 
 
 
An excerpt from The Roots of
Coincidence by Arthur Koestler. Narrated by
Joseph Voelbel
Chapter Three, 'Seriality and Syncrhonicity'
Kammerer was a Lamarckian; he believed in
the "inheritance of acquired characteristics"
-that the skills and improvements in physique
acquired by the parents are to some extent-
inherited by their offspring. As against
this, the orthodox neo-Darwinian theory holds
that acquired characteristics do not affect
the genes, carriers of the hereditary blueprint;
evolution is the outcome of random mutations
in the genetic material, retained by natural
selection. The Lamarckian view is philosophically
more attractive, because it regards evolu-
tion as the cumulative effect of the virtues
and strivings of successive generations, whereas
in the Darwinian view these efforts are wasted,
each generation must start from scratch, as
it were, and evolution is the result of blind
chance and selective pressures.
But the Lamarckians have never been able to
produce experimental evidence of the inheritance--
of acquired characteristics; Lamarckism went
out of fashion at the beginning of the century
and.came to be regarded as a heresy. Kammerer
was the- last Lamarckian of European fame;
he spent most of his life trying to -demonstrate
the inheritance of acquired characters in
reptiles, amphibians and even in sea-squirts.
But his experimental animals perished in the
First World War; and his last preserved specimen,
a so-called "midwife toad" (Alytes obstetricans)
was found
to have been tampered with to fake the evidence.
A few weeks after this disclosure, his reputation
ruined, Kammerer shot himself on an Austrian
mountain.
I have for many years been fascinated by this
extra- ordinary personality, and have recently
written his biography* (The Case ofthe Midwife
Toad (London, 1971, New York 1972). which,
I believe, contains strong evidence indicating
that the forgery was committed, without his
knowledge, by a different person. In the present
context, however, we are concerned not with
Kammerer's Lamarckian views (though I shall
briefly return to them later. on), but with
a second heresy to which he was committed:
his belief in the significance of apparent
coincidences. He published his theory on the
subject in 1919, in a remarkable work, Das
Gesetz der Sene-the law of seriality; no English
translation exists to date. I have given a
summary of the book in Appendix I of The Case
of the Midwife Toad, and must apologise for
repeating some passages from it.
Kammerer kept a log-book of coincidences from
the age of twenty to forty. He was not the
only one to indulge in this secret vice; jung,
for instance, did the same. "I have often
come up against the phenomena in question",
Jung-wrote, "and could convince myself how
much these inner experiences meant to my patients.
In most cases they were things which people
do not talk about for fear of exposing themselves
to thoughtless ridicule~ I was amazed to see
how many people have had experiences of this
kind, and how carefully the secret was guarded."
Kammerer's book contains a hundred samples
of coincidences. For instance: On September
18th, 1916, my wife, while waiting for her turn
in the consulting rooms of Prof. Dr.j. v.
H., reads the magazine Die Kunst; she is impressed
by some reproductions ofpicturesby a painter
named Schwalbach, and makes a mental note
to remember his name because she would like
to see the originals.
At that moment the door opens and the receptionist
calls out to the patients: "Is Frau Schwalbach
here? She is wanted on the telephone." On
July 28, 1915, I experienced the following
progressive series: (a) my wife was reading
about "Mrs. Rohan", a character in the novel
Michael by Hermann Bang; in the tramway she
saw a man who looked like her friend, Prin~f
Rohan; in the evening Prince Rohan dropped
in on us. (b) In the tram she overheard somebody
askirig the pseudo-Rohan whether he knew
the village of Weissenbach on Lake Attersee,
and whether it would be a pleasant place for
a holiday. When she got out of the tram, she
went to a delicatessen shop on the Naschmarkt,
where the attendant asked her whether she
happened to know Weissenbach on Lake Attersee-he
had to make a delivery by mail and did not
know the correct postal address.
