Seance science
Dorothy Bonn
Science and Parascience Brian Inglis (Hodder & Stoughton £12.95)
The new Koestler chair in para- psychology at Edinburgh UniversitY should provide a wonderful opportunitY r191. putting the investigation of PsYchic phenomena on a scientific footing. But the resistance that Brian Inglis and his col- league Ruth West encountered, as Koestler's representatives, when they can- vassed the idea of such a chair among British universities, is a measure of the reluctance of academics to take Para' psychology seriously. In his new book, 3 scholarly account of psychical research bet pwlet phenomena o mi9e1n4a and
a
d t 1939, apparently s explanation to be given a fair trial. Ing1; declares himself to be an agnostic in suck matters, but there is little doubt that he d eafpy peraaltsi 0 for leaning towards belief. And so, he tells us, are most of us. 70 to 80 per cent of us, he sperception.ay , no w accept An d given nidea that of fsoenix t some a speenospoiirel apparently without motive of gain, actli.3„. claim to have had telepathic or precogInt"" experiences, then I suppose I would 8° along with Henry Habberley erstwhile Wykeham professor of logic Oxford, who once said, in the contest we ESP, that 'instead of disputing the facts' w must try to explain them'. The difficultY aboutis that t testing th ey d opsychic n ota appear tophenomena is Science and Parascience covers wha in
t
often thought of as a dead Peri°d the psychical research, an interlude between 'id disruption of research by the First War and J.B. Rhine's experiments on at Duke University in the 1930s. Inglis own investigations show, on the contral'e that the 1920s was a period wever, of intenhe research activity in Britain, Europe, and the USA; a time also when the Society iPsychicalng i n t o t temporary Research y flourisheddecline, pabretfioyre Or*, thro 1:1cgaPi the activities of a notorious PsYcelljlect researcher, Harry Price, who, having rne- to inveigle his way into the Society, instead to the attack. In 1927, even the Be;- was persuaded to participate in an SPRh:d periment to find out if any listeners "Of telepathic abilities. From the repliesiety 25,000 eager listeners, however, the s°c of could report only 'the great clifficult.):' in treesatcshoinfgthaisnykindde,f.inite statistical result Also 3 The Twenties and Thirties were -1,,,eria time of remarkable paranormal phench" the — of ectoplasm, levitations, e'en, here materialisation of a deceased poet (au" - dress
is a photograph to prove it; the poet,
ed in Bunthorne garb, sitting between the Medium and a very startled observer). Some of the psychic events of that era are scarcely credible but have nevertheless withstood the most rigorous examination. Take the case of Eva C, a young medium from Algiers, rs well known for her ectoplasmic materialisa- tions kind of jelly would flow from her and organise itself into the shape of a face or a limb Yet no one who investigated her extraordinary performances could detect the slightest possibility of fake. Even Charles Richet, a dedicated materialist (that is, one who subscribes to materialism rather than materialisations) felt bound to accept the evidence of his own eyes after stringent tests, which included having Eva C minute- ly. searched and making her drink coffee or bilberry juice, which would stain any swallowed muslin or other flimsy material that she might regurgitate to produce her ghostly image. There were other odd things about Eva C, not the least of which were her `confes- slon' to a lawyer that she used a trap-door M the seance room and the admission by the her coachman that he had been one of 'ler Materialised figures. But the lawyer had not attended her seances, and the coachman, having been dismissed for steal- 1.ng, might well have wanted to discredit his former employer. And so the case of Eva C has never been satisfactorily resolved — not to MY mind, anyway. All of this reminds me ,°! my Young friend Adrian, who pulls rab- Mts out of top hats and does amazing things with playing cards. To me these feats ap- rar quite beyond explanation in terms that Ithey understand, but Adrian tells me that ney are all tricks. Now Adrian's sleights of the .so-called paranormal phenomena that the ishe.latt describes. Must I really accept that r are the products of forces that the rational mind simply cannot understand? Paradoxically, it is the physicists, once the Masters of materialism, who have been the parapsychologists' main prop since the J'20s, sensationalism apart. To Sir James ,,ean. s, as he wrote in The Mysterious i:nring in 1931, the universe was begin- g to look great 'more like a great thought than machine'. And Nils Bohr 's „alscovery' that electrons can move from .une orbit to another apparently without siraversing the intermediate space must have researchers like a gift from heaven to psychical r_ esearchers at the time. But that was in the Ltunaty arlY el days of quantum physics, and unfor- 4 (though Inglis fails to note this) larohr was
proved wrong. However, there ph
en Mena ofof unexplained physical for physicists and para- Es.yehologists alike to grapple with. The experiment, for ttostarlee, illustrates an unexplained correla- ° between the direction of spin in pairs sub-atomic particles. By using spin a clagnetic field to alter the direction of spin st one Particle, the experimenter can, in- ,,,antaneously and from a distance, ,"'_all!Pulate its twin. Perhaps Mr Inglis would care to have a go at that.
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