Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 2Wallace, Alfred Russel
Science
Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 2
Wallace, Alfred Russel
Naturalists -- Correspondence; Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1823-1913
In the discussion on Prof. Barrett's paper at the Glasgow Meeting of the
British Association, which took place in the London _Times_ and other
newspapers, instances of apparent thought-transference were given by
many correspondents. Each of these cases Prof. Barrett investigated
personally, and one of them led to a remarkable series of experiments
which he conducted at Buxton, with the result that no doubt was left on
his mind of the fact of the transference of ideas from one mind to
another independent of the ordinary channels of sense. He asked Prof.
and Mrs. H. Sidgwick to come to Buxton and repeat his experiments with
the subjects there--daughters of a local clergyman. They did so, and
though they had less success at first than Prof. Barrett had had, they
were ultimately convinced of the genuineness of the phenomena. In
addition, Mr. Edmund Gurney, Mr. Frederic Myers, Prof. A. Hopkinson and
Prof. Balfour Stewart, all responded to Prof. Barrett's invitation to
visit Buxton and test the matter for themselves, and all came to the
same conclusion as he had. Subsequently Gurney and Myers associated
their name with Barrett's in a paper on the subject, published in the
_Nineteenth Century_.
Prof. Barrett asked Wallace to read over the first report made by Prof.
and Mrs. Sidgwick, which at first seemed somewhat disheartening, and the
following is his reply:
REMARKS ON EXPERIMENTS IN THOUGHT READING BY MR. AND MRS. SIDGWICK AT
BUXTON
The failure of so many of these experiments seems to me to depend on
their having been conducted without any knowledge of the main
peculiarity of thought reading or clairvoyance--that it is a perception
of the object thought of or hidden, not by its name, or even by its sum
total of distinctive qualities, but by the simple qualities separately.
A clairvoyant will perceive a thing as round, then as yellow, and
finally as an orange. Now Mr. Galton's experiments have shown how
various are the powers of visualising objects possessed by different
persons, and how distinct their modes of doing so; and if these distinct
visualisations of the same thing are in any way presented to a
clairvoyant, there is little wonder that some confusion should result.
This would suggest that one person who possesses the faculty of clearly
visualising objects would meet with more success than a number of
persons some of whom visualise one portion or quality of the object,
some another, while to others the name alone is present to the mind. It
follows from these considerations that cards are bad for such
experiments. The qualities of number, colour, form and arrangement may
be severally most prominent in one mind or other, and the result is
confusion to the thought reader. This is shown in the experiments by the
number of pips or the suit alone being often right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account