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Marion devotes several chapters to the strange adventures which he encountered as a music-hall entertainer. There is one inimitable story describing how he was offered an engagement at the town of Perm on the borders of Siberia. When he duly arrived at his destination with half a ton of stage trappings, he found he was called upon to perform to an audience of one and the audience was sitting with its back to the stage. Somewhat disconcerted, Marion began with his usual stage patter about telepathy. As he proceeded the 'back' turned slowly round, its face began to smile, then it chuckled, and finally roared with mirth. Then before Marion had time to do a single experiment the audience - who proved to be an elderly gentleman with aristocratic looking features - called him across the room and thanked him for the finest comic performance it had ever witnessed in its life. It seemed that the gentleman was no less a person than a Russian grand duke, in fact the exiled of the Tzar Nicholas. This extraordinary performance was repeated each night for a fortnight without the least variation.
The book is written in the chatty, pleasant style that is reminiscent of Harry Price's Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter and it contains even taller stories than that masterpiece. This highly coloured journalistic kind of writing has the drawback that it gives any work an anecdotal flavour which prevents one from taking any of the incidents very seriously. It is unfortunate, but it is not easy to be sensational and accurate at the same time. One marvellous story follows another without a shred of corroboration or supporting evidence. Thus (p. 143) Marion tells Dr. Springer, a Nazi, that he, along with the upper ten of the Nazi party, will hang on Marion's birthday, 15 October. This prediction, according to Marion, was made at Dresden in 1931. on another occasion he used his 'powers' to assist a woman to recover a currency note which it turns out had been purloined by a milkman. If even half these stories are true Marion must be the greatest psychic who has ever lived. But one feels strongly that even were an investigation set on foot to discover the truth about these claims it would fail owing to the people concerned being either dead or untraceable.
Marion has also dabbled in criminology. The bulk of his stories are as usual uncorroborated, but in one case he does provide a translation of a letter he received from the Royal Dutch Constabulary at Apeldoorn after carrying out a test. Marion was handed a small box containing an automatic pistol which had been used for a crime. Of this crime none of the officers present had any knowledge. Marion stated correctly that three shots had been fired by a man at a woman with this pistol but that the woman was not killed or fatally injured. He gave many other details, but it was impossible to verify them. Marion's description of the man could not be checked by comparison with a photograph on a police index card.
What is certain is that when Marion visited England in 1934 and was tested by the writer and a group of other persons at 13d Roland Gardens, the officers of the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation, his remarkable powers must have been entirely dormant. As I have described in my monograph Preliminary Experiments with a Vaudeville Telepathist, numerous people handed Marion objects, letters, and specimens of handwriting on which to exercise his skill, but the 'readings' he gave were evasive and vague, devoid of specific detail, and banal to the last degree. Not one of the persons who tendered the objects was convinced. When handed part of a letter from a woman Marion described the writer as a man. When he was given a letter from a mischievous boy of fourteen he said the writer was an elderly savant aged about fifty who worked in a large institution and was of a cantankerous nature. He also claimed that by inspecting a person's handwriting he could tell whether that person was alive or dead. We tested him with a carefully controlled statistical experiment and he failed to substantiate the claim. Of the present reviewers brother who was killed in the First World War at the age of 19 Marion asserted: 'This writer is a middle-aged man, good-hearted, and likes a quiet life. Living'. So much for Marion's claims as a graphologist.
In his autobiography Marion tells us for the first time that he was employed by the Austrian army during the First World War as an expert water-diviner in Albania. It is rather curious that when he came to be investigated at Roland Gardens he never revealed this fact to us. We should have been delighted to have carried out experiments along these lines. On page 20 Marion makes a very unusual claim. He writes: 'I have carried out many times an experiment in which I contrive to shatter a thin wine-glass by projecting thought-waves upon it. Incredible? Not at all.' I suggest that Marion should demonstrate this to Dr. Rhine. Surly it would be more convincing proof of psychokinesis than all the dice-throwing that has ever been done in the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University!
