Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; 403pp; Paperback £24,99; ISBN: 978-1-107-18854-9
Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira
What is ‘science’ – and, as a corollary, ‘non-science’? What does it mean for something to be called ‘scientific’? And is ‘science’ an objective, singular entity, or is it conditioned by culture? These questions have provoked some of the most fascinating scholarly debates over the past two centuries, precisely the period during which ‘science’ (however defined) gradually became the standard of truth in most societies across the globe. These concerns – sometimes called ‘the demarcation problem’ – far exceed the immediate purview of philosophers and historians of science, having lasting consequences in fields such as education, medicine and public policy. Philosophers like Karl R. Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown that to define ‘science’ is far more complicated than we might initially assume.[1] Over the past few years, their (often contrasting) views have inspired a wave of ground-breaking historical works on the ‘fringe sciences,’ those disciplines and subjects – such as mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research and parapsychology– rejected by ‘mainstream’ scientists for not conforming with their own ideological agenda.
Physics and Psychics belongs to this revisionist tradition of scholarship in the history of science and technology. Richard Noakes has for years looked at the cooperation and contention between the physical sciences – fields like chemistry, physics and astronomy – and the occult in fin-de-siècle Britain. Physics and Psychics not only reunites his latest works on telegraphy, ether and psychics but also goes beyond, calling into question the popular, hasty definitions of ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ (or ‘pseudoscience’). It centres on the lives and activities of eminent British physical scientists who split their time between physical experiments and psychical investigation. Noakes calls these individuals ‘physical-psychical scientists’, an etic category that highlights their primary background as practitioners of the physical sciences while distinguishing them from the broader community of spiritualists, conjurers and psychical researchers also interested in the study of psychical phenomena. ‘Psychic’ (also called ‘psychical’, ‘supernormal’ or ‘paranormal’) refers to a wide range of phenomena not contemplated by mainstream science and often labelled as ‘supernatural’, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, levitation and spirit materialisation. To physical-psychical scientists like Oliver Lodge, William Crookes and William F. Barrett, however, there was nothing ‘supernatural’ in all this. Indeed, they endeavoured precisely to demonstrate, by empirical means, that psychical phenomena belonged to the realm of nature and, therefore, constituted legitimate objects of scientific inquiry.
The heyday of physical-psychical research coincided with the formative period of modern scientific disciplines, when the boundaries of such fields as physics and chemistry were relatively fluid and constantly challenged in light of new discoveries, methods and theories. Physical-psychical scientists argued that a systematic study of psychical phenomena could not only expand the purview of the physical sciences beyond the recognised spheres of matter and energy but, ultimately, revolutionise our understanding of the universe, of life and death. Who were the British physical scientists interested in psychical investigation? What drove their enthusiasm for the subject? How did they negotiate their position as physical scientists and psychical researchers? To what extent did their achievements in physics profit from their studies in psychics, and vice-versa? These are some of the main concerns running through Physics and Psychics.
Noakes draws on a remarkable wealth of primary sources, ranging from diaries and personal letters to specialised journals, wide-circulation newspapers, illustrations and books. The methodological sophistication of Physics and Psychics also deserves praise. In contrast to studies that tend to label such subjects as psychical research, spiritualism and Theosophy as ‘superstition’ or ‘pseudoscience’, Noakes favours ‘alternative sciences’ as a framework through which to accommodate disciplines or subjects not contemplated in fin-de-siècle scientific orthodoxy. As a medical historian working on psychical research and the occult in early twentieth-century China, I find the category of ‘alternative sciences’ particularly valuable. It helps historians of China appreciate the emergence of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學) – the Nippo-Chinese offspring of the Anglo-American psychical research – in the 1910s not as a backlash reaction to science and modernity but rather as an alternative to scientific materialism, ontological dualism and the worldview that everything in the universe is mere matter and motion. Indeed, my reading of Physics and Psychics is concerned primarily with the transnational history of fin-de-siècle psychical research, particularly its development in East Asia.
