Miracles denied and ignored: Sommer excerpt #3

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: So where did all this ‘atheism’ and opposition to belief in paranormal phenomena come from, which troubled Boyle and several fellow men of science so much? The consensus of professional historians of science today is once again completely at odds with popular standard narratives here. In Boyle’s day, the Enlightenment default derision of all things ‘paranormal’, which also increasingly came to characterize religious texts, was first popularized not by men of science, but by Protestant divines and anti-clerical though not strictly atheistic ‘free-thinkers’, who typically gathered not in scientific societies but at court and in fashionable coffee-houses.

Moreover, free-thinkers in England were often followers of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who – unlike Newton – made no secret of his mortalist theology. This – as well as the fact that he was a vocal philosophical critic of conventional scientific experimentalism – was enough to make Hobbes a persona non grata in the Royal Society. Here it’s important to point out that allegations of ‘atheism’ were hurled freely at anyone with unorthodox theological convictions, and it can be doubted if Hobbes really denied the existence of God. It was Hobbes’s expressed Christian materialism, which inevitably provoked accusations of ‘atheism’ by the intellectual and scientific mainstream of the time. But while Newton would in secret only reject belief in evil spirits (he was fine with angels), the Christian materialism of Hobbes was far more thoroughgoing. This is especially evident in the many attacks on belief in immaterial spirits and magic in Hobbes’s famous Leviathan. And as we will see in a moment, it is hardly accidental that the rejection of spirits and magic occurred so prominently in what is now considered a classical text in political philosophy.

The key lesson of all this is another insight fundamentally at odds with popular views: In striking contrast to modern ‘free-thinkers’ since the late nineteenth century, early Enlightenment scoffers at magic did not claim science as the ultimate cudgel in their war on belief in the occult. On the contrary, early modern English opponents of magic in fact often followed Hobbes in holding the collective scientific experimentalism of the Royal Society in contempt. To assume that the new science championed by Boyle and colleagues – and here I mean perfectly conventional experimental sciences, including chemistry and physics – instantly gained prestige would again mean to write history backwards. In fact, those who began to laugh magic and spirits out of intellectual discourse also often mocked the new scientific experimentalism of the Royal Society as a trivial, eccentric fad, unworthy of men of culture and common sense.

Whereas science historian Michael Hunter, the leading expert on Boyle and the Royal Society, has reconstructed in painstaking detail the actual means by which the ‘empirical occult’ was suppressed in Enlightenment Britain, other historians have presented similar findings for countries including France, Germany and Italy. The professional consensus regarding the role of science for the supposed ‘disenchantment’ of the world throughout the Enlightenment was nicely captured in a seminal study of the marginalization of the anomalous by the former director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a colleague at Harvard, who observed:

it was neither rationality nor science nor even secularization that buried the wondrous for European elites. Enlightenment savants did not embark on anything like a thorough program to test empirically the strange facts collected so assiduously by their seventeenth-century predecessors or to offer natural explanations for them [...] Leading Enlightenment intellectuals did not so much debunk marvels as ignore them [...] On metaphysical, aesthetic, and political grounds, they excluded wonders from the realm of the possible, the seemly, and the safe.

Emanuel Swedenborg    

The case of the most famous spirit-seer of the Enlightenment, Emanuel Swedenborg, offers a good illustration of rejections of the occult on such non-scientific grounds. Swedenborg’s greatest critic in Germany was philosopher Immanuel Kant, a devout believer in the immortality of the soul. On the one hand, Kant was certainly impressed by reports from reputable witnesses who claimed that Swedenborg – who, incidentally, was a leading man of Scandinavian science and a Fellow of the Royal Society – had demonstrated clairvoyance and the ability to communicate with the dead. But this didn’t keep him from ridiculing Swedenborg by comparing spirit visions with brain flatulence, before declaring him mad. Apparently the only major representative of Enlightenment science to openly criticize Swedenborg was the great English chemist, Joseph Priestley. But despite Priestley’s eminence as a natural philosopher, his ‘critique’ was no more scientific than Kant’s. Unlike Kant, Priestley was completely uninterested in testimony for Swedenborg’s supposed extra-sensory and mediumistic capacities, and he declared spirit visions null and void for explicitly theological reasons: Priestley, who was a lay preacher as much as man of science, was yet another devout Christian mortalist who used the Bible rather than science to ‘prove’ that immaterial souls and spirits did not exist.

