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

Abstract

This book is about William James and psychical research. The author effectively makes two major points. James’s interest in psychical research was lifelong and profound. Right through the last years of his life as he was writing his great philosophical works, he kept on heroically with psychical research. Knapp points out that even after all his co-explorers in England (Myers, Gurney, Hodgson, etc.) passed away, James doubled-down rather declined his interest, and wore himself weary from hours of working with mediums, often with meager results.

            After a lengthy Introduction on the main idea of the book, which is Knapp’s methodology, it begins with a nicely textured narrative of James’s early life and influences: the combative relationship with his father, life in a carnivalesque New York City, encounters with the redoubtable Sidgwicks and the more emotionally alive Myers and his wife, all very interesting and informative—the contextual grounding of James’s evolution as a thinker.

            James was a serious, indeed impassioned, lifelong psychical researcher, an important fact about one of America’s greatest philosophers and psychologists. This leads to the second point that Knapp takes great pains to discuss: James’s method of approach to psychical research. According to Knapp, he was not only passionate and persistent about exploring psychical research but did so in a manner that Knapp calls a tertium quid, or third way.

            The third way mediates between fanatical overbelief and fanatical disbelief. The third way cleaves to the value of fact and is guided by a relentless quest for the truth wherever it leads. A true picture of James. Knapp tries to put the new quest called psychical research in the historical context of 19^th century Europe, a unique period of cultural ferment and technological transition. Darwinism and mechanistic science and technology had triumphantly arrived on the scene. A new awareness of mortal wounds to Biblical cosmology began to dawn, and people of the West found themselves looking for new ways to reconfigure their shattered worldviews.