History of science and magic: Sommer excerpt #6

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: Atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach once famously suggested that the Christian dogma stating man was created in God’s image had to be inverted, as it was actually the other way around. There’s obviously much to be said for this argument. But as we have seen, it’s also in the nature of man to create eminent fellow mortals in his own image, through the magic of the historian’s pen.

This is most safely done when the revered person in question is dead and can’t object. That such transformations can occur even when the idol in question is still alive, I already suggested through the example of Gustav T. Fechner’s failed attempts to rectify false claims about his skepticism regarding parapsychological phenomena.

  Robert Boyle            

There are of course other cases, including that of Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society. When Boyle was still alive, someone circulated rumors asserting he had finally seen the errors of his ways and no longer believed in poltergeist phenomena. Like Fechner centuries after him, Boyle publicly set the record straight and emphasized his views had not changed, but without effect.

1848 saw the birth of modern spiritualism, but also the publication of  a new history of the Royal Society. Written by its secretary, it briefly addressed investigations of ‘things that go bump in the night’ by the Society’s founding members, but adjusted the historical record to recreate them in the image of nineteenth-century scientists:

It was a labor well worthy the men who met avowedly for the investigation and development of truth, to inquire into these superstitions, and patiently and dispassionately to prosecute such experiments as should tend to eradicate them. It would indeed be difficult to over-estimate the great benefit that accrued to society by their destruction, and a lasting debt of gratitude is due to the Royal Society, for having been so essential an instrument in dispelling such fatal errors.

As we have seen earlier, this is pretty much the exact opposite of what had actually happened: Boyle and other early members who did investigate the phenomena came out in favor of their reality, and the few outspoken critics within the Society empathically did not proceed “patiently and dispassionately”, but responded just like non-scientific outside critics: with little more than scoffs. Still, as Boyle scholar Michael Hunter observed, this falsification of basic historical facts survived into the next major history of the Royal Society published in 1944, and continued to inform the ‘naturalistic’ self-image of modern scientists.

The nineteenth century was the first time in history when scientists made efforts of becoming celebrities, a status which was often cultivated and exploited to influence public opinion. One such science celebrity in Germany was du Bois-Reymond, who also appropriated history for his own secularizing ends. In one of his legendary public lectures, he proclaimed, rather falsely:

In the place of miracle, natural science put law. Like fading from the light of dawn, spirits and ghosts faded away from her. She broke the reign of old sacred lie. She extinguished the witches’ and heretics’ burning stakes. She put the blade into the hand of historical criticism.

14 years later, du Bois-Reymond’s friend Huxley replaced his coinage ‘agnosticism’ with ‘scientific naturalism’ at the end of a historical reconstruction of the evolution of modern naturalistic thought. The first proponents of scientific naturalism, Huxley asserted, were not the materialists of the French Enlightenment, but the humanists of the Renaissance. But instead of singling out a Renaissance man of science for special praise, Huxley’s focus was on the great philologist and early biblical critic Erasmus.

Huxley’s selection made good sense in the context of his ‘naturalistic’ agenda, as he could hardly afford to admit the fact that practically every leading man of Renaissance science embraced beliefs in occult principles and phenomena, ranging from astrology to clairvoyance and what was now called telepathy. And as historians of early modern science accept today, it was these occult Renaissance philosophies which would inspire and shape the experimental philosophy of the man widely regarded as the very ‘father’ of modern science, Francis Bacon.

Naturally, evidence-free historical narratives would also underpin anti- parapsychology polemics by early university psychologists. In 1892, for example, Wilhelm Wundt launched an attack on the SPR in England, two German psychological societies emulating the SPR’s work, and French scientists (he explicitly targeted Richet and fellow psychologist Pierre Janet) who had published experimental evidence for telepathy. Recycling tropes from his public assault on spiritualism in 1879, Wundt claimed that telepathy would indicate the existence of a world in which natural law would be “turned on its head”, one which was separate from “the world of a Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, of a Leibniz and Kant”, and he concluded this ‘scientific’ critique by terming psychical research an endeavor he thought was “pathological through and through”.

The year of the coinage of the German term Parapsychologie (by philosopher- psychologist Max Dessoir) saw the attack on psychical research by another eminent experimental psychologist using history in his defense of ‘science’ and ‘reason’. Hugo Münsterberg, a pupil of Wundt’s, scolded psychical researchers for failing to realize that telepathy was quite obviously “impossible”, arguing that a serious consideration of telepathy would be just as anachronistic as a renewed scientific interest in alchemy.

After William James employed Münsterberg to run his laboratory of experimental psychology at Harvard from 1892, the German psychologist only ramped up his polemical crusade. Using tricks which might put the stereotypical fraudulent medium to shame, he would virtually sabotage James’s efforts to establish critical but open-minded psychical research as a branch of experimental psychology.

One of James’s and Münsterberg’s successors at Harvard was the psychologist and historian Edwin Boring. An opponent of continuing attempts to establish parapsychology at American universities, in 1950 Boring still briefly acknowledged Gurney’s and Myers’s work in his classic History of Experimental Psychology. But he situated psychical research “just at the periphery” of the discipline, and neglected to mention the fact that William James, whom Boring considered the ‘father’ of psychology, considered Gurney and Myers his closest scientific allies. 

Later, in a preface for a book by a debunker of experimental parapsychology, Boring selectively quoted James, with the purpose of portraying him as being at best agnostic regarding the existence of psychic phenomena: Insisting that it was “quite clear that interest in parapsychology has been maintained by faith. People want to believe in an occult something”, Boring praised “James’s own suspended judgement on psychic research”.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.