Transcending embodied mind: Sommer excerpt #8

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: One of the major upshots of the secularization of modern sciences by professionalization since the 1800s is what historian of neuroscience Fernando Vidal has called ‘brainhood’ – the popular standard view of modern neuroscientists claiming that anything worthwhile saying about humanity can be said by studying the brain. According to this view – parodied by cartoonist Scott Adams with the image of the ‘moist robot’ – our minds and personalities cease to exist with the death of our bodies. As the aforementioned examples of Christian materialists Hobbes and Priestley, and the German ‘scientific materialists’ of the nineteenth century already suggested, the idea ‘mind equals brain’ has long predated modern neuroscience. And as a growing body of sophisticated studies in the history of neurosciences have shown (which, I hardly need to stress, are not usually read by scientists), the fledgling brain sciences of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would become major platforms for political battles driving the ‘soul’ out of scientific discourse. In practical terms, rather than constituting the undisputable result of modern brain sciences, ideas of ‘brainhood’ were on the contrary a significant motivating factor in their very formation. Unsurprisingly, any competing ideas, data and theories, which have always existed as well, fell to the wayside – again not so much for coercively scientific and empirical reasons, but on overtly political and ideological grounds.

One of the most striking psychophysical anomalies reported by physicians since antiquity but ignored by brain researchers from about the mid-nineteenth century until recent years, is called ‘terminal’ or ‘paradoxical lucidity’. These are well-documented cases of a sudden and often full restoration of personality in cognitively impaired, mentally ill or disabled patients, whose loss of cognitive functions has been assumed to be permanent, shortly before death. The anomaly lies in the fact that ‘terminal lucidity’ is reported to occur even in victims of severe neural decay or brain damage following accidents, hydrocephalus, meningitis, dementia, hemispherectomy, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, abscesses, tumors, and so on.

In a typical case, a patient who was in a prolonged state of profound dementia and confusion would spontaneously come to, recognize and communicate with their family and friends in a clear and coherent manner, and appear to be in a state of heightened mood and vitality – only to die within hours or days after the puzzling recovery. Cases of such anomalous recoveries just before death are now again reported in the biomedical mainstream literature and are acknowledged to pose serious difficulties for reductionistic understandings of brain-mind relationships.

As pointed out by authors like nineteenth-century philosopher Carl du Prel and the modern rediscoverer of ‘terminal lucidity’, biologist Michael Nahm, these cases occasionally are reported to come with other anomalies, e.g. patients having visions of deceased loved ones or displaying extra-sensory perception. But even without properly ‘paranormal’ features, cases of terminal lucidity belong to a growing class of anomalies which are threatening to explode practically all models reducing the mind to the brain. If our understanding of mind-brain relationships is at least basically accurate, ‘terminal lucidity’ simply should not occur.

2021 book cited for this paragraph

The same applies to classical NDEs occurring during states like cardiac arrests and deep general anesthesia – including cases in which patients have reported ‘veridical’ perceptions, i.e. often highly specific events taking place while they ‘flatlined’. Cases involving veridical components are occasionally published even in the medical mainstream literature, and in my view there are now too many well-corroborated veridical cases on record to be dismissed as anecdotes. But even if we categorically ignored veridical cases, NDEs often occur during states in which, according to recognized criteria of modern brain sciences, neocortical functions required for any form of coherent conscious experience are abolished

Since 2012, neuroscientists have struggled to make sense of neuroimaging studies which demonstrate another fundamental anomaly. We already noted well-established therapeutic effects of NDE-type mystical states produced by psychedelic drugs. Brain scans made during these experiences have shown that the intensity of these mystical experiences dramatically correlates with a deactivation of all neural regions held to be responsible for conscious experience. These findings have caused quite a stir in the neuroscientific community as they show the opposite of what should happen: conscious experience is normally associated with activation of the neural network in question. Almost a decade later, it seems there is still no conventional solution for this puzzle in sight.

Granted, discussions of these findings are ongoing, and they do not provide strong, direct evidence for personal survival by themselves. But apart from considerably weakening the evidence-base for all models with hold that consciousness inevitably dies with the brain, models which do account for these anomalies, and which also provide a conceptual framework allowing us to integrate these findings with more positive evidence for survival, have existed since the late 1800s.

