This feigning is of course a very vexatious and regrettable thing. It throws suspicion upon the experiments, renders them much more difficult and less within the reach of the investigator. But this is only an impediment, and ought not to fetch us up short and lead us to give a premature decision. All of us who have experimented with and handled these sensitives know that at every step we run foul of fraud, conscious or unconscious, and that all mediums—or almost all—are used to the thing. We know that we must, unfortunately, take our share, for the moment, of this regrettable weakness, and be perspicacious enough to hinder, or at least to unearth the trickery, and to disentangle the true from the false.
More than one of those who have engaged perseveringly in psychic experiments, can say that he has been sometimes enervated and irritated while waiting for a phenomenon which does not take place, and that he has felt something like a desire to put an end to this waiting by himself giving the extra twist or decisive touch.[44]
Such experimenters can understand that if, in place of being conscientious workers, always masters of themselves, incapable of deceiving, and engaged solely in the search for scientific truth, they were, on the contrary, somewhat dreamy and impulsive persons who were susceptible to suggestion and whose amour propre was active, and in whose minds scientific probity did not hold the first and pre-eminent place, they would undoubtedly engage, more or less involuntarily, in the artificial production of phenomena which refused to take place in smooth and natural order.
As to Eusapia, if she does sometimes counterfeit, she does it only by eluding the watchful inspection of the experimenters and by escaping for a moment from their control; but she does it without any other artifice. Her experiments are not planned, and, contrary to the habit of prestidigitators, she does not carry any apparatus upon her person. It is easy to assure one's self of this, for she is very willing to completely undress before a lady charged with keeping watch of her.
Furthermore, she exhibits her powers ad libitum with the same persons, and repeats indefinitely the same experiments before them. Prestidigitators do not act in this way.
Plate XI
