“Pretty fancy, what? And rather difficult to explain by behaviorist theory. Ever run across any cases of levitation, Phil?”
“Not of human beings. However I have seen a local medium—a nice kid, non-professional, used to live next door to me—make articles of furniture in my own house rise up off the floor and float. I was cold sober. It either happened or I was hypnotized; have it your own way.
Speaking of levitating, you know the story they tell about Nijinsky?”
“Which one?”
“About him floating. There are thousands of people here and in Europe (unless they died in the Collapse) who testify that in Le Spectre de la Rose he used to leap up into the air, pause for a while, then come down when he got ready. Call it mass hallucination—I didn’t see it.”
“Occam’s Razor again,” said Joan.
“So?”
“Mass hallucination is harder to explain than one man floating in the air for a few seconds.
Mass hallucination not proved—mustn’t infer it to get rid of a troublesome fact. It’s comparable to the ‘There aint no sech animal’ of the yokel who saw the rhinoceros for the first time.”
“‘Maybe so. Any other sort of trick stuff you want to hear about, Ben? I got a million of’em.”
“How about forerunners, and telepathy?”
“Well, telepathy is positively proved, though still unexplained, by Dr. Rhine’s experiments.
Of course a lot of people had observed it before then, with such frequency as to make questioning it unreasonable. Mark Twain, for example. He wrote about it fifty years before Rhine, with documentation and circumstantial detail. He wasn’t a scientist, but he had hard common sense and shouldn’t have been ignored. Upton Sinclair, too. Forerunners are a little harder. Every one has heard dozens of stories of hunches that came true, but they are hard to.follow up in most cases. You might try J. W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time for a scientific record under controlled conditions of forerunners in dreams.”
“Where does all this get you, Phil? You aren’t just collecting Believe-It-Or-Nots?”
“No, but I had to assemble a pile of data—you ought to look over my notebooks—before I could formulate a working hypothesis. I have one now.”
“Well?”
“You gave it to me—by operating on Valdez. I had begun to suspect sometime ago that these people with odd and apparently impossible mental and physical abilities were no different from the rest of us in any sense of abnormality, but that they had stumbled on potentialities inherent in all of us. Tell me, when you had Valdez’ cranium open did you notice anything abnormal in its appearance?”
“No. Aside from the wound, it presented no special features.”
“Very well. Yet when you excised that damaged portion, he no longer possessed his strange clairvoyant power. You took that chunk of his brain out of an uncharted area—no known function. Now it is a primary datum of psychology and physiology that large areas of the brain have no known function. It doesn’t seem reasonable that the most highly developed and highly specialized part of the body should have large areas with no function; it is more reasonable to assume that the functions are unknown. And yet men have had large pieces of their cortices cut out without any apparent loss in their mental powers—as long as the areas controlling the normal functions of the body were left untouched.
“Now in this one case, Valdez, we have established a direct connection between an uncharted area of the brain and an odd talent, to wit, clairvoyance. My working hypothesis comes directly from that: All normal people are potentially able to exercise all (or possibly most) of the odd talents we have referred to—telepathy, clairvoyance, special mathematical ability, special control over the body and its functions, and so forth. The potential ability to do these things is lodged in the unassigned areas of the brain.”
Coburn pursed his lips. “Mmm—I don’t know. If we all have these wonderful abilities, which isn’t proved, how is it that we don’t seem able to use them?”
“I haven’t proved anything—yet. This is a working hypothesis. But let me give you an analogy. These abilities aren’t like sight, hearing, and touch which we can’t avoid using from birth; they are more like the ability to talk, which has its own special centers in the brain from birth, but which has to be trained into being. Do you think a child raised exclusively by deaf-mutes would ever learn to talk? Of course not. To outward appearance he would be a deaf-mute.”