Marion honours me with a whole chapter devoted to the tests I carried out with the assistance of Mrs. K. M. Goldney and others during the spring and summer of 1934. The report of these experiments is contained in Bulletin 3 of the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation (London, 1937). I carried out a series of further experiments in the years 1938-9, but these are still unpublished. Marion does not agree with any of my conclusions, and in his chapter 'On Trial in England' he quotes numerous extracts from a criticism written by a certain Mr. Edmond P. Gibson who has had some association with the Duke University workers in parapsychology. Many years ago Mr. Gibson sent me a typescript which I thought at the time was the most extraordinary piece of special pleading I have ever read. I answered Mr. Gibson's points in great detail, but received no reply from him. Mr. Gibson, who is apparently annoyed because my experiments showed that Marion does not use telepathy in his stage feat of finding objects hidden by members of the audience, questions the validity of my methods. Let me now put the plain facts before the reader as succinctly as possible.
In order to test Marion's ability to find hidden objects we placed six tin boxes in different parts of the room. Marion was taken outside the room by another person. In his absence a die was thrown in order to decide which of the six boxes a light scentless handkerchief was to be hidden. The lids were replaced on the tins and each tin was given a random push. The audience, consisting of five or six persons, then seated itself round a table. Marion was called in. The rule was that if he touched a tin must open it. Members of the audience were not to give him any deliberate clues. Marion walked round the room and ultimately opened a box. In a total of 91 trials in which Marion's friend Mr Van Lier was excluded Marion opened the right tin no less than 38 times and the odds against such a result being due to chance are nearly one in seventy-one millions. Obviously, then, Marion could perform this feat. But observe the sequel which Mr Gibson blatantly ignores. A curtain was rigged up across the corner of the room. In this curtain were a few tiny chink-holes. In the new experiments, immediately the handkerchief was hidden the audience retired behind the curtain and Marion was called in. The audience, who all knew in which tin the object was hidden, watched Marion through the chink-holes, being careful not to disturb the curtain. The audience 'willed' Marion to go to the right tin as they had done in the previous tests. The only difference was that now Marion was unable to observe the audience or any of their head-movements etc. Four afternoons were devoted to this series, and Marion opened the correct tin only 13 times in 64 trials. The chance of getting such a result is greater than 1 in 4. If Marion, as he claims, performed his feat by telepathy, why should he fail so completely when the audience was still in the room but invisible to him?
In the face of such a finding I simply cannot imagine why any person should want to maintain that Marion uses telepathy.
In another test the audience was seated round the table, but each person had a thick blanket over his head and shoulders and stopped his or her ears. Marion, under these conditions, was right just 4 times in 28 trials, a result which we should expect by chance alone.
In one experiment in which Mr H. S. Collins, who knew in which tin the object was hidden (the rest of the audience being behind the curtain), was seated in a corner of the room with a stockingette hood over his head, we watched Marion moving his hand up and down over a tin deliberately waiting for Collins to nod his head or give some other tell-tale sign that Marion was at the right tin. Marion kept glancing repeatedly at Collins. We noticed the same thing in other experiments when Collins was standing in the sentry box with only his hooded head exposed.
Mr Gibson makes great play with the word hyperaesthesia. But in the conclusions at the end of my report I do not even mention the word. In the above feat there is no question of hyperaesthesia. It is merely a matter of Marion's trained observation. Marion, by years of practise, has trained himself to interpret correctly small movements on the part of those who know where the object is hidden.
Mr Gibson asks 'Why is Mr Soal so miserly with his perfect experiments?' He says erroneously (p. 226) that I only made 25 trials which I considered to be free from any sensory cues. He ignores entirely the 64 curtain experiments which were as 'perfect' as can be desired. These in number compare quite favourably with the 91 experiments in which Marion could watch the movements and reactions of his audience. I had no particular reason to suppose that Marion employed genuine telepathy in his stage work. I soon satisfied myself that he did not. Only the credulous believe that vaudeville mystery showmen perform their feats by telepathy, and why should Marion prove an exception? My main object was to gain some idea of the perfectly normal methods used to produce certain effects. 'Perfect' experiments which made it impossible for Marion to succeed at all would have taught me just nothing of the modus operandi.
Mr Gibson's views seem to be in a minority of one. Such scientific journals as Nature and the British Medical Journal commended my work in the highest terms and the first-named journal applied the epithet 'outstanding' to it. Nor would anyone accuse the late Whately Carington of hostility to the paranormal. Yet in his book Telepathy he wrote: 'His paper on the subject deserves to rank as a classical example of how such work should and can be done - Soal conclusively showed by a beautiful series of step-by-step tests that this (feat of finding hidden objects) was due to the subconscious utilization by Marion ... of trifling clues and indications unwittingly given by members of the audience.'