Most of his other examples are even more trivial;
(*For this reason I have quoted the same two
samples as in TIe Case ofthe Midwife\'b7Toad.)
thus he records that on November 4, 1910,
his brother- in-law went to a concert where
he had seat No. 9 and cloakroom ticket NO.9;
the next day, at another concert, he had seat
No. 21 and cloakroom ticket No. 21. Kammerer
calls this a "series of the second order"
because the same type of coincidence occurred
on two successive days, and comments:
"We shall soon see that such clusterings of
series of the fir~t order into series of the
second or nth order are common, almost regular
occurrences.'"
It is indeed commonly believed that coincidences
tend to come in. series-gamblers have "lucky
days", and vice versa, "it never rains but
it pours". Hence the title of the book, Das
Gesetz der Serie. He defines a Serie as "a
lawful recurrence ofthe same or similar things
and events -a recurrence, or clustering, in
time or space w,hereby the individual members
in the sequence-as far as can be ascertained
by careful analysis-are not connected by the
same active cause". The expression "lawful
recurrence" may give the impression that the
series is governed by causal laws.. But Kammerer's
purpose is to prove just the opposite- that
coincidences, whether they come singly or
in series, are manifestations of a universal
principle in nature which operates independently
from pfrysical causation.
The "laws of Seriality" are, in Kammerer's
view, as fundamental as those of physics,
but as yet unexplored. Moreover, single coincidences
are merely tips of the iceberg which happened
to catch our eye, because in our traditional
ways we tend to ignore the ubiquitous manifes-
tations of Seriality. The first half of Kammerer's
book is devoted to the classification of coincidental
series, which he undertook with the meticulousness
of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy. There
is a typology of non-causal concurrences related
to numbers, names, situations, etc. After
this comes a chapter on the morphology of
Series, which are ' classified according to
their order" (the number of successive coincidences),
their power (number of parallel coincidences)
and their parameters (number of shared attributes).
Kammerer spent hours sitting on benches in
various public parks, noting down the numbers
ofpeople that strolled by in both directions,
classifying them by sex, age, dress, whether
they carried umbrellas or parcels. He did
the same on his'long tram journeys from suburb
to laboratory. Then he analysed his tables
and found that on every parameter they showed
the typical clustering phenomena familiar
to statisticians, gamblers and insurance companies.
He made the necessary allowances for such
causal factors as rush-hour, weather, etc.
 
At the end of this classificatory part of
the book Kammerer concluded: So far we have
been concerned with the factual manifestations
ofrecurrent series, without attempting atyeXPhmation.
We have found that the recurrence of identical
or similar data in contiguous areas of s~ace
or time is a simple empirical fact which has
to be accepted and which cannot be explained
by coincidence-or rather, which makes coincidence
rule to such an extent that the concept ofcoincidence
itself is negated.
In the second, theoretical part of the book,
Kammerer develops his central idea that coexistent
with causality there is an a-causal principle
active in the universe, which tends towards
unity. In some respects it is compar- able
to universal gravity-which, to the physicist,
is also still a mystery; but unlike gravity
which acts on all mass" indiscriminately,
this force acts selectively on form and function
to bring similar configurations together in
space and time; it correlates by aifinity.
By which means this a-causal agency intrudes
into the causal order ofthings- both in dramatic
and trivial ways-we cannot tell, since it
functions ex hypothesi - outside the known
laws of physics. In space it produces concurrent
events related by affinity; in time similarly
related series. "We thus arrive at the image
of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope,
which, in spite of constant shuffiings and
rearrangements, also takes care of bringing
like and like together."
Kammerer was particularly interested in temporal
Series of recurrent events; these he regarded
as cyclic processes which propagate themselves
like waves along the time-axis of the space-time
continuum. But we are aware only of the' crests
of the waves, which appear to us as isolated
coincidences, while the troughs remain unnoticed.
(He thus reverses the sceptic's argument that
out of the multitude of random events we only
pick those which are significant.)
The cycles may be caused either by causal
factors (i.e. planetary motion) or patterned
by Seriality"" - as the lucky runs of gamblers.
He devotes a chapter to previous theories
ofperiodicity, from the Pythagoreans' magic
seven to Goethe's "revolving- circles ofgood
and bad days", up-to Freud-who believed in
cycles of twenty-three and twenty-seven days
which somehow combine to produce the data
ofsignificant events. At the end of the book
Kammerer expresses his belief that Seriality
is "ubiquitous and continuous in life, nature
and cosmos. It is the umbilical cord that
connects thought, feeling, science and art
with the womb of the universe which gave birth
to them."
