It is my duty to point out here some examples of this failing. Before doing so, I ought to recall the fact that for a period of forty years I have examined all the mediums whose achievements have had the widest celebrity,—including Daniel D. Home, gifted with the most astounding powers, who gave at the Tuileries, before the Emperor Napoleon III, his family, and his friends, such extraordinary séances, and who was later employed by William Crookes in the accurate scientific researches made by that gentleman; Mme. Rodière, a remarkable typtologic medium; C. Brédif, who produced strange apparitions; Eglington, with the enchanted slates; Henry Slade, who made with the astronomer Zöllner those incredible experiments from which geometry only saved itself by admitting the possibility of a fourth dimension of space; Buguet whose photographic plates caught and held the shadows of the dead, and who, having allowed me to experiment with him, let me conduct my researches for five weeks before I detected his fraudulent methods and mechanisms; Lacroix, to whom spirits of all ages seemed to troop in crowds; and many others who inspire deep interest in Spiritualists and scientific investigators by manifestations more or less strange and marvelous.
I have quite often been absolutely deceived. When I took the precautions that were necessary to put the medium beyond the possibility of trickery, I obtained no result; if I pretended not to see anything I would perceive out of the corner of my eye attempts at deceit. And, in general, the phenomena which took place happened only in the moments of distraction in which my attention was for an instant relaxed. While I was pushing my investigation a little farther, I saw with my own eyes Buguet's prepared negatives; saw with my own eyes Slade writing under the table upon a concealed slate, and so forth. Apropos of this famous medium Slade, I may recall the fact that after his experiments with Zöllner, director of the observatory at Leipzig, he came to Paris, and for the purpose of experimentation, placed himself at my disposal (and that of all the astronomers at the Observatory to whom I should introduce him). He said he got direct writings from the spirits by a bit of pencil placed between two slates tied together, by oscillations of the magnetic needle, displacements of furniture, the automatic throwing about of objects, and the like. He was very willing to give me one séance a week, for six weeks (on Monday at 11 o'clock A. M., at 21 Beaujon Street). But I obtained nothing certain. In the cases that did succeed, there was a possible substitution of slates. Tired of so much loss of time, I agreed with Admiral Mouchez, director of the Observatory of Paris, to confide to Slade a double slate prepared by ourselves, with the precautions which were necessary in order that we should not be entrapped. The two slates were sealed in such a way with paper of the Observatory that if he took them apart he could not conceal the fraud. He accepted the conditions of the experiment. I carried the slates to his apartment. They remained under the influence of the medium, in this apartment, not a quarter of an hour, not a half-hour or an hour, but ten consecutive days, and when he sent them back to us there was not the least trace of writing inside; and yet specimens of this were always furnished by him when he had the opportunity of transposing slates prepared in advance.[42]
Without entering into other details, let it suffice me to say, that, too frequently deceived by dishonest and mendacious mediums, I brought to my experiments with Eusapia a mental reserve of scepticism, of doubt, and of suspicion.
The conditions of experimenting are in general so crooked that it is easy to be duped. And scientists and scholars are perhaps most easily duped of all men, because scientific observation of experiments is always honest, since we are not obliged to distrust nature,—when the question is of a star or of a molecule,—and since we have the habit of describing facts as they present themselves to our intelligence.
That granted, we may now look at certain curious doings of Eusapia.
We considered a little farther back (p. 173) Col. de Rochas's strange experiment with the letter-weigher. This was considered by the experimenters as absolutely conclusive. I was curious to verify it. Here are my notes on the matter.
I.
November 12, 1898.—This afternoon we took a drive in a landau (Eusapia and I) in company with M. and Mme. Pallotti of Cairo, and, among other things, we visited the exhibition of chrysanthemums at the Tuileries. Eusapia is enchanted. We return about 6 o'clock. My wife seats herself at the piano, and Eusapia sings some Neapolitan airs and some little fragments of Italian operas. Afterwards we all three chat confidentially with each other.
She is in a very happy state of mind, tells us how sometimes on stormy days she experiences electric cracklings and sparkling in her hair, especially on an old wound that she once received on the head. She also tells us that when she has been a long time without holding a séance she is in a state of irritation, and feels the need of freeing herself of the psychic fluid which saturates her. This avowal astonishes me, for, at the end of every séance, she seems rather to be listless and melancholy and seems to hold a sitting rather unwillingly than otherwise. She adds that she frequently has fluidic prolongations of the ends of her fingers, and, putting her two hands on my knees, the inside of the hand turned upward, at the same time spreading out the fingers and placing them opposite each other face to face, at a distance of several inches, and alternately bringing the hands together and withdrawing them, she tells us to observe from time to time the radiations which prolong the fingers by forming a sort of luminous aureole at their extremities. My wife thinks she perceives some of them. I am unable to see anything at all, in spite of all my efforts, although I change the light and shade in all sorts of ways. The salon is lighted at this time by two intense Auer burners. We go into the bedroom, lighted only by candles, and I cannot see them any better. I snuff out the candles, on the supposition that this is perhaps a case of phosphorescence; but I never perceive anything. We return to the salon. Eusapia spreads a black woollen shawl over her silk skirt and shows me the luminous effluence. But all the time I can see nothing, unless it be for a moment a kind of pale ray at the end of the index finger of her right-hand.
The dinner hour approaches. It is seven o'clock. A letter-weigher ([Pl. X]), which I had bought to renew the curious experiment of M. de Rochas, is upon the table. I ask Eusapia if she remembers having made a piece of mechanism like this move downward on its spring by placing her hands on each side of it, at a distance, and making something like magnetic passes. She doesn't seem to remember anything about it and hums a little stanza from Santa Lucia. I beg that she will try it. She does so. Nothing moves. She asks me to place my hands on hers. We make the same passes, and, to my amazement (for I really was not expecting it at all) the little tray sinks down to the point where it touches the lever and produces the sharp sound of contact. This point is beyond the graduation of the scale, which stops at fifty grams, and may go to sixty, and represents seventy grams at the lowest. The tray immediately rises again. We begin a second time. Nothing. A third time: the same lowering and the same return to equilibrium. Then I beg her to try the experiment alone. She rubs her hands together and makes the same passes. The letter weigher goes down to the same maximum point. We are all standing close by her, in the full light of the Auer burners. The same performance is repeated, the tray remaining down for an interval of about five minutes. The movement does not take place at once; there are sometimes three or four trials without success, as if the force were exhausted by the result. The tray had already sunk down four times before our eyes, always as far as the maximum point, when the valet de chambre, passing by upon some matter of service, I tell him to stop and look. Eusapia begins again and does not succeed. She waits a moment, rubs her hands, begins again, and the same movement without contact is produced for the seventh time, before the three witnesses, each as much astonished as the other. Her hands are sensibly chilled. I think of the trick of the hair, pass my hands between both of hers and find nothing there; I did not see anything. Besides, she does not seem to have touched her head, and her hands have remained before us since the commencement of the experiment, free and untouched.