The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [160]
Science proved its power and worth every day, Nora said, and for many educated people it had replaced religion as the most believable way to explain the world. Yet in any belief system, she pointed out, there was a risk of blindness, especially when it became unquestioning belief. “Danger only arises when the scheme becomes a system of dogma which is master instead of slave,” Nora said.
Consider, for instance, the insistence of scientists that no observation or experimental result is proven unless it can be reliably repeated. Obviously, there were exceptions to that in nature—no one claimed that a shooting star could be replicated. And yet researchers used their set methods to deny everything the SPR wanted to study, which was also, by nature, spontaneous, erratic, and unpredictable—including the telepathy results.
Under identical conditions, the SPR investigators achieved apparently perfect mental coordination on one occasion, and absolutely nothing on another. “This is one of the difficulties which make patience and perseverance such essential qualities in psychical research,” Nora acknowledged, “and it is one of the difficulties which we hope further study may reduce.”
As an illustration, she gave the history of a small experiment she’d tracked over the past several years. Two women, who lived in different villages some twenty miles apart, had been daily noting certain impressions or events, trying to send them telepathically to the other, and also mailing postcards recording what had been sent and what had been received.
The postcards illustrated a typical hodgepodge of success and failure. Participant A had attended a tea at which a village woman had worn the oddest pair of spectacles. She decided to send the ideas of the spectacles that day. She received a postcard from participant B complaining that she’d spent the day thinking about spectacles.
On a bright fall day, participant B had been told a lively story by a friend, a tale of a big white hog with an unusually long snout. Amused, she sent a card in the afternoon mail telling of the pig. Participant A sent a postcard that same day, which talked of a cold, wet evening and a pig with a long snout.
“The setting you see was wrong,” Nora noted, “but the pig turned up all right.” She doubted that a traditional scientist would see the pig and the spectacles as evidence. But she did. She regretted that scientific “dogma” blinded intelligent people to such possibilities.
G. STANLEY HALL, president of Clark University, an ASPR dropout and for many years an outspoken critic of psychical research, had surprised Mrs. Piper’s supporters by asking for sittings with her. Hall offered assurances that his intentions were only to do good science. And yet William James did not quite believe him.
Hall had written to both Hyslop and James, asking help in scheduling time with the medium. James inclined toward denying the request. He considered Hall “a crank,” a rigid and unforgiving man, and a somewhat vindictive scientist. Hyslop countered that psychical research would never advance by denying mainstream scientists access to its best study subjects.
While the Americans hesitated, Hall continued to press his case. He wrote to Oliver Lodge, asking whether the English SPR “would raise any objection to his making some simple physiological tests on Mrs. Piper’s condition in trance.” Lodge also thought this looked like an opportunity. Hall, as an eminent psychologist, founding editor of the American