Why Eminence Did Not Transfer

The reaction of Crookes's colleagues was severe and the reasoning behind it has held up. A first-rate experimentalist is trained against one kind of error, the error of a badly designed measurement, and nature does not adapt to defeat the apparatus. A seance does. The sittings were held in Crookes's own house but on terms the medium influenced, with the lighting, the seating and the timing arranged as he preferred, and the reports do not record the kind of controls a conjuror would have insisted on. The sittings with Florence Cook, a young medium who produced a full-form materialised figure called Katie King, drew the most suspicion, since Crookes vouched for her at length and the figure was never observed simultaneously with the entranced medium under conditions that excluded the obvious explanation.

Later writers, from the 1960s onward, have argued that Crookes was either complicit or personally involved with Cook; the evidence offered is circumstantial and the charge is not established. What is established is that no scientist replicated his results, that he did not repeat the measurements under conditions his critics specified, and that he never withdrew the reports. He was knighted in 1897 and became president of the Royal Society in 1913, which tells you how completely Victorian science was able to hold the two halves of his career apart.