| Department of Mathematics and Statistics |
A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton
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13. Prevision; recuperation
On 1 July the Aitkens left Edinburgh for a summer holiday at Aberlady, a village about 20km away, but in Aitken’s words the effect was to fan the fire of his turmoil into a blaze. They returned home on 31 July. Aitken was prescribed a drug that let him sleep, and he began the long road back to his old world. But it led to place only superficially resembling the one he had known. ‘I remember,’ he wrote in 1933,
the horrible sensation of fear that even ordinary reminders of the past, such as street-names, old letters and so on, caused me before they were accepted again as part of my world-system; for subjective time is the only one we can apprehend, and when it is distorted and elongated by a breakdown into aeonian eternities, the combined familiarity and colossal remoteness even of one’s own name can be pretty shaking.110
He detected an ability in himself to anticipate future events or, more accurately, to experience mental states later found to have real counterparts. He called them ‘Dunne effects’ after J.W. Dunne, whose book An Experiment With Time (1929) analysed prevision and attempted to give it a philosophical basis. The problem fascinated Aitken. He wrote in 1947:
In June 1927, during excessive insomnia, I first observed this peculiar prevision of the future, inaccurate and distorted, in myself. I imagined it to be partly bound up with telepathy. Of the existence of telepathy, from my experience of Christmas 1917, at the seaside at Warrington, New Zealand, I had no doubt whatever. Even so these curious intimations of what was going to happen,* usually trivial and unimportant, the following day, were disturbing.
*[Added later] Not so: when they happened, I knew I had dreamed them.
These experiences were associated with mental crises, he knew; the telepathic episode he refers to was experienced in the aftermath of the war, and other episodes of prevision always occurred in periods of mental instability. This was by no means a cue to Aitken that they were unreliable. During an attempt to recall, nearly thirty years later, words and numbers he had learnt under experimental conditions in 1932, he remarked: ‘the others are not recoverable although in an extreme state, such as insomnia, they might come back’.111 Aitken accepted prevision as a reality and explored it even in the worst moments of his breakdowns. His description of himself:
like Dunne, I noted the effects that he noted, dismissing some, intrigued by others, endeavouring always to keep a detached view,
is dispassionately objective, despite his frantic behaviour. He was not that denuded entity, the rational man, who allows reason to inform against his consistent experience. With great courage he accepted the validity of the new data and considered what they meant.
In the midst of these revelations his family was an oasis of normality. Margaret recalled Aitken on all fours with her and George, they calling ‘Be a lion!’, he roaring like a lion, then ‘Be a bear!’ and he growling, and so on. ‘He would play Schubert’s Marche Militaire and George and I would march round the room to it. This was one of our games which we enjoyed, and Father enjoyed.’112
Aitken returned to lecturing – ‘mechanic exercise’ – and research. ‘I continued to write papers, but I know very well that they were inferior, and that only in 1930-31 did they come up to standard again.’113 The radiance that transformed the sleepless days and nights of his illness was followed by the dullness of convalescence. It was a period he was keen to put behind him. His sensuous anticipation of spring perhaps reflects a sense that this lethargy was finally falling away.
Buds and shoots are beginning to appear on the trees, and soon we shall witness that marvellous green renewal of a northern spring, a delicate shimmering greenness which must be seen to be understood. The old sycamore tree in front of us will come out in the special golden-green colour, distinguishing it among all trees on the level when seen from the height of Corstorphine Hill.114
| 110 | ACA to Mabel McIndoe, 28 Oct. 1933. |
| 111 | Ian M.L. Hunter, An exceptional memory, British Journal of Psychology, 68 (1977), 155-164, 156. |
| 112 | MM speaking to me, 13 June 1996. |
| 113 | Ian M.L. Hunter, Large Cognitive Accomplishments: Aitken Revisited, in Problem Solving and Cognitive Processes (Bergen, 1995), 447-462. |
| 114 | ACA to Pearl, 31 March 1928. |
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