Chapter VI: The Experiments of Count De Gasparin (2)

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
circumlocutions. 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, pass 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 assert 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 grass 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
surpass 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 space.

"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 passage. 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 naive. 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 pronouncing! 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 circumstances 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 passes 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 constituted
that, after we have asserted 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 associates 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.

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 Institute.

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 passes the limits which
must be assigned to incredulity, the conclusion is clear. Nobody 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 assuredly 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
participate 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 mass 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 assuredly 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 surpass 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 analogous 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 Institute 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 superstitious 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 Institute, 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."