James Stanley Grimes

Background

James Stanley Grimes was born on May 10, 1807 in Boston. His parentage is uncertain: he was probably the son either of Andrew Grimes and Polly Robbins or of Joseph Grimes and Sally Robbins.

Education

He then became professor of medical jurisprudence in the Castleton Medical College; he also taught for a period in Willard Institute, which claimed to be the first woman’s college established in the United States.

Career

He practised law for a time in Boston and New York City, and was sufficiently prominent in his profession to enjoy the acquaintance of Webster. Choate, Clay, and Van Buren. He then became professor of medical jurisprudence in the Castleton Medical College; he also taught for a period in Willard Institute, which claimed to be the first woman’s college established in the United States. Eventually he drifted to the newly founded town of Evanston, 111. , where he resided for the rest of his long life.

His main interest, however, was not in the law but in wide speculative problems of sciences and pseudo-science.

His attention was attracted at the outset by phrenology; he threw himself into the study of this subject in 1832 and for a number of years was one of its most fervent exponents. In his leisure moments he roamed the platforms of the Eastern states, delighting equally in lecture and debate.

In 1839 he published A New System of Phrenology, in which he set forth a different system of classification from the orthodox one of Spurzheim, substituting, for the latter’s dichotomy of mental functions into the intellectual and affective, a threefold division into ipseal (self-regarding), social (other-regarding), and intellectual (relation-regarding) activities.

O. S. Fowler, editor of the American Phrenological Journal, promptly attacked the heretic in a thirteen-page review, and, although Grimes’s system was championed by the important Phrenological Society of Albany, it made little headway against Fowler’s opposition.

Grimes then for a time turned his energies to mesmerism and mental healing and is credited by Woodbridge Riley with having started “the whole tribe of Yankee healers”. In particular, it was a lecture of his in Poughkeepsie which first aroused the interest of Andrew Jackson Davis in the subject of mesmerism.

During the next two decades his pen became increasingly active.

Appeared Phreno-Geology (1851), which Grimes claimed was “the first essay ever published on theistic evolution”; then, The Mysteries of Human Nature Explained, a further study of occult phenomena, giving special attention to the errors of spiritualism; and then, Outlines of Geonomy a hardy statement of various ingenious theories in regard to the formation of planetary systems and of the earth.

In 1860 he made his last appearance on a New England platform in a series of eight debates on spiritualism at the Melodeon in Boston, where he successfully routed his spiritualistic opponent, Leo Miller.

Shortly after this he retired to Evanston and sank into forty years of obscurity broken only by the publication of his belated Phreno-Physiology in 1893. He would seem never to have lost his self-confidence, however, for at the age of seventy he persuaded an insurance company to change a $4, 000 life policy to an annuity policy of $400. Under this second policy he drew over $10, 000 before he died twenty-six years later.

Achievements

• Grimes was one of the first American evolutionists, one of the first American investigators of mesmerism to reach constructive conclusions, a stout opponent of superstition in a superstitious age.

Works

More photos

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  • Great Discussion of Modern Spiritualism, Between Prof. J. Stanley Grimes and Leo Miller, Esq: At the Melodeon, Boston, Every Evening During the Second Week in March, 1860 ...

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Phreno-Geology: The Progressive Creation of Man, Indicated by Natural History, and Confirmed by Discoveries Which Connect the Organization and ... Brain with the Successive Geological Periods

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Etherology: And the Phreno-Philosophy of Mesmerism and Magic Eloquence: Including a New Philosophy of Sleep and of Consciousness, with a Review of the ... of Phreno-Magnetism, Electro-Biology, &c

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Outlines of Geonomy: A Treatise on the Physical Laws of the Earth and the Creation of Continents

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

Views

In 1845 he published Etherology, in which he attacked the assertions of Joseph Rodes Buchanan that the organs of the brain can be excited by touching the head, and showed himself in advance of his time by ascribing mesmerism to the power of suggestion rather than to the action of an occult fluid; on the other hand, he introduced elsewhere in his system an occult fluid of his own, the universal “etherium, ” and argued fancifully that the seat of consciousness is to be found in the medulla oblongata.

Personality

Ill-trained, and sharing the interest of his day in occult phenomena, he nevertheless possessed a fearless, original, and absolutely honest mind.

Like many of his contemporaries, he was hampered by ignorance coupled with excessive self-confidence.

He was bold, argumentative, gifted with a ready flow of speech and considerable humor.