About eighteen months ago I first opened a new book by the novelist
Upton Sinclair, entitled _Mental Radio_, then newly issued. In 239 pages
it outlined the story of the discovery and development of what purported
to be a supernormal faculty possessed by his wife, and rehearsed a large
number of experiments in which she seemed to have achieved a large and
convincing percentage of successes as a telepathic “percipient,” the
“agent” generally being Mr. Sinclair, but sometimes her brother-in-law
or another person. I confess to misgivings as I began to read, first for
the very reason that the writer is a novelist (unmindful of Wells and
certain other writers of fiction who, nevertheless, have shown
themselves capable of serious and even scientific thinking),[1] and
secondly because I had suspected, rightly or wrongly, that once or twice
in the past he had failed to discover the devices of certain clever
professionals. To be sure, his wife was not a professional, and all the
conditions could be under his own hand, but sometimes through sheer
confidence people are deceived by their own relatives.
This, to be frank, was my initial attitude—one of cautious interrogation
and alertness to find signs of credulity, failure to appreciate the
possibilities of chance, or lack of data by which the calculus of chance
coincidence could be determined. But as I read on and studied the
reproductions of drawings it became more and more evident that something
besides chance had operated, that the conditions of many of the
experiments had been excellently devised, and that where the conditions
were relaxed Mr. Sinclair had been quite aware of the fact and was
candid enough to admit it. He stated that such relaxation did not
increase the percentage of success, and it certainly so appeared from
the examples given. He reported the total number of experiments, and
estimated the percentages of successes, partial successes, and failures.
In 290 experiments, he made these percentages: successes, approximately
23 per cent; partial successes, 53 per cent; failures, 24 per cent. He
admitted that judges probably would not agree upon exactly the same
ratios. In fact I personally think that certain examples which he did
not publish are better than a few which he did, but have not yet found
reason to quarrel with his general estimates.
After considerable study of the book, becoming interested beyond any
expectation, I wrote to Mr. Sinclair, stating that I had become
favorably impressed, and making the somewhat audacious proposal that he
should send me all the original materials for a fresh study by the
individual standards and through the particular methods of a
professional investigator. One can think of several reasons which might
make the most honest and confident man hesitant to assent to such a
proposal, coming from one whom he had never seen, and who might for all
he knew have a set of prejudices which after all would cause him to make
a lawyer’s argument against the case. I was really surprised that the
bundle of materials was sent as quickly as it could be gotten
together.[2]
Among the objects in mind were: (1) To study the materials in their
strict chronological order, day by day. The mode of presentation in
_Mental Radio_ was to give some of the most striking results first, then
many more that were more or less classified according to subjects and
aspects. This is effective for popular reading but not satisfactory to
the serious student. (2) To see if there were signs, in any part of the
results, of profiting from normal knowledge, whether consciously or
subconsciously acquired, of what the “agent” had drawn. Mr. Sinclair
took this theory into account and quite decidedly killed it, but it was
my duty to try it out anew by my own processes, with the same rigor
shown in relation to my own wife and my daughter in _The Psychic in the
House_. Later, in summary fashion, these tests will be set forth. (3) To
try out other theories to account for the ratios and degrees of
correspondence between “original drawings” and “reproductions” in the
Sinclair experiments, such as involuntary whispering and chance
coincidence. (4) To make a large number of guessing tests on the basis
of the Sinclair originals, both as a means of deciding whether the “mere
coincidence” theory is tenable (as aforesaid) and, if it should prove
otherwise, in order to make a rough measurement of the disparity between
telepathic results and those of guessing. (5) In the event that there
appeared to be no reasonable escape from conclusion that telepathy is
displayed by the material, to ascertain (a) whether the telepathic
faculty with Mrs. Sinclair was constant, vacillating, progressively
constant, or what; (b) whether the telepathic impressions came to her in
the form of ideas, images, names or in more than one fashion; (c)
whether any further hints as to the mental processes involved could be
discerned or any particular pieces of information isolated which might
be helpful in this field of study. (6) Finally, to urge readers to
institute experiments of their own, and to give amateurs some directions
as to procedure. If many could be persuaded to start “games” of this
character with their friends, doubtless favorable subjects could be
discovered or developed. Attention being called to these persons, series
of tests could be made with them under conditions against which none of
the old objections could be offered.[3]
The Sinclair experiments are treated first in this Bulletin, since they
are its chief subject. The drier Historical Notes, presenting a sketch
of the first steps in methodical research relating to alleged
Thought-Transference, with summaries of some of the classic series of
tests, particularly such as are based upon drawings, are relegated to
Part Two. The more earnest and methodical students of such matters will
prefer to read that first.
