In the next place, this striking thing befalls, that the phenomenon which muscular action could easily produce is precisely the one that we most rarely and with the greatest difficulty obtain, and that the phenomenon which muscular action could not compass is the one the most habitually realized when the chain is formed. Why does not our involuntary impulse always make the table turn? Why should not our "fraud" always procure such a triumph? Why, as a general thing, do we only succeed in effecting that which is mechanically impossible?
I advise people who like to make fun of table-turnings not to investigate them too closely, and to beware of giving too careful attention to our supreme demonstration,—that of movements without contact, for it will leave them not the slightest pretext for incredulity.
Thus the fact is established. Multiplied experiments, diverse and irrefutable proofs, which are, moreover, joined in the closest solidarity, give to the fluidic action the stamp of complete certainty. Those who have had the patience to follow me thus far will have felt their suspicions vanishing one after another, and their faith in the new phenomenon more and more strengthened. They will have made good what we ourselves have substantiated and made good; for no one has opposed more difficulties to table-turning than have we, no one has shown himself more inquisitorial and exacting respecting them.
It is not our fault if the results have been conclusive (and more and more so), nor ours the blame if they have reciprocally confirmed each other, if they have ended by forming one body and taking on the character of perfect evidence. To study, to compare, to repeat and repeat again, and to finally exclude all that admits of doubt or question—this was our duty. Nor have we failed to perform it. I make no affirmations in these reports which I have not proved over and over again.
Such are the memorable experiments of the Count de Gasparin. Their worth will be appreciated by all who read them. I have been anxious to reproduce these careful reports; for they establish of themselves the absolute and undeniable reality of these movements that contradict the normal law of gravitation. Let us hear the Count's explanatory hypotheses.
The reader will have noticed the care I have taken to confine myself to the verification of the facts, without hazarding any explanatory hypothesis. If I have employed the word "fluid," it was to avoid circumlocutions. Strict scientific precision would have demanded that I always write "the fluid, the force, or physical agent whatever it may be." I shall be pardoned for having been a little less exact than this in my language. It was enough that my thought was perfectly clear. That we have to do with a fluid, properly so called, in the phenomena of table turning and lifting I cannot absolutely affirm. I affirm that there is an agent, and that this agent is not supernatural, that it is physical, imparting to physical objects the movements which our will determines.
Our will, I have said. And this is in fact the fundamental idea we have gathered out of this subject of a physical agent. It is this which characterizes it, and it is this also which compromises it in the eyes of a good many folks. They might, perhaps, be resigned to a new agent, if it were the necessary and exclusive product of the hands forming the chain, if only it were true that certain positions or certain acts insured its manifestation. But this is not the case with it: the mental and the physical must combine in order to give it birth. Here are hands that tire themselves out in forming the chain, and yet obtain no movement: the will has not been mingled in the act. Here is a will that commands in vain: the hands have not been placed in a suitable position.
We have thrown light upon both these sides of the phenomenon, for they are both essential.
Another fact has been noted by us, and ought to enter into a description of the physical agent in question: this agent inheres in the persons and not in the table. Let the operators, when they are in rapport, pass to a new table and encircle it: they will be able immediately to exercise all their authority over it; their will will continue to dispose of the physical agent and to make use of it for rapping numbers mentally selected by persons present or for producing movements without contact.
Such are the facts. The explanation of them will come later. It is, however, very natural to want to find this at once, and to make hypotheses which may be regarded as possible, if not true. I have taken the risk of doing this, and I do not repent of it. Was it not imperative to prove to our opponents that they have not even the pretext of "a scientific impossibility"? Hypotheses have their legitimate place and their utility, even if they are incorrect. If they are admissible in themselves, that is sufficient, for that defends the facts to which they are applied from the accusation of monstrosity. The critic has no longer the right to demand the previous question.