Free Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal Page B

however, a
tertium quid
, as its proponents often referred to it in the Latin they all could still read. 9 Emily Williams Kelly points out that Myers had been schooled in the mid-nineteenth-century liberalism of John Stuart Mill, who had argued that new knowledge is created by avoiding the extremes and taking truths from both sides of an honest argument. In this liberal spirit, he put the matter this way: “something is gained if, having started with the preconception that ‘all which is not A is B,’ we have come to the conclusion that our own subject-matter is neither A nor B, but X.” 10 This was the X-option that, as Myers once put it in less Latin and more humor, has “fallen between two stools.” 11
    Myers, in other words, belonged to a group of elite intellectuals who refused to be dogmatic about
either
their religion
or
their science. Put less metaphorically, they embraced science as a method that could throw new light on old religious questions. They attempted to work through the polarities of reason and faith toward what they thought of as a new and hopeful “science of religion.” By such a shocking combination of words (and it
was
shocking), these Cambridge friends did not mean what their much more famous contemporary Max Müller meant by the same phrase over at Oxford, that is, they did not understand religious systems as comparable languages whose family organizations, grammatical structures, and devolving histories of literalization could be speculatively traced through time (whereby, for example, the ancient awe before the sun became the worship of a literal, personalized sun-god).
    What they meant by a science of religion was a fully rational and fundamentally comparative exercise of collecting, organizing, and analyzing experiential data that could not be fully explained by either the theological categories of the churches or the reductive methods of the sciences. In other words, they did not equate rationalism with materialism. And here the reported experiences were the key: collected and compared in astonishing numbers, these constituted the researchers’ experiments and functioned as the base of their empiricism.
    By a science of religion, then, they did not intend a method that would necessarily reduce the religion to the science (although it just might). But neither did they intend away of doing things that would somehow “respect” religion or protect it from the powerful gaze and hard questions of the new scientific method. Rather, what they intended was a still future method that would move beyond both materialistic science and dogmatic religion into real answers to ancient metaphysical questions that had never really been convincingly answered. As Myers put it, “I wish to debate the matter on the ground of experiments and observations such as are appealed to in other inquiries for definite objective proof.” 12 In other words, belief was irrelevant. What mattered now was evidence—empirical, experiential evidence.
    Both their Enlightenment hostility to traditional religion and their Romantic openness to religious experience are worth emphasizing here. On one page, for example, an author like Myers could write of “how much dogmatic rubbish” even the best minds of earlier centuries were clouded by, and then two pages later approach the pious subject of Prayer (which he capitalized) with “the need of a definition which shall be in some sense spiritual without being definitely theological” (HP 2:307, 309). 13 Such passages constitute more strong evidence that the modern popular distinction between the “religious” and the “spiritual” is by no means a recent invention, but in fact reaches at least as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, to the birth of modern science. 14
    Such passages also signal that categories like the psychical, the occult, and the paranormal should be studied