Science Spars With The Supernatural At Cambridge

By Nancy Mattoon

Raphael. A manual of astrology, or the, book of the stars:
being the art of foretelling future events,
by the influences of the heavenly bodies,
in a manner unattempted by any former author
and divested of the superstitions of the Dark Ages, 1828.
(All Images Courtesy of Whipple Library.)

When Sir Isaac Newton wrote his third law of motion, translated from the Latin as, "To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction," he was talking physics, not philosophy. But his law often seems to govern the world of thought and belief, as much as the world of physical objects. In just one example, when we celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species in 2009, calls for teaching "Intelligent Design" in U.S. schools continued to mount. A new online exhibit from the University of Cambridge's Whipple Library illustrates the same action-reaction phenomena as it unfolded in the 19th century.

Raphael. A manual of astrology, or the, book of the stars:
being the art of foretelling future events,
by the influences of the heavenly bodies,
in a manner unattempted by any former author
and divested of the superstitions of the Dark Ages, 1828.

This library display shows a number of books from the Whipple's collection which illustrate that, in what was known as the "Age of Science," interest in the spirit world and the supernatural was at an all-time high. The Whipple Library was created in 1944, to house a gift of rare books from Robert Stewart Whipple. It is the largest library specializing in the history and philosophy of science and medicine in the UK. The collection includes books documenting everything from "the ancient use of astrology to the current curiosity in new age magic and ghost hunting." The exhibit Adventures in the Unknown: Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and the Supernatural, examines the strange attraction of many eminent 19th century men of science to the world of mediums, spirit guides, ghosts, and communication from "the other side."

Raphael. A manual of astrology, or the, book of the stars:
being the art of foretelling future events,
by the influences of the heavenly bodies,
in a manner unattempted by any former author
and divested of the superstitions of the Dark Ages, 1828.

Robert C. Smith, known as "Raphael," edited a magazine prophetically entitled The Struggling Astrologer beginning in 1824. It was a financial disaster, and was discontinued after only a handful of issues. Smith collected his articles from the periodical in this book, which he dedicated to Sir Walter Scott. It refers to astrology as a science and mentions "...that every problem is calculated merely by an arithmetical process, devoid of any thing resembling divination." It gives the reader instruction on how to make horoscope charts and contains handwritten perpetual tables of the celestial houses.

Frontispiece From:
Transcendental physics:
an account of experimental investigations
from the scientific treatises of
Johann Carl Friedrich Zollner,1882.

Johann Zollner (1834–1882), was a German Professor of Astrophysics at Leipzig, who specialized in optics. The frontispiece of this book depicts the study where he began his investigations of spiritualism and the fourth dimension, along with the notorious American medium, Henry Slade. Slade had been convicted of fraud by British authorities, and was on the lam in Europe when he first met Professor Zollner. Slade convinced Zollner and his fellow séance participants (all respected German scientists) of his skills through the appearance of "spirit writing" on slates, and through the mysterious movement of objects by unseen hands.

A Plate From Transcendental Physics
Depicting The Seance Table Before A Spirit Visitation.

And The Seance Table As Altered By The Spirits.

Zollner believed that these supernatural writings were caused by spirits working through Slade from the fourth dimension, and that the objects on his "seance table" were manipulated by ghosts. (In fact, Slade was extremely adept at writing with his feet, and was a better than average sleight of hand magician. And it didn't hurt that his seances were always conducted in the dark.) The publication of Transcendental Physics (1882) damaged Zollner's scientific reputation, and caused a major scandal in the world of modern German occultism. According to American historian of magic Henry Ripley Evans, by 1892, Slade was "an inmate of a workhouse in one of our Western towns, penniless, friendless and a lunatic."

Portrait of author Alfred Russel Wallace From:
The Wonderful Century, 1898.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist, was one of the great Victorian scientists. He is best known for proposing a theory of evolution due to natural selection independent of, and prior to, Charles Darwin. He publicly embraced spiritualism in 1866, and wrote a number of works on spiritualism including A Defence of Modern Spiritualism (1874). In The Wonderful Century, Wallace describes what he sees as successes and failures of the 19th century. In the failure section he includes a chapter entitled The Opposition to Hypnotism and Psychical Research in which he takes to task those who refuse to accept the validity of mesmerism and hypnotism, in spite of experiments involving men of learning which he believed had "produced convincing evidence." His very public advocacy of spiritualism caused him to lose standing in the scientific world, and even strained what was a previously close friendship with Darwin.

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