Some of the chapters in the book, particularly
those dealing with physics, contain naive
errors; others show tantalising flashes of
intuition. I have compared its effect to that
of an Impressionist painting which has to
be viewed from a distance; if one puts one's
nose into it, the details turn into clumsy
blobs. While thus the theoreti- cal part can
hardly stand up to critieal scrutiny, this
first attempt at a systematic classification
of coincidental events may find some unexpected
applications at some
future date.
These things happen in science. It may also
be the reason why Einstein gave a favourable
opinion of the book; he called it' "original
and by no means absurd.* (Quoted by H.
Przibram, "Paul Kammerer als Biologe", Monistische
Monatshefte, November, 1926.) He may have
remembered that the 'non-Euclidian geometries,
invented by early mathematicians more or less
as a game, provided the basis for his relativistic
cosmology.
Section II
Another great physicist whose thoughts moved
in a similar direction was Wolfgang Pauli.
At the end of the 1932 conference on nuclear
physics in Cope gen the participants, as was
their custom on these occasions, performed
a skit full of that quantum hum ur of which
we have already had a few samples. In at particular
year they produced a parody of Goethe's Faust,
in which Wolfgang Pauli wascast in the role
of Mephistopheles.; his Gretchen was the neutrino,
whose existence Pauli had predicted, but which
had not yet been discovered.
MEPHISTOPHELES (to Faust):
Beware, beware, of Reason and of Science
Man's highest powers, unholy in alliance.
You'll let yourself, through dazzling witchcraft
yield 
To weird temptations of the quantum field.
Enter Gretchen; she sings to Faust.
Melody: "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel" by
Schubert.
GRETCHEN:
My rest-mass is zero
My charge is the same 
You are my hero
Neutrino's my name.
Well... But Pauli really was a kind of Mephistoles
among the sorcerers of Copenhagen. Years earlier
he had produced, by a brilliant sleight
of hand, one of the key concepts of modern
physics, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which
says, roughly speaking, that only one electron
at a time can occupy any "planetary orbit"
inside an atom.* (More precisely: that in
a neutral atom no two electrons can have the
same set of quantwn nwnbers.)
The Exclusion Principle was a purely mathematical
construct, for which no justification
in terms of physical causation could be invoked--except
the fact that without it quantum theory made
no sense. The Professor of Physics at Yale
commented: Men in theoretical physics
today invoke a principle . known as the "Exclusion
Principle: it was discovered by Pauli.
It is responsible for most of the organising
actions that occur in nature. All ofthers
are brought about by the Pauli principle,
which is simply aprin- ciple of symmetry,
a formal mathematical character- istic of
the equations which in the end regulate phenomena
in nature.
Almost miraculously it calls into being what
we call exchange forces, the forces which
.bind atoms into molecules and molecules into
crystals. It is responsible for the fact that
iron can be magnetised, that matter cannot
be squeezed together into an arbitrarily small
volume. The impenetrability of matter, its
very stability, can be directly traced to
the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Now, this principle
has no dynamic aspect to it at all. It acts
like a force although it is not a force. We
cannot speak of it as doing anything by mechanical
action. No, it is a very general and elusive
thing; a mathematical symmetry imposed upon
the basic equations of nature.
Pauli shared Kammerer's and Jung's belief
in non-causal, non-physical factors operating
in nature. Even the Exclusion Principle "acts
like a force although it- is not a force".
He probably had a more profound insight than
his fellow-sorcerers into the limitations
of science. When he was fifty, he wrote a
penetrating study on the emergence of science
from mysticism, as reflected in the ideas\'b7ofJohannes
Kepler-who was both a mystic and the founder
of modern astronomy.* (Cf. my biography of
Kepler in The Sleepwalkers and the analysis,
which is very close to Pauli's, of his intellectual
development in my article on Kepler in the
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.) The essay is
called "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas
on the Scientific Theories of Kepler", and
originally appeared in a series of monographs
published by the Jung Institute in Ziirich.
