“Is There a Case for Retrocognition?”, 1950-04 (; backlinks):
[Summary from 1991:
Even some of Moberly and Jourdain’s defenders, paradoxically, managed to discredit them. In “Is There a Case for Retrocognition?” a bizarre essay published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research…—while willing to accept Moberly & Jourdain’s story whole hog—argued that they had not in fact gone back in time: they had simply had a “precognition”, or foreglimpse, of the results of their future research.
Their “hallucinatory visions”, he maintained, “did not contain any information not ascribable to clairvoyant awareness of documents and books, and/or precognition of the coming experience of looking them up” (pg 63).
Why, then, were their visions specifically of Marie Antoinette? Because, Sabine argued, they suffered from “lingering schoolgirl sentimentality” (pg 61).
They were already obsessed with the dead queen in 1901; they “precognized” the future researches they would undertake regarding her; and through a kind of maudlin, back-to-front ESP, thought they saw her.]
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