The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was established in 1882, in the wake of a disappointed spiritualism and steaming toward the scientific unconscious. A decade earlier, physics had shut out William Crookes’s “psychic force,” but the new psychology was still open to exploration. Psychical researchers penetrated its elite networks despite a roster that included telepathy and apparitions. They did so by emphasizing experimentation over interpretation, muting theoretical controversy until it could play out more productively elsewhere. Frederic Myers, Oliver Lodge, and Andrew Lang brought psy ... More

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was established in 1882, in the wake of a disappointed spiritualism and steaming toward the scientific unconscious. A decade earlier, physics had shut out William Crookes’s “psychic force,” but the new psychology was still open to exploration. Psychical researchers penetrated its elite networks despite a roster that included telepathy and apparitions. They did so by emphasizing experimentation over interpretation, muting theoretical controversy until it could play out more productively elsewhere. Frederic Myers, Oliver Lodge, and Andrew Lang brought psychical data deep into the scaffolding of psychology, physics, and anthropology, respectively, deploying its intellectual alchemy inside highly technical, internal debates. The result was the first formal theory of the subconscious (Myers’ subliminal self), Lodge’s entelechial evolution, and Lang’s revolutionary anthropology of psycho-folkore. This disciplinary speculation of the 1890s outcrossed with larger religious themes later in the decade in venues like Mind and Arthur Balfour’s Synthetic Society. But the psychical focus remained on the problem of knowledge, extending the epistemological concerns of an earlier “crisis of faith.” Except now, instead of just undermining theology, the continuing exclusion of metaphysics from nature tainted the epistemological sources of science as well. Such was the empirical conquest of psychology, collapsing self and object into a single simulation. The psychical self made for a more resilient modern subject. Its dual-aspect monism gave free will, human understanding, and even the modern soul an ontic basis inside phenomenology, while laying out a new path for secular knowledge to boldly move beyond it.