The medium, whose marvellous séance performances we have been describing has been the subject of a long series of observations by eminent and careful experimenters. Her endowments are indeed exceptional. When you study with Eusapia, the comparison of her powers with those of ordinary cases makes you think of the difference between a fine electrical machine operated under good atmospheric conditions and a bad one operated on a rainy day. You see more with her in one hour than in a host of faulty trials with other mediums.
Our study of these unknown forces will progress rapidly if, in place of limiting the results obtained to one or two groups, such as those which precede, we examine the totality of the observations made in the séances of this medium. My readers can then compare them with the preceding ones; they can judge, they can make their own estimates.
The documents which I am now going to print are all borrowed from the Annales des sciences psychiques and from the valuable collection of M. Albert de Rochas upon The Externalization of Motivity.
A few words, first, about the débuts of Eusapia in her mediumistic career.
Professor Chiaia, of Naples, to whom I owe it that I was able to receive Eusapia at my house and obtain the experiments reported above, was the first to bring her gifts into public notice. He first published on the 9th of August, 1888, in a journal issued at Rome, the following letter addressed to Professor Lombroso:
Dear Sir,—In your article, The Influence of Civilization upon Genius (which has incontestable beauties of style and of logic), I noticed a very happy paragraph. It seems to me to sum up the scientific movement (starting from the time when man first invented that head-breaking thing called an alphabet) down to our own day. This paragraph reads as follows:
"Every generation is prematurely ready for discoveries which it never sees born, since it does not perceive its own incapacity and the means it lacks for making further discoveries. The repetition of any one manifestation, by impressing itself upon our brains, prepares our minds and renders them less and less incapable of discovering the laws to which this manifestation is amenable. Twenty or thirty years are enough to make the whole world admire a discovery which was treated as madness at the moment when it was made. Even at the present day academic bodies laugh at hypnotism and at homœopathy. Who knows whether my friends and I, who laugh at Spiritualism, are not in error, just as hypnotized persons are? Thanks to the illusion which surrounds us, we may be incapable of seeing that we deceive ourselves; and, like many persons of unsound mind who stubbornly oppose the truth, we laugh at those who are not of our way of thinking."
Struck by this keen thought, which by chance I find adapted to a certain matter with which I have been occupied for some time, I joyfully accept it, without abatement, without any comment which might change its sense; and, confining myself to the fine old rules of chivalry, I make use of it as a challenge. The consequences of this challenge will neither be dangerous nor bloody: we shall fight fairly; and, whatever may be the results of the encounter, whether I succumb or whether I make my opponent yield, it will always be in a friendly way. The result will tend to the improvement of one of the two adversaries and will be in every way useful to the great cause of truth.
There is much talk nowadays of a special malady which is found in the human organism. We notice it every day; but we are ignorant of its cause and know not what to call it. The cry is raised that it be subjected to the examination of contemporary science; but science, in reply, only meets the request with the mocking ironical smile of a Pyrrhus, for the precise reason (as you say) that the time is not yet ripe.
But the author of the paragraph I have quoted above, of course did not write it merely for the pleasure of writing. It seems to me, on the contrary, that he would not smile disdainfully if he were invited to observe a special case that is worthy to attract the attention and to seriously occupy the mind of a Lombroso. The case I allude to is that of an invalid woman who belongs to the humblest class of society. She is nearly thirty years old and very ignorant; her look is neither fascinating nor endowed with the power which modern criminologists call irresistible; but, when she wishes, be it by day or by night, she can divert a curious group for an hour or so with the most surprising phenomena. Either bound to a seat or firmly held by the hands of the curious, she attracts to her the articles of furniture which surround her, lifts them up, holds them suspended in air like Mahomet's coffin, and makes them come down again with undulatory movements, as if they were obeying her will. She increases their weight or lessens it according to her pleasure. She raps or taps upon the walls, the ceiling, the floor, with fine rhythm and cadence. In response to the requests of the spectators, something like flashes of electricity shoot forth from her body, and envelop her or enwrap the spectators of these marvellous scenes. She draws upon cards that you hold out everything that you want—figures, signatures, numbers, sentences—by just stretching out her hand toward the indicated place. If you place in the corner of the room a vessel containing a layer of soft clay, you find after some moments the imprint in it of a small or a large hand, the image of a face (front view or profile), from which a plaster cast can be taken. In this way, portraits of a face taken at different angles have been preserved, and those who desire so to do can thus make serious and important studies.[30]