Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 December 1884 — The Supernatural. [ARTICLE]

The Supernatural.

“The Society for Psychal Research will be grateful for any godd evidence bearing on su6h phenomena as thoughtreading, clairvoyance, presentiments, and dreams, noted at the time of occurrence and afterward confirmed; unexplained disturbances in places supposed to be haunted; apparitions at the moment of death-or otherwise; and of such other abnormal events as may seem to fall under somewhat the same categories.” It would be difficult for the society to put forth anything better fitted than this advertisement to lower the estimation in which their work is held by common-sense people. Let us make a little calculation showing how often coincidences of the kind sought for must really occur in our country. Numerical exactness in our data can not, of course, be reached; all we can do is to make rough estimates which shall not be unreasonably far from the probable truth. Any physician, we apprehend, will consider it quite within the bounds of probability that 1 per cent, of the population of the country are subject to remarkably vivid dreams, illusions, visions, etc. This will make half a million such people in the United States. Each of these persons may be supposed to have fifty friends or relations, of whom one per annum dies. If they are subject to a dream or vision once a week, there is one chance out of seven that they have one on the same day that the friend dies. Let us suppose that it takes a combination of eight separate and independent points of resemblance, between the vision and the circumstances attending the death of a friend to constitute a remarkable coincidence, and that each of these has a probability of one half. We shall have, in one case out of two hundred and fifty-six, a remarkable combination of coincidences. Putting these results together, we may offer that, as a matter of fact, some case of extraordinary coincidence between the circumstances in the death and the dream or vision by a friend of the dying person does occur somewhere in the country nearly every day in the year. Thus, what the Psychal Society will find it will be what we know must exist as the result of chance coincidence.— Science.