Personality and the Paranormal

The keynote of what I have to say is the opening up of a new world-view. But in making this attempt we must be true to certain old-new principles and values which are only now becoming clear. They have been clarified, strangely enough, through the long clash between science and religion. We are discovering that religion, at its best, is not a matter of belief or theory. It is primarily a matter of feeling and attitude—an attitude to the actual, here and now.

This attitude has two aspects. First, there is moral championship: devotion to something worth while, to what we may call spirit. Secondly, there is an agnostic piety toward the Whole, or toward whatever superhuman reality may lie beyond our understanding. The past gave us religious experience, though it generally confused that experience with theories about the universe. The modern age has given us the scientific spirit, intellectual integrity and modern logic. It has also forced upon us a realization of the limitations of thought and language. Hence arise agnosticism, natural piety and cosmical piety.

My aim this evening is to assess the interim findings of paranormal psychology in relation to the rest of modern experience, and especially in relation to religion. What difference does the paranormal make? There seem to be three questions. First, what difference does it make to our practical prospects, here and hereafter? Secondly, what difference does it make to our understanding of the self and the cosmos? Thirdly, what difference does it make to religion at its best?

I approach the matter as a plain man looking at psychical research—perhaps with my mouth rather widely open in amazement, but still with my tongue in my cheek. I am not an expert in this difficult field, and I must therefore speak tentatively.

As I understand it, the experts’ verdict contains both agreement and disagreement. The impressive point of agreement is that psi does happen. Further, it cannot simply be reduced to the physical. Mind is not merely an epiphenomenon upon physical processes; the physical is not ultimate reality. Our ordinary spatial experience, and apparently our ordinary temporal experience also, must be in some sense superficial.

But beyond this there is much disagreement. What are the actual powers of psi? Is there only telepathy, or is there clairvoyance also? Are both genuine? Is there telekinesis? Are there precognition and postcognition? We may even have to consider corresponding kinds of action upon events—what I shall later call pre-kinesis and post-kinesis.

There is disagreement also about the self. Is it a substantial ego, or a system of psychons? There is disagreement about survival and the value of the evidence for it. Can we argue from the fact of thinking to a substantial thinker? Hume’s criticism remains relevant. If there is survival, is it complete or only partial? Is there pre-existence? Again, what is the common ground in which paranormal relations occur? Is it personal, impersonal, or supra-personal? What is the status of time—fully real, wholly illusory, merely superficial, or perhaps multidimensional? Is reality in principle fully revealable and wholly open to scientific study, or are there, as Tyrrell suggested, grades of significance? And throughout all this there remains the old question of free will.

One distinction may prevent confusion. Telepathy proper means awareness of experience in other minds—thought-reading in the widest sense. But there may also be what I shall call “teleboulia,” or far-willing: the influencing of other minds. This could take the form either of thought-transference or of actually swaying another will. Helpful prayer, if it has an objective influence upon another person, might be an instance of this second kind.

What, then, of the evidence? I am disposed to accept it, but still with caution. There is always the possibility of a systematic error running through the whole inquiry because of some hidden factor. One may recall the old ether theory, with its supposed “perfect fluid” and all the rest of its elaborate equipment, constructed before relativity had risen above the horizon. A whole body of careful thought may be misdirected by an assumption which nobody has yet learned to question.

We must remember also the depths of human gullibility. In a sufficiently complex field almost anything can be proved, given an obsessive will to prove it. Consider the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, the British Israelites, or the Flat Earth theory. Ingenuity can accumulate an astonishing body of apparent confirmation. I therefore reserve final judgement, though I provisionally accept the main findings.

Above all, we should beware of staking our lives upon them. We should not found a faith upon the paranormal, or use it as a prop for crumbling theories and doctrines which ought in any case to be outgrown.

Let me turn to particular powers. Telepathy may be a direct contagion of experience from mind to mind, or it may work indirectly through some “other sphere.” What appears in consciousness may be only a symbolization of an unconscious contagion, rather as a dream symbolically presents unconscious material. The result may be tangled with repressions and other private complications.

There may be much undetected telepathy. It may merely “tilt” conscious thinking. It may contribute to fashions of thought and feeling, even to such collective disturbances as war fever. It may play a part in artistic creation and inspiration, in reverie, and in hypnagogic visions. I have myself, on the verge of sleep, seen faces and heard voices.

Telekinesis calls for greater caution. In any case its demonstrated scope appears extremely restricted. And yet—we must at least wonder about the ages of supposed miracle-working, and about autosuggestive cures. Is telekinesis itself a special case of psychokinesis, as in normal volitional action upon our muscles?

