We may allow for the fraud, conscious and unconscious of mediums. We may deplore it, for it throws an unpleasant gloom upon all the phenomena; but let us render justice to incontestable facts, and continue to observe them.
Quære et invenies! Seek and thou shalt find. The Unknown, the science of to-morrow.
CHAPTER VI
THE EXPERIMENTS OF COUNT DE GASPARIN
One of the most important series of experiments that has been made on the subject of moving tables is that of Count Agénor de Gasparin at Valleyres, Switzerland, in September, October, November, and December of the year 1853. The Count has published formal reports of these studies in two large volumes.[51] These séances may be called purely scientific, for they were conducted with the most scrupulous care and were under the severest control. The table usually employed had a round oak top thirty-two inches in diameter, which rested on a heavy three-footed central column, the feet being about twenty-two inches apart. There were usually ten or twelve experimenters, and they formed the chain on the table by touching each other with their little fingers in such a way that the thumb of the left hand of each operator touched that of his right hand, and the little finger of the right hand touched that of the left hand of his neighbor. In the opinion of the author, this chain is useful, but not absolutely necessary. The rotation of the table usually began after a waiting of five or ten minutes. Then it lifted one foot to a height that varied from time to time, and fell back again. The levitation took place even when a very heavy man was seated on the table. Rotations and levitations were obtained without the contact of hands. But let us hear the author himself:
It is a question of positive fact that I wish to solve. The theory will come later. To prove that the phenomenon of turning tables is real and of a purely physical nature; that it can neither be explained by the mechanical action of our muscles nor by the mysterious action of spirits,—such is my thesis. It is my wish to state it with precision and circumscribe its limits here at the very start. I confess I find some satisfaction in meeting with unanswerable proofs the sarcasms of people who find it easier to mock than to examine. I am well aware that we have got to put up with that. No new truth becomes evident without having been first ridiculed. But it is none the less agreeable to reach the moment when things assume their legitimate place, and when rôles cease to be inverted. This moment might have been long in coming. For a long time I feared that table-phenomena would not admit of a definite scientific demonstration; that, while they inspired absolute certainty in the minds of the operators and witnesses at first hand, they would not furnish irrefutable arguments to the public. In the presence of bare possibilities, each person would be free to cherish his own particular opinion; we should have had believers and sceptics. The classification would have taken place in virtue of tendencies rather than by reason of one's knowledge or ignorance of the facts. Some, in the agreeable sensation of their intellectual superiority, would have carried their head very high, and others would have abandoned themselves in despair to the current superstitions of the day. The truth incompletely demonstrated would have been treated as a lie, and, what is worse, would have ended by becoming such.
But thank God! it will not be so now. Our meetings were real and formal séances, to which the best hours of the day were given. The results, verified with the most minute care, were embodied in formal and official declarations. I have these procès-verbaux before me now, and it seems to me that I could not do better than to take up one after another and extract from each the interesting observations it may contain. I shall thus follow the method of certain historians, and relate the truth rather than systematize it. The reader will, as it were, follow us step by step. He will examine and check my various assertions by comparing them; he will form his own conviction, and will judge whether my proofs have that character of frequent occurrence, of persistency, of progressive development which false discoveries, based upon some fortuitous and poorly described coincidence, never have.
These are promising premises. We shall see whether the promises will be kept. The report (or minutes) of the first meeting bears the date of September 20, 1853. Numerous séances had been held before, but it had not been thought necessary to write down the results. What those results were will be seen by the following brief account: