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Unruly Spirits
The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France
By M. Brady Brower
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07751-7
Introduction
Psychical Research and French Science I fear that those to whom I confided my intentions have thought of me more than once as a victim of a bizarre and, in short, a rather futile curiosity. On what path have I put myself? "This curious by-path of yours," a friendly Englishman once told me in no uncertain terms. I, however, continued to believe that it was a detour worth following and it seemed to me by experience that it would lead rather far. With something that had, until the present, been nothing more than an anecdote, I supposed that I could make history. —Marc Bloch,
Les Rois thaumaturges
If "psychical research" is an expression that has limited currency among contemporary Anglophones, the French equivalents, les sciences psychiques and la mitapsychique, are even less obvious to French ears. A quick analysis of any of these terms would not be incorrect in concluding that they have something in common with the field of psychology. A survey of the membership of the field of psychical research would reveal a number of prominent figures associated with the development of psychology in the late nineteenth century. For those who invented both the expression and the field of study to which it referred, "psychical research" was, in fact, a study of mental phenomena, and in this respect it was closely aligned with the nascent field of scientific psychology, whose aims and principles were, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, still very much disputed by the philosophers, physiologists, neurologists, neuroanatomists, psychiatrists, alienists, and all those who were eventually to become "psychologists." Some of these early figures in the field of psychology maintained that the mind could be studied scientifically only if links could be established between mental processes and their organic supports. Others insisted that consciousness could be studied on its own terms through introspection and that psychology need not limit itself to studying the neurosystem or the physiological processes of sensation and reflex. Within this debate psychical research offered an extreme argument for the autonomy of the mind by presenting itself as an investigation of "phenomena which are often ... attributed to minds apart from material organisms." At the same time, it proposed that the mind, as presented in certain phenomena, could nevertheless be studied using the objective methods of the experimental sciences. In psychical research the mind was objectivized but without recourse to the body.
The raw material for this endeavor was to be found in a set of practices and beliefs born out of the religious enthusiasms of the mid-nineteenth century and adapted to the secular and democratic values of the age. Usually given a precise date of origin in the discovery of mediumistic powers by the teenaged Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, Modern Spiritualism became an international movement in the early 1850s as millions of practitioners throughout America and Europe engaged in communication with spirits of the dead. In France spiritisme would debut in the spring of 1853 with the proliferation of "talking" and "dancing" tables, remarkable phenomena in which ordinary household furnishings moved by mysterious means around middle- and lower-middle-class salons. These movements often corresponded to verbal commands given by siance participants, and it was soon learned that the tables could respond with extraordinary accuracy to participants' inquiries by rapping out letters of the alphabet. Eventually, these communications, like the American form of the practice, highlighted the intervention of "mediums," individuals who were seen as especially skilled at contacting the spirit world and could, in the most talented cases, produce a whole host of strange mental and physical phenomena, ranging from clairvoyance and telepathy to the materialization of spirit forms. Adepts of spiritism argued that these phenomena could not be explained away with references to mundane causes. They also argued, however, that these phenomena were not the product of supernatural forces. Spirits belonged, they insisted, fully to the order of nature. Communication with the spirit world was not an occult practice limited to those with access to secret knowledge. Spirit phenomena could be produced and observed by anyone willing to follow a few simple procedures.
In the 1880s elite researchers from the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, literature, and philosophy began taking these claims seriously enough to subject them to close scrutiny. The reasons for this interest among scientists and intellectuals varied. In most cases, the individuals involved in psychical research felt an obligation to render, for the benefit of science and the concerns of the general public, an account of mediumistic phenomena that conformed to the scientific understanding of the natural world. For extreme skeptics, the engagement with mediumism might be sparked by the expectation that the medium would, in the course of close scrutiny by cautious and disciplined observers, be exposed as a fraud. For credulous researchers who accepted the so-called spirit hypothesis, the study of mediums was understood as a means of publicly confirming the survival of the soul as a fact of nature. For the many critical but open-minded researchers who occupied a place between these two extremes, the admittedly remarkable events of the siances were curiosities, alluring in that they suggested faculties of mind and properties of matter that remained, as yet, hidden from the light of science. In the movement of distant objects, materialization of spirits, telepathy, precognition, and other phenomena produced by mediums, psychical researchers saw evidence of an agency that defied mechanical notions of cause and prevailing scientific understandings of time and space. Spiritists and psychical researchers agreed to the extent that the phenomena observed in the siances were natural in origin and that they didn't exhibit the "fatalism" associated with other processes of nature. The events studied suggested instead "intellectuality, will, intention" as well as "choice, purpose, [and] decision consistent with volition." Rejecting the divine provenance of the soul, psychical researchers set out to demonstrate that intelligence was a faculty of nature. At the same time, however, they were drawn to phenomena that indicated that intelligence was, in its willfulness, creativity, and capriciousness, not completely bound by the deterministic forces that much nineteenth-century science had attributed to the natural order.
In this sense, the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist and psychical researcher Charles Richet would find his ideas in agreement with the pioneering French spiritist Allan Kardec. Just as Kardec had argued that "every intelligent cause has an intelligent effect," Richet would insist that the physical and mental phenomena of mediumism were "attributable to forces that seem intelligent or to some unknown, latent powers of human intelligence." But while Kardec had made his claim in a period in which the mind was still considered unitary and self-identical (thus giving rise to an explanation dependent on the action of disembodied spirits), the intervening history of psychology would insure that Richet's statements resonated with theories of the mind in which this unity could no longer be assumed. As the historian Henri Ellenberger argued, psychical research would play an important role in psychology's theories of a decentered and fragmented subject. Psychology would draw abundant evidence for subconscious activity, the subliminal self, and unconscious mental processes from the often staggering feats of mediums.
