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One of the major difficulties of the science of psychic phenomena, latterly known as parapsychology, has been the enormous resistance provoked by its unfamiliar subject matter. As with resistance to the less threatening aspects of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, resistance to the basic facts and propositions of parapsychology takes a variety of forms, all more or less easily rationalized, all fundamentally phobic and irrational. Of all the façades readily utilized by resistance, the presumption of chance is the most difficult to resolve from the purely logical point of view.
The only way out of this difficulty is to set up a system for observing the hypothesized event in which the factor of chance is known completely and in advance. Thus if a subject is asked to guess the first card that will be turned up from a well-shuffled pack of ordinary playing cards, the probability of a correct hit will be 1 in 52. If in 5 runs through the deck he makes 13 hits instead of the expected 5, it can easily be calculated that the probability of this occurring by chance is about 1 in 5,000. If a perfect cubical die is used, the subject's chance of correctly calling the face that will turn up in any random throw is 1 in 6. If the