"It was not I," said he.
While these phenomena were taking place, Eusapia seemed to be suffering. It seemed as if out of her own physiological fund or stock she were furnishing all the force required to put the objects in motion.
After the séance, while she was still very much prostrated, we saw an easy-chair which was behind the curtain come rolling up behind her, as if to say, "Hold on there! you've forgotten me!"
My conviction is that I witnessed phenomena which I cannot relate to any ordinary physical law. My impression is that fraud, in any case, is more than improbable,—at least so far as concerns the displacement at a distance of heavy articles of furniture arranged by my companions and myself. That is all that I can say about it. For my part, I call "natural" that which is scientifically proved. So that the word "mysterious" means that which still astonishes us because it cannot be explained. I believe that the scientific spirit consists in verifying facts, in not denying a priori any fact which is not in contradiction with known laws, and in accepting none which has not been determined by safe and verifiable conditions.
Séance of September 26.—A dark bust moves forward upon the table, coming from where Eusapia sits; then another, and still another. "They look like Chinese ghosts," says M. Mangin, with this difference, that I, who am better placed, owing to the light from the window, am able to perceive the dimensions of these singular images, and above all their thickness. All these black busts are busts of women, of life size; but, although vague, they do not look like Eusapia. The last of them, of fine shape, is that of a woman who seems young and pretty. These half-lengths, which seem to emanate from the medium, glide along between us; and, when they have gone as far as the middle of the table or two-thirds of its length, they sink down altogether (all of a piece, as it were), and vanish. This rigidity makes me think of the reproductions, or fac-similes, of a bust escaped from a sculptor's atelier, and I murmur, "One would think he was looking at busts moulded in papier-maché." Eusapia heard me. "No, not papier-maché," she says indignantly. She does not give any other explanation, but says (this time in Italian), "In order to prove to you that it is not the body of the medium, I am going to show you a man with a beard. Attention!" I do not see anything, but Dr. Dariex feels his face rubbed against for quite a while by a beard.
New experiments made at Genoa in 1901, at which Eurico Morselli, professor of psychology at the University of Genoa, was present, were reported by my learned friend the astronomer Porro, successively director of the observatories of Genoa and Turin, to-day director of the national observatory of the Argentine Republic at La Plata. Here are some extracts from this report:[38]
Nearly ten years have passed since Eusapia Paladino made her first appearance in the memorable séances at Milan during the course of her mediumistic tours through Europe. The object of shrewd investigations on the part of experienced and learned observers; the butt of jokes, accusations, sarcasms; exalted by certain fanatics as a personification of supernatural powers and scoffed at by others as a mountebank,—the humble haberdasher of Naples has made so much stir in the world that she is herself bored and displeased by it.
I had good proof of this when I took leave of her, after I had listened with much curiosity to the anecdotes which she related to me of her séances and of the well-known men with whom she has been associated,—Ch. Richet, Schiaparelli, Lombroso, Flammarion, Sardou, Aksakof, et al. She then very emphatically asked me not to speak in the journals of her presence at Genoa and of the experiments in which she should figure there. Happily, she has good reasons herself for not reading the journals.[39]
Why was an astronomer chosen to give an account of the experiments at Genoa? Because astronomers are occupied with researches into the unknown.[40]
If a man absorbed in his own private studies and attached to an austere and laborious manner of life, such as my venerated master M. Schiaparelli, has not hesitated to defy the irreverent jests of the comic journals, it behooves us to conclude that the bond between the science of the heavens and that of the human soul is more intimate than appears. The following is the most probable explanation. We have to do in these studies with phenomena which are manifested under wholly special and still undetermined conditions, in conformity with laws almost unknown and, in any case, of such a character that the will of the experimenter has but little influence upon the unshackled, self-regulating, and often adverse volitions which betray themselves at every moment in the study of these psychical marvels. Nobody is better prepared to study these things than an astronomer, possessing, as he does, a scientific education precisely adapting him to the investigation of such conditions. In fact, by the systematic observation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, the astronomer contracts the habit of being a vigilant and patient spectator of phenomena, without attempting either to arrest or to accelerate their irresistible development. In other words, the study of the stars belongs to the science of observation rather than to that of experiment.