Apparitions and thought-transference: an examination of the evidence for telepathy. Frank Podmore

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СКАЧАТЬ ii. pp. 3, 4.)

      Further experiments in this direction are much to be desired. But apart from the difficulty above referred to, experiments of the kind are liable to be tedious and inconclusive because of the inability of most persons to discriminate accurately between one taste and another, when the guidance of all other senses is lacking. To conduct such experiments to a successful issue, it would probably be necessary that the percipients should have some preliminary training to enable them to distinguish by taste alone between various salts and pharmaceutical preparations.

       Transference of Pains.

      Experiments in the transference of pains are not attended with the same difficulties, nor open to the same evidential objections; and some interesting trials of this kind with one of the same percipients, Miss R., met with a fair amount of success. The experiments were carried on at intervals, interspersed with experiments of other kinds, by Mr. Guthrie at Liverpool during nine months in 1884 and 1885. The percipient on each occasion was blindfolded and seated with her back towards the rest of the party, who each pinched or otherwise injured themselves in the same part of the body at the same time. The agents in these experiments—the whole series of which is here recorded—were three or more of the following:—Mr. Guthrie, Professor Herdman, Dr. Hicks, Dr. Hyla Greves, Mr. R. C. Johnson, F.R.A.S., Mr. Birchall, Miss Redmond, and on one occasion another lady. The results are given in the following table:—

      No. 2.—By MR. GUTHRIE AND OTHERS.

      1.—Back of left hand pricked. Rightly localised.

      2.—Lobe of left ear pricked. Rightly localised.

      3.—Left wrist pricked. "Is it in the left hand?" pointing to the back near the little finger.

      4.—Third finger of left hand tightly bound round with wire. A lower joint of that finger was guessed.

      5.—Left wrist scratched with pins. "Is it in the left wrist, like being scratched?"

      6.—Left ankle pricked. Rightly localised.

      

      7.—Spot behind left ear pricked. No result.

      8.—Right knee pricked. Rightly localised.

      9.—Right shoulder pricked. Rightly localised.

      10.—Hands burned over gas. "Like a pulling pain … then tingling, like cold and hot alternately," localised by gesture only.

      11.—End of tongue bitten. "Is it the lip or the tongue?"

      12.—Palm of left hand pricked. "Is it a tingling pain in the left hand here?" placing her finger on the palm of the left hand.

      13.—Back of neck pricked. "Is it a pricking of the neck?"

      14.—Front of left arm above elbow pricked. Rightly localised.

      15.—Spot just above left ankle pricked. Rightly localised.

      16.—Spot just above right wrist pricked. "I am not quite sure, but I feel a pain in the right arm, from the thumb upwards to above the wrist."

      17.—Inside of left ankle pricked. Outside of left ankle guessed.

      18.—Spot beneath right collar-bone pricked. The exactly corresponding spot on the left side guessed.

      19.—Back hair pulled. No result.

      20.—Inside of right wrist pricked. Right foot guessed.

      (Proc. S.P.R., vol. iii. pp. 424–452.)

       Transference of Sounds.

      It is noteworthy that there is little experimental evidence for the transmission of an auditory impression. Occasionally, in trials with names and cards the nature of the mistakes made has seemed to indicate audition, as when, e.g., three is given for Queen or ace for eight. But obviously a long series of experiments and a long series of mistakes would be necessary to afford material for any conclusion. Sometimes a percipient has stated that he heard the name of the thing thought of; as, for instance, in a case recorded in Chapter V., where the percipient "heard" the word gloves before "seeing" a vision of them. But such cases appear to be rare. Experiments with a view to test the transmission of actual sounds could of course only be carried out under special conditions, of which one would be the separation of the agent from the percipient by a considerable intervening space—and this condition is, of itself, found to interfere with success. Some evidence, indeed, of a quasi-experimental character for the transference of musical sounds at a distance will be given in a later chapter (Chapter V., No. 33). Experiments with imagined sounds appear to have been rarely tried, or at least, successful results have rarely been recorded.[16] Occasionally indeed experimenters have put on record that in thinking of an object they have mentally repeated the name of the object as well as pictured the object itself, and there are a few cases where the general idea of the object thought of appears to have reached the percipient before the outlines of the form, which may possibly be explained as due to the reception of an auditory before a visual impression.[17]

      This lack of evidence for auditory transmission is no doubt largely due to a desire on the part of experimenters in the first instance to make the proof of actual thought-transference as complete as possible. Experiments with sounds would impose a greater strain upon the agents, since in most cases they must be imagined sounds. Moreover, in such experiments it would be at once more difficult to estimate with precision degrees of success, and to preserve a permanent record of the result; and finally, the subject thought of would be more easily communicated either fraudulently, by a code, or by unconscious indications on the part of the agent. In this connection it is possibly significant that whilst in morbid conditions auditory hallucinations are much commoner than visual, the proportion appears to be reversed with telepathic hallucinations. It seems probable that the apparent infrequency of auditory transmission may be in part due to the fact that in the modern world the sense of vision is for educated persons the habitual channel for precise or important information. To the Greek in the time of Socrates no doubt the ear was the main avenue for all knowledge; it was the ear that received not merely the current talk of the market-place and the gymnasium, but the oratory of the law-court, the literature of the stage, and the philosophy of the Schools. But for modern civilised societies the newspaper and the libraries have placed the eye in a position of unquestioned pre-eminence. It seems likely therefore, apart from all defects in such evidence, that the agent would find a greater difficulty, as a rule, in calling up a vivid representation of a sound than of a vision; and that the percipient would experience a corresponding difference in the reception and discrimination of the two classes of impressions.

       Transference of Ideas not definitely classed.

      Experiments by PROFESSOR RICHET and others.

      In the following cases, where the exact nature of the impression received was not apparently consciously classified by the percipient, it may be presumed to have been either of a visual or an auditory nature. M. Charles Richet (Revue Philosophique, Dec. 1884, "La suggestion mentale et le calcul des probabilités") conducted a series of experiments in guessing the suits of cards drawn at random from a pack. 2927 trials were made: ten persons besides M. Richet himself—who acted sometimes as agent and sometimes as percipient—taking part in the experiments. In the 2927 trials the suit was correctly named 789 times, the most probable number of correct guesses being 732. A similar series of trials was conducted, on Edmund Gurney's initiative, by some members of the S.P.R. and others. There were 17 series, containing 17,653 trials, СКАЧАТЬ