The book is divided into six chapters. It begins in the first half of the nineteenth century, the formative period of the physical sciences. Chapter 1 explores how mesmerism, Karl von Reichenbach’s theory of od and the emergence of Modern Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century inspired British physical scientists to appreciate the scientific study of psychical and occult phenomena as extensions of the nascent discipline of physics. They celebrated Mesmer’s discovery of a new physical force – animal magnetism – as having the potential to revolutionise people’s understanding of the human body, reconcile science and religion, and eventually clarify the underlying causes of such ‘inexplicable’ and ‘remarkable’ phenomena like mind-reading, thought-transference and spirit materialisation. The potential to investigate psychical phenomena through scientific means led a group of eminent British scientists and intellectuals to establish the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882. Centred on the SPR, chapter 2 teases out the identities and networks of physical-psychical scientists. Dissatisfied with the limitations of Christian orthodoxy and scientific materialism, this group included not only official members of the SPR but a broader community of high-ranking scientists whose interest in psychics often predated the Society’s foundation, and whose sustained commitment to psychical investigation went beyond the Society’s umbrella.
The next three chapters look at the physical-psychical scientists’ view that psychical phenomena belonged to the natural (=material) realm and, therefore, deserved scientific investigation. Chapter 3 examines how those scientists envisaged the relevance of the physical sciences – their theories, methods and experiments – to clarify the mechanisms of the psychical world. The physical sciences offered not only a scientific framework through which to investigate psychical phenomena but also furnished a set of tools for physical-psychical scientists to draw analogies between the visible and invisible realms of existence. Their latest achievements in electricity, telegraphy and ether, for example, suggested that psychical phenomena were not as impossible or ‘supernatural’ as some might have once assumed, and that physical experiments could enhance our understanding of the same. Indeed, Fukurai Tomokichi’s 福来友吉 (1869–1952) invention of thoughtography – the ability to imprint mental images onto photographic plates – in the mid-1900s,[2] and the myriad of early twentieth-century Japanese and Chinese articles and books explaining the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance in terms of electricity, ether and wireless telegraphy indicate that the analogies proposed by British physical-psychical scientists enjoyed an impressive transnational audience.
Following, Noakes turns to the laboratory as a shared space for physical and psychical investigation. While the use of scientific instruments yielded some positive evidence for the reality of certain psychical effects – like table-rapping and telekinesis – experimental work also posed new challenges. The unavailability of reliable mediums or difficulty to see, control and replicate paranormal phenomena in the laboratory led many practitioners of the physical sciences to doubt the feasibility of psychical research. Despite this, psychical experimentation inspired creative uses of the physical sciences to an extent far greater than historians have so far recognised. Not everyone agreed that physical scientists were the most suited to study psychical matters, though. Chapter 5 examines the debates between spiritualists, psychologists, psychical researchers, conjurers and physicists regarding who could claim authority in psychical investigation. Unsurprisingly, the most outspoken defenders of the physical expertise were the same familiar individuals who were engaged in shaping the boundaries of the physical sciences in Britain’s public sphere. Physical theories, methods and experimental work, they declared, ranked as the most appropriate to decipher the puzzles underlying the cause and reality of psychical effects.
The final chapter is probably the most insightful to scholars working on the popularisation of psychical research beyond the United Kingdom. Noakes turns from the debates taking place in laboratories and scientific journals to the engagement of physical-psychical scientists in the dissemination of psychical research – its methods, achievements and social uses – through mass media and popular scientific literature. Focused on Oliver Lodge, Noakes shows how wide-circulation newspapers, popular books and lecture halls became important venues where physical-psychical scientists could expose ideas deemed inappropriate in secularised scientific settings, such as the reconciliation of science and religion, the survival of the soul after death, and the physical effects happening in spiritualist seances.
