the members of the family may heighten by a kind of
autosuggestion her sensitiveness for the perception
of the slight signs. I have no doubt that this kind of
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autosuggestion plays a large role in her mind. She
can read a card much better when she is allowed to
touch with her fingers the rear of the card. She herself
believes that she receives the knowledge through her
finger tips. In reality it is, of course, a stimulus by
which she becomes more suggestible and by which ac-
cordingly her sensitiveness to the slight signs which her
mother and sister give her becomes increased. We
must, however, never forget that these signs, whatever
they may be, are not only unintentional on the part
of her family, but also not consciously perceived by
Beulah. If she stares at the ceiling, and her mother,
without knowing it, makes seven slight foot movements,
Beulah gets through the side parts of her eye a nerve
impression, but she does not think of the foot. This
nerve impression, as we saw, works on the subcon-
scious mind, or on the brain, and the idea of seven then
arises in her conscious mind like a picture which she
can see.
Such a system of signs, completely unknown to those
who give them and to her who receives them, cannot
have been built up in a short while. But we heard
how it originated. At first Beulah recognized the
queen in the hands of her sister and mother, when they
were playing "Old Maid." There are many who have
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
so much power to recognize the small signs. But
when they began to make experiments with cards,
probably definite family habits developed; there was
much occasion to treat each card individually, to link
some involuntary movement with the face cards and
some with each suite, and slowly to carry this system
over to letters. They all agree that Beulah recognizes
some frequent letters much more easily than the rare
letters. What the observers have now found was the
result of two years' training with mother and sister.
Yet all this became possible only because Beulah evi-
dently has this unusual, supernormal sensitiveness to-
gether with this abnormal power to receive the signs
without their coming at once to consciousness. Her
mental makeup in this respect constantly reminds the
psychologist of the traits of a hysteric woman.
We have to add only one important point. Some
startling results have surely been gained by another
method. The same sensitiveness which makes Beulah
able to receive signs which others do not notice, evi-
dently makes her able to catch words spoken in a low
voice within a certain distance, while she is not con-
sciously giving her attention to them. She picks up
bits of conversation which she overhears and which set-
tle in her subconscious mind, until they later come to
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THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE
her consciousness in a way for which she cannot account.
All were startled when at the end of our first day to-
gether I took a bill in my closed hand and asked her
what I had there, and she at once replied a "ten-dollar
bill," while they all agreed that the child had never seen
a ten-dollar bill before. This result surprised the min-
ister and the judge greatly, and only later did I remem-
ber that I had whispered to the judge in the next room,
with the door open, that I should ask her to tell the
figures on a ten-dollar bill. In the same way the great-
est sensation must be explained, which the experiments
before my arrival yielded. The New York lady who
came with the minister's family and others to the house
was overwhelmed when Beulah spelled her name, which,
as the affidavit said, was not known to any one else
present. This affidavit was as a matter of course given
according to the best knowledge of all concerned. Yet
when later I came to Warren, one of the participants
who told me the incident strengthened it by adding
that he was the more surprised when the child spelled
the name correctly with a K at the end, as he had under-
stood that it was spelled with a T. In other words,
some of those present did know the name, and the lady
had evidently either been introduced or addressed by
some one, and this had slipped from then- minds because
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY ,
Beulah was not in the room. But she was probably
in the other room and caught it in her subconscious
mind. At her first debut before the minister, too, by her
same abnormal sensitiveness she probably heard when
he told the mother that he had a glass of honey in his
pocket. In short, the two actions of her subconscious
mind, or of her brain, always go together, her noticing
of family signs from her mother and sister and her
catching of spoken words from strangers, both under
conditions under which ordinary persons would neither
see nor hear them. We have therefore nothing myste-
rious, nothing supernatural before us, but an extremely
interesting case of an abnormal mental development,
and this unusual power working in a mind which is
entirely naive and sincere.
How long will this naivete and sincerity last? This
is no psychological, but a social problem. Since the
newspapers have taken hold of the case, every mail
brings heaps of letters from all corners of the country.
Some of them bring invitations to give performances,
but they are not the most dangerous ones. Most of
the letters urge the child to use her mysterious, super-
natural powers for trivial or pathetic ends in the inter-
est of the writers. Sometimes she is to locate a lost
trunk, or a mislaid pocketbook; sometimes she is to
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THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE
prophesy whether a voyage will go smoothly or whether
a business venture will succeed; sometimes she is to
read in her mind where a runaway child may be found;
and almost always money promises are connected with
such requests. The mother, who has not much educa-
tion but who is a splendid, right-minded country woman
with the very best intentions for the true good of her
children, has ignored all this silly invasion. She showed
me a whole teacupful of two-cent stamps for replies
which she had collected from Beulah's correspondence.
