Arthur Koestler and the Roots of Coincidence
In the early 1900s, a Viennese biologist named Paul Kammerer carried a notebook in which he recorded coincidences. In a park, he counted the people who passed by with umbrellas and noticed that the same number appeared again and again.
He heard a name in the morning and met the person that afternoon. From these notes he wrote a book, The Law of Series, in which he proposed that events fall into clusters through some force unknown to science, as waves gather on a shore.
Kammerer was derided, and he killed himself in 1926. Half a century later, a Hungarian-born writer revived his ideas in a book about coincidence, and it became one of the strangest books by one of the twentieth century's most remarkable minds.
A Life of Many Lives
Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest on September 5, 1905, and grew up in Vienna. He worked as a journalist, joined the Communist Party in 1931, and left it in 1938 in disillusion. In the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by Franco's forces and held for months in a Seville prison under threat of execution.
He escaped to England, where he wrote his most famous novel, Darkness at Noon (1940), a portrait of a Soviet show trial that became a classic of anti-totalitarian literature.
After the war, his interests turned to science and the mind. The Sleepwalkers (1959) is a history of astronomy from the Babylonians to Newton, with a famous portrait of Kepler. The Act of Creation (1964) is a study of how scientists and artists come up with new ideas.
In 1967 he published The Ghost in the Machine, in which he introduced the word "holon" for something that is at once a whole and a part of a larger whole.
The Case of the Toad
In 1971, Koestler published The Case of the Midwife Toad, a defense of Paul Kammerer. Kammerer had claimed that midwife toads trained to breed in water developed dark pads on their feet, a trait that was then inherited by their offspring.
If true, it would have supported the discredited idea that characteristics acquired during life can be passed to children. A specimen was examined in 1926 and found to have been injected with ink. Kammerer denied any fraud and shot himself weeks later. Koestler argued that Kammerer was a victim, not a cheat, though the verdict of most biologists has not changed.
The book led Koestler back to Kammerer's other interest, the law of series, and so to The Roots of Coincidence.
The Roots of Coincidence
Published in 1972, The Roots of Coincidence is a short, readable book that surveys the borderlands of science. It discusses the experiments of J. B. Rhine on extrasensory perception, Kammerer's series, and Carl Jung's idea of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence that is not caused by anything.
It also draws on the conversations between Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Koestler's argument is a modest one: that modern physics has become so strange that old assumptions about causation should not be taken for granted, and that it might be wise to investigate coincidence without prejudice.
He did not claim to have found a mechanism. He suggested only that a future physics might one day include a place for such events, and he called his proposal a speculation.
What Scientists Say
Most scientists remain unconvinced. Rhine's experiments were criticized for weak controls and have not been reliably repeated. The appeal to quantum physics has also been questioned, because the strange effects of the quantum world do not carry over in any simple way to everyday events.
A more ordinary explanation for coincidence comes from mathematics. The statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller wrote in 1989 that with a large enough sample, almost any outrageous thing is likely to happen. With billions of people having billions of experiences, remarkable coincidences are bound to occur, and human minds are quick to notice and remember them. This does not remove the sense of wonder, but it offers an explanation that needs no new forces.
The Bequest
When Koestler died in London on March 3, 1983, he and his wife Cynthia took their own lives together. He was ill with Parkinson's disease and leukemia. He left most of his estate to establish a chair in parapsychology at a British university, and in 1985 the University of Edinburgh set up the Koestler Chair, which still exists.
It has produced research that is closer to ordinary psychology than to the occult, and it has been a place for sober study of belief and anomalous experience.
Closing
Koestler was a man who changed his mind many times in his life, and who admitted it. His last great curiosity was perhaps the most human: why do we find meaning in coincidences? Whether the answer lies in physics, in statistics or in the workings of the psyche, the question remains alive.
The next time two strange events line up on an ordinary day, it might be worth stopping a moment, as Kammerer did on his park bench, and noting it down.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Synchronicity and the Unus Mundus: Jung and Quantum Physics
- Wolfgang Pauli and the Synchronicity of the One
- Erwin Schrodinger and the Mind of the One: The Quantum Gnosis
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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