Some time before these observations I had met a gentleman who had told me of most wonderful phenomena occurring in his own family,--among them the palpable motion of solid bodies when no person was touching them or near them; and he had recommended me to go to a public medium in London (Mrs. Marshall), where I might see things equally wonderful.
Accordingly, in September, 1865, I began a series of visits to Mrs.
Marshall, generally accompanied by a friend,--a good chemist and mechanic, and of a thoroughly sceptical mind.
1. A small table, on which the hands of four persons were placed (including my own and Mrs. Marshall"s), rose up vertically about a foot from the floor, and remained suspended for about twenty seconds, while my friend, who was sitting looking on, could see the lower part of the table with the feet freely suspended above the floor.
2. While sitting at a large table, with Miss T. on my left and Mr. R.
on my right, a guitar which had been played in Miss T"s hand slid down onto the floor, pa.s.sed over my feet, and came to Mr. R., against whose legs it raised itself up till it appeared above the table. I and Mr.
R. were watching it carefully the whole time, and it behaved as if alive itself, or rather as if a small invisible child were by great exertions moving it and raising it up. These two phenomena were witnessed in bright gaslight.
3. A chair, on which a relation of Mr. R"s sat, was lifted up with her on it. Afterwards, when she returned to the table from the piano, where she had been playing, her chair moved away just as she was going to sit down. On drawing it up, it moved away again. After this had happened three times, it became apparently fixed to the floor, so that she could not raise it. Mr. R. then took hold of it, and found that it was only by a great exertion he could lift it off the floor. This sitting took place in broad daylight, on a bright day, and in a room on the first floor with two windows.
However strange and unreal these few phenomena may seem to readers who have seen nothing of the kind, I positively affirm that they are facts which really happened just as I have narrated them, and that there was no room for any possible trick or deception. In each case, before we began, we turned up the tables and chairs, and saw that they were ordinary pieces of furniture, and that there was no connection between them and the floor, and we placed them where we pleased before we sat down. Several of the phenomena occurred entirely under our own hands, and quite disconnected from the "medium." They were as much realities as the motion of nails towards a magnet, and, it may be added, not in themselves more improbable or more incomprehensible.
The mental phenomena which most frequently occur are the spelling out of the names of relatives of persons present, their ages, or any other particulars about them. They are especially uncertain in their manifestation, though when they do succeed they are very conclusive to the persons who witness them. The general opinion of sceptics as to these phenomena is, that they depend simply on the acuteness and talent of the medium in hitting on the letters which form the name, by the manner in which persons dwell upon or hurry over them,--the ordinary mode of receiving these communications being for the person interested to go over a printed alphabet, letter by letter, loud taps indicating the letters which form the required names. I am going to choose some of our experiments which show how impossible it is to accept this explanation.
When I first received a communication myself I was particularly careful to avoid giving any indication, by going with steady regularity over the letters; yet there was spelt out correctly, first, the place where my brother died, Para; then his Christian name, Herbert; and lastly, at my request, the name of the mutual friend who last saw him, Henry Walter Bates. On this occasion our party of six visited Mrs. Marshall for the first time, and my name as well as those of the rest of the party, except one, were unknown to her. That one was my married sister, whose name was no clue to mine.
On the same occasion a young lady, a connection of Mr. R."s was told that a communication was to be made to her. She took the alphabet, and instead of pointing to the letters one by one, she moved the pencil smoothly over the lines with the greatest steadiness. I watched her, and wrote down the letters which the taps indicated. The name produced was an extraordinary one, the letters being Thomas Doe Thacker. I thought there must be an error in the latter part; but the names were Thomas Doe Thacker, the lady"s father, every letter being correct. A number of other names, places, and dates were spelt out on this occasion with equal accuracy; but I give only these two, because in these I am _sure_ no clue was given by which the names could have been guessed by the most preternaturally acute intellect.
On another occasion, I accompanied my sister and a lady who had never been there before to Mrs. Marshall"s, and we had a very curious ill.u.s.tration of the absurdity of imputing the spelling of names to the receiver"s hesitation and the medium"s acuteness. She wished the name of a particular deceased relative to be spelled out to her, and pointed to the letters of the alphabet in the usual way, while I wrote down those indicated. The first three letters were y r n. "Oh!" said she, "that"s nonsense; we had better begin again." Just then an e came, and, thinking I saw what it was, I said, "Please go on, I understand it." The whole was then spelt out thus: yrnehkcocffej. The lady even then did not see it, till I separated it thus: yrneh kcocffej, or Henry Jeffc.o.c.k,--the name of the relative she had wanted, accurately spelt backwards.
