ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Ernest W. Barnes and James Jeans: Two Perspectives on Spiritualism

• In Event: Sciences and Spiritualism

English Abstract

This paper analyses the attitudes of two major figures in the British scientific and intellectual landscape of the early 20th century, Ernest W. Barnes and James Jeans, towards spiritualism. Spiritualism in Britain has already been the subject of several major studies covering the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g. Janet 1985, Luckhurst 2022, Noakes 2019), which have highlighted the complexity of the context of the time, when the boundaries between science, metaphysics and religion were constantly being debated. This contribution aims to complement existing studies, which rarely refer to Jeans and never to Barnes.
I will draw in particular on a lecture by Barnes, Fellow of the Royal Society and Bishop of Birmingham, entitled ‘Spiritualism and the Christian Faith’ (1918), and a BBC radio broadcast by Jeans in 1930, supplemented by a few documents from their respective archives. Barnes adopts a reserved but curious position towards spiritualist phenomena, showing himself to be favourable towards telepathy experiments. His attitude will be examined in detail, as it shows an original effort to reconcile scientific rigour, Christian theology and spiritualist phenomena. In contrast, Jeans is openly hostile to spiritualism, to the point of arousing the anger of Oliver Lodge, the question raised by Lodge being that of Jeans’ competence in psychical research.

Author

• Florian LAGUENS, IPC-Facultés Libres, Paris