Adela Pinch. Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780521764643. Price: US$95.00/£55.00

The questions that Adela Pinch raises in Thinking about Other People have something of the quality of a hologram: from one angle they appear so strange as to be startlingly original and, from another, they seem so obvious that it is only surprising no one has already asked them. In this book, Pinch explains, she “seeks to explain why nineteenth-century British writers—poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult—were both attracted to and repulsed by” the notion that “thinking about another person could affect him or her, for good or ill” (1). However anomalous such a belief may seem initially, as Pinch describes it in her lucid and entertaining prose, “radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons” quickly come to seem ubiquitous (1). How many of us have reassured a friend in distress, "I'm thinking of you," despite our commonsensical conviction that thinking alone makes no tangible difference? And how many of us have found the obverse unsettling: the knowledge that anyone can think of us who wishes to do so, even those who might wish us harm? As Pinch shows, engaging seriously with nineteenth-century versions of the magical thinking that gives rise to impulses like these opens out onto a wide range of diverse topics (mesmerism, telepathy, gender, marriage, friendship, poetic meter, and the omniscient narrator, to name a few); it offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century debates about ethics, psychology, belief, and the experience of reading; and it makes available a new taxonomy of thinking, grounded not in an empiricist assumption of the dependence of ideas on sensations, but in an opposition between thinking and sensation, or even between thinking and ideas. Although Pinch starts with the question of why nineteenth-century writers imagined that thoughts have material consequences, Thinking about Other People quickly moves beyond the question of origins (in part by making us see that it is the rare person who does not at least occasionally hold this belief) to a series of meditations on its forms and consequences in the nineteenth century. The book opens with two chapters on a wide range of philosophical prose. The choice of writers here is idiosyncratic: the first chapter is devoted to the relatively obscure philosopher James Frederick Ferrier, whose importance for Pinch has to do with his rejection of the empiricist tradition that has dominated accounts of nineteenth-century philosophy and psychology. For Ferrier, “consciousness is actively antagonistic to sensation” (35), identity is the product of a kind of heroic act of self-assertion, and ethics depends not on knowledge or understanding, but is instead “linked directly to the primary act of thinking itself” (39). The next chapter follows up on this notion of ethics as inhering in thinking by exploring a wide range of writers committed to thinking as a form of force: Charles Bray’s notion that thought may be continuous with other forms of energy; James Hinton’s vision of thinking as a form of altruism in and of itself that need not be expressed in acts; and the various authors collected in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which describes “a world of people who are ‘thinking intently’ about people they love, producing and receiving strange extrapersonal mental effects” (60). This chapter also addresses the epiphenomenalists’ conviction that mental life causes absolutely nothing, not even the behavior of the bodies to which any individual consciousness appears to be attached. As much through her choices of texts as in the questions she asks of them, in these chapters Pinch offers what we might call intellectual history from below, seeking to determine not the dark disciplinary …