Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/187

XIV ] guess of what the card was which an "agent" in another room was looking at. The agent was also under observation by an experimenter, the number of the card he was to look at being chosen by the experimenter's drawing counters of various colors from a bag.

The results showed that the subject had a marked tendency to guess not the target card but the one following it; that is, he knew what the card was going to be two and a half seconds before it was turned up and looked at by the "agent." Tests showed that there were "good agents" and poor ones, successful procedures and unsuccessful ones, but, pooling all conditions, good and bad, the results could not have been due to chance more than once in 10 35 times.8 Independent and eminent witnesses were frequently present at the experiments.

The experiments in "extrasensory perception" at Duke University by Dr. J. B. Rhine and his students (such as the Pratt-Woodruff experiments) are by now so well known as hardly to need description; while the University of Colorado study by Martin and Stribic, the University of Groningen (Holland) study9 and many others show that by the same or similar objective techniques similar results can be arrived at.

As relevant to Swedenborg, however, Whately Carington's distance experiments in telepathy10 are most interesting, as are Carington's theories to account for these phenomena.

Here the experimenter looks at a picture, say a hedgehog, and draws it at 8 P.M. of a certain day; a fixed time later he draws another picture, and so on. The persons to be tested, who may be seas or continents away, try to draw the picture they think it is at the same time (previously arranged) and, before midnight, they must put their guesses in the mail for the experimenter. The postal date on the envelope is a check.

Instead of a few cards the whole pictorial universe is now the target of guessing, so far as the person tested knows, but correct guesses, some fantastically above chance, have even so been made. The results are conscientiously tabulated. For example, in one of Mr. Carington's experiments the drawing of a bow-tie was "sent," and in the answers there were a number of hourglasses (very similar in shape), but they were rejected.

It is usually a picture that is transmitted. A hedgehog appears