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I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this book. When I was studying philosophy I first met James � the brother of the author and father of psychology in the US. I wasn’t all that keen on him, but was a bit addicted to Hegel at the time and so found the fact that he had clearly read and understood Hegel something of a treat. Nonetheless, his and Dewey’s pragmatism (or Instrumentalism) was a bit too simple for my tastes. The implicit denial of objective truth also caused me problems.

Books like this one, either written in support of spiritualism or against it, always follow the same formula. First you are given a series of miraculous tales. You are given time to ooh and ahh. Then some of these tales are completely discredited.

The books only diverge at this point. Those in favour focus on the ‘successful� accounts and say something like, “Although we can never really know, some doubt must always be part of the scientific method and …�

Others basically adopt my view of sports champions � we should wait to give them their medals after they are dead and therefore after we can do an autopsy to determine they had not cheated. It seems only fair. If they want their medals early then they will just have to submit to an autopsy early. And with Spiritualist and their supporters, we should wait until they are dead and can come back to prove ‘life after death�, and if they are in a hurry, well, that too can be arranged.

There are bits of this book I found terribly amusing. The little saying at one point about a woman who had become convinced that the only people likely to be saved were her and her husband George (and there were times when she wasn’t all that sure about George) made me smile. There were also the times when James would say things that also made me smile, but unfortunately not exactly with him. His agonising over why spirits would make the supreme effort it seemed to take for them to make contact with our realm and yet always seemed quite out of proportion with the nonsense they seemed to come off with.

This book is much more sympathetic to spiritualists and spiritualism than I would have thought likely. If I have one prejudice it is that this stuff does not deserve anything more than laughter.

So, it might seem reasonable to expect that I didn’t like this book. Well, it is a strange thing. Parts of this book annoyed me � but not for the content so much as how it was told. I got a bit lost at times as there seemed to be too many stories going on. But this was less a book about the cheats (oh, sorry, spiritualists) and more about those who had been cheated (oh, I mean, their scientific investigators). I did warn you that I was prejudiced.

What is very interesting is the roll call of exceptional scientists who in one way or another gave their names in support of this kind of research. From Wallace (Darwin’s co-discoverer of Evolution) to Arthur Conan Doyle. That I can think of not a single scientist who would be prepared to say that it is remotely likely that spirits can lift tables or move curtains today either proves that there has been a remarkably successful conspiracy to keep this stuff secret or modern scientific methods of detection are somewhat better at spotting fraud than they were at the start of the 20th century.

This book leaves much of what I would take to be the obvious conclusions that need to be drawn from these ‘experiments� up in the air. This is very much the sort of book that someone of more religious feeling than myself may well come away from reading saying, ‘one just never knows�. Like I said, I found it interesting because of the quotations from some of the greatest scientists of the age struggling to leave even a slither of a door open to religion in any form imaginable. It is sad to watch the delusions of great minds � such a terrible waste.