The New Prometheans

Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle

Courtenay Raia

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226635491
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.

CHAPTER ONE

The Culture of Proof and the Crisis of Faith

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Western world began its acceleration toward modernity. In the space of that fifty years, scientific knowledge entered fully into its physical frame. Bessemer steel poured into its scaffolds, its bridges and railways; coal fires became combustion engines, windmills became dynamos, and carriages turned into motor cars. This gave change its definite, visible architecture. But a parallel transformation was under way that would likewise make over the traditional mind. The theocentric view that had cradled nature and the nation within the Kingdom of God was coming apart piece by piece as a manmade world was pushing its way into the midst of this God-given one. This had profoundly disturbed the resting place of private religious conscience, which had sheltered within Anglican natural theology. The harmonized understanding of heaven and earth was being swept away, and a new, replacement framework had yet to arise. Whether this framework was to be rebuilt through a reformed theology or secular metaphysics, or indeed abandoned altogether as an unworkable divide, it was, for the first time, up to the people to decide. The forces of democratization had put ordinary individuals, their ideas, and their sense of possibility into play.

While the “Victorian crisis of faith” narrative has hung clouds of spiritual despair over this changing landscape, the rhetorical gloom belonged largely to the intellectual stratosphere. Scholars peering below have seen that this remained a profoundly religious age. What had changed was the nature of religious debate. The cultural ruckus over “how to get to heaven,” under way since the Reformation, was now caught up in the gear-works of this new scientific philosophy of knowledge. Religious belief now intersected with deeper questions about what could be known and the best way to build such knowledge, complicating the terrain in which religious faith was held. While scientists themselves did not particularly seek this competition with theology, they did enforce a boundary between knowledge based on faith and that based on reason, setting up their own distinct system for arbitrating truth. And lurking within this new scientific understanding of the physical world was the potential basis for developing new social guidelines for modern living, calling into question the faith-based customs of the past. The culture wars had begun.

Among the greatest weapons in this fight to assert new certainties, even in matters of religious faith, was the persuasive power of science itself, and especially the appeal to physical proof. Indeed, the appeal to proof was not limited to any one side but was sought and accepted everywhere. It was a common language that could be spoken by everyone and understood by all. Evidence was in. Nothing captured the demos like demonstration. From the sensational road shows of mentalists to the prestigious public lectures at the Royal Institution, audiences from the late eighteenth century onward had been encountering evidentiary spectacles: celebrity scientists made chemical elements flame, smoke, phosphoresce, and flash with light; they discharged electric currents from Leyden jars; they set discs gyrating within mysterious fields of force. Seeing was the new believing as Victorians began applying this passion for proof even to the afterlife, discovering that ghosts could be subjected to the new evidence-based standards of the time. They clasped hands eagerly to demarcate the revolutionary investigative space of the séance circle, hoping to witness at last “evidence of things unseen” and even to touch “the substance of things hoped for.”1

