Testimony, Fiction, and the Science of the Mind: Occult Empiricism and A.P. Sinnett’s Karma: A Novel

Abstract

Nineteenth-century mental science was open to a wide spectrum of hypotheses, supported by the testimonial evidence of an equally diverse group of researchers.A long arc can be drawn across the century, tracing the development of mental science from an investigation of soul as much as brain to a body of associated research fields dominated by empiricist research methods and epistemologies.Mid-to-late-century scientists of this latter persuasion rooted their research in expert knowledge and professional scientific methodologies.This discourse of professionalism frequently sought to strengthen itself by polemically rejecting the amateur, non-empirical approaches of esoteric or occult theorists: mesmerists, Spiritualists, Theosophists and, to some extent, psychical researchers.These groups vociferously opposed these attempts to push their knowledge and research to the margins of science.They proposed competing methodologiesan occult empiricismwhich claimed scientific value for the subjective, experiential perceptions of the non-expert mind.This diverse group of occult empiricists embraced many of the methodological principles of empiricist mental physiology, or "psychophysiology," including the principle that observed phenomena, however strange, must fit within the framework of natural law and have physical causes.However, the bounds of the natural and physical were typical of what Egil Asprem has identified as an "open-ended naturalism" common in occultism and psychical research of the period (Problem 9-10).This expanded naturalistic perspective readily incorporated phenomena that psychophysiologists might deem supernatural into experiments and theories.These competing empiricisms are part and parcel of what Rick Rylance calls the "first-person/third-person problem" in mental science (42), a spectrum of debate over the admissibility of subjective, interior experience within objective empirical research.The authority of the scientific expert, the reliability of the observing brain, and the trustworthiness of testimony loom large in this debate.In the context of these contesting empiricisms, journalist and occultist Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840-1921) published Karma: A Novel (1885).This was a staunch defence, via fiction, of occult empirical methods of knowing the mind and knowing with the mind, using what Sinnett believed to be the untapped potential of psychic powers for scientific observation.Karma devotes much of its narrative energies to defending the reliability of the minds of non-experts and the authenticity of their testimonies, both core planks of occult empiricism.Sinnett's attempt to use fiction to develop and communicate a scientific method for the study of the mind might seem to the modern mind both unusual and doomed to failure, but it is emblematic of a great number of similar conflations of fiction, occultism, and science in the period.This article will analyse Karma in the context of all three currents in latenineteenth-century Anglophone culture.I will argue that the novel is emblematic of the way in which the occult empirical emphasis on testimony as evidence mediated mental scientific methods and concepts between popular fiction, occultism, psychical research, and psychophysiology.My analysis has two main objectives.First, I want to interpret Karma and situate it in its intellectual and cultural context to show the key tenets of occult empiricism which the novel makes clear, both within itself and in the wider context of nineteenth-century mental science.Second, my analysis aims to explore the