Certain distinguished savants to whom I had communicated the results we had secured, agreed in assuring me that levitations without contact would have the character of absolute certain proof if we succeeded in verifying them by the following practical device: "Sprinkle flour upon the table," they said, "at the instant your hands have just left it; then produce one or more levitations; finally assure yourselves that the layer of flour bears not the slightest sign of any touch, and all objectors will be dumb."Why, it is precisely this experiment that we have performed successfully several times. Let me give a few details:Our first trial had succeeded very badly. We used a coarse sieve which we had to move to and fro over the entire table. This produced the double inconvenience; first, of suspending too long, and so of nullifying the action of the operators; and, secondly, of spreading a layer of flour much too thick. The buoyant spring and impulse of the wills of the operators was abated, the fluidic action was thwarted, the table-top got chilled down, so to speak; nothing moved. The mischief went so far that the table not only refused us levitations and rotations without contact, but almost all the ordinary ones.Then a brilliant idea came to one of us. We possessed one of those bellows used in blowing sulphur upon vines attacked by the grape-mildew. In place of sulphur we put flour into it, and, so prepared, began the test.The conditions were most favorable. The weather was dry and warm, the table went leaping under our fingers, and, indeed, before the order to lift hands had been given, the greater part of the band of us had spontaneously ceased to touch the table-top. Then the command rings out; the whole chain lifts up from the table, and at the same instant the bellows covers its entire surface with a light dusting of flour. Not a second had been lost; the levitation withoutcontact had already taken place. But to leave no doubt, the thing was repeated three or four times in succession.That done, the table was scrupulously examined;no finger had touched it, or even grazed it in the slightest degree.The fear of grazing it involuntarily had even been so great that the hands had acted fluidically from a height much greater than in previous sittings. Each one had thought he could not raise his hands too high, and the hands removed to such a distance from the top, had not had recourse to any of the manœuvres or passes of which we had at other times made use. Keeping its place, above the table to be lifted, the chain had preserved its form intact; it had made hardly a perceptible motion in the direction of the movement it was producing at a distance from the table.I will add, finally that we did not content ourselves with a single experience. A careful inspection following each of several levitations, always showed that the dust-like layer of flour was absolutely untouched; and no portion of the table had escaped its tell-tale coat of white.
Certain distinguished savants to whom I had communicated the results we had secured, agreed in assuring me that levitations without contact would have the character of absolute certain proof if we succeeded in verifying them by the following practical device: "Sprinkle flour upon the table," they said, "at the instant your hands have just left it; then produce one or more levitations; finally assure yourselves that the layer of flour bears not the slightest sign of any touch, and all objectors will be dumb."
Why, it is precisely this experiment that we have performed successfully several times. Let me give a few details:
Our first trial had succeeded very badly. We used a coarse sieve which we had to move to and fro over the entire table. This produced the double inconvenience; first, of suspending too long, and so of nullifying the action of the operators; and, secondly, of spreading a layer of flour much too thick. The buoyant spring and impulse of the wills of the operators was abated, the fluidic action was thwarted, the table-top got chilled down, so to speak; nothing moved. The mischief went so far that the table not only refused us levitations and rotations without contact, but almost all the ordinary ones.
Then a brilliant idea came to one of us. We possessed one of those bellows used in blowing sulphur upon vines attacked by the grape-mildew. In place of sulphur we put flour into it, and, so prepared, began the test.
The conditions were most favorable. The weather was dry and warm, the table went leaping under our fingers, and, indeed, before the order to lift hands had been given, the greater part of the band of us had spontaneously ceased to touch the table-top. Then the command rings out; the whole chain lifts up from the table, and at the same instant the bellows covers its entire surface with a light dusting of flour. Not a second had been lost; the levitation withoutcontact had already taken place. But to leave no doubt, the thing was repeated three or four times in succession.
That done, the table was scrupulously examined;no finger had touched it, or even grazed it in the slightest degree.
The fear of grazing it involuntarily had even been so great that the hands had acted fluidically from a height much greater than in previous sittings. Each one had thought he could not raise his hands too high, and the hands removed to such a distance from the top, had not had recourse to any of the manœuvres or passes of which we had at other times made use. Keeping its place, above the table to be lifted, the chain had preserved its form intact; it had made hardly a perceptible motion in the direction of the movement it was producing at a distance from the table.
I will add, finally that we did not content ourselves with a single experience. A careful inspection following each of several levitations, always showed that the dust-like layer of flour was absolutely untouched; and no portion of the table had escaped its tell-tale coat of white.
The author of these reports himself estimates as follows the results he has recorded:
The phenomena observed confirm and elucidate each other. Large four-legged tables compete with three-legged ones. Inert weights, placed on these, come forward as substitutes for persons suspected of giving a helping hand to the table charged with the task of lifting them. At last the great discovery arrives in its turn: we begin by continuing without contact movements already initiated, and we end by producing them; we succeed almost in creating the process, to such an extent that these extraordinary facts manifest themselves sometimes in an uninterrupted series of fifteen or thirty performances. The glidings round out the subject by throwing light on one phase of action at a distance: they reveal it as powerless (at times) to lift the table, but able to draw it along over the floor.Such is the rapidly sketched account of our progress. Taken just by itself alone, it constitutes a solid proof and I recommend a study of it to serious men. It is not thus thaterror proceeds. Illusions originating in accident, or chance, do not thus resist a long study, and do not pass unmasked through a long series of experiments that justify them more and more.The reading of numbers in others' minds, and the balance of forces, merit special consideration.When all the operators but one are ignorant of the number to be materialized by raps, the operation (unless it is fluidic) ought to proceed either from the person who knows the number and furnishes at once the movement and the arrest, or else it ought to proceed from a relation instinctively established between that person who furnishes the arrest and his vis-à-vis who furnishes the movement. Let us examine both hypotheses.The first is untenable; for, in the case where some one chooses a leg of the table upon which the operator who knows the number can exercise no muscular action, the leg thus designated none the less rises at his command.The second is untenable; for, in the case where some one indicates a zero, the movement which ought to take place does not do so. Nay more. If you place at loggerheads two persons placed on opposite sides of the table and enjoin each to make a different number triumph, the more powerful operator secures the execution of the chief number although his vis-à-vis is interested not only in not furnishing it to him, but in arresting it.I know that this matter of the divining of numbers thought of is in bad odor. It lacks a certain pedantic and scientific form. Yet I have not hesitated to insist on it; for there are few experiments in which is better manifested themixed characterof the phenomenon,—physical power developed and applied outside of ourselves by the effect of our will. Just because it forms the great offense, or stumbling block, I am unwilling to be shame-faced about it. I maintain, besides that this is just as scientific as anything else. True science is not tied to the employment of such and such a process or such and such an instrument. That which a fluidometer would show would be no less scientifically demonstrated than what is seen with the eyes and estimated by the reason.Let us go on, however. We have not yet reached the end of our proofs. One of these has always especially struck me: I mean the proof derived from failures.It is claimed that the movements are produced by the action of our muscles, by involuntary pressure. Now here are the same operators who yesterday secured from the table the fulfilment of their most capricious desires; their muscles are as strong, their vivacity is as great, their desire to succeed is perhaps keener—and yet nothing! absolutely nothing! A whole hour will pass without the least rotation beginning; or, if there are rotations, levitations are impossible to procure; what little is done by the table is done feebly, dismally, and as if reluctantly. I repeat it again, the muscles have not changed; then why this sudden incapacity? The cause remaining identically the same, whence comes it that the effect varies to such a degree?"Ah!" says an objector, "you are talking of involuntary pressure, and say nothing about voluntary pressure, of fraud, in short. Don't you see that the cheaters may be present at one sitting and not appear at another, that they may act one day and not give themselves the trouble on the next?"I will reply very simply, and by facts."The cheaters are absent when we do not succeed!" But it has happened many a time that our personnel has not been changed in any way. The same persons, absolutely the same, have passed from a state of remarkable power to a state of comparative impotence. And that is not all. If there exists no operator whose presence has preserved us from failures, no more does any exist whose absence has rendered us incapable of success. With and without each one of the members of the chain we have succeeded in performing all the experiments,—all without exception.But 'the cheaters do not take so much pains every day!' The pains would be great indeed, and those who infer fraud little think what prodigies they are invoking. The accusation is an absurdity which verges on silliness, and its silliness removes its sting. One does not take offense at things like that. But come now, let us suppose for the moment that Valleyres were peopled with disciples of Bosco, thatprestidigitation were generally practised there, and that it had been thrust under our very eyes for five months, and under the eyes of numerous and very suspicious witnesses without a single case of perfidy having been pointed out. We have so well concealed our game that we have invented a secret telegraphic code for the experiment of reading numbers, a particular turn of the finger for moving the most enormous masses, a method of gradually lifting tables that we do not