- 7 - 1. 4 Professor William MacDougall and Professor J. B. Rhine, Duke University, North Carolina A significant about-face - largely undetected by the rest of the world - happened within the sciences in 1935: The soul was rediscovered. - This momentous occurrence is mainly thanks to two psychologists: Professor William MacDougall, many years at the University of Oxford and the University of Harvard, and the young researcher Professor J. B. Rhine. They founded an institute at the Duke University in Durham (USA State of North Carolina) that was designed to fathom the mysterious forces of human nature. The term “parapsychology” was coined at that time to describe a new subject area within the academic curriculum. These two scientists investigated “crazy things” like dreams, clairvoyance, telepathy and thought transference. But the deeper they delved into this new field of research, the more urgent the question: “If these abilities, they have nothing to do with sensory perceptions and other quite normal performances, are real - where do these “supernatural talents” actually come from? Do people, something that has been believed since the beginning of time, really possess something like a soul? Can it be verified? Can it be separated from the body? The Parapsychological Institute at the Duke University collected and closely examined ghost stories. Dreams and prophecies were noted down and one pursued all other events that seemed to be of an unusual nature. One developed laboratory test to examine so-called paranormal abilities. - The reality is: There are people that occasionally “see” things that take place in far off places and sometimes also in the future. Some might quite obviously defy place and time and seemingly also the laws of nature. But we are not dealing with a miracle when something like this happens, it is actually something natural. In his book “Extrasensory Perceptions” J. B. Rhine reports for the first time about telepathic and clairvoyant experiments that were undertaken at a university institute. He utilised a system involving playing cards depicting five simple symbols. Five playing cards depicted either a cross, a star, a waved line, a square and a circle. Rhine didn’t work with professional mediums, but with quite ordinary people - students or relatives of university staff. • With the first important result of his experiments, he discovered that many more people possess simple abilities in regards to extrasensory perception than one assumes. It had indeed been often attempted to depict the results of Rhine and others as deceptions, even though they could be repeated. But one cannot dismiss scientifically operated parapsychology that easily. Sociology, an equally “new” discipline, developed on hand of mathematical, cybernetic, technical and psychological means, sophisticated control mechanisms for testing groups of people. With a few alterations, these can also be applied in parapsychological experiments. No serious scientist would nowadays consider troubling himself with starting an experiment, knowing that he could already be attacked before he even started. The public’s scepticism is still infinitely great even with genuine experiments and its disbelief hardly conquerable even when faced with irrefutable facts. An experiment associated with even a shadow of a fraudulent manoeuvre would not be taken notice of. We can therefore confidently assume that Professor Rhine’s experiments took place devoid of intentional deceptions. But that was not enough for him. Careful precautions were taken in order to avoid unconscious falsifications. Attempts where clairvoyant abilities were tested were not allowed to be watered down telepathically. If a conductor of theses tests had been there to hold up the cards, the medium could have tapped into his thoughts telepathically. Such an ability has nothing to do with clairvoyance. The medium therefore
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