Mr. Upton Sinclair, about fifty-two years old when his book _Mental
Radio_ was issued, is, as everyone is supposed to know, one of the
leading novelists of the United States. His stories are all, or nearly
all, characterized by an intense purpose. To those who claim that art
should be exercised only for art’s sake this may be obnoxious. But from
the point of view of this examination of his book purporting to prove
telepathy, the fact that his novels also attempt to prove something, on
the basis of studies made by him, is quite in his favor.[4] Whether he
has in fact proved the thesis of his respective tales is not within our
province to determine; we do propose rigidly to analyze and review his
claims to have proved telepathy.
Mr. Sinclair is a Socialist, and a very active and prominent one; he has
been Socialist candidate for Congress in New Jersey and later in
California, besides having been Socialist candidate for the United
States Senate and for Governor in the latter-named State. Political
prejudices or predilections should be strictly excluded from the minds
of readers of the book or this review of it.[5] It is another gratifying
indication that Mr. Sinclair was not deterred from publishing _Mental
Radio_ by the solicitations or irony of influential friends in his
political group, for the scientific spirit is in part compounded of
courage, honesty and candor.
Mrs. Sinclair, née Mary Craig Kimbrough, somewhere about forty-five
years old when the experiments afterwards published took place, is the
daughter of a retired judge, bank president, and planter of Mississippi.
The reader may judge of the quality of her mentality by reading Appendix
1. That is, in part, the reason that it is printed. It is a piece of
writing by Mrs. Sinclair shortened according to permission given. Almost
immediately after my suggestion that the experimental materials should
be sent for examination, they were bundled up and sent, together with
some stray scraps, among which was this unfinished piece of manuscript
which, as it proved, the Sinclairs did not know had been included. In
spots the composition may be a bit diffuse and repetitious, but the
woman really thinks and reasons, which is more than many do.
There is in it a sincerity, earnestness and intensity of desire to know,
which can hardly be counterfeited. Its writer fairly rivals Descartes in
her determination to find some salient and secure spot from which to
start in her quest. But in a manner she goes back farther than
Descartes, at least she splits his ultimate in two. She is satisfied
with “I am,” not because “I think,” but because “I am conscious of
thinking”; but she does not so readily grant the “_I_ think.” She wants
to know, “Am _I_ doing all the thinking I am conscious of?”
In fact, the document is so intense in its eagerness to penetrate the
secret of personality in relation to its cosmic environment that it is
almost febrile. At least in its first pages there is something
pathological. To paint life with such dark colors and to dwell so upon
its “discouragements” is not an indication of perfect health.
And yet it is certain that the writer is not self-absorbed. The painful
reactions of the kind which she has experienced, the torture produced in
her by the existence of so much in life that seems unmeaning and
disappointing, she supposes to be quite general with her fellow-men and
so feels a great pity for them. Whereas, in my belief, while more are
complaining than are happy or contented, it is common to fret because of
income taxes, and inability to wear such fine clothes as those of Mrs.
Jones, and cold weather and squalling cats, and such sordid matters, but
uncommon to be agonized by the desire to fathom the mysteries of the
human spirit.
