E.S.P. Extra Sensory Perception. J. B. Rhine PhD

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СКАЧАТЬ interest, not only to the question of distribution of Extra-Sensory Perception, but even more to the problem of mediumship. The report appeared in the December issue of the journal, Character and Personality (Alien and Unwin, London).

      No part of the huge bulk of data gathered since the first publication has been inconsistent with the earlier work appearing herein. On the contrary, it supports this report at every point where there is close enough similarity of conditions to make comparison possible. From outside the laboratory comes still further support and confirmation. Seven serious and systematic attempts to repeat our experiments elsewhere have been reported to me, and all have yielded significant positive deviations from mean chance expectation. That is, all are evidential, so far as excluding the chance hypothesis is concerned. Over a dozen others are planned, several of them in psychological laboratories. There may be still others I do not know of.

      I have added a short appendix to this edition in which to reply briefly to the few criticisms that have been offered. In closing, I should like to pay tribute to the great parapsychologist who wrote the Introduction to this book at a time when he was ill, and who died a few months after its publication. I have been proud to claim Dr Walter Franklin Prince as my teacher, and I strongly hope that his splendid critical poise and his ruthless logic will continue to influence the subject he did so much to advance along sound lines in America.

      To English readers it is especially appropriate for me to acknowledge again the debt which this work owes to their great countryman, Professor William McDougall. So much of its inspiration, its support and protection, and its guidance, has come from him, that it can well be said that in all probability, without him, it would never have been carried out.

      PREFACE

      There has been considerable deliberation prior to the publication of this work on perception-without-the-senses. It is three years since it was begun, and more than two years since the results began to be so striking as to move some of my interested friends to urge publication. These two years have been spent in making sure 'ten times over’, in testing and retesting at every reasonable point of doubt, and in going on beyond the point of proof into the discovery of natural relationships or laws that will make the capacity for this mode of perception more understandable and acceptable to those who must understand somewhat before they can believe. Now that we are fast approaching the mark of 100,000 trials or individual tests—will doubtless be beyond it before this leaves the press—it seems entirely safe to publish these experiments. We need, of course, to have them discussed before a larger forum.

      It is to be expected, I suppose, that these experiments will meet with a considerable measure of incredulity and, perhaps, even hostility from those who presume to know, without experiment, that such things as they indicate simply cannot be! But this inevitable reactionary response to all things new and strange, which is as old as the history of science, already shows many signs of decline, as the scientific world adopts a 'scientific attitude’, one of open-minded but cautious inquiry, toward the facts. Even so short a period as the last ten years has been one of marked transition. In it we have had many features contributing to popular interest and enlightenment. There have been broadcasting telepathy experiments by radio in England and America; the popular presentation of some remarkable evidence in Upton Sinclair's Mental Radio, with introductions by William McDougall (in America) and Albert Einstein (in Germany), (and with a splendid analysis by Walter Franklin Prince in B.S.P.R. Bulletin xvi); popular tests for telepathy conducted by the Scientific American Magazine; favorable expressions by Freud, Whitehead and other prominent intellectuals in their lectures; and other features and facts that reach and impress the minds of the people at large. There is today much more natural inquiry as a con- sequence and less of the older blind intolerant credulity—for or against.

      The work reported here is motivated largely by what may be termed an interest in its philosophical bearing—by what it can teach us of the place of human personality in nature and what the natural capacities are, that determine that place. Ever since reading, ten years ago, of the telepathy experiments carried out by Prof. Lodge when he was a young Professor of Physics at Liverpool I have been bent upon this quest. The somewhat unknown and unrecognized features of mind such as are studied here promise more of such 'philosophical fruit’ as that mentioned than any other inquiry I can conceive of: Hence, their deep fascination for me. By a cautious study of the unusual we come most readily into an understanding of the more usual and common.

      But it is a 'philosophy for use’ that these studies are meant to serve. The need felt for more definite knowledge of our place in nature is no mere academic one. Rather it seems to me the great fundamental question lying so tragically un-recognized behind our declining religious system, our floundering ethical orders and our unguided social philosophies. This work is, then, a step, a modest advance, in the exploration of the unrecognized boundaries and reaches of the human personality, with a deep consciousness of what such steps might lead to in the way of a larger factual scheme for a better living philosophy.

      It is the more general purpose behind this work to push on with caution and proper systematization into all the other seriously alleged but strange phenomena of the human mind. By proceeding always from already organized territory out into the phenomena on trial, never lowering the standards of caution in the face of the desire to discover or the need to generalize, the field of these unrecognized mental occurrences can and will ultimately be organized and internally systematized to a degree that will simply compel recognition. How long this may require one cannot estimate; but it is the only truly scientific course to take.

      I began using the term 'Extra-Sensory Perception’ (E.S.P.) at first with the more tentative meaning, 'perception without the function of the recognized senses’. But as our studies progressed it gradually became more and more evident that E.S.P. was fundamentally different from the sensory processes, lacking a sense organ, apparently independent of recognized energy forms, non-radiative but projectory, cognitive but un-analyzable into sensory components—all quite non- sensory characteristics. It seemed to extend the word 'sensory' ridiculously to use it to cover this phenomenon. Hence the present interpretation is rather that E.S.P. is, frankly, 'perception in a mode that is just not sensory’, omitting all question of 'unrecognized’. I think we have progressed this far with reasonable certainty.

      'Extra-Sensory Perception’ is preferable, I think, to 'Supernormal Perception’ because of the ambiguity of the term 'Supernormal’ in psychology and because 'super’ is taken by many, in spite of careful definition to the contrary, to imply an hypothesis of the explanation. In fact, 'extra’ (as 'without’) includes 'super’ (as 'above’) and we do not yet know if 'above’ is what we want to state about the process; i.e., 'above’ may be the wrong 'direction’ or rating. 'Metagnomy’ is defined in much the same way as the use here of Extra-Sensory Perception; but I prefer the more obvious and simpler term, even though it is longer. E.S.P. keeps the natural association with sensory perception more before the mind as one reads; i.e., it normalizes it as a psycho- logical process more than does the strange and less obviously associative term 'metagnomy’. There the need is to keep in mind that E.S.P. is a natural mode of perception and an integral part of mental life, as this work helps to demonstrate. 'Cryptaesthesia’, the name given by the eminent physiologist, Richet, means a hidden sense, and for this there is no evidence; it calls, moreover, for a vibratory theory of transmission which its author proposes. This, too, has all the facts against it. Let us merely Say, if we wish to be noncommittal, as is safest, of course: 'perception by means that are outside of the recognized senses', and indicate this meaning by 'Extra- Sensory Perception’ or E.S.P. We may then think of it, as I do, as a non-sensory type of phenomenon.

      In the use of the words 'Telepathy’ and 'Clairvoyance’ I take their accepted usage of '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'.

      The convenience of the reader will, it is hoped, be served by the arrangement of the chapters. Part I is introductory, СКАЧАТЬ