9) On psychical research and eugenics

In 1921, the British psychologist William McDougall declared:

I have two hobbies — psychical research and eugenics. So far as I know, I am the only person alive today who takes an active interest in both these movements. [‘The need for psychical research’]

This was not true. In fact, these two movements had many points of contact and shared many followers. WB Yeats wrote in On the Boiler: ‘Eugenical and psychical research are the revolutionary movements with that element of novelty and sensation which sooner or later stir men to action’. This article will explore the relationship between these two fields, and try to explain it. Although a lot of academic work exists on both psychical research and eugenics, this topic hasn’t been explored before, except for Egil Asprem’s work on William McDougall (see The Problem of Disenchantment, p390–397).

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which explores the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality. For a definition of those terms and an introduction to this project, go here.

The origins of psychical research

The field of psychical research was launched one night in Cambridge, when a young thinker called Frederic Myers went for a ‘star-lit walk’ with his mentor, moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Myers was a restless Victorian seeker — he was made the youngest-ever classics fellow of Trinity College, at 22, but left academia to dedicate himself to women’s education. Spiritually, he started off a Platonist, then briefly became an evangelical Christian, then a fervent disciple of Wordsworth, before flirting with the ‘liberating’ insights of Darwin and TH Huxley. But Darwinian materialism seemed to lead to ‘the decline of any real belief in the dignity, the meaning, the endlessness of life’. What about Spiritualism? He’d had some unusual experiences at seances — at one, a giant hairy hand emerged from the ether. When he reached out and grasped it, it shrank to the size of a baby’s hand, then disappeared altogether. But he was also struck by the amount of fraud and charlatanry in Spiritualism.

Myers wondered if the murky phenomena of Spiritualism might be explored using the open and critical methods of science. One night in Trinity College, walking with his friend Henry Sidgwick, Myers asked the venerable philosopher if he thought it might be possible to ‘solve the riddle of the Universe’ by scientifically examining phenomena like ghosts and spirits. Sidgwick replied that he thought it might be. The two organized a group of friends to investigate ghosts and other spiritual phenomena, and, in 1882, they formally established the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

The SPR was the Victorian equivalent of Ghostbusters, but they were anything but marginal cranks. Henry Sidgwick was the leading philosopher of his generation, and extremely well-connected. His wife, Eleanor, principal of Newnham College, joined the ghost-hunters. Her brother, Arthur Balfour, British prime minister, also joined the SPR and became its president. Other SPR members would include prime minister William Gladstone; Marie Curie; Arthur Conan-Doyle; the French philosopher Henri Bergson; Tennyson, Ruskin, Lewis Carrol, Freud, Jung, and later Julian Huxley. Perhaps the greatest SPR researcher was William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, who would become a close friend and colleague of Myers.

Henry Sidgwick with one of the SPR’s research subjects, the medium Eusepia Palladino

Most of the research was done by Myers, Sidgwick and a few others connected to Trinity College. Myers in particular worked tirelessly, travelling up and down the country to attend over 1000 seances. Sometimes he and Sidgwick would personally cling to the medium’s legs, to make sure they didn’t fake any celestial communications. The SPR published 11,000 pages of their findings in their journal, as well as two enormous books.

Myers declared:

our very raison d’etre is the extension of the scientific method, of intellectual virtues — of curiosity, candour, care — into regions where many a current of old tradition, of heated emotion, even of pseudo-scientific prejudice, deflects the bark which should steer only towards the cold unreachable pole of absolute truth…[Obituary of Henry Sidgwick]

The SPR was trying, like other spiritual movements of the time, to create a post-Darwinian ‘science-religion’, which steered a course through the Scylla of religious fundamentalism and the Charybdis of dogmatic materialism. Myers wrote:

just as the old orthodoxy of religion was too narrow to contain men’s knowledge, so now the new orthodoxy of materialistic science is too narrow to contain their feelings and aspirations.

Myers had huge hopes for psychical research. He thought that, within a few years, the field would prove telepathy (a word he coined), prove the immortality of the soul, and establish reliable lines of communication between the living and the dead. He even set up an experiment for his own death, sealing a message in an envelope, the contents of which he hoped to communicate from beyond the grave.

Alas, that experiment failed. Myers’ spirit proved very loquacious after his death, with mediums reporting over 1000 messages from him. But none of these messages accurately revealed the contents of the envelope. Nor did psychical research have the revolutionary impact he anticipated. Today, it’s a fringe field in academia. It did however, have four long-term impacts.

