This case seems to me, as well as to Crookes, more conclusively in favor of an exterior spirit, so much the more since the experimenter having asked that the raps be given by the Morse telegraphic code, another message was thus rapped out. I also remember that the learned chemist mentions that the word "however" hidden by his finger, upon a newspaper, and unknown even to himself, was rapped out by a little rod.
Wallace also mentions a name written upon a piece of paper fastened by him under the central leg of the experiment table; Joncières, a water-color correctly painted in complete darkness, and a musical theme written with a pencil; M. Castex Dégrange, the announcement of a death, and the place where a lost object might be found. We have also seen sentences dictated either backwards or in such a way that every other letter only must be read to get the sense, or else by strange combinations showing the action of an unknown intellect. We have a thousand examples of this kind.
But if the mind of the medium may liberate itself and appear in an extra-normal state, why might it not be this mind which acts? Do we not have several distinct personalities in our dreams? If they could dynamically appear, would they not act somewhat in this way?
We ought not to lose sight of the fact that these phenomena are of a mixed character. They are at once physical and psychical, material and intellectual, are not always produced by our conscious will, and are rather the subject of observation than experiment.
It is expedient to insist on this characteristic. I one day, (January 31, 1901) heard E. Duclaux, member of the Institute, director of the Pasteur Institute, express the following confused idea (an idea held by so many physicists and so many chemists), in a company which was yet quite competent to discuss these phenomena: "There is no scientific fact except a fact which can be reproduced at will."[93] What a singular reasoning! The witnesses of the fall of a meteor bring us an aërolite which has just fallen from the sky and been dug up, all hot, from the hole it had made in the ground. "Error! illusion!" we ought to reply: "We shall only believe when you repeat the experiment."
They bring to us the body of a man killed by a stroke of lightning, stripped of his clothes, and shaved as if with a razor. "Impossible!" we ought to reply; "pure invention of your deluded senses." A woman sees appear before her, her husband, who has just died nearly two thousand miles away. We are asked to believe that this is not so, and will not be so until the apparition appears a second time.
This confusion between observation and experiment is a very strange thing as coming from cultivated men.
In psychical phenomena there is a voluntary, capricious, incoherent, intellectual element.
I repeat, we must learn to comprehend that everything cannot be explained and resign ourselves to waiting for an extension of our knowledge. There is intelligence, thought, psychism, mind, in these phenomena. There is still more in certain communications. Can the observations be confirmed and justified by assuming the mind of the living merely as the active agents? Yes, perhaps, but only by attributing to us unknown and supernormal faculties. Yet it must be remembered that this is only an hypothesis. The Spiritualistic hypothesis of communication with the souls of the dead remains also as a working hypothesis.
That souls survive the destruction of the body I have not the shadow of a doubt. But that they manifest themselves by the processes employed in séances the experimental method has not yet given us absolute proof. I add that this hypothesis is not at all likely. If the souls of the dead are about us, upon our planet, the invisible population would increase at the rate of 100,000 a day, about 36 millions a year, 3 billions 620 millions a century, 36 billions in ten centuries, etc.,—unless we admit re-incarnations upon the earth itself.