We tried to obtain words by means of the alphabet, but without success. (I will remark in this connection that Eusapia knows neither how to read nor to write.)
Pierre Ostwalt was able to write a word with the pencil. It seemed as if an invisible force was guiding his hand. The word he pencilled down was the first name of Mme. Werner, _well known to him_.
In spite of all our efforts, we were unable to obtain a single proof of ident.i.ty. Yet it would have been very easy for Mme. Werner to find one, as she had so solemnly promised us to do.
In spite of the announcement by raps that an apparition would appear which we would be permitted to see, we were only able to perceive a dim white form, devoid of precise outline, even when we manipulated the light so as to get almost complete darkness. From this new sitting the following conclusions are deduced:
_a._ Fraud cannot explain the phenomena, especially the levitation of the table, the violent blows and shakings given to the door, and the projection of the curtain into the room.
_b._ These phenomena are certainly produced by a force emanating from the medium, for they all occur in her immediate neighborhood.
_c._ This force is intelligent. But it is possible that this intelligence which obeys our requests is only that of the medium.
_d._ Nothing proves that the spirit evoked had any influence.
These propositions, however, will be examined and developed one by one in the pages that follow.
All the experiments described in this first chapter reveal to us unknown forces in operation. It will be the same in the chapters that follow.
These phenomena are so unexplained, so inexplicable, so incredible, that the simplest plan is to deny them, to attribute them all to fraud or to hallucination, and to believe that all the partic.i.p.ators are sand-blind.
Unfortunately for our opponents, this hypothesis is inadmissible.
Let me say here that there are very few men--and above all, women--whose spirit is completely _free_; that is, in a condition capable of accepting, without any preconceived idea, new or unexplained facts. In general, people are disposed to admit only those facts or things for which they are prepared by the ideas they have received, cherished, and maintained.
Perhaps there is not one human being in a hundred who is capable of making a mental record of a new impression, simply, freely, exactly, with the accuracy of a photographic camera. Absolute independence of judgment is a rare thing among men.
A single fact accurately observed, even if it should contradict all science, is worth more than all the hypotheses.
But only the independent minds, free from the cla.s.sic leading-strings which tie the dogmatists to their chairs, dare to study extra-scientific facts or consider them possible.
I am acquainted with erudite men of genius, members of the Academy of Sciences, professors at the university, masters in our great schools, who reason in the following way: "Such and such phenomena are impossible because they are in contradiction with the actual state of science. We should only admit what we can explain."
They call that scientific reasoning!
Examples.--Frauenhofer discovers that the solar spectrum is crossed by dark lines. These dark lines could not be explained in his time. Therefore we ought not to believe in them.
Newton discovers that the stars move _as if_ they were governed by an attractive force. This attraction could not be explained in his time. Nor is it explained to-day. Newton himself takes the pains to declare that he does not wish to explain it by an hypothesis. "_Hypotheses non fingo_" ("I do not make hypotheses"). So, after the reasoning of our pseudo-logicians, we ought not to admit universal gravitation. Oxygen combined with hydrogen forms water. How? We don"t know. Hence we ought not to admit the fact.
Stones sometimes fall from the sky. The Academy of Sciences of the eighteenth century, not being able to divine where they came from, simply denied the fact, which had been observed for thousands of years. They denied also that fish and toads can fall from the clouds, because it had not then been observed that waterspouts draw them up by suction and transport them from one place to another. A medium places his hand upon a table and seems actually to transmit to it independent life. It is inexplicable, therefore it is false. Yet that is the predominant method of reasoning of a great number of scholars. They are only willing to admit what is known and explained. They declared that locomotives would not be able to move, or, if they did succeed, railways would introduce no change in social relations; that the transatlantic telegraph would never transmit a despatch; that vaccine would not render immune; and at one time they stoutly maintained (this was long ago) that the earth does not revolve.
It seems that they even condemned Galileo. _Everything_ has been denied.
Apropos of facts somewhat similar to those we are here studying,--I mean the stigmata of Louise Lateau,--a very famous German scholar, Professor Virchow, closed his report to the Berlin Academy with this dilemma: _Fraud or Miracle_. This conclusion acquired a cla.s.sic vogue. But it was an error, for it is now known that stigmata are due neither to fraud nor miracle.
