The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [94]
Twain’s intention was to offer his own evidence to support their work, in particular his personal experiences with telepathy. He told of a visit to Washington, D.C., which involved a very late arrival. He knew that a good friend was also planning to be in the capital; but “I did not propose to hunt for him at midnight, especially since I did not know where he was stopping.”
Although it was late, Twain found himself restless. He went out for a walk, drifted into a cigar shop, and stayed for a while, “listening to some bummers discussing national politics.” Suddenly his friend came back into his mind, with startling specificity. If he left the shop, turned left, and walked ten feet, his friend would be standing there. Twain immediately walked out the door and turned left. There was his friend, standing on the edge of a street corner, chatting with another man, delighted to see Twain stepping up to join the conversation.
“In itself the thing was nothing,” Twain commented. “But to know it would happen so beforehand, wasn’t that really curious?”
The essay went on to catalogue other such events: of many times thinking of one friend or another and writing a hasty note, only to find that the friend had written to him at nearly the same time. Of hearing his wife suddenly mention an event that had just crossed his own mind. Of two writers almost simultaneously coming up with the same idea for a story; of two inventors creating a similar device in almost the same month. He proposed that telepathy could even account for scientists such as Darwin and Wallace developing their insights into evolution during a similar time period.
“We are always mentioning people, and in that very instant they appear before us. We laugh, and say, ‘Speak of the devil’ and so forth and there we drop it, considering it an ‘accident.’ It is a cheap and convenient way of disposing of a grave and puzzling mystery. The fact is it does seem to happen too often to be an accident.”
Twain proposed that most people pick up the occasional thought from someone else, casually, telepathically, without conscious awareness. They simply underestimate or deny their own ability. “While I am writing this, doubtless someone on the other side of the globe is writing it too. The question is, am I inspiring him or is he inspiring me?”
The following month, an inspired response appeared in Scribner’s, an article titled “The Logic of Mental Telegraphy,” by which the author, Joseph Jastrow, clearly meant the illogic of Mark Twain.
Jastrow, of the University of Wisconsin, had been one of the first members of the ASPR and one of the earliest dropouts. Most of the former ASPR members now preferred to ignore their old association. But a few, notably Jastrow and his mentor, Stanley Hall of Clark University, wished instead to dismantle it.
Hall, founder of the American Journal of Psychology, wanted to cut psychology clean of any link to the theological study of behavior. Jastrow, a former Hall student who’d founded the psychology department at Wisconsin, was a pure researcher to the core, a noted experimentalist in the field of visual perception. He’d earlier been responsible for those ASPR experiments that discredited the claim that mediums possess a rare sensitivity to magnetic fields.
Both Jastrow and Hall felt that mere withdrawal from the psychical research society wasn’t enough, that they were obliged to atone for their earlier sins by exposing its wrongness. They worried that adopting their peers