Systems Methodology and the Buckmaster Bequest: An Update

The Society for Psychical Research’s Annual Report and Accounts for the year 2020-21 were published in late July 2022.  As it has been some time since I addressed the vexed issue of the awarding of £78,000 by the SPR to Dr David Rousseau in March 2014 for the task of providing six papers and a book, I thought it worth providing an update, as remarkably the matter is still unresolved.  The money came from the late Nigel Buckmaster’s extremely generous bequest to the SPR, and the lack of progress of this project is always recorded in the Annual Report.

The relevant section of the Buckmaster Committee report in the 2020-21 Annual Report says: ‘The delayed Systems Methodology for Exploratory Science project under Dr David Rousseau is finally nearing completion but has encountered yet another delay due to family reasons. The remaining and final product of this project is a practical handbook for applying Systems Methodology to the problems of psychical research, and this is now expected early in 2022.’  That early 2022 deadline, like so many before it, was missed.

‘Delayed’ is putting it very mildly.  In fact, this matter has been going on for so long, a significant proportion of the SPR’s present Council were not on it when the award was made and are probably unaware of how much money is involved.  SPR members will certainly not realise it from reading the annual Buckmaster Committee report.

The first Buckmaster report appeared in the 2013-14 Annual Report, and the relevant paragraph merely stated that a component of the ‘Buckmaster project’ was: ‘a research and publication project to develop Systems Methodology as a new tool especially suited to the investigation of spontaneous cases.’  Annual Reports since then have provided excuses for work not completed and revised delivery dates which were ignored.

Finally, however, last year’s Annual Report, for 2019-20, announced some good news:

‘After previous delays, the Systems Methodology for Exploratory Science project under Dr David Rousseau made good progress over the past year. All six of the planned publications are now finished and five have been published with the sixth about to be published. These deal with various topics including the fundamentals of Systems Methodology, reconciling spirituality and natural science, and using Systems Methodology to reconcile differing world views. The final product of this project is a practical handbook for applying Systems Methodology to the problems of psychical research, and this is underway and expected early in 2021.’

So, on paper it looked like finally significant progress had been made, apart from that niggling handbook.  Unfortunately, none of the contracted papers has yet made it to the SPR library.  Despite having been assured of their competition, we do not know what the titles are, nor how relevant they are to psychical research, and we are still unable to judge whether or not the Society has received value for its (considerable) money.

Hoping to get an idea of what the six published papers might be, I looked at Dr Rousseau’s Centre for Systems Philosophy (CSP) website as it has a bibliography.  The first thing I noticed is that, despite listing the various organisations with which he is associated, he does not mention being a Council member of the SPR.  One would have expected acknowledgement of an organisation that has been so good to him, but perhaps he does not consider the association to be advantageous professionally.  It is a sentiment sadly shared by some psychical researchers, though it is less common than it used to be.

Scanning the bibliography, it is not easy to work out which essays might fulfil the criteria for the Buckmaster contract.  I can see nothing specifically related to psychical research and systems philosophy.  It is possible the Buckmaster essays have not been listed in Dr Rousseau’s bibliography because they are SPR property, but there would be nothing legally to prevent them being included in a list of publications.

There are some essays on spirituality, a topic referred to in the 2019-20 Annual Report, and these may be the ‘planned publications.’  If they are the items in question, they would need a strong justification to demonstrate their relevance to psychical research.  Nobody will grumble that the scope has been extended from spontaneous cases, as originally announced in 2014, but what we get does need to be applicable to psychical research, not vaguely about ‘spirituality’.

After all, the entire project was posited on the basis it would use systems methodology to develop new approaches in psychical research; what these might be currently remains a mystery.  Some of the essay topics alluded to in the 2019-20 Report sound generic and not produced with the SPR solely in mind.  Writing about ‘the fundamentals of Systems Methodology’ and ‘using Systems Methodology to reconcile differing world views’ sounds the sort of thing Dr Rousseau would be doing anyway as a systems methodologist.  Perhaps the handbook will make it all clearer, once we see it.

