James’s talk would become the title essay in one of his first, and most famous, collections of philosophical musings. In The Will to Believe, he carefully explored the ways that humans can choose to understand—and to live in—the world. He gave a simple comparison: “Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things,” and religion says that the best things are eternal, “an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.”
This matter of choosing to live upon a foundation that could never be verified appeared to set science at odds with faith. James suspected that many scientists dealt with that challenge in the simplest possible way—by denying religious precepts entirely, without always asking themselves which intellectual pitfall was the greater evil: “Better risk loss of truth than chance of error—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.”
He argued that pursuit of truth, even when it might seem illogical by the rules of science, was always worth the risk. For himself, James had decided against “agnostic truth-seeking”; he couldn’t suppress his belief that to reach the stubborn mysteries of the universe, one had to be willing to believe that the most unlikely paths might lead in that direction.
FOR ALMOST TEN YEARS, William Barrett had held tightly to his grudge against the Society for Psychical Research. He refused to forgive either the late Edmund Gurney’s exposure of some of Barrett’s favorite telepathy subjects or Sidgwick’s insistence on striking some of his favorite experiments from the SPR record.
He had remained a member of the organization, but a sulky and uncooperative one. Fred Myers had further stoked Barrett’s resentments. Myers was forever writing notes demanding that Barrett better document his private psychical research. Barrett disliked everything about those notes—their chastising tone, the way that Myers underlined his criticisms with an insulting slash of black ink, the fact that they were written by a philosophy major. He might have abandoned the whole cause if he wasn’t even more irked with his colleagues in orthodox science.
“About the narrowest minded, most intolerant & least sympathetic minds at present,” Barrett wrote to Oliver Lodge, “are those whose eyes are forever glued to the microscope of their own special branch of science.” Lodge agreed. He also saw an opportunity in the Irish physicist’s evident exasperation. He suggested to the Sidgwicks that if approached nicely, Barrett might be ready to work directly for the SPR again.
Henry Sidgwick had just the project in mind. He wanted someone to investigate the never-ending claims about dowsing or “divining” rods and their users. As the SPR had gained visibility, Sidgwick found himself fielding a stream of letters concerning dowsers and their supposedly eerie spirit powers. Many of these letters originated in Cornwall, where the rods were thought to be especially responsive to pixies. Sidgwick wrote to Barrett, offering to personally finance an objective investigation of such claims. Barrett recognized this as Sidgwick’s notion of an olive branch.
After he’d agreed to do it, even after he’d completed the investigation, Barrett confessed to personal doubts about the task. “Few subjects,” as he admitted in the resulting 1897 report, “appear to be so unworthy of scientific notice.”
Divining rods seemed carved equally from wood and from superstition. They’d been used for centuries to find water and more—mineral lodes, buried treasure, archaeological sites, even criminals. The Romans thought the rods were blessed by the god Mercury; the Germans had called them “wishing rods” and used them to tell fortunes. There had been early Christians who believed diviners were blessed by God. Others claimed the rods worked best when cut from a tree on either Good Friday or Saint John’s Day. But Saint John’s Day, June 24, corresponded roughly with the summer solstice, an ancient pagan time of celebration. Some believed that both the rods and their users were un-Christian, possessed by the devil.
Divining lore—sometimes called rhabdomancy (from the Greek rhabdos, “rod,” and manteia, “divination”)—declared that, handled correctly, the rod would move as truly as a magnetic needle pulled to the north. At the moment of discovery, the rod’s operator (or rhabdomancer) would feel its power: sudden acceleration or retardation of the pulse, a sensation of heat or cold prickling along the skin. At the same time, the rod would bend, pointing toward what was sought.
The wood of choice was traditionally cut from the hazel tree, with its reddish bark, heart-shaped leaves, gold-colored hazelnuts, and mystic history. In Celtic lore, nine hazel trees guard the entrance to the Otherworld, and their nuts serve as containers for wisdom itself. A good divining rod was cut with a branched fork at one end, so that it could be held two-handed. Diviners held one hand curled around each prong of the fork, leaving the attached branch to extend downward like a flexible wand. But most people preferred a simpler term for a simpler version of the rod, a single stick known as a magic wand.
Despite his willingness to entertain the notion of telepathy, Barrett def initely did not believe in magic, and he considered rhabdomancy to be nonsense. In the case of water dowsing, in particular, he suspected that good diviners merely possessed a sharp eye for changes of vegetation and other observable signs of underlying wetness.
Barrett began his study by gathering records from the history of divining, finding to his satisfaction that most discoveries were easily discredited. But—as it turned out so often in psychical research—a handful of reports stubbornly held up, despite his best efforts to see and expose fraud.
There was, for instance, an 1889 case from the operators of a business in Ireland, the Waterford Bacon Factory. At that time, the factory managers had been working with geologists to drill a new well. Numerous holes had been sunk, one to a depth of 1,000 feet, and all had been dry. In frustration, despite the outrage of the consulting scientists, the managers decided to consult a dowser.