Precognition presents a difficulty. Suppose I foresee that I shall die tomorrow in a railway accident. Naturally, I do not take the train. If I then escape, the supposed foreseeing was illusory; it was not real foreseeing at all. But if the foreseeing was genuine, my precautions must somehow be defeated, perhaps in ways which I had not foreseen.

Clairvoyance means awareness of remote objects which are not sensed, and which are known neither by telepathy nor by precognitive perception. It is extremely hard to isolate experimentally, because these rival explanations are so difficult to exclude.

Precognition and postcognition may themselves take telepathic or clairvoyant forms. Once more we must ask whether they are direct or indirect—whether they occur through the “other sphere,” perhaps by some participation in an eternal “now.”

Precognition and free will are not antithetical. Grant that choice is free and effective; but grant also a supratemporal sphere. Then what I shall choose and do is available now in that supratemporal order.

But we should note that the familiar free-will controversy is false. I may be, in one sense, determined through and through, physically and mentally, and yet, in another sense, free—within limits. A trolley-bus, for instance, is determined and yet free within limits. In our own case freedom means self-determination by our own extant nature, rather than constraint imposed externally.

Finally, free will is unimportant. The cult of it is due to veiled egoism and self-importance, and violates the best religious feeling. The truly religious aspiration is: “Let me be God’s hand, eye and voice.”

There is also the question whether pre-kinesis and post-kinesis are logical possibilities. A past volition might directly affect present events, or a present volition might directly affect past events. John’s present heroic choice might contribute directly either to his future strength or to his past strength. His present longing for a fine day in the future might influence the future weather. His present love for Jane might directly strengthen Jane in the past. God, as the ultimate flower of the cosmical process, might in the end create the initial stage of the cosmos. These are put forward merely as logical possibilities.

Communication with the dead is, of course, offered as evidence for survival. But we must first define survival. Complete or true survival would mean the continuance of intelligent activity together with memory of earthly life. Without intelligent activity there would be only the survival of records—something like Broad’s psychic factor. Without memory there would be no personal survival at all, unless one postulated a “clean-slate” ego.

Incomplete survival might consist of intelligent activity with only some memory, or perhaps memory without present intelligent activity.

As for the evidence, some say survival is proved; others say there is no proof; others again say that it is not proved but remains possible. I suspend judgement. I have no expert knowledge, and I have no strong preference. I shall make some further comments later.

Consider, however, what may be called “ad hoc survival,” or the ad hoc re-creation—or better, re-vival—of a full or partial personality. Tyrrell rejected such a suggestion with scorn, but it would explain the scrappy character of much of the evidence, and it would explain why there is no positive information about the after-life. The hypothesis implies a non-centred theory of personality. A stimulus—a thought or desire from living persons—reaches the other sphere, or common ground. The common ground responds by re-creating the person for that occasion, with memory and activity relevant to the stimulus. The re-creation might be complete or incomplete.

Our concepts are probably inadequate. “Does the person survive—yes or no?” may be a false question, to which neither answer is appropriate. The truth may still be inconceivable.

Rhine reports that psi functions according to the normal laws of the higher mental functions, and that the effects of drugs upon it are similar.

Several general questions arise about paranormal powers. First, are they primitive or highly developed? There is much evidence for calling them primitive. Tradition speaks of second sight, soothsayers, witches, the oracle at Delphi and miracles. The coordinated movement of bird-flocks and the homing instinct may suggest powers not included in our ordinary account of sensation. Modern primitive tribes are often credited with unusual capacities of this kind. Such powers seem rarer in civilized societies—perhaps because civilization has produced too much individualism. Mediums themselves are mostly persons of a primitive type, and dreams and trances play a large part in the phenomena.

On the other hand, there is evidence for regarding psi as a developed function. Rhine concluded that the best experimental subjects tend to be intelligent, educated, balanced and not neurotic.

Secondly, are these powers universal or exceptional? The evidence suggests great differences of power, but Rhine claims that everyone has at least some capacity.

Thirdly, are the powers fixed, or can they be improved? Performance often deteriorates with use. This may be fatigue, or merely the onset of boredom. There is as yet no evidence of improvement. But there may be a future development of technique. Electricity was known in a fragmentary way in ancient times, though no one then possessed an electrical technology. Psi may stand today in a comparable position.

I offer, very tentatively, a hypothesis of three phases. In the primitive phase paranormal power was strong but wild. In the civilized phase it has become weak. In a future phase it may be greatly developed.

