The Invention of Telepathy

by Roger Luckhurst

The belief in telepathy is still widely held and yet it remains much disputed by scientists. Roger Luckhurst explores the origins of the term in the late nineteenth century. Telepathy mixed physical and mental sciences, new technologies and old superstitions, and it fascinated many famous people in the late Victorian Sigmund Freud, Thomas Huxley, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. This is an exciting and accessible study, written for general readers as much as scholars and students.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Paranormal, Education

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.

Reviews

[Hooper Bring]

“The problem of confirming theories in the conjectural sciences was on the forefront of scientists’ minds during the Victorian era. Frank notes that Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin’s greatest supporters, “worried aloud about the fact that the paleontological record shows ‘no evidence of [evolutionary] modification…’. In Origin of Species Darwin’s imagination had driven him beyond the evidence available to him.” The fossil record, by definition, only shows extinct species, and as Darwin notes, yields very few specimens. Huxley worried about Darwin’s leap from noting extinct species to suggesting that those species represent ancestors of modern species. Roger Luckhurst explores the anxieties created by new scientific discovers further in his book The Invention of Telepathy, where he suggests that the occult sciences grew out of spaces of epistemological doubt in the institutional sciences: “[Telepathy] does not derive from anti-materialist Spiritualism, but emerged from the interspaces [the Spiritualist and scientist, William] Crookes levered open from anomalies in mechanical models. The phenomena he examined were part of the occasion for inaugurating, in Kuhnian terms, a phase of extraordinary science, where experiment runs in advance of theoretical paradigms and becomes messy and unbounded, and full of ‘many speculative and unarticulated theories.’”