Ten ladies offered themselves for experimentation. Of course the likelihood was very small that any one of them would show a trace of telepathic faculty. As it proved, there developed no reason to suspect its possession by a single one of them. And it is certain that no one who disbelieves that any one gets impressions by telepathy will complain of our conclusion that the ten ladies did nothing more than guess.
If they did nothing more than to guess, it made no difference what method we employed, so long as the ladies were given no inkling of the original drawings. Nevertheless, the exact replicas of Mr. Sinclair’s 13 drawings of February 15th were separately sealed in numbered envelopes, and the lady was asked to hold the envelopes, one by one, in her hand, and to draw what came into her mind visually or by concept, choosing from such impressions according to vividness, recurrence or by whatever criterion seemed to her most congenial. She was told to take all the time she wished and was then left alone. Thus the conditions of the Sinclair experiments were imitated as closely as possible. The time occupied by the ladies for the series varied from half an hour to nearly an hour and a half. Every woman would have been pleased, naturally, if her results had been such as to give grounds for suspecting telepathy, but the results of the ladies differed in quality only by narrow degrees, and, as said, there was not the slightest reason to suppose that with any of them there was anything but chance in play.
It is, of course, not practicable to reproduce their 130 drawings in this Bulletin. But they are to be mounted, the ten for each original drawing on a separate sheet together with a copy of the Sinclair original and reproduction, and the 13 sheets will be preserved by the Boston Society for Psychic Research as a permanent exhibit which any visitor may inspect and judge for himself.
As has been seen, we classified the Sinclair reproductions of this series as Successes, Partial Successes, Suggestive and Failures. This is a rough method, and others might increase or decrease the number assigned to any of these classes, except the last. There can be no question that there is but one entire failure. But however faulty our standard of rating, it is the same standard which is applied to the drawings of the ten ladies.
Not only did I use the utmost care in rating the drawings of the ten ladies, but I asked my secretary, Miss Hoffmann, a lady of education and keen intelligence, to do the same. Her rating of the guessing sets was as absolutely independent of mine as mine was independent of hers.
Our mutually independent estimates were surprisingly alike. According to both, there were among the 130 trials (by 10 women) not a single Success, only 1 (Miss H) or 2 (W. F. P.) deserving to be entitled to Partial Success, 7 Suggestive, 5 Slightly Suggestive and 116 (W. F. P.) or 117 (Miss H) Failure. Compare with the Sinclair set, 3 Success, 5 Partial Success, 4 Suggestive, 1 Failure, out of a total of but 13.
Before the foregoing judging was done, I had Miss Hoffman guess the whole set, twice a day, until another 10 sets were produced, based upon the same Sinclair series. Our wholly independent estimates of the total results of these additional 130 experiments in guessing proved again to be surprisingly alike. Neither found a single Success, 1 (W. F. P.) or no (Miss H) reproduction deserved to be called a Partial Success, 5 (W. F. P.) or 7 (Miss H) were rated Suggestive, 8 (W. F. P.) or 7 (Miss H) as Slightly Suggestive and 116 as Failures.
We will now tabulate the two groups (the sets of the 10 ladies and Miss H’s 10 sets), taken together (260 experiments in guessing).
| W. F. P.’s Estimate | Miss H’s Estimate | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| S. | 0 | S. | 0 |
| P. S. | 3 | P. S. | 1 |
| Sug. | 12 | Sug. | 14 |
| S. Sug. | 13 | S. Sug. | 12 |
| F. | 232 | F. | 233 |
If we calculate the averages for the 20 sets of experiments, we can more directly compare with the Sinclair results.