So let’s turn to such more direct evidence, and begin with indications suggesting that at least some of the aforementioned ‘bereavement hallucinations’, deathbed visions, and encounters with the departed during NDEs are not hallucinations in the ordinary meaning of the word. 

 

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.

The medical mainstream: Sommer excerpt #7

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: You probably noted that I still haven’t made anything like a strong statement about the reality of parapsychological phenomena. But as it should be evident by now, one major obstacle for many people to even look at the evidence has long been removed by perfectly mainstream history of science and medicine scholarship: The standard belief that ‘scientific naturalism’ – the categorical exclusion of ‘paranormal’ explanations from science, and indeed academic discourse at large – is the inevitable, cumulative and irreversible result of impartial scientific research over the past centuries, is not supported by evidence. Quite on the contrary: perhaps shockingly, ‘naturalism’ turns out to be little more than a gentleman’s agreement, one that has been shaped by theological as much as by properly secular concerns.   

Our Judge might of course still object even before we get to the empirical evidence, and say: Fine, Skeptics and their orthodox religious forerunners shouldn’t have twisted historical facts to suit their ends. But their battle against paranormal beliefs is still praiseworthy and noble. After all, it’s undeniable that such beliefs have always disastrous consequences: Jihad suicide bombers commit unspeakable atrocities for rewards in the afterlife. In Africa and other parts of the world, people accused of witchcraft continue to be tortured and murdered. Even here in the West, people still sometimes die in the course of exorcisms. Then there’s the undeniable emotional and economic damage caused by charlatans making a profession out of preying on the bereaved and other vulnerable people.

Similar arguments were of course common throughout history. In fact, Wilhelm Wundt advanced such concerns in his 1879 attack on spiritualism, where he explicitly stated that evidence for paranormal phenomena simply didn’t matter. Wundt thought it would be irresponsible to admit them even if they were real: “The moral barbarism produced in its time by the belief in witchcraft”, Wundt wrote, “would have been precisely the same, if there had been real witches,” and he added: “We can therefore leave the question entirely alone, whether or not you have ground to believe in the spiritualistic phenomena”.

Nobody in their right mind will deny that uncritical belief in the paranormal has caused disasters and will continue to do so. In fact, my own journey into the strange world of survival research as a teenager back in Germany began with such a tragedy: My surrogate family fell apart as a result of my closest friend’s mother’s growing obsession with the Ouija board, leading to divorce and grief which continues up to the present day. For me, this was a painful experience, and it’s probably easy to image it would bias me against rather than in favor of belief in the paranormal. But I have also witnessed how friends and acquaintances became better people – kinder, more responsible, and more resilient to the hardships of life – after adopting certain paranormal or spiritual beliefs which I myself find rather odd and do not share. 

And here I have to confess I don’t quite buy it when Skeptical activists claim they are primarily motivated by feelings of social responsibility. After all, it would never occur to Skeptics associations to try and debunk nuclear physics because of Hiroshima and Chernobyl; or destroy the automobile industry because of hundreds of thousands of traffic accident fatalities; or attack mainstream medicine and pharmaceutical corporations because of tens of thousands of patients dying of medical misconduct and side-effects of drugs every year. What’s missing here is a basic appreciation of symmetry regarding evident functions of paranormal beliefs. And the need for symmetry as a basic methodological tool in the assessment of the empirical evidence should start becoming clear once we face certain drastic changes in recent mainstream medicine in approaches to survival-related experiences (as I have argued in a recent contribution to a volume published in the Oxford Cultural Psychiatry series).

For example, since the early 1970s there has been growing medical attention to so- called ‘hallucinations of widowhood’ or ‘bereavement hallucinations’, medical terms for encounters of the bereaved with deceased spouses and loved ones. These ‘hallucinations’ are now recognized to be remarkably widespread, with a conservative estimate of at least 40% of the bereaved experiencing them. They range from a vivid sense of presence to tactile, auditory and visual impressions, which can be indistinguishable from encounters with actual people. These ‘hallucinations’ are reported by persons with no other indications of mental illness, and they can be transitory but can occur over years. ‘Ghostly’ encounters experiences by the bereaved are not usually perceived as scary or disturbing, and physicians do not consider them pathological or even therapeutically undesirable. On the contrary: whatever their ultimate explanation, it is recognized that these ‘hallucinations’ often provide the bereaved with much-needed strength to carry on.

