The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind by Courtenay Raia (review)

In her introduction to The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind, Courtenay Raia asks, "Can investigators who gave positive testimony regarding telepathy, telekinesis, spirit communication, or other such phenomena really be taken seriously?" (8). For almost fifty years now, historians of science and cultural studies scholars have answered this question with a resounding yes. In the early 1970s, George Stocking and Malcolm Jay Kottler produced complex, archivally situated examinations of the spiritualist investigations of Alfred Russel Wallace and E. B. Tylor, their efforts fueling a groundswell of spiritualism and science studies that would later manifest in landmark monographs by Janet Oppenheim, Alison Winter, and Roger Luckhurst. Interest in psychical research has intensified and diversified since the millennium's turn, its history pursued by Peter Lamont, John Warne Monroe, Egil Asprem, Jason Josephson-Storm, Richard Noakes, and others. If by "taking seriously," Raia means subjecting historic scientific investigations of spiritualist phenomena to rigorous academic inquiry, paying careful attention to their scientific, religious, cultural, and biographical dimensions, and refusing to patronize, ridicule, or simply debunk their subjects, then psychical research has been taken very seriously for quite some time. Indeed, the onus of proof seems now to lie with anyone who wishes to claim otherwise.

Raia shows some awareness of this extensive precedent in her endnotes, but never fully acknowledges it in her central argument. Instead, The New Prometheans insists that the psychical pursuits of its Victorian professional subjects remain marginalized because it is "hard for academics to see psychical research as a genuine scientific effort" (x). Of convinced psychical researchers, she writes, "we dismiss out of hand what they are saying and wonder, instead, why they are saying it: are they duped, delusional, dishonest? … Psychical activity is thus immediately deflected away from scientific considerations and captured by interests of a more biographical, cultural, or even occult nature" (8). The term "we" is made to do quite a lot of heavy lifting, and readers might well begin to wonder who it describes. If it is historians of science or spiritualism, then this allegation of ignorance is demonstrably untrue. Has even a single of the academic studies of psychical research produced over the last two decades been written with the primary intention to prove that its champions were "duped, delusional, or dishonest"? And if it is dismissive for scholars to focus on the topic's biographical and cultural dimensions, then why does so much of The New Prometheans do exactly that? It is not, after all, Raia's intention to authorize the psychical convictions of her subjects. Even if it were, such an endorsement would not necessarily represent a more ethical approach to the early work of the Society for Psychical Research than a more neutrally agnostic historiographical position. The Victorian psychical research community was a broad church whose members advocated, if unevenly, a healthy skepticism in their investigations; they did not always agree, and their work could just as easily debunk as credit spiritualist phenomena.

Such problematic rhetorical gestures undermine an otherwise engaging account of the psychical research of four "New Prometheans": William Crookes, F. W. H. Myers, Oliver Lodge, and Andrew Lang. Raia's first chapter contextualizes their work in light of the so-called crisis of faith narrative, arguing that this narrative, if by no means culturally ubiquitous, was very much real for the individuals she studies. Chapter 2 focuses on Crookes's notorious investigative séances with the medium Florence Cook, providing a fascinating account of his potential motivations for entering the psychical fray and of his shifting relationship to spiritualism, one far more equivocal than the movement's frequent and unilateral declaration of his allyship suggests.

The next two chapters are devoted to Myers. The first examines the spiritual struggles and youthful romanticism that marked his early career at Cambridge, and the second shows how his formulation of an optimistic theory of human psychological evolution drew upon his ongoing interactions...