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IN THE next two chapters, some well-attested concrete examples of the kinds of
paranormal occurrences that appear to constitute empirical evidence of survival
will be cited and discussed. But the occurrences the reports describe are so
shocking to the scientific commonsense of the present epoch that some re marks
are called for at this point concerning the relation of paranormal occurrences
to science, and concerning the attitude prevalent among scientists towards
reports of them.
1. Reports of paranormal occurrences commonly dismissed offhand by scientists
During the last seventy-five years, many facts which there is strong reason to
regard as paranormal have been recorded as a result of painstaking
investigations made by some highly capable individuals, by the societies for
psychical research, and more recently by the parapsychology laboratories. The
majority of scientists, however, still do not bother to acquaint themselves with
those facts, or at most only superficially; and yet are in general ready to
dismiss on a priori grounds any reports of them, much as Faraday did reports of
levitation when he wrote: "Before we proceed to consider any question involving
physical principles, we should set out with clear ideas of the naturally
possible and impossible." Premising then that creation or destruction of force
is impossible, Faraday went on to declare that since levitation of an object
"without effort" would constitute creation of force, it therefore "cannot
be."(1) As the late Professor James H. Hyslop, founder of the American Society
for Psychical Research, wrote some forty years ago, "Science, content, without
thorough inquiry, to confine its investigations to the physical world in which
it has achieved so much, will not open its eyes to anomalies in the realm of
mind and nature and so degenerates into a dogmatism exactly like that of
theology."(2)
(1) Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, London 1859, pp. 478-9.
(2) Contact with the other world. The Century Co. New York, 1919, p. 425.
The following recent statement by an eminent biologist may be cited as a quaint
example of such ingenuous dogmatism: -Bordering all branches of science there is
of course a 'lunatic fringe' of wishful thinkers to be found defending some
bogus cancer cure, mysterious radiation effect, or species of dualism. Among the
latter should be classed postulates of cellular intelligence or memory, vital
force, perfecting principle, cosmic purpose, extrasensory perception ("ESP")
telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance..."(3)
(3) Science Fiction as an Escape, an article by Hermann J. Mullet, Nobel prize
in biology, President of the American Humanist Association; in The Humanist,
Vol. XVII:338, No. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1957.
These words, of course, automatically relegate offhand to the "lunatic fringe"
of science such naturalists and biologists as Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles
Richet, Hans Driesch, H. S. Jennings; such physicists as Sir William Crookes,
Lord Rayleigh, Sir Oliver Lodge; the astronomer Camille Flammarion; and
philosophers like Henry Sidgwick, William James, and Henri Bergson - to mention
only a few of the eminent men who have thought that some of the things listed by
Prof. Muller deserve serious consideration. If because of this these men belong
to the lunatic fringe of science, then many of us would be proud to find
ourselves included in it on the same grounds(4).
(4) The remarks in the remainder of this chapter were originally presented by
the writer as one of the addresses at the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of
the American Society for Psychical Research, held on March 2, 1956. The
addresses were published in the Journal of the Society, Vol. L, No. 4. October,
1956.
2. What accounts for the dogmatism of scientists on the subject of paranormal
events
Statements by scientists, such as that of Prof. Muller quoted above,
compel us to ask what accounts for the dogmatism they exemplify; for the truly
scientific attitude is not dogmatic but open-minded. It is free alike from
adverse and from favorable prejudice. It welcomes facts as such, no matter
whether they confirm or invalidate the assumptions or theories on which they
have bearing. Its first commandment is to investigate and observe. In short,
disinterested curiosity - the passion to know the truth - is the one scientific
passion. It is a stem censor, which rules out of scientific judgments factors
such as arrogance, dogmatism, hopes or fears, and wishful belief or
disbelief - factors which so often vitiate the judgments of ordinary men. Such is
the scientific attitude. It is altogether admirable, and the command over the
forces of nature, which adherence to it and to the methods it dictates has put
into the hands of man, testifies to the fruitfulness of that attitude.
