The Society and Unorthodox Science

The Royal Society's standing as the ultimate gatekeeper of legitimate science in Britain meant claims of mesmerism, spiritualism and later psychical research were repeatedly measured against its judgment, even when the Society itself declined to investigate them formally. In the nineteenth century the chemist and Society fellow William Crookes conducted controversial personal investigations into spiritualist mediums, including Florence Cook, using instruments and methods drawn from his own laboratory work, but the Society never endorsed these investigations as its own, and Crookes faced sustained criticism from colleagues who felt he had risked the Society's collective authority on his personal enthusiasms.

The Society's general posture toward psychical research and mesmerism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one of institutional silence rather than active engagement, leaving the field to dedicated bodies such as the Society for Psychical Research, which drew heavily on Royal Society trained scientists as members without ever securing anything like a formal association between the two. This pattern, a research topic pursued by individually credentialed scientists but never adopted institutionally, recurs throughout the history covered by this Atlas, and the Royal Society remains its clearest example, continuing today as the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences and a major funder of mainstream scientific research.