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

With an historian's critical eye and abundant use of primary sources, Knapp weaves a complex and compelling thesis that reconsiders the role James' psychical research played in his personal, social, and intellectual development. Knapp offers an account of James that centralizes his psychical research as the forge for his method that extended to his thought on fideism, pragmatism, and psychology. This method "designed to navigate the epistemological uncertainty of the modern age" (18)—what Knapp calls James' tertium quid—provides a theoretical anchor that holds the book together.

Part One of William James establishes the tertium quid thesis, explores James' journey towards the psychical, his initial research in the field, and some of his early, resultant theories. Psychical refers to "phenomena … at the borderland of regular consciousness" or what James termed "consciousness beyond the margin" (1). Research into this area included Spiritualism and telepathy and was carried out by organizations such as the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), a group that played a key role in James' research. Knapp writes: "James turned to psychical research to rethink, not reject, the well-trodden approaches to two classic dualisms—the natural versus the supernatural and the normal versus the paranormal …" (6). Knapp then establishes James' lifelong interest in the "non-normal," as encouraged by a coterie of thinkers that surrounded his family life and the intellectual freedom he experienced growing up.

After detailed (and sometimes boring) accounts of the Sidgwick Group, the SPR, and the American branch of the SPR, Knapp takes a closer look at James as a psychical researcher. Much of this section revolves around his philosophical development, involvement in debunking various fraudulent mediums, his attendance at séances, and extensive concentration on his "one white crow," Lenora Piper, a mental medium whom he believed held "dramatic possibilities" for psychical research. Part Three connects the historical and contextual with the constellation of James' emergent theories about the nature of consciousness and the afterlife. He concludes that James' "sublime reservoir theory of immortality became the final instance of his tertium quid intellectual disposition" (185). The conclusion wrestles with competing narratives in Jamesian studies and adds a critique of following the tertium quid method ad absurdum, especially in the face of scientific falsification.

Overall, Knapp has a novelist's attention to detail. However, this assiduity sometimes weighs in on arguments in Jamesian minutiae that the reader may find uninteresting. At these points, the author is so busy at filling in the gaps in the literature that he forgets to fill in the gaps for the reader. Ironically, and at times maddeningly, the endnotes only have the barest of bibliographic information when what one really wants is insightful commentary. Nonetheless, the nicely reproduced photographs of the major players help anchor the historical and abstract into the personal and concrete.

Religious studies scholars will find much to appropriate and appreciate in William James. It provides an excellent snapshot of an important time through the lens of a major thinker. Such a historical treatise still has contemporary purchase as more and more new religious movements emerge from conditions similar to the nineteenth century. James' tertium quid, so well-articulated by Knapp, is a helpful disposition in a discipline struggling against reductionistic Positivism and religious exclusivism. William James would make an excellent supplemental text for an upper division undergraduate/graduate religious studies or psychology of religion course.