We must know how to explain in what way our thoughts—conscious, unconscious, sub-conscious—can strike blows in a table, move it, lift it. As this question is rather embarrassing, Dr. Pierre Janet treats it as "secondary personality," and is obliged to have recourse to the movements of the toes, to the snapping of the muscles of the fibular tendon, to ventriloquism and the deceptions of unconscious accomplices.[20] This is not a sufficient explanation.
As a matter of fact, we do not understand how our thought, or that of another, can cause raps in a table, by which sentences are formed. But we are obliged to admit it. Let us call it, if you please, "telekinetsis"; but does that get us any farther along?
There has been talk for some years about unconscious facts, about sub-consciousness, subliminal consciousness, etc. I fear that in these things also we are putting ourselves off with words which do not explain things very much.
I intend some day, if the time is given me, to write a special book on Spiritualism, studied from the theoretic and doctrinal point of view, which will form a second volume of my work The Unknown and Psychic Problems, and which has been in preparation since the publication of that work in 1899. Mediumistic communications, dictations received (notably by Victor Hugo, Mme. de Girardin, Eugène Nus, and the Phalansterians), will be the subject of special chapters in this volume,—as well as the problem, otherwise important, of the plurality of existences.
It is not my intention to enlarge in this place upon the aspects of the general question. That which I restrict myself to establishing in this book is that there are in us, about us, unknown forces capable of putting matter in motion, just as our will does. I ought, therefore, to limit myself to material phenomena. The range of that class of investigations is already immense, and the "communications" of which I have just spoken are really outside the limits of this range. But, as this subject and that of psychological experiments are continually overlapping, it was necessary to give a summary of it in this place. Let us return for the present to the material phenomena produced by mediums and to that which I have myself ascertained in my experiences with Eusapia Paladino, who unites them nearly all in her own personality and experiences.
CHAPTER III
MY EXPERIMENTS WITH EUSAPIA PALADINO.
In the earlier pages of this volume some of my later experiments with the Neapolitan medium, Eusapia Paladino, have been described. We shall now revert to the earlier ones.