As a specialized field of elite practitioners, psychical research formally debuted in 1882 under auspicious circumstances with the advent of the London-based Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Bolstered by the prestige of the Cambridge moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the SPR was formed with the purpose of establishing a permanent institutional basis for an area of inquiry that had, to that point in time, been pursued either too informally or too sporadically to offer any meaningful contributions to science. The SPR's research program built upon and continued the studies performed roughly a decade earlier by the London Dialectical Society, studies that were, in turn, only a formalization of the countless personal investigations, interested and disinterested, credulous and skeptical, undertaken in the countless siances that had been held since the advent of Modern Spiritualism at midcentury. Based on the reputations of its core members, the British-based movement quickly drew a prestigious international membership. The internationalism of the field was realized with the emergence of other organizations like the American Society for Psychical Research in Boston and later in New York (1885-present), the Institut Giniral Psychologique (1900-1933), and the Institut Mitapsychique International (1919-present). International cooperation reached its apogee in the decades following the First World War with a series of international congresses involving participants from dozens of European, Asian, and American countries.
As members of a field of research that emphasized the mind's independence from matter, psychical researchers self-consciously occupied a heterodox relation to what they termed "official science," describing their field as a study of phenomena that "lie on or outside the boundaries of recognized science." Claiming the status of a science in their methods and attitudes, the practitioners nevertheless opposed themselves to the narrow and routinized practice of science that they saw developing around them. Emerging in a period when broad proclamations about the mastery of science and technology over nature were common, psychical researchers were quick to point out those facts that continued to elude scientific knowledge. By doing so, they sought to preserve the speculative character of the scientific enterprise by staking out an area of free inquiry in which existing scientific paradigms were undeniably inadequate.
If the field willingly adopted a marginal relationship to the established sciences, its core members—men like Frederic William Henry Myers in England, William James in America, Thiodore Flournoy in Switzerland, Cesare Lombroso in Italy, and Henri Bergson and Pierre Janet in France—were hardly foreigners to the scientific establishment they so often criticized. The great paradox of psychical research was that, while it maligned the stifling effects of "official science," many of its practitioners were members of the very faculties and scientific academies that this term presumably encompassed. These men nevertheless resented the silences that science, in its institutionalized form, seemed to impose on those anomalies that refused to fit its established paradigms. As men already respected for their individual contributions to their respective fields, psychical researchers would make their effort to sustain the heroic age of discovery in an era increasingly characterized by the regimentation and specialization of scientific work. William James would, for instance, note in a reference to anomalies ignored by official science: "Only the born geniuses let themselves be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions ... [y]our Galileos, Galvanis, Fresnels." In the meantime the "more passive disciples" would continue to look upon their science as a "closed and complete system of truth." For scientists who refused to adopt this "passive" relation to knowledge, psychical research seemed to hold out the opportunity for creative new insights worthy of the adventurous spirit of science. For these researchers, this also meant taking on an ambivalent and uncertain relationship to what they took to be the institutional sources of scientific authority. The result was that, as Richard Brown has pointed out, psychical researchers "request[ed] admission into orthodox science with their left hand while rejecting it with their right."
While opposed to the constraining effects of institutionalization, the figures who founded the field of psychical research nevertheless drew upon the great personal prestige that institutional recognition lent to their various efforts. Indeed, the attention directed toward psychical research had much to do with the presence of so many highly credentialed scholars in the field. While the reputations of these individuals tell us nothing about the objective value of their personal observations, the concentration of social capital does confirm the importance of mediumism to those elites who would otherwise wield great influence over the intellectual currents of their time. While these men sought to claim mediumism as an object of elite scientific study, the practice was ultimately disassociable from the popular, democratic circumstances at its origins. Even as prominent men of science claimed that mediumism was a legitimate object of study, the practices of table rapping, clairvoyance, spirit materializations, and telepathy would continue to bear strong associations with middle- and lower-middle-class religiosity. Just as this popular aspect tended to color attitudes toward psychical research in its own time, so too does it continue to confuse historical discussions of the field, which tend to equate psychical research with an assortment of presumably premodern and nonscientific practices like magic, mysticism, and occultism. While psychical researchers were diligent in defending themselves from such associations, they were never entirely successful in doing so. Spiritists eagerly embraced the legitimizing aura of elite science by drawing parallels between their religious beliefs and the findings of psychical researchers. For their part, psychical researchers sometimes found it rhetorically useful to draw upon the legitimizing principles of democracy by making reference to the fact that the phenomena they studied had been witnessed by tens of thousands of amateur observers on numerous continents. Due to the antagonisms between psychical research and official science, they also found it useful on occasion to draw upon popular enthusiasm to procure material resources for their research. What was at issue in these transactions between the elite world of psychical research and the world of popular spiritism was not the question of what sort of phenomena it was proper for science to study or what questions it was permitted to ask. The question was, rather, by what distinction science claimed its special authority over public knowledge, given the democratic nature of modern society.
My examination of the scientific heterodoxy represented by psychical research proceeds on the assumption that a field of knowledge as general and far-reaching as "science" achieves its identity only in relation to that which it excludes, prohibits, and otherwise invokes to differentiate itself from competing systems of knowledge. In the nineteenth century such distinctions were more difficult to inscribe between the disciplines as science expanded into new areas, producing knowledge of objects that had formerly been deemed improper to a field dedicated to an objective study of nature. The most notable expansion in this respect was in those undertakings in which the human being's consciousness, beliefs, behavior, and patterns of association were deemed fully knowable objects of scientific inquiry. Scientific psychology, sociology, anthropology, and modern linguistics all arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century as part of this general effort in the sciences to produce socially useful knowledge about man.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unruly Spirits by M. Brady Brower Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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