The man arrived on a sunny afternoon, forked rod in hand. He ambled around the site, his head cocked a little, as if he were listening, until suddenly the twig twisted so sharply that it snapped in two. Not only did the dowser insist water lay below, he provided a depth range between 80 and 100 feet. The Irish Geological Society had assigned a representative to observe this tomfoolery; he gloomily reported back that when the new borehole was sunk, as directed, water bubbled up. The resulting well yielded up to 5,000 gallons an hour.
The good examples, and they were rare, were all like that. There were reputable observers, witnesses who swore that the whole exercise had been a gamble, that they’d expected no more than a good show, right until the moment that the rod leapt to life in its owner’s hands, like a thing possessed.
Barrett picked apart most divining claims without ceremony He dismissed the reputed motion of the diving rod as an involuntary muscle spasm; the dowser’s arms would get tired holding a stick aloft indefinitely. He still suspected most water discoveries involved knowledge of the area, visible evidence of water. Further, the record keeping was so poor, he complained, that it was impossible to compare the overall success of dowsers to that of geologists engaged in the same pursuit.
And yet he didn’t deny that a few cases—such as the Irish well-drilling episode—could not be so simply explained away. He saw no evidence for magic there. But he thought a few operators might possess an unusual sensitivity, perhaps another example of one of those subliminal selves proposed by Myers. It might be, Barrett thought, that it was a kind of innate ability, comparable to migratory or homing instincts in other animals. The ability to somehow sense the presence of water, after all, would have been a powerful evolutionary advantage if it had occurred in ancient mankind.
As he had twenty years before, in his first paper on telepathy, Barrett concluded his report for the SPR with a recommendation. Here was a puzzle, he wrote, toward whose solution a scientific investigation might serve a useful purpose.
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RICHARD HODGSON HAD also been thinking over innate abilities, trying to put into perspective the mind of a medium and what it could—and couldn’t—accomplish. Surprising himself and his colleagues, Hodgson announced that he’d been mistaken in calling G.P merely a trance personality of Leonora Piper. After sittings with 130 different visitors, he’d been persuaded of the impossible—that the personality in the room was indeed a spirit, proof that his friend lived on.
Out of that long line of visitors, only twenty or so were friends of the late George Pellew. The rest were strangers, brought in to muddle the picture. All were presented without a clue as to name or background. Yet G.P. had effortlessly sorted through this parade, greeting all his old friends by name except one, a girl who was now eighteen and had been only ten when he met her. She had changed, G.P. told her finally, adding rather rudely that he wondered if she still played the violin as badly as she had as a child. As Hodgson reported, not once in the years between 1892 and 1897 did “G.P” ever confuse a stranger for a friend of George Pellew—or vice versa.
Hodgson found telepathy an inadequate explanation; it could hardly be supposed that all of G.P’s friends happened to be gifted telepathic agents, capable of sharing their thoughts with the medium. Sometimes G.P. talked accurately about friends not in attendance, some living miles away, making thought transference even more unlikely. Hodgson found support from other sittings as well. For instance, messages from people who had apparently died in mental anguish, such as suicides, were consistently confused, almost desperately so. If Mrs. Piper worked by telepathy to create a mental picture of a person lost to suicide, by reading the minds of friends and acquaintances, there was no reason that it would be garbled compared to all the other mind-reading. Time after time, though, messages from suicides remained muddled, miserable.
By contrast, there continued to be occasional sittings that rendered such breathtakingly clear and personal responses that even an observer given to doubt could not avoid that sense of a spirit in the room. In one such sitting, the parents of a little girl, Katherine (nicknamed Kakie), who had died a few weeks earlier at the age of five, came to visit. They did not identify themselves but brought with them a silver medal and string of buttons that the child had once played with.
A transcription of the sitting read as follows:
Where is Papa? Want Papa. [The father takes from the table a silver medal and hands it to Mrs. Piper] I want this—want to bite it. [She used to do this.] ... I want you to call Dodo [her name for her brother George] . Tell Dodo I am happy. [Puts hands to throat] No sore throat any more. [She had pain and distress of the throat and tongue] ... Papa, want to go wide [ride] horsey [She pleaded this throughout her illness] Every day I go to see horsey. I like that horsey ... Eleanor. I want Eleanor. [Her little sister. She called her much during her last illness.] I want my buttons. Where is Dinah? I want Dinah. [Dinah was an old rag doll, not with us]. I want Bagie [her name for her sister Margaret]. I want to go to Bagie ... I want Bagie ...
It was a shock to hear Hodgson, the longtime cynic, the tough-minded investigator, the most skeptical of the SPR inquirers, declare such sessions to be evidence of spirit communication. But once convinced, he did so with typical forthrightness in his second report on Leonora Piper, published in December 1897: “At the present time I cannot profess to have any doubt but that the chief ‘communicators’ to which I have referred in the foregoing pages are veritably the personages they claim to be, that they have survived the change we call death, and that they have directly communicated with us, whom we call living, through Mrs. Piper’s organism.”
Hodgson’s paper illuminated beautifully—if unintentionally—the inherent difficulties of producing persuasive results in psychical research. To accept that G.P. was a spirit, one had to believe in immortality. Further, one needed to believe that the exchanges between this modest American medium and a self proclaimed spirit proved the reality of life after death, trumped all other explanations.
