Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance entered the modern vocabulary through animal magnetism. In the 1780s the Marquis de Puysegur, a student of Franz Mesmer, found that some magnetised subjects fell into a deep artificial somnambulism in which they seemed to describe objects, illnesses, or distant scenes they could not have perceived normally. French practitioners called the faculty "clairvoyance," clear seeing, and it became a standard claim of magnetic healers through the nineteenth century: a somnambulist might diagnose a patient's illness by "seeing" inside the body, or locate a lost object at a distance.

The claim travelled easily into spiritualism after 1848, where clairvoyant description of the deceased or of unseen rooms became a staple platform skill for mediums, and into the broader occult revival, where clairvoyance was folded into theosophical and esoteric teaching about subtle senses beyond the physical five. By the time organised psychical research began in 1882, clairvoyance already had a century of anecdote behind it, entirely undocumented by controlled observation, which is precisely what the Society for Psychical Research set out to supply. The distinction researchers draw between clairvoyance and telepathy, perceiving an object directly versus reading another mind that knows the object, has mattered enormously to experimental design ever since, because it determines whether a sender is needed at all.

Clairvoyance was built directly into Rhine's Duke card-guessing program: in the "pure clairvoyance" condition, a subject guessed the order of a sealed, unseen deck of Zener cards with no sender looking at them at all, ruling out telepathy as an explanation for any hit. Rhine's early results again beat chance, and again drew the same objections levelled at his telepathy work: inadequate card shielding, non-random shuffling, and selective reporting of successful runs. Joseph Gaither Pratt, Rhine's assistant, ran a much-cited clairvoyance series with student Hubert Pearce across separate campus buildings, later criticised for the recording procedures used to log Pearce's calls against the target order.

No twentieth-century clairvoyance protocol produced an effect that later independent laboratories could reliably reproduce under matching conditions. The claim was largely absorbed into remote viewing research from the 1970s onward, which asked subjects to describe a real, distant, physically existing target rather than a hidden card, and into the ganzfeld line, which nominally tests telepathy but has sometimes used non-agent "clairvoyance" target selection as a control condition. Clairvoyance therefore no longer has a dedicated modern research programme of its own; its evidentiary status rests on the same unreplicated card-guessing record that undermined the parallel telepathy claim.