James accepted the reality of a wide variety of facts differing from the set of facts considered by ordinary science. This is significant, because the kinds of facts accepted by science to a large extent determine its theories and laws, which establish relationships among these facts. Once science accepts certain categories of facts, and constructs theories and laws based on these facts, and further uses these theories and laws to explain and predict patterns among these facts, it becomes difficult to give serious consideration to facts that have no place in this system. James (1897, in Murphy and Ballou 1960 p. 26) said, “Phenomena unclassifiable within the system are therefore paradoxical absurdities, and must be held untrue.” He called the total collection of such absurd facts “the unclassified residuum.” James (1897, in Murphy and Ballou, pp. 25–27) observed: “no part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena generally called mystical. . . . All the while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the surface of history. no matter where you open its pages, you find things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood.”
James hoped that future generations of psychologists and anthropologists would carefully study these phenomena “with patience and rigor” and integrate them into a proper theoretical framework, instead of receiving them with “credulity on the one hand and dogmatic denial . . . on the other.” He felt it was a “scientific scandal” that this had not yet happened (James 1897; in Murphy and Ballou 1960, p. 31). Indeed, he said, “The most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may have a positive place” (James 1897; in Murphy and Ballou 1960, p. 42).
Unfortunately, it still has not happened. for this reason, James is a principal inspiration for this book, and particularly this chapter, in which I have tried to give a small indication of the actual scope and character of the unclassified residuum of observations related to the question of conscious human existence and origins. not only much of science but much of religion has turned its back on this unclassified residuum, with unfortunate results for contemporary human consciousness. If this situation is to change, the impetus will most probably come from the world of science, a science that breaks radically with its long flirtation with materialism and once more opens its eyes to the full range of phenomena displayed to rational human inspection.
The ultimate effect of such a change would be recognition of the power of personality as an explanation for factual events. The primary characteristic of modern science is its refusal to consider personal causation of natural effects. James (1897) said, “This systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly i mpersonal world, may, conceivably . . . prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our boasted science” (Murphy and Ballou 1960, p. 47). James’s prediction is already coming true, and I believe it will be entirely fulfilled in the present century.
Lord Rayleigh (Physicist)
John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919), made many important contributions to physics. He studied mathematics at cambridge, and later became interested in physics. He did most of his work at a private laboratory, which he installed on his family estate. during this time, he corresponded frequently with physicist Jame clerk Maxwell. In 1871, he married Evelyn Balfour, sister of Arthur James Balfour, later prime minister of England. After the death of Maxwell in 1879, Rayleigh took his chair at cambridge. He served as President of the Royal Society from 1905 to 1908, and in 1904 he received the nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the element argon.
In 1919, Rayleigh became president of the Society for Psychical Research. His presidential address (Rayleigh 1919; in Lindsay 1970) gives a good summary of his own experiences and his general attitude toward the scientific investigation of the paranormal. Rayleigh began his address by noting the recent death of Sir William crookes, a fellow nobel laureate in physics who had also served as president of the Society for Psychical Research from 1896 to 1899. He recalled that his own interest in psychical research, awakened while a student at cambridge, increased further when he read crookes’s “notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual during the years 1870–73.” He knew of crookes’s scientific reputation, and thought that such a careful experimenter was well equipped to guard against illusions. This gave credibility to his reports of psychical phenomena.
He thought the séances with the medium daniel dunglas Home were particularly credible. Skeptics claimed that crookes had been deceived, but Rayleigh said, “I found (and indeed still find) it difficult to accept what one may call the ‘knave and fool theory’ of these occurrences.” And it therefore seemed that “one must admit the possibility of much that contrasts strongly with ordinary experience” (Lindsay 1970, p. 231).
Rayleigh, desiring to perform his own experiments, engaged a well known medium, Mrs. Jencken. He invited her to his country house, where she stayed, on a few occasions, a total of fourteen days. Rayleigh’s séances with Mrs. Jencken gave some interesting results, but not as astounding as those obtained by crookes with Home. Rayleigh explained: “Before commencing, the room was searched and the doors locked. Besides Mrs. Jencken, the sitters were usually Lady Rayleigh and myself. Sometimes a brother or a friend came. We sat close together at a small, but rather heavy, pedestal table; and when anything appeared to be doing we held Mrs. Jencken’s hands, with a good attempt to control her feet also with ours; but it was impracticable to maintain this full control during all the long time occupied by the séances” (Lindsay 1970, p. 232). Rayleigh noted that paper cutters and other small objects would fly about the room. Most strikingly, lights would appear in the darkened room and drift about. “They might be imitated by phosphorus enclosed in cotton wool,” said Rayleigh. “But how Mrs. Jencken could manipulate them with her hands and feet held, and it would seem with only her mouth at liberty, is a difficulty” (Lindsay 1970, p. 233).
“Another incident hard to explain,” said Rayleigh (1919), “occurred at the close of a séance after we had all stood up. The table at which we had been sitting gradually tipped over until the circular top nearly touched the floor, and then slowly rose again into the normal position. Mrs. Jencken, as well as ourselves, was apparently standing quite clear of it. I have often tried since to make the table perform a similar evolution. Holding the top with both hands, I can make some, though a bad, approximation; but it was impossible that Mrs. Jencken could have worked it thus. Possibly something better could be done with the aid of an apparatus of hooks and wires; but Mrs. Jencken was a small woman, without much apparent muscular development, and the table for its size is heavy” (Lindsay 1970, p. 233). Rayleigh rejected the idea of hallucination. for one thing, all of the witnesses agreed afterwards on the movements they had observed. Rayleigh witnessed some séances with the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino, about whom we shall have much more to say. His cryptically stated conclusion was: “There is no doubt that she practised deception, but that is not the last word” (Lindsay 1970, p. 235).