J. B. Rhine

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) and The Reach of the Mind (1947).

The test by counting

J. B. Rhine teaches that the claims of psychical research can be settled only by experiment: plain targets, many trials, and every score set against what chance alone would give. His tools, the pack of five symbols and the dice, and the conditions that separate one kind of claimed perception from another, are taught in full in the branches called From Rhine to the Ganzfeld and Psychokinesis. What follows is what he held the experiments to mean, and how he held that the work must be done.

The living mind first

Psychical research before him had asked chiefly whether the dead survive, and had looked for the answer in the séance room. Rhine turns the question round. Any true message a medium gives, he reasons, might come from the minds of the living by extrasensory perception rather than from the dead, so nothing can be settled about survival until it is known whether living minds have such powers at all. The first question is therefore the living mind, and it is a question for the laboratory, not the darkened parlour.

So the subject should be an ordinary person and not a famous medium; the material should be plain, cards and dice and not messages; the procedure should be the same each time, so that others can repeat it; and the result should be a number. He took the German word parapsychology for this experimental science, and meant it as a branch of psychology like any other.

A power of ordinary people

Rhine holds that extrasensory perception is not the gift of a rare few but a capacity found, in some measure, in ordinary people, many of whom scored above chance in the early tests without any training. It is, he says, a natural power of the mind and not a supernatural one: lawful, though not yet understood, and open to study as memory and learning are.

Unconscious and shy

The power, as he describes it, works below awareness. A subject cannot tell which calls were hits and which were misses, cannot summon the power at will, and cannot keep it. It is easily lost: scores fall with boredom, fatigue, distraction and a dulled mind, and rise with interest, a spirit of play, a friendly and encouraging experimenter and the sense of a challenge. In the early work, he reported, a sedative drug lowered a subject's scores and caffeine brought them back. The decline of scores across a run or a session he read as the mark of a mind tiring, not of a machine.

Beyond space and time

From the tests at a distance and the tests of the future he drew his boldest conclusion. Scores did not fall as the distance between subject and cards grew, from one room to another building and then across many miles, as they would if a physical signal carried the knowledge and weakened on the way. And in the tests of precognition the calls matched an order of cards that did not yet exist when the calls were made. A power that is not bound by space or by time, he argues, cannot be a physical energy of any known kind: the mind has a property that the physics of his day does not contain.

One psi, knowing and acting

The dice showed him the other face of the same power. If the mind can know matter without the senses, he reasons, it may also act on matter without the muscles; and the same signs appeared in both kinds of test, the same falling off with boredom and the same dependence on mood. He took the name psi for the whole from two colleagues in Britain, and taught extrasensory perception and psychokinesis as two sides of one function, the mind receiving from the world and acting on it.

The reach of the mind

Here his teaching meets the old questions of religion. If the mind can reach beyond the body in space and time, then the picture of a person as nothing but a physical machine is incomplete, and the questions that religion has long asked by faith, of the soul, of the freedom of the will, of what may outlast the body, become questions that experiment can begin to touch. He did not claim that parapsychology proves any creed, only that it opens these questions to test. Beside his conclusions stands the plain fact that his best results were not repeated under tighter controls, and that the case is not held proven.

The experimenter's duty

He held the experimenter to a strict rule: publish the method in full, keep every record, report the failures with the successes, invite the critics in, and tighten the conditions whenever a flaw is shown. A science of something so elusive, he held, lives or dies by its honesty, and any fraud found in it must be made public at once by those who find it.