Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920 Vol 4

Shane McCorristine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000559484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This edition provides an insight into the dark areas between Victorian science, medicine and religion. The rare reset source material in this collection is organized thematically and spans the period from initial mesmeric experiments at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the decline of the Society for Psychical Research in the 1920s.

CRITICISMS OF THE TELEPATHIC THEORY

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112815-10

‘The Telepathy Theory,’ Light, 219:5 (1885), pp. 121–2.

‘How Many Senses Have You?’ The Times, editorial, 30 October 1886.

‘Spooks and their Friends, Saturday Review, 62:1623 (1886), pp. 750–1.

Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Criticism on “Phantasms of the Living”’ Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1 (1887), pp. 150–7.

Edmund Gurney, ‘Remarks on Professor Peirce’s Paper’ Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1 (1887), pp. 157–80.

A. Taylor Innes, ‘Where are the Letters ?’ Nineteenth Century, 126 (1887), pp. 174–94.

Josiah Royce, ‘Hallucination of Memory and “Telepathy”’ Mind, 13:50 (1888), pp. 244–8.

Mark Twain, ‘Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History’ Harper’s Monthly Magazine (European Edition) (1891), pp. 95–102.

G. B. Ermacora, ‘Telepathic Dreams Experimentally Induced’ Proceedings of the Societyfor Psychical Research, 11 (1895), pp. 235–308.

Robert Hind, ‘Telepathy in Relation to Theological Investigation’ Primitive Methodist Quarterly (January 1899), pp. 76–90.

Charles Leadbeater, The Rationale of Telepathy and Mind-Cure. A Lecture Delivered in Steinway-Hall, Chicago (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1903).

William T. Stead, ‘Can Telepathy Explain All?’ Contemporary Review, 98 (1910), pp. 446–57.

As psychical researchers mapped out a terrain of knowledge in which telepathy formed the keystone of a new theory of apparitions, critics of the concept were quick to respond. These responses ranged from satirical barbs and caricatures, to bemused acknowledgement, to sceptical appraisals, to serious rebuttals, to debunking replications. While the boundaries between science, spiritualism and conjuring were considered by many to be in a permeable state in the 1880s, the documents extracted here will give some idea of the kind of encounters the concept of telepathy had when it left the pages of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.

The SPR developed an impassioned rejection of the use of popular phrases such as ‘ghosts’, ‘supernatural’ and ‘occult’, and used their telepathic theory of apparitions to create some distance between themselves and spiritualist groups. Increasing tension between psychical researchers and spiritualists played out in the journal Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research, one of the most prominent metropolitan spiritualist journals, founded in 1881 by Edmund Dawson Rogers and W. Stainton Moses (1839–92). Rogers was a founding member of the SPR and Moses was sympathetic to their cause, but events in 1885 strained their approval of the new psychical research. A rupture occurred when Richard Hodgson (1855–1905), an Australian psychical researcher, published a highly critical report on the Theosophical Society, based on investigations he carried out in Adyar, India.¹ The document extracted here from Light, ‘The Telepathic Theory’ emerged from this context and reflects a more sceptical approach to the work of the SPR on the part of some spiritualists.

Phantasms of the Living was the SPR’s dramatic entrance into late-Victorian society and culture, and this in itself, apart from its radical findings, merited a spirited response in the print media. The first major reaction came when The Times devoted a leader to Phantasms on 31 October 1886 entitled ‘How Many Senses Have You?’² Here the reviewer readily recognized the remarkable nature of the volumes and their importance for the scientific world and outlined for the reader the main theses of Phantasms: (1) Experimental evidence proves the existence of telepathy; (2) Testimony proves the existence of phantasms of the living; (3) Phantasms of the living are instances of telepathic action. Of these three suggestions, the critic was not convinced that the third had been sufficiently proved beyond doubt. While admitting that the book had not been examined in detail for the review, the critic believed that what was now called telepathy had appeared down the ages under many different forms and went on to note: ‘We have no right to assume that we know all that can be known of the phenomena of the human consciousness, or that the unknown will not reveal itself if interrogated in the proper way’. However, the critic believed that the issue of apparitions was fundamentally different from that of telepathy, arguing that experimentation in cases of ghost-seeing fails altogether, while observation can only ever be indirect. It was argued that the ghost-seer as a unit of evidence was not scientifically valid and that such a person could never actually relate what they saw, but only what they think they saw: ‘To explain them [apparition cases] by telepathy is surely, in the present condition of our knowledge, to beg the whole question’.

