Science and Religion in Western Literature: Critical and Theological Studies

Edited by Michael Fuller

My chapter “Cosmic Consciousness: Henry James, William James, and the Society for Psychical Research” was published in this volume. In 1884, Williams James founded an American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), a British organization 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. The writer Henry James was skeptical 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.