BOOKS

The future lies . . .

Conn Welch

THE UNKNOWN GUEST: THE MYSTERY OF INTUITION by Brian Inglis, with Ruth West

Chatto & Windus, £12.95

Dr Brian Inglis, former editor of this Paper, and Ruth West, of the Koestler Foundation, here advance the case for what is loosely called the supernatural, the Unknown Guest of the title. The Koestler Foundation, they say, exists `to promote interest and research in areas just outside conventional science's boundaries' — well outside, the rigidly conventional might prefer. Benevolent forces, benign daemons', guiding hands, hunches, intui- tion, premonitions, meaningful coinci- dences, telepathy, divinations, clair- voyance, hallucinations, ghosts and extra- sensory perception are all credited and hospitably entertained by our authors. The impression is given of vast new areas of parascience to be discovered, tapped and turned to human advantage. Your tele- phone is out of order? Can't get a taxi? Note how the great conductor, Bruno Walter, ill at a lunch, summoned his manager's car by occult means, note and be of good cheer. Now let me make it clear at the start that I am no irreverent ghostbuster, no blink- ered enemy of the supernatural, much of which I imagine is not really supernatural at all. It just lies out there in parts of nature which, like Africa in the last century, have not been explored. My own mind is like a modest pub at midday, small maybe but °Pen. Naturally sceptical, perhaps I am like Heisenberg `sceptical about sceptic- ism'. Of ghosts and like phenomena, the true sceptic demands just as much evidence that they do not exist as that they do. He is never likely to get it. With Coleridge I regard perpetual incre- dulity as only the obverse side of perpetual credulity, just as misleading and dimin- ishing- The composer Saint-Saens on the last day of the Franco-Prussian War, knew by telepathy (before the word was in- vented) that his friend, Henri Regnault had been killed. 'Established science', he concluded 'does not know the human being . . . we have everything to learn'. I do not disagree. I also fully share Inglis's and West's contempt for the behaviourist heresy. Of this one might say that it was produced by people who were themselves behaviourists (I can think of no worse insult) and who then recklessly extrapo- lated their own deformities to form general laws governing the whole human race. The role of pure intuition in science, moreover, has long been made clear to civilised people by Polanyi and others. It is intuition which separates the scientific genius from the plodder. It inspires the genius to bold leaps into the unknown, like parachute drops well behind the enemy lines, creating gaps which the scientific infantry must close and secure, thus joining territory newly-won back to the main body of knowledge. Koestler himself ridiculed the popular idea of great scientists as `sober, ice-cold logicians'. Their letters, with the names suppressed, might be thought to have come from 'poets or musicians of a rather romantically naive kind'. Science's rationale is 'objectivity, verifiability and logicality'; indeed, but it is `dependent on mental processes which are subjective, irrational and verifiable only after the event' — i.e. on genius.

In all these respects so far I am warmly sympathetic to Inglis's and West's sort of crankery. All the more disappointing to find their book consistently interesting but, well, disappointing. The trouble lies not, I think, in the general theses, which are laid out in a suitably philosophical, persuasive and sophisticated way. It lies rather perhaps in some of the illustrative anec- dotes which are supposed to flesh them out, to lend verisimilitude to prove or at least suggest that there must be 'something in them'. The effect is rather as if William James or Koestler himself had collaborated with Ripley of Believe It Or Not.

Let me take, for instance, three anec- dotes provided by Sir Alec Guinness, which illustrate some of the difficulties. In charge of a landing craft in 1943, he woke suddenly, frightened as he'd never been in childhood: 'A very unpleasant voice spoke close to my ear: just one word — "tomor- row". It was penetrating, gloating, and undoubtedly evil. It implied that . • tomorrow I would be dead.' A storm blew up that night. The craft was wrecked, but Sir Alec, as we know to our delight, survived. Perhaps the unpleasant voice should have said: 'Not tomorrow'.

Our authors call this a 'protective pre- cognition', though it did not protect, may not have been meant to, and 'precognition' is an odd word for advance knowledge of something which did not happen. Don't most of us have numberless premonitions of this sort? I had strong premonitions I would not survive the war, was indeed quite disconcerted to find I had. Don't most of us too hear grim voices saying `tomorrow'? Didn't we hear them yester- day — and, yes, the day before? We ignore them, though one day they'll be right. Till they are, they are of no real help to Inglis and West. Indeed, were they truly 'protec- tive', i.e. if they were intended to warn and to counsel a change of plan to avoid disaster, don't they constitute a major objection (a 'stock' objection, our authors call it) to clairvoyance, to seeing the future? To foresee the future must surely be to see what in a sense already exists or is predestined. How can we foresee alterna- tive conditional futures, dependent on what we do or don't do now, unless what we do now is also predestined? Our au- thors proudly cite many cases in which dreamers, forewarned, have acted success- fully to prevent calamity. There may be many of these, but each is fatal to any claim that the future can be foreseen rather than guessed or deduced.

