Chapter III THE MYSTERY OF RAPS AND LEVITATIONS
I now pass at once to a class of Spiritualistic manifestations which would be put forward by any well-educated occultist as the most authentic of all. Reference was made a few pages back to a large group of scientific and professional men who believe in what they call "mediumistic phenomena." They are not Spiritualists, and it is one of the questionable features of recent Spiritualist literature that they are often described as such. Thus the astronomers Flammarion and Schiaparelli are quoted. But Flammarion says repeatedly in his latest and most important book (Les forces naturelles inconnues, 1907) that he is not and never was a Spiritualist (see p. 581), and he includes a long letter from Schiaparelli, who disavows all belief even in the phenomena (p. 93). Professor Richet, who believes in materializations, is not a Spiritualist. Professor Morselli, who also accepts the facts, speaks of the Spiritualist interpretation of them as "childish, absurd, and immoral." The long lists of scientific supporters which the Spiritualists publish are in part careless or even dishonest.
But such professors as Richet, Ochorowicz, de Vesme, Flournoy, etc., and men like Flammarion, Carrington, Maxwell, etc., do believe that raps and other physical phenomena are produced by abnormal powers of the medium. They believe that when the medium sits in or before the cabinet, in proper conditions, the floor and table are rapped, the furniture is lifted or moved about, musical instruments are played, and impressions are made in plaster, although the medium has not done it with his or her hands or feet. As I said, these scientific men scorn the idea that "spirits" from another world play these pranks. They look for unknown natural forces in the medium. They think that they have excluded fraud. We shall see. Meantime, the assent of so many scientific men to the phenomena themselves gives this class of experiences more plausibility than others.
Most of these men base their opinion upon the remarkable doings of the Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino, and we shall therefore pay particular attention to her. But Spiritualists rely for these things on a very large number of mediums. In fact, some of our leading English Spiritualists do not believe in Palladino at all, having detected her in fraud. We must therefore first examine the evidence put before us by Spiritualists.
We begin with the story of the Fox family in America in 1848, which admittedly inaugurated modern Spiritualism. Since Spiritualists commemorate, in 1920, the "seventy-second" anniversary of the foundation of their religion, I will surely not be accused of wasting time over trivial or irrelevant matters in going back to 1848. As, however, this is not a history, I must deal with this matter very briefly.
In March, 1848, a Mr. and Mrs. Fox, of Hydesville, a very small town of the State of New York, had their domestic peace disturbed by mysterious and repeated rappings, apparently on their walls and floors. Swedenborgians and Shakers had by that time familiarized people with the idea of spirit, and the neighbours were presently informed that the raps took an intelligent form, and replied "Yes" or "No" (by a given number of raps) to questions. The Foxes stated that the raps came from the spirit of a murdered man, and later they said that they had dug and found human bones. These raps were clearly associated with the two girls, Margaretta (aged fifteen) and Katie or Cathie (aged twelve). A third, a married elder sister, named Leah—at that time Mrs. Fish, and later Mrs. Underhill—came to Hydesville, and, at her return to Rochester, took Margaretta with her. Leah herself was presently a "medium." The excitement in rural America was intense. Mediums sprang up on every side, and the Foxes were in such demand that they could soon charge a dollar a sitter. The "spirits," having at last discovered a way of communicating with the living, rapped out all sorts of messages to the sitters. In a few years table-turning, table-tilting, levitation, etc., were developed, but the "foundation of the religion" was as I have described in 1848.
Towards the close of 1850 three professors of Buffalo University formed the theory that the Fox girls were simple frauds, causing the supposed raps by cracking their knee joints. At a trial sitting they so placed the legs and feet of the girls that no raps could be produced. A few months later a relative, Mrs. Culver, made a public statement, which was published in the New York Herald (April 17, 1851), that Margaretta Fox had admitted the fraud to her, and had shown her how it was done. Neither of these checks had any appreciable effect upon the movement. From year to year it found new developments, and it is said within three years of its origin to have won more than a million adherents in the United States, or more than five times as many as it has to-day.
