Whately Carington

Whately Carington (1892–1947), also known as Walter, was a British parapsychologist and psychical investigator.

Biography

Carington was educated at Eton and Cambridge University where he studied science. He joined The Royal Flying Corps during World War One and became an experienced pilot, but was badly injured after a forced landing. On behalf of the Air Ministry and War Office he returned to Cambridge to undertake research into acoustics, with special reference to psychological problems. At this time he devised some innovative methods for the mathematical assessment of feelings, which proved useful in his later work.

At around the same time as he was forced to give up flying, Carington heard some remarkable stories from friends about incidents with psychical mediums. He booked some personal sittings with medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. The results impressed him and he set about studying psychical research in more detail.

Carington gave up all other work for his interest. With nothing to live on apart from a small private income, he lived for a time in a remote village in Holland. In 1938 he travelled to Germany, to rescue a woman from harassment by the Gestapo. They were later married and set up home in Cornwall, where his wife collaborated in his experiments and nursed him as his health gradually failed.

His early death at the age of fifty-four was due in part to his injury during World War One, and to overwork.

Research

Carington’s approach was to move away from the quantitative methods of the ‘card-guessing’ type of psychical experiment (as exemplified by the work of J.B. Rhine), and to combine qualitative experiments with statistical methods of assessment. His reason was that quantitative experiments are capable only of demonstrating that psi exists, rather than of casting much light upon the nature of psi.

In one experiment that he designed, at 7pm on ten successive evenings he hung up a drawing in his study. The drawing depicted a single target object chosen at random by opening a book of mathematical tables which he used as a pointer to a page in a dictionary. Opening the dictionary at that page, he selected the first drawable word. The picture remained hanging in Carington’s locked study until 9.30am the next morning.

Between those hours, Carington's selected percipients – who all lived at a distance – were invited to draw the target object on a pro forma he had supplied. A series of ten drawings constituted one experiment. There was a gap in time between each experiment. After a group of experiments, the shuffled drawings were sent to an outside judge for assessment.

Carington completed 11 experiments and collected 20,000 drawings. Notably, he refused to accept as 'hits' any guesses that matched the target visually but interpreted it differently. For example: the target was a drawing of a peach on a twig with two leaves. The percipient produced a visually identical image but described it as an ‘orange’. It was rejected as incorrect.

Findings

Carington’s analysis suggested that the hits were more than would be expected from chance alone. However, the degree of significance varied from odds of a few hundred to several thousand to one against.

The results also indicated that percipients were more sensitive to ideas than to purely visual forms, and that it did not seem to matter if the target was actually drawn – the agent simply having thought of the target seemed to be sufficient.

Another striking and unexpected finding was that hits on a particular target were not only most frequent on the night it was drawn, but also more frequent one night earlier or later. There was a 'displacement' or 'scatter' effect, both before and after the night that the target was shown, the effect arising and passing at roughly the same rate on both sides of the event. Carington’s discovery of this 'displacement effect' enabled fellow researcher Samuel Soal to realise that his apparently unsuccessful experiments actually contained significant hits ‘displaced in time’.

Hypotheses

Carington theorised that individual minds are less isolated from one another than is assumed. Yet if there is a shared substratum of mind how does the percipient identify a particular target object? Carington’s answer was to draw upon the association of ideas: in a single mind, one idea yields to another through associative links. Carington hypothesised that telepathy depends upon an analogous type of linkage at a subconscious level. He suggested that such links could perhaps be reinforced by what he called ‘K’ ideas or objects. To his percipients he sent a photograph of the study in which he hung the drawings, so that this might act as a 'K' object to strengthen the subconscious link between the target object and the percipients' minds.

Publications

Carington, Whately (1920). "The Foundations of Spiritualism."

––– (1920). "A Theory of the Mechanism of Survival."

––– (1922). "The Measurement of Emotion."

––– (1932). "The Death of Materialism."

––– (1934). "Three Essays on Consciousness."

––– (1940). "Matter, Mind and Meaning." Completed by H. H. Price. London: Methuen.

––– (1945). "Telepathy: An Outline of its Fact, Theory and Implications." London: Methuen.

References

Rosalind Heywood (1978). "The Sixth Sense: An Inquiry Into Extra-Sensory Perception." Harmondsworth: Penguin.

External links

* [http://www.enformy.com/LeonardTOC.htm The Mediumship of Mrs. Leonard - Contents ] at www.enformy.com Online text of: Susy Smith (1964). "The Mediumship of Mrs. Leonard." New Hyde Park NY: University Books. See Chapter 8 for Carington's word association experiments with Mrs. Leonard.

* [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3686/is_200408/ai_n9444867/pg_14 Cultural Exchange and Religious Change: Buddhism, Vedanta and Immortality in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain | Canadian Journal of History | Find Articles... ] at findarticles.com. Alison Falby (2004). 'Cultural exchange and religious change: Buddhism, Vedanta and immortality in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain'. "Canadian Journal of History". Includes a brief discussion of Carington's interest in Eastern mysticism.