Skeptics will of course object and say there were at least two instances in which the ‘paranormal’ was successfully refuted during the Enlightenment by perfectly rational means. One of the standard texts in the arsenal of modern Skeptics, after all, is the essay “Of Miracles” by Scottish philosopher and critic of religion, David Hume. In a nutshell, Hume argued that specific reports of ‘miracles’ can and always should be dismissed in favor of ‘natural’ general explanations, such as fraud, errors of perception, love of wonder, and of course religious dogmatism as the prime motivating force behind pitfalls of human testimony regarding the ‘miraculous’. Perhaps most crucially, Hume argued that the better-substantiated reports of ‘miracles’ (he mentioned levitations and dead men coming back to life as examples) were so rare and exceptional that the alleged effects would constitute violations of natural law, and therefore should be rejected along with purely anecdotal claims.

Interestingly, Hume’s arguments were practically ignored by contemporary fellow anti-occultism crusaders, and his essay only began achieving some popularity about a century after his death, when it was cited in battles against spiritualism and other large- scale occult movements. What’s more, it would be wrong to assume it was only spiritualists or religious types who fundamentally disagreed with Hume. ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas H. Huxley, for example, certainly shared Hume’s antipathies with orthodox Christianity and heretical occult beliefs and dismissed contemporary evidence for paranormal phenomena (some of which, as we shall see, was published by scientific friends of his). Still, as we shall see below, Huxley especially rejected Hume’s interpretation of hypothetical levitations as self-evident violations of natural law, and part 2 of this essay will address other problems with Hume’s arguments.

For now, let’s say the examples of Bacon’s explicitly theological prohibition of ‘survival research’, and Boyle’s fears of devils preventing him to follow a strictly experimental route to a spirit world, more than indicate that Hume’s claim that reports of ‘paranormal’ phenomena have only been motivated by religious beliefs is questionable at best. But he probably knew this fairly well himself. For example, as an instance of seemingly well-attested ‘miracles’ reported to occur in the present, Hume referred to marvels associated with a group called the ‘French prophets’. These were followers of a widely revered heretical priest, at whose tomb in Paris a broad range of paranormal phenomena were observed – marvellous cures, clairvoyance, automatic writing and speaking, spirit visions, and so on. When physicians began documenting the efficacy of healings supposedly worked by the ‘prophets’, this was a serious problem not just for devout anti-clerics, but also for the Church: The prophets were members of a religious sect, so the Church could impossibly embrace them as legitimate Christian miracles, and therefore officially declared them false. British historian of Enlightenment science and medicine, Roy Porter, spelled out the dilemma:

if for reasons of its own, the Catholic Church saw fit to discredit ‘miracles’ which happened in the here-and-now, on its own doorstep and before people’s very eyes, how could any other ‘miracle’ in the Christian canon be sustained?

Porter also reminds us that the Church’s contradictory stance on ‘miracles’ was water on the mills of French atheist-materialist critics of the ‘paranormal’ like Denis Diderot, and anti-clerical Deists (who believed in God but rejected miracles) like the great Voltaire. And as we shall see, the debate over the French prophets is just one of countless examples where the ‘empirical occult’ was declared a mortal enemy by two powerful and mutually opposed camps: orthodox religion on the one end, and anti- clerical thinkers on the other.

Still, as Hume’s familiarity with the case already suggests, news of the French prophets spread across the channel, and soon enough they garnered a following in England and Scotland. Isaac Newton considered these reports with interest, and one of his closest and most promising students, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, even became their leading spokesman in England. Hardly surprisingly, de Duillier’s public support of these brazen heretics quickly resulted in the ruin of his scientific career and social standing, after his support of the prophets led to legal persecution and had him end up on the pillory.

