Telepathy : an outline of its facts, theory, and implications / by Whately Carington.

  • Carington, Whately, 1892-1947.
Date:
[1945]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Telepathy : an outline of its facts, theory, and implications / by Whately Carington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    29/198 (page 11)
    in fifty-two; but if I decide to draw, say, a Dog, and ask you to guess, or try to ‘reproduce’, what I have drawn, I have no idea at all what the probability of your doing so is, if you are merely guessing and there is nothing paranormal at work. Again, how can we be sure that my decision was ‘random’? Possibly I am a fanatical dog-lover, or perhaps I have been reading something about dogs in the morning paper; and perhaps you have too. If so, then I might be specially likely to draw, and you might be specially likely to guess, the object Dog’, rather than any other object that I might otherwise have drawn; and this would evidently tend to produce a spurious appear¬ ance of telepathic action though there might really be none. It is easy to see that experiments with drawings will need special precautions and special methods if their results are to be reliable. As a matter of history, it was not till 1938 that anything like a truly satisfactory method of assessing experiments with drawings was suggested by W. L. Stevens; and not till 1941 that I evolved a con¬ venient and flexible way of dealing with them from a method first proposed by Professor Fisher for scoring partial successes with playing cards. I shall have a good deal to say about this at a later stage. None the less, though drawings are so much less easy to deal with than cards, etc., they have very great advantages. They are more interesting to work with, both for subjects and experimenter; com¬ pared with cards, they have much more ‘content’, so to say; and their almost infinite variety, and the corresponding uniqueness of the particular drawings used as ‘targets’ (commonly and hereafter known as ‘originals’) enables one to keep track of them, as it were, and to study such points as the effect of several experimenters working at once, in a way which the very limited number of sorts of cards makes quite impossible. 12. General. I will now give a brief account of a few cases of relatively early experiments, which seem to me to be worthy of notice, though it should be understood that they add very little to the main weight of the evidence derived from later researches. Experimental work, as I have said, only got properly into its stride about ten years ago, and much of the most informative is of even more recent date. But students of the subject have been trying experiments from the earliest days and with all kinds of materials, and many of them have claimed very remarkable results. Most of 1 . e®e must n°w be rejected, not, in my opinion, because they were in fact unsound (though, of course, some of them probably were), but because the early workers simply did not tell us enough about the precautions they took and the conditions of the experiments for us to be sure that they excluded every source of error. But even when we have drastically eliminated all that seem at all suspect, there is quite enough left to show that the more recent work is no new