seem to touch. We are all liars, all; for we have been mutually watching each other for a long time now, and do not denounce anybody. Nay, more, the contagion of our vices is so swift to take that, as soon as we admit a stranger, a hostile witness, into the chain, he becomes our accomplice; he voluntarily closes his eyes to the transmission of signals, to muscular efforts, to the repeated and prolonged suspicious actions of his next neighbors in the chain! Well and good; suppose we grant all that, we shall not have got farther along for that. It will still remain to be explained why our cheaters sometimes do nothing at the very moment when it would be to their interest to succeed. It has happened, indeed, that a certain sitting at which we had many witnesses and a great desire to convince turned out to be a mediocre one. Such and such another, under the same conditions, was, on the contrary, a brilliant success.There you have real and important inequalities, and they dare to talk to us of muscular action and of fraud.Fraud and muscular action! Here for instance is a fine opportunity to put them to the proof. We have just placed a weight on the table. This weight is inert and cannot be accessory to any device. Fraud is all around it perhaps, but it is not in the tubs of sand. This weight is equally divided among the three legs of the table, and they are going to prove it by each one rising in turn. The total load weighs 165 pounds, and we scarcely dare to increase it, for, as it is, it was enough, one day, to break our very solid table. Very well; now let someone try to move this weight. Since muscular action and fraud must explain everything, it will be easy for them to put the mass in motion. Now they cannot do it. Their fingers contract and the knuckles whiten without their obtaining a singlelevitation, whereas, some moments later, levitations will take place at the touch of the same fingers, which gently graze the table's top and make no effort at all, as any one may easily convince himself.Certain very ingenious scientific rules of measurement, for the invention of which I cannot claim the credit, put us in the way of translating into figures the effort which the rotation or levitation of the table demands, when loaded in the way just described. With the above-mentioned weight of 165 pounds, rotation is secured by means of a lateral traction of about 17½ pounds, while levitation is only obtained by a perpendicular pressure of 132 pounds at least (which I will reduce, however, to 110, in deference to the presumed wishes of the critic, and on the supposition that the pressure might not be absolutely vertical). Several deductions are to be drawn from these figures.In the first place, muscular action may cause the table to turn, but it cannot lift it. As a matter of fact, the ten operators have one hundred fingers applied to its surface. Now, the vertical, or quasi-vertical, pressure of each finger cannot exceed twelve ounces on the average, the chain being composed as it is. They only develop, then, a total pressure of 66 pounds, which is quite insufficient to produce levitation.In the next place, this striking thing befalls, that the phenomenon which muscular action could easily produce is precisely the one that we most rarely and with the greatest difficulty obtain, and that the phenomenon which muscular action could not compass is the one the most habitually realized when the chain is formed. Why does not our involuntary impulse always make the table turn? Why should not our "fraud" always procure such a triumph? Why, as a general thing, do we only succeed in effecting that which is mechanically impossible?I advise people who like to make fun of table-turnings not to investigate them too closely, and to beware of giving too careful attention to our supreme demonstration,—that of movements without contact, for it will leave them not the slightest pretext for incredulity.Thus the fact is established. Multiplied experiments,diverse and irrefutable proofs, which are, moreover, joined in the closest solidarity, give to the fluidic action the stamp of complete certainty. Those who have had the patience to follow me thus far will have felt their suspicions vanishing one after another, and their faith in the new phenomenon more and more strengthened. They will have made good what we ourselves have substantiated and made good; for no one has opposed more difficulties to table-turning than have we, no one has shown himself more inquisitorial and exacting respecting them.It is not our fault if the results have been conclusive (and more and more so), nor ours the blame if they have reciprocally confirmed each other, if they have ended by forming one body and taking on the character of perfect evidence. To study, to compare, to repeat and repeat again, and to finally exclude all that admits of doubt or question—this was our duty. Nor have we failed to perform it. I make no affirmations in these reports which I have not proved over and over again.
The phenomena observed confirm and elucidate each other. Large four-legged tables compete with three-legged ones. Inert weights, placed on these, come forward as substitutes for persons suspected of giving a helping hand to the table charged with the task of lifting them. At last the great discovery arrives in its turn: we begin by continuing without contact movements already initiated, and we end by producing them; we succeed almost in creating the process, to such an extent that these extraordinary facts manifest themselves sometimes in an uninterrupted series of fifteen or thirty performances. The glidings round out the subject by throwing light on one phase of action at a distance: they reveal it as powerless (at times) to lift the table, but able to draw it along over the floor.
Such is the rapidly sketched account of our progress. Taken just by itself alone, it constitutes a solid proof and I recommend a study of it to serious men. It is not thus thaterror proceeds. Illusions originating in accident, or chance, do not thus resist a long study, and do not pass unmasked through a long series of experiments that justify them more and more.
The reading of numbers in others' minds, and the balance of forces, merit special consideration.
When all the operators but one are ignorant of the number to be materialized by raps, the operation (unless it is fluidic) ought to proceed either from the person who knows the number and furnishes at once the movement and the arrest, or else it ought to proceed from a relation instinctively established between that person who furnishes the arrest and his vis-à-vis who furnishes the movement. Let us examine both hypotheses.
The first is untenable; for, in the case where some one chooses a leg of the table upon which the operator who knows the number can exercise no muscular action, the leg thus designated none the less rises at his command.
The second is untenable; for, in the case where some one indicates a zero, the movement which ought to take place does not do so. Nay more. If you place at loggerheads two persons placed on opposite sides of the table and enjoin each to make a different number triumph, the more powerful operator secures the execution of the chief number although his vis-à-vis is interested not only in not furnishing it to him, but in arresting it.
I know that this matter of the divining of numbers thought of is in bad odor. It lacks a certain pedantic and scientific form. Yet I have not hesitated to insist on it; for there are few experiments in which is better manifested themixed characterof the phenomenon,—physical power developed and applied outside of ourselves by the effect of our will. Just because it forms the great offense, or stumbling block, I am unwilling to be shame-faced about it. I maintain, besides that this is just as scientific as anything else. True science is not tied to the employment of such and such a process or such and such an instrument. That which a fluidometer would show would be no less scientifically demonstrated than what is seen with the eyes and estimated by the reason.
Let us go on, however. We have not yet reached the end of our proofs. One of these has always especially struck me: I mean the proof derived from failures.
It is claimed that the movements are produced by the action of our muscles, by involuntary pressure. Now here are the same operators who yesterday secured from the table the fulfilment of their most capricious desires; their muscles are as strong, their vivacity is as great, their desire to succeed is perhaps keener—and yet nothing! absolutely nothing! A whole hour will pass without the least rotation beginning; or, if there are rotations, levitations are impossible to procure; what little is done by the table is done feebly, dismally, and as if reluctantly. I repeat it again, the muscles have not changed; then why this sudden incapacity? The cause remaining identically the same, whence comes it that the effect varies to such a degree?
"Ah!" says an objector, "you are talking of involuntary pressure, and say nothing about voluntary pressure, of fraud, in short. Don't you see that the cheaters may be present at one sitting and not appear at another, that they may act one day and not give themselves the trouble on the next?"
I will reply very simply, and by facts.
"The cheaters are absent when we do not succeed!" But it has happened many a time that our personnel has not been changed in any way. The same persons, absolutely the same, have passed from a state of remarkable power to a state of comparative impotence. And that is not all. If there exists no operator whose presence has preserved us from failures, no more does any exist whose absence has rendered us incapable of success. With and without each one of the members of the chain we have succeeded in performing all the experiments,—all without exception.
But 'the cheaters do not take so much pains every day!' The pains would be great indeed, and those who infer fraud little think what prodigies they are invoking. The accusation is an absurdity which verges on silliness, and its silliness removes its sting. One does not take offense at things like that. But come now, let us suppose for the moment that Valleyres were peopled with disciples of Bosco, thatprestidigitation were generally practised there, and that it had been thrust under our very eyes for five months, and under the eyes of numerous and very suspicious witnesses without a single case of perfidy having been pointed out. We have so well concealed our game that we have invented a secret telegraphic code for the experiment of reading numbers, a particular turn of the finger for moving the most enormous masses, a method of gradually lifting tables that we do not seem to touch. We are all liars, all; for we have been mutually watching each other for a long time now, and do not denounce anybody. Nay, more, the contagion of our vices is so swift to take that, as soon as we admit a stranger, a hostile witness, into the chain, he becomes our accomplice; he voluntarily closes his eyes to the transmission of signals, to muscular efforts, to the repeated and prolonged suspicious actions of his next neighbors in the chain! Well and good; suppose we grant all that, we shall not have got farther along for that. It will still remain to be explained why our cheaters sometimes do nothing at the very moment when it would be to their interest to succeed. It has happened, indeed, that a certain sitting at which we had many witnesses and a great desire to convince turned out to be a mediocre one. Such and such another, under the same conditions, was, on the contrary, a brilliant success.
There you have real and important inequalities, and they dare to talk to us of muscular action and of fraud.
