The blind and dangerous belief in the security of the scientific Trinity
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To Michael Fordham
Dear Fordham, 24 January 1955
According to your wish and to my notoriously helpless state concerning higher mathematics, I have sent the galley proofs and your notes to Prof. Fierz.
You will find the other notes included in this letter.
I am deeply obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken over this complicated matter.
An American pupil of mine, Dr. Progoff (New York), has tried to adapt and to explain synchronicity to the average reader but he landed his ship on the rocks because he could not free his mind from the deep-rooted belief in the Sanctissima Trinitas of the axiomata time, space, and causality.
Funny how few people can draw the inevitable conclusion from causality being of statistical nature, that it must suffer exceptions.
You can arbitrarily dismiss them as indispensable parts of the real world, if you like averages better than random facts.
The latter are facts none the less and cannot be treated as non-existent.
Moreover, since the real man is always an individual and unique event and as such merely “random,” you have to label the whole of mankind in its essentials as “valueless.”
But on the other hand, only the individual carries life and consciousness of life, which seems to me rather a significant fact not to be lightly dismissed at least not by the physician.
You can do such things in Nazi Germany or in Russia, but-God forbid-not with us.
But wherever a philosophy based upon the sciences prevails (as in the USA), the individual man loses his foothold and becomes “vermasst,” turned into a mass particle, because as an “exception” he is valueless, not very different from the Russian.
This is the reason and the motive of my essay.
I am convinced that something ought to be done about this blind and dangerous belief in the security of the scientific Trinity.
I don’t expect that my contemporaries will accept my idea, but my book will be in existence and sooner or later somebody will draw the same conclusions.
By the way-do you know Brown’s paper about the Rhine experiments?
I only know it in its French form (G. Spencer Brown: “De Ia recherche psychique consideree comme un test de la theorie des probabilites,” Revue metapsychique, Mai-Aout, 1954, p. 87 sqq.).
The author cannot deny the validity of Rhine’s results.
But since it is “impossible” to look round corners and to know the future, the probability calculus must be basically wrong!
This shows the impact of synchronicity upon the fanatical one-sidedness of scientific philosophy.
Thanking you again for your care and attention,
I remain,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 215-216.
