Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research

Selected Essays

C.D. Broad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415225588
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317830054
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is Volume I of seven in a series on the Philosophy of Religion and General Philosophy. Originally published in 1953, this is a collection of selected essays looking at Psychical Research to philosophy, arguments around the validity of a personal God and also looking at afterthoughts at the time of the Cold War.

Section One
Psychical Research

The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy

I WILL begin this paper by stating in rough outline what I consider to be the relevance of psychical research to philosophy, and I shall devote the rest of it to developing this preliminary statement in detail.

In my opinion psychical research is highly relevant to philosophy for the following reasons. There are certain limiting principles which we unhesitatingly take for granted as the framework within which all our practical activities and our scientific theories are confined. Some of these seem to be self-evident. Others are so over-whelmingly supported by all the empirical facts which fall within the range of ordinary experience and the scientific elaborations of it (including under this heading orthodox psychology) that it hardly enters our heads to question them. Let us call these Basic Limiting Principles. Now psychical research is concerned with alleged events which seem prima facie to conflict with one or more of these principles. Let us call any event which seems prima facie to do this an Ostensibly Paranormal Event.

A psychical researcher has to raise the following questions about any ostensibly paranormal event which he investigates. (I) Did it really happen? Has it been accurately observed and correctly described? (2) Supposing that it really did happen and has been accurately observed and correctly described, does it really conflict with any of the basic limiting principles? Can it not fairly be re garded merely as a strange coincidence, not outside the bounds of probability? Failing that, can it not be explained by reference to already known agents and laws? Failing that, can it not be explained by postulating agents or laws or both, which have not hitherto been recognized, but which fall within the framework of accepted basic limiting principles?

Now it might well have happened that every alleged ostensibly paranormal event which had been carefully investigated by a competent psychical researcher was found either not to have occurred at all, or to have been misdescribed in important respects, or to be a chance-coincidence not beyond the bounds of probability, or to be susceptible of an actual or hypothetical explanation within the framework of the basic limiting principles. If that had been so, philosophy could afford to ignore psychical research; for it is no part of its duty to imitate the White Knight by carrying a mousetrap when it goes out riding, on the offchance that there might be mice in the saddle. But that is not how things have in fact turned out. It will be enough at present to refer to a single instance, viz., Dr. Soal's experiments on card-guessing with Mr. Shackleton as subject, of which I gave a full account in Philosophy in 1944. There can be no doubt that the events described happened and were correctly 1eported; that the odds against chance-coincidence piled up to billions to one; and that the nature of the events, which involved both telepathy and precognition, conflicts with one or more of the basic limiting principles.

Granted that psychical research has established the occurrence of events which conflict with one or more of the basic limiting principles, one might still ask: How does this concern philosophy? Well, I think that there are some definitions of 'philosophy', according to which it would not be concerned with these or any other newly discovered facts, no matter how startling. Suppose that philosophy consists in accepting without question, and then attempting to analyse, the beliefs which are common to contemporary plain men in Europe and North America, i.e., roughly the beliefs which such persons acquired uncritically in their nurseries and have since found no occasion to doubt. Then, perhaps, the only relevance of psychical research to philosophy would be to show that philosophy is an even more trivial academic exercise than plain men had been inclined to suspect. But, if we can judge of what philosophy is by what great philosophers have done in the past, its business is by no means confined to accepting without question, and trying to analyse, the beliefs held in common by contemporary European and North American plain men. Judged by that criterion, philosophy involves at least two other closely connected activities, which I call Synopsis and Synthesis. Synopsis is the deliberate viewing together of aspects of human experience which, for one reason or another, are generally kept apart by the plain man and even by the professional scientist or scholar. The object of synopsis is to try to find out how these various aspects are inter-related. Synthesis is the attempt to supply a coherent set of concepts and principles which shall cover satisfactorily all the regions of fact which have been viewed synoptically.

Now what I have called the basic limiting principles are plainly of great philosophical importance in connection with synopsis and synthesis. These principles do cover very satisfactorily an enormous range of well-established facts of the most varied kinds. We are quite naturally inclined to think that they must be all-embracing; we are correspondingly loth to accept any alleged fact which seems to conflict with them; and, if we are forced to accept it, we strive desperately to house it within the accepted framework. But just in proportion to the philosophic importance of the basic limiting principles is the philosophic importance of any well-established exception to them. The speculative philosopher who is honest and competent will want to widen his synopsis so as to include these facts; and he will want to revise his fundamental concepts and basic limiting principles in such a way as to include the old and the new facts in a single coherent system.

