Like its more enduring English counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research included among its members well-known scientists and intellectuals, William James for one. As a member of the society he sponsored a particular medium, a Mrs. Leonara Piper. This was James's problem: Even if there is general agreement that most mediums are frauds most of the time, how is one to arrive at any definite judgement on the existence or non-existence of psychic phenomena? A medium like Mrs. Piper appeared to have knowledge and abilities which she could not have acquired by 'ordinary' means, she submitted to the protocols of investigators, helped sustain good conditions of observation, leaving investigators without evidence of fraud. While this did not keep James from speculating about the ways she might have cheated, after all, scientists like Alfred Russell Wallace would remind him that the correct empiricist stance does not allow such speculation in the absence of proof.
What. moreover, if a medium's sponsor (like Sir William Crooke) vouched for her abilities (producing a photograph of himself dancing with a ghost)? In such cases, the epistemologically possible claim that "of course the medium is cheating, you just failed to catch her" becomes socially impossible: Even if rumor had it that Sir William was sleeping with his medium, the attack on the credibility of the medium would be tantamount to an attack on the credibility of an esteemed gentleman and colleague in psychical research. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence relied very much on the idea of 'gentlemanly science' and mutual trust which also informed, for example, Charles Darwin's fact-collection on variation in animals and plants.
If one wants to catch a medium in the act of fraud, the standards of evidence therefore need to be high. But was it really James's interest primarily to detect fraud and to confirm the empiricist pre-conception that telepathy or the movement of objects by means of psychic powers do not, perhaps cannot exist? As Ignas pointed out, James's very empiricism did not allow for any a priori conception of "real impossibility." Moreover, his interest in psychology generated an interest in psychic phenomena not as "super-natural" events but possibly as naturalistic facts which need to be explored. It may be possible, after all, that ordinary consciousness has learned to ignore and become insensitive to anything that does not lie within its interest. States of trance, states induced by hypnosis, etc., might therefore represent a different kind of consciousness attended by a different sensibility. This would indicate that our traditional list of 'five senses' is incomplete, and James's own research had explored how with the ear is associated not only the sense of hearing but also the sense of balance. So, how can one rule out "psychic phenomena" as resulting possibly from an expanded or altered consciousness of sensibility? Indeed, according to James, to admit this question is the sign of the "true naturalists" who go where inquiry and experience take them and who will also treat religious experience naturalistically, as opposed to the wretched and vile "closet naturalists" who are locked into scientific orthodoxy, reject hypnosis and psychic phenomena, and refer religious experience to metaphysics.
Ignas concluded by asking the most difficult about James: Did his "true naturalism" shade into an anti-naturalist spiritualism, after all? What might lead a "true naturalist" to believe that there is genuine novelty in the universe, i.e., events that are not implicit in earlier states? While there are some passages in James (for example, in an 1891 letter to his dying sister) in which he suggests that metaphysical hypotheses may be grounded in empirical research, there is also this extraordinary response to the unique instance where James was persuaded that he had witnessed a genuinely "paradoxical" phenomenon of an object moved by a spiritual force or simply on its own:
"With this conviction that I saw all there was to see, I have to confess that I am surprised that the
phenomenon affected me emotionally so little. [...] I have only once before seen an object moved
'paradoxically,' and then the conditions were unsatisfactory. But I have supposed that if I could
once see the same thing 'satisfactorily,' the levee by which scientific opinion protects nature
would be cracked for me, and I should be as one watching an incipient overflow of the
Mississippi of the supernatural into the fields of orthodox culture. I find, however, that I look on
nature with unaltered eyes to-day, and that my orthodox habits tend to extrude this would-be
levee-breaker. It forms too much of an exception." (from William James's 1909-note "Physical
Phenomena at a Private Circle" in Essays in Psychical Research, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986, pp. 248-252)
Alfred Nordmann
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