Fraud and muscular action! Here for instance is a fine opportunity to put them to the proof. We have just placed a weight on the table. This weight is inert and cannot be accessory to any device. Fraud is all around it perhaps, but it is not in the tubs of sand. This weight is equally divided among the three legs of the table, and they are going to prove it by each one rising in turn. The total load weighs 165 pounds, and we scarcely dare to increase it, for, as it is, it was enough, one day, to break our very solid table. Very well; now let someone try to move this weight. Since muscular action and fraud must explain everything, it will be easy for them to put the mass in motion. Now they cannot do it. Their fingers contract and the knuckles whiten without their obtaining a singlelevitation, whereas, some moments later, levitations will take place at the touch of the same fingers, which gently graze the table's top and make no effort at all, as any one may easily convince himself.
Certain very ingenious scientific rules of measurement, for the invention of which I cannot claim the credit, put us in the way of translating into figures the effort which the rotation or levitation of the table demands, when loaded in the way just described. With the above-mentioned weight of 165 pounds, rotation is secured by means of a lateral traction of about 17½ pounds, while levitation is only obtained by a perpendicular pressure of 132 pounds at least (which I will reduce, however, to 110, in deference to the presumed wishes of the critic, and on the supposition that the pressure might not be absolutely vertical). Several deductions are to be drawn from these figures.
In the first place, muscular action may cause the table to turn, but it cannot lift it. As a matter of fact, the ten operators have one hundred fingers applied to its surface. Now, the vertical, or quasi-vertical, pressure of each finger cannot exceed twelve ounces on the average, the chain being composed as it is. They only develop, then, a total pressure of 66 pounds, which is quite insufficient to produce levitation.
In the next place, this striking thing befalls, that the phenomenon which muscular action could easily produce is precisely the one that we most rarely and with the greatest difficulty obtain, and that the phenomenon which muscular action could not compass is the one the most habitually realized when the chain is formed. Why does not our involuntary impulse always make the table turn? Why should not our "fraud" always procure such a triumph? Why, as a general thing, do we only succeed in effecting that which is mechanically impossible?
I advise people who like to make fun of table-turnings not to investigate them too closely, and to beware of giving too careful attention to our supreme demonstration,—that of movements without contact, for it will leave them not the slightest pretext for incredulity.
Thus the fact is established. Multiplied experiments,diverse and irrefutable proofs, which are, moreover, joined in the closest solidarity, give to the fluidic action the stamp of complete certainty. Those who have had the patience to follow me thus far will have felt their suspicions vanishing one after another, and their faith in the new phenomenon more and more strengthened. They will have made good what we ourselves have substantiated and made good; for no one has opposed more difficulties to table-turning than have we, no one has shown himself more inquisitorial and exacting respecting them.
It is not our fault if the results have been conclusive (and more and more so), nor ours the blame if they have reciprocally confirmed each other, if they have ended by forming one body and taking on the character of perfect evidence. To study, to compare, to repeat and repeat again, and to finally exclude all that admits of doubt or question—this was our duty. Nor have we failed to perform it. I make no affirmations in these reports which I have not proved over and over again.
Such are the memorable experiments of the Count de Gasparin. Their worth will be appreciated by all who read them. I have been anxious to reproduce these careful reports; for they establish of themselvesthe absolute and undeniable reality of these movements that contradict the normal law of gravitation. Let us hear the Count's explanatory hypotheses.
The reader will have noticed the care I have taken to confine myself to the verification of the facts, without hazarding any explanatory hypothesis. If I have employed the word "fluid," it was to avoid circumlocutions. Strict scientific precision would have demanded that I always write "the fluid, the force, or physical agent whatever it may be." I shall be pardoned for having been a little less exact than this in my language. It was enough that my thought was perfectly clear. That we have to do with a fluid, properly so called, in the phenomena of table turning and lifting I cannot absolutely affirm. I affirm that there is anagent, and that this agentis not supernatural, that it isphysical, imparting to physical objects the movements which our will determines.Our will, I have said. And this is in fact the fundamental idea we have gathered out of this subject of a physical agent. It is this which characterizes it, and it is this also which compromises it in the eyes of a good many folks. They might, perhaps, be resigned to a new agent, if it were the necessary and exclusive product of the hands forming the chain, if only it were true that certain positions or certain acts insured its manifestation. But this is not the case with it: the mental and the physical must combine in order to give it birth. Here are hands that tire themselves out in forming the chain, and yet obtain no movement: the will has not been mingled in the act. Here is a will that commands in vain: the hands have not been placed in a suitable position.We have thrown light upon both these sides of the phenomenon, for they are both essential.Another fact has been noted by us, and ought to enter into a description of the physical agent in question: this agent inheres in the persons and not in the table. Let the operators, when they are in rapport, pass to a new table and encircle it: they will be able immediately to exercise all their authority over it; their will will continue to dispose of the physical agent and to make use of it for rapping numbers mentally selected by persons present or for producing movements without contact.Such are the facts. The explanation of them will come later. It is, however, very natural to want to find this at once, and to make hypotheses which may be regarded as possible, if not true. I have taken the risk of doing this, and I do not repent of it. Was it not imperative to prove to our opponents that they have not even the pretext of "a scientific impossibility"? Hypotheses have their legitimate place and their utility, even if they are incorrect. If they are admissible in themselves, that is sufficient, for that defends the facts to which they are applied from the accusation of monstrosity. The critic has no longer the right to demand the previous question.Seeing that it was asked for on all sides, I have risked the following statement:You assert that our pretensions are false, for the simple reason that theycannot betrue! Very well. But, at all events, allow me to lay before you certain postulates. Suppose, in the first place, that you do not know everything, that the moral and even the material nature of man have obscurities which you have not been able to remove. Suppose that the smallest blade of grass springing up in the field, that the smallest grain reproducing its kind, that the finger of your hand in the act of executing the order you give it, enclose mysteries that surpass the powers of the learned doctors to fathom, and which they would declare absurd if they were not compelled to recognize them as real. Then, in the second place, suppose that certain men who will so to do, and whose hands are joined one to another in a certain way, give birth to a fluid or to a special kind of force. I do not ask you to admit that such force exists; you will only agree with me that it is possible. There is no natural law opposed to it that I know of.Now, let us take one more step. The will disposes of this fluid. It gives an impulse to external objects only when we will it, and in quarters selected by us. Would there be anything impossible in this? Is it an unheard-of thing that we transmit movement to matter that is outside of ourselves? Why, we do so every day, and every instant; our mechanical action is nothing more or less than this. The horrible thing in your eyes doubtless is that we do not act mechanically! But there is something besides mechanical action in this world. There are physical causes of movement that are something else than this. The caloric that penetrates a living body produces dilatation there; that is to say, universal movement. The loadstone placed in the neighborhood of a piece of iron attracts it, and makes it leap across the intervening space."Yes," some one will exclaim, "we should make no objection, provided your pretended fluid did not obey one special direction in its progress. If it went straight on, as a blind force, well and good! It would then be like the caloric, that dilates everything it meets in its passage. Itwould be like the magnet which attracts indiscriminately toward a fixed point all the particles of iron in its vicinity. As for you, your invention of the theory of a rotative fluid calls vividly to mind the explanation of the dormitive properties of opium."It is impossible to more completely misunderstand things. No one dreams of a "rotative fluid." All we maintain is, that, when the fluid is emitted and imparts either repulsion or lateral attraction to a piece of furniture resting on legs, a very simple mechanical law transforms the lateral action into rotation.I do not say, "The tables turn because my fluid is rotative." I say, "The tables turn, because, when they receive an impelling force or undergo an attraction, they cannot help turning." Stated in this way, it is a little less naïve. Consequently, I should be under no obligation to undertake the cause of the poor university scholar of theMalade Imaginaire, and defend his famous reply: "Opium facit dormire quia est in eo virtus dormitiva" ("opium puts people to sleep because it has the sleep-producing virtue or property"). Nevertheless, I can't help it, out it must come: I find the reply an excellent one. I doubt whether the savants have found a better one to this day, and I advise them to resign themselves sometimes to the following kind of reasoning: "Opium puts us to sleep because it puts us to sleep; things are because they are." In other words, I see the facts and do not know the causes. I do not know. "I do not know!" terrible words, which one finds difficulty in pronouncing! Now, I suspect very strongly that the sly roguishness of Molière is for the benefit of the doctors, who pretend to know everything, invent explanations which do not explain, and do not know how to accept the facts while waiting for more light.But there is more to come. The hypothesis of the fluid (a pure hypothesis, remember) must still prove that it is a hypothesis reconcilable with the different circumstances of the phenomenon. The table does not merely turn: it lifts its legs up, it raps numbers mentally indicated to it; in a word, it obeys the will, and obeys it so well that the removal of contact does not terminate its obedience. The impellingforce or lateral attraction which account for rotations cannot account for levitations.But why? Because the will directs the fluid now into one leg of the table, now into another. Because the table identifies itself with us, after a fashion, becomes a limb of our own body, and produces movements thought of by us in the same manner as our arm produces them. Because we have no conscious knowledge of the direction imparted to the fluid, and govern the movements of the table without imagining that any kind of fluid or force whatever is in action.In all our acts, in all without exception, we have no consciousness of the direction imparted by our will. When you explain to me how I lift my hand, I will explain to you how I make the table-leg rise from the floor. I "willed to raise my hand." Yes, and I also willed to lift this table-leg. As for the executing of the mandates of the will, the putting into play of the muscles required to lift the hand, or of the fluid-power required to lift the table-leg, I have no knowledge of what passes in me apropos of this. Strange mystery, and one which ought to inspire in us a little modesty! There is in me an executive power, a power of such a nature that, when I have willed such or such an act, it addresses detailed orders to the different muscles and sets in motion a hundred complicated movements to bring about a final result which has been merely thought of, merely willed. That miracle goes on within me, and I understand it not at all, and never shall understand it. Do you not agree that the same executive power can give to the fluid the directions it gives to the muscles? I have willed to play a sonata on the piano, and, unknown to me, something within me has given orders to hundreds of thousands of muscular acts. I have willed that the leg of this table should be lifted up, and, unknown to me, something within me has directed the attractions and impulsions of the fluid to the designated place.The hypothesis of a fluid is, then, defensible. It accords with the nature of things and with the nature of man. I have no wish to go farther and furnish at once a definitive explanation. But I am not worrying. Let the facts oncebe admitted, and explanations will not be wanting. What seems impossible now will seem very simple then. About incontestable things no trouble is made. We are so constituted that, after we have asserted the impossibility of everything we do not comprehend, we declare comprehensible all that we have recognized as real. People are everywhere to be met with who shrug their shoulders when you speak to them of table-turnings and who make nothing of the Puck-like performance of the electric current in putting the girdle of its circuit around the earth in the fraction of a moment, and who find the miracle of the transmission of the mental and moral qualities of the fathers to the children a very simple thing to understand! The tables of the psychic experimenter cannot escape the common lot. Their phenomena, absurd to-day, are to-morrow self-evident.
