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This book makes the interesting attempt to put parapsychology into a new framework by connecting it with modern physics.
Reporting on the experiments of Rhine, Soal, Thouless and others Koestler acknowledges the ‘almost painful intellectual discomfort’ caused by parapsychology. But when he quotes the most recent discoveries and theories of atomic and sub-atomic physics they prove, if possible, even more puzzling and discomforting than those of ESP or PK. Concepts such as the ‘Physical psi-field’, negative mass, or the neutrino have opened up truly fantastic vistas regarding the nature of the universe and the interrelation of mind and body, giving substance to Eddington's famous dictum, ‘The stuff of the world is mind-stuff’. (Cf. Jung's remark on the possible meeting-point of psyche and physis on the atomic level.)
Koestler produces his own theory, based on the ‘archetypal belief in the fundamental unity of all things, transcending mechanical causality’, and manifesting an ‘all-embracing order’. He distinguishes between two basic tendencies, the self-assertive and the integrative, the latter being the source of ‘self-transcending emotions’, craving to surrender to ‘maybe God, or nature, or a Bach cantata, or the mystic's “oceanic feeling”’. His theory of the two tendencies is an interesting contribution to the problem of polarity and of unity-in-variety, although I fail to see how cravings and emotions can be used as evidence for the limitations of a purely causal/mechanistic order of the universe.
Koestler makes considerable use of Jung's concept of synchronicity which he calls ‘perhaps the most radical departure from the world-view of mechanistic science in our time’. But he is less than generous or fair to Jung in his general attitude. It is significant