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and the invisible, or the immanent and the transcendent. A quintessentially
“Western” and “modern” corollary is found in the writings of the nineteenth-
century geologist and Spiritualist psychometrist, William Denton. For
Denton, the natural world consisted of a vast moral apparatus of radiant
forces inscribed into all things, from rocks and fossils in the ground, to the
leaves on a tree, to the birds perched on its branches, to the human eye
that beholds such a scene, to the daguerreotype camera, which—like the
disciplined techniques of psychometry—possesses the power to catalogue
the broad canopy of eternal things and which, by the beautiful “chemistry”
of intermingling of material and spiritual fluids, impresses these essential
properties onto our conscious minds (Denton 1888; see also Cox 2003:
109–10, 225–7).
Denton was only one of many adherents to Spiritualism, the popular
religious movement that spread across and beyond the Atlantic world
over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the
United States to Britain, France, Germany, Brazil, and further-flung locales.
Spiritualists were marked by considerable differences of social location,
political orientation, and degrees of accommodation to prevailing religious
orthodoxies (such as mainline Protestantism, Anglicanism, or the Roman
Catholic Church), but for the most part they were united in their commitment
to a cosmology of sympathetically interconnected and eternal intelligences,
in the form of spirits that survived corporeal life and that served as the
animating force behind all things. Often, the rapport of spirits with the
material world was explained in terms of a “universal fluid,” analogous to the
flow of electricity—another mysterious power that in the nineteenth century
was propelling dramatic, new technological advancements in the form of
telegraph cables, telephones, light bulbs, and dynamo engines. By thus
proposing to ground the moral, social, and physical order in a “naturalist”
account of universal spirit forces, Spiritualists sought to overcome what
many nineteenth-century witnesses perceived as the increasingly shaky
foundations of Christian scripture and at the same time to win scientific
credibility from skeptical detractors and curious onlookers. Not unlike the
animist shaman who “activates the powers of a different body,” Spiritualists
turned to their own material culture of writing instruments, metal wires
and cables, magnets, pressure gauges, clocks, and cameras in their efforts
to communicate with the dead. In so doing, they dissolved the distinctions
between the material and the immaterial and between “this world” and
“the next,” just as, all around them, modern subjects were dissolving once-
fixed notions of past and present, or proximate and distant, through the
transmission of a telegraph message across the ocean, the recording of one’s
voice on a phonograph, or the photographic preservation of one’s image
after death (see Connor 1999; Noakes 2002; Stolow 2007).