Another phenomenon, necessitating the exertion both of force and intellect, is the following: The table having been previously examined, a sheet of note paper was marked privately by me, and placed with a lead-pencil under the centre foot of the table, all present having their hands upon the table. After a few minutes, taps are heard, and, on taking up the paper, I find written on it, in a free hand, "William." On another occasion, a friend from the country--a total stranger to the medium, and whose name was never mentioned--accompanied me; and, after receiving what purported to be a communication from his son, a paper was put under the table, and in a few minutes there was found written on it "Charley T. Dodd." the correct name. In these cases it is certain there was no machinery under the table; and it simply remains to ask if it were possible for Mrs. Marshall to slip off her boots, seize the pencil and paper with her toes, and write on it a name she had to guess at, and again put on her boots without removing her hands from the table, or giving any indication whatever of her exertions.
It was in November, 1866, that my sister discovered that a lady living with her had the power of inducing loud and distinct taps and other curious phenomena; and I now began a series of observations in my own house, the most important of which I shall briefly narrate.
When we sat at a large loo table without a cloth, with all our hands upon it, the taps would generally commence in a few minutes. They sound as if made on the under side of the leaf of the table, in various parts of it. They change in tone and loudness, from a sound like that produced by tapping with a needle or a long finger-nail, to others like blows with a fist or slaps with the fingers of a hand.
Sounds are produced also like sc.r.a.ping with a finger-nail, or like the rubbing of a damp finger pressed very hard on the table. The rapidity with which these sounds are produced and are changed is very remarkable. They will imitate, more or less exactly, sounds which we make with our fingers above the table; they will keep good time to a tune whistled by one of the party; they will sometimes, at request, play a very fair tune themselves, or will follow accurately a hand tapping a tune upon the table.
Of course, the first impression is that some one"s foot is lifting up the table. To answer this objection, I prepared the table before our second trial without telling any one, by stretching some thin tissue paper between the feet an inch or two from the bottom of the pillar, in such a manner that any attempt to insert the foot must crush or tear the paper. The table rose up as before, resisted pressure downwards, as if it was resting on the back of some animal, sunk to the floor, and in a short time rose again, and then dropped suddenly down. I now with some anxiety turned up the table, and, to the surprise of all present, showed them the delicate tissue stretched across altogether uninjured! Finding that this test was troublesome, as the paper or threads had to be renewed every time, and were liable to be broken accidentally before the experiment began, I constructed a cylinder of hoops and laths, covered with canvas. The table was placed within this as in a well, and, as it was about eighteen inches high, it kept the feet and dresses of the ladies away from the table. The latter rose without the least difficulty, the hands of all the group being held above it.
A small centre-table suddenly moved up of its own accord to the table by the side of the medium, as if it had gradually got within the sphere of a strong attractive force. Afterwards, at our request, it was thrown down on the floor without any person touching it, and it then moved about in a strange life-like manner, as if seeking some means of getting up again, turning its claws first on one side and then on the other. On another occasion, a very large leather arm-chair which stood at least four or five feet from the medium, suddenly wheeled up to her, after a few slight preliminary movements. It is, of course, easy to say that what I relate is impossible. I maintain that it is accurately true; and that no man, whatever be his attainments, has such an exhaustive knowledge of the powers of nature as to justify him in using the word "impossible" with regard to facts which I and many others have repeatedly witnessed.
We evidently have here facts similar to those which I observed in my experiments with Eusapia and with other mediums.
Alfred Russel Wallace continues his account by the citation of cases a.n.a.logous to those which have been described in this work; then sums up the experiments of Crookes, of Varley, Morgan, and other English scientists; does me the honor of citing my letter to the Dialectical Society which I have printed above; pa.s.ses in review the history of Spiritualism, and declares that (1) _the facts are incontestable_, and that (2), in his opinion, the best explanatory hypothesis is that of _spirits_, or _the souls of the disembodied_--the theory of "the unconscious" being _evidently inadequate_.
Such is also the opinion of the electrician Cromwell Varley. Neither he nor Wallace believes that there is anything supernatural in the phenomena.
Discarnate spirits are in nature, as well as the incarnate. "The triviality of the communications ought not to astonish us, if we consider the myriads of trivial and fantastic human beings who every day become ghosts and are the same beings the day after their death that they were the day before."
