradually, recalled that when his company was making the first edition of The Standard Dictionary, nine years earlier, he had borrowed an old coin, which had been called the Widow’s Mite, to copy for an illustration.
But he’d given it back.
“This I promptly returned,” he repeated.
“This one has not been returned,” came the reply. Funk was advised to look for it in a large iron safe, in a drawer, under a pile of papers.
When he returned to his offices in Manhattan, Funk queried his longtime business manager, who recalled the coin with some trouble, and also that it had been returned years before. The company cashier told him the same.
The cashier agreed, however, to search the iron safe in the business office, with his assistants for witnesses. In a small drawer, in a dirty envelope, pushed under a muddle of papers, they found the coin.
Funk mailed it back to the original owner and received a letter from the man’s son, saying that his father had died years back, but he too had thought the coin returned. “As executor of my father’s estate, I felt so certain that this coin had been returned that it never occurred to me to make inquiry of you whether it was in your possession.”
Funk was an organized man, a list maker by nature. He drew up four possible explanations: fraud, coincidence, telepathy, or spirit communication. To find the correct answer, he decided on two actions: to tell the story publicly, seeking comment, and to consult with experts.
Funk wrote to forty-two scientists, editors, philosophers, and other scholars, describing his “Widow’s Mite” incident and asking them which of his four possibilities made sense. He queried James Hyslop, William James, Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes, and professors of physics and philosophy at Yale, Princeton, the University of Toronto, the University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and a smattering of other institutions across Canada and Europe.
The resulting answers didn’t resolve the question, but they did neatly reflect the schism in thought between psychical and traditional researchers. “Spirits,” replied Wallace and Crookes. “Possibly spirits,” answered Hyslop and James. The rest of the scientists queried, to a man, voted for either fraud or mental illness.
“A batch of reporters came after me about the Dr. Funk case,” complained Hodgson to Hyslop, adding that he wished psychic euthusiasts would keep their alleged test cases out of the newspapers. Thanks to Dr. Funk’s well-known name and the peculiar nature of his experience, the Widow’s Mite was front-page news in New York, jostling for space with accounts of the trans-Pacific telephone line connecting Canada and Australia, President Roosevelt’s successful move to take over the Panama Canal, and an extraordinary decision in Australia to allow women to vote (making it and New Zealand the only two countries thus far to permit such electoral inclusiveness).
Hyslop’s gold-mining venture in Vermont had not been a financial success. But his tuberculosis was once more in abeyance. He was stronger and more determined than ever to prove that he had been right about spirit communication and that his enemies at Columbia had been wrong. He rented a small apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, supporting himself with some family money, some writing jobs, lecturing, and the occasional investigation for Hodgson.
Hodgson, meanwhile, tried to finish Myers’s book while continuing his work with Mrs. Piper. He did his best to ignore Evie Myers’s frequent letters accusing him of going about it in the wrong way. He was delighted to have Hyslop again as a friend and ally. A colleague described them once as a curious pair: “Hodgson with his lithe athletic frame, a perfect dynamo of mental and physical energy; Hyslop, inactively tubercular, frail of physique, but with tremendous high tension enthusiasm, appearing to almost consume physical vitality as a flame consumes the candle.”
But they were alike in their single-mindedness; “It was hard to say which of them had a greater hatred of sham, hypocrisy and academic cowardice.” Hyslop and Hodgson shared thoughts and ideas and complaints, letters between them going from Boston to New York discussing fraudulent mediums, pig-headed scientists—and the mistakes made by the British and American societies for psychical research.
Hodgson thought the SPR’s British leaders were too willing to believe. They’d stumbled badly with Eusapia Palladino; he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t fall again without his help. Recently he’d written several stiff criticisms of Rosina Thompson, only to have them edited out of the British journal. “In fact, the more I come to think of it, the more I feel like that old woman who has been so often quoted, who said that she ‘wasn’t sure that anybody at all would be saved but herself and her husband Sandy, and there were times when she was nae so sure of Sandy!”’
The Americans stood at the other extreme. They were “morbidly afraid” of belief, as Hodgson put it. The ASPR had turned away countless interested supporters on the grounds that they weren’t skeptical enough. No wonder the organization had stayed small and poor. Hodgson now owed his secretary, Lucy Edmunds, almost $900 in back pay, which had accumulated over four years, and he himself had spent $600 of his own money just to keep the office supp
lied with up-to-date publications.
He wasn’t complaining on his own behalf. True, he was still unmarried, still living in two small rooms on Charles Street, but the rooms were stacked, floor to ceiling, with his greatest indulgence: books—poetry, philosophy, novels, science. For fun, he talked to his pet parrot, which he also occasionally brought with him to the Tavern Club, where he went almost every night for dinner and company. He played handball, fished, hiked, swam in the Atlantic whenever he could. He didn’t want for money himself—just to fund the work.
Perhaps, Hyslop suggested, the psychic investigators should stop doing inadequate, underfunded investigations. Perhaps they should save, build up an endowment, wait till they could afford to do it right.
It would be wonderful to have the money, Hodgson agreed, but he didn’t think they could afford the time that would take. He didn’t want to lose even the small momentum the group had achieved. They had lost Gurney, then Sidgwick, then Myers; they couldn’t spare a single warm body. Hodgson would work harder, that was all.
WILLIAM JAMES HAD hoped that Fred Myers’s book on subliminal consciousness would be “epoch making.” But Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published in late 1903, almost two years after Myers’s death, proved more complicated than that—and less successful.
Myers’s ideas had stretched beyond his fundamental concept of the subliminal mind to a far grander proposal, that the connections between conscious and subconscious, subliminal and waking mind, were coordinated by the immortal soul. This meant, as Myers ruefully acknowledged, that to accept his bigger theory, one had to accept the notion of a soul and of its survival after death. In the modern age, simple acceptance would not do, he continued; the question at hand was whether the existence of an immortal soul could be proved. “In this direction,” he wrote, “have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.”
