THE CHICKEN-HEARTED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 940, 16 August 1957, Page 11

THE CHICKEN-HEARTED

Sir-J. C. Hayes refers to the work of J. B. Rhine on parapsychology at Duke University, North Carolina. I thought at first it was to illustrate his first sentence that the mind of man is still in the early stages of evolutionary development. Instead he seems to regard it as. meaning that man’s mind has greater potentials than originally thought. About the only conclusion that can be drawn from J. B. Rhine’s publications is that there is a sucker born every minute. Although we were invited by the conjurer when we were still children to "name a card," we were not really surprised when by some kind of magic it was produced. However, Doctor Rhine, by leaving out of his calculations many of the times when the right card is not produced, manages to be surprised that now and then the right card is produced slightly more often than might be expected. The unscientific approach of Doctor Rhine is fully discussed in The Spoor otf Spooks and Other Nonsense, by Bergen Evans, and by Joseph Jastrow, in "E.S.P., House of Cards," an article published in the American Scholar. Duke University was a small college which obligingly changed its name to Duke University at the suggestion of a wealthy oil man named Duke. When Doctor Rhine’s experiments have been tried at larger universities such as Stanford, the University of Glasgow, the University of Chicago and also, I understand, at Victoria University College, no one was found who could guess the cards more accurately than chance expectancy would indicate. If there really was any scientific basis for this telepathy, other investigators in other universities using exactly the same cards would be able to achieve the same results. They cannot. While people are only too willing to believe the psychic nonsense produced by the scientific conjurer, rather than the cold hard facts of physics, then the

frontiers of the mind are still the same old frontiers; ignorance, illiteracy, supere stition and sentiment.

R. M.

D.

. (Masterton).