7. Touchings.
8. Snatching of the block of paper.
9. Throwing of the lead-pencil.
10. Transference of the round table to the top of the other table.
11. Music from the little box.
12. Transfer of the guitar to a point above the head.
13. Imprints of a hand and of a face.
The first four events, having taken place in full light, are incontestable. I should put almost in the same rank Nos. 5 and 6. No. 7 may perhaps be due very often to fraud. The last in the list, having been produced toward the end of the séance, at a time when attention was necessarily relaxed, and being still more extraordinary than all the others, I confess that I cannot admit it with certainty, although I can not understand how it could have been due to fraud. The four others seem genuine; but I should like to observe them anew; a man could wager ninety-nine to one hundred that they are true. I was absolutely sure of them during the séance. But the vividness of the impressions grows weak, and we have a tendency to listen only to the voice of plain common sense,—the most reasonable and the most deceptive of our faculties.
The first impression we get upon the reading of these reports is that these different manifestations are rather vulgar, altogether banal, and do not tell us anything about the other world—or about other worlds. Surely it does not seem probable that any spiritual being would take part in such performances. For these phenomena are of an absolutely material class.
On the other hand, however, it is impossible not to recognize the existence of unknown forces. The simple fact, for example, of the levitation of a table to a height of six and one-half, eight, sixteen inches from the floor is not banal at all. It seems to me, speaking for myself alone, so extraordinary that my opinion is very well expressed when I say that I do not dare to admit it without having seen it myself, with my own eyes: I mean that which is called seeing, in full light and under such conditions that it would be impossible to suspect. While we are very sure that we have proved it, we are at the same time sure that in such experiments there emanates from the human body a force that may be compared with the magnetism of the loadstone, able to act upon wood, upon matter (somewhat as the loadstone acts upon iron), and counterbalancing for some moments the action of gravity. From the scientific point of view, that is a weighty fact in itself. I am absolutely certain that the medium did not lift that weight of fifteen pounds either by her hands or by her legs, or by her feet, and, furthermore, no one of the company was able to do it. The table was lifted by its upper surface. We are, therefore, certainly in the presence of an unknown force here which emanates from the persons present, and above all from the medium.