The New Prometheans : Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin De Siècle

The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. __The New Prometheans__ traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths. In a world increasingly shut in by the iron-clad determinism of Victorian physics, the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, - tasked itself with finding scientific evidence for phenomena science had all but denied. The point was not to refute physical explanation, but to give it pause, turning its attention away from nature's routines toward its more mysterious intervals. Psychical research was a fully academic discipline concerned only with mental (as opposed to supernatural) phenomena, yet its scheme of evidence was of the most extraordinary kind: telepathy, mesmerism, clairvoyance, apparitions, psychokinesis, et. al. Though it concerned itself mainly with establishing the facts, the implications of its data were profound: consciousness was an objective structure of reality. There was also the corresponding inner truth already mined by poets, mystics, psychonauts, and s ance mediums: every individual consciousness maintained some connection to the greater whole. Psychical research managed to take this romantic view of consciousness and affirm it within an empirical theory of academic psychology. The book plots the lives of four leading British intellectuals, all brought to psychical research by questions their own disciplines could not answer: the depth psychologist Frederic Myers, the chemist William Crookes, the physicist Oliver Lodge, and the anthropologist Andrew Lang. They all had exceptionally high profiles in both the scientific and psychical communities, and moral energies that brought them out of academic circles and into the public sphere. In a world increasingly shut in by the iron-clad determinism of Victorian physics, the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, - tasked itself with finding scientific evidence for phenomena science had all but denied. The point was not to refute physical explanation, but to give it pause, turning its attention away from nature's routines toward its more mysterious intervals. Psychical research was a fully academic discipline concerned only with mental (as opposed to supernatural) phenomena, yet its scheme of evidence was of the most extraordinary kind: telepathy, mesmerism, clairvoyance, apparitions, psychokinesis, et. al. Though it concerned itself mainly with establishing the facts, the implications of its data were profound: consciousness was an objective structure of reality. There was also the corresponding inner truth already mined by poets, mystics, psychonauts, and séance mediums: every individual consciousness maintained some connection to the greater whole. Psychical research managed to take this romantic view of consciousness and affirm it within an empirical theory of academic psychology. The book plots the lives of four leading British intellectuals, all brought to psychical research by questions their own disciplines could not answer: the depth psychologist Frederic Myers, the chemist William Crookes, the physicist Oliver Lodge, and the anthropologist Andrew Lang. They all had exceptionally high profiles in both the scientific and psychical communities, and moral energies that brought them out of academic circles and into the public sphere