The savants are, however, excusable for not going too quick (let us admit with Thury).
What! a perturbative force lurking, by the hypothesis, in the human organism sufficiently powerful to lift tables, and which yet had never produced the slightest derangement in the thousands of experiments that physicists are daily making in their laboratories! Their balances, responsive to the weight of a tenth of a milligram, their pendulums whose oscillations take place with mathematical regularity, had never felt the slightest disturbing effect of these forces, whose source is there present wherever there is a man and a volition! Now, it is the ardent wish of the physicist that the experiment shall always exactly tally the forecasts of theory. Must he then admit an unknown disturbing force?
And, even without going outside of the limits of the human organism, think, if the organism is unable to move the smallest part of itself when the part is deprived of muscles and nerves, or, when a single hair of our head is absolutely withdrawn from the influence of the will—think, I say, how much less (and with how much stronger reason) that nervous organism of ours would seem to be able to move inert bodies residing outside the limits of our own frames!
But, if there is a profound improbability in the thing, still, we cannot say that it is impossible. No one can show a priori the impossibility of the phenomena described, as they demonstrate the impossibility of perpetual motion or the squaring of the circle. Consequently, no one has the right to treat as absurd the evidences which tend to confirm the experiments. Provided these evidences are furnished by judicious and truthful men, then they are worth the trouble of examination. If this logical course had been followed—the only true and equitable one,—the work would now have been done, and the learned men would have the glory thereof.
Thury begins by examining the experiments of Count de Gasparin at Valleyres.
The experiments of Valleyres (he writes) tend to establish the two following principles:
1. The will, in a certain condition of the human organism, can act, from a distance, upon inert bodies, and by an agency different from that of muscular action.
2. Under the same conditions, thought can be communicated directly, though unconsciously, from one individual to another.
As long as we were ignorant of any other facts than those resulting from a movement effected by contact with the fingers of the hand, in a way in which the mechanical action of the fingers became possible, the results of the experiments upon the table were always of difficult and doubtful interpretation. These results had to be necessarily based upon an estimate of the mechanical force exerted by the hands compared with the strength of the resistance to be overcome. But the mechanical force of the hands is difficult to measure exactly, under the conditions necessary to produce the phenomena.
Yet over and above that plan of work there remained two methods, of operation to employ.