Well, I do not see anything inadmissible in this,—that in the case of hypnotic and hysterical persons the excitation of certain centres, which become powerful by the paralysis of all the others and then provoke a transposition and a transmission of physical forces, may also produce a transformation in luminous force or in motive force. Thus we understand how the force in a medium which I shall call cortical or cerebral may, for example, lift the table, pull somebody's beard, hit him, caress him, etc.
During the transposition of senses due to hypnotism,—when, for example, the nose and the chin see (and that is a fact which I observed with my own eyes), and when for some moments all the other senses are paralyzed, the cortical centre of vision, which has its seat in the brain, acquires such an energy that it supersedes the eye. It is this which we have been able to prove, Ottolenghi and I, in the case of three hypnotized persons, by making use of the lens and of the prism.
The phenomena observed would be explained, according to this theory, by a transformation of the powers of the medium. Let us continue our account of the experiments.
Taking into consideration the testimony of Professor Lombroso, several savants—including MM. Schiaparelli, director of the observatory at Milan; Gerosa, professor of physics; Ermacora, doctor of natural philosophy; Aksakof, councillor of state to the Emperor of Russia; Charles du Prel, doctor of philosophy in Munich; Dr. Richet, of Paris, and Professor Buffern—met in October, 1892, in the apartment of M. Finzi, at Milan, to renew these experiments. M. Lombroso was present at several of the soirées. There were seventeen in all.
The experimenters present signed the following long declaration:
The results obtained did not always come up to our expectations. Not that we did not secure a large number of facts apparently or really important and marvellous; but, in the greater number of cases, we were not able to apply the rules of experimental science which, in other fields of observation, are regarded as indispensable in order to arrive at certain and incontestable results. The most important of these rules consists in changing, one after the other, the methods of experiment, in such a way as to bring out the true cause, or at least the true conditions of all the events. Now it is precisely from this point of view that our experiments seem to us still incomplete.
It is very true that the medium, to prove her good faith, often voluntarily proposed to change some feature of one or the other experiment, and frequently herself took the initiative in these changes. But this applied only to things that were apparently indifferent, according to our way of seeing. On the contrary; the changes which seemed to us necessary to put the true character of the results beyond doubt, either were not accepted as possible or ended in uncertain results.
We do not believe we have the right to explain these things by the aid of insulting assumptions, which many still find to be the simplest explanation, and of which some journals have made themselves champions. We think, on the contrary, that these experiments are concerned with phenomena of an unknown nature, and we confess that we do not know what the conditions are that are required to produce them. To desire to fix these conditions in our own right and out of our own head would be as extravagant as to presume to make the experiment of Torricelli's barometer with a tube closed at the bottom, or to make electrostatic experiments in an atmosphere saturated with humidity, or to take a photograph by exposing the sensitive plate in full light before placing it in the camera. However, it is a fact that the impossibility of varying the experiments in our own way has diminished the worth and the interest of the results obtained, by depriving them of that rigorous demonstration which we are right in demanding in cases of this kind, or, rather, to which we ought to aspire.
The following are the principal phenomena observed.