Ethers, Religion and Politics in Late-Victorian Physics: Beyond the Wynne Thesis

Abstract

In the past thirty years historians have demonstrated that the ether of physics was one of the most fl exible of all concepts in the natural sciences. Cantor and Hodge’s seminal collection of essays of 1981 showed how during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries British and European natural philosophers invented a range of ethers to fulfi l diverse functions from the chemical and physiological to the physical and theological. 1 In religious discourse, for example, Cantor identifi ed “animate” and spiritual ethers invented by neo-Platonists, mystics and some Anglicans to provide a mechanism for supporting their belief in Divine immanence in the cosmos; material, mechanistic and contact-action ethers that appealed to atheists and Low Churchmen because such media enabled activity in the universe without constant and direct Divine intervention; and semi-spiritual/semi-material ethers that appealed to dualists seeking a mechanism for understanding the interaction of mind and matter. 2 The third type proved especially attractive to Oliver Lodge and several other late-Victorian physicists who claimed that the extraordinary physical properties of the ether made it a possible mediator between matter and spirit, and a weapon in their fi ght against materialistic conceptions of the cosmos. 3 Lodge was, of course, one of many late nineteenth-century British physicists who were involved in psychical research. More physicists than representatives of other scientifi c disciplines reached senior positions during early decades of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), that symbol of the Victorian intellectual preoccupation with the occult which was founded in 1882. The SPR boasted Balfour Stewart, William Crookes, William Fletcher Barrett, and the third Baron Rayleigh as presidents, J. J. Thomson as a vice-president, and Arthur Chattock, Arthur Schuster, W. C. D. Whetham and many other physicists as ordinary members. It is tempting to think that physicists’ marked interest in the mysterious, and typically invisible and imponderable phenomena, of psychical research was linked to their adherence to the hypothesis of an invisible and imponderable ether. Connections between the ether and the kind of phenomena studied by late-Victorian psychical researchers certainly had some pedigree. From the mid-nineteenth century many spiritualists speculated that “spiritual” ethers or ethereal elements were involved in the production of clairvoyance, telekinesis, and the manifestation of spirits, and they championed physicists’ conception of the ethereal basis of matter as a sign that science in general and physics in particular was becoming spiritualistic. 4 But to what extent did the ether constitute a link between physicists and psychical research?