Mysterious Psychic Forces Part 2

The medium next places her hands with ours upon the table, and the taps heard in the table are stronger than in the preceding case.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE I. COMPLETE LEVITATION OF A TABLE IN PROFESSOR FLAMMARION'S SALON THROUGH MEDIUMs.h.i.+P OF EUSAPIA PALADINO.]

These taps audible in the table, this "typtology" well known to Spiritualists, have been frequently attributed to some kind of trickery or another, to a cracking muscle or to various actions of the medium. After the comparative study I have made of these special occurrences I believe I am right in affirming that this fact also is not less certain than the first. Rappings, as is well known, are obtained in all kinds of rhythms, and responses to all questions are obtained through simple conventions, by which it is agreed, for instance, that three taps shall mean "yes" and two mean "no," and that, while the letters of the alphabet are being read, words can be dictated by taps made as each letter is named.

3. During our experiments, while we four persons are seated around a table asking for a communication which does not arrive, an arm-chair, placed about twenty-four inches from the medium's foot (upon which I have placed my foot to make sure that she cannot use hers),--an arm-chair, I say, begins to move, and comes sliding up to us. I push it back; it returns. It is a stuffed affair (_pouf_), very heavy, but easily capable of gliding over the floor. This thing happened on the 29th of last March, and again on April 5th.

It could have been done by drawing the chair with a string or by the medium putting her foot sufficiently far out. But it happened over and over again (five or six times), automatically moving, and that so violently that the chair jumped about the floor in a topsy-turvy fas.h.i.+on and ended by falling bottom side up without anybody having touched it.

4. Here is a fourth case re-observed this year, after having been several times verified by me, notably in 1898.

Curtains near the medium, but which it is impossible for her to touch, either with the hand or the foot, swell out their whole length, as if inflated by a gusty wind. I have several times seen them envelop the heads of the spectators as if with cowls of Capuchin monks.

5. Here is a fifth instance, authenticated by me several times, and always with the same care.

While I am holding one hand of Eusapia in mine, and one of my astronomical friends, tutor at the Ecole Polytechnique, is holding the other, we are touched, first one and then the other, upon the side and on the shoulders, as if by an invisible hand.

The medium usually tries to get together her two hands, held separately by each of us, and by a skilful subst.i.tution to make us believe we hold both when she has succeeded in disengaging one. This fraud being well known by us, we act the part of forewarned spectators, and are positive that we have each succeeded in holding her hands apart. The touchings in this experiment seem to proceed from an invisible ent.i.ty and are rather disagreeable. Those which take place in the immediate vicinity of the medium _could_ be due to fraud; but to some of them this explanation is inapplicable.

This is the place to remark that, unfortunately, the extraordinary character of the phenomena is in direct ratio with the absence of light, and we are continually asked by the medium to turn down the gas, almost to the vanis.h.i.+ng point: "_Meno luce! meno luce!_" ("Less light, less light").

This, of course, is advantageous to all kinds of fraud. But it is a condition no more obligatory than the others. There is in it no implication of a threat.

We can get a large number of mediumistic phenomena with a light strong enough for us to distinguish things with certainty. Still, it is a fact that light is unfavorable to the production of phenomena.

This is annoying. Yet we have no right to impose the opposite condition.

We have no right to demand of nature conditions which happen to suit us.

It would be just as reasonable to try to get a photographic negative without a dark room, or to draw electricity from a rotating machine in the midst of an atmosphere saturated with moisture. Light is a natural agent capable of producing certain effects and of opposing the production of others.

This aphorism calls to my mind an anecdote in the life of Daguerre, related in the first edition of this book.