The implicit materialism of such a concrete, evidential “culture of proof” can seem strikingly at odds with spiritualism’s otherworldly agenda. However, it makes more sense if we understand this materialism as conditioning a set of empirical practices, and thus as mainly methodological in nature. It did not necessarily imply any deference to scientific theories or use facts to enforce some metaphysical exclusion. Its particular brand of mid-Victorian facticity is best interpreted within the context of a more naive positivism. This outlook cheerfully identified with Auguste Comte’s notion that empirical science marked the high point in the evolution of knowledge, without taking on formal positivism’s godless cultural agenda, that is, Comte’s “Religion of Humanity.” Intellectual ascetics like George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, high positivism’s literary power couple, may have felt duty-bound to expel religion from modern life as a necessary step in humanity’s moral and social evolution, but most people were not so keen to abandon the divine order.2 Likewise, the strict, antimetaphysical discipline of elite theoretical science had limited mass appeal because of its chastely physical view of natural philosophy.3 Because naive positivism embraced experimental evidence, not theoretical explanation, as the most compelling aspect of scientific argument, it did not require the renunciation of God in the realm of either culture or philosophy. Evidence was also, not coincidentally, its most democratic aspect, privileging common sense and common senses. Popular empiricism set observational data free of the interpretive demands of recondite academic theories and other exclusionary qualifications on understanding, enlarging the public’s personal authority in relation to professional scientific opinion. This allowed nonspecialists to bypass intellectual pronouncements inconsistent with their own values. In the case of spiritualistic phenomena, people could see for themselves the phenomenon in question and judge it accordingly, trumping any intellectual interdictions imposed from on high. Thus, even after institutional science put an end to overt clerical interference, it still had to contend with the tenacity of those unwilling to surrender their own, more personal claim to its talisman.4 In the late 1860s and early 1870s, when spiritualism was approaching its zenith, the boundaries of scientific knowledge and scientific authority still lacked a clear, cultural consensus. Ideologues, entertainers, amateurs, eccentrics, and lay educators all vied with academics and specialists for their share of the narrative power of science. The openness of this terrain is important to understanding the ambitions of scientific spiritualists to assert their own rival scientific worldview, and the extent to which psychical researchers were actually able to do so. The choice for those seeking some yet-to-be-defined alternative to this still-to-be-consolidated orthodoxy was, in the words of Oliver Lodge, a choice between “two distinct conceptions of the universe: the one, that of a self-contained and self-sufficient universe, with no outlook into or links with anything beyond, and the other conception of a universe open to all manner of spiritual influences and permeated through and through with a Divine spirit.”5

The philosophical materialism that imposed this strict seal upon the cosmos may have been a largely elite phenomenon exaggerated by polemicists, but the concerns it raised were far more diffuse. Such rhetoric drew a clear line between the ethos of scientific skepticism and the outcome of religious doubt for all the faithful to see, even those who would not normally be able to infer such a line for themselves. Even if one did not have doubts about one’s own faith, one could never be sure about the faith of the person in the neighboring pew. The institutional power of the church might not visibly flag and cultural tradition might continue to compel a certain outward deference, but as long as the hearts of men were hidden, there would always be room for doubt. Here is where the eloquent apostasy of elites, often seen as driving a somewhat artificial or out-of-touch narrative, finds its broader significance. Such public “crisis confessions” made an emotional spectacle of an otherwise interior struggle, realizing for the public a somewhat mythical atheistic threat.6 These elite misgivings put doubt on display, traveling socially and intellectually downstream to be taken up as part of a wider debate. Doubt, whether privately held or publicly multiplied through the media explosion of magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, essays, novels, and lay-interest journals, captured the Victorian imagination and entered prominently into its discourses. This anxiety was powered not by unbelief, but by the deep social and personal investment Victorians had in the beliefs of others, as well as the voice it gave to their own unconfessed tests of faith. The secret, subjective states of mind, where God had been inscribed since the Reformation as a matter of private conscience, had now come under new kinds of pressure as theological narratives encountered secular discourses. This gave the idea of a war between science and religion its popular resonance, even if the public’s continued allegiance to both remained outwardly undisturbed.

Understood this way, the crisis of faith becomes an interior, psychological crisis concerned as much with the subjective act of faith as with its object: the religious claims themselves. This reflexive approach offers a productive shift away from the reality of a religious crisis to the more historically relevant notion of the perception of one. The substance of religious crisis need not derive from the actual headcount of confirmed atheists, but may arise from the potential, indwelling doubts of the faithful themselves. This inward turn toward private conviction also heightens the epistemological dimensions of the crisis, wherein doubt recognized a fundamental insufficiency in one’s knowledge. In the context of the culture of proof, the insufficiency of faith is implicit in the distinction between believing something to be true and proving it to be true. This elevation of evidence-based knowledge could not help but stand in silent detraction against all assertions that were not themselves evidential: for instance, religious assertions based on faith. For the many who took pride in this positive age, no matter how tightly they held to their spirituality, somewhere (in the forefront or back of one’s mind) this evidential ethos had opened up a ledger keeping track of one’s running debt of proof. Séance spiritualism was a way of crediting this account. Such metaphysical facts could justify the strength of one’s private faith and also lend public support to others of potentially weak faith. Spiritualism’s avid identification with proof was a play for, and defense against, its power, explaining in part why spiritualism’s vicissitudes track so closely with the heyday of scientific naturalism.