But I ask again, how long will it last? If Beulah closes
her eyes and some chance letters come to her mind,
and she forms a word from them and sends it as a
reply to the anxious mother who is seeking her child,
she will soon discover that it is easy to gather money
in a world which wants to be deceived. She is followed
by the most tempting invitations to live in metropolitan
houses where sensational experiments can be performed
with her. The naive mother is still impressed when a
New York woman applies the well-known tricks and
assures her that the child reminds her so much of her
own little dead niece that she ought to come to her
New York house. It is a pity how the community
forces sensationalism, commercialism, and finally hum-
bug and fraud on a naive little country girl who ought
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
to be left alone with her pet lamb in her mother's
kitchen. Her gift is extremely interesting to the
psychologist, and if it is not misused by those who try
to pump spiritualistic superstitions into her little mind
or to force automatic writing on her it will be harmless
and no cause for hysteric developments. But surely
her art is entirely useless for any practical purpose.
She cannot know anything which others do not know
beforehand. Clairvoyant powers or prophetic gifts are
not hers, and above all her mind-reading is a natural
process. The edifice of science will not be shaken by
the powers of my little Rhode Island friend.
Yet the most important part is not the fate of the
individual child, but the behaviour of this nation-wide
public which chases her into the swamps of fraud. No
one can decide and settle whether the party of super-
stition forms the majority or the minority. If all the
silent voters were sincere, they probably would carry
the vote for telepathy. But in any case, such a party
exists, and it does not care in the least that scientific
investigations clear up a case which threatens to bring
our world of thought into chaotic disorder. A world
of mental trickery and mystery, a world which by its
very principle could never be understood, is to them
instinctively more welcome than a world of scientific
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THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE
order. There cannot be a more fundamental contrast
between men who are to form a social unit than this
radical difference of attitude toward the world of ex-
perience. Compared with this deepest split in the
community, all its other social questions seem tem-
porary and superficial.
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THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
EVERY lawyer knows some good stories about some
wild juries he has known, which made him shiver and
doubt whether a dozen laymen ever can see a legal
point. But every newspaper reader, too, remembers an
abundance of cases in which the decision of the jury
startled him by its absurdity. Who does not recall
sensational acquittals in which sympathy for the defend-
ant or prejudice against the plaintiff carried away the
feelings of the twelve good men and true? For them
are the unwritten laws, for them the mingling of justice
with race hatreds or with gallantry. And even in the
heart of New York a judge recently said to a chauffeur
who had killed a child and had been acquitted: "Now
go and get drunk again; then this jury will allow you to
run over as many children as you like."
Yet whatever the temperament of the jury and its
legal insight, we may sharply separate its ideas of de-
served punishment from that far more important aspect
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
of its function, the weighing of evidence. The juries
may be whimsical in their decisions, they may be leni-
ent in their acquittals or over-rigid in their verdicts of
guilty, but that is quite in keeping with the democratic
spirit of the institution. The Teutonic nations did not
want the abstract law of the scholarly judges; they
want the pulse-beat of life throbbing in the court deci-
sions, and what may be a wilful ignoring of the law of
the jurists may be a heartfelt expression of the popular
sentiment. Better to have some statutes riddled by
the illogical verdicts than legal decisions severed from
the sense of justice which is living in the soul of the
nation. But while a rush into prejudice or a hasty
overriding of law may draw attention to some excep-
tional verdicts, in the overwhelming mass of jury de-
cisions nothing is aimed at but a real clearing up of the
facts. The evidence is submitted, and while the law-
yers may have wrangled as to what is evidence and what
is not, and while they may have tried, by then* pres-
entation of the witnesses on their own side and by their
cross-examinations, to throw light on some parts of
the evidence and shadow on some others, the jurymen
are simply to seek the truth when all the evidence has
been submitted. And mostly they do not forget that
they will live up to their duty best the more they sup-
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THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
press in their own hearts the question whether they like
or dislike the truth that comes to light. Whoever
weighs the social significance of the jury system ought
not to be guided by the few stray cases in which the
emotional response obscures the truth, but all praise
and blame and every scrutiny of the institution ought
to be confined essentially to the ability of the jurymen
to live up to their chief responsibility, the sober finding
of the true facts.
It cannot be denied that much criticism has been
directed against the whole jury system in America as
well as in Europe by legal scholars as well as by lay-
men on account of the prevailing doubt whether the
traditional form is really furthering the clearing up of
the hidden truth. Where the evidence is so perfectly
clear that every one by himself feels from the start
exactly like all the others, the cooperation of the twelve
men cannot do any harm, but it cannot do any par-
ticular good either. Such cases do not demand the
special interest of the social reformer. His doubts and
fears come up only when difference of opinion exists,
and the discussion and the repeated votes overcome the
divergence of opinion. The skeptics claim that the
system as such may easily be instrumental for suppress-
ing the truth and bringing the erroneous opinion to
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
victory. In earlier times a frequent objection was that
lack of higher education made men unfit to weigh cor-
rectly the facts in a complicated situation. But this
kind of arguing has been given up for a long while.
