Note 15 — THE SINCLAIR EXPERIMENTS FOR TELEPATHY

If it be objected that we are not told exactly what the conditions of the series of February 15th were, though assured that all series were carried out with scrupulous honesty, that is true. But it is also true that the results of this series were not better than some where we do know that the conditions were excellent, and that this series contains no successes of such astounding significance as three in the Sinclair-Irwin Group, when many miles separated the experimenters. I would have been quite willing to have employed for the guessing tests the originals in that group, plus those of February 17th, done under excellently satisfactory conditions. (To be sure, the parties were in the same room, but it will be shown later that, even granting all which the egregious “unconscious whispering” theory claims, it could not account for the results actually obtained.) In fact, the Sinclair-Irwin Group was avoided for the test for the very reason that it is an exceptionally good one. That of February 15th was selected because I wanted a series of a considerable number of experiments, an unbroken one produced at one time, and one which exhibited results of a more nearly average character.