First, the field has by now amassed a large body of evidence for telepathy or extra-sensory perception, which doesn’t fit with our present materialist model of the mind. Secondly, Myers was one of the first psychologists to hypothesize the existence of a ‘subliminal self’, several years before Freud. Myers argued the ‘subliminal self’ is a ‘rubbish dump and a treasure trove’, containing both primitive instincts, but also latent ‘potentialities’ of creativity, inspiration, healing, and perhaps telepathy, prophecy and connection to the spirit world.

Spiritual experiences, according to Myers and his friend, William James, could be understood as ‘uprushes’ from the subliminal self. They could be delusional or pathological (this was the standard position of materialist psychiatry). But they could also be life-enhancing and empowering. In fact, they could be indicative of ‘an advanced stage of evolutionary progress’.

In other words, mystics and mediums are the first buds of humanity’s superhuman future, when powers like telepathy will be widely distributed. This was a much more positive view of spiritual experiences (and spirituality in general) than was found in mainstream psychiatry and psychology at that time. As such, it was a big influence on transpersonal psychology and the human potential movement, which both owe a great deal to Myers and James’ work.

Finally, perhaps the biggest enduring impact of psychical research was that figures like Myers and James tried to empirically measure spiritual experiences and practices. This ‘empirical spirituality’ inspired later fields like mindfulness science, psychedelic science and the science of hypnosis, all of which are mainstream academic research fields today.

What is the overlap between psychical research and eugenics?

When you look at the membership of the SPR, you notice that many members were also members of the Eugenics Society. The prime minister, Arthur Balfour, was both president of the SPR, and chair of the International Eugenics Conference. Philosopher and SPR president FCS Schiller was also on the council of the Eugenics Education Society. Harvard psychologist William McDougall was both president of the American Society for Psychical Research and also a member of the Eugenics Education Society. British psychologist Havelock Ellis was both a keen psychic researcher and vice-president of the Eugenics Education Society. Statistician RA Fischer was a member of the SPR, and head of the eugenics department at UCL. Cyril Burt, developer of the eleven plus test and founder of Mensa, carried out research into both ESP and eugenics. Julian Huxley was a member of the SPR and president of the Eugenics Society, and his brother Aldous was also interested in both fields. Aldous’ friend, the science journalist Gerald Heard, gave talks on both eugenics and psychical research for BBC Radio in the 1930s. He was introduced to the SPR by the philosopher Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who was also a member of the Eugenics Education Society. In France, Nobel Prize-winning scientists Charles Richet and Alexis Carrel were involved in both psychical research and eugenics. In Italy, physicians Cesare Lombroso, Augusto Tamburini, Leonardo Bianchi and Enrico Morselli were leading figures in psychical research, and also in eugenics. The overlap continues after World War Two — American psychologist Gardner Murphy was both a leading parapsychologist and a supporter of eugenics.

Myers himself was not an active supporter of eugenics, although he knew Francis Galton and even attended a séance with him. But he did express his approval of the ‘much needed science’ of eugenics and saw it as a field allied to his own field of psychical research. He wrote:

The main use of knowing in what ways the race tends to slip backwards is that we may know how to press it forward instead. In short, it is a science of eugenics rather than of therapeutics which is the characteristic, the primary science for any living and modifiable race; and for our dawning practical science of eugenics experimental psychology is the indispensable theoretic precursor. [Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death]

It’s certainly not the case that all psychical researchers were eugenicists. But a surprising number of them were. Before we try to figure out why this overlap existed, let us explore in depth one example — Richard M. Bucke, the author of Cosmic Consciousness.

Bucke had a colourful early life, emigrating from Norfolk to the Canadian outback, running away from home at 16, working on a paddle-ship and then as a gold miner, losing a foot to frostbite. He eventually trained in medicine and became the head of a psychiatric hospital in Ontario. Along the way, he read the poetry of Walt Whitman and befriended the poet. He thought this was the most significant experience of his life. He felt he’d met another order of being, whose mere presence and friendship lifted him up the evolutionary scale.

To explore this idea of higher states of consciousness and higher beings, Bucke wrote Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1902). It was an influence on James’ Varieties, and is a founding document of transpersonal psychology, inspiring later psycho-spiritual researchers like Timothy Leary, Ken Wilber and Rick Doblin.

Bucke helped to develop a secular, quasi-scientific theory of mystical experiences. He’d personally had an experience where, on the road home after an evening reading Whitman and other Romantic poets,

all at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped up in a flame-coloured cloud…Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness…I saw that the universe is not dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.

Like a good psychic researcher, Bucke sets off to collect other specimens of this experience. He decides that the great founders of religions all had experiences of ‘cosmic consciousness’ — a phrase he gets from his friend Edward Carpenter, a late-Victorian spiritual progressive. And he also collects evidence of such experiences among contemporary people, who all happen to be his own friends.