The reader will have noticed the care I have taken to confine myself to the verification of the facts, without hazarding any explanatory hypothesis. If I have employed the word "fluid," it was to avoid circumlocutions. Strict scientific precision would have demanded that I always write "the fluid, the force, or physical agent whatever it may be." I shall be pardoned for having been a little less exact than this in my language. It was enough that my thought was perfectly clear. That we have to do with a fluid, properly so called, in the phenomena of table turning and lifting I cannot absolutely affirm. I affirm that there is anagent, and that this agentis not supernatural, that it isphysical, imparting to physical objects the movements which our will determines.
Our will, I have said. And this is in fact the fundamental idea we have gathered out of this subject of a physical agent. It is this which characterizes it, and it is this also which compromises it in the eyes of a good many folks. They might, perhaps, be resigned to a new agent, if it were the necessary and exclusive product of the hands forming the chain, if only it were true that certain positions or certain acts insured its manifestation. But this is not the case with it: the mental and the physical must combine in order to give it birth. Here are hands that tire themselves out in forming the chain, and yet obtain no movement: the will has not been mingled in the act. Here is a will that commands in vain: the hands have not been placed in a suitable position.
We have thrown light upon both these sides of the phenomenon, for they are both essential.
Another fact has been noted by us, and ought to enter into a description of the physical agent in question: this agent inheres in the persons and not in the table. Let the operators, when they are in rapport, pass to a new table and encircle it: they will be able immediately to exercise all their authority over it; their will will continue to dispose of the physical agent and to make use of it for rapping numbers mentally selected by persons present or for producing movements without contact.
Such are the facts. The explanation of them will come later. It is, however, very natural to want to find this at once, and to make hypotheses which may be regarded as possible, if not true. I have taken the risk of doing this, and I do not repent of it. Was it not imperative to prove to our opponents that they have not even the pretext of "a scientific impossibility"? Hypotheses have their legitimate place and their utility, even if they are incorrect. If they are admissible in themselves, that is sufficient, for that defends the facts to which they are applied from the accusation of monstrosity. The critic has no longer the right to demand the previous question.
Seeing that it was asked for on all sides, I have risked the following statement:
You assert that our pretensions are false, for the simple reason that theycannot betrue! Very well. But, at all events, allow me to lay before you certain postulates. Suppose, in the first place, that you do not know everything, that the moral and even the material nature of man have obscurities which you have not been able to remove. Suppose that the smallest blade of grass springing up in the field, that the smallest grain reproducing its kind, that the finger of your hand in the act of executing the order you give it, enclose mysteries that surpass the powers of the learned doctors to fathom, and which they would declare absurd if they were not compelled to recognize them as real. Then, in the second place, suppose that certain men who will so to do, and whose hands are joined one to another in a certain way, give birth to a fluid or to a special kind of force. I do not ask you to admit that such force exists; you will only agree with me that it is possible. There is no natural law opposed to it that I know of.
Now, let us take one more step. The will disposes of this fluid. It gives an impulse to external objects only when we will it, and in quarters selected by us. Would there be anything impossible in this? Is it an unheard-of thing that we transmit movement to matter that is outside of ourselves? Why, we do so every day, and every instant; our mechanical action is nothing more or less than this. The horrible thing in your eyes doubtless is that we do not act mechanically! But there is something besides mechanical action in this world. There are physical causes of movement that are something else than this. The caloric that penetrates a living body produces dilatation there; that is to say, universal movement. The loadstone placed in the neighborhood of a piece of iron attracts it, and makes it leap across the intervening space.
"Yes," some one will exclaim, "we should make no objection, provided your pretended fluid did not obey one special direction in its progress. If it went straight on, as a blind force, well and good! It would then be like the caloric, that dilates everything it meets in its passage. Itwould be like the magnet which attracts indiscriminately toward a fixed point all the particles of iron in its vicinity. As for you, your invention of the theory of a rotative fluid calls vividly to mind the explanation of the dormitive properties of opium."
It is impossible to more completely misunderstand things. No one dreams of a "rotative fluid." All we maintain is, that, when the fluid is emitted and imparts either repulsion or lateral attraction to a piece of furniture resting on legs, a very simple mechanical law transforms the lateral action into rotation.
I do not say, "The tables turn because my fluid is rotative." I say, "The tables turn, because, when they receive an impelling force or undergo an attraction, they cannot help turning." Stated in this way, it is a little less naïve. Consequently, I should be under no obligation to undertake the cause of the poor university scholar of theMalade Imaginaire, and defend his famous reply: "Opium facit dormire quia est in eo virtus dormitiva" ("opium puts people to sleep because it has the sleep-producing virtue or property"). Nevertheless, I can't help it, out it must come: I find the reply an excellent one. I doubt whether the savants have found a better one to this day, and I advise them to resign themselves sometimes to the following kind of reasoning: "Opium puts us to sleep because it puts us to sleep; things are because they are." In other words, I see the facts and do not know the causes. I do not know. "I do not know!" terrible words, which one finds difficulty in pronouncing! Now, I suspect very strongly that the sly roguishness of Molière is for the benefit of the doctors, who pretend to know everything, invent explanations which do not explain, and do not know how to accept the facts while waiting for more light.
But there is more to come. The hypothesis of the fluid (a pure hypothesis, remember) must still prove that it is a hypothesis reconcilable with the different circumstances of the phenomenon. The table does not merely turn: it lifts its legs up, it raps numbers mentally indicated to it; in a word, it obeys the will, and obeys it so well that the removal of contact does not terminate its obedience. The impellingforce or lateral attraction which account for rotations cannot account for levitations.
But why? Because the will directs the fluid now into one leg of the table, now into another. Because the table identifies itself with us, after a fashion, becomes a limb of our own body, and produces movements thought of by us in the same manner as our arm produces them. Because we have no conscious knowledge of the direction imparted to the fluid, and govern the movements of the table without imagining that any kind of fluid or force whatever is in action.
In all our acts, in all without exception, we have no consciousness of the direction imparted by our will. When you explain to me how I lift my hand, I will explain to you how I make the table-leg rise from the floor. I "willed to raise my hand." Yes, and I also willed to lift this table-leg. As for the executing of the mandates of the will, the putting into play of the muscles required to lift the hand, or of the fluid-power required to lift the table-leg, I have no knowledge of what passes in me apropos of this. Strange mystery, and one which ought to inspire in us a little modesty! There is in me an executive power, a power of such a nature that, when I have willed such or such an act, it addresses detailed orders to the different muscles and sets in motion a hundred complicated movements to bring about a final result which has been merely thought of, merely willed. That miracle goes on within me, and I understand it not at all, and never shall understand it. Do you not agree that the same executive power can give to the fluid the directions it gives to the muscles? I have willed to play a sonata on the piano, and, unknown to me, something within me has given orders to hundreds of thousands of muscular acts. I have willed that the leg of this table should be lifted up, and, unknown to me, something within me has directed the attractions and impulsions of the fluid to the designated place.
