63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Perfect 10!, September 11, 2006
This review is from: Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Hardcover)
If five stars were not the limit, I'd give this book a more perfect 10!
My first awareness of this fascinating book was an e-mail from a friend who knew of my interest in the paranormal, especially spirit communication. I replied that I had not heard of the book and was not particularly interested in "ghost hunting." By the title of the book and without knowing the subtitle, I had assumed that this book was about modern parapsychologists visiting haunted houses with gadgets designed to detect "ghostly" cold spots and energy fields. I assumed wrong.
When, a few weeks later, I saw the subtitle - "William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death" - I immediately knew the book was about the pioneering psychical research of yesteryear. It is a subject very dear to me. In fact, I have written often on the subject and had recently completed my own book, "The Articulate Dead: Bringing the Spirit World Alive" (due for release by Galde Press later this year or early next year).
Noting that Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and journalism professor, I had more or less anticipated a contemptuous treatment of the subject matter. Since journalists generally tend to ape mainstream scientists in superciliously smirking, snickering, sneering, and scoffing at the paranormal, I assumed Blum would find much caustic humor in the pursuits of educated and reputable men (and one woman) who dared stray outside the bounds of scientific fundamentalism. I assumed wrong again.
As the subtitle suggests, Harvard professor William James, remembered more for his contributions to psychology and philosophy than psychical research, was one of the early leaders in scientific research aimed ultimately at determining whether consciousness survives bodily death. The research was prompted by advances in science - advances that seemed to relegate religious dogma and doctrine to mere superstition. "Could any God - Christian or otherwise - survive in an age where religion feared science and science denied faith?" Blum expresses the sentiments of Frederic W. H. Myers, another pioneering researcher. "It was into that divide that Myers saw psychical research bravely marching. The goal was to bridge research and religion, to show that they were not incompatible, that one could even explain the other."
Myers appears to have been motivated, Blum observes, by a feeling that science was reducing the universe to a large machine and people to small ones. Other scholars and scientists were similarly motivated. "He was an educated man; he understood and even appreciated the arguments for a purely mechanical universe," Blum describes Edmund Gurney, one of Myers' research associates. "Life lived as a cog in a cold, godless, indifferent machine, however, had come to seem to him unbearable."
The research was primarily with mediums. "Mediums were peculiar creatures; there was no denying it about even the best of them," Blum explains. "How could they not be? They spent hours of their time surrounded by people desperate to talk with the dead. They fell into trances reputedly inhabited by ghosts. They agreed to be hogtied by investigating scientists. Skeptics mocked them; journalists parodied them; former friends feared them. One had to wonder why anyone would choose to become a medium."
The most credible and intriguing of all mediums was Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife, who was discovered by James and studied for some 18 years by Richard Hodgson, an Australian who was recruited to head up the American Society for Psychical Research. Hodgson had a reputation as a debunker of fraudulent "mediums," but became convinced that Mrs. Piper was the real thing, what James called his "white crow," the one that proved all crows weren't black.
The researchers were often frustrated by charlatans as well as by their arrogant scientific colleagues who assumed the subject was too absurd for educated men. One such haughty professor was James Cattell of Columbia University. He sneered at his fellow professor, James H. Hyslop, when Hyslop became interested in psychical research, and when Hyslop published articles that strongly supported non-mechanistic theories, Cattell tried to have him fired. In his defense, Hyslop, noting scientific efforts to find a species of useless fish to support Darwin's theory, asked "why it is so noble and respectable to find whence man came, and so suspicious and dishonorable to ask and ascertain whither he goes?"
Other researchers, including Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Charles Darwin of the natural selection theory of evolution, William Crookes, a brilliant chemist and physicist whose invention led to the X-ray, Oliver Lodge, a pioneer in electricity and radio, and William Barrett, a Dublin physicist knighted for his scientific work, came under attack by their peers when they dared report on evidence that did not fit into the post-Darwin scientific paradigm. "Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name," James lashed out as the cynics, "and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow `scientific' bounds."
While some of the researchers, including Wallace, Crookes, Barrett, Lodge, Hodgson, and Hyslop were able to satisfy themselves that a spirit world exists, and, concomitantly, that consciousness does survive bodily death, James was more guarded and would remain warily perched on the "fence" separating believers from non-believers, seeing that position as the only way to reconcile the differences between science and religion. Moreover, James recognized the difference between the subjectivity of proof and the objectivity of evidence. "The concrete evidence for most of the `psychic' phenomena under discussion is good enough to hang a man 20 times over," James once admonished the scientific fundamentalists.
The closing chapters of the book deal with the famous cross-correspondences - messages coming through different mediums in different parts of the world, which in themselves meant nothing but when collected by the researchers formed coherent messages. The best of these messages were said to have come from Frederic Myers after his death in 1901. Hodgson also began offering convincing messages through Mrs. Piper after his death in 1905.
In the end, it is a matter of what James called the "will to believe" versus the "will to disbelieve."
Blum examines the work of the psychical researchers with respect, objectivity, and understanding. She apparently spent three years researching the subject. I thought I knew the subject pretty well from over 10 years of study, but I learned a lot from this book. As I consumed the book over mochas at Starbucks, I delighted in my initial false assumptions and continually marveled at the accuracy and detail of the stories as well as at Blum's prolific writing.
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56 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Story of Heroes, August 3, 2006
This review is from: Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Hardcover)
Ms Blum has written a wonderful story of a heroic group of people, scientests who believed that science should explore and, if possible, test the supernatural. They endured ridicule and scorn from other scientests who believed that science should deal only with what could be seen and heard and from religious leaders who believed that scientests should leave the supernatural to them. Year after year, this group of people worked brutally hard, exposing so many fraudulent claims of supernatural occurences that you could understand if they just gave up. But, they found a few examples of the unexplainable that could not be disproven by scientific methods, and these examples are fascinating. If you are unsure about life after death and the supernatural, you will still be unsure after you read this book, but you will have a lot to think about and, also, you will be aware of some brilliant, determined people who formed a scientific organization that survived its critics and still exists today.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
depends on what you're looking for, June 19, 2007
If you want a historical overview of the life of the first group of men (and one woman) who attempted to apply scientific method to supernatural or paranormal phenomena, this is your book. If you are interested in the life and times of these folks, their family background, their wives, their illnesses, their spats and squabbles, this is your book. If you want a snapshot of Victorian life, especially the low-tech contraptions and Oscar-worthy performances from the shysters who made a good living in this business, this is your book.
But if you want succint factual description of their methods or the results they obtained, you'll be frustrated, cuz that info is distributed all over the book in bits and pieces. This book is more about the men themselves than about the phenomena they investigated.
But here's the bottom line: 95% of the reports they investigated were fraud, and the majority of that tantalizing other 5% were apt to cheat too, when they could get away with it. They really only came across one person whose "gifts" continued to stand up to their scrutiny year after year.
And so, the conclusion seems to be that true paranormal or supernatural phenomena are exceedingly rare, but do indeed exist.
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