Let us imagine first the ideal limit. Full telepathy would mean awareness of all minds. Full clairvoyance would mean awareness of all present events. Full telekinesis would mean control of all present events. Full pre- and postcognition would mean awareness of all events, past and future; full pre- and post-kinesis, control of all events. At that limit “I” should be “God.”

Partial development is more relevant. With telepathy we should need not only methods of development but methods of prevention. Would privacy end, and with it secretiveness? We should get used to such openness. It might increase mutual understanding, as Rhine suggests. It would affect love, crime and politics; it would affect preparation for war; and it might assist the exploration of other worlds.

Clairvoyance might extend such practices as dowsing and might even contribute to astronomical exploration. Telekinesis, or psychokinesis, might produce a new age of “miracles,” but miracles systematically controlled. It might also produce conflicts between rival magicians.

Precognition might forestall accidents and permit the study of “future history.” Postcognition might revise our knowledge of past history and open new methods for studying prehistory, biological evolution and cosmical origins.

Pre-kinesis and post-kinesis would carry practical intervention beyond the present. Teleboulia, or far-willing, would mean control of other minds at a distance. We might even have to speak of preboulia, or fore-willing, and postboulia, or after-willing—the influence of volition across temporal as well as spatial separation.

Before setting out the main theories, I should distinguish two forms of the system theory of personality. In one form, associated with Price, the elements are strictly atomic—sense-data, for example—and are related together extrinsically.

In the second form the “elements” are neither substances nor true atoms. Each is what it is in virtue of its function in a field: first, its relation to the external physical world; secondly, its relation to the subsystem which is the individual; and thirdly, its relation to the supersystem. In a Whiteheadian manner we might then say that an individual is a “prehension” of the universe from a certain locality and date, and also from a certain “position” in the other sphere.

How, then, does psi work? What is its mechanism? Why does it work sometimes and not at other times? Put in the most extreme form, why am I not God?

The personality of common sense is imprisoned in its body and in the specious present, though it has remote perception and memory. Its perception is limited by the sense-organs; its memory is limited to its personal biography; its communication is limited by the sense-organs. Its character is due to physical heredity and to conditioning. A single paranormal occurrence shatters the theory.

One possible theory is direct action by the common-sense personality, conceived as a substance. Telepathy and teleboulia would be mind acting upon mind. Clairvoyance would be things acting upon minds without the senses. Telekinesis would be minds acting upon things. Precognition and postcognition would involve the transcendence of time. But how does any of this happen, and why does it not happen always? The theory gives no answer.

A second theory supposes indirect action through a common ground—the other sphere—which is supratemporal and supraspatial, and in which individual minds are rooted. The individual remains a substance, but one inhering both in the normal world and in the other sphere, or potentially in several spheres. It might extend and retract psychic “pseudopodia.” This resembles Tyrrell’s conception of “stretching”: in trance the mind stretches into the other sphere; in death it withdraws completely from the ordinary world. But the questions remain. How does the stretching occur, and why only sometimes? Again there is no answer.

A third theory, associated with Carington and Price, treats the person not as a substance but as a system—a subsystem within a supersystem. Its elements are experiences, or psychons. They are related psychologically within the personal system and also with the supersystem in paranormal phenomena. Similar laws govern both kinds of relation. But once more the central questions remain: why does paranormal connexion occur sometimes and not always, and why am I this subsystem rather than the supersystem itself?

Whatever theory we adopt, simple materialism must be abandoned. Mind is not absolutely limited by the physical, though it is still largely limited by it. Mind is not an epiphenomenon. Whether dialectical materialism may still stand is another question.

Let me offer a tentative suggestion about paranormal linkage. Rhine invites us to interpret the paranormal in terms of normal psychological principles. Following a line suggested by Carington, we may relate it to the unity of the individual mind. How do experiences coalesce into one mental life?

What is traditionally called the association of ideas may operate through identical elements of content. Compare F. H. Bradley’s treatment of such connexion. An experience AB recalls an experience BC through the identity of the common factor B. That common factor may be mainly cognitive, affective or conative: a thought, a feeling, a desire or a volition. It may be hidden from consciousness, so that the identity itself is undiscoverable.

Applied to telepathy, the connexion might be made through an identical factor in two minds—a common “K-object,” in Carington’s terminology—operating through the supersystem. The identity might be a common general tone or some particular element.

In clairvoyance the individual’s view of a remote situation might be identical with that situation in some special respect; the identity would import the object into the experience. In telekinesis there might be a crucial identity between a mental state and a remote physical condition, so that the mental state sways the physical. Pre- and postcognition might involve a similar mechanism.

