Title: The new Prometheans : faith, science, and the supernatural mind in the Victorian fin de siècle /
Authors: Raia, Courtenay
Year: 2019
Subjects: Crookes, William,; Myers, F. W. H.; Lodge, Oliver,; Lang, Andrew,; Crookes, William,; Lang, Andrew,; Lodge, Oliver,; Myers, F. W. H.; Parapsychology England History.; Supernatural History.; Parapsychology; Supernatural; England
Abstract: 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.
Contents: The culture of proof and the crisis of faith -- William Crookes in Wonderland: scientific spiritualism and the physics of the impossible -- Romancing the crone: Frederic Myers, spiritualism, and the "enchanted portal to the world" -- "The incandescent solid beneath our line of sight": Frederic Myers, the self and the psychiatric subconscious -- Knowledge in motion: Oliver Lodge, the imperceptible ether, and the physics of (extra-)sensory perception -- Uncanny cavemen: Andrew Lang, psycho-folklore, and the romance of ancient man -- Psychical modernism: science, subjectivity, and the unsalvageable self.