It was a highly unusual enterprise for a modern
scientist to engage in this kind ofwriting,
and to have it printed in a psychological
journal. Towards the end of his essay Pauli
says: "Today we have the natural sciences,
but no longer a philosophy of science. Since
the discovery of the elementary quantum, physics
was obliged to renounce its proud claim to
be able to understand in principle the whole
of the world. But this predicament may contain
the seed offurther developments which will
correct the previous one-sided orientation
and will move towards a unitary world-view
in which science is only a part in the whole."
This kind of philosophical doubt about "the
meaning of it all" is not unusual among scientists
when they get over fifty. One might almost
call it the rule. Hence the galaxy of FRSs
and Nobel Laureates in the Society for Psychical
Research's role of honour. But Pauli went
further than devising physicalistic theories
to explain ESP in callsal terms. He felt that
this was hopeless, and that it was preferable
and more honest to accept that parapsychological
phenomena, including apparent coincidences,
were the visible traces of untraceable a-causal
principles in the universe. This provided
the basis for his collaboration with Jung.
Section III
Jung used Pauli, so to speak, as a tutor in
modem physics. Jung had experimented in parapsychology
and spiritual- ism from his early days as
a student of medicine, to the end of his life.
He refused "to commit the fashionable stupidity
of regarding everything I cannot explain as
a fraud".l3 In his early twenties he organised
regular spiritualistic seances; in the course
of one of these "a heavy walnut table,
an old heirloom, split with a loud report,
and soon afterwards abread-knife in a
tlrawer inexplicably snapped into four parts,
again with a sound like a pistol shot. The
four pieces of the knife are still in the
possession of the Jung family.
In his memoirs Jung relates a famous episode
which took place when, in 1909, he visited
Freud in Vienna, during the honeymoon of their
collaboration (the break was to come three
years later). Jung wanted to know Freud's
opinion on ESP. Freud, at that time, rejected
it, although in later years he changed his
mind. Jung narrates:
While Freud was going on this way, I had a
curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm
was made of iron and was becoming red-hot-a
glowing vault. And at that moment there was
such a loud report in the bookcase, which
stood right next to us, that we both started
up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to
topple over us. I said to Freud: "There, that
is an example ofa so-called catalytic exteriorisation
phenomenon."
"Oh come," he exclaimed. "That is sheer bosh."
"It is not," I replied. "You are mistaken,
Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now
predict that in a moment there will be another
loud report!" Sure enough, no sooner had I
said the words than the same detonation went
off in the bookcase.
To this day I do not know what gave me this
certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that
the report would come again. Freud only stared
aghast at me.
I do not know what was in his mind, or what
his look meant. In any case, this incident
aroused his mistrust of me, and I had the
feeling that I had done something against
him. I never afterwards discussed the incident
with him. Though he experimented with mediums,
Jung initiallydrew the line at ghosts. In
a lecture at the English Society for Psychical
Research in 1919 he explained apparitions
and apparent materialisations as "unconscious
projections" or "exteriorisations":
I for one am certainly convinced that they are
exteriorisations. I have repeatedly observed
the tele-pathic effects of unconscious complexes,
and also a number of parapsychic phenomena,
but in all this I see no proof whatever of
the existence of real spirits, ~ and until
such proof is forthcoming I must regard this
whole territory as an appendix of psychology.\
How an "exteriorisation" of an emotional state
could produce the detonations in Freud's bookcase
remained for the time being an unresolved
question. But the next year Jung met a real
ghost-in Engl~md, of course. He described
the event in a little-known anthology. He
spent several weekends
several nights he heard all sorts of noises-the
dripping ofwater, rustlings, knockings, which
increased in intensity until, during the fifth
weekend, he thought somebody outside was knocking
at the wall with a sledge-hammer. "I had the
feeling of a close presence. I opened my eyes
with an effort. Then I saw lying next to my
head on the pillow, the head of an old woman
whose right eye, wide open, was staring at
me. The left half of her face, including the
eye, was missing. I leapt out of b"d and lit
a candle." Thereupon the head vanished. Later
on, Jung and his host discovered that the
whole village knew the house was haunted.