Our Spiritualists may find it possible, in their solemn commemoration of 1848, to smile at the Buffalo professors and Mrs. Culver, but I have yet to meet a representative of theirs who can plausibly explain away what happened in 1888. Margaretta Fox married Captain Kane, the Arctic explorer, who often urged her to expose the fraud, as he believed it to be. In 1888 she found courage to do so (New York Herald, September 24, 1888). She and Katie, she said, had discovered a power of making raps with their toe-joints (not knee-joints), and had hoaxed Hydesville. Their enterprising elder sister had learned their secret, and had organized the very profitable business of spirit-rapping. The raps and all other phenomena of the Spiritualist movement were, Mrs. Kane said, fraud from beginning to end. She gave public demonstrations in New York of the way it was done; and in October of the same year her younger sister Cathie confirmed the statement, and said that Spiritualism was "all humbuggery, every bit of it" (Herald, October 10 and 11, 1888). They agreed that their sister Leah (Mrs. Underhill), the founder of the Spiritualist movement and the most prosperous medium of its palmiest days, was a monumental liar and a shameless organizer of every variety of fraud. That a wealthy Spiritualist afterwards induced Cathie to go back on this confession need not surprise us.
So much for "St. Leah"—if she is yet canonized—and the foundation of the Spiritualist religion in 1848. We need say little further about raps. Dr. Maxwell, the French lawyer and medical student who belongs to the scientific psychic school which I have noticed, gives six different fraudulent ways of producing "spirit-raps." He has studied every variety of medium, including girls about the age of the Fox girls, and found fraud everywhere. In one case he discovered that the raps were fraudulently produced by two young men among the sitters; and the normal character of these men was so high that their conduct is beyond his power of explanation. He has verified by many experiments that loud raps may be produced by the knee- and toe-joints, and that even slowly gliding the finger or boot along the leg of the table (or the cuff, etc.) will, in a strained and darkened room, produce the noises. In the dark, of course—Dr. Maxwell roundly says that any sitting in total darkness is waste of time—cheating is easy. The released foot or hand, or a concealed stick, will give striking manifestations. Some mediums have electrical apparatus for the purpose.
If any Spiritualist is still disposed to attach importance to raps, we may at least ask for these manifestations under proper conditions. Since spirits can rap on floors, or on the medium's chair, let the table be abolished. It usually affords a very suspicious shade, especially in red light, in the region of the medium. Let the medium be plainly isolated, and bound in limb and joint, and let us then have these mysterious raps. It has not yet been done.
The same general objection may be premised when we approach the subject of levitation and the moving of furniture generally. Levitation is a more impressive word than "lifting," but the inexpert reader may take it that the meaning is the same. The "spirits" manifest their presence to the faithful, not by making the table or the medium "light," but by lifting up it or him. It is unfortunate that here again the spirits seem compelled by their very limited intelligence to choose a phenomenon which not only looks rather like the pastime of a slightly deranged Hottentot, but happens to coincide with just the kind of thing a fraudulent medium would be disposed to do in a dim light. However, since quite a number of learned men believe in these things, let us consider them seriously.
And, with the courage of honest inquirers, let us attack the strongest manifestations of this power first. Such are the instances in which the medium himself—spirits respect the proprieties and do not treat lady-mediums in this way—is lifted from the ground and raised even as high as the ceiling. When I say that ladies are not treated in this frivolous way, the informed reader will gather at once that I decline to take serious notice of the once famous levitation of Mrs. Guppy. Dr. Russel Wallace was quite convinced that this lady was "levitated" on to the table, in the dark, and she was no light weight. But we shall be excused from examining his statement if we recall what the lady claimed in 1871. Herne and Williams, both impostors, were giving a séance in Lamb's Conduit Street, and their "spirit-controls" said they would "apport" the weighty Mrs. Guppy. Three minutes later, although the doors were locked, and her home was three miles away, she was standing on the table. She had a wet pen in her hand, and she explained tearfully to the innocent sitters that she had been snatched by invisible powers from her books and taken through the solid walls. People like Russel Wallace still believed in Mrs. Guppy, but I assume that there is no one to-day who does not see in this case a blatant collusion of three rogues to cheat the public. I assume that the same contempt will be meted out to the claim of the Rev. Dr. Monck, who, not to be outdone, stated shortly afterwards that he had been similarly transported from Bristol to Swindon.
Probably the modern reader will be disposed to dismiss with equal contempt the claim that Daniel Dunglas Home was, in the year 1869, wafted by spirit-hands from one window to another, seventy feet above the ground, at a house in Victoria Street. But here I must ask him to pause. This is one of the classical manifestations, one of the foundations of Spiritualism. Sir A. C. Doyle says that the evidence here is excellent. Sir William Barrett maintains that the story is indisputably true. Sir William Crookes says that "to reject the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all human testimony whatever." It is a Spiritualist dogma.
I have shown in the debate with Sir A. C. Doyle that this dogma is based on evidence that will not stand five minutes' examination. Not one of these leading Spiritualists can possibly have examined the evidence. No witness even claims to have seen Home wafted from window to window. Lord Adare is the only survivor of the three supposed witnesses, and, when he saw some Press report of my destructive criticism in the Debate, he sent to the Weekly Dispatch a letter that he had written at the time. He seemed to think that this letter afforded new evidence. The interested reader will be amused to find that this letter is precisely the evidence I had quoted in the Debate, for it was published forty years ago.
No one professes to have seen Home carried from window to window. Home told the three men who were present that he was going to be wafted, and he thus set up a state of very nervous expectation. Sir W. Barrett, who tells us that "nothing was said beforehand of what they might expect to see," says precisely the opposite of the truth. Both Lord Crawford and Lord Adare say that they were warned. Then Lord Crawford says that he saw the shadow on the wall of Home entering the room horizontally; and as the moon, by whose light he professes to have seen the shadow, was at the most only three days old, his testimony is absolutely worthless. Lord Adare claims only that he saw Home, in the dark, "standing upright outside our window."[7] In the dark—it was an almost moonless December night—one could not, as a matter of fact, say very positively whether Home was outside or inside; but, in any case, he acknowledges that there was a nineteen-inch window-sill outside the window, and Home could stand on that.
So there is not only not a shred of evidence that Home went from one window to another, but the whole story suggests trickery. Home told them what to expect, and he pretended, in the dark, that he was a "spirit" whispering this to them. He noisily opened the window in the next room. He came into their room, from the window-sill, laughing and saying (in spite of the historic solemnity of the occasion!) that it would be funny if a policeman had seen him in the air. When Lord Adare went into the next room, and politely doubted if Home could have gone out by so small an aperture, Home told him to stand some distance back, and then swung himself out in a jaunty fashion, as a gymnast would. In fine, it is well to remember that this was the same D. D. Home who had defrauded a widow of £33,000, and had been, in the previous year (1868), branded in a London court as a fraud and an adventurer.
After this we need not linger long over the other "levitations" of Home, or allow ourselves to be intimidated by the bluster of Sir A. C. Doyle and Sir W. Barrett. Sir Arthur tells us that "there are altogether on record some fifty or sixty cases of levitation on the part of Home"; that "Professor Crookes saw Home levitated twice"; and that "as he floated round the room he wrote his name above the pictures." It is a pity that Sir A. C. Doyle does not tell people that Home did all these wonderful things in the dark, and that in most cases the people present merely had Home's word for it that he was "floating round the room." The whole evidence for these things has been demolished so effectually by Mr. Podmore in his Newer Spiritualism (chs. i and ii) that I need say little here.
No reliable witness, giving us a precise account of the circumstances, has ever claimed that he saw Home off the ground and clear of all furniture. Sir W. Crookes says that he saw Home, in poor light, rise six inches for a space of ten seconds. It is a poor instalment of miracle; but I am obliged to add that Crookes was at the other side of the room, and he confesses that he did not see Home's feet leave the ground! Crookes says that on one occasion he was allowed to pass his hands under Home's feet; but he tells this wonderful exploit twenty-three years after the event (in 1894), and he does not give precise indications where the hands were when he examined the feet. Mr. John Jones saw Home rise in 1861; but he does not say that he saw Home's hands, and he admits that his muscles were so taut that he calls them "cataleptic." It is equally true that Home wrote his name above the pictures; but no one had examined the spots before the séance, and no one could see if he stood on anything to reach them during the séance, as it was pitch dark. The only apparently good case is an occasion when a sitter says that, in the dark, he saw Home's figure completely cross the rather lighter space of the window, feet first, and then cross it again head first. But it happens that on this occasion there are two witnesses, and the less rhetorical of the two expressly says that the shadow on the blind was at first only "the feet and part of the legs," and then (after Home had announced that the spirits were turning him round) only "the head and face." Any gymnast could do that. The whole of these recorded miracles reek with evidence of charlatanry. The lights were always put out, and Home in nearly all cases said that he was rising, and then told them that he was floating about various parts of the room.
Still worse is the evidence for Home's occasional "elongation." The picture of Sir W. Crookes gravely measuring the height of this brazen impostor, as he alternately draws himself in and stretches out, is as pathetic as the picture of him standing with a bottle of phosphorus in a bedroom at Hackney while two girls make a fool of him. It is just as pathetic that men like Sir A. C. Doyle and Sir W. Barrett assure the public that they believe these things, when they have, apparently, not examined the evidence. To believe that in the course of a few seconds certain spiritual powers, who cannot unravel for us the smallest scientific problem, can so alter that marvellous world of cells and tissues which make up a man's body as to make him even six inches taller, is to believe in a miracle beside which the dividing of the waters of the Red Sea is child's play. Yet distinguished men of science and medical men assure the public that they believe this, and believe it on evidence that has been riddled over and over again.
It was a still earlier fraud, Gordon, who began this trick of mounting furniture in the dark and saying that the spirits bore him up; but the "evidence" is not worth glancing at. One might as well ask us to examine seriously the evidence for the "elongation" of Herne, Peters, Morse, and all the other impostors of the time, or for the spiritual transit of Mrs. Guppy and Dr. Monck. Let us rather see what sort of evidence is furnished in recent times.
It appears that the spirits no longer levitate the mediums themselves. Although the power is said to be developing as time goes on, the age of these impressive floatings round pitch-dark rooms is over. The only instance I have read in the last twenty years is that of Ofelia Corralès, of Costa Rica, who unfortunately fell off the stool she was standing on. We have now to be content with the levitation of tables and the dragging of furniture towards the medium.
Again let us, in order not to waste time, address ourselves at once to the classical case of Eusapia Palladino. Your common or garden medium, with his uncritical audience, has a dozen ways of tilting and lifting tables and pulling furniture about the room. To press on with the hands or thumbs (with four fingers "above the table" to edify the audience) and lift with the knees is easy. The same thing can be done by pressure against the inside of the legs of the table. The foot is still more useful, for the table is generally light. A confederate is even more useful. The more artistic medium wears a ring with a slot in it, and has a strong pin in the table. While his hands seem to be spread out above the table, he catches the head of the pin in the slot of his ring, and—the miracle occurs. Other mediums have leather cuffs inside their sleeves, with a dark piece of iron or a hook projecting to catch the edge of the table.
But we will take Palladino, who was examined by scores of scientific men, many of whom to this day believe that at least a large part of her "phenomena" were genuine. The average man hesitates immediately when he hears that everybody admits that part of her performances were fraudulent. She was a "grey" medium, Sir A. C. Doyle says. But he, and so many others, assure you at once that this is quite natural. She had real mediumistic powers; but these decay after a time, while the public still clamours for miracles, and the poor medium is strongly tempted to cheat. I have already said that Sir Arthur is here even more inaccurate than he usually is. He says that she was "quite honest" for the first fifteen years, as any person who studies her record will admit. Let us briefly study it.
