Science and parapsychology: Sommer excerpt #2

Andreas Sommer writes: One of the first histories of parapsychological research I read was by John Beloff, a widely respected British psychologist and advocate of impartial research on the paranormal. Beloff was also instrumental in establishing the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh, following a bequest by author and social critic Arthur Koestler. I highly recommend Beloff’s sketch of the little-known history of parapsychology at universities other than Edinburgh throughout the twentieth century, which he wrote from the well-informed perspective of an insider.

But I doubt Beloff did his efforts of bringing parapsychology into the scientific mainstream any favors when he set the stage with a reference to the Scientific Revolution beginning in the sixteenth century. It was then, he wrote, that modern standard notions of “a sharp distinction between normal and paranormal, between science and pseudoscience, reality and magic” began to crystalize, and it was in the “aftermath of this revolution” that these supposedly fixed boundaries have “ever since divided parapsychology from conventional science”.

To be fair to Beloff, he did draw on writings by professional historians of science. However, most of his sources were already outdated by several decades at the time he wrote his book. Other works not considered, such as a now classical eight-volume survey by science historian Lynn Thorndike, had already documented the significance of the ‘occult’ in the early history of experimental science by the late 1950s.  Since about the 1970s, other mainstream historical works increasingly showed that supposedly fixed boundaries between science and the ‘paranormal’ simply did not exist during the Scientific Revolution. On the contrary, it is now common knowledge that practically all figureheads of the Scientific Revolution held rather strong occult beliefs. Isaac Newton’s alchemy is probably well known today – though not nearly as widely as his studies of apocalyptic prophecies. And next time you meet an astronomer, observe his reaction when you mention that Galileo, Kepler, and in fact all early heliocentrists, were practicing astrologers who didn’t just cast horoscopes for money, but because they seriously believed astrology worked.

The reason why I’m pointing this out is obviously not to imply that we all should believe in astrology because Kepler and Galileo did. It’s simply to illustrate the fact that once certain ingrained cultural myths are being questioned, public opinion can be as impervious to mainstream historical and sociological evidence as it is to heterodox but well-supported empirical findings. And here again it is no accident that modern historical standard narratives, which inform public opinion as well as the self-image of scientists as part of their very training, have relied upon popular myths rather than academic research.

The bible of modern popular science is probably Carl Sagan’s best-selling The Demon-Haunted World, first published in 1995. Sagan, an astronomer on a mission to improve public scientific literacy and critical thinking, was also a co-founder of the modern Skeptics movement. His works are not history books, but he occasionally invoked great scientific names of the past to get his core message across: Scientists are the incarnation of heroic anti-dogmatism and love of truth, and if there was an essential characteristic of science, it was the systematic elimination of personal biases and wishful thinking. From its early beginnings, science was thus defined by a single and universal method, which boiled down to a set of personal virtues vouching for the self-correcting nature of science.

As an illustration, Sagan paraphrased statements to this effect by Francis Bacon, a key figure of the Scientific Revolution in England, who has been called the very ‘father’ of modern science. In 1604, for example, Bacon cautioned that the “root of superstition” lay in the widespread mental habit of men who “observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other”. Sagan called this principle “observational selection”, but psychologists might say that Bacon gave a description of confirmation bias – roughly, the natural but unfortunate tendency of our minds to inflate the significance of perceptions if they confirm our beliefs. And while Sagan admitted that scientists have sometimes sinned against the ‘scientific method’ by being dogmatic and unethical, the take-home message of his writings was that such instances were only insignificant exceptions to the rule: The organizing principle of science has always been, still is, and will ever be, nothing but reason and devotion to truth.

We will see in a moment why his references to Bacon, which served the purpose of making Bacon appear like a modern ‘naturalistic’ scientist, may qualify as unintended evidence for Sagan’s own confirmation bias. In fact, other passages in Bacon’s writings, which clearly out him as a believer in things most scientists would dismiss as ‘superstition’, are pretty hard to miss. And as far as the ‘scientific method’ is concerned, Sagan also failed to address works by professional historians and historically informed philosophers of science who systematically studied the very practice of science, and in result dropped the term ‘the scientific method’ as an accurate description of what science separated from other fields of knowledge.

In 1974, Science journal in fact published an article with the peculiar title “Should the history of science be rated X?”, which seriously entertained the question if the growing consensus in the community of professional historians of science should be censored. After all, the upshot of this work, which the article stated could no longer be doubted, was that the popular image of the scientist did not stand up to scrutiny. History of science scholarship had thoroughly undermined the “professional ideal and public image of scientists as rational, open-minded investigators, proceeding methodically, grounded incontrovertibly in the outcome of controlled experiments, and seeking objectively for the truth, let the chips fall where they may”. The author, a physicist and historian, justified his implicit suggestion to censor the findings of colleagues in the mainstream history of science for pedagogic reasons, arguing that young scientists needed a moral compass and heroes to look up to – even if the heroism of these figures was largely mythical. As candidates for censorship, he further briefly mentioned historical studies revealing occult beliefs in icons of the Scientific Revolution, which, however, he downplayed as supposedly inconclusive.

But the concrete historical evidence for the occult underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution was already too strong to be dismissed, with the paranormal beliefs of Francis Bacon being a point in question. Bacon in fact suggested a wide range of squarely ‘parapsychological’ experiments, to test the effects of ‘fascination’ and ‘imagination’ – contemporary terms for modern concepts including ‘telepathy’ and ‘psychokinesis’. In a statement particularly interesting for survival researchers, Bacon was further open to the belief that

the mind, when it is withdrawn and collected into itself [...] hath some extent and latitude of prenotion, which therefore appeareth most in sleep, in extasies, and near death, and more rarely in waking apprehensions; and is induced and furthered by those abstinences and observances which make the mind most to consist in itself.

Bacon here refers to prophetic glimpses into the future, reported to occur during what we may call ‘altered states of consciousness’ – sleep, trance or ecstasy, meditation, and the process of dying. Elsewhere, Bacon admitted that questions about the nature of the ‘soul’ – including its survival after death – had previously not been investigated in a systematic manner. Possible solutions, Bacon observed, “have been not more laboriously inquired than variously reported; so as the travel therein taken, seemeth to have been rather in a maze than in a way”.

However, instead of conducting such experiments, let alone suggesting concrete areas of research especially concerning survival, Bacon nipped such scientific aspirations firmly in the bud:

But although I am of opinion, that this knowledge may be more really and soundly inquired even in nature than it hath been; yet I hold, that in the end it must be bounded by religion, or else it will be subject to deceit and delusion [...] the true knowledge of the nature and state of the soul, must come by the same inspiration that gave the substance.

In other words: Bacon here explicitly disavows ‘survival research’ – not for scientific, but for squarely theological reasons. In the spirit of his time, he demanded that knowledge about the hereafter must come not by natural but by properly supernatural means: by divine inspiration.

Bacon has been widely portrayed as the first thinker to systematically propose a modern scientific approach to nature, one supposedly unrestricted by religious dogma.

Yet, especially in regard to the question of empirical research concerning survival, we see that this is simply false. Here it’s also important to note that Bacon’s daytime job was not ‘man of science’, but Lord Chancellor and Solicitor General of England. And in his role of a high-ranking politician, Bacon again expressed his religious worries over magic – by formulating bills for the prosecution of witchcraft such as these:

Where a man conjures, or invocates wicked spirits, it is felony.
Where a man doth use or practise any manner of witchcraft, whereby any person shall be killed, wasted, or lamed in his body, it is felony.

Perhaps you are puzzled by Bacon’s prohibition to invocate wicked spirits only. But far from encouraging intercourse with good or divine spirits, early modern intellectuals considered any attempt to contact the spirit world with profound concerns. To be sure, in Bacon’s day you would have been in serious trouble if you denied the existence of immaterial souls. But that may have been nothing compared to the problems you’d gotten yourself into by telling someone you were trying to converse with them. Bacon and fellow intellectuals still subscribed to biblical authority, and scriptural prohibitions of contacting spirits – the story of the witch of Endor in the Old Testament and warnings of evil spirits camouflaging as angels in the New Testament being important examples – still determined the way mainstream scholars like Bacon thought about these things.

Hence, Bacon’s contemporary, the famous Cambridge mathematician John Dee, had every reason not to publicize his ostensible communications with angels, which he claimed to have received through crystal-gazing. When Oxford scholar Méric Casaubon published the records after Dee’s death, he in fact presented them as a case study in illicit magic or necromancy. Issuing a stern warning in the preface, Casaubon asserted that Dee’s accounts of spirits were authentic but “A Work of Darknesse”.

We will see that fears of devils and other theological concerns would often continue to motivate intellectual opposition to the study of ‘occult’ phenomena until at least the nineteenth century. In fact, it would be a grave mistake to assume that attacks on all things smacking of magic by certain prominent modern scientists were necessarily driven by sympathies with ‘scientific materialism’, let alone atheism.