A related body of clinical data concerns so-called ‘end-of-life experiences’ including ‘deathbed visions’, i.e., comforting other-worldly visions reported by dying patients. The first mainstream psychiatrist to call systematic attention to often emotionally striking visions of dead relatives and friends by terminally ill patients was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer of the modern hospice movement. Like ‘hallucinations of widowhood’, these visions, which seem to differ markedly from drug- and dementia- induced hallucinations, are also reported to have overwhelmingly constructive effects, and are recognized to be of significant help for the dying and sometimes bystanders (including family and medical personnel) to come to terms with the fear of death.

Kübler-Ross was also one of the first psychiatrists to write about ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs), which have been reported by survivors of cardiac arrests and other close brushes with death. Certain NDE elements have become part of popular culture – impressions of leaving the body, passing through a barrier or tunnel, encounters with deceased relatives and friends, a light representing unconditional love, a sudden insight of the interconnectedness of all beings, and so on. The public discourse over NDEs is typically polarized by claims that scientists who study NDEs have either proven life after death or debunked them through ‘natural’ explanations. But once you get past the clickbait, it again turns out there exists a wealth of rigorous research published in biomedical mainstream journals which suggests something strange is going on indeed. Medical authors usually steer clear of discussions of paranormal effects often reported by NDE survivors, but yet again even the ‘naturalistic’ clinical consensus is that NDEs have often strikingly constructive after-effects and can even be transformative.

While no two NDEs are identical, they can often occasion lasting and significant personality changes. Regardless of survivors’ previous religious convictions or lack thereof, they usually ‘come back’ with the unshakable conviction that personal consciousness persists after bodily death. Other long-term effects of NDEs are striking increases in empathy, altruistic engagement and environmental responsibility, as well as significantly reduced consumerism and competitiveness. Considering that NDEs are overwhelmingly characterized as a state of bliss, perhaps the most counter-intuitive finding is that those having them are not prone to commit suicide. In fact, studies have suggested that suicide survivors reporting NDEs typically don’t repeat attempts to end their lives, and claim their NDEs as a reason to categorically rule out suicide in the future.

Interestingly, full-blown NDEs can occur in situations other than near death, such as in states of deep meditation. Practically each of its elements have also been described throughout history by people (including – you guessed it – modern scientists) reporting to be overcome by ‘mystical’ ecstasy and related states. The mainstream biomedical literature has also shown NDE-style experiences to occur in psychedelically induced mystical states, using substances such as psilocybin (‘magic mushrooms’) and N, N- Dimethyltryptamine (DMT, naturally occurring in the ayahuasca plant). Clinical trials have demonstrated that these induced ‘other-worldly’ experiences often cause similar personality changes as NDEs, most notably a loss of fear of death, and a newfound courage to face the struggle of life. For these reasons, psychedelic therapies have become serious contenders in the treatment even of severe conditions, including alcohol- and drug-addictions, and treatment-resistant depressions and post-traumatic stress disorder.

There is great irony in the fact that experiences and states of mind which mainstream medics now induce for therapeutic purposes have been demonized and aggressively pathologized throughout the history of Western science and medicine. The fact that today’s medicine is far more discerning in its diagnoses of patients reporting ‘weird’ experiences, and has even begun to exploit apparently striking therapeutic benefits of certain mental states and experiences which were systematically suppressed throughout the last four centuries, might justify a rather delicate question: Can clinicians afford historical illiteracy?

After all, it seems the ‘naturalistic’ self-image of modern scientists and clinicians has been informed – or rather, fundamentally misinformed – by certain historical myths and evidence-free assumptions. Modern axiomatically ‘naturalistic’ sensibilities have had a considerable limiting impact not only on scientific and medical research, but also on clinical practice. And while it remains important to keep exaggerated and uncritical beliefs in the ‘paranormal’ in check to avoid tragedies, I think it is high time to finally look at the other side of the coin, and wonder how much concrete damage has been caused by centuries of stigmatization, mis-diagnoses and mis- or overmedication of people reporting ‘paranormal’ experiences.

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.

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.

