Our first trial had succeeded very badly. We used a coa.r.s.e 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 without contact 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 manoeuvres or pa.s.ses 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 subst.i.tutes 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 const.i.tutes a solid proof and I recommend a study of it to serious men. It is not thus that error proceeds. Illusions originating in accident, or chance, do not thus resist a long study, and do not pa.s.s 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-a-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-a-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 the _mixed character_ of 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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, that prestidigitation 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 ma.s.ses, 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 ma.s.s in motion. Now they cannot do it. Their fingers contract and the knuckles whiten without their obtaining a single levitation, 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 17-1/2 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 compa.s.s 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 themselves _the 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 circ.u.mlocutions. 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 an agent, and that this agent _is not supernatural_, that it is _physical_, 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, pa.s.s 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 a.s.sert that our pretensions are false, for the simple reason that they _cannot be_ true! 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 gra.s.s 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 surpa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce.
"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 pa.s.sage. It would 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 nave. Consequently, I should be under no obligation to undertake the cause of the poor university scholar of the _Malade 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 p.r.o.nouncing! Now, I suspect very strongly that the sly roguishness of Moliere 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 circ.u.mstances 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 impelling force 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 pa.s.ses 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 once be 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 const.i.tuted that, after we have a.s.serted 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 a.s.sociates 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.