Philosophical Interactions with Parapsychology: The Major Writings of H.H. Price on Parapsychology and Survival. - book reviews

Edited by Frank B. Dilley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. Pp. xix + 294. $59.95, hardcover. ISBN 0-312-12607-7.

What Murphy and Ballou (1960) did for William James nearly 40 years ago, Frank Dilley has now done for another philosopher, H. H. Price. Like James, Price's interest in psychical research extended over nearly the whole of his professional life, and his writings spanned several decades and were scattered in a variety of journals and books. By bringing together many of Price's major writings on psychical research into one volume, Dilley has provided readers with the opportunity not only to appreciate the prominent place in Price's intellectual life that psychical research held, but also to recognize more clearly the important and recurrent themes in Price's thinking about psychical research.

The papers that Dilley has collected were published between 1937 and 1970, but they are arranged thematically, rather than chronologically - the first part of the book dealing with some theoretical implications of parapsychological phenomena in general, the second part containing Price's discussions of some theoretical problems pertaining to survival research. In Chapter 1, part of a paper published in 1953, Price discusses how parapsychology can contribute to the debate about the conflicting materialistic and religious views of the nature of human personality. The religious view, according to Price, is rooted in two beliefs: that human cognitive capacities extend beyond sensory functioning and ultimately connect the individual with a larger reality - namely, the Divine; and that the individual has a soul that is immortal. The materialistic or scientific view, in contrast, is that human cognitive capacities are inseparable from the body, both in the way they operate and in their temporal existence. As Price points out, the parapsychological concepts of ESP and of survival after death cannot be equated with the religious concepts of a sense of the divine and immortality. Nevertheless, in undermining the chief obstacle to the religious view - materialism - parapsychological evidence keeps alive the possibility that the religious view may not be entirely false.

Chapter 2 is the first half of Price's 1939 Presidential Address to the SPR, "Haunting and the 'Psychic Ether' Hypothesis." Despite the rather occult sound of the rifle, the paper is in fact an important theoretical contribution not only to parapsychology, but also to the question of mind-matter relations in general. Price begins by outlining the two major obstacles to progress in psychical research - obstacles that still loom large nearly six decades later. First, there is the lack of a repeatable method. Price offers two suggestions for increasing the likelihood of finding an approach to producing the desired phenomena. He believes it is important for investigators to experience the phenomena at first hand, and he suggests that they attempt to do so by adopting some of the practices of religious, and particularly Eastern, traditions. He also suggests that there seems to be an inverse relationship between intellectual functioning and the occurrence of psi, and he urges investigators to examine or produce conditions in which the intellect is in abeyance, both in other persons and in themselves.

The second problem facing psychical research is the lack of a comprehensive theory. In psi research in general and survival research in particular, he believed that the main problem in psychical research was not any lack of good evidence, but the unintelligibility of the evidence. He thought that, whereas one could not be too cautious in gathering evidence, one could not be too bold in suggesting ways to try to make sense of that evidence. In the rest of this chapter, Price describes and elaborates a view - similar to Myers's idea of the metetherial, Stace's view of a psychic ether, and Eastern (as well as some Western) views - of a tripartite rather than monistic or dualistic structure to the universe. This tripartite view is that there is "something intermediate between mind and matter as we ordinarily understand them" (p. 27), something that is extended in space as matter is but that is not detectable as matter is and has the properties of mind. Images, ideas, or other mental contents may thus take on a somewhat objective existence, in the form of this intermediate, quasi-material substance, independent of the minds that created them. Telepathy may then be seen as the interaction of these semi-autonomous mental entities, rather than of two minds, and the Collective Unconscious not so much as the merging of minds as the arena of potential interaction of these images or ideas.

In Chapter 3, a paper published a year later (1940) as "Some Philosophical Questions about Telepathy and Clairvoyance," and Chapter 4, a 1949 paper entitled "Mind over Mind and Mind over Matter," Price elaborates on these ideas, particularly with two important additional ideas. First, he presents the view, which has been expressed periodically throughout the history of thought about subconscious or subliminal processes, that telepathy, clairvoyance, and other unconscious phenomena may be filtered out or otherwise prevented from reaching consciousness for biological reasons of adaptation to the physical environment. Secondly, he suggests that working against this filtering or narrowing of consciousness may be an inherent tendency of ideas, which take on an independent, quasi-material existence after being created by a mind, to emerge into consciousness in some psychophysiological form, whether as an image, an apparition or hallucination, a motor action, or PK.

