SEEING THE FUTURE

By S. G. SOAL

THE experimental evidence for what has been variously called " supernormal knowledge," " extra-sensory perception," or the "psi faculty," has of recent years grown to such an extent that any psychologist who deliberately ignores it labels himself as belonging to a past generation.

The earlier workers of the Society for Psychical Research made a sharp distinction between Telepathy and what they called Clair- voyance ; they found considerable evidence for the former, and very little for the existence of the latter faculty. Let me illustrate this distinction by a pair of modern experiments. In the first, I think of one of five animals, without having any drawings of the animals before me, while a person in a distant room tries to guess

which of the five animals I have at random chosen. This is an experiment in Telepathy. In another experiment I open a pack of new playing cards in the dark, and having shuffled it, draw out a card which another person tries to guess. That is an experiment in Clairvoyance. If the guesser succeeded often enough in the first experiment he could only be getting his knowledge from my mind, while in the second case he would be manifesting awareness of an event in the physical world not in any human mind at the moment when he made his guess.

During the past ten years Mr. G. N. M. Tyrrell in England, and the Duke University experimenters in America, have concentrated largely on the second type of experiment, and have collected some impressive evidence for the existence of Clairvoyance. In the great majority of such experiments, however, it was necessary that eventually someone should look at the card, in order to verify or disprove the correctness of the subject's guess, and the question arose: Could the guesser be getting his knowledge, not from the card itself as a physical object, but by becoming aware of the image which would be in the experimenter's mind when he came to check the guess? If the supposition proves correct the old con- ception of clairvoyance must give way to the idea of a telepathy that is precognitive and not merely simultaneous. It is this kind of telepathy which the experiments of Mrs. K. M. Goldney and myself appear to have demonstrated.

From early times men have claimed to foresee the future in dreams, but since the greater part of the world's population is dreaming every night, even quite complex cases of correspondence between dreams and future events might not unreasonably be ascribed to chance. Herein lies 'a serious weakness in the argu- ments of Mr. J. W. Dunne. The late Dr. Osty was convinced of precognition through successful forecasts of his own life by mediums, but personal conviction is not the same thing as scientific proof.

It is only through controlled experiments in which one can vary the conditions at will, and in which the odds against chance co- incidence are easily calculated, that any serious progress is likely to be made. A major difficulty in such cases is the extreme scarcity of good subjects, and the disturbing fact that the majority apparently lose their powers in a very short time. We were extremely fortu- nate in being able to work with our subject, Mr. Basil Shackleton, for over two years. The experiments arose in the first place out of an attempt which we made in England to verify Dr. J. B. Rhine's experiments in " simultaneous " telepathy and ordinary clairvoyance by allowing persons to guess at the geometrical symbols on Zener cards. Between the years 1934 and 1939 some 16o persons were tested, and over 128,000 guesses recorded, without any apparent success in either telepathy or clairvoyance. Then, through a sug-

gestion by Mr. Whately Carington, the writer re-examined his records in order to discover whether any of his subjects had been

guessing correctly the cards one place behind or one place ahead of

the card actually looked at by the agent. Two persons were found who had been scoring hits on the preceding and succeeding cards to a degree that precluded chance coincidence. One was a Mrs. S., with whom we hope to carry out further experiments in the near future, and the other Mr. Basil Shackleton. A complete report of

the new experiments with Mr. Shackleton may be found in the S.P.R. Proceedings, Part 167, but there is also an excellent résumé by Professor C. D. Broad in the current number of Philosophy.

I will summarise briefly the most interesting type of experiment without giving technical details. Mr. Shackleton's studio has two rooms, one a large room and the other a smaller room called the ante-room. Mr. Shackleton sat in the ante-room with a ruled sheet on which he recorded his guesses. The agent or transmitter sat in the larger room with five cards laid face downwards in a row in front of him. The faces of these cards bore pictures of the five animals—I:ion, Elephant, Zebra, Giraffe and Pelican. The animal picture to be looked at by the agent was decided by an experimenter, who, standing behind a screen, drew a coloured counter from a bag or bowl which contained equal numbers of counters in five different colours. If, for instance, a red counter was selected, the agent looked at the fourth card in the row, counting from left to right. At a signal from the experimenter, Mr. Shackleton in the ante-room wrote down the initial letter of one of the names of the five animals. Then the experimenter drew another counter, the agent looked at the appropriate card and Mr. Shackleton guessed again.

A record was kept of the counters chosen, and after about 200 guesses the list of colours (translated into animals' names) was compared with Mr. Shackleton's list of guesses. It was found that when the interval between successive guesses was between two and three seconds, Shackleton made correct guesses at the card one ahead, that is, the next card which had -not yet been selected by the process described above ; but when this interval was reduced to II seconds he scored on the card two places ahead. He did not succeed at all when the agent did not know the order of the cards in the box, and was not allowed to look at their faces. This fact appeared to rule out clairvoyance. It was found, further, that he was suc- cessful when working with only three out of the thirteen persons who were tried as agents, and that the nature of the phenomena varied to some extent with the agent with whom he worked. On the whole, the most economical hypothesis is to assume that Shackleton is able to detect the image which will be in the agent's mind in two or three seconds' time.

From the above description it follows that the card looked at by the agent is governed by the counter which is drawn from the bowl, and the success of the experiment implies that some part of Mr. Shackleton's mind is aware of what this counter will be before it is drawn. But the experimenter can exercise a certain amount of conscious choice in selecting the counter. The experiment, there- fore, has far-reaching implications, involving as it does the questions of determinism and free-will. Such questions, however, are not to be lightly settled, and much further work will be necessary before any conclusions can be drawn.

Mr. Shackleton has told us that he writes down his initial letters " almost automatically," and usually without any mental picture pass- ing through his mind. An analysis of the data shows that his own conscious pre-estimates of success or failure are as often mistaken as not. It would be truer to say that his choice is unconsciously influenced by a future mental event than that he perceives such events.

The fact of precognition lends support to the views of philosophers like M'Taggart who deny the reality of Time, and maintain that the Past, the Present and the Future have ontologically an equal status, so that the world exists in an Eternal Present. On this view we emphasise the reality of the present moment- only because it is more clearly presented to our consciousness than other moments, and so we draw an artificial distinction between the Present and the other parts of Time.