The hypothesis of a fluid is, then, defensible. It accords with the nature of things and with the nature of man. I have no wish to go farther and furnish at once a definitive explanation. But I am not worrying. Let the facts oncebe admitted, and explanations will not be wanting. What seems impossible now will seem very simple then. About incontestable things no trouble is made. We are so constituted that, after we have asserted the impossibility of everything we do not comprehend, we declare comprehensible all that we have recognized as real. People are everywhere to be met with who shrug their shoulders when you speak to them of table-turnings and who make nothing of the Puck-like performance of the electric current in putting the girdle of its circuit around the earth in the fraction of a moment, and who find the miracle of the transmission of the mental and moral qualities of the fathers to the children a very simple thing to understand! The tables of the psychic experimenter cannot escape the common lot. Their phenomena, absurd to-day, are to-morrow self-evident.
These experiments of Count de Gasparin and his associates have been known for over half a century, and it is really incomprehensible that even the fact of the levitation of tables and of their movements has continued to be denied. Verily, if the tables are sometimes light, it must be confessed that the human race is a little heavy.
As to the theory, the hypothesis of the fluid,—felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas(Happy the man who can know the cause of things)—I shall return to this matter in the chapter on explanatory theories. But it is incontestable that, in such experiences, we act by means of an invisible force emanating from us. One must be blind not to admit that.
After a series of experiments so admirably conducted we can understand that the author might well be allowed to indulge in a little derision of obstinately prejudiced unbelievers. In closing this chapter, I cannot forego the pleasure of citing Count de Gasparin apropos of the learned negations of Babinet and his emulators of the Institute.
The savants are not the only ones to stand on their dignity. I also stand on mine, and I make bold to think that a certificate signed with my name would not be rated by anybody as a piece of imposture or frivolity. It is known that I am in the habit of weighing my words; it is known that I love the truth, and that I will not sacrifice it on any consideration; it is known that I prefer to admit an error rather than persist in it; and when, after a long-continued inquiry, I persist with a firmer and profounder conviction than ever, the import or scope of the declaration I make is not to be misapprehended.I can tell you, in the next place, that the testimony of the eyes has, in my opinion, a scientific value. Independently of instruments and figures, on which I set the highest values, I believe that the trueseeingof things may serve. I believe that this also is of itself an instrument. If a sufficient number of good pairs of eyes have ascertained and proved, ten, twenty, a hundred times, that a table is put in motion without contact; if, furthermore, the explanation of the fact by fraudulent or involuntary contacts passes the limits which must be assigned to incredulity, the conclusion is clear. Nobody is warranted in crying out: "You have neither fluidometer nor alembic; you do not give a specimen of your physical agent in a bottle; you do not describe how it acts upon a column of mercury or upon the dip of a needle. We don't believe you, for you have done nothing but see.""I do not believe you because you have done nothing but see!" "I do not believe you because I have not seen with my own eyes!" So many pedants, so many objections. They hardly take the trouble to agree among themselves; in a war waged against the tables any weapon is fair, nothing comes amiss.I do not wish to forget that scientists were still talking only of rotations at the moment when Faraday invented his disks.[54]In the presence of a phenomenon so inadequate, and, let us admit it, so suspicious, we can understand howthe savants showed themselves sceptical and contented themselves with flimsy refutations. They proportioned the number and size of their weapons to the appearance of the enemy. The one among them who showed the most penetration, and who proposed the most plausible explanation, is most assuredly Chevreul. His theory of the tendency to movement is incontestably true. It explains how the objects we suspend from our finger finally take a vibratory movement in the direction indicated by our will. I am not astonished that some have thought this theory sufficient to explain how experimenters can, in the end, impart a rotation to the table and participate in the movement themselves. I need not say that our proved levitations of weights, and our movements without contact, will not henceforth permit anyone to take refuge in such an explanation. If all the tendencies to movement were united into one they would not be able to produce at a distance an impelling power, nor move a mass that mechanical action could not set in motion.Really, the learned doctors ought not to throw out to the public these explanations which do not explain. They ought rather to get to work and show us, in fact, how to set about the lifting directly and mechanically of a weight of 220 pounds without applying to the task a force of 220 pounds.But they prefer to use insulting expressions, and then proceed to invent some theory or other which has only one little fault—that it has no legs to walk with. The recent article of M. Babinet in theRevue des Deux Mondesis a masterpiece in its way. If I needed to be convinced of the reality of the phenomena of table-turning, etc., I should most assuredly have been convinced by the reading of this refutation of it.In the opinion of M. Babinet, the phenomena of the tables offer no difficulty whatever! Happy science of physics, happy science of mechanics which has an answer ready for everything! We poor, ignorant fellows thought we had detected something extraordinary, and did not know we were merely obeying two extremely elementary laws,—the law of unconscious movements, and, above all, that of nascentmovements, movements the power of which seems to surpass that of developed movements.As far as regards unconscious movements, M. Babinet adds nothing to previous explanations—nothing but the story of that lord (an English lord, he says) whose horse was so admirably trained that it seemed as if it were only necessary for one to think the movement one wished to have him execute, and he instantly realized it. I am thoroughly convinced, as is M. Babinet, that the aforesaid lord gave an impulse to the bridle without suspecting it, and I am just as thoroughly convinced that the experimenters whose hands are touching a table may exert a pressure of which they are not conscious. Only—I think there should be some proportion between the cause and the effect. Suppose the movements are unconscious: they are none the less vigorous for all that. The burden is upon M. Babinet and his followers, to prove that the very same fingers that in vain clench themselves till they are stiff in the endeavor to lift a weight of eighty-eight pounds, will lift double this weight by simply being unconscious that they are making any effort.My honorable and learned opponent will not hear of movements obtained without contact. "Everything that has been said about action exercised at a distance ought to be banished to the realm of fiction." The judgment is curt and summary. Movements without contact are a fiction,—first because they are impossible; secondly because powdered soapstone has hindered the rotation of a table; and, finally, because perpetual movement is impossible.Movements at a distance are impossible! To be strictly logical, M. Babinet ought to have stopped there, remembering the reply made by Henry IV to the magistrates who had thus begun an address to him:"We did not give a salute of cannon on the approach of Your Majesty, and that for three good reasons. In the first place, because we had no cannon—""That reason is sufficient," said the king.We are fain to believe that M. Babinet himself has little doubt about his "impossibility." He has acted wisely in doing so; for this impossibility is based entirely on avicious circle of reasoning. "Is there a single known example of movement produced without a force acting from the outside? No. Well, movement at a distance would very plainly take place by an active external force. Therefore movement at a distance is impossible." I feel very much disposed to say to M. Babinet, in the technical language of the schools, that his major premise is true and that his conclusion would be legitimate if his minor were not purely and simply a begging of the question. You claim that there is no active force exterior to the table which lifts it without the touch of the hands. But that is precisely the point at issue between us. A fluid is an external active force. It is handy for my critic, indeed, to begin by establishing this axiom. Now (he says), there is no fluid, or analogous physical agent, in the case of the tables;thereforethere is no effect produced.The learned gentlemen, Faraday, Babinet, and others, do not limit themselves to objections derived from nascent or unconscious movements, small causes producing great effects. They have still another method of proceeding. If an experiment has succeeded it has no longer any value. Oh, if one could succeed in performing such another experiment, well and good! But this would not hinder the new experiment from becoming insignificant in its turn and giving place to a new desideratum. The phrasing runs somewhat in this way:"You are doing such and such a thing. Very well; but now let us see you do a different thing. You are employing such or such a method; be pleased to be contented with those which we prescribe you. To succeed in your way is not enough; you must succeed in ours. Your way is not scientific; it runs contrary to the traditions. We shut the door in the face of facts if they do not come in the regulation claw-hammer coat of full dress. We shall pay no attention to your experiments if our experimental apparatus does not figure in them."Strange way of verifying and establishing the results of experiments! You begin by changing the conditions under which they are produced. You might as well say to the man who has seen the harvesting of barley in Upper Egyptin January, "I will believe it when I see it done before my eyes in Bourgogne." One can understand, of course, how an unreasonable and troublesome fastidiousness might be shown regarding travellers' tales. But scientific experiments are of another character. In the presence of facts so evident, it is almost incredible that they wish to impose upon us instruments, needles, and mechanical devices. The idea of introducingbecausesandthereforesinto an investigation in which the real nature of the acting force is a mystery to all the world!Polemical essays are not scientific studies. In general, they are the direct opposite. When persons who have seen nothing, who have not devoted any considerable portion of their energy and time to experimentation, who have perhaps been present only at some ridiculous rotations of centre-tables, take their pen in hand for the purpose of exposing theories or giving lofty reprimands to experimenters, I do not look at them in the light of scientific students.I am convinced that a man never really studies that which he declaresa priorito have no sense in it. If attacks are studies, there is no lack of them, and (I may add) never will be. At the time when the Academy of Medicine buried the report of M. Husson and published what everybody in Europe persisted in calling a refusal to examine, there was issued every morning a paper against magnetism; every morning some new writer vociferated that the partisans of magnetism were imbeciles, and proposed an explanatory system of his own. If you call that making a study, then I grant that they have studied table-turnings, for there certainly has been no dearth of insults and of theories about these phenomena. They have received every attention, except that no one was willing to inspect, experiment, listen, and read.Twice, a month apart, the Institute has announced (without protest from anybody whatever) to the students of table-turnings that it was shelving papers relating to that topic; that it was not obliged to occupy itself with nonsense; that there was a place in its archives for lucubrations of that kind; namely, the place to which were consigned papers on perpetual motion.Oh, Molière! why are you not present with us? But, in reality, you are here. Your genius has limned with ineffaceable lines that everlasting disease of venerable big-wigs and mouldy specialists,—disdain of the laity, respect for their fellow-members, idolatry of the past. A most singular deformity, this! And it appears in all ages, in various disguises, in the midst of all branches of human activity, now in the name of religion, now in that of medicine, and again in the name of science or of art. Yes, even surviving the wreck of revolutions which spare nothing, appearing even within the walls of learned academies the members of which write for the furtherance of the great movements of modern progress, one thing remains,—the spirit of partisanship, of cliques, the spirit of tradition, the superstitious regard for forms.Really, it would seem as if people must be still taking Bible oaths like those in the baccalaureate ceremony at the end of Molière'sMalade Imaginaire. M. Foucault is fond of this scene, and will therefore not take it ill if I recall to his mind a couple of stanzas:Essere in omnibusConsultationibusAncieni aviso,Aut bono,Aut mauvaiso.—Juro!De non jamais te servireDe remediis alcunisQuam de ceux soulement doctæ facultatis,Maladus dut-il crevare,Et mori de suo malo.—Juro![55]If you don't call that a refusal to examine, I don't know what the words mean in good French.