 

 

 

Psychical research: Sommer excerpt #5

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: Hermann Helmholtz was the teacher of several famous physicists including Heinrich Hertz and Max Planck, but he also trained the founder of experimental psychology – the science of the ‘soul’ (a literal English translation of psyche) – in Germany, Wilhelm Wundt. Some psychologists still debate the question whether the ‘father’ of their profession was Wundt in 1879, or William James at Harvard a few years earlier. More important for our purpose is a check of how the maximally opposed attitudes to the ‘paranormal’ by the founders of modern academic psychology have been portrayed in histories of the discipline.

Since histories of psychology are still often written not by trained historians, but by psychologists invested in promoting the ‘naturalistic’ public image of psychology, it may not be very surprising that Wundt’s rejection of the ‘empirical occult’ has been adopted without question. Occasionally, even professional historians have praised him as a hero of modern science vanquishing self-evident paranormal charlatanry. Reviews of the scholarship on William James, on the other hand, found that his life-long involvement in parapsychological research had either been downplayed or passed over by most scholars until about the late 1980s.

 

While James’s advocacy of psychical research will become evident enough during the remainder of this essay, it’s probably no overstatement to say that Wundt consciously cultivated a deep hatred of all things ‘occult’. In fact, Wundt had practically inaugurated the birth of his institute for experimental psychology in 1879 with a polemical attack in the same year on fellow Leipzig scientists who investigated the hotly debated American medium Henry Slade. Spearheaded by astrophysicist Karl F. Zöllner (a friend of William Crookes in England), these investigators included the man Wundt himself would later call “the founder of experimental psychology”, the widely revered physicist and philosopher Gustav T. Fechner.

Later, Wundt literally rewrote history when he portrayed Fechner as being overwhelmingly skeptical of paranormal phenomena, by selectively quoting from the dead man’s diary. The full diary would only be published in 2004, but relevant passages, which shone a rather different light on Fechner’s actual attitudes than Wundt’s selections, were printed in a German psychical research journal as early as 1888. In his tribute to his teacher, Wundt also briefly mentioned correspondence with Fechner in response to Wundt’s 1879 attack on spiritualism, but did not reveal its contents. Little wonder, as Fechner’s letters included a detailed critique of Wundt’s arguments and misrepresentations of the experiments. Wundt also swept Fechner’s attempts to publicly set the record straight under the carpet, concerning misrepresentations of parapsychological research in general and Fechner’s views in particular. These included a book by Fechner on these topics and his public protest to made-up skeptical statements attributed to him in an interview with the secretary of the Seybert Commission for the ‘investigation’ of spiritualism at the University of Pennsylvania. However, Fechner’s interventions had practically no effect and psychologists have essentially ignored these contexts up to the present day.

The cultural and political climate in which Fechner and colleagues had conducted their parapsychological investigations was of course still hardly conducive to a calm, dispassionate reception of their findings by fellow intellectuals. After all, with Wundt’s foundation of German experimental psychology, they took place toward the end of yet another political key event, which would only reinforce the ‘naturalistic’ foundations of modern university sciences during their infancy: The so-called Kulturkampf (‘war for culture’), waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church in Germany throughout the 1870s. The crisis reached a peak in 1876 in Marpingen, a small village in Baden, where three eight-year-old peasant girls claimed to see apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Soon, crowds of pilgrims began flocking to Marpingen, where the ‘Virgin’ began making dangerous political statements. Hardly surprisingly, the result was a brutal crackdown on the child visionaries and their followers by the police, and this and similar events only served to polarize debates about the supposed pathology of visions and other supposed revelations from the beyond, which were lumped in with spiritualism.

Declared opponents of spiritualism and its calm, dispassionate investigation also included a growing number of philosophical materialists, most notably the founders of Communism including Karl Marx – who, incidentally, explicitly refused to base their ‘dialectical materialism’ on science. One of Marx’s few scientific friends in England was the zoologist and self-appointed secular Great Inquisitor of the paranormal, Ray Lankester. A patron saint of the modern Skeptics movement, Lankester is often credited for having exposed the medium Henry Slade as an evident impostor before he was investigated by Zöllner and Fechner.

