A Promethean enterprise

Tom Ruffles examines a new study of the early days of the Society for Psychical Research and its exploration of the complex relationship between science and religion

The New Prometheans

Psychical research put universal questions to nature on behalf of humanity

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

University of Chicago Press 2019 Pb, 424pp, $35/£27, notes, bib, ind, ISBN 9780226635354

Scientific advances in the second half of the 19th century had implications both for religious belief, requiring a new framework within which a relationship between secular and religious values could be determined, and for the understanding of consciousness.

Courtenay Raia has brought together a wide range of sources to examine the contributions made by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to these currents, highlighting the role psychical research was to play within the renegotiation between science and religion and in the development of psychology.

The formation of the SPR in 1882 was less an attempt by its pioneers to nostalgically fill a void caused by the growth of “reluctant doubt” than an endeavour to become an integral element of science’s energetic march towards a fuller understanding of the world, constituting a “Promethean enterprise” that in its early days looked as though it might succeed. The SPR’s founders may have grappled with the conflict between not being able to live with religion yet not able to live without it, but their approach was one of scepticism, not faith, as part of a broader movement seeking a harmonisation between epistemology and the search for spiritual meaning.

Raia is not interested in the reality or otherwise of psychic phenomena, but in the role psychical research played in the development of the institutions of academic science. Rather than providing a linear narrative with details of the SPR’s programmes, she focuses on the ideas and practices of four individuals who were significant contributors to both the debates the SPR’s work generated and the four disciplines they represented: Sir William Crookes (chemistry), Frederic Myers (psychology), Sir Oliver Lodge (physics) and Andrew Lang (anthropology). All four served as president of the SPR and collectively indicate the extent to which, despite a level of hostility, the Society was embedded in elite social, cultural and scientific networks, to a degree that may seem surprising today when psychical research is so often dismissed as pseudoscience. Collectively the four helped to make psychical research – located at the intersection of the physical and mental, while acknowledging the lack of strict demarcation – part of the public discourse, bringing to bear a multidisciplinary approach that was ahead of its time.

Thus while the SPR conformed to the scientific method, it expanded the limits of what had previously been that method’s objects of study. In particular, it was able to contribute to the growing interest in consciousness, with Myers’s subliminal self not in opposition to the nascent discipline of psychology but at its cutting edge, particularly alert to the progress being made in France. Raia accords Myers two chapters, compared to one each for the other three individuals she primarily studies, a testament to his significance.as a major thinker.

Admittedly the outcomes were not always successful, as the chapters dealing with Crookes’s involvement with medium Florence Cook (sardonically titled “William Crookes in Wonderland: Scientific Spiritualism and the Physics of the Impossible”) and Lodge’s championing of ether attest. But in general their astonishingly productive empirical explorations, far more sophisticated than previous initiatives such as Edward Cox’s Psychological Society, tested the boundaries of the developing scientific disciplines (though not without controversy), evolving both experimental methods and a theoretical perspective that could critically address such phenomena as Spiritualism, Theosophy and mesmerism, often to their adherents’ displeasure.

For a brief period, psychical research was highly influential in its approach as it wrestled with aspects of the supernormal mind and surveyed the boundaries of incarnate and discarnate existence. It established itself as a hub for an international network of scholars stimulated by its innovative approach, though not ultimately managing to attain professional status within academe. The final chapter notes that the early promise of psychical research has not been fulfilled; despite its rigour, and while, today, projects occasionally throw up provocative results, it is still not considered a legitimate undertaking by mainstream science.

Unfortunately Raia’s treatment, though erudite, is marred by dense prose which makes for a stiff read. It fails to give due credit to Edmund Gurney’s contributions to the SPR’s research efforts (which were more significant than Lang’s), and completely ignores Trevor Hamilton’s dissection of Myers’s thought in Immortal Longings (2009), despite Myers’s centrality to her analysis. She also agrees with the unreliable hatchet-wielding Trevor Hall that Crookes and Cook had an affair when this is speculation. Like the Templeton Foundation, the modern SPR is, it is claimed, attempting to import religious questions into scientific frameworks, which ignores the latter’s “no corporate views” policy and for which no evidence is produced.

Despite these reservations, The New Prometheans is a useful contribution to our understanding of the SPR, and anyone with some prior knowledge who wants to know more about early psychical research, and the complexities of the dynamic intellectual context that characterised its heroic period, will be able to appreciate just how groundbreaking its pioneers were. As Raia concludes, “psychical research put universal questions to nature on behalf of humanity”, and the ambition is surely worthy of respect, whatever one concludes about the achievements.

★★★★