Mr. Upton Sinclair needs no introduction to the public as a fearless,
honest, and critical student of public affairs. But in the present book
he has with characteristic courage entered a new field, one in which
reputations are more easily lost than made, the field of Psychic
Research. When he does me the honor to ask me to write a few words of
introduction to this book, a refusal would imply on my part a lack
either of courage or of due sense of scientific responsibility. I have
long been keenly interested in this field; and it is not necessary to
hold that the researches of the past fifty years have brought any
solidly established conclusions in order to feel sure that further
research is very much worth while. Even if the results of such research
should in the end prove wholly negative that would be a result of no
small importance; for from many points of view it is urgently to be
wished that we may know where we stand in this question of the reality
of alleged supernormal phenomena. In discussing this question recently
with a small group of scientific men, one of them (who is perhaps the
most prominent and influential of American psychologists) seemed to feel
that the whole problem was settled in the negative when he asserted that
at the present time no American psychologist of standing took any
interest in this field. I do not know whether he meant to deny my
Americanism or my standing, neither of which I can establish. But his
remark if it were true, would not in any degree support his conclusion;
it would rather be a grave reproach to American psychologists. Happily
it is possible to name several younger American psychologists who are
keenly interested in the problem of telepathy.
And it is with experiments in telepathy that Mr. Sinclair’s book is
chiefly concerned. In this part, as in other parts, of the field of
Psychic Research, progress must largely depend upon such work by
intelligent educated laymen or amateurs as is here reported. For
facility in obtaining seemingly supernormal phenomena seems to be of
rare and sporadic occurrence; and it is the duty of men of science to
give whatever encouragement and sympathetic support may be possible to
all amateurs who find themselves in a position to observe and carefully
and honestly to study such phenomena.
Mrs. Sinclair would seem to be one of the rare persons who have
telepathic power in a marked degree and perhaps other supernormal
powers. The experiments in telepathy, as reported in the pages of this
book, were so remarkably successful as to rank among the very best
hitherto reported. The degree of success and the conditions of
experiment were such that we can reject them as conclusive evidence of
some mode of communication not at present explicable in accepted
scientific terms only by assuming that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair either are
grossly stupid, incompetent and careless persons or have deliberately
entered upon a conspiracy to deceive the public in a most heartless and
reprehensible fashion. I have unfortunately no intimate personal
knowledge of Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair; but I am acquainted with some of Mr.
Sinclair’s earlier publications; and that acquaintance suffices to
convince me, as it should convince any impartial reader, that he is an
able and sincere man with a strong sense of right and wrong and of
individual responsibility. His record and his writings should secure a
wide and respectful hearing for what he has to tell us in the following
pages.
Mrs. Sinclair’s account of her condition during successful experiments
seems to me particularly interesting; for it falls into line with what
has been observed by several other workers; namely, they report that a
peculiar passive mental state or attitude seems to be a highly
favorable, if not an essential, condition of telepathic communication.
It would seem that if the faint and unusual telepathic processes are to
manifest themselves, the track of the mind must be kept clear of other
traffic.
Other experiments reported in the book seem to imply some supernormal
power of perception of physical things such as is commonly called
clairvoyance. It is natural and logical that alleged instances of
clairvoyance should have from most of us a reception even more skeptical
than that we accord to telepathic claims. After all, a mind at work is
an active agent of whose nature and activity our knowledge is very
imperfect; and science furnishes us no good reasons for denying that its
activity may affect another mind in some fashion utterly obscure to us.
But when an experimenter seems to have large success in reading printed
words shut in a thick-walled box, words whose identity is unknown to any
human being, we seem to be more nearly in a position to assert
positively—That cannot occur! For we do seem to know with very fair
completeness the possibilities of influence extending from the printed
word to the experimenter; and under the conditions all such
possibilities seem surely excluded. Yet here also we must keep the open
mind, gather the facts, however unintelligible they may seem at present,
repeating observations under varied conditions.
And Mrs. Sinclair’s clairvoyant successes do not stand alone. They are
in line with the many successful “book-tests” recorded of recent years
by competent workers of the English Society for Psychical Research, as
well as with many other less carefully observed and recorded incidents.
Mr. Sinclair’s book will amply justify itself if it shall lead a few
(let us say two per cent) of his readers to undertake carefully and
critically experiments similar to those which he has so vividly
described.