Never having been a fan of the proposal to sink £78,000 into this endeavour, I especially thought it a bad idea to pay the money upfront in three tranches, and not on production of results.  As evidence of the incentive the prospect of getting paid generates, it is worth noting that Dr Rousseau’s painfully slow progress on the Buckmaster work was not matched by the speedy production of the essay he co-wrote with his wife, Julie Rousseau (calling herself Julie Billingham), for the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies’ 2021 essay competition.

The result, What would have to be true about the world? On evidence for the possibility of consciousness surviving death, was a $50,000 runner-up, and unlike the essays for which the SPR has paid it is easily identifiable in Rousseau’s CSP website bibliography.  He should really have allocated the time he spent on the Bigelow entry to fulfilling his existing well-remunerated and long overdue commitment to the SPR, rather than the best part of a decade it has so far taken.

This unsatisfactory situation really needs to be wrapped up after so many years.  If all the outputs cannot be produced immediately, and their relevance to psychical research firmly demonstrated, there are grounds for clawing back the money; in practice, though, it is hard to see this happening considering the relaxed way the affair has been handled.

 

Update 9 March 2023:

Systems Methodology for Spontaneous Case Analysis Revealed!

I finally received the last of the six essays from the chair of the Buckmaster Committee on 27 February 2023.  No reason was given why it took so long to make them all available, when according to the 2019-20 Annual Report they had been completed at some point before the end of September 2020.  Presumably the failure to publish the final essay, ostensibly on grounds of its length, was part of the explanation.

Having achieved my goal, after so long, of having the essays in my hands, I thought it worth checking to see whether the SPR has received value for money.  This analysis applies only to the essays as there is no word on the accompanying manual, which is still awaited.  The essays in question are as follows (essay number two exists in two versions, so there are seven items):

1 Rousseau, David. ‘Reconciling Spirituality with the Natural Sciences: A Systems-Philosophical Perspective’. Journal for the Study of Spirituality, Vol. 4 No. 2, 2014, pp. 174-188. (Available in Taylor & Francis Online)

2a Rousseau, David. ‘Three General Systems Principles and Their Derivation: Insights from the Philosophy of Science Applied to Systems Concepts’, in A.M. Madni et al. (eds.), Disciplinary Convergence in Systems Engineering Research, New York: Singer, 2018, pp. 665-681. (Available on the Springer website)

2b Rousseau, David. ‘Strategies for Discovering Scientific Systems Principles’, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 34, 2017, pp. 527–536, (available in the Wiley online library).

3 Rousseau, David, Billingham, Julie and Calvo-Amodio Javier, ‘Systemic Semantics: A Systems Approach to Building Ontologies and Concept Maps’, Systems, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 1–24. 2018. (Available on the Systems journal website).

4 Rousseau, David and Billingham, Julie (2018). ‘A Systemic Framework for Exploring Worldviews and its Generalization as a Multi-Purpose Inquiry Framework’, Systems, Vol. 6, Issue 3, pp. 1–20. (Available on the Systems journal website).

5 Rousseau, David. (2015). ‘Anomalous Cognition and the Case for Mind-Body Dualism’. In E. C. May & S. B. Marwaha (Eds.), Extrasensory Perception: Support, Skepticism, and Science [2 volumes]. Vol. II Ch. 13, pp. 271–304. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

6 Rousseau, David and Billingham, Julie. ‘A Systems Philosophy Perspective on the Architecture of Reality’, unpublished, 2022 (but on Systems-headed paper).

Each item is stamped with the SPR logo and the words ‘SPR Library Copy: Buckmaster Fund Project Systems Methodology for Spontaneous Case Analysis’.  So how often are psychical research and parapsychology mentioned in the articles?

1 Mentions parapsychology once, in a reference – the title of an essay by William Braud, referred to in passing in a footnote.

2a/b Mentions neither.

