Fact and Fable in Psychology

by Joseph Jastrow

The distinction between the individual and the statistical aspect of a problem may be further illustrated in the much-discussed question of the differences in brain characteristics of men and women. When the claimants for woman's equality point to the acknowledged inability of an anatomist to determine whether a particular brain belonged to a man or a woman as conclusive evidence of their contention, they unconsciously assume that the problem is capable of determination in the individual specimen. A sounder logic would insure greater caution. The differences in question may be certainly established and typical, and yet depend upon statistical, not upon individual data. Give the anatomist a goodly number of fairly selected brains and tell him that all the women's brains are in one group, and all the men's brains in another, and he will tell you which group is feminine, which masculine; and this more than offsets his failure in the former test. It establishes a statistical regularity. Individually we may argue that many women of our acquaintance have larger heads than the men; that the English, are not taller than the French, because the Frenchmen we have chanced to meet have been quite as tall as the Englishmen of our acquaintance; that the laws of chance do not apply to the gaming-table, because on that basis we should have come out even and not as losers; and that coincidences cannot explain our strange mental experiences, because they are altogether too peculiar and too frequent. It is only in the most complete stages and in the more definite realms that knowledge becomes applicable accurately and definitely to individual cases. For the present it is well if, with such abstruse or rather indefinite material, we can glimpse the statistical regularity of the entire group of phenomena, trace here and there the possible or probable application of general principles, and refuse to allow our opinions to be disarranged by rather startling individual cases. The explanation of these, however interesting they may be to ourselves or entertaining to others, is not the test of our knowledge of the subject.

I pick up a stone, and with a peculiar turn of the hand throw it from me; probably no student of mechanics can exactly calculate the course of that projectile,—nor is it worth while. What he can do is to show what laws are obeyed by ideal projectiles, ideally thrown under ideal conditions, and how far the more important practical cases tend to agree with or diverge from these conditions. It is unfair to test his science by its minute applicability to our special experiences.

When the problems involved in mental telegraphy come to be generally viewed under the guidance of a sound logic, the outlook will be hopeful that the whole domain will gradually acquire definite order; and that its devotees, after appreciating the statistical regularity of the phenomena, will come to the conclusion that much of the energy and ability now expended in a search for the explanation of complex and necessarily indefinite individual cases, is on the whole unprofitable. With an infinite time and an infinite capacity it might be profitable to study all things; but, at present, sanity consists in the maintenance of a proper perspective of the relative importance of the affairs of the intellectual and the practical life. It may be that the man who puzzles day and night over some trivial mystery expends as much brain energy as a great intellectual benefactor of mankind; but the world does not equally cherish the two.

III

It becomes important in the further consideration of coincidences to emphasize the great opportunity presented in their description for error, for defective observation, for neglect of details, for exaggeration of the degree of correspondence; and equally demonstrable is the slight amount of such error or mal-observation that is all-sufficient to convert a plain fact into a mystery. Consider the disfigurement that a simple tale undergoes as it passes from mouth to mouth; the forgetfulness of important details and the introduction of imaginary ones, exhibited upon the witness stand; the almost universal tendency to substitute inferences from sensations and observations for the actual occurrences; and add to these the striking results of experimental inquiry in this direction—for example, the divergences between the accounts of sleight-of-hand performances or spiritualistic séances and what really occurred—and it becomes less difficult to understand why we so often fail to apply general principles to individual cases. The cases cannot be explained as they are recorded, because as recorded they do not furnish the essential points upon which the explanation hinges. The narrator may be confident that the points of the story are correctly observed, that all the details are given; and yet this feeling of confidence is by no means to be trusted. It is quite possible that the points that would shed most light on the problem are too trivial to attract attention; a slightly imperfect connection as effectively breaks the circuit and cuts off the possibility of illumination as a more serious disturbance. After the explanation is given or the gap supplied or the break discovered, we often wonder how we could have failed to detect the source of the mystery; but before we know what to observe and what to record and what to be on our guard against, the possibility of error is extremely great, far greater than most of us would be willing to make allowance for; and the strict demonstration as also the refutation of a proposed explanation becomes correspondingly difficult.

