 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The following article has been submitted for publication by the Adsagsona Paranormal Society, is used with the permission of the author and is the opinion of the author, which may or may not reflect the opinion(s) and or view(s) of the Adsagsona Paranormal Society. You may link to this page, but if you would like to use this article on your site, please contact the APS Editor at editor@apsociety.com, and the Editor will get you in touch with the appropriate person.
If you'd like to submit an article for publication, please contact the Editor. While we do not pay for article submissions, we do give full credit for original, well-researched work.
The Origins of E.S.P and Psychical Research
By Scott Williams
Most persons learn through experience that awareness of objects in the world outside them arises through the use of our senses. Scientific knowledge explains how this comes about – we see an object because light is reflected from it into our eyes – and also makes clear, indirectly, the conditions under which seeing cannot take place – light is necessary for vision; therefore, without it we cannot see.
Personal experience also tells us that our thoughts remain private unless expressed by voice or action. Another person's thoughts can be guessed, but few would claim to be able to know them as they would if the person were thinking aloud. There are exceptions. On the stage, men appear to see when blindfolded and to read thoughts; but such performances are classified as magic, and it is known that the magician uses tricks that enable him to appear to do what common sense says is impossible.
During the past 50 years, however, the public has become aware of reports that abilities such as clairvoyance and telepathy have been demonstrated in the laboratory by means of rigorously controlled experiments. These claims are puzzling to many persons who are interested in natural processes and scientific experimentation, for the investigators appear to have established, by means of carefully planned experiments and conventional statistical analyses, the reality of phenomena that conflict with well-established principles.
Experimental evidence has been approved for five such processes to date:
Since the first four of these processes involve an act of perception or cognition and also because they are, by definition, independent of activity in the sense organs, each is commonly referred to as a kind of extrasensory perception, or ESP.
It will be seen that these four terms are restatements in systematic language of beliefs that have long been apart of folklore and superstition. Telepathy is a new name for mind reading; clairvoyance for second sight; precognition for divination or premonition; clairsentience for reading energy: and telekinesis or psychokinesis is another name for levitation or for the process whereby a person thinks, for example, that he can get good weather for his holiday by praying for it. For this reason, the experiments, if they can be relied on, would imply that much of what has in the past been regarded as superstition must now be included in the domain of natural science.
The Foundation of the Society for Psychical Research
Preoccupation with these beliefs was responsible for the emergence at the end of the nineteenth century of psychical research, in which the study of ESP and other related phenomena became an organized discipline. At that time, there was a great deal of speculation about the possibility of strange new human powers. Stories of extraordinary happenings that seemed to contravene accepted scientific principles were popular, just as they are today. In the latter half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, much publicity was given to spiritualist mediums, who supposedly received messages from the dead and whose exploits attracted considerable scientific interest.
But, at that time science displayed a unity in that when a new discipline, such as biology, revealed facts involving new types of process, they were always consistent with other scientific knowledge. Thus, principles of physics and chemistry operated in the new discoveries of biology. As D’Arcy Thompson (1860-1948), the Scottish biologist, wrote,”…no physical law, anymore than gravity itself, not even among the puzzles of stereo-chemistry, or of physiological surface-action and osmosis, is known to be transgressed by the bodily mechanism.”
In the realm of the senses, the eye was found to employ principles known to optics and the ear to contain mechanisms that might be expected from the study of sound. Messages were transmitted along nerve fibers from the sensory organs to the brain, and the nervous system behaved in a manner that was consistent with knowledge of other physical systems.
While it was not clear at the time whether psychological events would ever be fully explicable in terms of the natural laws already known to science, nothing in human behavior seemed at variance with known processes. The precise changes arising in the brain that were responsible for, say, memory were not known, but remembering displayed no very strange characteristics; similar processes, such as the camera’s recording of a photographic image or the creation of a charge in the condenser, were well understood. However, if a man had shown himself to be capable of quite a different order, as if the photograph could emerge before the film had been exposed in the camera.
While telepathy seemed unlikely but not impossible – for it was conceivable that some sixth sense lay undiscovered – precognition.
Return to the Articles Index.