The only other performance of any interesting which Marion was successful consisted in the picking out of a playing card which he had previously handled after it had been mixed with several cards of similar make and design. It should be emphasised that he was quite unable to say correctly what figure was on the face of a playing card which he had never seen before when merely allowed to see its back. He merely recognized the actual piece of paste-board which he had previously touched. If this was 'clairvoyance' it was a very strange form of clairvoyance indeed! Marion proved himself quite unable to emulate the feats of good card-guessing subjects such as Mrs Stewart or Basil Shackleton. Our experiments showed that Marion used sometimes visual and sometimes tactual cues. He would manage to give the card a slight flex while handling it so that it stood out from the other cards as being less flat when placed on the table. When we gave him a very thick mill-board card that was almost inflexible and then sealed it up in an envelope and mixed the envelope with others which contained similar cards, Marion would spend two or three minutes in vigorously ruffling the edges of each envelope so that it was painful to watch him. The only way in which these stiff cards could be recognized tactually through an envelope was by feeling for slight ridges and concavities along the edges, and it became quite obvious that Marion was trying desperately to identify the card in this way. Even so, he scored hardly any success. The word 'hyperaesthesia' used by Drs Thouless and Wiesner and Mr Gibson is altogether too strong to use in this connection. Marion possesses a fairly sensitive touch and that is all. He was quite unable to emulate the alleged feat of the blind osteopath, Captain Lowry, of whom it was said he was able to distinguish the pips of a playing card by touch alone. Mr Gibson makes one remark that is glaringly misleading. He says: 'Mr Soal argues that each card touched or tapped by Marion has a pitch or keynote of its own, perceptible only to Marion' (p. 227). This was a casual suggestion made by Dr Harris the physiologist and not my hypothesis at all. On page 42 of my report I merely mention it and remark that it seemed far-fetched.
Drs Thouless and Wiesner in a foreword to Marion's book state that in their opinion he possess paranormal capacities of an unusually high order. It is impossible for me to comment on this statement since, in spite of a considerable lapse of time, no report on their experiments has yet appeared. During the past three years I have heard reports of Marion's methods which are not reassuring. In particular, two members of the Magic Circle watched Marion's trick of picking out a 'red' card from among seven 'black' ones without tactual contact1 and on 25 March 1947 one of them, using the same pack of playing cards with which Marion had performed his feat, demonstrated before Dr Wiesner, Dr west, and Mrs K. M. Goldney that it was possible to duplicate Marion's feat. Dr Wiesner, Dr West, and Mrs Goldney all signed a statement to the effect that they were completely convinced that the conjuror had made good his claim. Marks were discovered on the backs of the cards, predominately though not entirely on the cards of red denomination. Whether these marks were manufacturers' marks or not is beside the point. If they could have been utilised to identify certain of the 'red' cards, then clearly the experiment was valueless as a test for paranormal cognition.
I might also mention another incident which occurred recently at a party in the house of Mrs C. Richards. During the evening Dr Flugel handed Marion a sealed envelope in which Mrs Goldney had put a letter which Marion was to 'psychometrise' later. On the envelope Mrs Goldney had placed a secret mark. Holding the envelope in his hands, Marion gave a remarkably accurate 'reading' of the contents of the enclosed letter. Mrs Goldney then asked Marion for the envelope, which she insisted on seeing. To her surprise she saw that the envelope was not the original one in which she had sealed the letter. Marion explained to her that he had opened the original envelope by mistake believing that it contained a cheque from Mrs Richards. He said that he had not read the letter but had immediately sealed it up in a fresh envelope.
But surely it was Marion's duty after opening the envelope to have gone to Mrs Goldney or Dr Flugel and explained what had happened. He must have known that once the envelope had been opened the experiment lost its value. Had Mrs Goldney not made the secret mark and insisted on examining the envelope the incident might have appeared as a striking exposition of Marion's psi powers. Incidentally, the subject-matter of the enclosed letter was printed in inch-tall letters at the head of the notepaper so that it would have been practically impossible not to read this in transferring the letter from one envelope to another.
