"_She was hunting matches; for she was frightened in her sleep, and didn"t want to sleep without light._"
Sure enough, there were always matches in the drawer opened by Eusapia, except on this particular night. She therefore returned without getting any.
While listening to the explanation of the table, Eusapia shrugged her shoulders, but protested no longer.
Here, then, is a woman who, from time to time, has the power of pa.s.sing from one psychical state to another. Is it just to accuse such a creature of premeditated fraud, without the slightest medical and psychological examination, without the least attempt at verification?...
M. Ochorowicz adds here that, so far as he is concerned, the phenomena are not produced by a personality different from that of the medium, nor by a new independent occult force; but it is a special psychic condition which permits the vital _dynamism of the medium_ (the astral body of the occultists) _to act at a distance_, under certain exceptional conditions.
It is the only hypothesis which seems _necessary in the actual state of our knowledge_.
Why does the medium so often try to release her hand? So far as the Cambridge experimenters are concerned, the cause is very simple and always the same: she releases her hand in order to indulge in tricks. As a matter of fact, the reasons why she frees her hand are many and complicated.
Dr. Ochorowicz"s explanations are as follows:
1. Let me observe, in the first place, that Eusapia frequently releases her hand for no other reason than to touch her head, which is in pain at the moment of the manifestations. It is a natural reflex movement; and, in her case, it is a fixed habit. Since, more often than not, she does not notice that she is doing it, or at least fails to give warning to her controller, the darkness justifies suspicions.
2. Immediately before the mediumistic doubling of her personality, her hand is affected with hyperaesthesia and, consequently, the pressure of the hand of another makes her ill, especially in the dorsal quarter.
She then most frequently places the hand which is to be mediumistically active _above_ and not below that of the controller, trying to touch it as little as possible. When the doubling of the personality is complete, and the dynamic hand more or less materialized, that of the medium contracts and rests heavily upon the controller, exactly at the moment that the phenomenon takes place. She is then almost insensible and all shrunken together. In very good mediumistic conditions the doubling is easy and the initial hyperaesthesia of short duration. In this case the medium allows her hand to be completely covered and the feet of the controllers to be _upon_ hers, as was always the case in our seances at Rome in 1893; but, since that time, she can no longer endure that position, and rather prefers to be held by hands under the table.
3. In accordance with psychological laws, the hand always proceeds automatically in the direction of our thoughts (c.u.mberlandism). The medium acts by auto-suggestion, and the order to go as far as an indicated point is given by her brain simultaneously to the dynamic hand and the corporeal hand, since in the normal state they form only one. And since, immediately after the hyperaesthesia, the muscular sensation is excited and the hand grows benumbed, it sometimes happens (especially when the medium proceeds carelessly and does not properly govern her movements) that the dynamic hand remains in place, while her own hand goes in the indicated direction. The former, not being yet materialized, produces only a semblance of pressure; and another person, able to see a little in the darkness, will perceive nothing of it, and will even be able to ascertain by touch the absence of the medium"s hand from that of the controller. At the same time the hand of the medium is going in the direction of the object; and _still it may happen that it does not really reach it, acting, as it does, at a distance, by a dynamic prolongation_.
It is in this way that I explain the cases in which the hand, being released, has not yet been able to reach the point aimed at (physically inaccessible), as well as the numerous experiments made at Varsovie in full light, with a little bell hung in different ways, with compa.s.ses of different forms, with a very small table, etc.,--experiments in which Eusapia"s fingers were quite near, but did not touch, the object. I proved that there was no electric force at work in these cases, but that things occurred as if the arms of the medium were lengthened and acted invisibly, but _mechanically_. At Varsovie, when one of my friends M. Glowacki, took it into his head "that it was necessary to give the medium free rein, in order to discover her method," we had an entirely fraudulent seance and lost our time to no purpose. On the contrary, in a poor seance at l"ile Roubaud, we obtained some good phenomena after having frankly told the medium that she was cheating.
And here are the conclusions of the author upon "the Cambridge frauds":
1. Not only was _conscious_ fraud not proved on Eusapia at Cambridge, but not the slightest effort was made to do so.
2. _Unconscious_ fraud was proved in much larger proportions than in all the preceding experiments.
3. This negative result is vindicated by a blundering method little in accordance with the nature of the phenomena.
Such is also the opinion of Dr. J. Maxwell, and of all who are competent judges of the question.
To sum up, we see that the influence of preconceived ideas, opinions, and sentiments, upon the production of phenomena, is certain. When all the experimenters have nearly the same sympathetic inclination for this kind of research, and when they have decided to exercise sufficient "control"
(that is, watchful oversight) not to be the dupe of any mystification, and agree among themselves to accept the regrettable conditions of darkness necessary to the activity of these unknown radiations, and not to trouble in any way the apparent exigencies of the medium, then the resulting phenomena attain an extraordinary degree of intensity.[36]
But if discord reigns, if one or more of the company persistently spy upon the acts of the medium, with the conviction that he or she must be cheating, the results are very much like the progress of a sailing vessel impelled by several contrary winds. The medium simply marks time without advancing; and little but sterile results are secured. _Psychic forces are no less real than physical or chemical or mechanical forces._ In spite of the desire that we may have to convince prejudiced sceptics, it is advisable to invite only one of them at a time, and to place him next to the medium, in order that he may be at once astonished, shaken, and convinced. But in general this is not worth the trouble.