Professor Morgan, the brilliant author of the _Budget of Paradoxes_ (an excellent piece of work, and highly complimented by the London _Athenaeum_, in 1865), expresses the same opinion in his work on _Mind_ (1863). Not only does he think that the facts are incontestable, but he also believes that the hypothesis that explains the facts by intelligences exterior to ourselves is the only satisfying one. He relates, among other things, that, in one of the seances attended by him, a friend of his (a very sceptical person), was making a little fun of the spirits, whereupon, while they were all standing (a dozen experimenters of them) around the dining room table, and forming the chain above it, _without contact_, the heavy table began to move of its own accord, and, dragging along the whole group, made a rush at the sceptic, and pinned him against the back of the sofa, until he cried "Hold! enough!"
Still, does that const.i.tute proof of an independent spirit? Was it not an expression of the collective thought of the company? And, likewise, in the experience which Wallace has just cited, were not the dictated names latent in the brain of the questioner? And was not the little centre-table, in its climbings acting under the physical and pyschical influences of the medium?
Whatever may be the explanatory hypothesis, the FACTS are undeniable.
We have here, before all, a group of substantial English scientists of the first rank, in whose opinion the denial of the phenomena is a sort of madness.
French scientists are a little more belated than their neighbors.
Nevertheless, I have already called attention to some of them during the course of this work. I should have taken pleasure in adding the names of the lamented Pierre Curie and of Professor d"Arsonval, if they had published the experiments they made with Eusapia during July, 1905, and March and April, 1906, at the General Inst.i.tute of Psychology.
Among the most judicious of experimenters in psychical phenomena I ought also to mention M. J. Maxwell, a doctor of medicine and (a very different function) advocate-general at the Court of Appeals in Bordeaux.
The reader may have already noticed (p. 173) the part which this investigator, at once a magistrate and a scientist, took in the experiments made at l"Agnelas in 1895. Eusapia is not the only medium with whom he studied, and his acquaintance with our subject is supported by the best of doc.u.mentary evidence.
It is fitting that I present to the reader at this point the most characteristic facts and the essential conclusions set forth in his work.[70]
The author has made a special examinations of _raps_.
_Raps (coups frappes)._--The contact of hands is not necessary to obtain raps. With certain mediums I have very readily obtained them without contact.
When one has succeeded in obtaining raps with contact, one of the surest means of continuing to thus obtain them, is to keep the hands resting on the table for a certain time, then to lift them _very slowly_, keeping the palms turned downward toward the table, the fingers loosely opened, but not held stiffly. It rarely happens under such circ.u.mstances, that the raps do not continue to make themselves heard, at least for some time. I need not add that the experimenters should not only avoid touching the table with their hands, but even with any other part of their bodies, or their clothes. The contact of garments with the table may be sufficient to produce raps which have in them nothing supernormal. It is necessary therefore to exercise great care that the dresses of ladies do not come in contact with the legs of the table. When the necessary precautions are used, the raps sound in a very convincing way.
In the case of certain mediums, the energy set free is powerful enough to act at a distance. I once happened to hear raps upon a table which was almost six feet from the medium. We had had a very short sitting and had left the table. I was reclining in an easy-chair; the medium, standing, was conversing with me, when a series of raps was made upon the table which we had just left. It was broad daylight in midsummer, about five o"clock in the evening. The raps were forcible and lasted for several minutes.
I have often observed facts of this kind. I happened once, while travelling, to meet an interesting medium. He did not allow me to use his name, but I may say that he is an honorable man, well informed, occupying an official position. I obtained with him lively raps in restaurants and in railway lunch counters. He did not suspect that he possessed this latent faculty before he had experimented with me. To have observed the raps produced under these conditions would have been sufficient to convince anyone of their authenticity. The unusual noise made by these raps attracted the attention of persons present and gave us much annoyance. The result surpa.s.sed our expectations. It is to be noted that the more we were confused with the noise made by our raps, the more frequent they became. One would have said that some waggish creature was producing them and amusing himself with our embarra.s.sment.
I also obtained fine raps upon the floors of museums before the pictures of the old masters. The most common are those made, with contact, upon the table or upon the floor; next, those made at a distance upon various articles of furniture.
More rarely, I have heard them on the garments of the sitters or of the medium, or upon the coverings of pieces of furniture. I have heard them on sheets of paper laid on the experiment-table, in books, in walls, in tambourines, in small wooden objects, especially in a planchette used for automatic writing. I noticed very curious raps in the case of a writing-medium. When she had automatic writing, the raps were produced with extreme rapidity at the end of her pencil; but, the pencil itself did not tap the table. Several times and very carefully I put my hand on the end of the pencil opposite the point, without the latter leaving for a single moment the paper on the table: the raps sounded in the wood, not on the paper. In this case, of course, the medium held the pencil.