Let’s assume for the sake of brevity that Lankester really did catch Slade red- handed in the act of fraudulently producing ‘spirit writings’ as often claimed. What matters for our present purpose is not to obtain certainty whether Slade – a professional medium who charged hefty fees for his seances – was the real deal or nothing but a fraud (thankfully, we don’t have to rely on his case). What should be acknowledged is that Slade wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting a fair hearing, no matter the concrete evidence either way. In fact, when Lankester famously sued Slade for fraud in England, the court proceedings show that the rule of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ was not observed. For example, there were eminent intellectuals on the defense for Slade, and while Lankester certainly made a strong case, he did not prove fraud beyond reasonable doubt. Still, Slade didn’t just get a slap on the wrist, but was sentenced with the maximum penalty of three months prison with hard labor.

Henry Sidgwick        

Among Slade’s defenders were not just devout spiritualists like the biologist Alfred R. Wallace, but another major Victorian intellectual, Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick. A doubter of survival and the physical phenomena of spiritualism, Sidgwick was widely admired for his skepticism in the proper meaning of the word – doubt or suspended judgement informed by active and calm consideration of all sides of an argument. A tireless promoter of women’s rights, Sidgwick became a reformer of British secular education after resigning his Fellowship at Trinity College at Cambridge University in the late 1860s because of religious doubts. Fellows were required to pay only lip-service to Anglican dogmas including belief in the biblical miracles, but having lost his faith, Sidgwick felt it was his duty to resign from his highly prestigious and well- paid position. Impressed by his integrity, supporters at Trinity would eventually create a lectureship for Sidgwick, which came without any theological stipulations. Later, Sidgwick occasionally worked with Huxley and other agnostics to achieve the admission of students by universities regardless of their religious faith.

In 1882, Sidgwick became the first president of the SPR after its foundation by Tyndall’s former assistant, William Barrett. Early members included (apart from the already-mentioned) J. J. Thomson and another future physics Nobel laureates, Lord Rayleigh, as well as dozens of now less famous members of the Royal Society, and even one of Helmholtz’s famous students, Heinrich Hertz in Germany. However, the wider context spelled out below makes it easy to understand why Hertz would remain the only famous professional German scientist among the early members, and why, as Hertz had emphasized to his friend Oliver Lodge, he would categorically refuse to conduct parapsychological investigations himself.

Contrary to the often-claimed ‘disenchantment’ of the modern world, there has been a clear continuity of serious interest in the paranormal by British scientific elites wide into the twentieth century. And as I have tried to show, even though physicists like Crookes, Barrett and Lodge were among the most active investigators, the strongest and most conscious efforts by early SPR members to contribute to scientific knowledge was not in the realm of physics, but to the fledgling science of experimental psychology. Apart from Sidgwick and his wife, the mathematician Eleanor M. Sidgwick, by far the most industrious early workers in this regard were two close friends and former students of Sidgwick’s, Edmund Gurney and Frederic W. H. Myers.

A nephew of the man who coined the term ‘scientist’ (William Whewell), Myers is known for also having invented a famous word, which, however, most scientists today may utter in a tone of enlightened contempt at best: telepathy. Myers’s Wikipedia page shows perhaps a little too clearly that whatever is at stake for modern Skeptics, concern for historical evidence is not it. The entry is an almost exhaustive list of ‘scientific’ critiques and rumors spread about Myers, along with several false claims and misrepresentations of his work, all with the evident purpose of making him appear like a hapless victim of an obsessive ‘will to believe’. The entry also mentions but immediately downplays the fact that Myers’s theory of the ‘subliminal self’ (of which more in Part 2) influenced Théodore Flournoy, the founder of Swiss experimental psychology, and Wundt’s competitor in ongoing claims of having ‘fathered’ the psychology as whole, William James.

What’s missing, however, is the acknowledgement that Myers – along with the Sidgwicks and other SPR figures – practically represented British psychologists at the early International Congresses of Psychology, the main platform on which the methods of fledgling experimental psychology were negotiated, from its first session in 1889 until Myers’s death in 1901. And while it is true that several ‘enlightened’ psychologists either ignored or actively denounced Myers, both Gurney and Myers became James’s closest collaborators in experimental psychology. They corresponded frequently, James replicated some of their experiments in automatic writing and hypnosis, and cited these studies in his Principles of Psychology and other canonical texts. Not least, between 1889 and 1897, James would collaborate with Myers and the Sidgwicks on an international survey of ‘telepathic hallucinations’, which we will discuss with other evidence in Part 2.