In 1955, Sir Alec met James Dean. Late as it was for dinner, tired and cross as Sir Alec was, Dean insisted on showing him his new sports car, which he had not yet driven. Sir Alec, 'in a voice he could hardly recognise as his own', said: 'Please never get in it', and predicted that otherwise he'd be found dead in it in a week. And so it proved. Another protective precognition, as our authors claim? Far from it, in the event. Could it even have unwittingly contributed to the tragedy? A strange voice predicting imminent death does not exactly build up self-confidence at the wheel. Confronted by excitable young men with new sports cars, many of us have premonitions. Unless they are certain to have a salutary effect, they are perhaps best kept to ourselves.

Sir Alec later relates how a succession of coincidences — oversleeping, a misread clock, consequent attendance at the wrong mass — caused him to take a later train home than usual. The one before crashed, bruising badly the occupants of the coach he normally travelled in. I was about to call these coincidences extraordinary, but real- ly aren't they ordinary enough? Perhaps other coincidences no more far-fetched enabled other passengers to catch the earlier rather than the later train, with bruises as their reward. But these coinci- dences are not ordinary enough to prevent our authors from bringing in Sir Alec's `own good angels' or 'daemon', nor to prevent Koestler from rambling on about `unconscious precognition', with 'the un- conscious cunningly persuading the con- scious self to misread the clock'.

The book is stuffed with anecdotes of this kind, many fascinating, some familiar, many taking us unsteadily a short distance before a wheel falls off, many taking too literally figures of speech, many boldly attributing to the machinations of God, the Unknown Guest or A. N. Other, what could clearly be the result of coincidence or prejudice (reason operating unconsciously) or of true reasoning unacknowledged. To be fair, coincidence is treated by our authors as an ally rather than an enemy, perhaps, as Koestler and Jung surmised, governed not by chance at all but by some as yet undiscovered principle. Koestler was surprised to find certain scientists inclined towards the undiscovered principle. For myself, I would think, they would be, wouldn't they? Isn't the discovery of such principles part of their trade?

A strong element of vanity is consciously or unconsciously implicit in many of these tales of how so-and-so was saved from disaster by some occult intervention. At least they make so-and-so interesting. A voice within Mr Philip Paul, press officer to the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Bri- tain, told him in the Blitz suddenly to stop dead in the street, which he did. Others hurrying ahead in the same direction were buried under a high wall which collapsed, with some fatalities. Impossible for Mr Paul not to feet that 'someone up there' had a specially high regard for him (or perhaps for the Pharmaceutical Society or perhaps even for press officers) or to tell the story without the slightest intrusion of complacency. This element of vanity must render much of the testimony suspect 'look at me! I'm under special protection'.

It also corrupts many assertions by creative geniuses, quoted here, that some of their works were not their own but dictated by the occult forces or even by God. For instance, the detailed design for the Temple was given to King David by God, who also, according to Puccini, dic- tated to him the score of Madame Butter- fly. We might mistake this at first for an attractive form of modesty. But surely it is in fact a signal honour, something to brag about, to he the chosen vehicle, agent and collaborator of God (who also claims no royalties — a matter not without interest to the worldly Puccini). I hasten to add that

neither our authors nor this reviewer make any such vaunting claims.

The notion that one's artistic works are in fact produced by 'something else' was understandably dear to the surrealists. They systematically reduced their own role, suppressed their own reason, taste and morals, exalted the unconscious and automatic, reduced themselves, as Max Ernst put it, to mere 'spectators' at the birth of their works. Upbraided by critics they could say, it wasn't me, it was, as Klee put it, 'something else, something higher and more remote, somewhere', some- where where dwelt 'powerful friends, some light ones and some dark'. These occult forces are a convenient way of evading personal responsibility. As such they might be of use, perhaps, say, to the architect Rogers — 'not me, guy, something bigger than all of us'.

Like occult forces this book is not without humour. It faithfully notes the fatuous results of most seances, though it also records that a 60,000-word novel was dictated in 36 hours of ouija-board time by a girl who'd lived three centuries earlier. I make this 27 words a minute: not bad going!

The book quotes against itself the salut- ary experiences of Oliver Wendell Holmes under ether. The vale of eternity lifted, the one great truth, the key to all mysteries, suddenly was revealed: all was clear. Re- covering, Holmes staggered to his desk and with difficulty wrote down the all- embracing truth, to whit: 'A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout'. Has mescalin or any other drug produced a greater truth?

Absolutely hilarious, if not intentionally or without alarming aspects, is a descrip- tion of Freud warning Jung against pyschic- al research, 'in terms of so shallow a positivism that I [Jung] had difficulty in checking the sharp report that was on the tip of my tongue'. Is 'report' a misprint for `retort'? Perhaps not, in view of what happened next. Jung felt as if his dia- phragm were made of iron and becoming red hot. In the nearby bookcase resounded a loud report. Both men started up in alarm, fearing it would fall on them. 'A so-called catalytic exteriorisation phen- omenon', Jung explained. 'Sheer bosh', exclaimed Freud. No, said Jung, and to prove it there will be another report in a moment, and lo! another detonation fol- lowed at once. Freud stared aghast at Jung, his mistrust aroused — and no wonder!

How the rest of us must envy Jung, his entry into psychiatry appropriately promp- ted by inexplicably broken tables and knives, his death marked by a great storm, a favourite tree struck by lightning and appearances to Laurens van der Post on a distant liner. If only we, and especially Inglis and West, addressed in terms of shallow positivism, could in reply generate reproving explosions in the surrounding furniture!