From Professor E. R. Dodds Sir: The writer's of '
A Spectator's Notebook ' (February 17) strangely attributes to me the suggestion that Gilbert Murray's feats of " thought-reading ' were due to unconscious auditory hyperaes thesia. If he had read my article (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. March 1971) he would know that this suggestion was first put forward in 1915 by Murray himself, in his first Presidential Address to the Society — a fact which makes nonsense of the grotesque inference that Murray was " a fraud." Far from coveting the reputation of a wonderworker, Murray clung as long as he could to a ' normal ' explanation of his remarkable powers; no doubt, like Freud, he feared that any taint of supernormal claims might damage his standing as a public figure and a professed rationalist. Only when the many weaknesses of the hyperaesthesia theory had been pointed out to him by experts did he reluctantly abandon it.
E .R. Dodds Cromwell's House, Old Marston. Oxford.
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