Does this theory imply the identity of indiscernibles, which Bertrand Russell and others deny? Perhaps we should substitute the notion of “identity in the other sphere.” The plain difficulty in my suggestion is that often no relevant identity can be discovered.

We are thus brought to the larger problem: how are the paranormal findings related to established knowledge? How do the two fit together? What must be abandoned? In particular, what is their relation to science, morality, religion and philosophy?

Objects “appear”; therefore they appear to something. But the subject is a featureless abstraction—a mere viewpoint with a biography. Objects stimulate the subject to cognize them, but always from that particular viewpoint and through that particular biography.

Error may be described as mental squinting. In a dark lane I see an imperfect shape and mistake a bush for a cow. I complete the obscure form by squinting, as it were, past cowishness on to it.

What is a personality, or a person? It is not merely a physical, electromagnetic system; nor is it merely a biological system of instincts and reflexes. A person is something aware of something, and responding to something. Personality has the subject-object form.

Consciousness is essentially a relation. Subjectivity involves objectivity—and perhaps objectivity, in some sense, involves subjectivity. Awareness is not photographic or merely passive. It is receptive-creative. For that very reason it is largely erroneous: what it gives us is often an inaccurate symbolization of its object.

What is the subject? Is it a metaphysical ego and an immortal soul? Is it a living body? Is it a subsystem of experience which continually absorbs new elements? Or is it a focal point within a supersystem, prehending an environment and responding to it by affecting it? Whatever the answer, experience always occurs from a viewpoint and from a “biography.”

There are qualitatively different and hierarchical ranges of objectivity: sensed qualities; perceived objects; persons, including oneself and others; scientific objects, such as electrons, including societies of persons; and pure abstractions or universals.

There is also an infinite gradation between awake and somnolent experiencing. We all know the difference. The more awake consciousness is aware of more objects, more truly and more coherently, and it reaches higher ranges of objectivity. Contrast the worlds of a worm, a dog and an infant; then that of the average man; and finally those of a saint, a great artist or a philosopher. Here too there is the error of mental squinting.

Values emerge from the impact of objects upon subjects. We are aware of some objects as dynamic, as tending toward action. There are bodily tensions, personality tensions and social tensions; perhaps there are cosmical tensions also.

We espouse dynamic objects, but always with some prejudice due to our biography. Objects stimulate the subject to espouse or reject them from a particular viewpoint and through a particular history. Like objects, values are hierarchical; but a lowly value may be an ingredient in a higher one. Bodily values, for instance, may be an ingredient in personal values.

The growth of personality is growth in cognition, affection and conation. It is growth in response to objective reality—in wisdom, love and creative action—and therefore in response to higher ranges of objectivity and value.

Perversion is deviation from the true line of growth. It consists in obsessive concern with the familiar, facile and trivial, whether objects or objective values. It may be obsession with the body, with self-regard and the psychological “me,” with the beloved person, with the social group, or with particular abstractions. Or it may consist in concern for some isolated higher values to the exclusion of others—obsessive pacifism is an example. Moral squinting projects irrelevant values upon the actual here and now.

In speaking of “the unconscious,” we may have to distinguish at least three things. First, there is the primitive unconscious, partly innate and partly acquired. Secondly, there may be an “upper” unconscious. Thirdly, there may be a universal unconscious.

Hence I will for “personality-in-community.” Each element involves the other.

The highest reaches of human personality are derived from our most awake experiences—that is, from our fullest sensitivity to objectivity. They therefore involve the fullest cognition, affection and conation in relation to total objectivity.

First comes personal love: the genuine espousal of another self, the true “I–Thou” relation of which Buber speaks. I cognize my own “me” as an object, and also your “me” as an object; yet in love there arises a spiritual symbiosis and an experience of “we,” of us. This is complicated by individualism, and therefore by conflict and hate; but these are transmuted.

Secondly, there is social loyalty. It begins with the “we” of acquaintance—in love, friendship and partnership. It extends to a larger “we” whose members are mostly unacquainted: a college, a trade union, a Church, a profession and so on. It may extend to the total society or nation, and beyond that to the total human “we,” as loyalty to mankind.

Thirdly, there is creative intellect, the manipulation of concepts under the motive of dispassionate cognition and intellectual integrity. From this spring the scientific and philosophical spirits. They involve, first, loyalty to objective fact—natural piety—and, secondly, loyalty to logical thinking, with a horror of loose and wishful thought. Their issue is comprehensive theory, scientific or philosophical. But theory is accompanied by inveterate doubt, the tongue in the cheek and intellectual humility.

