Note 6 — THE SINCLAIR EXPERIMENTS FOR TELEPATHY

If there are those who think there is no value in knowing something of the make-up of the chief witnesses in this case, I emphatically do not agree with them. That such knowledge is not absolutely determinative is, of course, true.

We are investigating a field of phenomena by all the methods which are practicable. The larger part of the phenomena are sporadic and spontaneous, and can hardly be expected to occur in a laboratory. There are many cases where a man has experienced but one apparition in his lifetime, and that at or close to the time when the person imaged died. Will any director of a laboratory consent to keep people under surveillance for a lifetime, to test if such an experience will take place in a laboratory, and can any persons be found who will consent so to spend a lifetime? And if under such conditions an apparition should be experienced and it should prove beyond doubt that the person imaged died at that moment, even though the apparitional experience occurred in a laboratory, in no sense would or could laboratory tests be applied to it. The authentication of the incident would be the testimonies of the scientific gentlemen present, to the effect that the story of the apparition was related to them and written down before the death of the person was known, with, perhaps, details of how the person who experienced the apparition looked and acted at the time. But the testimonies of witnesses outside of the laboratory are evidence of precisely as much weight, provided that their mentality and reputation for veracity are equal.

With favorable subjects experiments for telepathy can sometimes be and sometimes have been carried on with all the rigidity of method and the scrupulosity of a laboratory, or, if there remain doubts and objections on grounds seemingly almost of as “occult” a nature as telepathy itself, doubtless in time to come methods will be devised to meet these doubts and objections. But subjects of singularly calm and poised nature will be required. It seems to be a fact with which we have to deal, however regrettable, that with most persons who under friendly and unstrained conditions at times strongly evidence telepathic powers, suddenly to place them in a room containing strange apparatus, and before a committee of strangers, some perhaps cold and stern in appearance, others whose amiable demeanor nevertheless betrays an amused scepticism, is to make it improbable that they can exhibit telepathy at all. It will have to be recognized as a scientific datum that a state of mental tranquillity and passivity is generally requisite for such manifestations. Nor is this peculiar to psychical manifestations; the principle applies more or less to a variety of psychological manifestations and powers. Mark Twain could reel off witty utterances when he was mentally at ease, but had he been surrounded by a solemn-visaged group of psychologists with his wrists harnessed to a sphygmometer, and placed in face of an apparatus for recording graphs and a stenographer with poised pencil, it is very certain that his reactions would not have been those of brilliant and original humor. So I have seen a prominent violinist, invited to play at a reception, try to keep on amidst the waxing murmur of conversation, and finally falter and almost break down.

In this laboratory-fixation age it is well to remember that certain even of the physical sciences quite or mostly elude laboratory experimentation. Take astronomy, a great and promising but difficult and problematical field of research. No sun of all the millions, no planet, no planetary satellite, no comet, no tiniest of the asteroids can be brought into a laboratory. Once in a while a meteoric stone reaches the earth, and this can be analyzed, but no laboratory can control or predict time or place of its falling. It is necessary to devise agencies, telescopes, spectroscopes and so on, which, in a sense, go out and bring back data about the subjects of this science, and to develop methods of mathematical deduction by which to reach conclusions which are accepted by most people on authority only, since to most people the mathematics is quite unintelligible.

Astronomy, perhaps entitled to be called the most ancient of sciences, is one of the most difficult. A multitude of theories to account for its multitudinous phenomena have been supplanted by others; within the memory of persons now living many opinions once firmly held have been discarded or at least called in question. This is not in the least to the discredit of the science, but it is a fact. Today there are many contradictions of opinion among astronomers. While an article by a scientific man was printing in the Scientific American expressing the common view that in a little while, about a million million years, the earth will become too cold for anybody to live on it, another scientist was announcing to the world his reasons for questioning that conclusion. Even facts of a declared visual character are called in question. Professor Percival Lowell to his death in 1916 supported Schiaparelli’s announced discovery of canals on Mars, described them as he saw them through the telescope, and declared that they must be of artificial origin. It is said that there are astronomers who can see the canals but who question that they are artificial. And it is certain that there are astronomers who deny that there are any canals at all, and who claim that what seem to be canals to some are optical illusions or sheer hallucinations. (Is not astronomy getting to look like psychic research?)

But in spite of all its shifting and reconstruction of theories, its assertions and counter-assertions, the complexity and enormous difficulty of its numerous problems, and the exceedingly subtle methods by which, in a great measure, these problems must be studied, no one is so foolish as to think that astronomical investigation should not be pursued, or that there does not lie before it a great field for the pursuit of truth.

To a very large extent psychic research is analogous with astronomy. It, the youngest of the sciences (by few as yet acknowledged to be a science), has a very difficult field, lying as far apart from the ordinary life of most men as the multitudinous realities of infinite space lie outside the range of thought of ordinary men; its problems are many, theories are shifting and contradictory, certain facts are both affirmed and denied, and, what is more to the point for our present purpose, only to a limited extent can its problems be taken into the laboratory, but for the most part techniques and logical methods have to be devised to fit the nature of the facts with which we deal. In astronomy, most of the subjects of study can be found in place at any time; the great drawback is that they are so fearfully distant as to be sensed very slightly. On the other hand, with certain exceptions, either of kind or degree, the subjects of psychical study cannot be found in place whenever wanted but appear occasionally, yet when they do appear often do so with a nearness and clearness which spares the witnesses the necessity of those cautious qualifying phrases so common in articles dealing with astronomy.

In order at length to turn the attention of scientific men to a quarter of reality to which most of them are now voluntarily blind, we must continue to do what some people contemn as “old stuff,” and that is to multiply the number of intelligent and reputable witnesses by teaching people how to observe and how to record, and by ridding them of the cowardice which now keeps at least five out of six potential witnesses of such standing silent.