I contemplated a statement introducing this book to the reader, but on
further thought I realized that the book introduces itself and speaks
for itself all the way through. I will only say that Mary Craig
Kimbrough was my wife for almost half a century. She guarded me, managed
me, and worried about me during that period—for the task was an unending
one. I was often engaged in politically and socially dangerous tasks,
and Craig was the one who realized the dangers and undertook the task of
saving me. This went on all through our marriage, and in the end her
heart weakened, and for almost ten years I dropped all my other tasks
and devoted myself to keeping her alive. She died in April, 1961.
I wrote the text of _Mental Radio_, 1929, under her direction; she
revised every word and had it exactly the way she wanted it. She was the
most conscientious and morally exacting person I have ever known.
Loyalty to the truth was her religion; and every sentence in this book
was studied so that it would be exactly true and so clear that nobody
could misunderstand it. She knew just how we did our experiments; she
had told me exactly what to do, and I had done it; if I set it down
wrong in the manuscript, she made it right.
She has told of her early psychic experiences, and they were enough to
fill her with determination to make sure they were real, and if possible
to find out what they meant. It was she who laid down all the procedures
in our tests. It was she who studied the results and got the record
exact to the last comma. In reading this book bear in mind, there are no
errors. If the book says that the experiment was done in a certain
precise way, that is the way it was done; and always it was done without
prejudice, without a preconception or anything that could affect the
result. When the record was put on paper every word had to be studied,
and every little mistake that I made had to be corrected by her
tenacious memory.
So trust this book. Understand that what is told here happened exactly
as it has been told. Don’t think that maybe there was a slight slip, or
that there is a careless word. I remember in the course of the years
some learned psychologist suggesting that maybe Craig had unconsciously
got some idea of what the drawings were by seeing the movement of my pen
or pencil. This meant just one thing—the learned gentleman didn’t want
to believe, and hadn’t taken the trouble to go back and study the book.
You who are going to read now will note again and again that I went into
another room to make the drawing, and I shut the door. Make note now and
bear it in mind all through the book, I never made a drawing in the same
room with Craig; and always the door was shut. To have done otherwise
would have been to waste her time as well as mine, and she saw to it
that I did not waste either. She wanted to _know_; she was _determined_
to _know_; she laid down the law, and I obeyed it. The only way you can
reject the evidence in this book is to decide that we were a pair of
unconscionable rascals.
I’ll give you one opinion about that. Albert Einstein, possessor of one
of the greatest modern brains, and also of a high character, was one of
our close friends. He came to our home, and we came to his, and he
witnessed some of our experiments. When this book was ready for
publication in 1929 I sent him a set of the proofs and asked him if he
would care to write a preface for the German edition. He consented and
wrote the letter in German to the German publisher. Unfortunately, the
publisher went out of business.
What you are going to read is the exact text of Craig’s book as it was
written in the year 1929 and published in the next year. The only
changes I have made have to do with the lapse of thirty years since the
text was written. Near the end are one or two references to friends who
have since died, but you probably never knew those persons, so it
doesn’t matter.
At the end of the book I have published a few comments on it, and an
account, written by myself, of later experiments. Also I give an
extensive summary of the results of a study of the drawings published by
Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, a Boston clergyman who resigned from his
pulpit in order to become Research Officer of the Boston Society for
Psychic Research. Dr. Prince asked if we would be willing to entrust the
documents to his examination, and I immediately bundled them up and sent
them to him by registered mail. The long commentary which he wrote
appeared in the _Bulletin_ of the society for April, 1932.
Perhaps the most important single item concerning _Mental Radio_ is the
following:
Prof. William MacDougall, who had been head of the Department of
Psychology at Oxford University and later head of the Department of
Psychology at Harvard—and who had won the title of “Dean of American
Psychology”—came to see us in Pasadena soon after the publication of
this book. He told Craig that he had just accepted the job of head of
the Department of Psychology at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,
and would have at his disposal a considerable fund for research. He had
read _Mental Radio_ and had written the preface which is in this book,
and he said that he would like to be able to say that he himself had
witnessed a test of the genuineness of Craig’s telepathic power.
Craig had always shrunk from anything of that sort because her power
depended entirely upon solitude and concentration; but her respect for
MacDougall was great, and she told him she would do her best. He said
that he had some pictures in his inside coat pocket, and he would like
to see if she could describe them. She sat quietly with her eyes closed
and presently said that she saw a building with stone walls and narrow
windows, and it seemed to be covered with green leaves. MacDougall took
from his inside coat pocket a postcard of one of the buildings at Oxford
covered with ivy.
Other tests with him will appear later. Here I add one more story, how
we took the good man for a test with Arthur Ford, who was then head of a
spiritualistic church in Los Angeles. I had picked out four letters or
postcards from well-known persons, one of them Jack London and another
Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, highly respected. I wrapped each of
these documents in a sheet of green paper to remove any possibility of
holding them up to the light or otherwise getting a glimpse. I showed
this to MacDougall, and he agreed that the concealment was effective. We
then sealed them in four numbered envelopes, and in a little ante-room
of the church Arthur Ford lay back in his chair, covered his eyes with a
handkerchief, and put the envelopes one by one on his forehead.
I subsequently wrote an article about the experiment which was published
in the _Psychic Observer_, but I do not have the text at hand. Ford told
us significant things about the contents of all those envelopes, and I
remember that afterwards MacDougall, Craig and I strolled down the
street and stopped at a little kiosk where we ordered lemonade or orange
juice. I said, “Well, what do you think of it?” and MacDougall’s answer
was, “I should say that it is undoubtedly supernormal.”
He then told Craig that what she had done had already decided him—he was
going to Duke University in a week or two and his first action would be
to set up a Department of Parapsychology. That was a little over thirty
years ago, and I think it is correct to say that what MacDougall did,
with the help of J. B. Rhine, his assistant and later his successor, has
made the subject of Parapsychology scientifically respectable throughout
the United States and Europe.
And now, to the text, as published, 1931.