3 Mentions neither.

4 Mentions neither.

5 Both mentioned numerous times.

6 Mentions neither.

The references to psychical research, and the SPR, in the fifth paper are unsurprising as this is the one item that has an obvious relevance to the subject.  Despite the project title being ‘Systems Methodology for Spontaneous Case Analysis’, references to spontaneous cases in the essays are conspicuous by their absence.

What about funding declarations?  Surely this would be the opportunity to acknowledge the support for these articles provided by the SPR?  Below are the full statements of funding, where supplied.

1 No funding declaration.

2a/b ‘Financial and material support for the project was provided by the Centre for Systems Philosophy and by the University of Hull’s Centre for Systems Studies.’

3/4: ‘Financial and material support for the project was provided by the Centre for Systems Philosophy, INCOSE and the University of Hull’s Centre for Systems Studies.’

5 No funding declaration.

6 ‘: We are grateful for financial and material support provided by the Centre for Systems Philosophy, Oregon State University, the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), and the Systems Science Working Group (SSWG) of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE).

There is no reference whatsoever to the SPR.  I'm disappointed that despite the substantial amount of money Rousseau received for these efforts from the Society, he did not have the courtesy to acknowledge its contribution in any of these articles, as one would normally expect the recipient of funds to do.  Gratitude seems to have been in short supply.

It was also my assumption the SPR would hold the copyright on Rousseau’s Buckmaster outputs, for which he was being generously compensated.  Yet three of the essays show the copyright being held by the publisher, the open access journal Systems assigns the copyright to the authors, and the authors claim the copyright of the final, unpublished, paper.

Payment was made directly from the SPR’s Buckmaster fund, not via its Research Grants Committee as would have been usual, though Rousseau was given a sum far in excess of the typical grant.  In effect then he was paid as a contractor, not the recipient of a grant.  In that case, one would expect the SPR to have bought the results and be able to determine the use made of them.

Instead, the bulk of the papers can be accessed through the publishers’ websites.  Both volumes of Extrasensory Perception: Support, Skepticism, and Science, the second containing Rousseau’s essay, can already be found in the SPR’s Vernon Mews library.  Basically, then, all the SPR has to show for its outlay are copies of papers bearing the SPR logo and a Buckmaster stamp.  For £78,000 one might have expected something a little more exclusive.

Presumably the handbook at least will be the SPR's copyright, but who knows when it will see the light of day.  During my efforts to winkle the outputs from the Buckmaster Committee I jokingly likened it to the Key to All Mythologies in Middlemarch, it was so long awaited, adding Casaubon died before he finished it so hoped the parallel wasn't precise.  I didn’t like to say that Dorothea deemed the Key to be of no value, and Casaubon’s efforts a waste.

The seven digital files have been sent to the SPR librarian in London, and sets of hard copies will eventually be lodged in the library and the SPR archive housed at Cambridge University Library.  These will be available to visitors.  Alternatively, readers with access can simply download PDFs of the majority of them.

Looking at Rousseau’s website, he has written or co-written a number of papers on similar themes, and those submitted to fulfil the Buckmaster contract seem to be an arbitrary subset of his output, as if randomly chopped out from his systems methodology sausage machine and sent over to satisfy the contract.  Why these were selected is nowhere made clear, nor in what way they were considered to be particularly relevant to psychical research.  There is nothing I can see to justify the money paid for them.

Let's hope my scepticism is misplaced and these essays plus the handbook will constitute the important contribution to the progress of psychical research we were led to believe they would be.  If anyone can suggest ways these articles may be utilised in the pursuit of psychical research (for example in the form of citations), I would be very pleased to hear from them, because at the moment it is difficult to see how, apart from a single book chapter, they will contribute to its progress.

Perhaps that is why, in his relationship with the SPR, Rousseau has kept a low profile, not referring to the association in his published work, and not engaging with the psychical research community to test his ideas.  It may or may or may not be significant that he has so far not been deemed of sufficient importance to merit an entry in the SPR’s Psi Encyclopedia, although it contains a large number of biographies.

