The fear of grazing it involuntarily had even been so great that the hands had acted fluidically from a height much greater than in previous sittings. Each one had thought he could not raise his hands too high, and the hands removed to such a distance from the top, had not had recourse to any of the manœuvres or passes of which we had at other times made use. Keeping its place, above the table to be lifted, the chain had preserved its form intact; it had made hardly a perceptible motion in the direction of the movement it was producing at a distance from the table.
I will add, finally that we did not content ourselves with a single experience. A careful inspection following each of several levitations, always showed that the dust-like layer of flour was absolutely untouched; and no portion of the table had escaped its tell-tale coat of white.
The author of these reports himself estimates as follows the results he has recorded:
The phenomena observed confirm and elucidate each other. Large four-legged tables compete with three-legged ones. Inert weights, placed on these, come forward as substitutes for persons suspected of giving a helping hand to the table charged with the task of lifting them. At last the great discovery arrives in its turn: we begin by continuing without contact movements already initiated, and we end by producing them; we succeed almost in creating the process, to such an extent that these extraordinary facts manifest themselves sometimes in an uninterrupted series of fifteen or thirty performances. The glidings round out the subject by throwing light on one phase of action at a distance: they reveal it as powerless (at times) to lift the table, but able to draw it along over the floor.
Such is the rapidly sketched account of our progress. Taken just by itself alone, it constitutes a solid proof and I recommend a study of it to serious men. It is not thus that error proceeds. Illusions originating in accident, or chance, do not thus resist a long study, and do not pass unmasked through a long series of experiments that justify them more and more.
The reading of numbers in others' minds, and the balance of forces, merit special consideration.
When all the operators but one are ignorant of the number to be materialized by raps, the operation (unless it is fluidic) ought to proceed either from the person who knows the number and furnishes at once the movement and the arrest, or else it ought to proceed from a relation instinctively established between that person who furnishes the arrest and his vis-à-vis who furnishes the movement. Let us examine both hypotheses.
The first is untenable; for, in the case where some one chooses a leg of the table upon which the operator who knows the number can exercise no muscular action, the leg thus designated none the less rises at his command.
The second is untenable; for, in the case where some one indicates a zero, the movement which ought to take place does not do so. Nay more. If you place at loggerheads two persons placed on opposite sides of the table and enjoin each to make a different number triumph, the more powerful operator secures the execution of the chief number although his vis-à-vis is interested not only in not furnishing it to him, but in arresting it.
I know that this matter of the divining of numbers thought of is in bad odor. It lacks a certain pedantic and scientific form. Yet I have not hesitated to insist on it; for there are few experiments in which is better manifested the mixed character of the phenomenon,—physical power developed and applied outside of ourselves by the effect of our will. Just because it forms the great offense, or stumbling block, I am unwilling to be shame-faced about it. I maintain, besides that this is just as scientific as anything else. True science is not tied to the employment of such and such a process or such and such an instrument. That which a fluidometer would show would be no less scientifically demonstrated than what is seen with the eyes and estimated by the reason.