The savants are not the only ones to stand on their dignity. I also stand on mine, and I make bold to think that a certificate signed with my name would not be rated by anybody as a piece of imposture or frivolity. It is known that I am in the habit of weighing my words; it is known that I love the truth, and that I will not sacrifice it on any consideration; it is known that I prefer to admit an error rather than persist in it; and when, after a long-continued inquiry, I persist with a firmer and profounder conviction than ever, the import or scope of the declaration I make is not to be misapprehended.
I can tell you, in the next place, that the testimony of the eyes has, in my opinion, a scientific value. Independently of instruments and figures, on which I set the highest values, I believe that the trueseeingof things may serve. I believe that this also is of itself an instrument. If a sufficient number of good pairs of eyes have ascertained and proved, ten, twenty, a hundred times, that a table is put in motion without contact; if, furthermore, the explanation of the fact by fraudulent or involuntary contacts passes the limits which must be assigned to incredulity, the conclusion is clear. Nobody is warranted in crying out: "You have neither fluidometer nor alembic; you do not give a specimen of your physical agent in a bottle; you do not describe how it acts upon a column of mercury or upon the dip of a needle. We don't believe you, for you have done nothing but see."
"I do not believe you because you have done nothing but see!" "I do not believe you because I have not seen with my own eyes!" So many pedants, so many objections. They hardly take the trouble to agree among themselves; in a war waged against the tables any weapon is fair, nothing comes amiss.
I do not wish to forget that scientists were still talking only of rotations at the moment when Faraday invented his disks.[54]In the presence of a phenomenon so inadequate, and, let us admit it, so suspicious, we can understand howthe savants showed themselves sceptical and contented themselves with flimsy refutations. They proportioned the number and size of their weapons to the appearance of the enemy. The one among them who showed the most penetration, and who proposed the most plausible explanation, is most assuredly Chevreul. His theory of the tendency to movement is incontestably true. It explains how the objects we suspend from our finger finally take a vibratory movement in the direction indicated by our will. I am not astonished that some have thought this theory sufficient to explain how experimenters can, in the end, impart a rotation to the table and participate in the movement themselves. I need not say that our proved levitations of weights, and our movements without contact, will not henceforth permit anyone to take refuge in such an explanation. If all the tendencies to movement were united into one they would not be able to produce at a distance an impelling power, nor move a mass that mechanical action could not set in motion.
Really, the learned doctors ought not to throw out to the public these explanations which do not explain. They ought rather to get to work and show us, in fact, how to set about the lifting directly and mechanically of a weight of 220 pounds without applying to the task a force of 220 pounds.
But they prefer to use insulting expressions, and then proceed to invent some theory or other which has only one little fault—that it has no legs to walk with. The recent article of M. Babinet in theRevue des Deux Mondesis a masterpiece in its way. If I needed to be convinced of the reality of the phenomena of table-turning, etc., I should most assuredly have been convinced by the reading of this refutation of it.
In the opinion of M. Babinet, the phenomena of the tables offer no difficulty whatever! Happy science of physics, happy science of mechanics which has an answer ready for everything! We poor, ignorant fellows thought we had detected something extraordinary, and did not know we were merely obeying two extremely elementary laws,—the law of unconscious movements, and, above all, that of nascentmovements, movements the power of which seems to surpass that of developed movements.
As far as regards unconscious movements, M. Babinet adds nothing to previous explanations—nothing but the story of that lord (an English lord, he says) whose horse was so admirably trained that it seemed as if it were only necessary for one to think the movement one wished to have him execute, and he instantly realized it. I am thoroughly convinced, as is M. Babinet, that the aforesaid lord gave an impulse to the bridle without suspecting it, and I am just as thoroughly convinced that the experimenters whose hands are touching a table may exert a pressure of which they are not conscious. Only—I think there should be some proportion between the cause and the effect. Suppose the movements are unconscious: they are none the less vigorous for all that. The burden is upon M. Babinet and his followers, to prove that the very same fingers that in vain clench themselves till they are stiff in the endeavor to lift a weight of eighty-eight pounds, will lift double this weight by simply being unconscious that they are making any effort.
My honorable and learned opponent will not hear of movements obtained without contact. "Everything that has been said about action exercised at a distance ought to be banished to the realm of fiction." The judgment is curt and summary. Movements without contact are a fiction,—first because they are impossible; secondly because powdered soapstone has hindered the rotation of a table; and, finally, because perpetual movement is impossible.
Movements at a distance are impossible! To be strictly logical, M. Babinet ought to have stopped there, remembering the reply made by Henry IV to the magistrates who had thus begun an address to him:
"We did not give a salute of cannon on the approach of Your Majesty, and that for three good reasons. In the first place, because we had no cannon—"
"That reason is sufficient," said the king.
We are fain to believe that M. Babinet himself has little doubt about his "impossibility." He has acted wisely in doing so; for this impossibility is based entirely on avicious circle of reasoning. "Is there a single known example of movement produced without a force acting from the outside? No. Well, movement at a distance would very plainly take place by an active external force. Therefore movement at a distance is impossible." I feel very much disposed to say to M. Babinet, in the technical language of the schools, that his major premise is true and that his conclusion would be legitimate if his minor were not purely and simply a begging of the question. You claim that there is no active force exterior to the table which lifts it without the touch of the hands. But that is precisely the point at issue between us. A fluid is an external active force. It is handy for my critic, indeed, to begin by establishing this axiom. Now (he says), there is no fluid, or analogous physical agent, in the case of the tables;thereforethere is no effect produced.
The learned gentlemen, Faraday, Babinet, and others, do not limit themselves to objections derived from nascent or unconscious movements, small causes producing great effects. They have still another method of proceeding. If an experiment has succeeded it has no longer any value. Oh, if one could succeed in performing such another experiment, well and good! But this would not hinder the new experiment from becoming insignificant in its turn and giving place to a new desideratum. The phrasing runs somewhat in this way:
"You are doing such and such a thing. Very well; but now let us see you do a different thing. You are employing such or such a method; be pleased to be contented with those which we prescribe you. To succeed in your way is not enough; you must succeed in ours. Your way is not scientific; it runs contrary to the traditions. We shut the door in the face of facts if they do not come in the regulation claw-hammer coat of full dress. We shall pay no attention to your experiments if our experimental apparatus does not figure in them."
Strange way of verifying and establishing the results of experiments! You begin by changing the conditions under which they are produced. You might as well say to the man who has seen the harvesting of barley in Upper Egyptin January, "I will believe it when I see it done before my eyes in Bourgogne." One can understand, of course, how an unreasonable and troublesome fastidiousness might be shown regarding travellers' tales. But scientific experiments are of another character. In the presence of facts so evident, it is almost incredible that they wish to impose upon us instruments, needles, and mechanical devices. The idea of introducingbecausesandthereforesinto an investigation in which the real nature of the acting force is a mystery to all the world!
Polemical essays are not scientific studies. In general, they are the direct opposite. When persons who have seen nothing, who have not devoted any considerable portion of their energy and time to experimentation, who have perhaps been present only at some ridiculous rotations of centre-tables, take their pen in hand for the purpose of exposing theories or giving lofty reprimands to experimenters, I do not look at them in the light of scientific students.
I am convinced that a man never really studies that which he declaresa priorito have no sense in it. If attacks are studies, there is no lack of them, and (I may add) never will be. At the time when the Academy of Medicine buried the report of M. Husson and published what everybody in Europe persisted in calling a refusal to examine, there was issued every morning a paper against magnetism; every morning some new writer vociferated that the partisans of magnetism were imbeciles, and proposed an explanatory system of his own. If you call that making a study, then I grant that they have studied table-turnings, for there certainly has been no dearth of insults and of theories about these phenomena. They have received every attention, except that no one was willing to inspect, experiment, listen, and read.