Sadly, it looks like, having released an arbitrary selection of articles after almost a decade, he has remained silent about their significance because there is none, at least not for psychical research.  When one thinks what good nearly £80,000 could do in a field notoriously strapped for cash, it seems a shame this is how it was spent.  Those who supported the payout of so much for so little really should feel embarrassed.

A Harry Price Bookplate

Recently I came across an item in an online auction, the description for which mentioned the name Harry Price. This was for a set of three books titled Church Stretton: Some Results of Local Scientific Research, edited by C W Campbell-Hyslop and E S Cobbold (1900/1904).  A laudatory review of the first volume in Nature informed its readers that ‘Church Stretton is a market-town about twelve miles south by west of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and has a population of about 2000.’

What intrigued me was that each volume contained the bookplate of ‘a Harry Price’, as the description put it.  While not about psychical research, I wondered if the books might have come from the library of paranormal investigator Harry Price (1881-1948) as I knew he had a Shropshire connection: he claimed to have been born in Shrewsbury, and while this was a fabrication (he was born and grew up in London), he did have Shropshire links via his father.  I also saw the third volume dealt with archaeology, an early interest of Price’s.

Referring to the previous owner as ‘a Harry Price’ suggested the vendor was not aware of the significance of the name.  While one would have expected an antiquarian bookseller to have done some research, he is based in Telford, Shropshire, so presumably as far as he was concerned they were merely of local interest, and he had no reason to think they had a wider significance (or so I hoped).  Unfortunately, I could not enquire about them as it would have alerted him to their potential value, but the opening amount was not too high so I decided to take risk, even though Harry Price is not a particularly rare name.

Luckily mine was the only bid, and the next step was to establish whether it was the right Harry Price.  This was extremely easy, as Trevor Hall’s Search for Harry Price has a chapter discussing Price’s various bookplates, handily illustrating them all.  Mine were identical to the example in Plate 7 (shown above).  This Hall thinks was the earliest Price used, and he characterises it as ‘the spurious crested plate.’ He implies that not many examples are extant as ‘it is still displayed in a few items in Price’s collection.’

As to why Price chose the design, the answer casts an illuminating light on Price’s character and social pretensions.  There is, Hall states, a Denbighshire Price (ap Rhys) family who were created baronets in 1804.  Despite them being totally unrelated to his much more modest family background, Harry adapted their crest (‘faked’ in Hall’s words) with some modifications for his own use, thereby suggesting a link to a distinguished line.  His changes included the alteration of the Denbighshire Prices’ motto from ‘Vive ut vivas’ to ‘Dum vivimus, vivamus’, the Epicureans’ maxim ‘While we live, let us live’, which Price certainly took to heart.

I was fortunate Price bothered to include his plate in my acquisition, as Hall was told by Alan Wesencraft, the librarian then in charge of the Harry Price collection at Senate House, University of London, where it is housed, that a large percentage of Price’s books lacked any of his plates.  Wesencraft added that most of those with plates had them on the front free end paper rather than pasted on the inside of the front cover, a habit Hall considered curious as it risks wrinkling the paper.  My examples buck the trend by having been pasted onto the inside of the covers.

So how did the Church Stretton volumes come to be in the possession of a Telford bookseller in 2022?  Price’s library was deposited at Senate House Library in 1936 and bequeathed to it in 1948.  A University of London/Harry Price Library bookplate was pasted into each volume, and as these are not present in the Church Stretton books they must have left Price's possession beforehand.  Also, the title is not listed in the University of London’s online catalogue.  It seems he was not wedded to books on particular topics and decided to dispose of them after his need had passed.

As evidence, Hall mentions that apart from the crested plate appearing in books held at Senate House, by chance he came across an example much closer to home, in the Leeds Library, an institution with which he was associated.  Opening a book on trade tokens he was surprised to see the plate in question, ‘bearing the name of “Harry Price” on an elaborate scroll, below a crest which he had certainly no right whatever to display.’   From the library’s records Hall established the two-volume set was sold by Price to London bookseller Bernard Quaritch Ltd, from whence it was acquired by the Leeds Library in June 1913.

