GARDNER MURPHY HITS TELEPATHY SCEPTICS

Gardner Murphy '17, who worked with Dr. L. T. Troland at Harvard on the problem on mental telepathy and who left recently to continue his studies at Columbia, has come out strongly for ESP (extra-sensory-perception).

In Dr. Rhine and the Mind's Eye," an article in the Spring issue of the "American Scholar," he flays modern psychologists for refusing to take a more tolerant attitude towards extra-sensory-perception.

Psychology Too Contented

"Psychology, youngest of the experimental sciences, has been content to model itself upon physics and biology and instead of challenging their tenets has felt that its own scientific status depended in large part upon the acceptance of the standard world view," says Murphy.

He believes this to be the reason "for the hesitant reception which has been accorded experimental work upon processes of perception not conveyed to us along the ordinary path of the known senses."

Britain Tolerant to ESP

Showing that Britain has a more tolerant attitude toward ESP than elsewhere Murphy thinks that the rapid growth of spiritualism as a cult in America impaired rather than assisted the spread of systematic scientific inquiry.

Approves Dr. Rhine

More recently Dr. Rhine's Duke experiments come under his approving eye.

Factors which particularly interest him in the Rhine experiments are: 1) Very marked ESP capacity among children between four and thirteen 2) evidence of marked ability among various handicapped groups, notably the blind, and 3) evidence for high-scoring capacities among some psychotic groups at institutions.

"The leverage for a replacement of seventeenth century naive mechanism by other conceptions more characteristic of twentieth century scientific adventure is, I think, research on extrasensory perception," concludes Murphy