Another rather common objection is presented by certain persons apparently scientific. Confounding experience with observation, they imagine that a natural phenomenon, in order to be real, ought to be able to be produced at will, as in a laboratory. After this manner of looking at things, an eclipse of the sun would not be a real thing, nor a stroke of lightning which sets fire to a house, nor an aerolite that falls from the sky. An earthquake, a volcanic eruption, are phenomena of observation, not of experiment. But they none the less exist, often to the great damage of the human race. Now, in the order of facts that we are studying here, we can almost never experiment, but only observe, and this reduces considerably the range of the field of study. And, even when we do experiment, the phenomena are not produced at will: certain elements, several of which we have not yet been able to get hold of, intervene to cross, modify, and thwart them, so that for the most part we can only play the role of observers. The difference is a.n.a.logous to that which separates chemistry from astronomy. In chemistry we experiment: in astronomy we observe. But this does not hinder astronomy from being the most exact of the sciences.
Mediumistic phenomena that come directly under the observation, notably those I have described some pages back, have for me the stamp of absolute certainty and incontestability, and amply suffice to prove that unknown physical forces exist outside of the ordinary and established domain of natural philosophy. As a principle, moreover, this is an unimpeachable tenet.[5]
I could adduce still other instances, for example the following:
7. During seance experiments, phantoms often appear,--hands, arms, a head, a bust, an entire human figure. I was a witness of this thing, especially on July 27, 1897, at Montfort-l"Amaury (see Chapter III). M. de Fontenay having declared that he perceived an image or spirit over the table, between himself and me (we were sitting face to face, keeping watch over Eusapia, he holding one of her hands, and I the other), and I seeing nothing at all, I asked him to change places with me. And then I, too, perceived this spirit-shadow, the head of a bearded man, rather vaguely outlined, which was moving like a silhouette, advancing and retiring in front of a red lantern placed on a piece of furniture. I had not been able to see at first from where I sat, because the lantern was then behind me, and the spectral appearance was formed between M. de Fontenay and me. As this dark silhouette remained rather vague, I asked if I could not touch its beard. The medium replied, "Stretch out your hand." I then felt upon the back of my hand the brushing of a very soft beard.
This case did not have for me the same _absolute certainty_ as the preceding. There are degrees in the feeling of security we have in observations. In astronomy, even, there are stars at the limit of visibility. And yet in the opinion of all the partic.i.p.ators in the seance there was no trick. Besides, on another occasion, at my own home, I saw another figure, that of a young girl, as the reader will see in the third chapter.
8. That same day, at Montfort, in the course of the conversation, some one recalled the circ.u.mstance that the "spirits" have sometimes impressed on paraffin or putty or clay the print of their head or of their hands,--a thing that seems in the last degree absurd. But we bought some putty at a glazier"s and fixed up in a wooden box a perfectly soft cake. At the end of the seance there was the imprint of a head, of a face, in this putty.
In this case, no more than in the other, am I _absolutely certain_ there was no trickery. We will speak of it farther on.
Other manifestations will be noted in subsequent pages of this book.
Stopping right here, for the present, at the special point of view of the proved existence of unknown forces, I will confine myself to the six preceding cases, regarding them as incontestable, in the judgment of any man of good faith or of any observer. If I have considered these particular cases so early in the work, it is in response to readers of my works who have been begging me for a long time to give my _personal_ observations.
The simplest of these manifestations--that of raps, for example--is not a negligible a.s.set. There is no doubt that it is one or another of the experimenters, or their dynamic resultant, that raps in the table without knowing how. So, even if it should be a psychic ent.i.ty unknown to the mediums, it evidently makes use of them, of their physiological properties. Such a fact is not without scientific interest. The denials of scepticism prove nothing, unless it be that the deniers themselves have not observed the phenomena.
I have no other aim in this first chapter than to give a preliminary summary of the observed facts.
I do not desire to put forth in these first pages any explanatory hypothesis. My readers will themselves form an opinion from the narratives that follow, and the last chapter of the volume will be devoted to theories. Yet I believe it will be useful to call attention at once to the fact that matter is not, in reality, what it appears to be to our vulgar senses,--to our sense of touch, to our vision,--but that it is identical with energy, and is only a manifestation of the movement of invisible and imponderable elements. The universe is a dynamism. Matter is only an appearance. It will be useful for the reader to bear this truth in mind, as it will help him to comprehend the studies we are about to make.
The mysterious forces we are here studying are themselves manifestations of the universal dynamism with which our five senses put us very imperfectly into relation.
These things belong to the psychical order as well as to the physical.
They prove that we are living in the midst of an unexplored world, in which the psychic forces play a role as yet very imperfectly studied.
We have here a situation a.n.a.logous to that in which Christopher Columbus found himself on the evening of the day when he perceived the first hints of land in the New World. We are pushing our prow through an absolutely unknown sea.
