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. UPTON SINCLAIR CONTENTS _Page_ _Introduction_ by WILLIAM MCDOUGALL v _Preface_ by ALBERT EINSTEIN viii _Foreword_ xi MENTAL RADIO 3 _Addendum_: The Sinclair Experiments for Telepathy (by WALTER FRANKLIN PRINCE) 149 _Epilogue_ 237 MENTAL RADIO _1_ If you were born as long as fifty years ago, you can remember a time when the test of a sound, common-sense mind was refusing to fool with “new-fangled notions.” Without exactly putting it into a formula, people took it for granted that truth was known and familiar, and anything that was not known and familiar was nonsense. In my boyhood, the funniest joke in the world was a “flying machine man”; and when my mother took up a notion about “germs” getting into you and making you sick, my father made it a theme for no end of domestic wit. Even as late as twenty years ago, when I wanted to write a play based on the idea that men might some day be able to make a human voice audible to groups of people all over America, my friends assured me that I could not interest the public in such a fantastic notion. Among the objects of scorn, in my boyhood, was what we called “superstition”; and we made the term include, not merely the notion that the number thirteen brought you bad luck, not merely a belief in witches, ghosts and goblins, but also a belief in any strange phenomena of the mind which we did not understand. We knew about hypnotism, because we had seen stage performances, and were in the midst of reading a naughty book called _Trilby_; but such things as trance mediumship, automatic writing, table-tapping, telekinesis, telepathy and clairvoyance—we didn’t know these long names, but if such ideas were explained to us, we knew right away that it was “all nonsense.”