E.E. Doc Smith

PSIONTIST (si'en-tist) noun: A term first used by E. E. "Doc" Smith to refer to a person who investigates the nature of the mind as well as the world by using various physical instruments and refined mental abilities. [PSI + SCIENTIST: mind < Gr. psyche, soul < IE. base *bhes-, to blow + L. scientia, a discerning < IE. base *skei-, to separate].

In his last science fiction novels, a group of scientists with psychic abilities combine their skills to avoid conquest of our universe by aggressive inhabitants of another universe. Inspired by the approach, I find the idea of a scientist who uses his or her mind as a fine instrument to probe itself very appealing. Here are some excerpts from his novels.

(from SUBSPACE EXPLORERS by E. E. "Doc" Smith, ISBN 0-425-06245-7, p143, 1965)
   Andrew Adams had what was probably the finest mind of any strictly human being of his age. He had a voracious and insatiable appetite for knowledge; his brain was an unfilled and unfillable reservoir. He was without prejudice, inhibition, or bias. He could, and frequently did, toss a laboriously-developed theory or hypothesis of his own down the drain in favor of someone else's - anyone else's - that gave even slightly better predictions than did his own.
    Being what he was, it was inevitable that when the Destons gave Adams his first real insight into telepathy and, through it, into the unimaginably vast and theretofore almost hermetically sealed universe of psionics, he dropped his own researches in favor of the new. He and his wife studied, more and even more intensively, the possibilities and potentialities of the mind as the mind. Scholar-like, however, they needed to analyze and digest all the information available having any bearing upon the subject. Therefore, since there was no esoterica of that type in the Procyon's library, they went back to Earth.
    The Adams apartment was a fairly large one; five rooms on the sixteenth floor of Grantland Hall in Ann Arbor, overlooking the somewhat crowded but beautifully landscaped campus of the University of Michigan. Their living room was large - seventeen by twenty five feet - but it was the Adams, not the ordinary, concept of a living room. Almost everything in it was designed for study.

    First, they went through their own library's stores of philosophy, of metaphysics, of parapsychology, of occultism, of spiritualism, of voodooism, of scores of kinds of cultism and even more kinds of crackpotism, from Forteanism up - or down. They studied thousands of words to glean a single phrase of truth. Or, more frequently, bits of something that could be developed into truth or into something having to do with truth. Then they exhausted the resources of the University's immense library; after which they requested twenty two exceedingly rare tomes from the Crerar Library of Chicago. This was unusual, since scholars usually came to the Crerar instead of vice-versa, but Adams was Andrew Adams of the College; one of the very biggest of the Big Brains. Wheretofore:
    "It can be arranged, Dr. Adams," Crerar's head librarian told him, as one bibliophile to another. "These are replicas, of course - most of the originals are in Rome - and not one of them has been consulted for over five years. I'm glad to have you study these volumes, if for no other reason than to show that they are not really dead wood."
    Thus it came finally about that Andrew and Stella Adams sat opposite each other, holding hands tightly across a small table, staring into each other's eyes and thinking at and with each other in terms and symbols many of which cannot be put into words

(from SUBSPACE ENCOUNTER by E. E. "Doc" Smith, ISBN 0-425-06244-9, 1983, posthumously)
(p. 36) "That hits the high spots to date. Now. I know that the energy originates in the fourth dimension. I think that it is not a natural phenomenon, but is a product of parascience – psionics – and of technology. I infer that it is produced by generators designed and built by a race of highly intelligent entities, at least some of whom are psiontists. Not ordinary psychics or mystics, but highly-skilled, highly-trained psiontists; experts of at least our own grade. I deduce that there exists, somewhere, hitherto completely unsuspected, such a race. I conclude nothing, as yet. I request full and frank opinions from all of you. …"

(p. 43) "The Destons had given them their first real insight into telepathy, and, through it, their first inkling of the universe of psionics. That had been less than a year ago – and through their studies of metaphysics, parapsychology, occultism, and every other kind of esoterica; through telepathic consultation with sages in India and China, Tibet and Central America and everywhere else where a germ of truth might be gleaned, they had made of themselves psiontists of extraordinary ability."

(p. 46) "The Adams fusion had learned – rather confirmed – two facts. All six psiontists had in varying degrees all the psi powers – telepathy, precognition, teleportation, telekinetics, levitation, clairvoyance, clairaudience, - in some of them, more highly developed than in others. And he and Stella of course were adepts in all. Only the Destons, strangely, were "dowsers."…"

(p. 55) "Most important, psionics is in fact the all-embracing science. Out of our total thinking experience, we are able to formulate four hypotheses which may be among the basic laws of the science... First: the map is the territory. Second: the clarity of perception of any future event varies directly as its inevitability. Third: subjective time is measured by the number of learning events experienced. Fourth: communications concerning reality are neither accurate nor complete."

(p. 127) "Psychokinetics – sometimes called psychodynamics or telekinetics – is a subject to which very few nonpsis have given serious consideration. Nothing worthwhile concerning it is in general circulation, since it can be handled only in the esoteric symbology of paraphysics and paramechanics; both of which disciplines are closed books to nonpsionic minds.
Thus the belief is widespread that any psychic who can ‘port a pencil one inch above a table’s top can ‘port anything anywhere he pleases. This belief is false. The laws of psionics are as immutable as those of mechanics. While it is true that the map is the territory, the map must be very finely detailed indeed – the psiontist must know the object’s fine structure very well indeed – if great masses are to be handled psionically…."

http://psiontist.com updated 10/8/2010