In the month of September, 1895, a new series of experiments was made at l"Agnelas, in the residence of Colonel de Rochas, president of the polytechnic school, with the a.s.sistance of Dr. Dariex, editor of the _Annales des sciences psychiques_, Count de Gramont (doctor of science), Dr. J. Maxwell, deputy of the attorney-general at the Court of Appeals in Limoges, Professor Sabatier, of the faculty of sciences at Montpellier, and Baron de Watteville, a licentiate in science. They confirmed all the preceding details.[37]
A similar series was held in September, 1896, at Tremezzo, in the rooms of the Blech family, then in summer residence at Lake Como; again at Auteuil, at the home of M. Marcel Mangin, with MM. Sully-Prudhomme, Dr. Dariex, Emile Desbeaux, A. Guerronnan, and Mme. Boisseaux also partic.i.p.ating. Let us stop for a moment to glance at this last seance.
I will first mention the photograph of the table suspended in the air, a levitation which did not leave any doubt in the mind of the experimenters, any more than it does in that of the observer who examines with attention this photograph (Pl. IX). The table descended slowly and the succession of images was registered by the photograph (same plate, Cut B). The following is an extract from the report by M. de Rochas upon this seance and the succeeding one:
_September 21._--The table rises off its four feet. M. Guerronnan has time to take a photograph of it, but he fears that it may not be good.
We beg Eusapia to begin again. She consents with good grace. The table is again lifted off its four feet. M. Mangin notifies M. Guerronnan who, from his post, could not see, and the table remains in the air until he has had time to take a picture of it (from three to four seconds at the most). The dazzling magnesium light enables us all to verify the reality of the phenomenon.
The curtain, hung in the corner of the room, suddenly blows out and covers my head. Then I feel in succession three pressures of a hand upon my head, the pressures growing stronger and stronger. I feel fingers which press as those of M. Sully-Prudhomme, my neighbor on the right, might do. I hold his left hand as a part of the chain of hands.
It is a hand, it is fingers, which have just pressed upon me so; but whose? I have continually had Eusapia"s right hand upon my left hand, which she seized and tightly held at the moment of the production of the phenomenon....
I throw back the curtain, which has remained upon my head, and we sit waiting. "_Meno luce_" ("less light") asks Eusapia. The lamp is turned down more, and the remaining light shut off by a screen.
Facing me there is a window with closed outside shutters, but through which filters the light of the street. In the silence, my attention is caught by the appearance of a hand, the small hand of a woman. I can see it, owing to the feeble light coming from the window.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IX
PHOTOGRAPH OF TABLE SUSPENDED.
THE TABLE FALLEN BACK.]
It is not the shadow of a hand: it is a hand of flesh (I do not add "and of bone," for I have the impression that it has no bones). This hand opens and closes three times, sufficiently long to permit me to say:
"Whose hand is this?--yours, Monsieur Mangin?"
"No."
"Then it is a materialization?"
"Undoubtedly: if you hold the medium"s right hand, I hold the other."
I had the _right hand_ of Eusapia on my left hand, and _her fingers were interlaced with mine_.
Now the hand which I saw was a _right hand_, stretched out and presented in profile. It remained for a moment motionless in the air, at about from twenty-four to twenty-eight inches above the table and thirty-six inches from Eusapia. As its immobility (I suppose) was the cause of my not seeing it, it therefore opened and closed: it was these movements which attracted my attention.
My favorable position in respect to the window, unfortunately permitted me alone to see this mysterious hand; but M. Mangin saw, at two separate times, not a hand, but the shadow of a hand outlined in profile upon the opposite window.
Eusapia turns her head in the direction of the curtain, behind which there is a leather-covered easy-chair, and, displacing the curtain, this chair comes and leans against me.
She takes my left hand, lifts it above the table the whole length of her right arm, and makes the feint of rapping in the air: the echo of three blows is heard on the table.
A little bell is placed before her. She stretches out her two hands to the right and the left of the bell at a distance of from three to four inches; then she draws back her hands toward her body, and, lo and behold! the bell comes gliding along over the table until it b.u.mps against something and falls over. Eusapia repeats the experiment several times. You would think that her hands were invisibly prolonged; and that seems to me to justify the term "ectenic force,"
which Professor Thury, of Geneva, gave in the year 1855 to this unknown energy.
I was just asking if she did not perchance have some invisible thread between her fingers, when suddenly, an irresistible itching made her put her left hand to her nose; her right had remained upon the table near the bell; the two hands at this moment were about two feet apart.
I observed carefully. Eusapia rested her left hand upon the table, some inches from the bell, and this was again set in motion.
Considering the gesture made by her, it would have been necessary, in order to perform this feat, to have a wonderfully elastic thread, absolutely invisible; for our eyes were, so to speak, upon the bell, and the light was abundant. My eyes were only a foot distant from the bell, at the utmost.
This was a certain and undeniable case, and Sully-Prudhomme returned to his home with me as thoroughly convinced as I am.
The poet of _Solitudes_ and of _Justice_, wrote on his part, as follows:
After a rather long wait, an architect"s stool came marching up all alone toward me. It grazed my left side, rose to the height of the table, and succeeded in placing itself upon it. As I lifted my hand, I felt it at once seized.
"Why do you take my hand?" I asked of my neighbor.
"It was not I," said he.