This world, then, is “the Vale of Soul-Making,” as Keats called it. That conception condemns a bad otherworldliness—compare cash agriculture.

Fourth among the highest reaches is creative art: the making of concrete symbols which possess sensory unity-in-diversity and significance on every level—the primitive, the civilized and the religious. We should distinguish two functions of art. One is purgation, the release of pent-up force through symbolical fulfilment. The other is creative innovation: midwifery to new experience on the highest levels.

On religion and survival there are two conflicting religious feelings. One says that without survival everything is meaningless and worthless, and that religious experience gives evidence for survival; its interest is in the subject. The other says that survival, and even immortality, are irrelevant; its interest is in the object. What matters is the quality of individual life, here or hereafter. If we survive—well; if not—well!

On this second view we are vessels or instruments, not ends in ourselves. The desire for survival is at bottom irreligious, even in its most refined form, and must be outgrown—even if survival is in fact true.

There is a salutary tension between two convictions: the extreme worthwhileness of personality and personal relationships, and the sense that persons are ephemeral and not fully real. Out of this tension arises the supreme religious experience.

Fifth comes religious experience. It has two conflicting yet mutually supporting aspects. The first is apprehension of spirit as Tao, the Way, the ideal form of behaviour. It is self-fulfilment through self-abnegation: fulfilling what I am really “for” by identifying myself with “God,” conceived as an ideal universal self, and therefore abandoning “self” as finite individuality.

This is connected with the doctrine of salvation—with sin and vision, with instrumentality, and with espousing the supreme objects. Spirit is the way of love, wisdom and creativity: awareness of the world, oneself and others; feeling; and coherent, creative action.

Spirit’s cosmical status is unknown, and perhaps unknowable. If personality is instrumental, for what is it an instrument—for God, for the Whole, or for spirit itself? One may suggest that ultimately subjectivity fulfils objectivity through awareness, espousal and creative action. But this may be sheer myth, though symbolically true.

The second aspect is an attitude toward the inconceivable reality—the Others: perhaps the superhuman or superpersonal, perhaps the Whole. Its expression is, “Thy will be done.” Or again: “Though thou slay me, yet will I love thee.” Though thou slay mankind, though thou slay thy cosmos, yet will I love thee—knowing not what thou art, or even whether thou art, but feeling thee in myself, in others and in the cosmos.

The field of science is extended, and the scientific temper is still needed: empirical, analytical and sceptical; loyal to the objective; naturally pious; passionate for intellectual integrity. But present scientific orthodoxy is undermined. Physical concepts are inadequate to the study of mind and therefore inadequate to metaphysics. New methods and new concepts will be required.

Psychology may face a vast complication. Behaviour may be influenced from three spheres: conscious experience, the individual unconscious and the paranormal. Psychology may also have to investigate the control and development of psi.

Philosophy has two corresponding tasks. Critical philosophy must re-examine all fundamental ideas in the light of the paranormal. Speculative philosophy must attempt to build a new world-view, just as earlier philosophies were transformed by the influence of natural science.

Education may eventually make use of paranormal influence. It may seek to develop psi powers in everyone and in experts.

Let me summarize the significance of the paranormal. Its possible practical importance has already been noted. Its scientific and philosophical significance is that simple materialism becomes untenable and mind can no longer be treated as an epiphenomenon. Our understanding of time and space must be enlarged. There is more to them than appears. They are real, I should say, but they are not fully revealed in ordinary experience.

Our understanding of personality also changes. There may be unsuspected links between persons and an unsuspected supratemporality in personal life. Survival becomes possible, though not thereby proved.

What is the religious significance? Even if survival is proved, no new values have yet emerged from the evidence, and the “other side” has offered no new vision. Spirit remains the goal. Our task is engagement in this world for spirit—to build Jerusalem here and now.

There is also a danger. Belief in another world may encourage bad otherworldliness and provide a new sphere for self-concern. Disbelief in survival was salutary because it clarified morality and true religion. Renewed belief in survival makes true salvation harder.

This sheet contains only Stapledon’s Simon’s Field, Caldy, West Kirby letterhead and telephone number.

This section-divider stub bears the heading “Towards a new world view”; an abandoned “Two” is struck through above it.

Science is not a key to ultimate reality. And that—

The surviving note breaks off at this point; the sheet also bears Stapledon’s letterhead and the Liverpool University Library archive stamp.