Apart from Hume’s essay on miracles, another episode routinely cited by Skeptics as a victory of Enlightenment science over the ‘paranormal’ was the famous refutation of mesmerism or ‘animal magnetism’ by a French Royal Commission, which included the pioneer of electricity, Benjamin Franklin, and the eminent chemist Antoine Lavoisier. The commission’s goal was to test claims by the physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who professed to have discovered an all-pervading physical imponderable or vital fluid. Health and disease, Mesmer argued, were a matter of balance and distribution of this ‘animal magnetism’ in the human organism. A prominent technique employed by Mesmer and his pupils to restore such balance were magnetic ‘passes’ – up- and downward movements of the hands, usually a few inches away from the patient’s body, which were often reported to put patients in a state of trance and occasionally induced convulsions.

The Franklin commission set out to test these claims by conducting experiments on people who did not know whether they received actual or sham mesmeric treatment. In their report to the King, the commission did not doubt that patients did indeed occasionally get better. Crucial, however, was the finding that they not only responded to actual mesmeric interventions, but also when treatments were absent or only pretended. Instead of assuming the existence of a ‘magnetic fluid’ as claimed by Mesmer, any healing success was therefore explained in terms of effects of the ‘imagination’. Modern medics usually read ‘imagination’ as the equivalent of what has been called the ‘placebo effect’ since about the 1950s: genuine healing caused not by medicine, but by a patient’s beliefs and expectations.

Today, physicians typically decry Mesmer as a self-deluded charlatan, not least because of the popular image of mesmerism as a ‘paranormal’ belief system. But while it is true that many other practitioners of mesmerism certainly claimed the occurrence of properly parapsychological phenomena in the therapeutic setting – telepathy, clairvoyance, and not least spirit visions – Mesmer himself was actively hostile to all these things. As a child of the Enlightenment and its worship of cold reason, he also considered the induction of trance states and convulsions in mesmeric patients not as a welcome part of the treatment, but a rather regrettable side effect. And to be fair, even if we grant that the story of mesmerism can be reduced to a history of the placebo effect, it should be acknowledged that it often worked. Not to be outdone, mesmeric practice was also far less invasive and dangerous than treatments offered by contemporary mainstream medicine, which still prominently relied on blood-letting, purging, and other highly questionable blanket interventions. With a perspective on concrete historical contexts, it should also be acknowledged that Mesmer’s concepts were not actually that outlandish or even new, as they followed in the tradition of perfectly mainstream Renaissance natural philosophy.

Moreover, Mesmer himself became known as a ‘scientific’ opponent of supernaturalism, when he was appointed by the Bavarian government to debunked the German exorcist Johann Gassner in 1775. Mesmer did not doubt that Gassner’s exorcisms often worked. But in his view, the ailments in Gassner’s patients were not caused by evil spirits but organic imbalances, which the priest unwittingly restored through unconscious use of his unusually strong ‘magnetic’ powers. Mesmerism may be considered a ‘pseudoscience’ today by the medical mainstream, but Mesmer’s ‘explanation’ was still good enough for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences to appoint him a member in reward for his services in the battle against ‘superstition’, and it also informed Emperor Joseph II’s decision to prohibit exorcisms for the German empire.

We shall come back to squarely political motifs of Enlightenment crusades in a second. But there’s evidence that the downfall of Mesmer was also connected to a major course of worry of political elites in France, for the plain fact that mesmerist societies were often havens for revolutionaries working to upend the reign of the King.

There seems to be a widespread assumption today that the ‘scientific community’ instantly and overwhelmingly accepted the report of the Franklin commission as the ultimate verdict on the question of mesmerism. But as far as its practice by physicians is concerned, it certainly continued almost unabated, despite occasionally being prohibited by law. And this continuity included its ‘paranormal’ guises, which Mesmer himself had so thoroughly despised. Telepathic rapports between mesmerists and patients, and clairvoyant and spirit visions of entranced patients, continued to be anecdotally reported en masse not only by the scientific and medical laity all over continental Europe and, somewhat belated, in Britain and the United States, throughout the remainder of the eighteenth and the whole nineteenth century.

