– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
The psychical rose into prominence at a particular moment in Western intellectual history, a moment when Darwinism, materialism, and agnosticism (a word newly coined by “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Huxley, to capture and advance the spirit of the new era) were becoming increasingly dominant, when the universe was looking more and more indifferent to human concerns with each new discovery and every passing year. Science was conquering all, and it did not look good for the believer. Nor had it for quite some time. Ruskin put it well when, already in 1851, he expressed his own waning faith: “If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.” By 1877, W. H. Mallock was even more sanguine: “It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing,” he wrote. “One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying.” […]
Myers, in other words, belonged to a group of elite intellectuals who refused to be dogmatic about either their religion or their science. Put less metaphorically, they embraced science as a method that could throw new light on old religious questions. They attempted to work through the polarities of reason and faith toward what they thought of as a new and hopeful “science of religion.” […]
Both their Enlightenment hostility to traditional religion and their Romantic openness to religious experience are worth emphasizing here. On one page, for example, an author like Myers could write of “how much dogmatic rubbish” even the best minds of earlier centuries were clouded by, and then two pages later approach the pious subject of Prayer (which he capitalized) with “the need of a definition which shall be in some sense spiritual without being definitely theological”. Such passages constitute more strong evidence that the modern popular distinction between the “religious” and the “spiritual” is by no means a recent invention, but in fact reaches at least as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, to the birth of modern science.
Such passages also signal that categories like the psychical, the occult, and the paranormal should be studied alongside and contrasted to their cousin-categories of the spiritual and the mystical. All five categories, after all, are eminently modern constructions witnessing to the same broad individuation processes of Western society whereby religion is increasingly “psychologized,” that is, identified as a psychological experience not bound by traditional religious authority. These five terms, however, use different methods, focus on different sorts of reports, and so do different cultural work. Most simply put, whereas the categories of the mystical and the spiritual selectively return to historical religious sources for the creative construction of what amounts to a new religious vision (a perennial philosophy, a comparative theology, and so on), the categories of the psychical, the occult, and the paranormal attempt to move out of the religious register, advancing instead strong scientific or parascientific claims and connotations. This book is concerned with the latter processes, not the former.
Although Myers was certainly deeply influenced by the history of Western mysticism, particularly in its Platonic and Neoplatonic origins, and although he employs the terms “mystical” and “mysticism” in various ways throughout his corpus, his work is also best located in the latter streams of method and thought. Hence he can suggest that at least some mystical and occult events are both empirically real and entirely consistent with natural, though as yet unexplained, laws or patterns.
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