THE SANITY OF “THE SPIRIT CRAZE”

What eventually became known as “the spirit craze” began in Hydesvillle, New York, in 1848, when two teenage girls and a ghost exchanged raps on a barn wall that divided this world from the next.7 In this thoroughly improvised communication, the Fox sisters had found a way to make the dead speak in a staccato percussion signifying yes and no. Soon tables were tipping all across Europe, England, and America as curiosity seekers hailed ghosts of their own who tapped out their communiqués on the kitchen floor. The table-turning phenomenon arrived in England in 1852, where there was already a well-developed discourse of mesmerism ready to receive it, yet, it was the spiritualist narrative that soon took the initiative. Mesmerism’s comparatively staid notion of an exotic mental force simply could not compete with this new, exhilarating movement promising a cameo of heaven on earth.8 It dawned with a sense of quivering expectation, “pervading all classes, all sects, that the world stands upon some great spiritual revelation.”9 These tables were not just turning through some kind of mental kinesis, they were tapping out words and letters transmitted by a ghostly intelligence: a breakthrough in modern communication technology that eclipsed even “the new railway of thought,” the electrical telegraph.10 By 1853, the planchette, a gliding board with a pen attached for automatic writing, improved upon this rather cumbersome table-tipping device and gave further impetus to the fast-developing interest in spiritualism.

Spiritualism steadily assimilated the investigative armature of mesmerism in pursuit of its own, otherwise controversial agenda: the chain of clasped hands circulating magnetic fluid became the séance circle; the mesmerist’s powers of clairvoyance, levitation, crystal vision, and thought reading were all attributed to the spiritual medium; and the hypnotist’s ability to possess and even operate the nervous system of his subject was inverted to become the trance state in which the medium herself became possessed and operated upon by the agency of spirits. Even as spiritualism appropriated the set pieces of mesmerism, mesmerism likewise annexed the phenomena of spiritualism into its own area of concern. Phenomena such as hauntings, apparitions, trance mediumship, and levitations were taken up by the chief organ of scientific mesmerism, the Zoist, and framed as purely psychophysical phenomena.11 The continuum between mental and spiritual agencies that connected these inquiries conveniently blurred the line between philosophy and metaphysics, uniting the mysteries of mind to the mysteries of death, while maintaining two points of entry. Mesmerists and spiritualists shared the belief that human consciousness could potentially be the point of contact with some divine order, keeping alive the hope that engagement, perhaps even scientific engagement, with something more ultimate was still possible.