In my report of the 1934 experiments I have recorded cases which reveal a similar lack of candour on Marion's part. On 28 February 1934 I decided to put Marion's straightforwardness to the test. I obtained twelve white cards on which were printed in thick black type the numbers 1,2,3 ... up to 12. I placed each card in a thin envelope and sealed up the envelopes. The envelopes were so thin that when the card fell against the inner face the number on it could be read by a person with normal eyesight. The envelopes were handed to Marion one by one and he wrote on each envelope the number he thought it contained. Only in the case of three of the envelopes was Marion definitely wrong. In two other cases he could not decide whether the number was a one or a seven. We watched him carefully while he was manipulating the envelopes and it was obvious that he was tilting the card against the face of the envelope and reading the number enclosed. But did he say that he was reading through the envelope? He did not, but pretended that he was using clairvoyance. I then handed him twelve opaque envelopes containing similar cards numbered one to twelve and presented them to him in random order. Now he did not score a single success at first try and only two at second try, even though he made two guesses at the number in each envelope.
It is, of course, quite legitimate for a vaudeville telepathist to use any method that is available so long as he does not claim paranormal powers. But all through this book Marion insists that his work is not mere entertainment but is of value to science as examples of telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition. This attitude, I am sorry to say, is inconsistent with our observations of his shifty methods. How can Marion claim to be helping science to study telepathy, when all the time he knows he is using normal perception?
In 1939 Mrs Goldney and I tested Marion with many hundreds of guesses at Zener cards, but under properly controlled conditions he failed to demonstrate any powers of clairvoyance. On the first occasion he made his rectangles and circles look so much alike that in checking up we had to ask Marion to say if a symbol was meant for a circle or a square. Under these conditions he managed to win an excess above expectation equivalent to four standard deviations. But after this we were on our guard and insisted on his identifying the written symbols before he had any sight of the target symbols. Though we went on for many weeks Marion failed to score again above chance expectation. At the same time he claimed that when working alone without witnesses he was getting astonishing scores.
Marion is a genial person with great natural charm, and I have pleasant memories of his hospitality when he lived at Abinger hammer. He is no conjurer, and his movements are slow and deliberate. Some of his stage demonstrations of his ability to find hidden objects and of kindred feats of pseudo-telepathy are quite remarkable. I would not care to assert dogmatically that he has never shown any paranormal ability, but it is a pity that he claims that his stage effects are produced by telepathy. It is still a greater pity that while claiming to work by paranormal means he will resort to normal methods without any acknowledgement that he is using such methods. These defects must inevitably impair confidence in any claims made by him to the possession of a genuine paranormal capacity.
Incidentally, this was not part of Marion's stage performance prior to 1934, since it was I who originally suggested he should try these experiments.
SIR, - May I be allowed to comment on some points raised in Dr Soal's review of Frederick Marion's book In my Minds Eye in connection with experiments by Dr Wiesner and myself on Marion.
First, it is said that a statement was signed by Dr Wiesner, Dr West, and Mrs Goldney to the effect that a member of the Magic Circle had duplicated Marion's feat of picking out a red card from seven black ones. I have never seen this statement since I learned on inquiry at the S.P.R rooms that they had not retained a copy. If, however, the statement was in the terms here given, it was certainly not correct. The conjurer picked out the red card from seven black ones taken from a pack which he had handled and examined at a previous session at which I was present. In our experiments with Marion, he was not allowed to handle or examine the cards, except in practise experiments for which a special pack was used and which were not counted as critical experiments for our assessment. The pack in question was only one of many packs used, and marion showed himself able to succeed with a new pack freshly opened at the time the experiment started. Obviously criticism may be made of these card experiments and we later abandoned the use of cards. Nevertheless, such success as Marion had with cards was under conditions not duplicated by the conjurer.
I have read the article by Gibson to which Dr Soal so strongly objects. It seems to me to contain sound points of criticism which deserve to be taken seriously although it is written in a somewhat derisive style which I consider very inappropriate to scientific discussion. I agree with Nature in thinking well of Dr Soal's investigation of Marion. I do not, however, think that it was without defects, or that its negative findings are conclusive.