The main points of what Mr. Sinclair tells us of the characteristics of
his wife are to be discerned in this revealing manuscript. He says “She
has nothing of the qualities of naïveté and credulity. She was raised in
a family of lawyers and was given the training and sceptical point of
view of a woman of the world. ‘Trust people, but watch them,’ was old
Judge Kimbrough’s maxim, and following it too closely has almost made a
pessimist of his daughter. In the course of the last five or six years
Craig has acquired a fair-sized library of books on the mind, both
orthodox, scientific, and ‘crank.’ She has sat up half the night
studying, marking passages and making notes, seeking to reconcile
various doctrines, to know what the mind is, and how it works, and what
can be done with it.” This began with a breakdown of health when she was
about forty years old. “A story of suffering needless to go into;
suffice it that she had many ills to experiment upon, and mental control
became suddenly a matter of life and death.” This breakdown, it is said,
resulted directly from “her custom of carrying the troubles of all who
were near her.” She is intensely sympathetic, we are told. “The griefs
of other people overwhelm Craig like a suffocation.”[6]
The book relates several spontaneous experiences of Mrs. Sinclair when
she was young and which, taken together, strongly indicate telepathy.
Her husband rightly remarks that it is the number of such incidents
which is impressive; one or two might well be coincidence. Still the
coincidence of being suddenly impressed that Mr. B, whose home was three
hundred miles away, was at her home where he had never been, and turning
back from a drive and finding him there, even taken by itself, is a very
striking one. Mr. Sinclair himself is witness to the fact that she
suddenly, for no known reason became very much worried about Jack
London, insisting that he was in mental distress, whereas it proved that
London committed suicide at about that time.
Such incidents indicate that her experimental successes were not solely
the result of the method which she explains at length, but that she had
an inborn gift from early childhood. Her interest in that gift seems to
have been much stimulated by her acquaintance with “Jan,” the “young
hypnotist” of Appendix I, whose advent is probably not in that narrative
placed in chronological order. She became convinced that he showed
evidence of telepathy, and tried in turn to ascertain what he was
thinking or what he was doing when absent, and became convinced that
many times she had been successful. Also, “Craig has been able to
establish exactly the same _rapport_ with her husband,” who relates
instances. These were “written down at the time.” So few even
intelligent people do make immediate record of such things that we would
have suspected, even if he had not informed us on another page, that he
has made a considerable study of the literature of psychic research.
One of these incidents we shall particularly notice here, and that
because Mr. Sinclair himself has either not noticed all of its
evidential value, or has not fully called attention to it. * * * [Refer
to Figs. 14a and 14b and experiment.]
Probably Mr. Sinclair thought it would be sufficiently obvious to the
reader that the first drawing is as similar in shape to a clover blossom
as a person having no gift for drawing would be likely to make it, in
addition to the correspondence of color. But it should also be remarked
that the second drawing is like the flower-head of the American aloe, as
one may see by comparing it with the cut shown in the article entitled
“Agave,” in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_. The article provokingly fails
to tell us what are the colors of the flower, but the cut shows that it
is at least much lighter above than below.
Another incident is remarkable for its apparent revelation of
subconscious mechanisms. Seemingly here Mrs. Sinclair not only got an
impression of what her husband had drawn, but it was modified by
something he was then reading, and that by the aid of memories from
childhood. His drawing represented a football, “neatly laced up” (Fig.
15). Hers (Fig. 15a) shows a band of exactly the same shape on a figure
not so very far from that of a football, but with an extension
suggesting the head of an animal, and a line suggesting a leg. And she
wrote “Belly-band on calf.” * * *!
“Wishing to solve the mystery!” But why should the lady have felt that
there was any mystery in her drawing and script, any more than in the
generality of her results? But she evidently did, or she would not have
asked the question. It is one of the most interesting features of this
experiment that she seemed to feel that something else than the original
drawing or her husband’s thoughts about it was influencing her
impression, and suspected that this something was his contemporaneous
reading.
Sometimes the apparent telepathy was exercised in a dream, especially
during its latter stage, while the lady was gradually emerging into full
consciousness.[7]