Price had a long-standing interest in numismatics, hence the books on trade tokens.  He became interested in archaeology upon moving to Pulborough in Sussex in 1908, when he tried to establish himself as an authority on the subject.  It is likely he would have been particularly interested in the third volume of the Church Stretton set as it deals with archaeology.  Unfortunately for him, he was caught out claiming to have been involved in excavations when he had had no connection with them, leading him to withdraw from the field in 1910.  It is likely then that the Church Stretton set entered his library between 1908 and 1910, so presumably the bookplate was in use by the latter date.  After that, his involvement in the subjects addressed by the volumes having been terminated, and his interests turning to other matters, he had no further use for them.

Price’s sale of books raises an intriguing thought.  The ‘borrowed’ lion with a rose was succeeded by the much more elaborate ‘Abomination des Sorciers’ plate – in keeping with the types of books for which Price’s library is now well known – no later than 1923   As the crested plate was certainly in use before 1913, Price was using it for over a decade, yet Hall refers to only ‘a few items’ in the Harry Price Library with it.  Perhaps Price had a clearout of items relating to numismatics and archaeology to provide the funds and space for his ‘magical’ library.  If so, it is possible he sold additional books bearing those plates, and they are out there, sitting on shelves of owners having no interest in psychical research, believing they were once merely in the collection of ‘a Harry Price’ but not realising who that singular individual was.  They might not be as rare as Hall assumed.

 

References

Campbell-Hyslop, C W and E S Cobbold (eds.). Church Stretton: Some Results of Local Scientific Research. Vol. 1 (geology, macro-lepidoptera, molluscs), Shrewsbury: L Wilding, 1900 (reissued 1904); Vol 2 (birds, flowering plants, mosses, parochial history), Shrewsbury: L Wilding, 1904; Vol 3 (pre-Roman, Roman, and Saxon archaeological remains, church architecture), Shrewsbury: L Wilding, 1904.

Hall, Trevor H. Search for Harry Price, London: Duckworth, 1978.

‘Our Book Shelf’, Nature, Vol. 62, 11 October 1900, p. 571.

 

The Society for Psychical Research at 140

 

Sunday 20 February 2022 marks the 140th anniversary of the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 (on a Monday).  It’s not a satisfyingly round number, like a centenary or a sesquicentenary, but it seems worth marking nonetheless.  I’m sure in ten years’ time there will be significant celebrations, as there were in 1982 when there was a big conference at Cambridge, a series of books published by Heinemann on various aspects of psychical research, a collection of essays edited by Ivor Grattan-Guinness, and a history of the SPR written by Renée Haynes.

Grattan-Guinness’s Psychical Research: A Guide to its History, Principles and Practices provides a handy overview of its subject matter as it was viewed in 1982, containing contributions from some eminent names in the field.  One part discusses topics seen to constitute the range of psychical phenomena – mediumship, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, clairvoyance and telepathy, survival after death, poltergeists, psychic healing, precognition, psychokinesis and photography (Kirlian photography would nowadays be excluded) – and these could easily slot into a contemporary book, albeit with developments in experimental methods and theoretical models. 

Similarly, a contemporary overview of the relationship of psychical research to other disciplines would look much the same, with changes of emphasis (the section on computers seems quaint when set against their ubiquity now).  This is not to say psychical research has remained static over the last four decades.  Thinking about the way the Society has evolved since 1982, the title of the final chapter in Haynes’s book caught my eye: ‘Achievements. What Next?’  Naturally there is more on past achievements, of which there are many, than future prospects, but while the chapter is rambling, it provides a useful benchmark for measuring the subject’s evolution.

