Victorian psychical research (SPR)

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A conference met in London on 6 January 1882, convened by the physicist William Barrett, to consider whether a single body might take in hand a class of reports that the learned societies left untouched. Six weeks later, on 20 February 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was constituted. Its charge was to examine, by organized inquiry, phenomena that orthodox science declined to entertain: telepathy, apparitions, mesmeric trance, and the physical performances of the séance room. The founding objects, set out the following year, named the posture that would define the enterprise — to approach these problems “without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.” The wording is exact and was meant to be. It commits the inquirer in advance neither to belief nor to refusal, and so sets the society apart at once from the spiritualist movement, which already knew its answer, and from the scientific establishment, which did not care to put the question.

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy and the society’s first president. — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A society of the establishment

The founders were not fringe enthusiasts but figures near the center of late- Victorian intellectual life. Henry Sidgwick, Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge, served as first president, and his standing was itself a credential: a man of his exactitude would not lend his name to credulity. Around him gathered Barrett, who had called the meetings; the classicist and poet F. W. H. Myers; Edmund Gurney, whose patient labor would carry the society’s first great work; Frank Podmore, the most skeptical of the inner circle and later the movement’s keenest internal critic; and Eleanor Sidgwick — a mathematician who had helped Lord Rayleigh refine the measurement of electrical resistance, later principal of Newnham College, and who became one of the society’s most unsparing investigators before serving as its president for 1908–09. The presidency would pass through a roster that no marginal body could have assembled: the American philosopher and psychologist William James, president in 1894–95; the chemist and discoverer of thallium William Crookes; the physicists Oliver Lodge and Lord Rayleigh; and the statesman Arthur Balfour, prime minister and Eleanor Sidgwick’s brother.

Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (1845–1936), mathematician, principal of Newnham College, and one of the society’s leading investigators; president for 1908–09. — James Jebusa Shannon (1889), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The recruitment expresses its moment. Spiritualism had been advertising experimental proof of survival since the Hydesville rappings of 1848, and by the 1880s its lecture circuits, its journals, and its séance rooms had made the afterlife a matter of weekly demonstration. The natural sciences, meanwhile, were dissolving the older guarantees of religious assurance, leaving an educated class that could neither return to the catechism nor accept that the question of survival was closed. Into that gap the society proposed a third way: to treat the contested ground not as dogma and not as superstition but as a question of evidence, to be settled — if it could be settled — the way other obscure questions had been. The society organized its work under six committees: one on thought-transference, one on mesmerism and clairvoyance, one on the “sensitives” of Reichenbach’s school, one on apparitions and hauntings, one on the physical phenomena of mediums, and one charged simply with collecting and collating the testimony.

Much of the field’s lasting vocabulary was minted in these first years. The word telepathy — from the Greek tēle, “far,” and patheia, “feeling” — is Myers’s coinage from the society’s opening year, paired in his usage with “telaesthesia,” which did not survive; he introduced it to displace the narrower “thought-reading” and “thought-transference” and to cover impressions received at a distance without the recognized senses. “Supernormal” and “veridical” are his as well. The naming mattered: it gathered a scatter of older and non-equivalent things — the wraith of folklore, the mesmerist’s “community of sensation,” the Highland second sight, the dying who appear to the distant — under a single term that sounded like the name of a force rather than a portent.

The record cuts both ways

What distinguishes the society from the movements that flanked it is that its own findings refused to settle into a verdict. The work cut, repeatedly and by design, in both directions.

The first monument was Phantasms of the Living (1886), the two volumes of Gurney, Myers, and Podmore, written chiefly by Gurney. It assembled more than seven hundred reports of “crisis apparitions” — a person seen, heard, or sensed by someone far off at the very hour of his death or extremity — and argued from the sheer improbability of so many coincidences that chance could not account for them; the cause it proposed was telepathy between the dying and the living. To test that improbability the society then mounted, in the early 1890s, a mass Census of Hallucinations, canvassing some seventeen thousand people on whether they had ever, while waking and in health, seen or heard something that was not there. The report, drawn up largely by Eleanor Sidgwick and published in 1894, isolated within the affirmative answers a residue of well-attested apparitions coinciding with a death, and judged that residue far too large to be the work of accident. The reasoning was statistical, and in pressing the calculus of probability onto reports of the uncanny the society’s investigators were doing something genuinely novel in the methodology of evidence.

Against these collections stand the society’s exposures, which it pursued with equal rigor and rather more relish. In December 1885 its committee published a report on the marvels surrounding Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, the Mahatma letters that materialized through a shrine at Adyar and the messages said to arrive from hidden masters. Sidgwick had sent the young Richard Hodgson, a former pupil, to India to gather testimony and examine handwriting; Hodgson concluded that the phenomena were a system of fraud worked by Blavatsky with her housekeeper, Madame Coulomb, and others. The committee’s published verdict was blunt to the point of cruelty: Blavatsky was, it held, “one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.” (The judgment did not destroy Theosophy, which flourished regardless, and in 1986 the society itself printed Vernon Harrison’s reappraisal disputing Hodgson’s handwriting case — a late reminder that the society held no finding immune from its own revision.) A decade after the Hodgson report, the society’s Cambridge sittings of 1895 caught the celebrated Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino in plain trickery: she had freed a hand from her controllers by the old substitution device, sliding one watcher’s hand onto the other’s so that the two held each other while she worked.