IV

I turn to another point, in some respects the most important of all; I refer to the readiness with which we interpret as the remarkable frequency of coincidences what is due to a strong interest in a given direction. Inasmuch as we observe what interests us, a recently acquired interest will lead to new observations—that is, new to us, however familiar they may be to others. Take up the study of almost any topic that appeals to human curiosity, and it takes no prophet to predict that within a short time some portion of your reading or your conversation, or some accidental information, will unexpectedly reveal a bearing on the precise subject of your study, often supplying a gap which it would have been most difficult otherwise to fill; but surely this does not mean that all the world has become telepathically aware of your needs and proceeded to attend to them. Some years ago I became interested in cases of extreme longevity, particularly of centenarianism, and for some months every conversation seemed to lead to this topic, and every magazine and newspaper offered some new item about old people. Nowadays my interest is transferred to other themes; but the paragrapher continues quite creditably to meet my present wants, and the centenarians have vanished. When I am writing about coincidences, I become keen to observe them; such for example as this: I was reading for the second time an article on "Mental Telegraphy" (by Mark Twain in "Harper's Monthly Magazine," December, 1891); I was occupied with what is there described as a most wonderful coincidence, the nearly simultaneous origination by the author and by Mr. William H. Wright of a similar literary venture,—when I happened to take my eyes from the page and saw on my desk a visiting-card bearing the name, "W. H. Wright." It was not the same W. H. Wright, but a gentleman whom I had met for the first time a few hours before, and have not seen since. Had I not been especially interested in this article and its subject, the identity of the names would certainly have escaped my attention, and there would have been no coincidence to record. Quite apropos both of coincidences and of their dependence upon personal interest, I find recorded in a current magazine the experience of one who became enthusiastically interested in thoroughbred cats: "Strangely enough—for it is a thing which is recurrently strange—I, who had rarely seen any printed matter relating to cats, now found the word in every newspaper. Adopting a new interest is like starting a snowball; as long as it moves, it gathers other particles to itself."

It is only necessary to become deeply interested in coincidences, to look about with eyes open and eager to detect them, in order to discover them on all sides; resolve to record all that come to hand, and they seem to multiply until you can regard yourself and your friends as providentially favored in this direction. If your calling develops a taste for matters of this kind,—for example, if you are a writer, with a keen sense for the literary possibilities and dramatic effects of such coincidences, or if you are of an imaginative turn of mind with a pronounced or a vague yearning for the interesting or the unusual; if you have a more generous or more persistent endowment of the day-dreaming, fantastic, self-dramatization of adolescence, that is half unreal and yet half externalized in the vividness of youthful fancy,—is it strange that you should meet with more of these "psychic experiences" than your prosaic neighbor whose thoughts and aspirations are turned to quite other channels, and to whom an account of your experiences might even prove tiresome? If you cultivate the habit of having presentiments, and of regarding them as significant, is it strange that they should become more and more frequent, and that among the many, some should be vaguely suggestive, or even directly corroborative of actual occurrences?

The frequent coincidences, which form so influential a factor in disseminating an inclination towards such an hypothesis as telepathy, are doubtless largely the result of an interest in these experiences. This interest is very natural and proper, and when estimated at its true value is certainly harmless; it may indeed contribute material worthy of record for the student of mental phenomena,—or it may give spice to the matter-of-fact incidents of a workaday existence. To many minds, however, the temptation to magnify this interest into a significant portion of one's mental life, to invest it with a serious power to shape belief and to guide conduct, is unusually strong, in some cases almost irresistible. It is this tendency that is essentially antagonistic to a logical view and therefore to a scientific study of these irregular mental incidents; it is this tendency that is responsible for much of the spurious and the unwholesome interest in the problems of mental telegraphy.