The Victorians, as consumers of Romantic horror fiction, had already demonstrated a certain taste for occult spirits in the earlier part of the century, but investigative séance spiritualism constituted a distinct endeavor. The ghosts drawn by gothic writers like Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe were continental lotharios; they went about sexually terrorizing British maidens in the morally suspect Mediterranean. These amorous aristocrats were barely suitable for purposes of literary entertainment, let alone for the high-minded aspirations of this new undertaking. By way of contrast, spiritualists emphasized the facticity and moral forthrightness of their ghosts, setting them apart from these nefarious, fictional varieties emanating from the gothic imagination. The bricolage characteristic of spiritualism drew primarily from mesmeric, scientific, and nonconforming religious discourses rather than from literary ones, readily assuming their moral mantle of progress along with aspects of their utopianism. In keeping with this enlightened spirit, the familiar diabolical interpretation of spirit activity that could have been mined from religious and folk traditions was forcibly excluded from Victorian spiritualism’s identity formation. Such accusations of diabolism, however, were frequently directed against the movement from outside its ranks. Rev.Thomas Lake Harris warned, that the Devil was no longer “bound within the confines of the invisible world” but had “ruptured the odylic spheres of the human race let loose for a season.”12 This kind of demonization, constructed by Harris as the furtherance of an already objectionable mesmerism, was characteristic of the early reception of spiritualism. Its novelty was such that moral conservatives grappled confusedly with its oncoming tide not quite knowing how to name it. While they called upon traditional satanic tropes to identify the threat, they also sensed something strange and new, giving rise to paranoid rants covering all bases of the spiritualist agenda. Rev. W. H. Ferris accused the movement simultaneously of old-fashioned satanism, newfangled Christian universalism, deism, atheism, pantheism, Epicureanism, and free love.13 The authors of titles such as Thoughts on Satanic Influence or Modern Spiritualism Reconsidered (1854) and Spiritualism: A Satanic Delusion and a Sign of the Times (1856) understood that there was something modern to spiritualism’s hubris, even while it had its roots in an age-old sin: temptation by the Devil.14

These reactionary narratives were for the most part successfully overwritten by the furious wave of publishing activity defending and evangelizing spiritualism, dashed off by various writers in the 1850s and written in a tone of heroic, unblemished virtue. Far from being out to make some secret, self-serving Faustian bargain, spiritualists sought, in the words of Catherine Crowe, “progress in spiritual knowledge, together with the earnest and wide spread desire, especially in this country [England], to improve the moral condition and alleviate the sufferings of humanity.”15 Crowe’s assurances aside, this did not mean spiritualism posed no threat to traditional Christianity. A theme running across much of its literature was the quest for a new religious revelation, which implied a certain eagerness to cull unwanted elements from theological orthodoxy. What spiritualists desired, according to their leading apologist of the 1850s, was to get “closer to the truth of God,” which meant challenging the “deluded faith of bigoted minds” whose conflict with spiritualism stemmed from their cowardly “desire not to be undeceived.”16 While such attitudes were rarely intended as a refutation of Christianity, they did boldly signal the dawn of a new era in terms of mode of worship and structures of power. Spiritualism’s religious attitudes tended toward the antiauthoritarian, going so far as to deny the existence of the Devil and to suggest that Christ’s miraculous nature might pertain to us all should we choose to discover it. (Catherine Crowe’s anticlericalism boldly attributed humanity’s hitherto stunted spiritual growth to clerical mercenaries intent on making “the salvation of men’s souls a means of living.”)17

Given the diversity of its subgroups, historians have tended to divide spiritualism into a variety of “spiritualisms.” However, its doctrines were the product of a highly discursive culture in which core values and beliefs were debated and propagated through an open press. This allowed for a loose ideological consensus to evolve among the varieties of spiritualism: Anglican, theosophist, psychological, Unitarian, socialistic, plebeian, and scientific. From its inception, these narratives tended to culturally position spiritualism as a highly specialized form of intellectual activity, drawing upon the attributes of both science and religion. Whether it fully belonged to one or the other, both, or neither, the revolutionary “science of nature and of God” (as it was described by one leading spiritual pastor in 1851) was difficult to categorize.18 But it was abundantly clear to its followers that spiritualism charted the course of modern social, spiritual, and intellectual progress, holding out its promise of advancement to all.

This last point distinguishes the original Victorian project from successive iterations of modern spiritualism, which have since reabsorbed some of the necromantic themes excluded by this first wave. Because modern magic is so polymorphous and anti-institutional in nature, it can be somewhat difficult for us to grasp the earnest, programmatic, and uniquely indigenous character of Victorian spiritualism.19 Already in such late nineteenth-century hermetic revivals as theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the arcane, countercultural aspect of the magical tradition began to reassert itself. Such programs tended to be secretive and ceremonial, reasserting the hermetic ethos of personal development, ritual enactment, and the pu...