Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain

FIVE Rational Faith and Hallucination

FIVE Rational Faith and Hallucination A lady once asked me if I believed in ghosts and apparitions? I answered with truth and simplicity; No, Madam! I have seen far too many myself. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend WHILE SERVING AS LIBRARIAN to the Earl of Shelburne in the 1770s, the radical chemist Joseph Priestley was called to the chambers of the earl’s son. The youth had spent a sleepless night due to a distressing dream in which a hearse carried him to his family’s burial place. Dr. Priestley assured him that the dream was simply the product of a fever. The medical attendant assigned to oversee the boy’s convalescence stopped in one cold January day, only to find his charge outdoors, running to meet him. As the attendant rode toward the boy to admonish him for his carelessness, the young figure suddenly vanished. Once inside the house, the attendant learned to his astonishment that the child had just died—in his bed.1 Observers of industrial-age England have agreed that it was a haunted, hallucinatory place. Carlyle called belief in ghosts one of the “signs of the times.” When reports emerged in 1762 of a ghost haunting a house on Cock Lane in the East End of London, Andrew Lang groaned that his contemporaries had a greater obsession with spirits than the medievals had had.2 After about 1790, ghost stories sold widely as cheap literature. The spiritual had featured especially prominently in Gothic and Romantic fiction, but continued to haunt Victorian writing.3 These tales made such scintillating reading not just for their luridness but also because they literally captured this period’s spirit of rapid change. Vanessa Dickerson has aptly described the ghost as an emblem of 146 Victorians’ feelings of transition between “medieval god and modern machine, monarchy and democracy, religion and science, spirituality and materiality, faith and doubt, authority and liberalism.”4 What Dickerson captures in her understanding of apparitions is their liminality . In this chapter, I will argue that even before the Victorian period, the experience of hallucinations served as a lightning rod for discussions of the religious and political changes occurring in Britain. The rapid growth of nonAnglican religions from about 1780 to 1860 was one of the most marked changes in this period. That proliferation threatened a “universal” (moderate Anglican) understanding of faith in much the same way that provincial power threatened centralized state government or steam explosions threatened industrial efficiency. Natural philosophers and physicians advocated treating hallucinations as psychological and optical phenomena in order to keep more radical, potentially factionalizing religious understandings at bay. They argued that using one’s reason—and by extension, adhering to a moderate faith—to understand visions made better political and intellectual sense than succumbing to the superstitious and backward interpretation of visions as communications with the spiritual world (see Figure 5.1). Hallucination had become a medical issue early in the eighteenth century because just before this, portents had been reclassified as either natural events or miracles, the latter of which had lost much of their evidentiary status. In other words, from this point on, European churches and natural philosophers largely agreed that events could only have natural or divine causes. Preternatural phenomena—events caused by demons, angels, or other supernatural beings —now could only exist in the imaginations of the vulgar.5 The new experimental philosophy’s admission of singular experiences as typical instead of deviant contributed to this trend.6 Similarly, German Berrios has pointed to hallucinations’ “loss of semantic pregnancy” in the eighteenth century, or the loss of the “belief that their content meant something, that [they were] portent [s]. Hallucinations thus became but symptoms or markers of disease and what the patient saw or heard had no longer meaning in itself.” This strategy achieved several goals: it helped the sciences and medicine avoid participating in factious battles between different religions; it posited a central authority (reason) to counteract the provincializing forces of superstition and sectionalism ; and it allowed natural philosophers who knew they were sane to make sense of their own hallucinations.7 Well into the nineteenth century, though, the medical and scientific establishment felt the need to continue to denounce supernatural explanations for hallucinations. This suggests that, as with the RATIONAL FAITH AND HALLUCINATION 147 ❘ other disciplinary projects that I have described in this book, natural philosophy ’s attempts to tame hallucination...