To begin with, Haynes detects an essential continuity, despite swings in intellectual fashions, since the Society was founded.  That is reasonable, as its objects are largely the same as they were in 1882, albeit the means of studying them have evolved.  However, she notes modifications in attitude.  Even by 1982, she felt ‘the pendulum has jolted from an overwhelming interest in mediums and their psychology to an overwhelming interest in the use of mass experiments evaluated by statistical methods’; from scrutiny of environmental and emotional causes of poltergeists to research on meditators and ‘psychokinetically-gifted people’ (the inclusion of emotional in relation to poltergeists is surprising, a pendulum that has swung back); and with the continuing trend towards what Haynes somewhat sniffily characterises as ‘the technology of psi.’

Her assessment of mediumship now seems unduly pessimistic, with a great deal of research being carried out into this and other aspects of the possible survival of consciousness after bodily death.  She does mention super-psi as a view gaining traction, linking it to clairvoyance, the latter to her mind less popular with SPR members in the UK than in other countries, particularly the US and France.  Super-psi is an idea that is posited as an alternative to survival (Stephen Braude is a notable champion), but it is doubtful there are national preferences for clairvoyance.  Final answers on survival she believed were beyond psychical research to determine, a familiar view today.  Technology provides useful tools for the exploration of possible psi processes.

Some elements of serious psychical research she includes in her roundup have since fallen out of fashion, such as metal bending and the Cox minilab.  Others have endured, though methods may have achieved a greater degree of sophistication since 1982.  There is still interest in anthropology (having picked up the label of paranthropology to define its intersection with the paranormal), folklore, biology and historical studies.  Considerable resources have been devoted to precognition research, and much debate generated, over the years.  It is unlikely a modern book on psychical research would devote nearly a page, as Haynes does, to Nostradamus.  On the other hand, the philosophical implications of the nature of time are as strongly debated.

As she was writing a history of the SPR rather than psychical research there is much that is skimmed over, or missing entirely.  Some areas of neglect are surprising – psychic archaeology for example – others less so, because the SPR had little involvement, such as developments in the Soviet Union.  Occult links and the vexed relationship with Spiritualists are passed over probably because of Haynes’s own views.  EVP, dismissed by her as a ‘vogue’, is widely researched, having expanded its scope to encompass ITC.  Out-of-body experiences are present, but not near-death experiences, in 1982 a major omission.  Healing, given a section in Grattan-Guinness’s book, is ignored.  She deals with reincarnation, shortly to become a growth area, in a few lines.  As an indication of the higher profile it now has, and perhaps a degree of patrician disdain, she does not refer to the campaign waged by pseudo-sceptics/counter-advocates, despite the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal having been formed in 1976.

Moving on to what psychical research has achieved in a hundred years, she notes the formation of similar societies in other countries and the occasional foreign SPR president.  The number of organisations and university departments concerned with psychical research has grown further since then.  Some areas, such as animal migration, she considers to have largely been solved, though not that of ‘psi-trailing’, where an animal can find its way across long distances to owners who may have moved.  There has been further work on anpsi, and the research of Rupert Sheldrake has looked extensively at psychic connections between animals and humans.

Dowsing she feels may have a magnetite component, which would supply a physical explanation, but would not apply, she concedes, to map dowsing.  Little controlled dowsing research has been carried out in the field during the last four decades, and much remains anecdotal, though Elizabeth Mayer’s claim to have recovered her daughter’s stolen harp with the help of map dowsing has been taken by some as evidence for its validity.  Thought transference morphed into telepathy and is studied, unlike Reichenbach phenomena, present in the 1882 Objects, which had vanished from serious consideration long before 1982.  Haynes says she considers psychokinesis proven, both experimentally and from spontaneous cases, and much more work has been carried out subsequently, without universal acceptance of the results.

Psychical researchers took mesmerism and, as hypnosis, cleared away its occult accretions and misinterpretations, and put it on a sound footing, meaning it has largely disappeared from psychical research outside amateur regression sessions.  Apparitions, and haunted places, have shown longevity, being investigated now as they were in 1882 and 1982.  Unfortunately, while there are greater numbers doing the investigating, many take their cue from television rather than the scholarly literature, and despite much ink and ingenious speculation being devoted to the topic, little real progress has been made.