Eusapia Palladino was an Italian working girl, an orphan, who married a small shopkeeper of Naples. She remained throughout life almost entirely illiterate, but she came in time to earn "exorbitant fees" (Lombroso's daughter says) by her séances. She had begun to dabble in Spiritualism, and lift tables, at the age of thirteen, but she did little and was quite obscure until 1888, when Professor Chiaia, of Naples, took her up. He challenged Lombroso to study her, and in 1892 a group of Italian professors investigated her powers at Naples. That is the beginning of her public career, and her performances varied little. She sat with her back to the cabinet—unlike other mediums, she sat outside it—and her chief trick was to lift off the ground the light table in front of her while the professors controlled her hands and feet. It was the ghost of "John King" who did these things, she said; and we remember "John King" as a classic ghost of the early fraudulent mediums. He rapped on the table and raised it off the floor; he dragged furniture towards the medium, especially out of the cabinet behind her; he flung musical instruments on the table, and prodded and pulled the hair of the sitters; he made impressions of hands and faces in plaster; and he even brought very faint ghosts into the room at times.
Lombroso and other professors regarded these things as genuine or due to an abnormal power of the medium (not to ghosts). In the end of his life, in fact, Lombroso announced that he had come to believe in the immortality of the mind, though he still regarded this as material. His daughter, Gina Ferrero, tells us that at this time he was a physical wreck, and his mental vitality was very low.[8] However, the professors of 1892 said that they did not detect fraud. The reader of their report may think otherwise. They put Eusapia, for instance, on a scale, and "John King" took seventeen pounds off her weight. Any person can perform that miracle by getting his toe to the floor while he is on the weighing machine; and the professors gravely note that, whenever they prevented Eusapia's dress from touching the floor, she could not reduce her weight! They note also that she cannot raise the table unless her dress is allowed to touch it.
In the same year, 1892, Flammarion invited her to Paris. He says frankly that he caught her cheating more than once. One of her miracles was to depress the scale of a letter-balance by placing her hands on either side of it, at some distance from it. Flammarion found that she used a hair, stretched from hand to hand. His colleague, the astronomer Antoniadi, who was called in, said that it was "fraud from beginning to end."
In 1894 Professor Richet, assisted by Mr. Myers and Sir O. Lodge, examined her at Richet's house, and found no fraud. But Dr. Hodgson insisted that she released her hands and feet from control and used them, and Myers invited her to Cambridge in 1895. The result is well known. In great disgust they reported that she cheated throughout, and that not a single phenomenon could be regarded as genuine. This was, on the most generous estimate, seven years after the beginning of her public career; and Myers, the most conscientious and respected of English Spiritualists, reported that she must have had "long practice" in fraud. Yet Sir A. C. Doyle tells the public that she was "quite honest" for the first fifteen years.
Her admirers were angry, and they continued to guarantee her genuineness. She became the most famous and most prosperous medium in the world. In 1897 and 1898 she was again in France, and Flammarion detected her in fraud after fraud. She released her hands and feet constantly from control. From 1905 to 1907 she was rigorously examined by the General Psychological Institute of Paris. They reported constant trickery and evasion of tests. Sitters were not allowed to put a foot on her right foot because she had a painful corn on it. One of her hands must not be clasped by the control because she was acutely sensitive to pain in that hand. She will not allow a man to stand near and do nothing but watch her. She wriggles and squirms all the time, and releases her hands and feet. She learns that, in a photograph they have taken of one high "levitation" of a stool, it is plainly seen to be resting on her head, so she allows no more photographs of this. And so on. Professor G. le Bon got her at his house for a private sitting in 1906. He was able to instal an illumination behind her of which she knew nothing, and he plainly caught her releasing and using her hand.
In 1910 the Americans tried her. At one sitting Professor Münsterberg was carefully controlling her left foot, as he thought, when the table in the cabinet behind her began to move. But one man had stealthily crept into the cabinet under cover of the dark, and he seized something. Eusapia shrieked—it was her left foot![9] Then the professors of Columbia University took Eusapia in hand, and finished her. They had special apparatus ready for use, but they never used it. In a few sittings they discovered that she was an habitual cheat, and they abandoned the inquiry in disgust.
