New facts and findings of other types piled up through the mid and late thirties. ESP tests--with children, both seeing and blind, both in the schoolroom and at home--came into some prominence. Personality types became the subject of study in the search for a "psychic type," and for fifteen years this search for personality correlates occupied major attention among a number of leading works. ESP and Personality Patterns by Schmeidler and McConnell re- views one large block of this evidence, and it is summarized in The Reach of the Mind. The original articles on personality and ESP mostly appear in The Journal of Para' psychology. But no personality type associated with ESP ability was found, though some states and traits do seem to affect adjustment to the test and determine whether a subject will go above chance average or below it. None of the personality abnormalities are related.
Much has been learned about the odd effects of the un- conscious nature of ESP. In fact, some of the most revealing discoveries have sprung from this feature, which had little more than come to our attention when the first book was written. Now our knowledge of this lack of conscious control explains a lot of otherwise puzzling effects of psi (i.e. parapsychical) ability. Among these are unconscious missing (psi missing), displacement (hitting adjacent targets) and the various decline effects.
The work on ESP in animals, both through the collection of spontaneous or natural cases and experimental work, is new—too new, even, to have been covered in The Reach of the Mind. But it is reviewed in New World of the Mind, and the reports appear in The Journal of Parapsychology.
New Events: Most important to the scholar are new scientific publications. These will be listed at the end of this review. The new research centers too are of importance. A number have opened up during the last twenty-five years, some of them associated with colleges and universities, a list of which follows.
•Institute for Mental Hygiene and Borderline Studies, Freiburg, Germany.
•Institute for Parapsychology, University of Utrecht, Holland.
•Laboratory for Psychological Physics, University of Pitts-burgh.
•Parapsychology Laboratory, Wayland College, Plainview, Texas.
•Parapsychology Laboratory, St. Joseph’s College, Philadelphia.
•Parapsychology Laboratory, University of King's College, Halifax.
Other research centers are being (favorably) considered and two more in the U. S. A. are due to be announced before the year is out. At least a dozen doctoral degrees have been granted for theses in parapsychology by universities, mainly in Western Europe and the U. S. A. Several courses on the subject have been offered in colleges and universities in the U. S. A., Holland, Switzerland, and Argentina, with actual titles of Professor of Parapsychology being used at Utrecht for Dr. W. H. C. Tenhaeff and at the Universidad del Litoral by Dr. J. Riccardo Musso.
Scholarship funds for students wishing to prepare for research in parapsychology are being offered. A Parapsychology Scholar-ship Fund was established at Duke University for the aid of students, regardless of the place of study, and City College of New York has received funds for two graduate scholarships in parapsychology, to be handled by the Department of Psychology. Grants of research funds have been more generous in recent years than formerly. A number of the leading foundations have, at one time or another, aided research in parapsychology; for example, Rockefeller Foundation has aided the Duke Laboratory; the Mellon Charitable Trust supports work at the University of Pittsburgh; the Ittleson Family Foundation has made a grant to the Menninger Foundation for partial use in research in parapsychology, and the Human Ecology Fund of New York has made a grant for work in parapsychology at Oxford University. Other foundations too have made contributions to individuals or laboratories. And even government aid through contracts has entered to some extent into the support of parapsychological research.
The establishment of the William McDougall Award for Distinguished Work in Parapsychology (accompanied by a research grant) was set up by the Duke Laboratory to recognize work done outside of Duke. It is now in its sixth year. The Parapsychological Association was established in 1957 as an organization of professional workers in the field, with a membership of more than 130 associates and full members, drawn from many different countries of the world. It is preparing to hold its fifth annual convention this year.
Perhaps the most important event in any field is the establishment and maintenance of an adequate outlet of scientific publications. The Journal of Parapsychology, established in 1937, with Professor McDougall as one of the founding editors, has completed its twenty-fifth year and now is affiliated with the Parapsychological Association. It is published by the Duke University Press.
New Problems: Progress itself brings new problems. As soon as money problems are reduced, shortage of adequate personnel to do the research comes into first place. Then, as more fully trained and sophisticated workers become the rule, the researches become more intricate and difficult, and progress may appear to be slowing down. Some of the sense of adventure and excitement evaporate. Fortunately, however, there are always new influences, new breakthroughs, fresh challenges to pull researchers out of these doldrums, off of these plateaus, and into new advances.
For a while we sought eagerly for the outer bounds, the far frontiers of our field. That was in the thirties. Then, from the late thirties on into the mid-forties, we were searching for the tie-up with personality features and types. The late forties found us heavily preoccupied with distinguishing one type of parapsychical phenomenon from another—precognition from psychokinesis and vice-versa, proving telepathy could be demonstrated without the possibility of clairvoyance producing the results even with precognition added, and so on. In the fifties we took up the search for a biological linkage in the form of the demonstration of ESP elsewhere in the animal kingdom—not without success. Then, too, emerged the long-view aim of trying to bring psi under control; this in itself embodied a number of approaches; the most outstanding was that of ESP tests in the schoolroom, which rather dominate the decade of the fifties.
The opening of the sixties finds stress on physiological measurements accompanying test performance. New efforts are going also into training ESP subjects through hypnotic methods, searching for advantageous effects through drug usage, and all the while there is the slow, too slow, recognition of the importance of psychological conditions, already mentioned. (Parapsychology, Chapter 7). But the future will place more emphasis on a search for just such conditions as we spontaneously developed in producing the results summed up in this book. The stress simply has to be on gaining improved control over the abilities.
So I say again, if the ESP research field is important, then this book is important; for it shows something that I, at least, have not seen anywhere else. Can the secret of it be learned and in some degree applied? Why not? Most likely it can be improved upon and extended to other situations.
SUGGESTIONS
Finally, a few practical suggestions to the reader of this book: I suggest putting two bookmarks in the book for permanent use—one with a List of Abbreviations and another at the Appendix to Chapter 2, which explains the mathematics used. If anyone reads straight through the book, he will see these items by the time he needs them. Most readers, however, will probably get ahead of these sections without having noticed them; so the markers will help.
I have another warning. As I look at it today, there is in this book too much emphasis given to the critical ratios (X-values) and the astronomical odds against the occurrence of certain results by pure chance. Of course, we are more relaxed today. We have lived with this thing so much longer that now we are not so overcome by these unusual results. Also, we do not so freely combine the results of one experiment with those of another. We do not need to.
I have left this book the way it was because it is part of the picture of the time. It belongs with the exciting climbers scaling one peak after another; if there seems to have been a lot of loud shouting back and forth over the phenomenal effects--that is the way it was. Life around this Laboratory was like that: Every bit of it. What would I not give if we could have kept it like that; or renewed it. But, of course, human beings simply cannot go on living