Of hard science, Haynes mentions physics mainly in connection with the observer effect, the strangeness of some of physics’ findings acting as a gateway for strangeness in psychical research.  Awareness of the potential implications has increased enormously, with SPR vice-president Bernard Carr arguing that physics can provide the foundation for an expanded science bringing together matter, mind and spirit into a fuller understanding of the universe and our place within it.  There has been an increased interest in consciousness studies and their philosophical implications since 1982.

Haynes is out of sympathy with laboratory work, questionnaires, and the use of statistics, claiming, in her colourful way, that ‘The processes involved seem to resemble those of plucking, cleaning, and boiling a chicken down for stock.  The end product may be wholesome and nourishing; but nothing characteristic of the original remains, life, colour, shape are gone, regarded as irrelevant.’ (p. 165)  The resulting generalisations and abstractions, in her view, remove the researcher from the raw experiences of individuals.  Doubtless many ploughing laboriously through number-heavy papers in parapsychological journals would agree with her.

Haynes’s greatest fear was that the use of arcane, overtechnical language (‘gobbledygook’ as she terms it) within specialisms might inhibit cross-disciplinary research and lead to ghettoisation of specialists who failed to talk to each other.  Fortunately, it can be said with confidence this danger was averted, with psychical research benefiting from debate that crosses boundaries in the search for answers.  Qualitative methods exploring lived experience are thriving too, which no doubt she would have welcomed, while rolling her eyes at laboratory testing on groups rather than individuals, allowing potential ‘stars’ to slip through the net.

As a means of assessing the current situation, a useful overview has recently been provided by Terje G. Simonsen’s A Short History of (Nearly) Everything Paranormal.  Much would have been familiar to Haynes, including his central idea of the Mental Internet.  Crucially, though, he outlines three main approaches to our relationship to psi, focusing on laboratory, nature and spirituality, the last of the three seeking to comprehend ways in which our everyday existence, including psi, is part of a greater whole.  This issue was not addressed by Haynes, but it has become much more prominent since the publication of her book, as is evidenced by the foundation of organisations like the Scientific and Medical Network and IONS, specifically incorporating a spiritual element into their programmes, and the overlap of psychical research with transpersonal psychology.

It can be said that psychical research has progressed significantly since 1982, but with much still to do.  As for the future, the growth of computing, and specifically the Internet, in the last couple of decades has made an enormous difference to the way the SPR now operates. With electronic communication has come a greater ability to reach out and fulfil a core principle of the SPR’s charitable status, that of education.  Rather than talking mainly to a small group of like-minded individuals, it is now possible to disseminate the data of the SPR, and psychical research generally, in a way not foreseen in 1982.  This has opened up opportunities for cross-fertilisation of ideas that can only be helpful.  Grattan-Guinness’s geographical breakdown has four sections: Britain, Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, and the United States, as if there was nothing to be said about other regions.  Thanks to the Internet, the conversation can now be global.

Haynes famously coined the term ‘boggle threshold’, and in the introduction to her centenary history (p. ix) defines it as ‘the level above which the mind boggles when faced by some new fact or report or idea.’  Phenomena are judged on a case-by-case basis, and her threshold was fairly high for some, much lower for others.  Evidence will become stronger or weaker, and boggle thresholds rise and fall, as psychical research evolves.  In the process, topics leave the field, as the Reichenbach phenomena did, while others enter it, as methods increase in sophistication even if underfunding remains constant.  In 1982 Haynes concluded with the words, ‘here’s to the next hundred years,’ and to that sentiment one can happily raise a glass.

 

References

Grattan-Guinness, Ivor (ed.). Psychical Research: A Guide to its History, Principles and Practices. In Celebration of 100 Years of the Society for Psychical Research. Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1982.

Haynes, Renée. The Society for Psychical Research 188201982: A History. London: Macdonald, 1982.

Mayer, Elizabeth. Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind. New York: Bantam, 2007.

Simonsen, Terje G.. A Short History of (Nearly) Everything Paranormal: Our Secret Powers – Telepathy, Clairvoyance & Precognition. London: Watkins, 2020.