The famous French lawyer who, whenever he had a
weak case, made use of his right to challenge jurymen
by systematically excluding all persons of higher educa-
tion, certainly blundered in this respect, according to
the views of to-day. Those best informed within and
without the legal science agree that the verdicts of
straightforward people with public-school education
are in the long run neither better nor worse than those
of men with college schooling or professional training.
A jury of artisans and farmers understands and looks
into a mass of neutral material as well as a jury of
bankers and doctors, or at least its final verdict has
an equal chance to hit the truth.
But the critics say that it is not the lack of general or
logical training of the single individual which obstructs
the path of justice. The trouble lies rather in the
mutual influence of the twelve men. The more per-
sons work together, the less, they say, every single man
can reach his highest level. They become a mass with
mass consciousness, a kind of crowd in which each one
becomes oversuggestible. Each one thinks less reli-
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THE MIND OP THE JURYMAN
ably, less intelligently, and less impartially than he
would by himself alone. We know how men in a crowd
do indeed lose some of the best features of their in-
dividuality. A crowd may be thrown into a panic, may
rush into any foolish, violent action, may lynch and
plunder, or a crowd may be stirred to a pitch of en-
thusiasm, may be roused to heroic deeds or to wonderful
generosity, but whether the outcome be wretched or
splendid, in any case it is the product of persons who
have been entirely changed. In the midst of the panic
or in the midst of the heroic enthusiasm no one has
kept his own characteristic mental features. The in-
dividual no longer judges for himself; he is carried away,
his own heart reverberates with the feelings of the whole
crowd. The mass consciousness is not an adding up, a
mere summation, of the individual minds, but the crea-
tion of something entirely new. Such a crowd may be
pushed into any paths, chance leaders may use or mis-
use its increased suggestibility for any ends. No one
can foresee whether this heaping up of men will bring
good or bad results. Certainly the individual level of
the crowd will always be below the level of its best
members. And is not a jury necessarily such a group
with a mass consciousness of its own? Every individ-
ual is melted into the total, has lost his independent
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
power of judging, and becomes influenced through his
heightened suggestibility and sueial feeling by any
chance pressure which may push toward error as often
as toward truth.
But if such arguments are brought into play, it is
evident that it is no longer a legal question, but a psy-
chological one. The psychologist alone deals scien-
tifically with the problem of mutual mental influence
and with the reenforcing or awakening of mental ener-
gies by social cooperation. He should accordingly
investigate the question with his own methods and
deal with it from the standpoint of the scientist. This
means he is not simply to form an opinion from general
vague impressions and to talk about it as about a ques-
tion of politics, where any man may have his personal
idea or fancy, but to discover the facts by definite ex-
periments. The modern student of mental life is
accustomed to the methods of the laboratory. He
wants to see exact figures by which the essential facts
come into sharp relief. But let us understand clearly
what such an experiment means. When the psycholo-
gist goes to work in his laboratory, his aim is to study
those thoughts and emotions and feelings and deeds
which move our social world. But his aim is not simply
to imitate or to repeat the social scenes of the com-
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THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
munity. He must simplify them and bring them down
to the most elementary situations, in which only the
characteristic mental actions are left. Is this not the
way in which the experimenters proceed in every field?
The physicist or the chemist does not study the great
events as they occur in nature on a large scale and with
bewildering complexity of conditions, but he brings
down every special fact which interests him to a neat,
miniature copy on his laboratory table. There he
mixes a few chemical solutions in his retorts and his
test-tubes, or produces the rays or sparks or currents
with his subtle laboratory instruments, and he feels
sure that whatever he finds there must hold true every-
where in the gigantic universe. If the waters move in a
certain way in the little tank on his table, he knows that
they must move according to the same laws in the midst
of the ocean. In this spirit the psychologist arranges
his experiments too. He does not carry them on in the
turmoil of social life, but prepares artificial situations
in which the persons will show the laws of mental be-
haviour. An experiment on memory or attention or
imagination or feeling may bring out in a few minutes
mental facts which the ordinary observer would dis-
cover only if he were to watch the behaviour and life
attitudes of the man for years. Everything depends
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
upon the degree with which the characteristic mental
states are brought into play under experimental con-
ditions. The great advantage of the experimental
method is, here as everywhere, that everything can be
varied and changed at will and that the conditions and
the effects can be exactly measured.