It was torn down soon after.
Jung seemed to have been pursued by this kind
of experience all his life. Some of his patients,
too, became susceptible to them. A typical
case is the following:
A young woman I was treating had, at a critical
moment, a dream in which she was given a golden
scarab. While she was telling me this dream
I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly
I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping.
I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking
against the window-pane from outside. I opened
the window and caught the creature in the
air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy
to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes,
a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer
(Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual
habits had evidently felt an urge to get into
adark room at this particular moment.
At some point in his life J ung became convinced
that such phenomena transcended the realm
of "ordinary" ESP and that a more radical
approach was needed to find a place for them
in our mental outlook. In his lecture to the
English SPR in 1919 he had denied the existence
of "real spirits" and maintained that "this
whole territory was an appendix to psychology".
But when the lecture was reprinted in his
Collected Works in 1947, he appended a footnote
to this passage: After collecting psychological
experiences from many people and many countries
for fifty years, I no longer feel as certain
as I did in 1919. when I wrote this sentence.
To put it bluntly, I doubt whether an exclusively
psychological approach can do justice to the
phenomena in question. Not only the findings
ofparapsychology, but my own theoretical reflections
outlined in On the Nature of the Psyche, have
led me to certain postulates which touch on
the realms of nuclear physics and the wh~nception
of the space-time continuum. This opens up
the whole question ofthe transpsychic reality
imynediately underlying the psyche.
Section IV
At about the time when this was written]ung
was working, in collaboration with Pauli,
on his treatise on Synchronicity: An Acausal
Connecting Principle., which was published
together with Pauli's essay on Kepler in one
volume. This was evidently meant as a symbolic
act: one of the greatest physicists of the
century joining forces with one of its greatest
psychologists.
The result was a stimulating exercise in unorthodox
speculation, but at the same time sadly disappointing.
It did not amount to a theory in the proper
sense, but rather to a universal schema, both
very bold and very vague. Jung's treatise
hinges on his concept of"Synchronicity". He
defines it as "the simultaneous occurrence
of two meaningfully but not causally connected
events"; or alternatively as "a coincidence
in time of two or more causally unrelated
events which have the same or similar meaning
- equal in rank to causality as a principle
of explanation."
This is an almost verbatim repetition of Kammerer's
definition of "Seriality" as "a recurrence
of the same or similar things or events in
time or space" -events which, as far as can
be ascertained, "are not connected by the
same acting cause". The main difference appears
to be that Kammerer emphasises serial happen-
ings in time (though, of course, he includes
contempora- neous coincidences in space),
whereas Jung's concept of synchronicity seems
to refer only to simultaneous events -although
he includes precognitive dreams which occurred
sometimes several days before the events.
He tried to get around the time paradox by
saying that the unconscious mind functions
outside of the physical framework of space-time;
thus precognitive experiences are "evidently
not synchronous but are synchronistic since
they are experienced as psychic images in
the present as though the objective event
already existed". One wonders why Jung created
these unnecessary compli- cations by coining
a term which implies simultaneity, and then
explaining that it does not mean what it means.
But this kind of obscurity combined with verbosity
runs through much of Jung's writing.
Although Kammerer's "Seriality" and Jung's
"Synchronicity" are as similar as a pair of
gloves, each fits one hand only. Kammerer
confined.himself to analogies in naive physical
terms, rejecting. ESP and mentalistic explanations.
Jung went to the opposite extreme and tried
to explain all phenomena which could not
be accounted for in terms of physical causality,
as manifestations of the unconscious mind:
"Synchronicity is a phenomenon that seems
to be primarily connected with psychic conditions,
that is to say with processes in the unconscious." Its
deepest strata, according to Jungian terminology,
are formed by the "collective unconscious",
potentially shared by all members of the race.
The "decisive factors" in the collective unconscious
are the archetypes which "constitute its structure'.\
They are, as it were, the distilled memories
of the human species, but cannot be represented
in verbal terms, only in elusive symbols,
shared by all mythologies. They also provid
"patterns of behaviour" for all human beings
in arche typal situations--confrontations
with death; danger love, conflict, etc. In
such situations the unconscious archetypes
invade consciousness, carrying strong emotions
and-wing perhaps to the archetype's indifference
to - physical space and time - facilitate
the occurrence of "synchronistic" events.