The Basic Limiting Principles

I will now state some of the most important of the basic limiting principles which, apart from the findings of psychical research, are commonly accepted either as self-evident or as established by over-whelming and uniformly favourable empirical evidence. These fall into four main divisions, and in some of the divisions there are several principles.

(1) General Principles of Causation. (1.1) It is self-evidently impossible that an event should begin to have any effects before it has happened.

(1.2) It is impossible that an event which ends at a certain date should contribute to cause an event which begins at a later date unless the period between the two dates is occupied in one or other of the following ways: (i) The earlier event initiates a process of change, which continues throughout the period and at the end of it contributes to initiate the later event. Or (ii) the earlier event initiates some kind of structural modification which persists throughout the period. This begins to co-operate at the end of the period with some change which is then taking place, and together they cause the later event.

(1.3) It is impossible that an event, happening at a certain date and place, should produce an effect at a remote place unless a finite period elapses between the two events, and unless that period is occupied by a causal chain of events occurring successively at a series of points forming a continuous path between the two places.

(2) Limitations on the Action of Mind on Matter. It is impossible for an event in a person's mind to produce directly any change in the material world except certain changes in his own brain. It is true that it seems to him that many of his volitions produce directly certain movements in his fingers, feet, throat, tongue, etc. These are what he wills, and he knows nothing about the changes in his brain. Nevertheless, it is these brain-changes which are the immediate consequences of his volitions; and the willed movements of his fingers, etc., follow, if they do so, only as rather remote causal descendants.

(3) Dependence of Mind on Brain. A necessary, even if not a sufficient, immediate condition of any mental event is an event in the brain of a living body. Each different mental event is immediately conditioned by a different brain-event. Qualitatively dissimilar mental events are immediately conditioned by qualitatively dissimilar brain-events, and qualitatively similar mental events are immediately conditioned by qualitatively similar brain-events. Mental events which are so inter-connected as to be experiences of the same person are immediately conditioned by brain-events which happen in the same brain. If two mental events are experiences of different persons, they are in general immediately conditioned by brain-events which occur in different brains. This is not, however, a rule without exceptions. In the first place, there are occasional but quite common experiences, occurring in sleep or delirium, whose immediate conditions are events in a certain brain, but which are so loosely connected with each other or with the stream of normal waking experiences conditioned by events in that brain that they scarcely belong to any recognizable person. Secondly, there are cases of multiple personality, described and treated by psychiatrists. Here the experiences which are immediately conditioned by events in a single brain seem to fall into two or more sets, each of which constitutes the experiences of a different person. Such different persons are, however, more closely interconnected in certain ways than two persons whose respective experiences are immediately conditioned by events in different brains.

(4) Limitations on Ways of acquiring Knowledge. (4.1) It is impossible for a person to perceive a physical event or a material thing except by means of sensations which that event or thing produces in his mind. The object perceived is not the immediate cause of the sensations by which a person perceives it. The immediate cause of these is always a certain event in the percipient's brain; and the perceived object is (or is the seat of) a rather remote causal ancestor of this brain-event. The intermediate links in the causal chain are, first, a series of events in the space between the perceived object and the percipient's body; then an event in a receptor organ, such as his eye or ear; and then a series of events in the nerve connecting this receptor organ to his brain. When this causal chain is completed, and a sensory experience arises in the percipient's mind, that experience is not a state of acquaintance with the perceived external object, either as it was at the moment when it initiated this sequence of events or as it now is. The qualitative and relational character of the sensation is wholly determined by the event in the brain which is its immediate condition; and the character of the latter is in part dependent on the nature and state of the afferent nerve, of the receptor organ, and of the medium between the receptor and the perceived object.

(4.2) It is impossible for A to know what experiences B is having or has had except in one or other of the following ways. (i) By hearing and understanding sentences, descriptive of that experience, uttered by B, or by reading and understanding such sen tences, written by B, or reproductions or translations of them. (I include under these headings messages in Morse or any other artificial language which is understood by A.) (ii) By hearing and interpreting cries which B makes, or seeing and interpreting his gestures, facial expressions, etc. (iii) By seeing, and making conscious or unconscious inferences from, persistent material records, such as tools, pottery, pictures, etc., which B has made or used in the past. (I include under this head seeing copies or transcriptions, etc., of such objects.)