Persuaded by Noakes’s argument that Lodge stood as a prominent figure in early British radio broadcasting often called upon to illuminate the latest discoveries in physics to a broader audience, I looked for some visual evidence to satisfy my curiosity about what had made Lodge’s public appearances so special – the ‘thing’ written records cannot fully capture. Searching on YouTube, I was thrilled by a short video titled ‘Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible’, originally aired on British Movietone on 31 December 1930.[3]
Praising Lodge as ‘one of the greatest scientists of modern times’ who ‘needs no introduction to British audiences’, the film presents a charismatic old man in his early 80s playing with a device wherein a highly magnetic piece of cobalt steel seems to be levitating or ‘floating in empty space in vacuum.’ To demonstrate magnetic attraction and repulsion, Lodge then brings two pieces of steel up to each other. ‘As we can see’, Lodge explains, the piece ‘runs away’, they ‘don’t like each other; they chase each other’. But when he reverses them, then ‘they like each other very much.’ Using everyday experiments and lively language, Lodge illustrates what Noakes explored thoroughly in this book: how insights in physics – here, in magnetism – can help illuminate the causes and reality of psychical phenomena, if not life and death as a whole. If we understand ‘all the actors in the relation between ether and matter, or let’s say, between space and matter, we might begin to understand something more of what life and mind really are.’ After the proper appraisal of scientific evidence, Lodge concludes, ‘if the result is that personalities continue to exist then they must have a physical vehicle for that existence,’ a substance or entity ‘which fills space and which is a far more important thing than any form of matter’, which becomes ‘a trivial thing in comparison.’ That revolutionary thing refers to Lodge’s cherished ‘ether’.[4]
By the 1920s, some of Lodge’s most best-selling books in physics and psychics – including The Substance of Faith Allied with Science,[5] Survival of Man[6] and Raymond or Life and Death[7] – had already been rendered into Japanese alongside hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews on science and religion, ether and psychical research. An important channel for Chinese elites fascinated by hypnosis, telepathy and clairvoyance, Japan played a key role in the dissemination of Western psychical research in China. Publications about the latest achievements of British scientists like Lodge, Barrett and Crookes featured prominently in the Chinese popular press during the first half of the twentieth century. These typically comprised book excerpts and newspaper articles translated from English into Japanese, and then from Japanese into Chinese. These publications were decisive in the formation of Spiritual Science therein. For instance, in a review of the Claude’s Book – prefaced by Lodge – a Chinese writer praises the British scientist as ‘the physicist of the afterlife’, whose ‘established reputation had encouraged us to take the subject of psychical phenomena seriously’.[8]
Despite Noakes’ flowing prose, Physics and Psychics is dense reading. But while focused on the British context, the book is a must-read to anyone working on the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research. Noakes makes an important contribution to a recent body of work, which calls for spiritualism and psychical research to become legitimate subjects in the history of science, medicine and religion. It sheds much-needed light on the question of how religion and the occult have helped shape the boundaries of modern science, a concern with global implications.
Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (林友樂) is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCL. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, his research project investigates the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research in early twentieth-century China. It looks at the formation of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學), its impact on healthcare and religious experience. His areas of interest include modern Chinese history, medical history, esotericism, and science and technology studies, and he has published in Portuguese, Chinese and English.
[1] Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1975).
[2] Tomokichi, Fukurai. Clairvoyance & Thoughtography (London: Rider & Company, 1931).
[3] British Movietone, “Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible and Mr Sanger – Sound,” YouTube Video, 4:29, 21 July 2015, https://youtu.be/A4uOdx_dQBs.
[4] On Lodge and ether, see Noakes, Richard, “Making Space for the Soul: Oliver Lodge, Maxwellian Psychics and the Etherial Body,” in Jaume Navarro, ed, Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Agonising Object in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88–106; Noakes, Richard, “Glorifying Mechanism: Oliver Lodge and the Problems of Ether, Mind, and Matter,” in James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, eds, A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 135–152.
[5] Kagaku yori mitaru shinkō no honshitsu 科学より観たる信仰の本質, trans. Ōno Yoshimaro 大野芳麿 (Tokyo: Rakuyōdō, 1921).
[6] Shigo no seizon 死後の生存, trans. Takahashi Gorō 高橋五郎 (Tokyo: Genkōsha, 1917); Shinrei seikatsu 心霊生活, trans. Fujī Hakūn 藤井白雲 (Tokyo: Dai Nihon bunmei kyōkai kankōsho, 1917).
[7] Reimondo meikai tsūshin レイモンド 冥界通信, trans. Takahashi Gorō (Tokyo: Uchū reizō kenkyū kyōkai, 1918); Takai ni aru aiji yori no shōsoku 他界にある愛児よりの消息, trans. Nojiri Hōei 野尻抱影 (Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1922).
[8] “Weilai shenghuo zhi xinjieshi 未來生活之新解釋” (New Explanations on the Afterlife), Dongfang zazhi 17, no. 6 (1920): 53–54.