The appearance of the scarab while the patient
was telling her archetypal dream is considered
by Jung as an illustration of this nexus.
The same applies to the detonations in Freud's
bookcase during Jung's visit, indicating the
explosive nature of their father-son relationship:
"Meaningful coincidences- which are to be
distinguished from meaningless chance- groupings-therefore
seem to rest on an archetypal foundation;
At least all the cases in my experience and
there is a large number ofthem-show this characteristic."
Elsewhere in the essay he writes:
Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous
occurrence oftwo different psychic states.
One oIthem is the normal, probable state (i.e.,
the one that is causally explicable), and
the other, the critical experience, is the
one that cannot be derived causally from the
first. In the case of sudden death, the critical
experience cannot be recognised immediateIyas
"extra-sensory perception" but can only be
verified as such afterwards. In
all these cases, whether it is a question
of spatial or of temporal ESP, we find a simultaneity
of the normal or ordinary state with another
state or experience which is not causally
derivable from it, and whose objective existence
can only be verified afterwards. An unexpected [mental] content which is
directly or indirectly connected with some
objective external event coincides with the
ordinary psychic state: this is what I call
syncrhonicity.
The obscurity of these and similar passages
indicates .the apparently insurmountable difficulties
of breaking away from our ingrained habits
of thinking in terms of cause and effect.
Kammerer started with an intuitive conviction
of the existence of a-causal forces in the
universe, and landed up with his spurious
physical analogies. Jung, starting from the
same premiss as Kammerer, ended up with the
confused notion that his archetypes somehow
engineered the detonations in the bookcase,
or the scarab's appearance at the window.
To resolve this paradox he postulated that
the archetypes were psycho-physical entities
("psychoids"), whose "trans- psychic reality"
may produce not only detonations but also
ghosts-see the note revoking his earlier -disbelief
in the existence of "real spirits".* (See
also the comments of one of his close collaborators,
Aroela Jaffe: "The postulate of an imperceivable
psychoid background world colours the initial
problem of 'ghosts' only to this extent: Jung
could no longer maintain with assurance that
these apparitions are projections of psychic
complexes. Jung expressed himself very cautiously
in his Preface to the German edition of Stewart
Edward White's The Unobstructed Universe:
"Although on the one hand our critical
arguments throw doubt on every single case
[of apparitionsJ; there is on the other hand
not a single argument which could disprove
the existence of ghosts. In this regard, therefore,
we must probably content ourselves with a
non liquet."
In the same breath he wrote: "We must completely
give up the idea of the psyche's being somehow
connected with the brain, and remember instead
the 'meaningful' or 'intelligent' behaviour
of the lower organisms, which are without
a brain. Here we find ourselves much closer
to the formal factor which, as I have said,
has nothing to do with brain activity." The
term ('formal factor" refers to a presumed
archetypal consciousness in the amoeba; but
this could hardly justify the denial of the
connection between human consciousness and
the human - brain. It is painful to watch
how a great mind, trying to disentangle himself
from the causal chains of materialistic science,
gets entangled in its own verbiage.
Kammerer and Jung, in their different ways,
fell into the same trap: Whitehead called
it "misplaced concr teness". Like theologians
who start from the premiss th the mind of
God is beyond human understanding and then
proceed to explain how the mind of God works,
they postulated an a-causal principle, and
proceeded to explain it in pseudo-causal terms.
How Pauli reacted to all this we can only
guess. He must have realised that Jung's theory
of the archetype as a deus ex machina was
a non-starter, but apart from tutoring Jung
in theoretical physics (of which in the end
Jung made little use), it seems unlikely that
Pauli had much -influence on Jung's paper.*(One
wonders whether anybody else had~and whetherlung
him- self had even read the proofs. If he
had; it remains incomprehensible that he did
nofamend the flat nonsense about there being
no connection between mind and brain.)