One evening this ill.u.s.trious natural philosopher meets an elegant and fas.h.i.+onable woman in the neighborhood of the Opera House, of which he was at that time the decorator. Enthusiastic over his progress in natural philosophy, he happens to speak of his photogenic studies. He tells her of a marvellous discovery by which the features of the face can be fixed upon a plate of silver. The lady, who is a person of plain common sense, courteously laughs in his face. The savant goes on with his story, without being disconcerted. He even adds that it is possible for the phenomenon to take place instantaneously when the processes become perfected. But he has his pains for his trouble. His charming companion is not credulous enough to accept such an extravagance. Paint without colors and without a brus.h.!.+

design without pen or crayon! as if a portrait could get painted all by itself, etc. But the inventor is not discouraged, and, to convince her, offers to make her portrait by this process. The lady is unwilling to be thought a dupe and refuses. But the skilful artist pleads his cause so well that he overcomes her objections. The blond daughter of Eve consents to pose before the object-gla.s.s. But she makes one condition,--only one.

Her beauty is at its best in the evening, and she feels a little faded in the garish light of day.

"If you could take me in the evening--"

"But, madame, it is impossible--"

"Why? You say that your invention reproduces the face, feature by feature. I prefer my features of the evening over those of the morning."

"Madame, it is the light itself which pencils the image, and without it I can do nothing."

"We will light a chandelier, a lamp, do anything to please you."

"No, madame, the light of day is imperative."

"Will you please tell me why?"

"Because the light of the sun exhibits an intense activity, sufficient to decompose the iodide of silver. So far, I have not been able to take a photograph except in full sunlight."

Both remained obstinate, the lady maintaining that what could be done at ten o'clock in the morning could also easily be done at ten o'clock in the evening. The inventor affirmed the contrary.

So, then, all you have to do, gentlemen, is to forbid the light to blacken iodine, or order it to blacken lime, and condemn the photographer to develop his negative in full light. Ask Electricity why it will pa.s.s instantaneously from one end to the other of an iron wire a thousand miles long and why it refuses to traverse a thread of gla.s.s half an inch long.

Beg the night-blooming flowers to expand in the day, or those that only bloom in the light not to close at dusk. Give me the explanation of the respiration of plants, diurnal and nocturnal, and of the production of chlorophyll and how plants develop a green color in the light; why they breathe in oxygen and exhale carbonic acid gas during the night, and reverse the process during the day. Change the equivalents of simple substances in chemistry, and order combinations to be produced. Forbid azotic acid to boil at the freezing temperature, and command water to boil at zero. You have only to ask these accommodations and nature will obey you, gentlemen, depend upon it.

A good many phenomena of nature only occur in obscurity. The germs of plants, animals, man, in forming a new being, work their miracle only in the dark.

Here, in a flask, is a mixture of hydrogen and chlorine in equal volumes.

If you wish to preserve the mixture, you must keep the flask in the dark, whether you want to or not. Such is the law. As long as it remains in the dark, it will retain its properties. But suppose you take a schoolboy notion to expose the thing to the action of light. Instantly a violent explosion is heard; the hydrogen and the chlorine disappear, and you find in the flask a new substance,--chloridic acid. There is no use in your finding fault: darkness respects the two substances, while light explodes them.

If we should hear a malignant sceptic of some clique or other say, "I will only believe in jack-o'-lanterns when I see them in the light of day,"

what should we think of his sanity? About what we should think if he should add that the stars are not certainties, since they are only seen at night.

In all the observations and experiments of physics there are conditions to be observed. In those of which we are speaking a too strong light seems to imperil the success of the experiment. But it goes without saying that precautions against deception ought to increase in direct ratio with the decrease of visibility and other means of verification.

Let us return to our experiments.

6. Taps are heard in the table, or it moves, rises, falls back, raps with its leg. A kind of interior movement is produced in the wood, violent enough, sometimes, to break it. The round table I made use of (with others) in my home was dislocated and repaired more than once, and it was by no means the pressure of the hands upon it that could have caused the dislocations. No, there is something more than that in it: there is in the actions of the table the intervention of mind, of which I have already spoken.

The table is questioned, by means of the conventional signs described a few pages back, and it responds. Phrases are rapped out, usually ba.n.a.l and without any literary, scientific, or philosophical value. But, at any rate, words are rapped out, phrases are dictated. These phrases do not come of their own accord, nor is it the medium who taps them--consciously--either with her foot or her hand, or by the aid of a snapping muscle, for we obtain them in seances held without professional mediums and at scientific reunions where the existence of trickery would be a thing of the greatest absurdity. The mind of the medium and that of the experimenters most a.s.suredly have something to do with the mystery.

