NOTES TO PAGES 349–351 | 519
- J. B. Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception, Boston Society for Psychic Research (1934). This is only the
broadest outline of how Rhine conducted his tests: in fact, his methods varied from trial to trial. For
a detailed account of his work, see S. Horn, Unbelievable, Ecco (2009). For Rhine’s own account of
his experiments in dice rolling, see his The Reach of the Mind, William Sloan (1947); Faber & Faber
published the UK version of this book in 1948. - Rhine (Note 8), pp. 58, 165.
- S. G. Soal and F. Bateman, Modern Experiments in Telepathy, Yale University Press (1954), pp. 104–19.
On pp. 338–9, Soal and Bateman cite the opening sentences of Turing’s argument 9 as an ‘example
of the outlook of the scientific materialist. According to this view, human beings are just material
aggregates which behave according to the laws of quantum theory. The brain is, in this view, no more
than an electrical switchboard of amazing complexity, but without an operator’. Clearly they had not
read the rest of the article from which they were quoting. - Soal and Bateman (Note 11), pp. 123–5. See also S. G. Soal and W. Whately Carington, ‘Experiments
in non-sensory cognition’, Nature (9 March 1940), 389–390. Soal is a fascinating and elusive figure. A
putative adept at automatic writing, in 1927 he held the pencil in a series of séances whose result was
a sequence of letters ostensibly written by the dead Oscar Wilde. In Oscar Wilde from Purgatory, her
own account of the episode, Mrs. Travers Smith called Soal ‘Mr. V.’ and explained that he ‘wrote with
Mrs. T. S.’s hand resting on his. When she took her hand off, the pencil only tapped and did not con-
tinue . . . Mr. V. is a mathematical scholar and had no special interest in Oscar Wilde’. Subsequently,
Soal himself published a rather Jamesian essay on the séances in which he revealed that the Wilde
letters were cobbled together from books in his own possession. The account read in part: ‘If, however,
it should eventually turn out that in cases where the communicators are shown to be purely ficti-
tious characters the supernormal selection of material is as varied and ingenious as in the apparently
spiritistic cases, then we should have at least a presumption in favour of the view that in these latter
also the supernormal selection may be the work of living minds’. H. Travers Smith, Oscar Wilde from
Purgatory, T. Werner Laurie (1924), p. 7; S. G. Soal, ‘Note on the “Oscar Wilde” script’, Journal of the
Society for Psychical Research, 23 (1926), 110–12. - Soal and Bateman (Note 11), p. 124.
- Soal and Bateman (Note 11), p. 132.
- Three of Soal’s four agents were women. One, Rita Elliott, he also identified in his book as ‘Mrs. S. G.
Soal’. According to the General Register Office, however, Soal’s wife, whom he married in 1942, was
named Beatrice Potter. - Soal and Bateman (Note 11), pp. 134–7.
- Soal and Bateman (Note 11), p. 139.
- S. G. Soal and K. M. Goldney, ‘Experiments in precognitive telepathy’, Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research, 47 (1942–45), 21–150. - C. D. Broad, ‘The experimental establishment of precognition’, Philosophy, 19(74) (November 1944),
p. 261. In 1948 Soal’s research received an even stronger endorsement from G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a
professor of biology at Yale. Writing in American Scientist, Hutchinson characterized Soal’s experi-
ments as ‘the most carefully conducted investigations of the kind ever to have been made’ and quoted
from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
‘Summing up this general consideration’, Hutchinson concluded, ‘it would seem to the present
writer that, either we must suppose that the experiments are to be taken at face value, and that reality is
not exactly what it is generally supposed to be in scientific work . . . or we must reject the experiments
and accept that, without being precognitive, we are justified by past experience in setting limits to what
is possible’. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, ‘Marginalia’, American Scientist, 36(2) (April 1948), pp. 291–5. - ‘Evidence of telepathy’, The Times (2 September 1949), 2.
- R. Braddon, The Piddingtons: Their Exclusive Story, Werner Laurie (1950).