James and Psychical Research in Context

Abstract James’s open advocacy, practice, and defense of unrestrictedly empirical approaches to telepathy, mediumship, and other alleged “supernatural” phenomena was a central part of his work, yet it is still often misunderstood or passed over. By placing James back into an international network of contemporary elite intellectuals who were also preoccupied with reported occult phenomena as fundamental scientific anomalies that may or may not have spiritual significance, this chapter argues that James’s psychical research can be reconciled with the progressiveness for which his canonical ideas are often regarded. When appreciated within important political and medical contexts of his time, and in view of his long-term collaborations in the study of trance states and hallucinations in non-pathological populations with F. W. H. Myers and other figures connected to Henry Sidgwick in England, James’s psychical research was an integral part of his evolving experimental psychology. Growing out of James’s deep discontent with dogmatism in science and religion, his unorthodox work also shared mutual origins with his pragmatist and radical empiricist philosophy. Moreover, by illustrating the polemical nature of simultaneous attacks on James’s psychical research and pragmatism by fellow psychologists, and the employment of religious arguments by supposedly scientific critics, this chapter suggests the story of James and psychical research is a reminder that “scientific naturalism” as an inconsistently defined yet absolute standard of modern Western academic activity has grown out of concerns that were not as self-evidently science-based or humanistic as we may be accustomed to believe.