William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity by Krister Dylan Knapp (review)

It is not surprising that William James, famed for his broad sympathies, was deeply involved in psychical research. In the heyday of its late-nineteenth-century rise out of both professional psychology and religious upheaval, the study of mediums and marginal mental phenomena was at once a respectable elite intellectual project, a mass movement, and a laughingstock in the world of professional science. But although James' involvement in psychical research is widely known, few have considered it integral to his daily life and work. Working carefully with James' voluminous correspondence, Knapp corrects this imbalance by crafting a densely textured chronological story of James the psychical researcher. Knapp makes a definitive case for this view of James, showing the promise that the history of psychical research holds for students of scientific modernity.

Knapp's account begins with James' early years in New York City, where it patiently reconstructs his opportunities to learn about spiritualism and psychic performers through conversations, popular literature, and even advertisements in his neighborhood. Particularly effective is Knapp's correction of the usual assumption that James' father encouraged his open-mindedness toward spirit return. Knapp demonstrates that Henry Sr. was in fact an anti-spiritualist, and that the "scientific" spiritualism of family friend James John Garth Wilkinson was instead the key early influence upon James' psychical investigations. This tension between father figures sets up Knapp's portrayal of James as sympathetic but skeptical toward psychical research. This attitude forged by Wilkinson and Henry Sr. largely persisted, despite some important swells of sympathy, throughout James' career.

Knapp's detailed descriptions of the members of the Society for Psychical Research (spr) in Chapter 3—a new "transatlantic intellectual aristocracy"—will be broadly relevant to historians. So, too, will the argument in Chapter 6 that psychical research is crucial to the intellectual history of the unconscious, despite its comparative obscurity alongside Janet, Mesmer, and Freud (108).¹ The descriptions of the spr's investigations of specific mediums in the book's middle chapters also provide revealing portraits of the relationship between elite institutions and late Victorian mass culture.

Knapp decisively proves the book's fundamental point—that James' psychical research was a key nexus of intellectual activity and a time-consuming commitment that was inseparable from his more familiar (and more palatable) work. This point ought to make it impossible for future scholarship about James to ignore the subject. But although Knapp builds a compelling connection between James' psychical research and his changing view on consciousness and immortality in the final chapters, he could have integrated his account more with James' other texts. Especially given the recent resurgence of interest in James as a moral thinker—represented, for example, in Trygve Throntveit's William James and the Ethical Republic (London, 2014)—Knapp misses a chance to probe the relationship between James' idea of individual moral significance and his willingness to believe, despite countless instances of fraud, in mediums and psychic abilities.² Instead, the book's explanation of James' intransigent commitment to psychical research relies on what Knapp calls James' "tertium quid method of inquiry"—the idea that, when faced with irreconcilable opposites, James sought a third, conciliatory option (8). This reading of James will likely feel familiar to James scholars.³ Moreover, in placing this antecedent commitment at the core of James' interest in psychical research, Knapp reinforces the same separation between psychical research and science that his book works to overcome. Given that the book itself demonstrates how unstable the boundaries of psychology were, why does Knapp not do more to acknowledge the persuasiveness and scientific appeal of marginal mental phenomena?

Although this incongruence at times limits the book's broader arguments, Knapp's densely researched intervention will be valuable to a range of scholars. It is both a demonstration of psychical research's importance and a new image of the much-studied James, which...