At this moment the nurse entered and innocently asked, "Did you ring, sir?"
This event put us into an extraordinary state of mind, and if I had not had my sister with me I should have believed that it was an hallucination. But both of us saw, and all three of us heard. It is a good many years now since all that took place, but I can still hear the ominous and mournful sound of that bell ringing in the silence of the chamber.
This account, also, seems not to be devoid of value. There are undoubtedly several ways of explaining it. The first is that which occurs to everybody.
The Frenchman, born malign, says Boileau, does not mince matters, and, apropos of this story of De Musset, simply exclaims in his language (always flashy and devoid of literary distinction), "What a fine piece of rot!" And that is all there is to it. A few may reflect for a moment more, and not admit that there is necessarily any invention on the part of the governess, and may think that she, as well as her sister, believed that De Musset had not touched the bell cord, while in reality he touched it with the ends of his fingers. But these ladies can answer that the distance between the hand of the poet and the cord was too great, that the cord was inaccessible in that position, and that it was that very thing which impressed them, and without which there would have been no story to tell. We may also suppose that the bell was rung by some external force impinging on it, although the cord was not pulled. We may still further suppose that, in the restlessness of these hours of distress, the waiting-woman came in without having heard anything, and that the coincidence of her arrival with the gesture of De Musset surprised the two watchers, who afterward thought that they had heard the bell. However, to sum up the whole thing, while we may regard the occurrence as inexplicable, we may yet admit its truth as narrated. This seems to me the most logical view, and the more so that the gentle poet had, several times in his life, given other proofs of possessing faculties of this kind.
I will add here one more instance of the movement of objects without contact which is not without value. It was published by Dr. Coues in the Annales des sciences psychiques, for the year 1893. The views stated are also worthy of being summed up here. The observers, Dr. and Mrs. Elliott Coues, speak out of their own personal experience.
It is a principle of physics that a heavy body can only be put in motion by the direct application of a mechanical force sufficient to overcome its inertia, and orthodox science maintains that the idea of action at a distance is an erroneous idea.
The authors of the present study assert, on the contrary, that heavy bodies may be, and frequently are, put in motion without any kind of direct application of mechanical force, and that action at a distance is a well-established fact in nature. We offer proofs of these propositions based on a series of experiments undertaken for this purpose.
We often repeated these experiments, during more than two years, with results that were convincing not only to ourselves but to many other witnesses.
We do not understand how the scientific world has been able to accept the idea that the expression "action at a distance" is a false one, unless those who see an error in the assertion attach to these words a special meaning of which we are ignorant.
It is certain that the sun acts at a distance upon the earth and the other planets of the solar system. It is certain that a piece of anything thrown into the air falls back in consequence of the attraction of gravitation,—and that, too, at no matter what distance. The law of gravitation, so far as we know it, is universal, and it is not yet proved that there exists a ponderable, or otherwise palpable, medium which serves to transmit the force.[81]