If we apply these principles to the question of the
jury, the task is clear. We want to find out whether
the cooperation, the discussion, and the repeated voting
of a number of individuals are helping or hindering them
in the effort to judge correctly upon a complex situa-
tion. We must therefore artificially create a situation
which brings into action the judgment, the discussion,
and the vote, but if we are loyal to the idea of experi-
menting we must keep the experiment free from all
those features of a real jury deliberation which have
nothing to do with the mental action itself. Moreover,
it is evident that the situations to be judged must allow
a definite knowledge as to the objective truth. The
experimenter must know which verdict of his voters
corresponds to the real facts. Secondly, the situation
must be difficult in order that a real doubt may pre-
vail. If all the voters were on one side from the start,
no discussion would be needed. Thirdly, it must be a
rather complex situation in order that the judgment
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THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
may be influenced by a number of motives. Only in
this case will it be possible for the discussion to point
out factors which the other party may have over-
looked, thus giving a chance for changes of mind. All
these demands must be fulfilled if the experiment is
really to picture the jury function. But it would be
utterly superfluous and would make the exact measure-
ment impossible if the material on which the judgment
is to be based were of the same kind of which the evi-
dence in the courtroom is composed. The trial by
jury in an actual criminal case may involve many
picturesque and interesting details, but the mental act
of judging is no different when the most trivial objects
are chosen.
I settled on the following simple device: I used
sheets of dark gray cardboard. On each were pasted
white paper dots of different form and in an irregular
order. Each card had between ninety-two and a hun-
dred and eight such white dots of different sizes. The
task was to compare the number of spots on one card
with the number of spots on another. Perhaps I held
up a card with a hundred and four dots above, and be-
low one with ninety-eight. Then the subjects of the
experiment had to decide whether the upper card had
more dots or fewer dots or an equal number compared
[189]
PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
with the lower one. I made the first set of experi-
ments with eighteen Harvard students. I took more
than the twelve men who form a jury in order to reen-
force the possible effect, but did not wish to exceed the
number greatly, so that the character of the discussion
might be similar to that in a jury. A much larger num-
ber would have made the discussion too formal or too
unruly. The eighteen men sat around a long table and
were first allowed to look for half a minute at the two
big cards, each forming his judgment independently.
Then at a signal every one had to write down whether
the number of dots on the upper card was larger, equal,
or smaller. Immediately after that they had to indi-
cate by a show of hands how many had voted for each
of the three possibilities. After that a discussion began.
Indeed, the two cards offered plenty of points for earnest
and vivid discussion. During the exchange of opinion
in which those who had voted larger tried to con-
vince the party of the smaller, and vice versa, they were
always able to look at the cards and to refer to them,
pointing to the various parts. One showed how the
distances on the one card appeared larger, and another
pointed out how the spots were clustered in a certain
region, a third how the dots were smaller in some parts,
a fourth spoke about the optical illusions, a fifth about
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THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
certain impressions resulting from the narrowness of
the margin, and a sixth about the effect of certain irreg-
ularities in the distribution. In short, very different
aspects were considered and very different factors
emphasized. The discussion was sometimes quite ex-
cited, three or four men speaking at the same time.
After exactly five minutes of talking the vote was re-
peated, again at first being written and then being
taken by show of hands. A second five minutes' ex-
change of opinion followed with a new effort to con-
vince the dissenters. After this period the third and
last vote was taken. This experiment was carried out
with a variety of cards with smaller or larger difference
of numbers, but the difference always enough to allow
an uncertainty of judgment. Here, indeed, we had re-
peated all the essential conditions of the jury vote and
discussion, and the mental state was characteristically
similar to that of the jurymen.
The very full accounts which the participants in the
experiment wrote down the following day indicated
clearly that we had a true imitation of the mental pro-
cess in spite of the striking simplicity of our conditions.
One man, for instance, described his inner experience
as follows: "I think the experiment involves factors
quite comparable to those that determine the verdict of
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
a jury. The cards with their spots are the evidence
pro and con which each juryman has before him to
interpret. Each person's decision on the number is his
interpretation of the situation. The arguments, too,
seem quite comparable to the arguments of the jury.
Both consist in pointing out factors of the situation
that have been overlooked and in showing how differ-
ent interpretations may be possible." Another man
writes: "In the experiment it seemed that one man
judged by one criterion and another by another, such
as distribution, size of spots, vacant spaces, or counting
along one edge. Discussion often brought immediate
attention to other criterions than those he used in his
first judgment, and these often outweighed the original.
Similarly, different jurymen would base their opinion
on different aspects of the case, and discussion would
tend to draw their attention to other aspects. The
experiment also illustrated the relative weight given to
the opinion of different fellow-jurymen. I found that
the statements of a few of the older men who have had
more extensive psychological experience weighed more
with me than those of the others. Suggestion did not