The ideas in these first papers provide the basis for understanding the thought that lay behind the rest of the papers included in this volume. Chapter 5 consists of four book reviews. In the first, a 1954 review of C. D. Broad's Religion, Philosophy, and Psychical Research, Price discusses the issues of the relationship of psychical research to philosophy and of telepathy and clairvoyance to ordinary perception and cognition. In a 1954 review of Raynor Johnson's The Imprisoned Splendour, he discusses two of Johnson's ideas (which actually echoed nearly identical ideas expressed by Myers six decades earlier): first, the notion of human personality as a hierarchy, consisting of an empirical, everyday, conscious self as well as a "transcendental self," or "the fundamental reality in each of us" (p. 92); and, second, the theory of a psychic ether, "something intermediate between mind and matter as we ordinarily conceive of them, and possessing properties akin to both" (p. 95). In a 1949 review of J. B. Rhine's The Reach of the Mind, Price discusses again the nature of ESP, arguing that "extrasensory perception" is a misnomer, since it is so unlike ordinary perception, and that ESP and PK may not be a unitary phenomenon comparable to sensorimotor functioning, as Rhine argued, but may instead be evidence of the ideomotor nature of ideas in general. Finally, in a 1962 review of W. T. Stace's Mysticism and Philosophy, Price principally discusses Stace's evaluation of the argument that mystical experiences are universal and are therefore an objective source of knowledge, Stace's argument that mystical experiences are by nature paradoxical, and Stace's belief that mystical experiences do not support the idea of personal survival after death.

In both Chapter 6, the earliest paper in the volume, and Chapter 7, one of the latest, Price discusses the theory that minds have a wider range of operation than normal cognition suggests, but that they are narrowed by a censoring process that filters out all but what is most useful for biologically adaptive purposes. In "The Philosophical Implications of Precognition," Price uses this theory to argue for a telepathic theory of precognition, in opposition to Broad's memory theory. In "Paranormal Cognition and Symbolism," Price argues that this filter theory explains why paranormal cognitions occur so infrequently, and he suggests that when they do occur, they may emerge into consciousness not only completely, in a literal, obvious form, but also sometimes incompletely, in symbolic language that we should make some effort to decipher and learn.

In both Chapter 8 and Chapter 9, Price applies the theory of a psychic ether - a substance intermediate between mind and matter, different from both but sharing properties of both - to the phenomenon of hauntings and apparitions. Chapter 8 is the continuation of Price's 1939 Presidential Address to the SPR (the first part is published as Chapter 2 in this volume). Price suggests that hauntings and apparitions exist independently in a quasi-physical or "etheric" form and have thus become localized in space, where they can directly (as opposed to indirectly, through the peripheral senses) affect the nervous system of persons whose minds have some telepathic affinity with that particular idea. (Here again, Price's thinking shows a remarkable similarity to Gurney and Myers's 1884 theory of apparitions and Myers's later theory of the "phantasmogenetic efficacy" of some images or ideas.) In Chapter 9, Price describes the two opposing theories of apparitions - the telepathic theory and the theory of an objective, but not physical, double - and he suggests that some combination of the two theories (such as he had described in his 1939 paper) might be closer to the truth than either one alone.

Although nearly all of the papers in Part I touched in one way or another on the problem of survival, the five papers in Part II deal more exclusively with this issue. In Chapter 10, "Mediumship and Survival," Price suggests that spiritualists have paid too little attention to the relationship between mediumship and certain phenomena of psychopathology, such as multiple personality, and the evidence that both provide concerning the complexity and particularly the multiplicity of mind. On the other hand, Price also believes that those who dismiss the survival hypothesis "have to be more than unskeptical [about ESP], [they] have to be almost credulous" (p. 212). Chapter 11 is an introduction, delivered to a 1967 Society for the Study of Theology conference, to Price's views on the nature of ESP, the alternative theories of mediumship, and the importance of the cross-correspondences.

