Mental Radio

Part Two. the More Earnest and Methodical Students of Such Matters Will

prefer to read that first.

Mr. Upton Sinclair, about fifty-two years old when his book Mental Radio was issued, is, as everyone is supposed to know, one of the leading novelists of the United States. His stories are all, or nearly all, characterized by an intense purpose. To those who claim that art should be exercised only for art’s sake this may be obnoxious. But from the point of view of this examination of his book purporting to prove telepathy, the fact that his novels also attempt to prove something, on the basis of studies made by him, is quite in his favor. Whether he has in fact proved the thesis of his respective tales is not within our province to determine; we do propose rigidly to analyze and review his claims to have proved telepathy.

Mr. Sinclair is a Socialist, and a very active and prominent one; he has been Socialist candidate for Congress in New Jersey and later in California, besides having been Socialist candidate for the United States Senate and for Governor in the latter-named State. Political prejudices or predilections should be strictly excluded from the minds of readers of the book or this review of it. It is another gratifying indication that Mr. Sinclair was not deterred from publishing Mental Radio by the solicitations or irony of influential friends in his political group, for the scientific spirit is in part compounded of courage, honesty and candor.

Mrs. Sinclair, née Mary Craig Kimbrough, somewhere about forty-five years old when the experiments afterwards published took place, is the daughter of a retired judge, bank president, and planter of Mississippi.

The reader may judge of the quality of her mentality by reading Appendix 1. That is, in part, the reason that it is printed. It is a piece of writing by Mrs. Sinclair shortened according to permission given. Almost immediately after my suggestion that the experimental materials should be sent for examination, they were bundled up and sent, together with some stray scraps, among which was this unfinished piece of manuscript which, as it proved, the Sinclairs did not know had been included. In spots the composition may be a bit diffuse and repetitious, but the woman really thinks and reasons, which is more than many do.

There is in it a sincerity, earnestness and intensity of desire to know, which can hardly be counterfeited. Its writer fairly rivals Descartes in her determination to find some salient and secure spot from which to start in her quest. But in a manner she goes back farther than Descartes, at least she splits his ultimate in two. She is satisfied with “I am,” not because “I think,” but because “I am conscious of thinking”; but she does not so readily grant the “I think.” She wants to know, “Am I doing all the thinking I am conscious of?”

In fact, the document is so intense in its eagerness to penetrate the secret of personality in relation to its cosmic environment that it is almost febrile. At least in its first pages there is something pathological. To paint life with such dark colors and to dwell so upon its “discouragements” is not an indication of perfect health.

And yet it is certain that the writer is not self-absorbed. The painful reactions of the kind which she has experienced, the torture produced in her by the existence of so much in life that seems unmeaning and disappointing, she supposes to be quite general with her fellow-men and so feels a great pity for them. Whereas, in my belief, while more are complaining than are happy or contented, it is common to fret because of income taxes, and inability to wear such fine clothes as those of Mrs. Jones, and cold weather and squalling cats, and such sordid matters, but uncommon to be agonized by the desire to fathom the mysteries of the human spirit.

The main points of what Mr. Sinclair tells us of the characteristics of his wife are to be discerned in this revealing manuscript. He says “She has nothing of the qualities of naïveté and credulity. She was raised in a family of lawyers and was given the training and sceptical point of view of a woman of the world. ‘Trust people, but watch them,’ was old Judge Kimbrough’s maxim, and following it too closely has almost made a pessimist of his daughter. In the course of the last five or six years Craig has acquired a fair-sized library of books on the mind, both orthodox, scientific, and ‘crank.’ She has sat up half the night studying, marking passages and making notes, seeking to reconcile various doctrines, to know what the mind is, and how it works, and what can be done with it.” This began with a breakdown of health when she was about forty years old. “A story of suffering needless to go into; suffice it that she had many ills to experiment upon, and mental control became suddenly a matter of life and death.” This breakdown, it is said, resulted directly from “her custom of carrying the troubles of all who were near her.” She is intensely sympathetic, we are told. “The griefs of other people overwhelm Craig like a suffocation.”

The book relates several spontaneous experiences of Mrs. Sinclair when she was young and which, taken together, strongly indicate telepathy. Her husband rightly remarks that it is the number of such incidents which is impressive; one or two might well be coincidence. Still the coincidence of being suddenly impressed that Mr. B, whose home was three hundred miles away, was at her home where he had never been, and turning back from a drive and finding him there, even taken by itself, is a very striking one. Mr. Sinclair himself is witness to the fact that she suddenly, for no known reason became very much worried about Jack London, insisting that he was in mental distress, whereas it proved that London committed suicide at about that time.

Such incidents indicate that her experimental successes were not solely the result of the method which she explains at length, but that she had an inborn gift from early childhood. Her interest in that gift seems to have been much stimulated by her acquaintance with “Jan,” the “young hypnotist” of Appendix I, whose advent is probably not in that narrative placed in chronological order. She became convinced that he showed evidence of telepathy, and tried in turn to ascertain what he was thinking or what he was doing when absent, and became convinced that many times she had been successful. Also, “Craig has been able to establish exactly the same rapport with her husband,” who relates instances. These were “written down at the time.” So few even intelligent people do make immediate record of such things that we would have suspected, even if he had not informed us on another page, that he has made a considerable study of the literature of psychic research.

One of these incidents we shall particularly notice here, and that because Mr. Sinclair himself has either not noticed all of its evidential value, or has not fully called attention to it. * * * [Refer to Figs. 14a and 14b and experiment.]

Probably Mr. Sinclair thought it would be sufficiently obvious to the reader that the first drawing is as similar in shape to a clover blossom as a person having no gift for drawing would be likely to make it, in addition to the correspondence of color. But it should also be remarked that the second drawing is like the flower-head of the American aloe, as one may see by comparing it with the cut shown in the article entitled “Agave,” in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The article provokingly fails to tell us what are the colors of the flower, but the cut shows that it is at least much lighter above than below.

Another incident is remarkable for its apparent revelation of subconscious mechanisms. Seemingly here Mrs. Sinclair not only got an impression of what her husband had drawn, but it was modified by something he was then reading, and that by the aid of memories from childhood. His drawing represented a football, “neatly laced up” (Fig. 15). Hers (Fig. 15a) shows a band of exactly the same shape on a figure not so very far from that of a football, but with an extension suggesting the head of an animal, and a line suggesting a leg. And she wrote “Belly-band on calf.” * * *!

“Wishing to solve the mystery!” But why should the lady have felt that there was any mystery in her drawing and script, any more than in the generality of her results? But she evidently did, or she would not have asked the question. It is one of the most interesting features of this experiment that she seemed to feel that something else than the original drawing or her husband’s thoughts about it was influencing her impression, and suspected that this something was his contemporaneous reading.

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