The replies obtained generally tally the intellectual status of the company, as if the intellectual faculties of the persons present were exterior to their brains and were acting in the table wholly unknown to the experimenters themselves. How can this thing be? How can we compose and dictate phrases without knowing it. Sometimes the ideas broached seem to come from a personality unknown to the company, and the hypothesis of spirits quite naturally presents itself. A word is begun; some one thinks he can divine its ending; to save time, he writes it down; the table parries, is agitated, impatient. It is the wrong word; another was being dictated. There is here, then, a psychic element which we are obliged to recognize, whatever its nature may be when a.n.a.lyzed.

The success of experiments does not always depend on the will of the medium. Of course that is the chief element in it; but certain conditions independent of her are necessary. The psychical atmosphere created by the persons present has an influence that cannot be neglected. So the state of health of the medium is not without its influence. If he is fatigued, although he may have the best will in the world, the value of the results will be affected. I had a new proof of this thing, so often observed, at my house, with Eusapia Paladino, on May 30, 1906. She had for more than a month been suffering from a rather painful affection of the eyes; and furthermore her legs were considerably swollen. We were seven, of whom two lookers-on were sceptics. The results were almost nil; namely, the lifting, during scarcely two seconds of time, of a round table weighing about four pounds; the tipping up of one side of a four-legged table; and a few rappings. Still, the medium seemed animated by a real wish to obtain some result. She confessed to me, however, that what had chiefly paralyzed her faculties was the sceptical and sarcastic spirit of one of the two incredulous persons. I knew of the absolute scepticism of this man. It had not been manifested in any way; but Eusapia had at once divined it.

The state of mind of the by-standers, sympathetic or antipathetic, has an influence upon the production of the phenomena. This is an incontestable matter of observation. I am not speaking here merely of a tricky medium rendered powerless to act by a too close critical inspection, but also of a hostile force which may more or less neutralize the sincerest volition.

Is it not the same, moreover, in a.s.semblies, large or small, in conferences, in salons, etc.? Do we not often see persons of baleful and antipathetic spirit defeat at their very beginning the accomplishment of the n.o.blest purposes.

Here are the results of another sitting of the same medium held a few days afterwards.

On the 7th of June, 1906, I had been informed by my friend Dr. Ostwalt, the skilled oculist, who was at that time treating Eusapia, that she was to be at his house that evening and that perhaps I would be able to try a new experiment. I accepted with all the more readiness because the mother-in-law of the doctor, Mme. Werner, to whom I had been attached by a friends.h.i.+p of more than thirty years, had been dead a year, and had many a time promised me, in the most formal manner, to appear after her death for the purpose of giving completeness to my psychical researches by a manifestation, if the thing was possible. We had so often conversed on these subjects, and she was so deeply interested in them, that she had renewed her promise very emphatically a few days before her death. And at the same time she made a similar promise to her daughter and to her son-in-law.

Eusapia, also, on her part, grateful for the care she had received at the doctor's hands and for the curing of her eye, wished to be agreeable to him in any way she could.

The conditions, then, were in all respects excellent. I agreed with the doctor that we had before us four possible hypotheses, and that we should seek to fix on the most probable one.

_a._ What would take place might be due to fraud, conscious or unconscious.

_b._ The phenomena might be produced by a physical force emanating from the medium.

_c._ Or by one or several invisible ent.i.ties making use of this force.

_d._ Or by Mme. Werner herself.

We had on that evening some movements of the table and a complete lifting of the four feet to a height of about eight inches. Six of us sat around the table,--Eusapia, Madame and Monsieur Ostwalt, their son Pierre, sixteen years old, my wife and myself. Our hands placed above the table scarcely touched it, and were almost wholly detached at the moment it rose from the floor. No fraud possible. Full light.

The seance then continued in the dark. The two portieres of a great double-folding door, against which the medium was seated, her back to the door, were blown about for nearly an hour, sometimes so violently as to form something like a monk's hood on the head of the doctor and that of his wife.

This great door was several times shaken violently, and tremendous blows were struck upon it.