These experiments of Count de Gasparin and his associates have been known for over half a century, and it is really incomprehensible that even the fact of the levitation of tables and of their movements has continued to be denied. Verily, if the tables are sometimes light, it must be confessed that the human race is a little heavy.
As to the theory, the hypothesis of the fluid,—felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (Happy the man who can know the cause of things)—I shall return to this matter in the chapter on explanatory theories. But it is incontestable that, in such experiences, we act by means of an invisible force emanating from us. One must be blind not to admit that.
After a series of experiments so admirably conducted we can understand that the author might well be allowed to indulge in a little derision of obstinately prejudiced unbelievers. In closing this chapter, I cannot forego the pleasure of citing Count de Gasparin apropos of the learned negations of Babinet and his emulators of the Institute.
The savants are not the only ones to stand on their dignity. I also stand on mine, and I make bold to think that a certificate signed with my name would not be rated by anybody as a piece of imposture or frivolity. It is known that I am in the habit of weighing my words; it is known that I love the truth, and that I will not sacrifice it on any consideration; it is known that I prefer to admit an error rather than persist in it; and when, after a long-continued inquiry, I persist with a firmer and profounder conviction than ever, the import or scope of the declaration I make is not to be misapprehended.
I can tell you, in the next place, that the testimony of the eyes has, in my opinion, a scientific value. Independently of instruments and figures, on which I set the highest values, I believe that the true seeing of things may serve. I believe that this also is of itself an instrument. If a sufficient number of good pairs of eyes have ascertained and proved, ten, twenty, a hundred times, that a table is put in motion without contact; if, furthermore, the explanation of the fact by fraudulent or involuntary contacts passes the limits which must be assigned to incredulity, the conclusion is clear. Nobody is warranted in crying out: "You have neither fluidometer nor alembic; you do not give a specimen of your physical agent in a bottle; you do not describe how it acts upon a column of mercury or upon the dip of a needle. We don't believe you, for you have done nothing but see."
"I do not believe you because you have done nothing but see!" "I do not believe you because I have not seen with my own eyes!" So many pedants, so many objections. They hardly take the trouble to agree among themselves; in a war waged against the tables any weapon is fair, nothing comes amiss.
I do not wish to forget that scientists were still talking only of rotations at the moment when Faraday invented his disks.[54] In the presence of a phenomenon so inadequate, and, let us admit it, so suspicious, we can understand how the savants showed themselves sceptical and contented themselves with flimsy refutations. They proportioned the number and size of their weapons to the appearance of the enemy. The one among them who showed the most penetration, and who proposed the most plausible explanation, is most assuredly Chevreul. His theory of the tendency to movement is incontestably true. It explains how the objects we suspend from our finger finally take a vibratory movement in the direction indicated by our will. I am not astonished that some have thought this theory sufficient to explain how experimenters can, in the end, impart a rotation to the table and participate in the movement themselves. I need not say that our proved levitations of weights, and our movements without contact, will not henceforth permit anyone to take refuge in such an explanation. If all the tendencies to movement were united into one they would not be able to produce at a distance an impelling power, nor move a mass that mechanical action could not set in motion.
Really, the learned doctors ought not to throw out to the public these explanations which do not explain. They ought rather to get to work and show us, in fact, how to set about the lifting directly and mechanically of a weight of 220 pounds without applying to the task a force of 220 pounds.
But they prefer to use insulting expressions, and then proceed to invent some theory or other which has only one little fault—that it has no legs to walk with. The recent article of M. Babinet in the Revue des Deux Mondes is a masterpiece in its way. If I needed to be convinced of the reality of the phenomena of table-turning, etc., I should most assuredly have been convinced by the reading of this refutation of it.
In the opinion of M. Babinet, the phenomena of the tables offer no difficulty whatever! Happy science of physics, happy science of mechanics which has an answer ready for everything! We poor, ignorant fellows thought we had detected something extraordinary, and did not know we were merely obeying two extremely elementary laws,—the law of unconscious movements, and, above all, that of nascent movements, movements the power of which seems to surpass that of developed movements.