…Now there is a vast amount of testimony to psi phenomena. Freud and Jung took their existence for granted; they fascinated William James; and as Arthur Koestler pointed out in his The Roots of Coincidence, the British Society for Psychical Research has, since its formation in 1882, included on its list of presidents “three Nobel Laureates, ten Fellows of the Royal Society, one Prime Minister and a galaxy of professors, mostly physicists and philosophers.”
That parapsychological inquiry could engage minds of such caliber has surely done something to dispel the lingering idea that psi phenomena are for dotty old ladies who sit in darkened rooms watching quack mediums pull wads of cheesecloth ectoplasm out of their sleeves. Nevertheless, it is not final, or even acceptable, proof of the validity of psi phenomena.
When J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa began their experiments on ESP at Duke University, they were up against a wall of variables and imponderables; subsequent researchers have inherited the difficulties. There is no way to test some seer’s claim that the San Andreas Fault will split and precipitate Marin Country into the pacific on a given date. But you can, with patience and rigorous modesty, isolate model functions of psi phenomena and test them to exhaustion against the laws of chance. And that is what the Rhines and their successors have been doing. ( to be continued)…