Crookes (1874)

Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism

Article Analysis — AI-characterized, source-grounded

Contents

• Provenance
• What this document is
• What the compilation covers, paper by paper
• Reported experimental results
• What the document itself concludes
• Document-integrity notes

Provenance

• Author as printed: William Crookes, F.R.S.
• The stored text is an OCR extraction of a scanned pamphlet issued by J. Burns, 15 Southampton Row, London, 1874, self-described as “[Reprintedfrom The QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE.]” The scan copy carries a Boston Medical Library stamp and an Internet Archive digitization notice (2010, funded by Open Knowledge Commons and Harvard Medical School).
• Bibliographic record: ‘Researches in the phenomena of spiritualism’, Crookes, William, 1832-1919; QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, 1874.
• read the complete extracted text

What this document is

This is a compilation pamphlet gathering William Crookes’s serial publications on what he termed “Psychic Force.” It contains: (1) an opening essay (elsewhere in the text dated to July 1870) on how scientific method should approach spiritualist claims; (2) “Experimental Investigation of a New Force,” reprinted from the Quarterly Journal of Science, July 1, 1871; (3) “Some Further Experiments on Psychic Force,” from the same journal, October 1, 1871; (4) “Psychic Force and Modern Spiritualism: A Reply to the ‘Quarterly Review,'” with a prefatory note signed “William Crookes. London, Dec, 1871”; and (5) correspondence concerning Dr. W. B. Carpenter’s public account of Crookes’s experiments, involving Professor G. G. Stokes and Sir Charles Wheatstone.

The stakes, as the document frames them, are twofold: whether phenomena reported around the medium Mr. Daniel Dunglas Home can be brought under instrumental test conditions, and whether the scientific establishment (the Royal Society, the British Association, the Quarterly Review) has dealt fairly with the resulting reports. Crookes repeatedly distances himself from spiritualist theory while insisting on the reality of the physical effects he measured, writing that “I have thus arrived at certain definite results which I think it right should be published.”

What the compilation covers, paper by paper

The 1870 essay argues that scientific men have a duty to examine publicly discussed phenomena, quotes Professor De Morgan and Faraday, criticizes “the pseudo-scientific spiritualist,” and lists instrumental tests science may demand — a delicately poised balance, a phonautograph membrane, a pendulum in a glass case on solid masonry. It states that the only good series of test experiments the author had then met with were those of the Count de Gasparin.

The July 1871 paper describes evening sittings in Crookes’s gas-lit dining room with Mr. Home, witnessed by “Dr. A. B.” and “Serjeant C. D.” (later identified in appended letters as William Huggins and Edwd. Wm. Cox), Crookes’s brother, and his chemical assistant. Two apparatus are described: a drum-shaped cage of two wooden hoops (1 foot 10 inches and 2 feet diameter) joined by 12 laths and wound with 50 yards of insulated copper wire in 24 rounds, into which a newly purchased accordion was placed; and a 36-inch mahogany board, one end on a table and the other hung from a self-registering spring balance. The paper reports the accordion playing while held “in the usual manner,” and later floating and playing with no hand near it, and reports downward pulls on the balance while Mr. Home’s fingers rested lightly at the board’s supported end. Huggins’s letter confirms the account of what he saw but adds that “I express no opinion as to the cause of the phenomena which took place”; Cox’s letter proposes the terms Psychic Force, Psychics, and Psychism, and a Psychological Society.

The October 1871 paper answers critics (“Doubt, but do not deny”), recounts prior verifications by Professor Boutlerow of St. Petersburg, Count Agenor de Gasparin (1854), M. Thury of Geneva (1855, who proposed the terms psychode and ectenic force), and Dr. Robert Hare (communicated to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, August, 1855). It reproduces correspondence with Professor Stokes over papers sent to the Royal Society on June 15, 1871 and June 28, and disputes a Spectator report of their rejection. It then describes new experiments in which contact was made only through water (a copper vessel dipping into a glass vessel of water placed over the board’s fulcrum), or not at all, with curves traced by a steel point on clock-driven smoked glass; further experiments with a stretched-parchment apparatus were tried with an unnamed non-professional lady in Mr. Home’s absence. It closes by rebutting Mr. Coleman Sellers’s claim, relayed via Professor Morton, that the mahogany board should weigh about 134 pounds (Crookes reports four balances in his house confirm 6 pounds, and traces the board’s sixteen-year history).

