All that’s missing in the tales of dead apparitions, moving furniture and sudden revelations of tightly held secrets is the “Twilight Zone” theme song. Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, can tell a good ghost story, and there were many during this unsettled period of industrialization and urbanization when belief in the occult swept through America.
Despite their differences, what nearly all of them shared was the death of a loved one behind their lofty scientific and moral motives was also the very human desire to reconnect with a lost love. Blum details the supernatural studies of James Sidgwick and his wife, Nora his student Fred Myers and other British and American scholars, including the co-founder of evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, and the Nobel-winning scientist Charles Richet. Nor could Sidgwick and his associates understand how scientists could reject their claims without even bothering to investigate.
Blum writes, “He shuddered at the empty silence of what he called ‘the non-moral universe.’ ” Didn’t the church understand, Sidgwick wrote in his diary, that “if the results of our investigation are rejected, they must inevitably carry your miracles along with them”? People like Henry Sidgwick, a classics don at Cambridge who co-founded the British Society for Psychical Research, worried about “humankind stripped of faith.” As Ms.
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