Clairvoyance and Telepathy
Extra-Sensory Perception. By J. B. Rhine. (Faber. 12s. 6d.)
nip: matter of this book is of such interest and importance that I cannot do better than summarize it with the minimum of comment. It consists of the record of a number of experi- ments in telepathy and clairvoyance. These words Dr. Rhine _defines as the " perception of the thought or feeling of another (telepathy) or of an objective fact or relation (clairvoyance) without the aid of the known sensory processes." Both are included in the term Extra-Sensory Perception, which Dr. Rhine uses to mean not perception by an extra sense, but " perception in a mode that is just not sensory," as, for example, my perception of the fact that three and two make five or that a whole must be greater than its part is not sensory.
The experiments, which have taken. place at Duke Univer- sity in the United States, have already been in progress for over three years and have reached the prodigious total of between 90 and 100 thousand. Broadly, Dr. Rhine's pro- cedure was as follows. Special packs of 25 cards arc prepared ; each pack contains five cards inscribed with a particular geometrical diagram, a star, a rectangle, a plus sign and so on, and in each pack there were five such diagrams ; the pack is shuffled and laid face downwards on the table. The clairvoyant experiments were of two kinds. First, the " subject " names the diagram on the top card, which is then removed from the pack and placed face downwards on the table. He then names the diagram on the second card, and so on throughout the pack. In the second experiment he names the order in which the diagrams occur as the pack lies on the table, reading, as it were, downwards through all the 25 cards in the pack. In the telepathic experiment the " agent " looks at the card and the " recipient " then names the diagram on the card looked at. The clairvoyant experiments were usually witnessed by one or more observers. In the telepathy tests agent and recipient ,were as a rule separated by a screen. Some of the experiments were conducted in different rocms, some in different buildings. In the case of one remarkable set of telepathic experiments the distance between agent and recipient was 250 miles.
It is easy to work out in accordance with the mathematical Theory of Probability the probable error in naming the twenty-five cards on a basis of pure chance. In the case of most of the students examined this figure was not exceeded. Some students, however, were presently found to be returning right answers which were considerably in excess of the chance figure. It was with this group of students, some eight or nine persons, that the subsequent experiments, were conducted. Some surprising results were achieved. For example, in 2,250 witnessed clairvoyant trials a student returned an average of 9.7 correct calls for each twenty-five cards. More striking are a score of twenty-two " hits " in twenty-five calls and an unbroken run of twenty-six correct calls in a series of fifty guesses. These figures are, it is obvious, enormously in excess of what it would be reasonable to expect on the basis of pure chance. Chance, in fact, can be ruled out. What about deception ? This cannot be completely ruled out, unless and until one is in a position to know all the participators in the experiment (including oneself), to impOse one's own conditions, and to reproduce the same results in the same conditions. In this connexion, it is worth noting that similar experiments which have been .conducted during the last nine months in the Laboratory Of the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation have up to the present yielded negative result's. Dr. Thouless, who has experimented with a number of students at Glasgow, has, I understand, no better
success to report. •
We should not, hoWever, overemphasize the importance of these negative results. Dr. Rhine insists on the importance of building up a suitable psychological atmosphere, and this takes time. For example, there must be no distracting influences, the environment must be familiar, the subject unexcited, and so on. Taken before a committee of scientific experts, Dr. Rhine's students would almost certainly fail, as he himself admits, to reproduce their best clairvoyant form. As to the possibility of fraud, I cannot improve on Dr. Morton Prince's question in the Introduction he has contributed to the book. Can we suppose, he asks, " that a group of intelligent men., ':sonie of them belonging to a university staff, could, through a period of three years, all the while intent on sure conditionOi where such conditions were so' easy to devise and apply and where the described precautions were so multiplied and diversified, be all the time fooled by each other ? " Here; in fact,. were no mediums playing tricks in the dark for money, but experiments conducted in full daylight under the most rigid tests which imagination could devise.
Dr. Rhine is concerned less to explain than to establish the conditions under which the best results were obtained. A good deal of information in regard to these conditions was obtained. For instance, certain drugs such as caffeine increased the subject's ability, others lowered it ; slecpinegg and fatigue militated against it, and most subjects- showed a decline in ability after a number of tests. No special bOdity or sense organs seem to be involved, nor did it appear to matter what spatial distance separated the caller from the cards in the case of clairvoyance, or from the body animated by the communicating mind in the case of telepathy. The evidence suggests that what is involved is not passive recep- tion of physical (clairvoyance) or psychological (telepathy) intimations in the shape of waves from objects or minds, but process of active cognition in which the mind, concentrated by an act of will, goes out beyond what is immediately given to the senses. What appears to be at work, in fact, is not a sense organ, but a non-sensory process of knowledge, a function of the organism as a whole, demonstrating what Dr. Rhine calls " minds, relatively independent, agency under certain conditions of the material world."
Whether we accept or reject this suggestion will depend upon our general philosophy. It is obviously incompatible with Materialism, or with any view which regards the funda- mental laws and processes operating in the universe as analo- gous to those studied by Physics and Chemistry. But thoge who feel that the kind of explanation provided by the physical sciences is certainly not adequate in the spheres of art and ethics and improbably adequate in that of normal psychology will see no necessary reasoirto reject the hypothesis to which Dr. Rhine's experiments seem indubitably to point. What- ever view we take, however, we ought to be properly grateful to Dr. Rhine for the care and patience which he has brought to the unearthing of certain human faculties which lie outside the bounds which academic psychology somewhat arbitrarily sets itself. He has done a quite admirable piece of work:
C. E. M. JO AO.
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