And as far as such ‘enlightened’ critics of Myers and psychical research go, of the early university psychologists who aggressively battled his and James’s unorthodox science, not a single one was a materialist. On the contrary, major early university psychologists, such as Wundt in Germany and G. Stanley Hall in the US, routinely asserted that spiritualism and its open-minded investigation posed a fundamental threat to “true religion”.

 

But let me complicate things even further: While empirical approaches to occult phenomena prior to the nineteenth century have been rather consistently motivated by religious apologetics indeed, Victorian psychical research was by no means the exclusive domain of religious or even spiritual folk.

Myers’s and James’s principal collaborator in France, for example, was the future Nobel prize winner in physiology, Charles Richet. After inspiring Charcot’s interest in hypnosis, Richet would later be a major force behind the foundation of the International Congresses of Psychology. But far from being a spiritualist, Richet – the doyen of French psychical research from the 1870s to his death in 1935 – shared Charcot’s ‘medical materialism’. Although he held survival researchers like Myers and Oliver Lodge in high esteem and would somewhat soften his stance late in life, Richet was convinced that the mind would die together with the brain, and therefore rejected the survival hypothesis throughout his long career. It is true that Richet published volumes of empirical evidence for the occurrence of a wide range of paranormal phenomena, and he even claimed the coinage of ‘ectoplasm’ – the word for the weird substance out of which spirits are claimed to materialize in seances. But his work was explicitly atheoretical, and he considered the marvels of whose reality he convinced himself not as evidence for a spirit realm, but as fundamental scientific anomalies with unique potential to expand human understanding of the physical world.

The historical novelty of this strictly positivist approach, which investigated and accepted parapsychological phenomena as facts of nature but programmatically rejected spiritualist interpretations, can hardly be exaggerated. Especially in continental Europe, this non- and often anti-spiritualist approach was shared by other pioneering psychical researchers, and would characterize the work of practically all leading continental investigators in the twentieth century. These would also include Marie and Pierre Curie, who were rather uninterested in evidence for personal survival, but more than intrigued particularly by the physical phenomena produced by spiritualist mediums.

Einstein rejected off-hand spiritualist beliefs together with evidence for the physical marvels which interested J. J. Thomson, Lord Rayleigh and the Curies so much, but occasionally participated in tests of clairvoyance and telepathy. Though he usually avoided taking a stance in public, the archival evidence suggests that Einstein was more than just interested in certain psychic phenomena, and once he even wrote the preface to an experimental study of telepathy – in which he urged scientific psychologists in particular to pay open-minded attention to psychic phenomena.

Einstein never joined the SPR, but two of the most iconic modern psychologists – Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung – did. Jung’s parapsychological interests and convictions are well known, but despite his belief in psychic phenomena he did not adopt the ‘spirit hypothesis’. This was the subject of an article by Jung in the SPR Proceedings, which he concluded by stating “I am personally convinced of the reality of such facts, but I cannot accept them as evidence for the independent reality of spirits”.

 

Freud, who had studied hypnosis under Charcot, is known for his own promotion of ‘medical materialism’, and his epoch-making work was significantly motivated by a similar wish to reduce religion to pathology. Still, Freud would also become a believer in telepathy, which he almost certainly interpreted not as a spiritual phenomenon, but within the prevailing positivist and physicalist frameworks of continental European parapsychology. However, he was far more hesitant than Jung to put his convictions on public record. A letter by Freud to his disciple Ernest Jones, who was worried that Freud’s paranormal belief may jeopardize the ‘scientific’ image of psychoanalysis, speaks volumes:

 

When anyone adduces my fall into sin, just answer him calmly that conversion to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking and many other things, and that the theme of telepathy is in essence alien to psychoanalysis.

 

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.

Politics of the "soul": Sommer excerpt #4

And here we need to stress one absolutely crucial dimension of our story, which both Skeptics and historians of parapsychology have almost consistently ignored: the rather explosive significance of the ‘soul’ as a political object, and heated debates over its nature which more than just shaped the very curricula of modern sciences.

