The Unseen World

Chapter seven concentrates on James's theory of immortality, focusing on his explanation of the supposed communications from the dead. It establishes that his study of trance states in Spiritualist mediums led him to formulate the sublime cosmic reservoir theory, or the view that upon bodily death consciousness melds organically with all previous consciousness and is stored over time in the cosmos, which James called the “mother sea of consciousness.”

Out of the Egg

Chapter three charts James's contributions to the Society for Psychical Research and the American Society for Psychical Research a researcher, investigator, officer, committee chairman, financial supporter, and cheerleader.

Consciousness beyond the Margin

Chapter six examines James's theory of the subliminal self and contextualizes that theory within three competing explanations of the unconscious: the German idealist, French pathology, and British materialist schools.

Tertium Quid Redux

Two months before he died in August 1910, William James told Henry Adams that he was “an old man soon about to meet his maker.”1 Even before his prophecy, James began finishing his major philosophical writings A Pluralistic Universe and The Meaning of Truth...

A Human Rat Hole

Chapter four examines James's role as an investigator of physical mediums purporting to levitate tables and materialize ghostly forms of the deceased, and recounts the instances when he revealed several of them to be frauds including the notorious Eusapia Palladino.

Dramatic Possibilities

Chapter five traces James's role as an investigator of mental mediums purporting to communicate messages from the dead through automatic writing and trance speech. It examines the numerous mediums he studied and shows how and why Mrs. Leonora Piper, the famous Boston Spiritualist medium, convinced him of the “dramatic possibility” that her phenomena were real and genuine.

Moral Heroes

Chapter two recounts how James came to psychical research in the early 1880s through a series of friendships and professional relationships he formed with members of the British intellectual aristocracy especially through participation in their social and diner clubs.

A Relish for the Non-Normal

Chapter one maintains James's interest in Spiritualism emerged during late 1840s and early 1850s in his boyhood in New York City and London, and shows how it likely derived from his father's and father's friends' investigations of and conversations about Spiritualism.

Tertium Quid

At approximately one o’clock on a cold, rainy, and blustery New England day, 6 March 1889, Mr. Robertson James ambled up the front stone steps to the grand oak door located at 5 Boylston Place on Beacon Hill near the Massachusetts State House. On the other side lay the offices of the American Society for Psychical Research, where his brother William James, the psychologist and philosopher, and Richard Hodgson, the organization’s secretary, awaited him. Robertson had come directly to inform them that the James brothers’ aunt—Mrs. Catherine Walsh—had just passed away. Although “Aunt Kate’s” death certificate stated that she had died at “about 12 o’clock midnight,” her nephew had just been notified that she had passed away about 2:00 or 2:30 A.M. earlier that morning. Robertson, however, had not arrived from the coroner’s office, the hospital, the police station, or her bedside. Nor had he spoken with any physicians, nurses, aids, or relatives. Rather, he had just returned from a séance with Mrs. Leonora Piper, the trance medium whose primary control “Dr. Phinuit,” purporting to be in contact with Aunt Kate’s spirit in the “other world,” had announced the news. According to a statement signed by all three men, “Mrs. Walsh has been ill for some time and had been expected during the last few days to die at any hour. This is written before any despatch has been received informing [us] of the death.” Mrs. Alice Gibbens James, William’s wife and a Spiritualist enthusiast, also had participated in the séance. When she inquired about Aunt Kate, Mrs. Piper replied that “she is poorly” and suddenly threw her head back and blurted out, “Aunt Kate has come.” Mrs. Piper informed Mrs. James that when she returned home that evening she would find a “letter or telegram … saying she was gone.” When the Jameses did return home, William wrote, “I found a telegram as ...