Mediums Rare

by Richard Matheson

  They believe that this has already been accomplished.

  What today’s parapsychologists search for is meaning.

  They know that psi exists.

  Now they want to know why.

  Afterword

  On January 7, 1610, Galileo announced that, through his telescope, he’d seen four moons revolving around the planet Jupiter.

  Immediately, a pamphlet was distributed by his enemies. Nonsense, said the pamphlet. Galileo saw no such thing. What he’d seen were halos; reflections; luminous clouds; in brief, an optical illusion. Worse, a self-delusion.

  Accordingly, the Inquisition had its say and Galileo was compelled to recant.

  Only in the past few years have they absolved him.

  In 1807, Thomas Jefferson dismissed as utterly preposterous the notion that meteors could fall to Earth.

  “It is easier” he said, “to believe that these two Yale professors” (who had examined the meteors) “would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.” Earthly things could not fall from heaven.

  Those peasants whose cottage roofs had been demolished by these meteors no doubt took a different view.

  Of course these peasants were—unfortunately for the progressive course of science—not accredited as were the scientists who, in July of 1790, when a veritable rain of meteors fell on France declared it, quote, a physically impossible phenomenon, unquote.

  In 1935, F.W. Moulton, one of the world’s foremost authorities of celestial mechanics, did not hesitate to claim that “In all fairness to those, who by training, are not prepared to evaluate the fundamental difficulties of going from the Earth to the Moon, it must be stated that there is not the slightest possibility of such a journey.”

  We smile at such ignorance. But do we feel uneasy at the same time? How many truths of tomorrow are being attacked as the heresies of today? How many current Galileos will recant their observations? How many current meteoric concepts will be condemned as utterly preposterous?

  Especially in the field of ESP.

  Unhappily, the answer is self-evident. I have only to quote the scientist—still alive—who declared, of ESP, “This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed.”

  Knowing this to be the case, it is all the more ironic that the founders of Parapsychology believed—with an almost majestic naïveté—that the scientific community would embrace them as soon as enough experiments had been carefully performed.

  Yet here, more than a century later, Parapsychologists are still judged to be the loonies of the technological world because the phenomena they study contradict the “accepted” laws of the universe.

  Consider the following quotation made by a well known—I will not identify him—critic of the field.

  “In view of the a priori evidence against it, we know, in advance, that telepathy cannot occur.”

  Quoting further from the same distinguished source, “If the results could have arisen through a trick, the experiment may be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP whether or not is finally decided that such a trick was, in fact. used.”; aghast underlining mine.

  It is assumed to be the province of science to investigate nature without prejudice.

  Nowhere has this dictum met with less observation than in the field of Parapsychology.

  It is a fact that no other accumulation of evidence, attested to by so many people from all walks of life, has ever been rejected.

  Unfortunately, Parapsychologists do not, in the eyes of science, quahfy for this largess.

  Indeed, Parapsychology has been called the “deviant” science.

  Hopefully, recent developments call for a revision of this intransigent attitude.

  In scores of university centers and research laboratories, there has been a compilation of experimental findings which can no longer be explained away as artifacts, statistical errors or the results of some bizarre, international conspiracy of fraud and collusion.

  There has been a mounting number of observations involving apparent telepathic incidents in the psychotherapeutic world.

  Finally, the attitude of modern physics is gradually altering in regard to the concepts of time and space and the heretofore, supposedly immutable laws of cause and effect.

  In so-called “legitimate” science, the more that is discovered, the farther the horizon of knowledge recedes, the more underlying assumptions are discarded and replaced.

  Conventional reasoning always fails us in the end. As Margaret Mead has stated, “The history of scientific achievement is full of scientists investigating phenomena the establishment did not believe was there.”

  Or, to quote the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, “The history of science is partly the history of paradoxes becoming commonplaces and heresies becoming orthodoxies.”

  Would that the majority of today’s scientists had, at the very minimum, the attitude of Thomas Edison who, when asked to describe electricity, replied “Don’t know what it is. But it works.”

  Sadly, even that is an attitude rare.

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