The medium Eusapia Palladino apparently levitating a table at the Milan sittings of 1892, with the investigator Alexander Aksakof controlling at right — the kind of physical mediumship the society examined and repeatedly contested. — Unknown photographer (1892), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Yet the Palladino case is also where the society’s even-handedness shows its hardest edge. When three of its most experienced investigators — Everard Feilding, W. W. Baggally, and Hereward Carrington, each a student of conjuring with a reputation for unmasking mediums — sat with Palladino again at the Hotel Victoria in Naples in 1908, eleven sittings produced movements, touches, and displacements they could not, by their own account, explain away. Their long and meticulous “Report on a Series of Sittings with Eusapia Palladino” filled pages 309 to 569 of the society’s Proceedings for 1909 and remains among the most closely argued documents the field has produced. Its conclusion was carefully conditional — that genuine effects occurred when fraud was controlled — and Palladino was caught cheating again in America the following year. The society printed the report without endorsing it, because it held no corporate opinions to endorse with. The point bears stating plainly: by its own constitution, membership of the society implied no acceptance of any particular explanation of the phenomena, nor any belief in forces beyond those physical science already recognized. The body could publish a vindication and a debunking in the same decade and stand behind neither.

Myers and the subliminal self

F. W. H. Myers (1843–1901), classicist, poet, and founder, who coined “telepathy” and framed the theory of the subliminal self. — William Clarke Wontner (exhibited 1896), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

If the society had a culminating theory it was Myers’s, and it arrived after his death. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), gathered and seen through the press by Hodgson and Alice Johnson, drew the whole program into a single non-reductive framework. Its load-bearing idea was the “subliminal self”: beneath the ordinary waking consciousness Myers posited a vast submerged stratum of personality, the source at once of genius and of hysteria, of the hypnotic state and the automatism of the medium — and, he argued, the channel through which telepathy, apparitions, and perhaps survival itself operated. The conception runs parallel to, and partly anticipates, the depth-psychologies that were taking shape on the Continent; William James, who borrowed from Myers and gave him his due, treated the subliminal as one of the period’s genuinely original psychological ideas. It was the society’s most ambitious attempt to make a single coherent science out of the materials it had spent two decades collecting — to give the disparate reports a home in a theory of the mind rather than a theory of the spirit world.

A creature of the crisis of faith

The enterprise belongs to the Victorian crisis of faith as plainly as anything in the period. Within Sidgwick’s circle above all, the motive was personal and exact: men and women who could no longer believe on authority, and who would not pretend to, set out to learn by evidence whether the human personality outlasts the body — the one question that authority had always answered and that the new sciences seemed about to foreclose. The society’s distinctive temper, neither the spiritualist’s certainty nor the materialist’s dismissal, is the temper of people who took the question seriously enough to risk a real answer in either direction. Its work sat alongside, and overlapped with, the popular religion of spiritualism and the older science of mesmerism from which much of its vocabulary descended, yet it remained methodologically opposed to both: where the séance sought communion, the society sought corroboration.

It was also the first of a lineage. Across the Channel the physiologist Charles Richet would name a parallel discipline, métapsychique, in his 1905 address to the very society in London — a continental counterpart that leaned harder toward the physical mediumship and ectoplasm the British body treated more warily. Across the Atlantic the laboratory turn of J. B. Rhine would recode the society’s telepathy as “extra-sensory perception” and submit it to card-guessing statistics, just as the séance-room marvels of physical mediumship would be re-described as psychokinesis, the mind’s claimed action on matter. The society’s own Proceedings — the Hodgson report, the Census, the Feilding sittings — became the archive that every later inquiry, friendly or hostile, had to reckon with.

The textual record

The society’s primary archive is unusually open. Its Proceedings and Journal from the 1880s onward, the volumes that hold nearly every result described here, are largely in the public domain and are gathered, with the rest of the early psychical-research corpus, by the IAPSOP digital library. The society maintains its own encyclopedic reference, the Psi Encyclopedia, which prints the founding history and the texts of the early reports, and its 1883 Statement of Aims and Objectives remains the cleanest single source for the society’s self-understanding. The two flagship books — Phantasms of the Living (1886) and Myers’s Human Personality (1903) — are fully out of copyright and widely scanned.

The scholarly literature on the society is now substantial and largely agreed on its frame. Alan Gauld’s The Founders of Psychical Research (1968) is the standard internal history of the Sidgwick group; Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World (Cambridge, 1985) set the enterprise within the wider Victorian intellectual settlement of science and religion. Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford, 2002) made the load-bearing argument that “telepathy” is a datable Victorian construction rather than a perennial faculty, and Egil Asprem’s The Problem of Disenchantment (Brill, 2014) reads the society’s program as a serious attempt to extend, rather than abandon, naturalistic method into contested territory — what he calls open-ended naturalism. Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters (2006) carries the narrative of James and the Sidgwicks to a general readership. Each treats the society not as a curiosity but as a real episode in the history of how evidence about the mind came to be weighed.

What the society established was less any verdict than a method: that a claim about the mind be put to evidence, recorded with its conditions and its failures, and neither affirmed nor dismissed in advance. The vocabulary it coined — telepathy, the census of hallucinations, the controlled sitting — entered experimental psychology and stayed there, carried well past the séance room that first provoked it.

→ Related: Henry Sidgwick · Eleanor Sidgwick · Eusapia Palladino · Everard Feilding · Hereward Carrington · Theosophy · F W H Myers · Edmund Gurney · Frank Podmore · W W Baggally · William James · Telepathy · Spiritualism · Theosophical Society · Helena Blavatsky · Continental Metapsychique · Charles Richet · William Crookes · J B Rhine · Mesmerism · Psychokinesis · Telekinesis Psychokinesis Pk · Near Death Experience