In the next two papers, Price himself takes up a challenge he had issued in Chapter 2, and he attempts to make the notion of survival intelligible by providing a description of what form life after death might take. In Chapter 12, a 1953 lecture to the SPR entitled "Survival and the Idea of Another World," he conjectures that after death, released from the biological filter that is the body, our mental, and particularly image-producing, capacities can operate more widely. Postmortem existence is thus in a mind-dependent world, "dependent on the memories and the desires" of the person (p. 253), in which imagery replaces sensory perception and telepathic interaction between "like-minded personalities" (p. 252) replaces physical interaction. (In Chapter 14 [pp. 282-283] he adds the suggestion that clairvoyance replaces sensory perception in providing postmortem contact with an objective, rather than purely subjective, reality.) In Chapter 13, "What Kind of a 'Next World'?" Price describes two possible conceptions of postmortem survival. In one, we survive in an embodied form, an etheric, astral, or other quasi-physical body replacing the physical one. In the other, we survive as a disembodied, immaterial soul. Similarly, there are two parallel conceptions of the nature of a postmortem world: One is of a quasi-physical world, in a space of its own and with laws of its own, having no relation to physical space or laws. The other is of a purely psychological world, a dream world of subjective images. Repeating an idea that recurs throughout his writings on psychical research, Price suggests that the two conceptions of postmortem existence may not be so different as they first appear; they may "meet in the middle . . . there may be realities in the universe which are intermediate between the physical and the psychological realms as these are ordinarily conceived" (p. 269).

Finally, Chapter 14 consists of two papers primarily about C. J. Ducasse's views on survival, one a 1952 review of Ducasse's Nature, Mind, and Death, the other published shortly after Ducasse's death in 1969. In both of these Price describes and discusses Ducasse's chapters about mind-body relations, about objections to the notion of survival, and about three different conceptions of what form survival might take.

Perhaps my major objection to this volume is that I wish there had been space to include more, even all, of Price's papers on psychical research! Dilley has provided a complete list of these papers in the back of the volume so that readers can locate the ones not included.(1) Nevertheless, having a significant part of one person's writings available to read as a group is invaluable in highlighting significant ideas or themes in that person's contributions. Dilley outlined five of these in his introduction to the volume: the psychic ether hypothesis; the notion that ideas and images, once created, take on an independent existence and that they, not minds, are the vehicles for telepathy; the concept of a common or collective unconscious; the belief that parapsychological phenomena require a modification of Cartesian dualism, perhaps along the lines of a tripartite division of body, mind, and spirit; and the problem of making the notion of postmortem survival intelligible. I would have added some others, particularly Price's belief that "extrasensory perception" was a poor choice of terminology, since supernormal cognition is, in Price's view, nothing like ordinary perception, and the idea that the mental contents that actually emerge into consciousness, out of the larger potential pool of material available to a mind, have passed through a barrier or filtering process that is governed by demands of biological adaptation. Dilley laments that many of these ideas are sketchy and never explicitly related to each other by Price in a more comprehensive, fully developed theoretical work. But the direction in which Price was heading seems clear enough to me, even if he never fully elaborated his ideas. I think that all of Price's thinking about the phenomena both of parapsychology and of survival research centered around the idea of some substance "intermediate between mind and matter, as we ordinarily conceive of them, and possessing properties akin to both" (p. 95). But it is perhaps less important now to know with any certainty what Price was really thinking or how he would have tied all his ideas together more fully and coherently. It seems more important now to think how we might assess these various ideas and perhaps use them as the basis for a comprehensive theory that can relate the phenomena of psychical research with those of both psychology and the physical sciences. The idea of an intermediate, quasi-material substance, for example, has a long history, in occult traditions, in Eastern philosophy, and in psychical research. An historical review of this idea, and of others of Price's ideas, might be a useful tool in stimulating our own theoretical ideas.

Bold theories, as Price pointed out, are necessary in trying to make sense of the empirical data that we already have. But, conversely, theoretical conjecturing is useless unless it leads to ideas for further empirical research. Theoretical ideas must help us form "a reasonably clear idea of the [experimental] questions which we wish to ask" (p. 26). How can we take the theoretical ideas of Price, of others, of ourselves, and turn them into specific research? This is perhaps the more difficult task.

I might have made a few suggestions to Dilley for augmenting this volume. A more substantial index than the half-page "Index of Discussions" that he did include would have been useful. I would have been quite interested in a biographical sketch of Price and a brief summary of his other work in philosophy; information of this sort might provide further insight into Price's writings on psychical research. These are minor suggestions, however. Volumes of this kind, and this volume in particular, are invaluable additions to the literature of psychical research, if we and scientists and philosophers of the future will use them to identify ideas - some with unrecognized but long-standing histories - that may lead to progress in our field.

EMILY WILLIAMS COOK

Division of Personality Studies Box 152 Health Sciences Center University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22908 e-mail: ewc2r@virginia.edu

1 I do know of one paper not included by Dilley, a 1959 paper published in Light, cited by Alan Gauld in his 1977 Handbook of Parapsychology chapter. However, Dilley may have decided to list only Price's publications in more scholarly journals and books.

REFERENCES

Murphy, G., & Ballou, R. O. (Eds.) (1960). William James on psychical research. New York: Viking Press.

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