Such is also the opinion of the electrician Cromwell Varley. Neither he nor Wallace believes that there is anything supernatural in the phenomena. Discarnate spirits are in nature, as well as the incarnate. "The triviality of the communications ought not to astonish us, if we consider the myriads of trivial and fantastic human beings who every day become ghosts and are the same beings the day after their death that they were the day before."
Professor Morgan, the brilliant author of the Budget of Paradoxes (an excellent piece of work, and highly complimented by the London Athenæum, in 1865), expresses the same opinion in his work on Mind (1863). Not only does he think that the facts are incontestable, but he also believes that the hypothesis that explains the facts by intelligences exterior to ourselves is the only satisfying one. He relates, among other things, that, in one of the séances attended by him, a friend of his (a very sceptical person), was making a little fun of the spirits, whereupon, while they were all standing (a dozen experimenters of them) around the dining room table, and forming the chain above it, without contact, the heavy table began to move of its own accord, and, dragging along the whole group, made a rush at the sceptic, and pinned him against the back of the sofa, until he cried "Hold! enough!"
Still, does that constitute proof of an independent spirit? Was it not an expression of the collective thought of the company? And, likewise, in the experience which Wallace has just cited, were not the dictated names latent in the brain of the questioner? And was not the little centre-table, in its climbings acting under the physical and pyschical influences of the medium?
Whatever may be the explanatory hypothesis, the FACTS are undeniable.
We have here, before all, a group of substantial English scientists of the first rank, in whose opinion the denial of the phenomena is a sort of madness.
French scientists are a little more belated than their neighbors. Nevertheless, I have already called attention to some of them during the course of this work. I should have taken pleasure in adding the names of the lamented Pierre Curie and of Professor d'Arsonval, if they had published the experiments they made with Eusapia during July, 1905, and March and April, 1906, at the General Institute of Psychology.
Among the most judicious of experimenters in psychical phenomena I ought also to mention M. J. Maxwell, a doctor of medicine and (a very different function) advocate-general at the Court of Appeals in Bordeaux.
The reader may have already noticed (p. 173) the part which this investigator, at once a magistrate and a scientist, took in the experiments made at l'Agnélas in 1895. Eusapia is not the only medium with whom he studied, and his acquaintance with our subject is supported by the best of documentary evidence.
It is fitting that I present to the reader at this point the most characteristic facts and the essential conclusions set forth in his work.[70]
The author has made a special examinations of raps.