I have just said that there were three methods employed in our spiritistic experiments. I have given my opinion of the first (writing mediums), basing it on my personal observations, and without desiring to weaken other proofs, if there are any. As to the second (planchette), I became familiar with it more especially by the séances of Mme. de Girardin, at the home of Victor Hugo in the Isle of Jersey. It works more independently than the first method; but it is still only a prolongation, as it were, of the hand and the brain. The third method—table-rapping, or typtology; I mean taps in the table—seems to me still more emphatically an extension of the hand and brain, and some forty-five years ago I often made use of this form of experiment.
Rappings made on the floor by one foot of the table, as letters are spelled out, have no special value. The least pressure can produce these see-saw movements. The chief experimenter himself makes the responses, sometimes without suspecting it.
Several persons group themselves about a table, place their hands upon it, and wait for something to happen. At the end of five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, the time depending on the psychic atmosphere[8] and the faculties of the experimenters, raps are heard in the table, or the sitters help in the movements of the table, which seems possessed. Why choose a table? Because it is the only article of furniture around which folks usually sit. Sometimes the table is lifted on one or more of its feet and is gently rocked to and fro. Sometimes it comes up as if glued to the hands placed on it, remaining suspended in the air two, three, five, ten, twenty seconds. Again, it is nailed to the floor with such force that it seems to have double or triple its usual weight. At other times, and usually on demand, it gives forth the sound of a saw, of a hatchet, of a lead-pencil writing, etc. We have here material results coming under direct observation, and they prove irrefragably the existence of an unknown force.
This force is a material force in the psychic class. If we confined our attention to blind senseless movements of one kind or another, in relation only with the volitions of the experimenters, and not capable of being explained by the mere imposition of their hands, we might see proof of the existence of a new unknown force, explicable as a transformation of nervous force, of organic electricity; and that would be much in itself. But the raps made in the table, or by the feet of it, are made in reply to questions asked. Since we know the table is only a piece of wood, when we ask it questions, we are really addressing some mental agent who hears and replies. It was in this class of phenomena that modern Spiritualism took its rise; namely, in the United States, in 1848, when the Fox sisters heard sounds in their chamber,—raps in the walls and in the furniture. Their father, after several months of vexatious investigation, finally had recourse to the traditional theory of ghosts, and, addressing his questions to the wall, demanded some kind of an explanation from the invisible thing therein. This thing responded by conventional taps to the questions asked, and declared that it was the spirit of the former proprietor once assassinated in this his very home. The spirit asked for prayers and the burial of its body. (From this time on the replies were so arranged that one rap in response to a question signified yes, two meant no while three meant an emphatic yes.)
I hasten to remark at once that the tapped replies prove nothing, and could have been made unconsciously by the Fox sisters themselves, whom we can not consider to have been playing a little comedy since the raps produced by them in the walls astounded and overwhelmed them more, indeed, than they did any one else. The hypothesis of jugglery and mystification, dear to certain critics, has not the least application to this case, although I admit that rappings and movements are often produced as practical jokes by waggish persons.
There is, of course, an unseen cause that originates these rappings. Is it within us or outside of us? Is it possible that we might be capable of doubling our personality in some way without knowing it, of acting by mental suggestion, of answering our own questions without suspecting it, of producing material results without being conscious of it? Or does there exist, around and about us, an intelligent medium or atmosphere, a kind of spiritual cosmos? Or, again, is it possible that we are surrounded by invisible non-human beings,—gnomes, spirits, and hobgoblins (there may be an unknown world about us)? Or, finally, is it possible that the spirits of the dead may survive, and wander to and fro, and hold communication with us? All these hypotheses present themselves to our minds, nor have we the scientific absolute right to reject any one of them.
The lifting of a table, the displacement of an object, may be attributed to an unknown force developed by our nervous system or otherwise. At least these movements do not prove the existence of a mind extraneous to that of the subject. But when some one is naming the letters of the alphabet or pointing them out on a sheet of pasteboard, and the table, either by raps in the wood or by levitations, puts together an intelligible sentence, we are forced to attribute this intelligent effect to an intelligent cause. This cause may be the medium himself; and the simplest way is, evidently, to suppose that he himself raps out the letters. But experiments can be arranged in such a way that he cannot possibly do this, even unconsciously. Our first duty is, in reality, to make fraud impossible.
Those who have sufficiently studied the subject know that fraud does not explain what they have observed. To be sure, in fashionable Spiritualistic soirées people sometimes amuse themselves. Especially when the séances take place in the dark, and the alternation of the sexes is provided for so as to "reinforce the fluids," it is not altogether an unheard of thing for the gentlemen to profit by the temptation to temporarily forget the object of the meeting and break the established chain of hands in order to begin another on their own account. The ladies and the young girls like these changes in the program, and scarcely a complaint is heard. On the other hand, apart from fashionable soirées, to which everybody is invited for their amusement, the more serious reunions are frequently no safer; for the medium, who is, in one way or another, an interested person, is anxious to give the most he can—and something to boot.
Upon the leaf of an old note-book of mine which has just turned up, I classed Spiritualistic soirées in the following order, which is doubtless a slightly original one:—
1. Amorous caresses. (A similar reproach was made against the ancient Christian love-feasts or agapes.)