“You don’t want to mess with Mrs. Sidgwick!”. No Victorian has ever written a statement like this, though it is certainly along the lines of what many contemporaries of Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick were thinking. Born on 11 March 1845 into one of the most politically and intellectually influential families in Britain, Nora (as she was … Read more
In keeping with mesmerism and hypnotism as the themes of the last prize (a copy of Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud), I selected Alison Winter’s seminal study Mesmerized. Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain for the next draw. Published in 1998 by University of Chicago Press, Winter’s meticulously researched study continues to set the … Read more
In my last article on William James’ heretical science I mentioned that among the many opponents of his studies of alleged psychic phenomena were representatives of “scientific naturalism”, which I stated was “not the same as ontological materialism, of which major science ‘naturalizers’ such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall in Britain, and Emil du … Read more