Pauli's own essay, turning the mental evolution
of Kepler into a paradigm of the limitations
of science, is a model of clarity in sharp
contrast to Jung's meanderings.* (Pauli's
essay is, as we remember, called "The Influence
of Arche- typal Ideas on the Scientific Theories
of Kepler"; but he uses the word "archetypal"
in its classic, Platonic meaning (as Kepler
himself did), and not in the way lung abused
it.) But the comparison is not quite fair
because it is, as we have seen,'much easier
for a modern physicist than for a psychologist
to get out of the grooves of causality, matter,
space-time and other traditional categories
of thought. The physicist has been trained
to regard the world as-experienced by oUf
senses as an illusion-Eddington's shadow-desk,
covered by the veil of Maya. But that does
not worry him unduly, because he has created
a world of his own, described in a language
of great beauty and power, the language of
mathematical equations, which tells him all
he knows, and can ever hope to know, of the
universe around him.
Bertrand Russell did not mean to be ironical
when he wrote: "Physics is mathematical not
because we know so much about the physical,
world, but because we know so little: it is
only its mathematical properties that we can
discover."
Thus the physicist was able to discard, one-by
one, all commonsense ideas of what the world
is like-without suffering any traumatic shock.*(Cf.Jeans:
"The history of physical science in the twentieth
century is one of progressive emancipation
from the purely human angle of viision.
One by one, matter, energy and causality were
dethroned; but the physicist was richly compensated
by being able to play around with such enticing
Gretchens as the neutrino, and with such exhilarating
notions as time flowing backward, ghost-particles
of negative mass, and atoms of radium spontaneously
emitting beta radiation without physical cause.\
Pauli's revolutionary proposal was to extend
the principle of non-causal events from microphysics
(where its legitimacy was recognised) to macrophysics
(where it was not). This is why I said that
he was more radical in his approach than his
colleagues. He probably hoped that, by joining
forces with jung, they would be able to work
out some macrophysical theory which made some
sense of paranormal events. The attempt was
frustrated by deeply ingrained traditions
in Western thought, which go all the way back
to the Greeks. Like Kammerer, Jung kept relapsing
into spurious causal explanations to make
the a-causal principle work. They were both
ensnared, as Western man has been for two
thousand years, in the logical categories
of Greek philo- sophy which permeate our vocabulary"
and concepts, and decide for us what is thinkable
and what is unthink- able.
As Sidney Hook said, "When Aristotle drew
up his table of categories, which to him represented
the grammar of existence, he was really projecting
the grammar of the Greek language on the cosmos~"
It is that grammar which became the undoing
of Kammerer and Jung-together 
with a host of other swho~embarked on a similar quest. The literature
prparapsychology is full ofhopeful theories
which in fact, and for the same reason, were
doomed to failure from the beginning.
In Jung's case there is a particular irony
because he spent the best part of his life
in attempting to translate another untranslatable
language into the Western uni- verse of discourse-that
of Eastern mysticism. Looking back at the
rise and decline of Jungian psychology, it
does not seem to have fared better than his
theory of non-synchronous synchronicity-but
that is a subject beyond the scope of this
book.
The upshot ofthe treatise was a diagram onwhich,
Jung says, he and Pauli "finally agreed".
It looks like this: I'll include an image
in the video.
Jung offers no concrete explanations how the
schema is meant to work, and his comments
on it are so obscure that I must leave it
to the interested reader to look them up in
the library. One cannot help being reminded
of the biblical mountain whose labours gave
birth to a mouse: but it was .quite a symbolic
mouse nevertheless. It was for the first time
in the history of modern thought that the
hypothesis of a-causal factors working in
the universe was given the joint stamp of
respectability by a psychologist and a physicist
of international renown.
Section V
There has been in recent years a large crop
of other explanatory hypotheses regarding
paranormal pheno- mena. Physicists have played
with parallel universes, with Einstein's curved
space, with two-dimensional time and "tunnels"
in hyper-space which would permit direct contact
between regions separated in normal space
by astronomical distances. Among psychologists,
Freud, once he became convinced of telepathic
contact between analyst and patient, theorised
that ESP was an archaic method ofcommunication
between individuals, which was later supplanted
by the more efficient method of sensory communication.*
(Freud was a member of both the British and
the American SPR, and in. 1924 wrote to Ernest
Jones that he was prepared "to lend the support
of psychoanalysis to the matter of telepathy".
