Global Friendships and Occult Networks: The Case of William James and F. W. H. Meyers

The Cambridge classicist F. W. H. Myers helped found the London Society for Psychical Research in 1882.  Myers was a close friend and colleague of the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James.  Both men were extremely active in psychical research with mediums and Spiritualists for decades.  James travelled to Europe on different occasions to work with the Society and was himself instrumental in founding an American branch in 1885.  The present paper looks at this trans-Atlantic friendship, its relationship to the intense religiosities of the two families (James's father was an enthusiastic Swedenborgian, Myers's a pastor), its profound influence on James's psychology and philosophy, and the elaborate global networks, stretching from the U.S. through Europe to India, that constituted the psychical research movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.