Similar remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to the conditions under which A can acquire from B knowledge of facts which B knows or acquaintance with propositions which B contemplates. Suppose that B knows a certain fact or is contemplating a certain proposition. Then the only way in which A can acquire from B knowledge of that fact or acquaintance with that proposition is by B stating it in sentences or other symbolic expressions which A can understand, and by A perceiving those expressions themselves, or reproductions or translations of them, and interpreting them.

(4.3) It is impossible for a person to forecast, except by chance, that an event of such and such a kind will happen at such and such a place and time except under one or other of the following conditions. (i) By making an inference from data supplied to him by his present sensations, introspections, or memories, together with his knowledge of certain rules of sequence which have hitherto prevailed in nature. (ii) By accepting from others, whom he trusts, either such data or such rules or both, and then making his own inferences; or by accepting from others the inferences which they have made from data which they claim to have had and regularities which they claim to have verified. (iii) By non-inferential expectations, based on associations which have been formed by certain repeated sequences in his past experience and which are now stimulated by some present experience.

It should be noted here that, when the event to be forecast by a person is a future experience or action of himself or of another person, we have a rather special case, which is worth particular mention, although it falls under one or other of the above headings. A may be able to forecast that he himself will have a certain experience or do a certain action, because he knows introspectively that he has formed a certain intention. He may be able to forecast that B will have a certain experience or do a certain action, because he has reason to believe, either from B's explicit statements or from other signs, that B has formed a certain intention.

(4.4) It is impossible for a person to know or have reason to believe that an event of such and such a kind happened at such and such a place and time in the past except under one or another of the following conditions. (i) That the event was an experience which he himself had during the lifetime of his present body; that this left a trace in him which has lasted until now; and that this trace can be stimulated so as to give rise in him to a memory of that past experience. (ii) That the event was one which he witnessed during the lifetime of his present body; that the experience of witnessing it left a trace in him which has lasted till now; and that he now remembers the event witnessed, even though he may not be able to remember the experience of witnessing it. (iii) That the event was experienced or witnessed by someone else, who now remembers it and tells this person about it. (iv) That the event was experienced or witnessed by someone (whether this person himself or another), who made a record of it either at the time or afterwards from memory; that this record or copies or translations of it have survived; and that it is now perceptible by and intelligible to this person. (These four methods may be summarized under the heads of present memory, or testimony based on present memory or on records of past perceptions or memories.) (v) Explicit or implicit inference, either made by the person himself or made by others and accepted by him on their authority, from data supplied by present sense-perception, introspection, or memory, together with knowledge of certain laws of nature.

I do not assert that these nine instances of basic limiting principle are exhaustive, or that they are all logically independent of each other. But I think that they will suffice as examples of important restrictive principles of very wide range, which are commonly accepted to-day by educated plain men and by scientists in Europe and America.

General Remarks on Psychical Research

I turn now to psychical research. Before going into detail I will make some general remarks about its data, methods and affiliations.

(1) The subject may be, and has been, pursued in two ways. (i) As a critical investigation of accounts of events which, if they happened at all, did so spontaneously under conditions which had not been deliberately pre-arranged and cannot be repeated at will. (ii) As an experimental study, in which the investigator raises a definite question and pre-arranges the conditions so that the question will be answered in this, that, or the other way according as this, that, or the other observable event happens under the conditions. An extreme instance of the former is provided by the investigation of stories of the following kind. A asserts that he has had an hallucinatory waking experience of a very specific and uncommon kind, and that this experience either imitated in detail or unmistakably symbolized a certain crisis in the life of a certain other person, B, e.g. death or a serious accident or sudden illness, which happened at roughly the same time. A claims that B was many miles away at the time, that he had no normal reason to expect that such an event would happen to B, and that he received no information of the event by normal means until afterwards. An extreme instance of the latter is provided by the card-guessing experiments of Dr. Soal in England or of Professor Rhine and his colleagues in U.S.A.

Intermediate between these two extremes would be any carefully planned and executed set of sittings with a trance-medium, such as the late Mr. Saltmarsh held with Mrs. Warren Elliott and described in Vol. XXXIX of the S.P.R. Proceedings. In such cases the procedure is experimental at least in the following respects. A note-taker takes down everything that is said by sitter or medium, so that there is a permanent record from which an independent judge can estimate to a considerable extent whether the medium was 'fishing' and whether the sitter was inadvertently giving hints. Various techniques are used in order to try to estimate objectively whether the statements of the medium which are alleged to concern a certain dead person do in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• SECTION I. PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
• SECTION II. RELIGION
• SECTION III. POLITICS
• INDEX of Names and Titles
• INDEX of Subjects