Modern Experiments in Telepathy

M ODERN parapsychology is somewhat more relevant to philosophy than modern cosmology or modern psychoanalytic research and no less relevant than most symbolic logic: and there has been no lack of philosophers to discuss the significance of psychoanalysis for the free-will problem, cosmology for natural theology, and symbolic logic for everything else. It would be foolish to imagine that this imposes a moral obligation on contemporary philosophers to follow those who from Sidgwick to Broad and Price have played as prominent a role in scientific psychical research as in philosophy. Cybernetics is relevant to neurophysiology but not to the work of all neurophysiologists; yet they might gain something from a general understanding of its achievements. The philosophical problems of psychical research are closely analogous to those connected with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but they have the great advantage that they can be intelligently discussed without ten years of specialized training. They can not be intelligently discussed without a certain amount of hard reading and an elementary knowledge of statistics. This book provides an excellent backbone for the reading, and usually explains the statistics it employs. Dr. Soal himself was responsible for the most important and successful set of telepathy experiments ever performed in England if not in the world. Furthermore, he was the Brahe to Whately Carington's Galileo in the remarkable discovery of experimental precognition. In this volume, he gives a detailed account of his own work (in part of which he was assisted by his coauthor, Bateman) and a concise description of other historically important experiments at Groningen, Stanford, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and, of course, Duke. The account is not purely descriptive; it includes a great deal of material on interpretation, possible theories, and the various attempts to criticize or dismiss some or all of parapsychological research. And it is apparent from the beginning that the authors are not going to be pushed into metaphysical conclusions or fantasies about practical applications without a struggle; Dr. Soal is a mathematician on the University of London faculty and when he is obliged to discuss psychological and philosophical theses he

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