Bucke then decides that episodes of cosmic consciousness are becoming more frequent, and this is evidence that humanity is evolving to a higher state of consciousness. He takes from his friend Edward Carpenter the idea of humanity’s spiritual evolution from a tribal stage, to a stage of self-consciousness and separation, and now into a new stage of cosmic consciousness. It will be ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, when

each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever.

There is a clear eugenic tone to this millennialist vision. Cosmic consciousness is only occurring to a handful of special individuals, a genetic elite, who possess the right heredity, physique, education and ethics. This spiritual elite is, really, a different race, a different species, to common humanity:

The simple truth is, that there has lived on the earth, ‘appearing at intervals,’ for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.

This master-race is as superior to ordinary humans as humans are superior to animals, Bucke says. They possess this exalted capacity for cosmic consciousness, as well as supernormal powers like telepathy. They have ‘transhumanized’ — this is the first historical use of the word in English — into Gods. And naturally they will rule the world.

Bucke himself is one of this master-race — his experience of cosmic consciousness proves it. And so, as it happens, are several of his friends, who are all white, professional, Anglo-Saxon men. Other races, by contrast, are barely out of the animal phase of evolution. ‘There must…be many members of low races, such as the Bushmen of South Africa and native Australians, who never attain to this faculty.’ As humanity evolves into this new species, some will ascend and some will not:

As in the evolution of an individual tree some branches flourish while others fail…so in the forward march of the collective human mind across the centuries some individual minds are in the van of the great army, while in the rear of the column stagger and fall vast numbers of defective specimens

Did Bucke recommend the active pruning of humanity to ensure the evolution of cosmic superbeings? Not as far as I can discover. In fact, in his capacity as head of a psychiatric facility, he pioneered the humane treatment of the insane. Bucke did, however, champion a dubious theory that female mental illness is connected to gynecology, and he carried out over 100 operations on his female patients’ genitals. So he seemed to have the eugenic obsession with operating on the genitalia of the ‘unfit’.

Why the overlap between psychical research and eugenics?

The simplest answer is simply that eugenics and psychical research were both popular in the same intellectual ‘occulture’ at the same time — the 1880s to 1920s — so they were likely to cross-fertilize and attract some of the same free-thinkers. This makes sense. But there are also philosophical and ideological parallels between the two movements.

Both arose in the 1880s as a reaction to the Darwinian idea that the universe is purposeless. Both were post-Darwinian ‘science-religions’, which discovered a new purpose for humanity. At the centre of both was a moralized and spiritualized theory of evolution. Both movements imagined evolution advancing towards the glorious goal of homo superior, the genius, the superbeing. In both, along with the fascination with the exceptional individual comes a Nietzschean distaste for the mob and a grim fascination (or obsession) with those deemed sub-human, who perhaps need to be managed or cleared away to ensure humanity’s evolutionary advance.

Both psychical research and eugenics were activities carried out by a particular class — upper-middle class progressives. They were elite networks. And in both, one sometimes finds a class distaste for the ignorant masses, who get in the way of the evolution of the superhuman. This is not always the case, by any means, but one example of this anti-democratic ethos is the British psychologist William McDougall (1871–1938), who in his day was one of the most influential psychologists in the UK and US.

William McDougall, a ‘Nietzschean reactionary’

McDougall thought psychical research and eugenics were intimately connected. They ‘are the two lines of approach to the most vital issue that confronts our civilization — two lines whose convergence may in the end prevent the utter collapse which now threatens’. Psychical research would protect spiritual values and identify exceptional individuals, while eugenics would identify the degenerates, and deal with them.

McDougall believed that mental traits like intelligence, will-power and creativity are unequally distributed through the human species, and these traits are largely inherited. He thought the advance of human culture depends on a handful of superior minds, and these superbeings are unequally distributed among the classes and races. Most superior minds could be found among people like him, upper or upper-middle class white people (or ‘Nordics’), who should refrain from breeding with ‘lower’ races.

In 1920, McDougall moved to the US, to work at Harvard, and the following year, he published Is America Safe for Democracy? He warned that the US was heading for destruction, because immigration was allowing the unfit to swarm in, and the ‘lower breeds’ were out-breeding the ‘best stock’. One could create a ‘utopia’ through the ‘elimination’ of the lowest classes, he suggests, but this may be impractical. At the least, the government should sterilize those deemed ‘unfit’, introduce the ‘strictest measures’ of immigration, and provide government subsidies to encourage the ‘selected classes’ to have more children. This may not be electorally achievable, in which case democracy should be replaced by ‘some sort of Fascism or oligarchy’.

These views did not endear him to the American public. One reviewer accused him of being a ‘Nietzschean reactionary’. His career went into a ‘slow but colourful decline’, although he did establish the first academic parapsychology department, at Duke University.

A class-based defence against anti-spiritual eugenicists

What’s surprising about the overlap between eugenics and psychical research is that some psychiatrists suggested an interest in spirituality was itself indicative of mental pathology and degeneration. The Israeli eugenicist Max Nordau, for example, suggested mystics are ‘enemies to society of the direst kind. Society…must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin.’ This anti-spiritual eugenics prompted at least one psychical researcher — William James — to angrily reject the entire eugenic enterprise. Reviewing Nordau’s book Degeneration, James wrote:

The trouble is that such writers as Nordau use the descriptive names of symptoms merely as an artifice for giving objective authority to their personal dislikes. The medical terms become mere ‘appreciative’ clubs to knock men down with.

James rejected eugenics because, while he was fascinated by fulfilling human potential, he was also sympathetic towards human frailty. He suffered from depression and panic attacks, and these experiences ‘made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since’.

But other psychical researchers, like Bucke and McDougall, reacted to mainstream psychiatry’s eugenic attack on spirituality by incorporating the ideology of eugenics into their worldview and enacting a class-based eugenic defense of elite spirituality. They insisted that, when educated people like them have spiritual experiences, it is proof of their evolutionary advancement. But the religious experiences of the working class or non-white people are merely mob enthusiasms, symptomatic of degeneration rather than evolutionary advance. You see something similar take place in first-wave feminism. Some eugenicists criticized feminism as dysgenic and bad for the species. And some feminists reacted by defending feminism in eugenic terms, while criticizing working-class and non-white women for over-breeding, as we saw in the previous chapter.

Telepathic globalist politics

But as ever, the history of spiritual eugenics is complicated. For William McDougall, as for WB Yeats, an interest in psychical research and eugenics overlaps with authoritarian and proto-fascist politics. But for many eugenicist psychical researchers, their interests overlap with a politics of international cooperation.

For example, the philosopher Henri Bergson was president of the Society for Psychical Research, and he was also an internationalist, who in 1922 was made president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (a precursor to UNESCO). The ICIC committee included fellow psychical researchers like Marie Curie, Gilbert Murray and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. HG Wells and Julian Huxley, who we’ll meet next chapter, were also internationalists with an enthusiasm for both eugenics and psychical research.

The reason internationalists were also enthusiasts for psychical research was they thought telepathy proved humanity was really one group-mind. For example, Charles Richet, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist and a leading psychical researcher (and eugenicist), declared that his belief in telepathy confirmed his faith in international cooperation — telepathy showed we are all one global consciousness. Algernon Blackwood, the fantasy author and member of the SPR, was not unusual among SPR members in envisaging a future when all humanity would evolve telepathic powers, and this would finally make global consciousness possible:

With the greater powers must come greater knowledge, shared as by instantaneous wireless over the entire planet, and misunderstanding, chief obstacle to progress always, would be impossible. A huge unity, sense of oneness must follow. Moral growth would accompany the increase of faculty. [The Bright Messenger]

The Jesuit paleontologist and (as we’ll see) fan of eugenics, Teilhard de Chardin, also thought instances of telepathy were signs of a developing ‘noosphere’, when human consciousness would be telepathically fused into one mind.

Why would internationalist psychical researchers also promote eugenics? The answer, as we’ll explore in the next chapter, is that they had a global, ecological view of humanity. They took a planetary view of our species and its place in the ecosystem. They believed this planetary, or cosmic, worldview was only possessed by a tiny elite, who are capable of steering ‘Spaceship Earth’. And this planetary, ecological viewpoint made them view other humans as a natural asset, like livestock or mineral resources, which needed to be managed. Population had to be managed because, as Malthus supposedly proved, over-population was the biggest cause of suffering and war.

So you see, the globalist- eugenicist-telepathic view-point was at least consistent and coherent. We’ll examine this philosophy deeper in the next chapter when we turn to the life and work of HG Wells and Julian Huxley, the prophets of transhumanism.

Notes and further reading:

There is now a large literature on the history of psychical research. See, for example, Jeffrey Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible (2010); Allan Gauld’s The Founders of Psychical Research (1968); Ann Taves’ Fits, Trances and Visions (1999); Egil Asprem’s The Problem of Disenchantment (2014); Trever Hamilton’s Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death (2009) and John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission (2011).