Augustus de Morgan - Spiritualism

Spiritualism

De Morgan later in his life became interested in the phenomena of Spiritualism. In 1849 he had investigated clairvoyance and was impressed by the subject. He later carried out paranormal investigations in his own home with the medium Maria Hayden. The result of these investigations was later published by his wife Sophia. De Morgan believed that his career as a scientist might have been affected if he had revealed his interest in the study of spiritualism so he helped to publish the book anonymously. The book was published in 1863 titled From Matter to Spirit: The Result of Ten Years Experience in Spirit Manifestations.

According to (Oppenheim, 1988) De Morgan's wife Sophia was a convinced spiritualist but De Morgan shared a third way position on spiritualist phenomena which Oppenheim defined as a "wait-and-see position", he was neither a believer or a skeptic, instead his viewpoint was that the methodology of the physical sciences does not automatically exclude psychic phenomena and that such phenomena may be explainable in time by the possible existence of natural forces which as yet physicists had not identified.

In the preface of From Matter to Spirit (1963) De Morgan stated:

Thinking it very likely that the universe may contain a few agencies—say half a million—about which no man knows anything, I can not but suspect that a small proportion of these agencies—say five thousand—may be severally competent to the production of all the phenomena, or may be quite up to the task among them. The physical explanations which I have seen are easy, but miserably insufficient: the spiritualist hypothesis is sufficient, but ponderously difficult. Time and thought will decide, the second asking the first for more results of trial.

John Beloff in Parapsychology: A Concise History (1997) wrote that De Morgan was the first notable scientist in Britain to take an interest in the study of spiritualism and his studies had influenced the decision of William Crookes to also study spiritualism. De Morgan was also an atheist and because of this had debarred him from a position at Oxford and Cambridge.