Henry Sidgwick

Sidgwick's participation was not an eccentricity attached to a distinguished career; it followed from a crisis inside it. He had resigned his Trinity College fellowship in 1869 because he could no longer subscribe honestly to the Thirty-Nine Articles, an unusually costly act of integrity, and he spent the rest of his life working on ethics without a religious foundation. The Methods of Ethics, published in 1874, ends by acknowledging a gap he could not close: on his own analysis, the demands of self-interest and the demands of duty do not reliably coincide unless something beyond this life makes them do so.

Given that gap, the question of whether personality survives death was for him a live philosophical problem rather than a superstition, and he could not see why an empirical question of that magnitude should be left entirely to people with no standard of evidence at all. He became the first president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 for that reason, and his name on the letterhead is much of why the society was taken seriously in its first decade. It is worth being precise about what that respectability did and did not buy. It secured the society a hearing, a subscription list and access to laboratories and journals that would otherwise have been closed. It did not secure agreement, then or later, and Sidgwick himself was careful never to suggest that his own standing was an argument for any particular conclusion.

Sidgwick did not work alone. Eleanor Sidgwick, a mathematician who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, was in practice the more rigorous investigator of the two, and it was largely she who exposed several of the physical mediums the society examined, publishing detailed accounts of how the effects had been produced.

Together with the group around them the Sidgwicks conducted the Census of Hallucinations in the early 1890s, an attempt to establish by survey how often people experience an apparition and how often such an experience coincides with a distant death. Their conclusion after nearly two decades is the part worth preserving. Sidgwick stated in his presidential addresses that he was not appreciably nearer to a settled conviction than when he began, and that the accumulation of testimony had not carried him where he had hoped it would. Coming from a man who had given eighteen years to the effort and had every personal motive to conclude otherwise, that is a more useful datum than most of the case reports the society published, and it is the standard against which later confident summaries of the same evidence should be read. Eleanor Sidgwick outlived him by four decades and continued the work, publishing critical assessments of mediumship well into the twentieth century.