Mind Dust and White Crows – The Psychical Research of William James

William James famously remarked that in order to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough to prove one single crow to be white. This advice has not generally been followed by mainstream psychology, of which James was a part in his generation, although he was far more intellectually courageous than most in venturing into psychical research. It is interesting to note that in the year after his death, Harvard was offered money to endow a chair of psychical research, which they refused, presumably on the grounds of academic credibility. Had James still been alive, the outcome might have been different and the dominance of behaviourism less marked. As it turned out, psychology deviated from James's outlook, only to recover in part with the advent of consciousness studies since the 1990s. This volume bridges the divide between his widely accepted works and those on mediumship, telepathy and possession, with many essays published in book form for the first time.

The 27 chapters are divided into five parts: psychology and psychical research; telepathy, automatism, and extended consciousness; mediumship; possession; and the metaphysics of life after death. The introduction places James in the intellectual landscape of his time dominated by the advent of evolution and the compensating foundation of societies for psychical research in the 1880s. Both James and Wallace challenged the scientism espoused by Huxley with his one-sided dismissal of any belief in so-called supernatural phenomena and his insistence that scientific explanations had to be naturalistic. James was a pragmatist and radical empiricist open to the implications of the full range of human experience.

There are many seminal essays, addresses and book reviews in this volume, notably of Phantasms of the Living and Myers' Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, which brings up James's ambiguity around the issue – in this respect, his post-mortem journal through Jane Roberts makes complementary reading and very much comes across as an extension of his thinking while alive. James comments that Myers' hypothesis based on the evidence adduced is in its logical form 'a scientific construction of very high order.' Readers who are not already acquainted with his Ingersoll lecture on immortality will find it reprinted here with a preface countering some initial objections, and it is worth noting how similar arguments are more fully elaborated by FCS Schiller in his Riddles of the Sphinx (1891). In brief, this is an invaluable collection that belongs in any philosophy and psychology library.