WHAT THE OCCULT REVEALS

Abstract

Where does occultism fit on the map of modernity? Frank Miller Turner proposed an intriguing answer in his 1974 study Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. The book examined the lives and struggles of six Victorian men: the philosophers Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, the scientists Alfred Russel Wallace and George John Romanes, and the writers Frederic W. H. Myers and Samuel Butler. Of the six, three cultivated a serious and sustained interest in the occult. Sidgwick and Myers engaged in psychical research, while Wallace immersed himself in phrenology and spiritualism. Raised as Christians, all of them came to find Christian belief inadequate. Yet the scientific naturalism that might have provided an alternative pole for their allegiance, that was the alternative pole of allegiance for much of their generation, failed to entice them. All had ethical qualms about its refusal to comment on God's existence or on life after death. All, too, wondered about the soul and bemoaned the reluctance of scientists to investigate the immaterial and subjective aspects of human nature. Caught between the Christianity of their upbringing and the scientific naturalism of their adulthood, Turner argued, these men “came to dwell between the science that beckoned them and the religion they had forsaken.”