But there are prejudices less explicable. Thus, for example, at the séance of November 28 a distinguished engineer, M. L., absolutely refused to admit the levitation of the table, in spite of the evidence. Of this my readers may judge for themselves. Here is a note which I extract from my reports:
M. L. tells me that the medium lifts the table with her feet, while resting her hands upon it. I ask Eusapia to draw back her feet under her chair. The table is lifted.
After this second levitation, M. L. declares that he is not satisfied (although neither of the feet of the medium is under a foot of the table), and that we must begin the experiment again, without having her legs touched at any point. The medium then proposes that her legs be fastened to those of M. L. A third levitation takes place, after the left leg (the incriminated one) of the medium has been bound to the left leg of M. L.
This gentleman then declares that the hypotheses he has made, in order to explain the phenomenon, are null and void, but that there must be, all the same, a trick in the thing, because he does not believe in the supernatural.
Neither do I believe in the supernatural. And yet there is no trick.
This manner of reasoning, rather common, does not seem to me scientific. It is to claim that we know the limits of the possible and of the impossible.
People who deny that the earth moves reason in just this way. That which is contrary to common sense is not impossible. Common sense is the average state of popular knowledge; that is to say, of general ignorance.
A man acquainted with the history of the sciences, and who reasons calmly, cannot succeed in understanding the ostracism to which certain sceptics subject unexplained phenomena. "It is impossible," they think. This famous common sense on which they plume themselves is nothing after all, let me say, but common opinion, which accepts habitual facts without comprehending them, and which varies from time to time. What man of good sense would formerly have admitted that we should one day be able to photograph the skeleton of a living being, or store up the voice in a phonograph, or determine the chemical composition of an inaccessible star? What was science a hundred years ago, two hundred years, three hundred? Look at astronomy five hundred years ago, and physiology, and medicine, and natural philosophy, and chemistry. In five hundred years, in a thousand years, in two thousand years, what will these sciences of ours be? And in a hundred thousand years? Yes, in a hundred thousand years, what will human intelligence be? Our actual condition will be to that what the knowledge of a dog is to that of a cultivated man; that is to say, there is no possible comparison.
We smile to-day at the science of learned men of the time of Copernicus or Christopher Columbus or Ambroise Paré, and we forget that, in a few centuries, savants will estimate us in the same fashion. There are properties of matter which are completely hidden from us, and humanity is endowed with faculties still unknown to us. We only advance very slowly in the knowledge of things.
The critics do not always give proof that they possess a very compact logical power. You speak to them of facts proved by centuries of testimony. They challenge the value of popular testimony, and declare that these uncultivated folks, these petty merchants, these manufacturers, these laborers, these peasants, are incapable of observing with any exactitude.