Dr Soal remarks: 'Only the credulous believe that vaudeville mystery showmen perform their feats by telepathy, and why should Marion prove an exception?' The logic of this argument would preclude all study of unusual individuals. Only the credulous believe that professional photographers have paranormal powers, and why should Basil Shackleton prove an exception? Dr. soal proved that he was, and the same possibility arises in connection with Marion. To be settled also by experiment - not, of course, the question of whether he uses paranormal means on the stage, which would be virtually impossible to establish experimentally, but whether he shows unusual paranormal powers under test conditions. If one is looking out for the exceptionally paranormally gifted individual, it may not perhaps be unreasonable to investigate the stage performer. Even if he uses trickery on the stage, he might have been led to the idea of stage telepathic performance by finding that he had paranormal powers which, however, were not reliable enough to depend on by themselves for his effects. Probably one would often be disappointed, but no harm is done by looking for paranormal gifts everywhere they may be found. Whether a particular individual is paranormally gifted is to be determined by experiment and not by argument.
There is an unfortunate lack of detail in Dr Soal's account of his experiments on Marion with Zener cards. He says that Marion showed striking initial success but that his rectangles and circles looked so much alike that Marion had to be consulted during the check as to which he meant. But were these initial successes entirely due to scoring on these doubtful symbols? If so, it would have been easy for Dr Soal to say so; if not, the experiments with Zener cards were not without evidence for Marion's paranormal capacities.
SIR, - In addition to the points raised by Dr Thouless, the following comments are suggested by Dr Soal's review.
I feel that other readers will agree with me when I sat that it is unusual and imposes too greater strain upon human frailty to select as reviewer someone who has been criticised in the book under review.
Dr Soal persists in an entirely unwarranted interpretation of his own experiments with Marion. He showed in these experiments not that positive results were inevitably referable to identified or demonstrable sensory clues, but that in certain complex situations positive results tended to disappear. There was no evidence for the operation of sensory clues in many of his experiments, and in the nature of things there could not be any evidence against the operation of psi. It is regrettable that Dr Soal, by obscuring this obvious fact, should revive confusion with such assertive emphasis and defective logic.
It must be said, however, in Dr. Soal's defence that he himself cannot have been entirely satisfied with his own conclusions; for he resumed experimental work with Marion long after the publication of his first report which was so much admired by journals devoted to the study of 'normal' phenomena.
None of these considerations proves, to be sure, that telepathy is not present in these performances; but surely only because it is not possible to prove a negative. Dr. Thouless position is tantamount to saying that in his opinion telepathy is so common an occurrence that it must be preferred as an explanation to quick wit, skill in legerdemain, and the like. Does he believe that, or does he not accept the law of economy of hypothesis?
His attitude is endorsed by Dr. Wiesner, who writes, in support of Dr. Thouless, that, 'in the nature of things there could not be any evidence against the operation of psi'. Of course not, but is Dr Wiesner seriously proposing a reversal of the laws of evidence? Is he really claiming that the onus of proof rests on anyone who attributes a phenomenon to normal causes?
I ask these questions in no captious or controversial spirit: I am deeply concerned by these indications of a tendency not merely to abandon but even to treat with contempt the fundamental cannons of scientific evidence.
THEODORE BESTERMAN
I did not say at Brighton that I believed that the Piddingtons used telepathy in their B.B.C. performances. In reply to a question about the Piddingtons, I expressed the opposite opinion. I hope I added that, since I had little evidence on the matter, my opinion about it was not worth much. Also, I did not say that I believed that telepathy entered into the game of 'Twenty Questions'. I have heard this suggested and it seems possible, but I have done and know of no experimental work on the matter. I may have said in the discussion at Brighton that it was possible; certainly not that I believed it was so. On the other hand, it is true that I believe that Marion has paranormal capacities. This belief is not based on Marion's public performances (which I have never seen) but on his success in experiments carried out by Dr. Wiesner and myself designed to eliminate other possibilities of explanation.
The fundamental principle of science that I recognize is that if one wants to what is the truth on a particular problem, one must find out, not by applying high-sounding laws in one's arm-chair, but by designing and carrying out an experiment. Failing that, one must reserve judgement or form a tentative opinion from such evidence as is available while remaining ready to change that opinion when better evidence is available. For that fundamental principle, I venture to think that I show more respect than does Mr Besterman.
SIR, - Mr Besterman says by way of a first comment that I am right. Then he implies that I am claiming that explanations by paranormal causes should have some kind of precedence over explanations by normal causes.
I have never suggested this and do not feel called upon to defend a proposition which I have not made; even less a one which even Mr Besterman thinks is true.