Twice, a month apart, the Institute has announced (without protest from anybody whatever) to the students of table-turnings that it was shelving papers relating to that topic; that it was not obliged to occupy itself with nonsense; that there was a place in its archives for lucubrations of that kind; namely, the place to which were consigned papers on perpetual motion.
Oh, Molière! why are you not present with us? But, in reality, you are here. Your genius has limned with ineffaceable lines that everlasting disease of venerable big-wigs and mouldy specialists,—disdain of the laity, respect for their fellow-members, idolatry of the past. A most singular deformity, this! And it appears in all ages, in various disguises, in the midst of all branches of human activity, now in the name of religion, now in that of medicine, and again in the name of science or of art. Yes, even surviving the wreck of revolutions which spare nothing, appearing even within the walls of learned academies the members of which write for the furtherance of the great movements of modern progress, one thing remains,—the spirit of partisanship, of cliques, the spirit of tradition, the superstitious regard for forms.
Really, it would seem as if people must be still taking Bible oaths like those in the baccalaureate ceremony at the end of Molière'sMalade Imaginaire. M. Foucault is fond of this scene, and will therefore not take it ill if I recall to his mind a couple of stanzas:
Essere in omnibusConsultationibusAncieni aviso,Aut bono,Aut mauvaiso.—Juro!De non jamais te servireDe remediis alcunisQuam de ceux soulement doctæ facultatis,Maladus dut-il crevare,Et mori de suo malo.—Juro![55]
If you don't call that a refusal to examine, I don't know what the words mean in good French.
With such ingenious candor and with such authority did the Count Agénor de Gasparin express himself in the year 1854. It seems to me that the experiments made known in this volume furnish abundant evidence that he is right.
Yet I have still friends, at the Institute, who smile with the utmost scorn when I ask their opinion on the phenomena of the levitation of tables, the movement of objects without perceptible cause, unexplained noises in haunted houses, communication of thought at a distance, premonitory dreams, and apparitions of the dying. Although these unexplained phenomena have undeniably been proved to be facts of occurrence, those learned friends of mine remain convinced that "such things as that are impossible."
THE RESEARCHES OF PROFESSOR THURY
The insufficient explanations of Chevreul and of Faraday, the scientific negations of Babinet, the conscientious experiments of the Count de Gasparin had led several scientists to study the question from the purely scientific point of view. Among them was a highly-gifted savant whom I visited at Geneva,—M. Marc Thury, professor of natural history and of astronomy in the Academy of that city. We are indebted to him for a remarkable and little known monograph,[56]which it is my duty to condense for this volume.
When we were in the presence of new phenomena (writes Thury) there was only one alternative:First, either to reject, in the name of common sense and of the results acquired by science, all the pretended phenomena of tables as so many childish sports unworthy of taking up the time of the true scientist or scholar, since, on the very face of it, their absurdity is evident; in short, to let the matter drop by refusing to give it serious attention.Or, second, to make a determined examination of it at whatever cost, to study the fact in its details in order to lay fully open all the sources of illusion by which the public is duped, separate the true from the false, and throw a strong light on all aspects of the phenomenon, physical, physiological, and psychological, in order that the matter may be so superabundantly clear and evident that no further excuse for doubt may remain.
When we were in the presence of new phenomena (writes Thury) there was only one alternative:
First, either to reject, in the name of common sense and of the results acquired by science, all the pretended phenomena of tables as so many childish sports unworthy of taking up the time of the true scientist or scholar, since, on the very face of it, their absurdity is evident; in short, to let the matter drop by refusing to give it serious attention.
Or, second, to make a determined examination of it at whatever cost, to study the fact in its details in order to lay fully open all the sources of illusion by which the public is duped, separate the true from the false, and throw a strong light on all aspects of the phenomenon, physical, physiological, and psychological, in order that the matter may be so superabundantly clear and evident that no further excuse for doubt may remain.
Superfluous to say, the last method is the one adopted by Thury (as it was by Gasparin). He considers it to be the only suitable, efficient, and legitimate method.
Darkness saps the strength of science. Its strongest hold lies in bringing everything out into the full light of day. Here, then, lies the question: In these curious phenomena of the tables, is the explanation so clear that you can lay a finger on the causes of illusion and clearly show that there is in them no new and unknown element at work?
I do not think (replies the Genevan professor) that we have attained to that degree of evidence. I wish only one proof, the explanation of what has already been attempted.If, then, it is well established that the common explanation is not self-evident, in the eyes of all intelligent and sensible men, there remains a task to do, a duty owed to science,—that of throwing full light upon the phenomenon in question; and this task cannot be exchanged for the easier one of treating with irony or disdain those who have gone astray in the path that Science refused to illuminate.
I do not think (replies the Genevan professor) that we have attained to that degree of evidence. I wish only one proof, the explanation of what has already been attempted.
If, then, it is well established that the common explanation is not self-evident, in the eyes of all intelligent and sensible men, there remains a task to do, a duty owed to science,—that of throwing full light upon the phenomenon in question; and this task cannot be exchanged for the easier one of treating with irony or disdain those who have gone astray in the path that Science refused to illuminate.
The savants are, however, excusable for not going too quick (let us admit with Thury).
What! a perturbative force lurking, by the hypothesis, in the human organism sufficiently powerful to lift tables, and which yet had never produced the slightest derangement in the thousands of experiments that physicists are daily making in their laboratories! Their balances, responsive to the weight of a tenth of a milligram, their pendulums whose oscillations take place with mathematical regularity, had never felt the slightest disturbing effect of these forces, whose source is there present wherever there is a man and a volition! Now, it is the ardent wish of the physicist that the experiment shall always exactly tally the forecasts of theory. Must he then admit an unknown disturbing force?
And, even without going outside of the limits of thehuman organism, think, if the organism is unable to move the smallest part of itself when the part is deprived of muscles and nerves, or, when a single hair of our head is absolutely withdrawn from the influence of the will—think, I say, how much less (and with how much stronger reason) that nervous organism of ours would seem to be able to move inert bodies residing outside the limits of our own frames!
But, if there is a profound improbability in the thing, still, we cannot say that it is impossible. No one can showa priorithe impossibility of the phenomena described, as they demonstrate the impossibility of perpetual motion or the squaring of the circle. Consequently, no one has the right to treat as absurd the evidences which tend to confirm the experiments. Provided these evidences are furnished by judicious and truthful men, then they are worth the trouble of examination. If this logical course had been followed—the only true and equitable one,—the work would now have been done, and the learned men would have the glory thereof.
Thury begins by examining the experiments of Count de Gasparin at Valleyres.