And here it’s worth remembering that the very word ‘scientist’ was only coined in the 1830s, about two decades after Bacon’s death. (Before then, men of science were called ‘natural philosophers’). Many eminent scientific figures – such as physicist Michael Faraday and Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas H. Huxley – rather disliked the term and refused to call themselves so. And while we are accustomed to assume that modern experimental science has always been the domain of universities, by the time of the coinage of ‘scientist’ there were almost no university laboratories for experimental sciences like physics anywhere in the world.

In fact, modern scientific experimentalism as a collective and transparent endeavor – with findings published in professional periodicals for anyone to scrutinize – emerged as an expression of protest against the perceived dogmatism and stagnation of knowledge in the early modern universities. Pathbreaking in this respect was the establishment of private associations like the Royal Society in England in 1660, which was co-founded by a ‘father’ of modern chemistry and physics, Robert Boyle. There was probably no other natural philosopher at the time who did more to put Francis Bacon’s visions for an experimental approach to nature into common intellectual practice than Boyle, a wealthy man with important political connections. And Boyle and the early Royal Society once again show the extent to which the close entanglements between early modern science and the ‘paranormal’ were virtually written out of history.

Like Newton, Boyle was an avid practitioner of alchemy, but in contrast to Newton, he was also a strong advocate of what we now may call psychical research. For example, he supported investigations by other Fellows of the Royal Society – most notably Joseph Glanvill and Henry More – of reported apparitions, poltergeist disturbances, spirit possession and hexing. Boyle also wrote the preface to the English translation of the ‘Devil of Mascon’, a French report about a poltergeist case which had thoroughly impressed him. Not least, Boyle himself investigated the faith healer Valentine Greatrakes and initiated field research on clairvoyance or Second Sight in the Scottish Highlands. And while modern science popularizers in the ‘Skeptical’ tradition of Sagan typically cast the figure of the stereotypical scientist as a timeless debunker of ‘paranormal’ phenomena, the case of Boyle and others shows the opposite at a crucial moment in the history of modern science: Boyle and colleagues at the Royal Society tried not to debunk, but to establish the reality of the ‘paranormal’.

Here we must of course stress that Boyle and colleagues promoted these investigations explicitly as a weapon against ‘atheism’, and that their parapsychological research never became official part of Royal Society business. In fact, some Fellows like Robert Hooke, the astronomer and pioneer of modern microscopy, vocally opposed it. But neither should the Christian apologetic agenda of Boyle and fellow parapsychological researchers in the Royal Society make us assume that early modern skepticism regarding occult phenomena was informed or motivated by science, let alone that atheism or materialism were even remotely popular positions within early modern scientific communities. And if you look for dispassionate methodological dissections of these investigations by critics like Hooke, you will find nothing of the sort. Hooke’s ‘critiques’ were essentially polemical and sarcastic, and therefore hardly more ‘scientific’ than Isaac Newton’s later reported howl of despair over those taking news of a contemporary poltergeist outbreak seriously: “Oh! yee fools ... will you never have any witt, know yee not that all such things are meer cheats and impostures? Fy, fy!”.34

Newton’s own rather strong occult beliefs and practices – the study of alchemy and biblical prophecies – are well known today, and in the case of Hooke it’s also important to note that his skepticism regarding the ‘paranormal’ was rather selective as well. While he rejected the heretical investigations of Boyle and other Fellows offhand, Hooke was still a believer in ‘fascination’ and ‘imagination’ – capacities of embodied minds to act and perceive at a distance. In his ‘Lectures of Light’, for example, Hooke provided a mechanical account of such parapsychological effects.

In the case of Newton’s skepticism regarding poltergeist phenomena, it would be fair to say that he simply had no theological use for reported manifestations of supposedly evil spirits. Newton’s theology belonged to a tradition called ‘mortalism’ – a term for then heretical Christian conceptions of the mind as being essentially dependent on the body. But far from maintaining sympathies for atheism, mortalists like Newton held that the only legitimate notion of immortality was the bodily resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day. According to mortalist theologies in their strict form, mind and body were inseparable and indeed perished together at death, only to be recreated for eternal bliss or damnation in a physical hell or heaven by a supernatural act of God. Newton kept his strong but heretical mortalist faith a secret to avoid trouble, but again, we shouldn’t simply assume his religion was informed by the state of science at the time.

In Boyle’s day and indeed throughout the next two centuries to come, it was still primarily fundamental religious and associated political convictions and worries, which discouraged and practically outlawed parapsychological research perhaps more than anything else. Religion is almost certainly also the reason why Boyle and colleagues never held seances or tried other properly experimental approaches to the spirit world. In fact, for a while Boyle seriously considered taking up John Dee’s technique of crystal-gazing to communicate with spirits, but in the end his scientific curiosity was outweighed by demonological scruples.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?' A winning essay in the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies contest. The paper with notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.