Rhine Question

It was clear last week that psychologists, physicists, mathematicians and kibitzing outsiders are beginning to line up in earnest on one side or the other of a prickly question which has already attracted wide general interest: Is Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine right, or is he wrong, in assuming that the evidence amassed by him at Duke University is sufficient to prove the existence of telepathy, clairvoyance and associated faculties of the human mind grouped under the head of "ExtraSensory Perception?"

In his field of research, which he calls Parapsychology, Dr. Rhine is the most conspicuous university investigator in the U. S. His tools and methods are essentially simple. Prime piece of apparatus is a pack of cards bearing five designs: a circle, a star, a plus sign, a rectangle, a band of three wavy lines. The pack consists of 25 cards, five cards of each design. To observe clairvoyance, he asks his subjects to identify the cards one by one as the pack lies face down. To observe telepathy they are asked to call cards imagined in the mind of another person.

By chance alone five hits in 25 guesses could be expected. But in Dr. Rhine's great mass of recorded experiments there are long series of trials in which the hits are much higher than chance expectation--seven, eight, even nine hits per 25 tries. According to his mathematics the probability that chance might account for one subject's score alone is one in 100 quintillion, and when all the scores are taken together the figures are so fantastic that chance is ruled out altogether. Dr. Rhine tried out a well-known British "medium,'' found that she scored well but not better than his best subjects, who were ordinary students (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934).

This week Dr. Rhine publishes New Frontiers of the Mind,* which is the October choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club. For the most part it covers the story as narrated in his previous writings, with some addition of philosophical and anecdotal material. The author tells, for example, how he spurred a subject to guess every card right in the pack of 25 by betting him $100 on each card. He also confesses that he did not pay the $2,500 bet.

It would seem to laymen that Dr. Rhine has built up an airtight case for the existence of clairvoyance and telepathy. But certain scientists have criticized his mathematics and others his methods. Last week Professor Chester E. Kellogg, Associate Professor of Psychology at McGill University, published in The Scientific Monthly a categorical criticism of the Rhine studies under the ironic title. "New Evidence (?) for 'ExtraSensory Perception.' "

In an involved mathematical argument. Dr. Kellogg accused Dr. Rhine of underestimating the chance probability of high scores. He declares that the normal probability curve, used by Dr. Rhine, requires for proper operation chance scores as far below the average as good scores go above it. That would require some scores below zero--an absurdity. He also charges that Dr. Rhine evaluates only favorable scores, ignoring others; that he pays no attention to the internal inconsistency of his results; that the presence of sensory cues or some other extraneous factor is indicated by higher scores when conditions are such that the chance of such factors being present is greater. Concluded Dr. Kellogg: ''Concerning the theories, no comment need be made at present. We would suggest that they be held in reserve until such time as it may be known whether there is anything to explain. For, while Professor Rhine's experiments have yielded some interesting results, it is quite certain that neither he nor any of his followers has so far given proof of the existence of either clairvoyance or telepathy."

Dr. Kellogg laid not the slightest imputation against Dr. Rhine's sincerity, but he implied that the "will-to-believe" can lead an honest scientist astray as well as a layman. The one thing that seemed certain last week was that, since the parapsychology question goes to the root of human mentality, it will go on attracting attention, Dr. Rhine will go on attracting adherents, and more skeptics will join Dr. Kellogg on the other side of the fence. And the mechanism of telepathy and clairvoyance, if they exist, remains to be explained in toto.

* Farrar & Rinchart ($2.50).

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