Читать книгу E.S.P. Extra Sensory Perception - J. B. Rhine PhD - Страница 7

The reception given this volume since it was issued about twelve months ago in Boston has been most gratifying. Especially so has been the interest shown by many psychologists, most of them younger ones. The encouragement thus given to our efforts and the generous appreciation shown by many of the principal parapsychologists has induced new enthusiasm in our little group of workers here at Duke University.

During the year and a half since the book was written we have not been idle. The number of trials reported here has now been doubled, tripled and probably nearly quadrupled. And we have gone on in more than adding mere numbers. Several new lines of research have been opened up, and these will be presented in the reports to follow. Only one minor investigation has been reported at the time of this writing. I refer to a study of telepathic and clairvoyant capacity in the two-personality states of the British medium, Mrs. Garrett. The good positive results obtained in this work are of interest, not only to the question of distribution of Extra-Sensory Perception, but even more to the problem of mediumship. The report appeared in the December issue of the journal, Character and Personality (Alien and Unwin, London).

No part of the huge bulk of data gathered since the first publication has been inconsistent with the earlier work appearing herein. On the contrary, it supports this report at every point where there is close enough similarity of conditions to make comparison possible. From outside the laboratory comes still further support and confirmation. Seven serious and systematic attempts to repeat our experiments elsewhere have been reported to me, and all have yielded significant positive deviations from mean chance expectation. That is, all are evidential, so far as excluding the chance hypothesis is concerned. Over a dozen others are planned, several of them in psychological laboratories. There may be still others I do not know of.

I have added a short appendix to this edition in which to reply briefly to the few criticisms that have been offered. In closing, I should like to pay tribute to the great parapsychologist who wrote the Introduction to this book at a time when he was ill, and who died a few months after its publication. I have been proud to claim Dr Walter Franklin Prince as my teacher, and I strongly hope that his splendid critical poise and his ruthless logic will continue to influence the subject he did so much to advance along sound lines in America.

To English readers it is especially appropriate for me to acknowledge again the debt which this work owes to their great countryman, Professor William McDougall. So much of its inspiration, its support and protection, and its guidance, has come from him, that it can well be said that in all probability, without him, it would never have been carried out.