According to chronologists of modern ‘enlightened’ hypnotherapy, the irreversible death of mesmerism occurred at the hands not of the Franklin commission, but of Scottish physician James Braid in the early 1840s, when Braid experimentally demonstrated its medical powers lay not in a quasi-physical ‘animal magnetism’, but in the psychological principle of hypnotic suggestion. Like practitioners of mesmerism before him, Braid put his patients into a trance state, during which he claimed to painlessly extract teeth, cure paralysis, and restore sight and hearing. When Braid coined the term ‘hypnotism’, it was also important for him to stress that he never observed any paranormal phenomena in his medical practice. This was certainly wise to state, as one of his most vocal critics had accused him of being in league with the devil, which was in fact the topic of Braid’s very first publication concerning hypnosis. How far British science and medicine still was from embracing ‘scientific materialism’ is further illustrated by the fact that Braid himself was no materialist let alone an atheist – far from it: In 1852 he would sternly admonish a historian of magic for claiming there was no such thing as the devil and demons.

In the same year, Michael Faraday, perhaps the greatest British physicist of the nineteenth century, applied Braid’s psychological principles to explain ‘table-tilting’, a practice associated with spiritualism. Slight table movements, Faraday was able to show in a series of brilliant experiments, were not caused by ‘supernatural’ powers, but by unconscious muscular motions of the sitters. This episode in particular has been interpreted as yet another supposed victory of secular Skeptical science over paranormal superstitions. Never mind that Faraday, a devout member of a heretical Christian sect, revealed in a letter the squarely theological worries which had moved him to intervene: the new craze, Faraday suspected, was the work of “unclean spirits” let lose by Satan to delude man at the end of times, as predicted in the Bible.

Later, Faraday justified his conscious decision not to investigate widely reported phenomena which were inexplicable by unconscious muscular action – most notably levitating tables – by stating such reports were clearly ridiculous: levitations, Faraday proclaimed, were impossible because they obviously violated the law of the conservation of force. There is some irony in the fact that one of the most detailed and angry critiques of this argument by Faraday came from a man who was widely suspected to be an atheist, the London mathematician August De Morgan. Whatever his religious beliefs, De Morgan was no friend of dogmatism in any form, as he was one of the first major intellectuals to confess that he was fully convinced of the reality of certain phenomena of spiritualism, while doubting they were caused by disembodied spirits.

When Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace formulated modern evolutionary theory, Faraday’s refusal to comment on this game-changing event was probably also owing to his biblical commitments. Darwin’s own antipathies to spiritualism and the occult are well known and have been taken to represent the attitude to these things by the Victorian ‘scientific community’. But Darwin’s ally Wallace of all people became an enthusiastic convert to spiritualist faith, and he would later even argue that spirits were actively involved in the process of human evolution. It’s not far-fetched to assume it was because of Wallace’s highly unorthodox views, and his rather fervent proselytizing for spiritualism, that we associate only Darwin’s name with modern evolutionary theory today. And as we shall see in Part 2 of this essay, unfortunately Wallace was not always critical in his investigations, and we shouldn’t simply adopt his belief in survival on the grounds of his eminence as a biological scientist.

Wallace wrote that his first encounters with the paranormal took place during mesmeric experiments he conducted as a young man, which convinced him of the reality of clairvoyance. This was in the decade of Braid’s inauguration of medical hypnotism, which, however, British scientific and medical communities at large either completely ignored, ridiculed, or lumped in with mesmerism and spiritualism, Faraday and a few others being notable exceptions. It was only in the 1870s that hypnotism began to gain momentum not so much as a medical treatment, but as an experimental tool for the exploration of the human mind. This time, however, the man whose name became prominently associated with hypnotism was not a devout Christian like Braid, but a fierce atheist: the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot in Paris.

Charcot consciously blended public spectacle and medical demonstration in his legendary hypnotic performances at the Salpêtrière, a hospital which predominantly housed mentally ill female patients. Using hysterical girls and women as little more than dummies to demonstrate the stupendous powers of the hypnotist over the weak and sick mind, Charcot induced and released trance states, catalepsies, and seizures in his patients at will. Particular stress was laid by Charcot and his peers on the ease with which states resembling demonic possession and mystical ecstasy could be induced. This hammered home Charcot’s principal message: The whole history of religious experience was to be reduced to hysteria and mental disease .

 

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.