I am convinced that a man never really studies that which he declares a priori to have no sense in it. If attacks are studies, there is no lack of them, and (I may add) never will be. At the time when the Academy of Medicine buried the report of M. Husson and published what everybody in Europe persisted in calling a refusal to examine, there was issued every morning a paper against magnetism; every morning some new writer vociferated that the partisans of magnetism were imbeciles, and proposed an explanatory system of his own. If you call that making a study, then I grant that they have studied table-turnings, for there certainly has been no dearth of insults and of theories about these phenomena. They have received every attention, except that no one was willing to inspect, experiment, listen, and read.
Twice, a month apart, the Institute has announced (without protest from anybody whatever) to the students of table-turnings that it was shelving papers relating to that topic; that it was not obliged to occupy itself with nonsense; that there was a place in its archives for lucubrations of that kind; namely, the place to which were consigned papers on perpetual motion.
Oh, Molière! why are you not present with us? But, in reality, you are here. Your genius has limned with ineffaceable lines that everlasting disease of venerable big-wigs and mouldy specialists,—disdain of the laity, respect for their fellow-members, idolatry of the past. A most singular deformity, this! And it appears in all ages, in various disguises, in the midst of all branches of human activity, now in the name of religion, now in that of medicine, and again in the name of science or of art. Yes, even surviving the wreck of revolutions which spare nothing, appearing even within the walls of learned academies the members of which write for the furtherance of the great movements of modern progress, one thing remains,—the spirit of partisanship, of cliques, the spirit of tradition, the superstitious regard for forms.
Really, it would seem as if people must be still taking Bible oaths like those in the baccalaureate ceremony at the end of Molière's Malade Imaginaire. M. Foucault is fond of this scene, and will therefore not take it ill if I recall to his mind a couple of stanzas:
Essere in omnibus
Consultationibus
Ancieni aviso,
Aut bono,
Aut mauvaiso.
—Juro!
De non jamais te servire
De remediis alcunis
Quam de ceux soulement doctæ facultatis,
Maladus dut-il crevare,
Et mori de suo malo.
—Juro![55]
If you don't call that a refusal to examine, I don't know what the words mean in good French.
With such ingenious candor and with such authority did the Count Agénor de Gasparin express himself in the year 1854. It seems to me that the experiments made known in this volume furnish abundant evidence that he is right.
Yet I have still friends, at the Institute, who smile with the utmost scorn when I ask their opinion on the phenomena of the levitation of tables, the movement of objects without perceptible cause, unexplained noises in haunted houses, communication of thought at a distance, premonitory dreams, and apparitions of the dying. Although these unexplained phenomena have undeniably been proved to be facts of occurrence, those learned friends of mine remain convinced that "such things as that are impossible."