The raps occur even when I place my finger on the upper end of the pencil and when I press its point against the paper. You feel the pencil vibrating, but it is not displaced. Inasmuch as these raps are very resonant, I calculated that it would be necessary to give a pretty strong blow in order to produce them artificially. The necessary movement requires a lifting of the point from two to five millimeters, according to the intensity of the raps. Now the point does not seem to be displaced. Furthermore, when the writing is going on, these raps take place with great rapidity, and the examination of the writing does not show any place where a stop occurred. The text is continuous, no trace of tapping is perceptible in it, no thickening of the strokes can be perceived. Observations made under such conditions seem to me to exclude the possibility of fraud.
I have observed that these raps occur, without apparent cause, as far as nine feet from the medium. They manifest themselves as the expression of an activity and of a will distinct from those of the observers. Such is the _appearance_ of the phenomenon. A curious fact results from all this, that not only do the raps occur as the product of an intelligent action, but they also usually agree to perform as often as asked, and to produce definite rhythms, for example, certain airs. In like manner they imitate the raps made by the experimenters, upon demand of the latter.
The different raps frequently respond to each other, and it is one of the prettiest experiments in which one can take part to hear these blows, now slight and m.u.f.fled, now sharp and abrupt, or again soft and gentle, sounding simultaneously upon the table, the floor, and the frame-work and coverings of the furniture.
I had the good fortune to be able to study these curious rappings at close range, and I believe I have reached certain conclusions. The first, and the best attested, is that the raps are closely connected with the muscular movements of the sitters. I will sum up my observations on this point as follows:
1. Every muscular movement, even a feeble one, is generally followed by a rap.
2. The intensity of the raps did not seem to me to be proportional to the muscular movement made.
3. The intensity of the raps did not seem to me to vary in proportion to their distance from the medium.
The following are the facts upon which my conclusions rest:
I frequently observed that when we had raps that were feeble and occurred only at intervals, an excellent means of producing them was to form the chain upon the table, the hands resting upon it, and the observers putting their fingers in light contact. One of them, without breaking the chain (a feat he accomplished by holding in the same hand the right hand of his neighbor on the left and the left hand of his neighbor on the right) moved his released hand in circular sweeps or pa.s.ses over the table, at the level of the circle formed by the opened hands of the observers. After having made this movement four or five times, always in the same direction,--that is to say, after having thus traced four or five circles over the table, the experimenter brought his hand over toward the centre at a variable height and moved it down towards the table. Then he abruptly arrested this movement at a distance of seven or eight inches from the top. The abrupt stoppage of his hand was tallied by a rap in the wood. It is an exceptional case when this process does not yield taps,--that is to say, when there is a medium in the circle capable, even feebly, of producing them.
The same experiment can be made without touching the table, but forming around it a kind of closed chain. One of the operators then acts as in the preceding case.
I have no need to recall to the minds of my readers that with certain mediums, raps are produced without any movement being made. Almost all mediums can obtain them in this way by keeping perfectly quiet and having patience. But one would say that the execution of the movement acts as a determining cause. It seems as if the acc.u.mulated energy received a kind of stimulus.
_Levitations._--One day we improvised an experiment in the afternoon, and I remember that I observed a very interesting levitation made under these circ.u.mstances. It was about five o"clock in the evening (at any rate it was broad daylight), in the salon at l"Agnelas. We took our places about the table, _standing_. Eusapia took the hand of one of us and placed it on the corner of the table, at her right. The table thereupon rose up to the height of our foreheads; that is to say, the top of the table rose at least as high as five feet above the floor.
Such experiments were very convincing, for it was impossible for Eusapia, the circ.u.mstances being such as they were, to lift the table by a normal act. It is enough to suppose that she merely touched the corner of the table, to find out how heavy a weight she would have had to lift if she had made a muscular movement. Besides, she had not a sufficient grip on the table to lift it. Evidently, the conditions of the experiment being such, she could not make use of one of the fraudulent processes mentioned by her critics, such as straps or hooks of any kind. The phenomenon is undeniably authentic.
The breathing seems to have a very great influence. In the way things take place, it seems as if the sitters released, by breathing, an amount of motor energy comparable to that which they release when rapidly moving their limbs. There is something in this very curious and difficult to explain.
The more complete a.n.a.lysis of the facts allows us to think that the liberation of the energy employed depends upon the contraction of the muscles and not upon the movement made. The thing which reveals this peculiarity is easy to observe. When we are forming the chain about the table, we can set up a movement without contact by mutually pressing our hands together with a certain force, or by pressing the feet hard upon the floor. The first of these means is much the better of the two. The arms have only made an insignificant movement, and one can say that the muscular contraction is almost the only physiological phenomenon observable. Yet it suffices.