But the fact that, in so far as it has actually been the attitude of scientists,
they have accomplished wonders; and that these wonders have given magical
prestige to the very words, Science, and Scientist - this fact does not at all
guarantee that when a man who is by profession a scientist speaks, what he says
always represents one of the fruits of scientific investigation. For scientists
are men and usually have their share of the typical human frailties. They do
park some of these outside the doors of their laboratories, for inside, of
course, they either live up to the demands of the scientific attitude as
characterized above, or they achieve little. But outside they are as prone as
other men to pride of profession and of position; and the prestige with which
the name, Scientist, has come to endow them in the public eye easily provides
for many of them an irresistible temptation to pontificate concerning various
questions which fall outside their professional competence, but about which
naive outsiders nevertheless respectfully ask them to speak because they are
known as Scientists, and Scientists, by definition, are persons who know! The
oracular role which this flattering deference invites them to play leads them
almost fatally to assume on such occasions that their utterances have authority;
for the idea a person harbors of himself is largely determined by the picture of
him which others hold out to him.
Now, that pleasing though mainly subconscious picture of himself as an oracle is
what is affronted when outsiders venture to call to the attention of a scientist
certain facts, such as those psychical research investigates, which seem to
clash with certain assumptions of the science of his time. It is on such
occasions that the admirable scientific attitude described above easily deserts
him and that, as the late Dr. W. F. Prince charged, proved, and illustrated by
quoting the words of some twenty scientists from Faraday, Tyndall and Huxley to
less eminent ones - it is on such occasions that the outraged scientist is prone
to become unscientifically emotional, obscurantistic, inaccurate, illogical,
evasive, dogmatic, and even personally abusive(5).
(5) The Enchanted Boundary, Boston Soc. for Psychic Research, 1930; see
especially pp. 19-133.
3. Why the paranormal phenomena are regarded as impossible
The remarks made up
to this point about scientists have concerned only the psychological or more
specifically the emotional factors that account for the abandonment of the
scientific attitude by so many scientists when their attention is invited to the
existing evidence, experimental and other, that paranormal phenomena of various
kinds really occur. But something must now be said also as to the source of the
quite dispassionate firm conviction of many of them that, in the light of modern
scientific knowledge, those phenomena cannot possibly be real and can only be
semblances, delusions, or frauds.
Let us note first that, when a scientist declares that something, which belongs
to the field of his scientific competence, is possible, there is no mystery as
to the basis of his assertion. It rests either on the fact that he or some other
scientist has actually done or observed the thing concerned; or else that it is
anyway not incompatible with anything which science has so far established.
Again, when a scientist declares something to be impossible by certain means
under certain conditions, then the basis of his assertion is likewise not
mysterious. It is that he or some other scientist has actually tried to cause
that thing in that manner under those conditions, but that it did not in fact
then occur.
On the other hand, when a scientist declares something to be impossible, period;
that is, impossible without qualification, then it is a mystery indeed how he
could possibly know this. In such cases, the ground of his assertion is only
that occurrence of the thing concerned would clash with some principle which the
science of his time has somehow come to accept and which is thus part of "the
scientific commonsense of the epoch", but which has not in fact been established
by science. Such a "principle" however plausible and however wide its utility as
a working assumption - becomes a sheer dogma if the scientist's faith in it is so
boundless that it causes him to deny a priori or to ignore facts actually
observed, that constitute exceptions to it. Assertion that they are impossible
because they would clash with it then is pure dogmatism, even if unawares.
The clash of the facts observed may be either with the overall metaphysical
creed of the science of the time or, more narrowly, with one or another of the
specific articles of it. These are certain of the "basic limiting principles" of
the then current scientific thought, to which reference was made in Sec. 3 of
Chapt. XIV, and which the scientist uncritically assumes to have
unlimited
validity, whereas what scientific experience would really warrant him in
concluding would be only that it has very wide validity.
4. Clash of a reported occurrence with the metaphysical creed of the natural
sciences
The reference made above to "the over-all metaphysical creed of the
science of the time" calls for some words of explanation; for a scientist is
likely to deny emphatically that science has any truck with that vain and
vaporous thing called Metaphysics, which he is more than glad to leave to
philosophers or other unscientific thinkers.
As Prof. Ch. Perelman has pointedly remarked somewhere, however, a person's
repudiation and scorn of metaphysics is no guarantee that he does not himself
harbor unawares some metaphysical creed-in which case he is the more helplessly
captive in that mental prison because he does not suspect its existence or
perceive its walls.
