Enchanted Cambridge

While modern popular science still often relies on traditional claims of the inherent incompatibility of science and ‘magic’, current history of science scholarship has shown remarkably fluid boundaries between elite science and the ‘occult’. No location in Britain, and perhaps the whole Western hemisphere, is more apt to challenge popular standard notions of the alleged disenchantment of science than Cambridge.

For instance, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution the famous natural philosopher and mathematician John Dee, a student at St. John’s and early fellow of Trinity College, conducted alchemical and astrological studies, and explored techniques for the communication with angelic beings.

At the end of the seventeenth century, early members of the Royal Society such as Ralph Cudworth at Emmanuel College and Henry More at Christ compiled natural histories of witchcraft, apparitions and poltergeist phenomena. With the support of Robert Boyle and other fellow Royal Society members, Henry More edited and substantially supplemented the still famous outcome of these endeavours, Joseph Glanvill’s posthumous Saducismus Triumphatus.

Later, Isaac Newton’s celebrated achievements in cosmology and physics formed an inseparable part of his sustained and systematic studies of apocalyptic prophecies, alchemy and other occult questions.

After proponents of ‘rational’ Christianity ridiculed and pathologized reports of ‘supernatural’ phenomena during the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century saw a renewed scientific preoccupation with magic in the wake of large-scale movements such as mesmerism and spiritualism. Cambridge’s most famous son after Newton, Charles Darwin, had only a fleeting interest in the investigation of spiritualist mediums while ‘the other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace, converted to spiritualism. In 1882 the philosopher and educational reformer Henry Sidgwick at Trinity College became the founding president of the first substantial scientific body dedicated to the study of thought-transference, clairvoyance, haunted houses, mediumship and other problems that had become intellectually outlawed during the Enlightenment.

Though formally based in London, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was very much a Cambridge affair. Under the auspices of Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor (the mathematician, former assistant and co-author of Lord Rayleigh, second Principal of Newnham College and sister of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour), the SPR attracted many formidable representatives of the physical and human sciences from Britain and abroad, some of whom became future presidents of the Society.

Some of Henry Sidgwick’s pupils at Trinity and St. John’s – such as the philosophical writer Edmund Gurney, the classicist Frederic W. H. Myers, and the Australian-born student of law and philosophy Richard Hodgson – became the most active researchers within the early SPR. Investigating hypnotism, automatisms and a wide range of psychological questions related to mesmerism and spiritualism, the ‘Sidgwick group’ represented British psychologists at the first four International Congresses of Experimental Psychology and considerably informed the ideas of the ‘fathers’ of the modern psychological profession in the USA (William James, a future SPR President and close friend of Gurney, Myers and Hodgson) and Switzerland (Théodore Flournoy).

In the twentieth century, Cambridge continued to spearhead British elite universities employing scientists and philosophers with a serious interest in unorthodox problems. For example, the physics Nobel Laureate John William Strutt (the 3rd Baron Rayleigh) at Trinity College was intensely interested in mediumship and became president of the SPR in 1919. Strutt was followed in 1953-1955 by astrophysicist F. J. M. Stratton, Director of Solar Physics Observatory and President of Gonville and Caius College, who was particularly keen on investigating reported poltergeist phenomena.

In 1906, a Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research (CUSPR) was founded, which consolidated local interest in the active investigation of alleged occult phenomena by students and scientists. Maintaining close links to the London SPR, the CUSPR  became dormant at around the turn of the century, but is apparently still formally in existence.

While Trinity College established the Perrott-Warrick Fund after receiving bequests in 1937 and 1956 for the purpose of supporting psychical research, Cambridge notables continuing to advocate research in extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis were the renowned Trinity philosopher Charles D. Broad, the Corpus Christi Fellow and Reader in Educational Psychology, Robert H. Thouless (who, together with the Austrian physiologist Berthold P. Wiesner, suggested the label ‘psi phenomena’ for parapsychological effects), and Donald J. West, a Fellow of Darwin College, professor of Clinical Criminology and director of the Institute of Criminology.

In the mid-twentieth century, a Cambridge resident not formally affiliated with the University, the anthropologist Eric J. Dingwall, rose to prominence within the SPR. Shortly before emigrating to Canada in 1970, George Owen of Trinity College, a lecturer in genetics and mathematics, investigated the Cambridge adolescent Matthew Manning (Britain’s ‘teenage Uri Geller’).

Towards the end of the twentieth century, Cambridge-trained biologist and Fellow of Clare College, Rupert Sheldrake, became known for his experiments in human-animal telepathy and is now the foremost popularizer of parapsychological research in Britain. Apart from Sheldrake, Trinity Fellow and physics Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson at Cavendish Laboratory is perhaps the most scientifically eminent British advocate of research into extra-sensory perception today.

While anthropologists at the Scott Polar Research Institute organize the ‘Magic Circle’ (a seminar series featuring discussions on the anthropology of magic), college libraries and Cambridge University Library hold a number of unique archival collections, which are indispensable for those studying the history of the relationship between science and magic. The most important collections for historians working on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are the Sidgwick and Myers papers at Wren Library, and the SPR archives at CUL.

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