Most fundamentally and consistently, this played into the rather justified concern over the unholy alliance of altar and throne. A central argument by both religious and areligious critics of Catholicism not just since the Reformation was that the Church, supported by monarchs and aristocrats appointed by the Pope, consciously exploited human fears of hell for the purpose of maintaining absolute power. Such fears, it has been alleged throughout the centuries, were kept alive by stories of demonic possession, poltergeist infestations and ghostly visions of souls of the damned, and the assurance that relief could only come from Catholic priests performing exorcisms and reading masses.

And here we begin to understand the prominent place of attacks on ‘paranormal’ belief in Hobbes’s aforementioned political treatise Leviathan, first published in 1651. A much more prominent move to deny the existence of spiritual beings apart from God, as in the examples of Hobbes, Newton (who, however, still believed in angels) and Priestley, was to deny not the existence of spirits, but merely the possibility of their manifestation in the physical world. This view was consistent with mainstream Protestantism and (officially) held by major Enlightenment thinkers including John Locke, Leibniz, and to some degree, Kant. Also in the eighteenth century, it was properly atheistic materialists predominantly in France, including Diderot and La Mettrie, who fought alongside Deists like Voltaire to wage a war on any form of ‘paranormal’ belief, with the declared political goal to end talk of souls, hell, and devils once and for all.

It was these fierce debates over souls, prophecies, visions and ‘magic’ which also lay at the root of wars of religion, riots and bloody revolts, such as Cromwell’s overthrow of the monarchy in England before the restoration of the throne (and foundation of the Royal Society) in 1660, and the French Revolution in the 1780s and 90s in particular. Unsurprisingly, these never-ending religio-political upheavals were prominent topics in the correspondence and often at least alluded to in published writings of virtually every Enlightenment intellectual. And as Charcot’s appropriation of hypnosis for overtly secularizing purposes during renewed anti-Catholic revolts in Third Republic France indicates, this ‘Enlightenment crusade’ (to use Roy Porter’s term) continued until far into the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Perhaps the most relevant cultural transformation following similar events, however, occurred in Germany – a major cradle of modern experimental university sciences.

When debates over materialism divided German scientific and medical communities after a group of political radical physiologists declared that “Thoughts stand in about the same relationship to the brain as bile to the liver and urine to the kidneys”, these self-styled ‘scientific materialists’ were attacked not just by religious scientists. Among their most vocal critics in Germany were the famous physicist Herman Helmholtz and his friend, the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond. These men, who would become two of the most influential scientists and science popularizers internationally, were themselves deeply anti-clerical. And their critiques of the ‘scientific materialists’ notwithstanding, they certainly also contributed to modern notions of materialism being the default worldview of science.

Ernst Brücke

Throughout their long careers, both men worked relentlessly to implant a methodological reductionism in the fledgling life-sciences in Germany and beyond. This had been their professed goal since their student days, when they formed a circle of friends including other now famous physiologists, Ernst Brücke (Sigmund Freud’s teacher) and Carl Ludwig. Together, as put by du Bois-Reymond in a letter in 1842, these young men “conspired to assert the truth that there are no forces at work in the organism other than the common physical-chemical ones”.

Again, it would be writing history backwards if we simply assumed that this ‘truth’ was already scientifically established in 1842 (the beginning, by the way, of one of several political German revolutions against the Church). In fact, it’s not particularly controversial to state that the jury is still out even from the perspective of today’s mainstream biophysics. On the contrary, the reference to “common physical-chemical” forces already implies that ‘animal magnetism’ and related notions of a vitalistic ‘life force’ were to be categorically excluded from the men’s empiricism, which they indeed dismissed without any investigation whatsoever. Interestingly, this was demonstrably not the case in British elite physics, where such concepts – along with parapsychological phenomena, which Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond also categorically rejected – continued to be seriously considered at least until the early 1900s.

Still, and contra the ‘scientific materialists’, Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond absolutely refused to claim that science had solved the mystery of the relationship of mind and brain. Instead, and despite their own life-long anti-Catholic political commitments, they actively popularized a programmatic agnosticism: Science, they argued, never has and never will be able to say anything definite about the ultimate nature of the mind. This agnosticism was famously expressed in one of the most influential mottos of German science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which would also stake the permitted limits of scientific enquiry for decades to come: du Bois-Reymond’s verdict ignoramus et ignorabimus (Latin for “we do not know, and we will not know”).

Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond were friends with prominent scientists in Britain including Thomas H. Huxley and the physicist John Tyndall, who pursued the same secularizing goals as their German allies: to transform the sciences from an activity of leisurely, wealthy gentlemen to stable, paid professions protected from theological influence and censorship. We already noted Huxley’s critique of Hume, and his dislike of the new word ‘scientist’. As for neologisms, Huxley himself was the inventor of an important modern word which I just used: agnosticism. Huxley had originally coined the term in 1869, not so much to profess ignorance regarding the nature of mind-brain relationships, but of the existence of God. And unlike his German friends, Huxley famously did argue for the complete dependence of the mind on the brain.

Still, as philosophers are well aware, mind-brain epiphenomenalism is not the same as ontological materialism: Assuming matter, including the brain, turns out to be completely reducible to a mental substance or process, it does not necessarily follow that our individual minds persist after the brain dies. Despite his epiphenomenalism, Huxley was therefore still a vocal critic of ontological materialism, and while Huxley and Tyndall have often been called ‘materialists’, they both in fact subscribed to metaphysical positions much more closely akin to ‘pantheism’ – the belief in nature’s all-pervadedness by an impersonal divine spirit or force.

But as far as spiritualism and paranormal phenomena were concerned, Huxley, Tyndall and other members of the growing network of popularizers of ‘scientific naturalism’ were just as programmatically hostile as their German allies Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond. To illustrate this, let’s briefly return to Huxley’s critique of Hume’s assertion that even well-substantiated reports of ‘paranormal’ phenomena should be dismissed because the claimed effects would constitute transgressions of natural law (which, as you may have noted, closely resembles Faraday’s later claim concerning the impossibility of levitating tables). In reply, Huxley wrote:

If a piece of lead were to remain suspended of itself, in the air, the occurrence would be a “miracle”, in the sense of a wonderful event, indeed; but no one trained in the methods of science would imagine that any law of nature was really violated thereby. He would simply set to work to investigate the conditions under which so highly unexpected an occurrence took place; and thereby enlarge his experience and modify his, hitherto, unduly narrow conception of the laws of nature.

In practice, however, things looked a little different. When Huxley’s friend Alfred Russel Wallace invited him in 1869 to join a committee for the scientific investigation of reported marvels of spiritualism, which quite frequently involved levitating objects, Huxley replied: “Supposing the phenomena to be genuine – they do not interest me”. Still, both Huxley and Tyndall did occasionally attend seances. But as the unveiled sarcasm especially in Huxley’s private correspondence, and the bitingly polemical tone of both men’s ‘reports’ (published in popular papers) indicates, they did so with the evident goal to debunk rather than seriously investigate mediums.

Besides the ‘other Darwin’, A. R. Wallace, additional eminent scientific friends of Tyndall and Huxley came out in favor of the reality of spiritualist phenomena. The most prominent among those apart from Wallace was William Crookes, the discoverer of the element thallium and a pioneer in the study of radioactivity. Another eminent British parapsychological investigator was a former assistant and co-worker of Tyndall’s, physicist William Barrett. After failed attempts to mobilize scientific interest in parapsychological investigations through lectures to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and elsewhere, in 1882 Barrett became one of the founders of the aforementioned Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

When he was appointed president of the SPR in 1904, Barrett mentioned in his presidential address a meeting with Hermann Helmholtz during a visit in Britain in the late 1800s. When the conversation turned to the topic of telepathy, Barrett claimed, Helmholtz told him that neither “the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses”, would make him “believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation”, as this was “clearly impossible”.

We should be weary to accept Barrett’s verbatim quote from a decades-old conversation as a historical document. But his characterization of Helmholtz as an influential critic of the paranormal who was absolutely uninterested in empirical evidence is certainly consistent not just with Helmholtz’s goal to liberate science from theological tyranny through the professionalization and polarization of ‘naturalistic’ science, but expressed in statements Helmholtz made first-hand, for example in his correspondence with du Bois-Reymond. It’s also no coincidence that Helmholtz was one of the main proponents of a physical law which is still cited by Skeptics as a supposed knock-down proof of the physical impossibility of any paranormal phenomenon: the principle of the conversation of energy. Helmholtz himself explicitly stated that his formulation of the law – which was immediately translated into English by Tyndall – had been motivated by his intent to demonstrate the implausibility of the concept of the sou and vitalist notions of a life-force.

 

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.

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.