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

William James’s intense interest in psychical research has puzzled philosophers, historians, and biographers seeking to reconcile his efforts in this area with the empiricism and pragmatism that defined much of his philosophical work. What did James believe about psychical matters, these scholars ask, and how did his beliefs evolve over time? Knapp, senior lecturer in history at Washington University in St. Louis, addresses these questions by analyzing James’s writings and correspondence pertaining to psychical research, and by contextualizing his work historically and biographically. He closely examines James’s relationships with researchers and practitioners, and illuminates the place of spiritualism in western culture from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. His purpose, he says, is to clarify a statement by James’s biographer Ralph Barton Perry, whom Knapp much admires: “James’s interest in ‘psychical research’ was not one of his vagaries,” Perry wrote in The Thought and Character of William James, “but was central and typical” (p. 5). Knapp finds this statement tantalizing, since Perry “did not specify of what it was central and typical” (p. 305) and therefore requires explanation.

Unsatisfied with fragmented analyses from scholars of philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, parapsychology, and religion, Knapp proposes an overarching argument: James’s psychical research can be seen as an expression of modernist thought, arising from four intellectual developments of the late nineteenth century: a crisis of religious faith; the rise of scientific naturalism; the impact of statistical thinking and measurement on scientific research; and the professionalization of the social sciences. This “cognitive modernism” (p. 15) allowed for “all the accouterments of scientific practice to systematize the study of psychic phenomena while simultaneously making room for the ever-present subjectivity that permeated the investigator’s experience” (p. 13). Knapp calls this effort to account for subjective experience along with objective findings James’s tertium quid method of inquiry, which he believes underpins James’s philosophy and psychology. He argues persuasively that for James, the central question that engaged him in psychical research was not “is there an afterlife?” but “what is a fact?” Deeply immersed in James scholarship, Knapp offers a thoughtful and well-argued analysis of the increasing centrality of subjectivity that permeates James’s thought, informed his vision of reality as flexible and fluid, and defines him as a proto-modernist.

Knapp divides his book into three sections focused on the origins and development of James’s interest in psychical matters, a chronicle of his investigations, and the relationship of psychical research to his theories of consciousness and immortality. He asserts that James’s interest “began much earlier than scholars have heretofore recognized” (p. 59), grounded in childhood, growing up as he did in the 1850s, when ghosts, rapping, and mediums were much in the air in his native New York and in London, where the James family lived in 1855–56. Henry, Sr. was a close friend of Garth Wilkinson, a champion of Spiritualism, and his circle of fellow believers. But Knapp’s conclusions about how this atmosphere affected James is speculative, filled with assertions about James’s “probable knowledge” and how his path to Spiritualism “most likely began” (p. 59). Knapp is on firmer ground in tracing the research that James began in earnest in the 1880s, when he engaged in investigations whose protocols emulated those applied in laboratories of experimental psychology.

Knapp offers vivid portraits of the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research, whom James met during a visit to England in 1882, and who formed a “dynamic brotherhood” welcoming James’s participation (p. 101). They included philosopher Henry Sidgwick; Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers, who had been Sidgwick’s students at Cambridge; and Australian-born Richard Hodgson, who became one of the group’s principal investigators of mediums. In 1884, urged by his British colleagues, James helped to found the American Society for Psychical Research, and devoted much time and effort serving on its...