But Jones feared that this would discredit
psychoanalysis and dissuaded Freud from any
public gesture. He also prevented Freud from
reading, at the International Psychoanalytic
Congress in 1922, an essay he had prepared
on "Psychoanalysis and Telepathy". It was
only published after Freud's death.)
Among biologists a remarkable theory was proposed
,by Sir Alister Hardy, who thought that "the
highly skilled and coordinated activities
of some lower animals, such as the "Foraminifera,
could only be explained by a kind of group-mind
where each individual shared "a psychic blueprint".
Among philosophers, Professors Broad and Price
have produced challenging mentalistic hypotheses.*
(For a summary of these and other explanatory
theories see for instance, Rosalind Heywood's
The Sixth Sense (London, 1959.)
Lastly, among mathematicians, G. Spencer Brown
proposed an intriguing theory which attempted
to explain the anti-chance results in card-guessing
experiments by questioning the validity of
the concept of chance itself.
Spencer Brown claimed that by matching' pairs
of digits at random, where the first digit
symbolised the guess, and the second the target
card, he obtained a significantly higher number
of "hits" than chance expectation. However,
he did not publish his~cal tables, and did
not claim that his results were a comparable
magnitude to the astronomical anti-chance
odds obtained by the ESP experimenters.
The controversy petered out inconclusively,
but it nevertheless provided food for thought.*
(Spencer Brown first published-his theory
in Nature (July 25. 1953), "Statistical Significance
in Psychical Research", and followed it up
in a book, Probability and Scientific Inference
(London, 1957). See also Rosalind Heywood's
brief comment in The Sixth 'Sense, p. 169
footnote
102)
Unlike the propounders of the conspiracy of
fraud theory, Spencer Brown admitted that
the ESP experiments were "well designed and
rigorously controlled"; he accepted the results
at face value, but thought that they pointed
to some anomaly in the very concept of randomness.
'Fhough he did not elaborate on the nature
of this suspected anomaly, which asto explain
the disproportionately high number of hits
in ESP experiments, his ideas bear a close
resemblance to Kammerer's concept of Seriality.
The "Law of the Series" is in fact the reciprocal
of the concept of randomness.
It is interesting to note that it was Sir
Alister Hardy, a pioneer of ESP research,
who provided the grant for Spencer Brown's
research. Hardy commented:
It remained for Mr. G. Spencer Brown of
Trinity College, Cambridge, to suggest the
alternative and simpler hypothesis that all
this experimental work in so-called telepathy,
clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis,
which depends upon obtaining results above
chance, may be really a demonstration of some
single and very different principle. He believes
that it may be something no less fundamental
or interesting-but not telepathy or these
other curious things-something _implicit in
the very nature and meaning ofrandomness itself....
Whether or not the majority of card-guessing
experiments may be shown to be due to something
quite different from telepathy, there is to
my mind quite sufficient evidence to prove
the existence of a true form of telepathy
which seems likely to be of considerable biological
significance. In passing, let me say that
if most of this apparent card-guessing and
dice- influencing work should in fact turn
out to be something very different,. it
will not I believe have been a wasted
effort; it will have provided a wonderful
mine of material for the study of a very remarkable
new principle.
That new principle, let me repeat it, looks
remarkably like Kammerer's Law of the Series,
postulated in 1919. None of the explanatory
theories mentioned earlier embraces the whole
field of paranormal. phenomena. Some accept
telepathy, but draw the line at clairvoyance,
precognition or PK; and even those "ultras"
who accept apparitions and some form of life
after death are reluctant to attack the roots
of coincidence - although we stumble upon
them all the time. I have singled out for
discussion Kammerer's Seriality and Jung-Pauli's
Synchronicity because they are, to the best
of my knowledge, the only theories of the
paranormal which do attack the problem of
meaningful coincidences.
This has been an exerpt from The Roots of
Concidence by Arthur Koestler, Chapter Three,
Seriality and Synchronicity narrated by Joseph
Voelbel.
 
 