These are the main points in Eusapia's official record. They suffice to damn her. She cheated from the start to the finish. Her moans and groans and wriggles habitually enabled her to release her hands and feet from the men who were supposed to control them. Nothing is more notorious in her career than that. She pretended that "John King" did everything, yet she used constantly to announce that "some very fine phenomena would be seen to-night." She pretended to be in a trance, yet she habitually called out "E fatto" ("It's done") when something had been accomplished, in the dark, two feet away from her. She was alive to every suspicious movement of the sitters, and controlled the light and the photographers. The impressions of faces which she got in wax or putty were always her face. I have seen many of them. The strong bones of her face impress deep. Her nose is relatively flattened by the pressure. The hair on the temples is plain. It is outrageous for scientific men to think that either "John King" or an abnormal power of the medium made a human face (in a few minutes) with bones and muscles and hair, and precisely the same bones and muscles and hair as those of Eusapia. I have seen dozens of photographs of her levitating a table. On not a single one are her person and dress entirely clear of the table. In fine, at every single sitting, from beginning to end, the observers were distracted by the "ghost." They were prodded and pinched and pushed, and their hair and whiskers were pulled. It seems a pity that they did not refuse to continue unless "John King" desisted from this frivolity. It was Eusapia spoiling their vigilance.
Believers in Eusapia would point to some dozens of things in her record that these professors, and even conjurers like Carrington, could not explain. I am quite content to leave them unexplained. We are under no obligation to explain them or else accept Spiritualism. There is, as Schiaparelli said, a third alternative: agnosticism. If the majority of Eusapia's tricks were at one time or other seen to be done by fraud, the presumption is that the rest were fraud. There are scientific men who seem to lose their common sense in these inquiries. You might put a conjurer before them in broad daylight, and they will not see how he does a single one of his tricks. But when, in a bad light, a lady conjurer or medium does something which they cannot explain they appeal to abnormal powers or ghosts. It is neither science nor common sense.
Towards the close of Eusapia's career another powerful Italian peasant-woman, Lucia Sordi, began to interest the professors. She outdid Eusapia in some matters. While she sat bound with cords in the cabinet, a decanter of wine was lifted from the table, and a glass put to the lips of each sitter. She was eventually exposed, and I will not linger on her. She could get out of any bonds; and she had two confederates always, in the shape of her young daughters.
Most recent of all are the phenomena of the "Goligher circle" of Belfast. A teacher of mechanics, Mr. Crawford, has greatly strengthened the faith by recording their wonderful exploits in his Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1916) and Experiments in Psychical Science (1919). Sir A. C. Doyle is enthusiastic about them, as is his wont. Even Sir W. Barrett tells us that "it is difficult to believe how the cleverest conjurer, with elaborate apparatus, could have performed" what he witnessed. Decidedly, here is something serious. Yet I intend to dismiss it very briefly. The "circle" consists of seven members of the Goligher family, and they are all mediums. In other words, there were fourteen hands and fourteen feet to be watched, in a red light (the worst in the world for the eye), and this young teacher of science flatters himself that he controlled them all, and meantime attended to a lot of scales and other apparatus. We are asked to believe this after four or five professors repeatedly failed to control the hands and feet of one woman (Eusapia). Moreover, they were permitted to hold Eusapia's hands and feet, but Crawford was not permitted to touch the feet of his medium. He gives no photographs, except of his superfluous scales and tables. The Goligher family, he says, were most anxious to have photographs taken, but the "spirits" said it would injure the medium.
When Sir W. Barrett tells the public that "the cleverest conjurer, with elaborate apparatus," could not do these things, he talks nonsense of which he ought to be ashamed. There is nothing in the two books that requires any apparatus at all, or anything more than practice. Raps were common. They have been since 1848. Mr. Crawford talks of "sledgehammer blows" and "thunderous noises." As the mediums were never searched, the raps may have been exceptionally loud, but Mr. Crawford naïvely gives one detail which puts us on our guard. He one night brought a particularly sensitive phonograph. The noises that night were "terrific," he says. He took the record to the offices of Light, and the editor of that journal can do no more than say that the noises were "clearly audible" (p. 32). So, when Mr. Crawford tells us of strong men being unable to press down the levitated table, we will take a pinch of salt.
