ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an episode in late 19th-century intellectual history when the relationship between science and religion was being transformed by secularisation. During this episode, both the authority and purview of science and religion were contested, and intellectuals in newer fields like psychology actively engaged in what we might call boundary work. In 1884, Williams James founded an American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), a British organisation that explored the supernatural by employing ostensibly scientific methods. SPR members on both sides of the Atlantic believed that science could yield insights about the unseen world. Influenced by the earlier movement known as Spiritualism, psychical researchers brought scientific methodologies to bear upon telepathy, divination, and other psychic phenomena. Their goal was to communicate with the dead and to provide evidence of a supernatural world. The writer Henry James was sceptical of his brother William's investigations, yet he studied the SPR's ‘copious psychical record of cases of apparitions’ to write his most famous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1898). The story of the James brothers and the SPR reveals a surprising convergence of religion and science at a time when they were increasingly understood to be antagonistic or incompatible worldviews.