How this is possible becomes evident as soon as one realizes what constitutes a
metaphysical creed. It is something which, if put into words, takes the form:
"To be real is to have characteristic W' The word "real," as occurring in it, is
essentially a value term, which specifically means "supremely or alone existent,
important or significant." Hence, to have a metaphysical creed is to proceed in
all one's activities and judgments, and whether consciously or unawares, under
the assumption that only what has characteristic C exists, or at least is worth
taking into consideration. This is what "to be real" means in, for example, the
metaphysical creed that to be real is to be some material event, process, or
thing, (whether at the macroscopic, directly perceivable level, or at the atomic
or sub-atomic levels explored by theoretical physics.)(6) And just this
materialistic metaphysical creed is, in fact, that of most of the practitioners
of the natural sciences - physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, physiological
and behavioristic psychology, and the rest.
(6) For more detailed discussion of what "real" means as employed in the
formulation of a metaphysical creed, see the writer's Nature, Mind, and Death, chapt. 6, and in particular Sec. 8 thereof.
It is harbored by them, however, without recognition of the fact that it simply
consists of their personal inclination and commitment to dedicate their efforts
to the investigation of only the material part of the world, and hence to ignore
or deny mental events as such, or at least deny them any efficacy.
The material world, of course, is highly important to us, and study of it by
scientific methods has yielded a vast amount of valuable knowledge. The
scientists who have elected the material world as their field of exploration can
justly be proud of what they have achieved; and one can readily understand that
their prolonged attention to it should have brought them to the point of being
psychologically unable to notice or even conceive of any facts, events, or
processes other than material ones; and hence should have made them unable to
suppose that any material event should have a cause or an effect other than one
itself material.
This psychological incapacity, however, is only an occupational disease, which
does not at all guarantee that there are not "really" such things as thoughts,
feelings, mental images, volitions, and other psychological states. It only
compels the scientists who are captives within the invisible walls of the
materialistic metaphysical creed to assign at any cost a purely material meaning
to the words which denote those psychological states. For if one proceeds from
the start and all along on the arbitrary metaphysical assumption that nothing is
real unless it is some process or part of the material world, i.e., of the
perceptually public world, then necessarily thoughts, feelings, and the other
states accessible only to introspection are conceived either as unreal, i.e., as
inefficacious mere appearances; or else as themselves somehow material events.
It is, of course, perfectly legitimate and proper to push as far as it is
successful the attempt to account in purely material terms for all material
events, including all the activities of human bodies. But at the many points in,
for example, human willed acts, where no material event can be observed that
would account for those acts, there is no rational justification for insisting
wilfully that their causes must, somehow, anyhow, be material events; so that
when, for example, I wrote the present words, my thoughts and my desire to
formulate them in writing cannot possibly have been what caused the writing of
these words. What accounts for but does not justify that insistence is only the
quite arbitrary metaphysical creed, harbored and uncritically cherished by most
natural scientists, that only what is material is real and can have efficacy;
and therefore that not only the vast majority of material events, but all -
absolutely all without exception - must have purely material causes.
Nothing but Prof. Muller's pious adhesion to that particular metaphysical creed
dictated his naive relegation of dualism, of extrasensory perception, and of any
but material explanations, to the "lunatic fringe" of science. For of course to
ascribe some material event to a mental cause is cheating at the game in which
he like other natural scientists are engaged, to wit, that of seeking material
explanations for all material events; just as, while playing chess, moving the
king two steps at a time would be cheating. Yet the fact that it would be
cheating at chess is not evidence at all that the king is inherently incapable
of being moved more than one step at a time! Similarly, that to ascribe to a
mental cause a material event not in fact otherwise explained is cheating at the
material-science game, is no evidence at all that causation of that material
event by a mental event is inherently impossible.
The substance of the following remarks may be put both summarily and
picturesquely in the apt words used by Professor C. D. Broad in the preface to
his Tamer Lectures at Cambridge University in 1923. What he said there was that
the scientists who regard the phenomena investigated by psychical researchers as
impossible seem to him to confuse the Author of Nature with the Editor of the
scientific periodical, Nature; or at any rate seem to suppose that there can be
no productions of the former that would not be accepted for publication by the
latter!
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