This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Do you sometimes wish that you had telepathic or other supernormal powers? About 100 years ago, some of the greatest minds in philosophy thought there were people who had such abilities.
In fact, they even suggested that perhaps horses and dogs could have them too. At the turn of the 20th century, many great scientists, psychologists and philosophers became fascinated by the possibility of "psychic phenomena" like telepathy, clairvoyance or ghosts. Thomson, the 1906 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, performed experiments to test mediums.
Others, like the philosopher C.D. Broad, attended séances and thought about the possibility of precognition—the ability to foresee future events. These weren't just marginal charlatans.
Many of them had an impact on philosophy and science in the 20th century. Many of the concepts philosophers of time still argue over today trace back to Broad, such as the growing block theory, which says that the past is real, the present is real, but the future does not yet exist. Most of their focus was on the psychic abilities of humans.
However, some of these "psychic researchers" went even further and began wondering about the possibility of telepathy in animals. The philosopher Friedrich Canning Scott Schiller (1864–1937), who spent most of his career at the University of Oxford, was an active member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). He was one of the founders of pragmatism, the philosophical view that the truth of a theory can be judged based on whether it works in practice.
Schiller engaged in heated discussions about the psychic abilities of animals. His article on "psychical research" for the Encyclopedia Britannica has a section about "equine mathematicians"—horses with supposedly paranormal mathematical abilities that they demonstrated by tapping out solutions to equations with their hooves. In 1914, Schiller wrote an article for the SPR about Rolf, "the thinking dog of Mannheim" (in southwest Germany).
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