The Reply to the Quarterly Review defends Crookes, Huggins, Cox, Mr. Varley, and Lord Lindsay against an October article, “Spiritualism and its Recent Converts.” Crookes sets the reviewer’s statements against his own printed words in parallel columns, rebuts three charges the reviewer made “advisedly” (including the claim that his Royal Society Fellowship was conferred with hesitation — he prints Professor Alex. W. Williamson’s 1863 letters and notes his election on the 4th of June, 1863), reprints a long defense by an unnamed eminent chemist from the Birmingham Morning News, and answers separate public accusations by Mr. John Spiller, F.C.S., in the Echo and English Mechanic.

The closing correspondence concerns a lecture by Dr. W. B. Carpenter at the Vestry Hall, Chelsea, on Friday, 19th January, 1872, which Crookes calls a misrepresentation of his water-contact experiment; letters from G. G. Stokes (February 25th, 1872), C. Wheatstone (March 14, 1872, with an enclosed note from Carpenter), and Crookes’s rejoinder are printed. The text breaks off mid-sentence within this exchange.

Reported experimental results

Figures below are as printed in the surviving text (several fractions are OCR-damaged; see integrity notes).

Experiments II–IV report irregular descents of the board with Mr. Home’s hands on the apparatus stand, one foot away, and 3 feet away, his hands and feet held; Experiments V–VI report percussive vibrations and slow lever movements on the parchment apparatus with the lady and with Mr. Home. Wheatstone’s letter, contesting the earlier form of the water experiment, computes that displacing 3 cubic inches of water would exert a pressure equal to 6816 grains against Crookes’s reported 5000 grains; Crookes replies that this addresses an “imperfect form” superseded in his September 27th, 1871 paper.

What the document itself concludes

Crookes concludes that his experiments establish “the existence of a new force, in some unknown manner connected with the human organisation, which for convenience may be called the Psychic Force.” He states the force varies enormously in Mr. Home from week to week and hour to hour, acts at a distance (not unfrequently two or three feet), is probably possessed by all human beings in some degree (he reports nine or ten persons found with it, and five or six met in private families within twelve months), and that “the evolution of psychic force is accompanied by a corresponding drain on vital force.” He repeatedly caveats that he hazards no hypothesis as to cause, has “seen nothing to convince me” of the spiritual theory, and — in the December 1871 preface — likens himself to an electrician at Valentia testing cable pulsations regardless of their causation. Of the Quarterly Review attack he concludes that “in ten distinct instances the reviewer has deliberately calumniated me.” The pamphlet’s own supporting voices are likewise qualified: Huggins declines any causal opinion; Cox attributes the force to the nerve system and cites the Dialectical Society committee’s findings.

Document-integrity notes

• Heavy OCR damage throughout: the title page is garbled (“yHENOMENA PIRITUALISM”), dates print as “1 87 1,” and fractional figures are corrupted (e.g., “6\ lbs.”, “3! lbs.”, “i| lbs.”, “\\ inches”), so several key fractions — including the balance reading between 3 and 9 lbs., Crookes’s standing-weight deflection short of 2 lbs., the fingers’ distance from the board’s end, and the board’s printed width — cannot be read with confidence from this copy; the temperature range’s upper figure prints as “JO° F.”
• The copy is an Internet Archive scan of the 1874 J. Burns pamphlet: library stamps, digitization boilerplate, and what appear to be handwritten marginalia fragments (e.g., “ft.lC /WvO yrcsjh”) are embedded in the text stream.
• None of the woodcuts or instrument tracings survived extraction: Figs. 1–13, including the accordion-cage cuts, the apparatus diagrams, and the smoked-glass force curves, are present only as captions and in-text references, as is Stokes’s geometric diagram (“Fig. 1 (half scale)”).
• The text ends mid-sentence in the Carpenter correspondence (“…should have omitted to read the few lines which connect these passages ; ot”), so the compilation is truncated.
• The metadata line dates the item 1874 and labels it an article; the stored text is in fact a multi-part reprint collection whose constituent papers carry their own dates (July 1870; July 1, 1871; October 1, 1871; Dec., 1871; correspondence of 1872).