William James and the American Society for Psychical Research, 1884-9

Thanks to a travel grant from the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) I was able to present a paper at this year’s British-North American Joint Meeting of the BSHS, CSHPS, and HSS in Canada. The presentation distilled a small part of a chapter in my forthcoming study on the formation of modern psychology and psychical research. Here is the abstract:

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, 1884-9: A RECONSIDERATION

Abstract: Co-founded in 1884 by William James, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) is commonly referred to as a counterpart of its namesake in Britain, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Questioning standard accounts of the early ASPR as an equivalent of the SPR, this paper reconstructs its formation and activities in juxtaposition to those of the British Society until 1889, when the original ASPR dissolved and became the SPR’s American Branch. I argue that rather than following William James in promoting the radical empirical research programme typical of the SPR in Britain, other ASPR psychologist members – notably G. Stanley Hall, Joseph Jastrow, and George S. Fullerton – successfully policed the boundaries of the fledgling psychological profession from within the ASPR by polemically undermining the work of James and the SPR, whose studies in telepathy and automatisms were then internationally negotiated as legitimate fields of scientific psychology. Paying close attention to the involvement of psychologists and science popularizers in American psychical research, this paper highlights the enormous significance of ‘materialism’ and ‘superstition’ as complementary late-nineteenth century bogeys determining the legitimate research scope of fledgling psychology in the US and beyond.

Historians commonly think of the ASPR as the American equivalent of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Challenging this convention, the main argument of my paper was that some of the more active members of the original ASPR actually refused to investigate alleged psychic phenomena, and practically limited their activities to polemical attacks on the British SPR, thus helping originate the modern standard explanation of unrestrictedly empirical approaches to the contested phenomena by elite scientists such as William James, Oliver Lodge, J. J. Thomson and many others in terms of an intrinsically regressive if not morbid need to believe in magic.

In the context of comparable polemical attacks on elite psychical research by Wilhelm Wundt and other psychologists particularly in Germany, I briefly discussed James’s close collaboration with Frederic W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney at the British SPR, whose studies of psychological automatisms and telepathy James thought was the scientifically most fruitful type of psychological experimentation. When James helped found the ASPR in 1884, he hoped to consolidate a national network of like-minded researchers, but even with eminent (but passive) scientific members such as Asa Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, the project soon turned out to be a failure. Less than five years after its inception there were hardly any active researchers let alone funds, and the Society became the American Branch of the English SPR before it was dissolved and finally revived as an independent organization in the early twentieth century.

A fairly active hardliner within the original ASPR who sought to prevent rather than promote research was the Harvard embryologist Charles Sedwick Minot. When the ASPR was in the process of forming, Minot published an unsigned plug for the new Society in Science magazine, stating his own prospects and expectations:

“Now, spiritualism is an evil in the world, – in America it is a subtle and stupendous evil; a secret and unacknowledged poison in many minds, a confessed disease in others, – a disease which is sometimes more repulsive to the untainted than leprosy. … To those gifted with a clearer intelligence and purer moral sense, there is a moral duty in one aspect of the proposed studies. A hope that psychical research may liberate us from a baneful superstition is a stimulus to inaugurate the work of the American society; yet a scientific man cannot calculate all the after-effects of his labor, but must toil for the truth with blind devotion” (Minot, 1884, pp. 369-70).

Minot’s solemn vow to “toil for the truth with blind devotion” to the contrary, his publications in the ASPR Proceedings and notes in Science magazine were mainly limited to polemical assaults on the English work, while demonstrating that he hadn’t bothered studying the reports he attacked. Also employing ex cathedra pronouncements were hardliners in the ASPR other than Minot, whose verdicts became readily absorbed and promulgated by the press. These were ASPR president and prime American popularizer of Huxleyan scientific naturalism, Simon Newcomb, and perhaps most importantly, psychologists G. Stanley Hall, and Joseph Jastrow, whose rhetoric and polemical strategies were almost indistinguishable from those of Minot. Here is a slide from my presentation with some characteristic quotes by Hall:

I concluded my talk by arguing that the short story of the original ASPR’s foundation (a society with the same name was later founded by the philosopher James H. Hyslop) highlights major historiographical issues in the history of modern ‘naturalistic’ sciences. Studying the role of radical empirical approaches to the occult during the formation of psychology as a modern profession, and trying to understand not only why people have believed but also fervently disbelieved in alleged psychic phenomena, offers fertile opportunities for historians interested in the complexities of science-religion relationships. And the making of modern psychology as a hitherto unexpected site of discovery for continuities of notions reminiscent of early modern natural magic provides plenty of food for thought to rethink ingrained notions of ‘scientific naturalism’.

© Andreas Sommer

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