The "table" (really a light stool) usually lifted weighed two pounds. Sir A. C. Doyle assured his audience that this was lifted as high as the ceiling. On the contrary, Mr. Crawford expressly says that it never rose more than four feet; which is, I find by "scientific" experiment, the height to which a young lady, sitting on a chair, could raise such a stool on her foot. A most remarkable coincidence. It is a further remarkable coincidence that the young lady's weight increased, when an object was levitated, by just the weight of that object, less about two ounces which some other person took over (a steadying finger, for instance). It is an even more remarkable coincidence that, when Mr. Crawford asked for an impression of the ghostly machinery which made the raps, the mark he got on paper was "something of an oval shape, about two square inches in area" (p. 192); which is singularly like a young lady's heel. Similarly, when he asked for an impression in a saucer of putty, the mark he describes—and carefully omits to photograph for us—is precisely the mark of a young lady's big toe with a threaded material on it. It is further curious that this remarkable psychic power, which can lift a ten-pound table, could not lift a white handkerchief a fraction of an inch; which prompts the painful reflection that a dark foot might be visible if it touched a white handkerchief.
Mr. Crawford's books are really too naive. He asked Kathleen, by way of control experiment, to show him if she could raise the stool on her foot; and he asks us to believe that her very obvious wriggles and straining prove that this was not the usual lifting force. He puts her on a scale, and asks the "ghosts" to take a large amount of matter out of her body. He is profoundly impressed when her weight decreases by 54½ pounds; and he asks us to believe that ghosts have taken 54½ pounds of flesh and fat out of the fair Kathleen and "laid it on the floor." A simpler hypothesis is that she got her toe to the floor, as Eusapia did. Mr. Crawford ought to leave ghosts for a while, and take a course of human anatomy and physiology. His mechanical knowledge enables him to sketch a diagram of a "cantilever," constructed out of the medium's body, and reaching from it to the centre of the table, a distance of eighteen inches, or the length of Kathleen's leg from knee to foot. But how in the name of all that is reasonable this cantilever is worked from the body end, without wrenching the young lady's "innards" out of joint, passes the subtlest imagination. The "spirits" were consulted as to the way they did it. By a final peculiar coincidence it transpired that they knew just as much about science as Kathleen Goligher; and that was nothing.
This is a very long chapter, but the phenomena it had to discuss are the most serious in Spiritualist literature, and I was eager to omit nothing which is deemed important. Let me close it with a short account of an historical occurrence, which is at the same time a parable. We are often told that the medium was "physically incapable" of doing this or the other. Here is an interesting illustration of human possibilities.
In 1846 all Paris was busy discussing "the electric girl." Little Angélique Cottin, a village child of thirteen summers, a very quiet and guileless-looking maid, exuded the "electric fluid" (ghosts were not yet in fashion) in such abundance that the furniture almost danced about the room. When she rose from her chair it flew back, even if a man held it, and was often smashed. A heavy dining-table went over at a touch from her dress. A chair held by "several strong men" was pushed back when she sat on it. The Paris Academy of Sciences examined her, and could make nothing of her. The chairs she rose from were sent crashing against the wall, and broken. But one night, when the crowd gathered about her to see the marvels, a wicked old sceptic watched her closely from a distance. Only that afternoon a heavy dining-table, with its load of dishes, had gone over. The child saw the sceptic's eye, yet wanted to entertain the crowd. There was a struggle of patience between sceptic and child for two hours, and at last age won. He saw her move, and demanded an examination; and they found the bruise on her leg caused by knocking over the heavy table. It was all over. She had developed a marvellous way of using the muscles of her legs and buttocks instantaneously and imperceptibly. This was, says Flammarion, "the end of this sad story in which so many people had been duped by a poor idiot." He is wrong on two points. The child was by no means an idiot; and this was only the beginning, not the end. We do well to remember what this child of thirteen could do.[10]