Title: Seeing Things: Science, the Fourth Dimension, and Modern Enchantment
Abstract: RELIGIOUS DOUBT AND FEELINGS OF UNCERTAINTY were common in the nineteenth century, but only occasionally did they become so acute that they produced the kind of despair and paralysis described by C.Howard Hinton (1853-1907), who at one point found himself unable to say or do anything at all.At the Rugby School and then Oxford for bachelor's and master's degrees, Hinton wrote letters home about his deteriorating condition.The first indication that something was wrong was contained in a note to his father written in 1870, where he admitted that religious doubts were preventing him from proceeding with confirmation in the Church of England.But that was only a beginning, for Hinton's skepticism was running in deeper channels.When he left Oxford in 1877 and began teaching at a private secondary school, he started to feel not just that everything he knew about religion had to be discarded, but that our basic perceptions of the world were illusory.Could we say that we knew anything with certainty?Could we believe what we saw or touched?Did our eyes tell us anything true about objects?These kinds of doubts were not merely philosophical; they were personally distressing in a way that obliterated Hinton's basic sense of security and competency in the world.He experienced a sickening vertigo as the ground tilted beneath his feet.When he looked to friends for cues on how to act or speak truly, he could not right himself.Speech became difficult."For to a mind that inquires into what it really does know," he explained later, matter-of-factly, "it is hardly possible to enunciate complete sentences.""I was reduced," he wrote once of this time in his life, "to the last condition of mental despair." 1 Hinton's way of overcoming this intense despair is not well known among historians, but the despair itself is quite familiar to anyone working on nineteenthcentury Europe or America.Religious despair and doubt in this period has been discussed extensively, beginning with Progressive Era historians, who saw doubt and the turn away from religious superstition and supernaturalism as a necessary part of