CHAPTER II
MY FIRST SeANCES IN THE ALLAN KARDEC GROUP AND WITH THE MEDIUMS OF THAT EPOCH
One day in the month of November, 1861, under the Galeries de l"Odeon,[6]
I spied a book, the t.i.tle of which struck me,--_Le Livre des Esprits_ ("The Book of Spirits"), by Allan Kardec. I bought it and read it with avidity, several chapters seeming to me to agree with the scientific bases of the book I was then writing, _The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds_. I hunted up the author, who proposed that I should enter, as a free a.s.sociated member, the Parisian Society for Spiritualistic Studies, which he had founded, and of which he was president. I accepted, and by chance have just found the green ticket signed by him on the fifteenth day of November, 1861. This is the date of my debut in psychic studies. I was then nineteen, and for three years had been an astronomical pupil at the Paris Observatory. At this time I was putting the last touches to the book I just mentioned, the first edition of which was published some months afterwards by the printer-publisher of the Observatory.
The members came together every Friday evening in the a.s.sembly room of the society, in the little pa.s.sageway of Sainte Anne, which was placed under the protection of Saint Louis. The president opened the seance by an "invocation to the good spirits." It was admitted, as a principle, that invisible spirits were present there and revealed themselves. After this invocation a certain number of persons, seated at a large table, were besought to abandon themselves to their inspiration and to write. They were called "writing mediums." Their dissertations were afterwards read before an attentive audience. There were no physical experiments of table-turning, or tables moving or speaking. The president, Allan Kardec, said he attached no value to such things. It seemed to him that the instructions communicated by the spirits ought to form the basis of a new doctrine, of a sort of religion.
At the same period, but several years earlier, my ill.u.s.trious friend Victorien Sardou, who had been an occasional frequenter of the Observatory, had written, as a medium, some curious pages on the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter, and had produced picturesque and surprising designs, having as their aim to represent men and things as they appeared in this giant of worlds. He designed the dwellings of people in Jupiter. One of his sketches showed us the house of Mozart, others the houses of Zoroaster and of Bernard Palissy, who were country neighbors in one of the landscapes of this immense planet. The dwellings are ethereal and of an exquisite lightness. They may be judged of by the two figures here reproduced (Pl. II and III). The first represents a residence of Zoroaster, the second "the animals" quarters" belonging to the same. On the grounds are flowers, hammocks, swings, flying creatures, and, below, intelligent animals playing a special kind of ninepins where the fun is not to knock down the pins, but to put a cap on them, as in the cup and ball toy, etc.
These curious drawings prove indubitably that the signature "Bernard Palissy, of Jupiter," is apocryphal and that the hand of Victorien Sardou was not directed by a spirit from that planet. Nor was it the gifted author himself who planned these sketches and executed them in accordance with a definite plan. They were made while he was in the condition of mediumship. A person is not magnetized, nor hypnotized, nor put to sleep in any way while in that state. But the brain is not ignorant of what is taking place: its cells perform their functions, and act (doubtless by a reflex movement) upon the motor nerves. At that time we all thought Jupiter was inhabited by a superior race of beings. The spiritistic communications were the reflex of the general ideas in the air. To-day, with our present knowledge of the planets, we should not imagine anything of the kind about that globe. And, moreover, spiritualistic seances have never taught us anything upon the subject of astronomy. Such results as were attained fail utterly to prove the intervention of spirits. Have the writing mediums given any more convincing proofs of it than these? This is what we shall have to examine in as impartial a way as we can.
I myself tried to see if I, too, could not write. By collecting and concentrating my powers and allowing my hand to be pa.s.sive and unresistant, I soon found that, after it had traced certain dashes, and _o_"s, and sinuous lines more or less interlaced, very much as a four-year-old child learning to write might do, it finally did actually write words and phrases.
In these meetings of the Parisian Society for Spiritualistic Studies, I wrote for my part, some pages on astronomical subjects signed "Galileo."
The communications remained in the possession of the society, and in 1867 Allan Kardec published them under the head _General Uranography_, in his work ent.i.tled _Genesis_. (I have preserved one of the first copies, with his dedication.) These astronomical pages taught me nothing. So I was not slow in concluding that they were only the echo of what I already knew, and that Galileo had no hand in them. When I wrote the pages, I was in a kind of waking dream. Besides, my hand stopped writing when I began to think of other subjects.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II. HOUSE OF ZOROASTRE OF JUPITER FROM SOMNAMBULISTIC DRAWING BY VICTORIEN SARDOU.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III. ANIMALS" QUARTERS. HOUSE OF ZOROASTRE OF JUPITER FROM SOMNAMBULISTIC DRAWING BY VICTORIEN SARDOU.]