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 Inst.i.tute.
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 true _seeing_ of 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 pa.s.ses the limits which must be a.s.signed to incredulity, the conclusion is clear. n.o.body 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 how the 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 a.s.suredly 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 ma.s.s 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 the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ is a masterpiece in its way. If I needed to be convinced of the reality of the phenomena of table-turning, etc., I should most a.s.suredly 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 nascent movements, movements the power of which seems to surpa.s.s 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 a vicious 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 a.n.a.logous physical agent, in the case of the tables; _therefore_ there 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 Egypt in 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 introducing _becauses_ and _therefores_ into 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 declares _a priori_ to 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 Inst.i.tute 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, Moliere! 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 superst.i.tious 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 Moliere"s _Malade 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 omnibus Consultationibus Ancieni aviso, Aut bono, Aut mauvaiso._ --JURO!
_De non jamais te servire De remediis alcunis Quam de ceux soulement doctae 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 Agenor 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 Inst.i.tute, 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."
CHAPTER VII
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.
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.
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 the human 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 show _a priori_ the 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.