The experiments of Valleyres (he writes) tend to establish the two following principles:1. The will, in a certain condition of the human organism, can act, from a distance, upon inert bodies, and by an agency different from that of muscular action.2. Under the same conditions, thought can be communicated directly, though unconsciously, from one individual to another.As long as we were ignorant of any other facts than those resulting from a movement effected by contact with the fingers of the hand, in a way in which the mechanical action of the fingers became possible, the results of the experiments upon the table were always of difficult and doubtful interpretation. These results had to be necessarily based upon an estimate of the mechanical force exerted by the handscompared with the strength of the resistance to be overcome. But the mechanical force of the hands is difficult to measure exactly, under the conditions necessary to produce the phenomena.Yet over and above that plan of work there remained two methods, of operation to employ.a.So to dispose the apparatus employed that the movement to be produced shall be one that the mechanical action of the fingers could not compass.b.To set up movements at a distance without any kind of contact.The following were our first experiments:A.Mechanical action rendered impossible.The first experiment attempted along this line gave wholly negative results. We suspended a table by a cord that passed over two pulleys fixed in the ceiling and had a counter-weight attached to the free end. It was easy, by regulating this counterpoise, to balance in the air either the total weight of the table or only a fraction, more or less great, thereof.As a matter of fact, the table hung almost in equilibrium with the weight, one only of its three legs touching the floor. The operators placed their hands upon the top surface. We acted at first in a circular direction, a disposition of the force the efficacy of which had been established by previous experiments. We then tried in vain to lift the table by detaching it from the floor. No positive result was obtained.We had already (during the previous year) had a table suspended to a dynamometer, and the efforts of four mesmerizers were powerless to relieve the dynamometer of an appreciable fraction of the weight of the table.But the conditions necessary for the production of the phenomena were still unknown to us, and, consequently, when the experiments tried led to negative results, we had to try others, without pressing too hastily for inferences and conclusions. It was thus that we secured the results which I am going to describe.Experiment with the Swinging Table.—We needed a piece of apparatus of such a kind that the mechanical action of the fingers would be rendered impossible. For this purpose we had a table made with a top about 33 inches indiameter, and a central trifurcated leg underneath. This table bore a close resemblance to the one which had served our purposes up to that time, and could turn like its predecessor. Still, the new table was capable of being transformed in a moment into a mechanism such as I shall now describe.The summit of the tripod becomes the fulcrum of a lever of the first order which is able to balance freely in a vertical plane. This lever, whose two arms are equal to each other and to the radius of the table bears at one of its extremities the table-top, held by the edge, and, toward the other extremity, a counterpoise which just balances the weight of the table, but which can be modified at will. To the under side of the table-top is fastened a leg resting on the floor.After the necessary preliminary rotations, the table is harnessed up in its second form. Equilibrium is first secured, then 3-5 of a pound is taken from the counterpoise. The force required to lift the top by its centre is then 4 ounces, and previous experiments have proved that the adherence of the fingers of the operators (the top was polished, and not varnished), together with the possible effects of elasticity, form a total lower than that figure. Yet the top is lifted by the action of the fingers placed lightly on its upper surface, at a certain distance from the edge. Then the counterpoise is diminished; the mechanical difficulty of lifting is augmented, yet still it takes place. The weight is again diminished, and more and more, up to the limit of the apparatus. The force necessary to lift the top is then 8 1-5 pounds, and the counterpoise has been relieved of 24 pounds; yet the levitation is easily accomplished. The number of the operators is gradually lessened from eleven to six. The difficulty goes on increasing, yet six operators still suffice; but five are not enough. Six operators lift 9 1-3 pounds,—an average for each man of about 1½ pounds.We now possess, in the apparatus just described, a gauge or instrument of measurement.B. The following movements were produced without contact:The table on which were made the trials I witnessed hasa diameter of 32 inches and weighs 31 pounds. An average tangential force of 4 2-5 pounds, which may be raised to 6 3-5 pounds, according to the greater or less inequalities of the floor, applied to the edge of the table, is necessary to give to it a movement of rotation. Ten is usually the number of persons who operate about this table.In order to assure ourselves of the absence of all contact, we placed our eye on a level with the table in such a way as to see light between our fingers and the surface of the table, the fingers themselves remaining a little less than an inch above the top. Usually, two persons would be observing at once. For instance, M. Edmond Boissier was observing the legs of the table, while I was watching the top. Then we exchanged rôles. Sometimes two persons took places at the extremities of one and the same diameter, the one opposite the other, for the purpose of watching the top of the table. Several times we saw it move, although we could not detect the slightest touch by the fingers. According to my calculations, it would require the contact of at least 100 fingers, or the light pressure of thirty, acting voluntarily and fraudulently, to explain in terms of mechanics the movements we observed.Much more frequently still we obtained balancings without contact, balancings which sometimes went so far as to tip the table entirely over. To explain in terms of mechanical movement the effects we observed, we should have to admit the involuntary contact of 84 fingers, or the light pressure of 25, or two hands acting with intent to deceive. But these suppositions, also, are not at all admissible.Nevertheless, we always felt that someone might present the objection that it was difficult to observe these operations with precision, and we were constantly urging M. Gasparin to convince the doubters and sceptics in the matter of the non-contact of the fingers by means of some mechanical device. Out of this arose the last experiment made at that time, and the most conclusive of all. A light film of flour was almost instantaneously spread over the table by means of a sulphur bellows such as is used in vineyards. The movement of the chain of hands above the table set it whirling. Then the film of flour was examinedand found to be inviolate from the touch of hands. Several repetitions on different days always gave the same results.
The experiments of Valleyres (he writes) tend to establish the two following principles:
1. The will, in a certain condition of the human organism, can act, from a distance, upon inert bodies, and by an agency different from that of muscular action.
2. Under the same conditions, thought can be communicated directly, though unconsciously, from one individual to another.
As long as we were ignorant of any other facts than those resulting from a movement effected by contact with the fingers of the hand, in a way in which the mechanical action of the fingers became possible, the results of the experiments upon the table were always of difficult and doubtful interpretation. These results had to be necessarily based upon an estimate of the mechanical force exerted by the handscompared with the strength of the resistance to be overcome. But the mechanical force of the hands is difficult to measure exactly, under the conditions necessary to produce the phenomena.
Yet over and above that plan of work there remained two methods, of operation to employ.
a.So to dispose the apparatus employed that the movement to be produced shall be one that the mechanical action of the fingers could not compass.
b.To set up movements at a distance without any kind of contact.
The following were our first experiments:
A.Mechanical action rendered impossible.The first experiment attempted along this line gave wholly negative results. We suspended a table by a cord that passed over two pulleys fixed in the ceiling and had a counter-weight attached to the free end. It was easy, by regulating this counterpoise, to balance in the air either the total weight of the table or only a fraction, more or less great, thereof.
As a matter of fact, the table hung almost in equilibrium with the weight, one only of its three legs touching the floor. The operators placed their hands upon the top surface. We acted at first in a circular direction, a disposition of the force the efficacy of which had been established by previous experiments. We then tried in vain to lift the table by detaching it from the floor. No positive result was obtained.
We had already (during the previous year) had a table suspended to a dynamometer, and the efforts of four mesmerizers were powerless to relieve the dynamometer of an appreciable fraction of the weight of the table.
But the conditions necessary for the production of the phenomena were still unknown to us, and, consequently, when the experiments tried led to negative results, we had to try others, without pressing too hastily for inferences and conclusions. It was thus that we secured the results which I am going to describe.
Experiment with the Swinging Table.—We needed a piece of apparatus of such a kind that the mechanical action of the fingers would be rendered impossible. For this purpose we had a table made with a top about 33 inches indiameter, and a central trifurcated leg underneath. This table bore a close resemblance to the one which had served our purposes up to that time, and could turn like its predecessor. Still, the new table was capable of being transformed in a moment into a mechanism such as I shall now describe.
The summit of the tripod becomes the fulcrum of a lever of the first order which is able to balance freely in a vertical plane. This lever, whose two arms are equal to each other and to the radius of the table bears at one of its extremities the table-top, held by the edge, and, toward the other extremity, a counterpoise which just balances the weight of the table, but which can be modified at will. To the under side of the table-top is fastened a leg resting on the floor.
After the necessary preliminary rotations, the table is harnessed up in its second form. Equilibrium is first secured, then 3-5 of a pound is taken from the counterpoise. The force required to lift the top by its centre is then 4 ounces, and previous experiments have proved that the adherence of the fingers of the operators (the top was polished, and not varnished), together with the possible effects of elasticity, form a total lower than that figure. Yet the top is lifted by the action of the fingers placed lightly on its upper surface, at a certain distance from the edge. Then the counterpoise is diminished; the mechanical difficulty of lifting is augmented, yet still it takes place. The weight is again diminished, and more and more, up to the limit of the apparatus. The force necessary to lift the top is then 8 1-5 pounds, and the counterpoise has been relieved of 24 pounds; yet the levitation is easily accomplished. The number of the operators is gradually lessened from eleven to six. The difficulty goes on increasing, yet six operators still suffice; but five are not enough. Six operators lift 9 1-3 pounds,—an average for each man of about 1½ pounds.
We now possess, in the apparatus just described, a gauge or instrument of measurement.
B. The following movements were produced without contact:
The table on which were made the trials I witnessed hasa diameter of 32 inches and weighs 31 pounds. An average tangential force of 4 2-5 pounds, which may be raised to 6 3-5 pounds, according to the greater or less inequalities of the floor, applied to the edge of the table, is necessary to give to it a movement of rotation. Ten is usually the number of persons who operate about this table.
In order to assure ourselves of the absence of all contact, we placed our eye on a level with the table in such a way as to see light between our fingers and the surface of the table, the fingers themselves remaining a little less than an inch above the top. Usually, two persons would be observing at once. For instance, M. Edmond Boissier was observing the legs of the table, while I was watching the top. Then we exchanged rôles. Sometimes two persons took places at the extremities of one and the same diameter, the one opposite the other, for the purpose of watching the top of the table. Several times we saw it move, although we could not detect the slightest touch by the fingers. According to my calculations, it would require the contact of at least 100 fingers, or the light pressure of thirty, acting voluntarily and fraudulently, to explain in terms of mechanics the movements we observed.
Much more frequently still we obtained balancings without contact, balancings which sometimes went so far as to tip the table entirely over. To explain in terms of mechanical movement the effects we observed, we should have to admit the involuntary contact of 84 fingers, or the light pressure of 25, or two hands acting with intent to deceive. But these suppositions, also, are not at all admissible.
Nevertheless, we always felt that someone might present the objection that it was difficult to observe these operations with precision, and we were constantly urging M. Gasparin to convince the doubters and sceptics in the matter of the non-contact of the fingers by means of some mechanical device. Out of this arose the last experiment made at that time, and the most conclusive of all. A light film of flour was almost instantaneously spread over the table by means of a sulphur bellows such as is used in vineyards. The movement of the chain of hands above the table set it whirling. Then the film of flour was examinedand found to be inviolate from the touch of hands. Several repetitions on different days always gave the same results.
Such are the principal facts which establish the reality of the phenomenon. Thury next takes up the more difficult investigation of courses.