The Sceptic Inside the Society

Podmore is the most useful of the founders for a reader trying to work out what the early Society for Psychical Research actually established, because he spent his career inside it disbelieving most of what it published. He was a Post Office clerk by profession and a Fabian socialist by conviction, one of the small group who named the Fabian Society, and he brought to the investigation of mediums a temperament suited to the work: patient, unimpressed, and interested in exactly how a thing had been done. He co-signed Phantasms of the Living while remaining considerably less persuaded by its argument than Gurney was. His own position settled into a narrow one. He allowed that telepathy between living minds might turn out to be real, since the experimental evidence for it seemed to him not yet explained away, and he rejected essentially everything else, including every form of physical mediumship he examined and the entire case for communication with the dead. That is a harder line than most modern sceptics need to take, because most of the phenomena he was refuting are no longer claimed. It is also a reminder that the categories sceptic and believer were never as clean as later summaries suggest. Podmore was a founder of the field and one of its most destructive critics at the same time, and he held both roles for nearly thirty years without apparent strain.