Mysterious Psychic Forces / An Account of the Author's Investigations in Psychical Research, Together with Those of Other European Savants

by Camille Flammarion

Seeing that it was asked for on all sides, I have risked the following statement:

You assert that our pretensions are false, for the simple reason that they cannot be true! Very well. But, at all events, allow me to lay before you certain postulates. Suppose, in the first place, that you do not know everything, that the moral and even the material nature of man have obscurities which you have not been able to remove. Suppose that the smallest blade of grass springing up in the field, that the smallest grain reproducing its kind, that the finger of your hand in the act of executing the order you give it, enclose mysteries that surpass the powers of the learned doctors to fathom, and which they would declare absurd if they were not compelled to recognize them as real. Then, in the second place, suppose that certain men who will so to do, and whose hands are joined one to another in a certain way, give birth to a fluid or to a special kind of force. I do not ask you to admit that such force exists; you will only agree with me that it is possible. There is no natural law opposed to it that I know of.

Now, let us take one more step. The will disposes of this fluid. It gives an impulse to external objects only when we will it, and in quarters selected by us. Would there be anything impossible in this? Is it an unheard-of thing that we transmit movement to matter that is outside of ourselves? Why, we do so every day, and every instant; our mechanical action is nothing more or less than this. The horrible thing in your eyes doubtless is that we do not act mechanically! But there is something besides mechanical action in this world. There are physical causes of movement that are something else than this. The caloric that penetrates a living body produces dilatation there; that is to say, universal movement. The loadstone placed in the neighborhood of a piece of iron attracts it, and makes it leap across the intervening space.

"Yes," some one will exclaim, "we should make no objection, provided your pretended fluid did not obey one special direction in its progress. If it went straight on, as a blind force, well and good! It would then be like the caloric, that dilates everything it meets in its passage. It would be like the magnet which attracts indiscriminately toward a fixed point all the particles of iron in its vicinity. As for you, your invention of the theory of a rotative fluid calls vividly to mind the explanation of the dormitive properties of opium."

It is impossible to more completely misunderstand things. No one dreams of a "rotative fluid." All we maintain is, that, when the fluid is emitted and imparts either repulsion or lateral attraction to a piece of furniture resting on legs, a very simple mechanical law transforms the lateral action into rotation.

I do not say, "The tables turn because my fluid is rotative." I say, "The tables turn, because, when they receive an impelling force or undergo an attraction, they cannot help turning." Stated in this way, it is a little less naïve. Consequently, I should be under no obligation to undertake the cause of the poor university scholar of the Malade Imaginaire, and defend his famous reply: "Opium facit dormire quia est in eo virtus dormitiva" ("opium puts people to sleep because it has the sleep-producing virtue or property"). Nevertheless, I can't help it, out it must come: I find the reply an excellent one. I doubt whether the savants have found a better one to this day, and I advise them to resign themselves sometimes to the following kind of reasoning: "Opium puts us to sleep because it puts us to sleep; things are because they are." In other words, I see the facts and do not know the causes. I do not know. "I do not know!" terrible words, which one finds difficulty in pronouncing! Now, I suspect very strongly that the sly roguishness of Molière is for the benefit of the doctors, who pretend to know everything, invent explanations which do not explain, and do not know how to accept the facts while waiting for more light.

But there is more to come. The hypothesis of the fluid (a pure hypothesis, remember) must still prove that it is a hypothesis reconcilable with the different circumstances of the phenomenon. The table does not merely turn: it lifts its legs up, it raps numbers mentally indicated to it; in a word, it obeys the will, and obeys it so well that the removal of contact does not terminate its obedience. The impelling force or lateral attraction which account for rotations cannot account for levitations.

But why? Because the will directs the fluid now into one leg of the table, now into another. Because the table identifies itself with us, after a fashion, becomes a limb of our own body, and produces movements thought of by us in the same manner as our arm produces them. Because we have no conscious knowledge of the direction imparted to the fluid, and govern the movements of the table without imagining that any kind of fluid or force whatever is in action.

In all our acts, in all without exception, we have no consciousness of the direction imparted by our will. When you explain to me how I lift my hand, I will explain to you how I make the table-leg rise from the floor. I "willed to raise my hand." Yes, and I also willed to lift this table-leg. As for the executing of the mandates of the will, the putting into play of the muscles required to lift the hand, or of the fluid-power required to lift the table-leg, I have no knowledge of what passes in me apropos of this. Strange mystery, and one which ought to inspire in us a little modesty! There is in me an executive power, a power of such a nature that, when I have willed such or such an act, it addresses detailed orders to the different muscles and sets in motion a hundred complicated movements to bring about a final result which has been merely thought of, merely willed. That miracle goes on within me, and I understand it not at all, and never shall understand it. Do you not agree that the same executive power can give to the fluid the directions it gives to the muscles? I have willed to play a sonata on the piano, and, unknown to me, something within me has given orders to hundreds of thousands of muscular acts. I have willed that the leg of this table should be lifted up, and, unknown to me, something within me has directed the attractions and impulsions of the fluid to the designated place.

The hypothesis of a fluid is, then, defensible. It accords with the nature of things and with the nature of man. I have no wish to go farther and furnish at once a definitive explanation. But I am not worrying. Let the facts once be admitted, and explanations will not be wanting. What seems impossible now will seem very simple then. About incontestable things no trouble is made. We are so constituted that, after we have asserted the impossibility of everything we do not comprehend, we declare comprehensible all that we have recognized as real. People are everywhere to be met with who shrug their shoulders when you speak to them of table-turnings and who make nothing of the Puck-like performance of the electric current in putting the girdle of its circuit around the earth in the fraction of a moment, and who find the miracle of the transmission of the mental and moral qualities of the fathers to the children a very simple thing to understand! The tables of the psychic experimenter cannot escape the common lot. Their phenomena, absurd to-day, are to-morrow self-evident.