The Saturday Review lampooned the SPR in three articles in late 1886 on the backdrop of the publicity surrounding Phantasms, referring to them as the ‘Society for Spookical Research’ and their studies as ‘spookology’. Gurney’s writing style was attacked as cumbersome and circular, and the review asserted that ‘the great majority of those who accept his arguments will do so, not because they have been convinced by them, but because they agreed with him beforehand’.³ It was argued that with a subject-matter as controversial as this no one person’s testimony was to be accepted considering the human tendency to lie, to hoax and to misremember. With many cases dismissed as too reliant upon memory and hearsay, and in the absence of contemporary documentation, the cases of ghost-seeing reproduced in Phantasms were judged as not having gone beyond the possibility of hoax or chance-coincidence.⁴ In ‘Spooks and their Friends’ the Saturday Review critic connected the SPR with the Theosophical Society, writing gleefully about the ‘feuds between the rival admirer’s and exponents of spooks’, and proposing that regardless of whether a spook is theosophical and occult, or psychical and telepathed, they were both spooks of the same category and ‘but for practical purposes there is no difference between them’.

A different type of criticism was to come from America where the philosopher Charles S. Peirce had read Phantasms with much interest and was moved to publish a stinging article on the book in late 1887. Peirce’s article, written in response to a positive review of Phantasms from William James, initiated a sustained controversy with Gurney.⁵ In this article, originally published in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Peirce put forward eighteen different conditions which he argued rendered many of the strongest crisis apparition cases in Phantasms invalid: these ranged from suspicions about anxiety, intoxication, unreliability and delirium, to more general arguments about the validity of the statistical methodology and data used and the reliability of the three authors as investigators. To his credit Gurney responded with vigour to the attack and exposed Peirce’s mistaken readings of many of the cases he cited, scoring hits in the process. At this point contrasting interpretations of what it was that ‘anxiety’ connoted became important in the debate. Peirce, on the contrary, believed in the existence of a sub-conscious current of anxiety towards people with whom the percipient was in deep sympathy with: this not only radically challenged the speculations in Phantasms but also exposed the ghost-seeing consciousness as inherently haunted by an unrecognized stream of anxiety towards loved ones. For if anxious thoughts about people are constantly in our mind, subconscious or not, then consciously known details such as their age and state of health could prove crucial in the probability of a crisis apparition occurring ‘naturally’, that is, when the sympathetic percipient enters a mental state conducive to such a hallucination emerging: and as both Peirce and Gurney stressed, this discourse was predicated on probabilities.

In another challenge for Gurney, A. Taylor Innes, a Scottish lawyer writing in the Nineteenth Century asked a very specific question of the authors: ‘Where Are the Letters ?’ He praised Phantasms as a promising enterprise, but as it was a piece of work predicated on the testimony of percipients who claimed not to know of the agent’s death before seeing the phantasm, Innes requested that the authors publish the letters which have ‘crossed’, i.e. the percipient’s letter home, or to a third party, describing the ghost-seeing incident and their fears for the loved one, post-marked and dated, and thus indicative of a genuinely supernatural event. While the authors made clear in Phantasms that the evidential basis of the claims being made were dependent upon extremely accurate documentation, they had not actually published any of these crucial letters. Innes complained about letters and memoranda that were burned, lost, missing, of suspicious value or simply not conducive to offering absolute proof. Innes’s criticism demonstrated the fact that for the SPR the status of the letter was both proof and its opposite; Gurney’s chaotic production of Phantasms, while aiming to be cumulative, had failed to find The Letter that could offer positive proof of the ghost: ‘If such a letter exists’, wrote Innes, ‘it is worth a thousand guineas in the market, and its destination is a guarded glass case in the British Museum.’

It was ironic that in the criticisms of Innes and the Saturday Review the SPR was consistently linked with its bête noire, the Theosophical Society, and had its telepathic theory of ghost-seeing attacked as occultist and theosophical in nature. That the SPR, which had itself‘debunked’ the Theosophical Society in 1885 as unscientific and fraudulent movement, was associated with such occultist teachings must have been galling to its leadership. Yet it was doubly ironic that in the case of Phantasms the authority of letters was again the issue at the heart of the controversy: the presence of the Mahatmas letters, the critic noted, had ‘continually undermined Blavatsky’s authority as well as their own’ and resulted in Hodgson’s findings against the Theosophical Society: the absence of documented and dated letters indicative of telepathic ghost-seeing similarly undermined the SPR’s attempt to prove the ghost, at least in the periodical press.

In his criticisms of Phantasms, published in Mind, the idealist philosopher and ASPR member, Josiah Royce (1855–1916), followed Peirce’s train of thought by focusing on the role of memory disorders in the ghost-seeing experience. Royce’s own hypothesis was that Phantasms illustrated cases of a not yet recognized type of ‘instantaneous hallucination of memory, consisting in the fancy, at the very moment of some exciting experience, that one has EXPECTED it before its coming’.⁶ This hypothesis suggested that ghost-seers were actually remembering the future: on hearing of a loved one’s death the percipient suddenly declares that he/she saw an apparition or had a death-warning at the moment of the other’s death. The mechanics of such a hallucination were unknown to Royce, but he speculated that they would occur rarely among the sane and could possibly pass from one percipient to another, especially if they were members of the same family. Royce explicitly linked this type of hallucination of the memory, or ‘double memory’ with the notion of déjà vu, yet the idea of telepathic ghost-seeing, for Royce, resembled a more morbid version of déjà vu in that it was not immediately corrected by the self and could persist on in life as a conviction. Royce proposed, therefore, that Phantasms had revealed a hitherto unproven hallucination of the human memory, and not as the authors claimed, the reality of telepathy.

Royce’s counter-argument of double memory highlighted the increased strength of dynamic psychiatry in its interpretations of the psychology of the sane, and also pointed towards the focus on double or split personalities as a concept which could explain contradictory behaviour in psychiatric patients.⁷ Thus criticisms of the SPR’s theory of ghost-seeing proved useful in combating the ‘veridical’ in life: psychologists were exposing the fact that the mind could not be trusted – for every conviction that an event occurred, or something was seen, even on a collective scale, the psychologist could respond with empirical and experimental evidence of everyday delusions and disorders.

While not a direct criticism of the SPR theory of telepathy, research coming from Italy seemed to suggest the limitations of adopting a purely naturalistic interpretation of the phenomenon. The 18 90s and early 1900s were aparticularly active period in Italian psychical research with important figures such as Cesare Lombroso, Ernesto Bozzano and Enrico Morselli investigating spiritualism and telepathy. Many Italian psychical researchers collaborated on investigations into the remarkable Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918), a Neopolitan medium who also attracted the attention of the SPR and Charles Richet. A figure of note during this period was G. B. Ermacora, a Padua-based physicist and founder of the Rivista di Studi Psichici, which he co-edited with Giorgio Finzi from 1895 until 1897. In his obituary Myers described Ermacora’s death in 1898 as ‘a most serious loss for Psychical Research. Dr Ermacora was one of the few men in Europe – they may still, I fear, be counted on the two hands – who made this study his main care.’⁸ In ‘Telepathic Dreams Experimentally Induced’ (1895) Ermacora presented the results of his investigations into three women who lived together in Padua: Signora Maria Manzini, her four-and-a-half-year-old cousin, Angelina, and Maria’s mother, Signora Annetta Manzini. Maria was prone to trances in which a spirit named ‘Elvira’ would become manifest. Ermacora decided to conduct experiments to see if he could influence Angelina’s dreams through communication with ‘Elvira’. He held seventy trials and concluded that there was supernormal communication between the subliminal selves of Maria and Angelina and the personality of Elvira – although Ermacora declined to pronounce Elvira either spiritual or psychical in nature. In his review of this article William James, who visited Ermacora in Padua, claimed it was ‘a startling record of a new genus of thought transference’ but warned that the results were overdependent on the honesty of the Manzini’s.⁹

The strong critical reaction to Phantasms from American commentators continued with the publication of a review by G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924) in the first issue of the American Journal of Psychology. Hall used this entrance as an opportunity to challenge the SPR’s claims to membership in the discipline of experimental psychology. Hall, who had been a sceptical voice on the Council of the ASPR, was concerned that psychical research would disturb the project for the institutionalization of psychology, would queer its pitch so to speak, when the discipline needed to be ‘kept, in the severest sense, experimental and scientific’.¹⁰ As a writer Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), better known as Mark Twain, had no such concerns and celebrated the idea of telepathy, or ‘mental telegraphy’ as he called it, as a marvellous leap forward in tele-communications. Telepathy was for Twain something that could render traditional modes of communication such as letters, and more recent modes, such as the telephone, superfluous and unnecessary. Twain had written the piece included in this volume as early as 1878 but did not publish it ‘because I judged that people would only laugh at it and think I was joking’.¹¹

Other currents of thought in the 1890s included the idea of ‘Christian telepathy’. Robert Hind was a minister in the Primitive Methodist church, an organization with roots in early nineteenth-century British working-class evangelicalism. Hind was particularly associated with Methodism in the north of England and would have used the lexicon of revelation and ecstasy in his daily ministry. By the time he wrote ‘Telepathy in Relation to Theological Investigation’ Hind was preaching in Middlesbrough and overseeing a revival: ‘Upon one meeting the power of the Lord was so mighty that the people were almost lifted out of their seats, and Mr. Hind declared that he had never felt anything like it in all his life’.¹² In his article Hind broadly supports the work of the SPR and other psychical researchers but also felt that telepathy had bearing on theological subjects, helping to elucidate the teachings of Jesus Christ.

While many now associate telepathy with heterodoxy or occultism, the period between 1870 and 1920 also saw significant opposition to psychical theories from spiritualists. It was fashionable, even among sceptical scientists, to suspect that ‘ther...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Thought-Transference and Telepathy in the Society for Psychical Research
• Criticisms of the Telepathic Theory
• Editorial Notes