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Fascinating and a bit heart-wrenching, pioneering psychologist William James and many other well-respected scientists and famous people of the day suggested that psychic phenomena not be completely dismissed without a modicum of inquiry. Formed by journalist Edmund Rogers and physicist William Barrett, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) attempted a scientific assessment of spirituality and the persistence of the soul after death. Eventually splitting into British and American branches, the SPR performed research into psychic phenomena while concurrently exposing frauds and charlatans. It surprised and chilled me how much evidence the Society was able to gather to support the notion of life after death, primarily via the medium Leonora Piper. Their round-robin experiment with several psychic mediums was clever and rather convincing, particularly the spillover to Alice MacDonald Fleming (Alice "Trix" Kipling), sister of Rudyard Kipling, who described the rooms and other elements that had been requested by investigators with no knowledge of their quest.

Blum does not outright state it, but implies that these investigations were most likely abandoned because they were extremely difficult, and also because science itself was becoming increasingly pedantic and reductionist. The final chapter citing Thomas Edison's evaluation of James's interest in psychic phenomena was both telling and sad. He claims that we human beings are essentially machines and that when our gears wear out, only a husk remains. This kind of thinking led to erroneous "scientific" advancements such as counting calories (where all calories are considered equally valid fuel) - wrong; the "stress" theory of ulcers (because no bacterium can possibly survive in an environment as acidic as the human stomach, one of the lowest pH values to be found in nature) - wrong; that baby formula, scientifically created from correct chemical nutrients, is better than breast milk - wrong.

James and his roundly ridiculed compatriots sought a more sophisticated truth, one that we human beings might sense in a deep way, but may not be capable of understanding. In the book, Blum cites one of the researchers comparing this sensibility to the afterlife to our sensitivity to bandwidths of light outside of the visible spectrum, light that we cannot detect with our eyes, but that we feel and know to have real impact on us. These researchers sought an explanation of death more aligned with the uncertainties found in physics, where an electron is both a particle and a wave, and where matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, and where death is more complex than a simple rise into a paradisiacal afterlife (or the opposite) or rotting like an abandoned plow in a field.

I think they were onto something.