A second tub, weighing 42 pounds, was next placed in the middle of the other. They were both lifted—less easily, but very neatly and clearly.
Then a third tub, smaller, and weighing 28⅗ pounds, was placed on top of the two others. The levitations took place.
We had still further got ready enormous stones weighing altogether 48½ pounds. They were placed on the third tub. After rather long hesitation, the table lifted several times in succession each of its three legs. It lifted them with a force, a decision, an élan, which surprised us. But its strength, already put to so many proofs, could not resist this last one. Bending under the powerful swaying motion imparted by the total mass of 165 pounds, it suddenly broke down, and its massive centre-post was split from top to bottom—to the great peril of the operators on the side of whom the entire load rolled off.
I shall not stop to comment on such an experiment. It answers all demands. Our united muscular force would not have sufficed to determine the movements that took place. A mass of inert matter free from the suspicion of being obliging, had replaced the person whose complicity was held in suspicion. Finally, when the three legs had been lifted, each in turn, critics no longer had as a resource the insinuation that we had caused the weight to be laid more on one side than on the other.
Inasmuch as our poor table had been wounded on the field of honor and could not be repaired on the spot, we got a new one which much resembled it. But it was a little larger and a little lighter.
The interesting point was to be settled whether we were going to be obliged to wait for it to be charged with the psycho-physical fluid. The occasion was a famous one for solving this important problem: Where does the fluid reside?—in the operators or in the piece of furniture. The solution was as prompt as it was decisive. Scarcely had our hands, in chains, been placed upon this second table than it began to revolve with the most unexpected and the most comic rapidity! Evidently, the fluid was in us, and we were free to apply it in succession to different tables.
We lost no time. In the mood in which we then were, movement without contact must succeed better than ever. Nor did we deceive ourselves in so thinking. We first developed rotations without contact to the number of five or six.
As to levitations without contact, we discovered a method of proceeding that renders their success easier. The chain, formed a few millimetres above the top disk, is arranged so as to go in the direction in which the movement is to take place; the hands the nearest to the leg called on to rise are outside of and beyond the top; they draw near and pass gradually by, while the hands that are opposite, and which had at first advanced toward the same leg, move away from it while they attract it. It is during this progression of the chain, while all our wills are fixed upon a particular spot on the wood, and when the orders to levitate are forcibly given, that the foot quits the ground and the table-top follows the hands,—to the point of upsetting, if one did not keep hold of it.
This levitation without contact was produced about thirty times. We produced it by each of the three legs in succession, in order to remove every pretext for criticism. Moreover, we watched the hands with scrupulous care. If the reader will please observe that this surveillance was exercised during thirty operations without detecting the slightest contact, I think it will be concluded that the reality is henceforth placed beyond all doubt.
Séance of November 21