Besides James, the SPR could claim many professors, a pioneering evolutionary theorist, several important physicists, two Nobel Prize winners, a distinguished chemist, the principal of the first women's college at Cambridge and the discoverers or developers of half a dozen essential tools for modern life, from the cathode ray tube to wireless telegraphy.ĭeborah Blum's new history of the society's early days, "Ghost Hunters," professes to focus on James' involvement with the group (he's the best known of the initial members), but it's really a broader story. The society attracted some of the great minds of its era, including American psychologist and philosopher William James. The "ghost hunters" of the SPR were far from being the conglomeration of kooks you might expect.
The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 to answer questions that seemed terribly pressing at the time: Is there life after death? Is the human mind more than a collection of chemical and electrical reactions? Does some kind of divine intelligence inform the universe? Of course, those questions haven't gone away, despite fears on the part of SPR members that scientific materialism would soon become the ruling dogma of Western life.
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