Henry Sidgwick had longed for the day that his society showed the skeptics wrong, delivered up indisputable proof that the soul survived. But he could not convince himself that this was it; he’d spent too many years picking apart evidence, and he could see ways to pick apart Hodgson’s report as well.
The G.P. sittings were remarkable, Sidgwick agreed, but they did not entirely exclude telepathy. True, it seemed unlikely that all G.P.’s friends were strong telepathic communicators, delivering mental information to Mrs. Piper. But it was not impossible, and therefore thought reading could account yet for recognition and revelations about the dead man’s friends. Further, Sidgwick was troubled by the fact that while G.P. recognized others so readily, he retained so little knowledge of himself, at least of his former intellectual pursuits. Pellew had been an avid student of philosophy; the trance personality barely recognized the subject.
In one interview, a visitor asked G.P. about the American philosopher of science Chauncey Wright, who had been one of the earliest defenders of Darwinism and who had warned that theology should expect little support from the laws of science. Wright had written, for instance, that the idea that “the universe has a purpose” could be believed on grounds of faith only. It could never, he said, be “disclosed or supported” by scientific investigation. Until his death in 1875, Wright had worked in Cambridge, and his philosophical essays were widely read by northeastern intellectuals, Pellew among them.
Asked whether G.P.’s life after death shed light on Wright’s views of natural laws, the session went as follows:
G.P.: Yes, law is thought.
Sitter: Do you now find that law is permanent?
G.P: Cause is thought.
Sitter: That doesn’t answer it.
G.P.: Ask it.
The sitter asked if G.P. agreed with Chauncey Wright and was first told “most certainly” and then told, “He knows nothing, his theory is ludicrous.”
Surely, Sidgwick argued, the real spirit of George Pellew could have handled simple questions about a philosopher whose work he knew well. Did such hard-earned knowledge just leak away, sand trickling from broken glass, once a person died? Sidgwick found it hard to accept that the mind might survive but only as an empty container, bare of the knowledge that once filled it.
If Hodgson had hoped for better support from his colleagues, he did not chastise them for their doubts. Instead, he set about answering the criticisms. Sidgwick, he said, had raised one of the more interesting and complicating aspects of spirit communication, the difficulty of communicating through a medium. It called to mind the challenge of the “ghost of clothes” question, the way that one mind may alter information received from another. As Hodgson pointed out, Mrs. Piper knew nothing of philosophy. She was unlikely to understand it or relay its finer points with any grace. Her ability was to receive these flickers of communication but she wasn’t necessarily a competent interpreter. “If Professor Sidgwick were compelled to discourse philosophy through Mrs. Piper’s organism, the result would be a very different thing from his lectures at Cambridge,” he emphasized.
As Hodgson considered the issue, he’d come to believe that some things might be easier for spirits to communicate than others. Emotional connections—with their pure, personal power—might survive fairly intact through the translating mechanism of the medium. Intellect and sophisticated knowledge would be unlikely to fare so well, especially if the translator were uneducated, or if the medium lacked the language and training to understand what was being said in the first place.
He reminded Sidgwick of all the obstacles that must be overcome for any spirit communication, even of the most primitive type, to occur. If one considered the difficulty of communication between two living people in the same room—the way one person interprets or misinterprets another’s thoughts during a conversation—how much more difficult to conduct that conversation with someone speaking from another dimension, using the awkward device of an entranced medium to relay messages? “The conditions of
communication must be kept before the mind,” Hodgson insisted, and expectations for fluency should be lowered as a result.
JAMES McKEEN CATTELL, the Columbia professor who had so vehemently disparaged James’s SPR presidential address, read Hodgson’s affirmation of spirit life and hated it from first paragraph to last.
The life-after-death insinuations in Hodgson’s report struck him as simple spirit-mongering, and its conclusion—that even skeptics such as Richard Hodgson could be converted—infuriated him. Cattell didn’t really care if Hodgson wanted to make a fool of himself. But given the author’s reputation as a savvy investigator, Cattell did worry about the report’s influence on the beliefs of other scholars. What if a reputable scientist were to conclude that since the previously far-from-gullible Hodgson had crossed the line to credulity, it had become an intellectually permissible, even a respectable ideological crossing? The prospect horrified Cattell.
He fired off an essay to Science magazine, titled “Mrs. Piper, The Medium” (in homage to Browning’s cynical portrait of D. D. Home), to make sure that the real scientific point of view was understood. Cattell took aim not only at Hodgson’s analysis but at what he considered the bigger target, William James’s support of the SPR studies. Referring to James’s earlier description of Mrs. Piper as “the white crow” that helped persuade him of supernatural realities, Cattell wrote: “The difficulty has been that proving innumerable mediums to be frauds does not disprove the possibility (though it greatly reduces the likelihood) of one medium being genuine. But here we have the ‘white crow’ selected by Professor James from all the piebald crows exhibited by the Society.” Her credibility was due not to her own talents, Cattell continued, but to being endorsed by one of the country’s premier psychologists.