In the year 1888, Lombroso published a series of exhaustive experiments, dealing more especially with the limits of suggestion in the waking state, and the influence of a permanent magnet upon suggested sensations. It was most remarkable that this positivist investigator, a man whose habit it had been to confine himself to objective investigation, and to consider subjective phenomena as entirely subsidiary and to deal with them with extreme caution, should concern himself with matters so little accessible to objective observation as the reaction to hypnotic procedures and the examination of suggested ideas in hypnotized and hysterical subjects, and while engaged in this path of study to associate, ultimately, more and more intimately with thought-readers, spiritualists, and other thaumaturgists.
It was, indeed, a result of his overwhelming conviction, at once of the objectivity and of the materiality of the performances of hypnotized persons, associated with a reluctance to accept the explanation of such phenomena by purely subjective factors—viz., their explanation solely by means of ideas—that led Lombroso to the credulous assumption that there existed a peculiar material condition of the brain-substance as the cause of all these categories of phenomena.
The fact that the mediums themselves either coquetted in a most equivocal manner with the possibility of associated immaterial processes, or else introduced the absurd doctrines of spiritualism for the explanation of the phenomena occurring at their séances, did not discourage Lombroso from the continually renewed study of thought-readers, calculating wonders, telepathists, and teleurgists (persons who claimed the power of giving rise to mechanical changes in remote objects), for he believed in the genuineness of different forms of “trance”; and his honourable capacity for belief, his disinclination to explain anything that was new as the result of deception merely because it was an unusual experience, frequently delivered him over to the devices of cheats.
I can explain here that, from my own experience, his most important medium, Eusapia Palladino, whom, in April, 1894, in association with Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, the psychologist Luigi Ferri, the physiologist Richet, the anthropologist Sergi, and the painter Siemiradzki, I observed in several séances, was, indeed, a “miracle”—i.e., a miracle of adroitness, false bonhomie, well-simulated candour, naïveté, and artistic command of all the symptoms of hystero-epilepsy. In Rome, where the séances were held, she had at her disposal certain extremely adroit male mediums, who were associated in all her tricks. These mediums behaved irreproachably. During the séances, in consequence of emotional excitement and superstitious terror, they suffered publicly from hysterical paroxysms; and they were clever enough to charm Siemiradzki by arranging that “from the fourth dimension” a sheet of writing-paper should fall into his lap, upon which was inscribed in isolated Polish words[[51]] a prophecy of the speedy restoration of the kingdom of Poland. I took an exact transcript of this manifestation, and must repeat to-day what I said sixteen years ago, that if (as the mediums asserted, though I do not myself believe it) the spirit of Kosciuszko really wrote these hopeful words—instead of prophesying finis Poloniæ—then “in the fourth dimension” the spelling and grammar of the Polish language must have been very badly preserved. (Charles Dickens made the same observation in respect to English spelling as exhibited by “spirits.”)
At that time it was my impression that in these séances Lombroso’s interest was in the spiritualists, not in the “spirits,” and, in the next place, in the abnormal trance-state of the mediums. This was undoubtedly so at that time; but his subsequent publications have shown that at a later date he went much further than this, and ascribed to the brain-substance the faculty of exercising a powerful influence beyond the periphery of the body (although, according to the dominant and still unshaken opinion, the function of the brain-substance is subject to the law of isolated nervous conduction). For example, in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, 1892, p. 146 et seq., Lombroso wrote as follows:
“Not one of these facts (which we must admit to be facts, since we cannot deny that which we have seen with our own eyes) is of a nature to render it necessary to suppose for its explanation the existence of a world different from that admitted by neuropathologists to exist. I see nothing inadmissible in the supposition that in hysterical and hypnotized persons the stimulation of certain centres, which become powerful owing to the paralyzing of all the others, and thus give rise to a transposition and transmission of psychical forces, may also result in a transformation into luminous or motor force. In this way we can understand how the force, which I will call cortical or cerebral, of a medium can, for example, raise a table from the floor, pluck someone by the beard, strike him or caress him—very frequent phenomena in these séances. In certain conditions, which are very rare, the cerebral movement which we call thought is transmitted to distance, sometimes small, sometimes very considerable. Now, in the same way in which this force is transmitted, it may also become transformed, and the psychic force may manifest itself as a motor force. Do we not see the magnet give rise to a deflection of the compass-needle without any visible intermediary?”
We must not without further consideration dismiss this idea as absurd, because a very simple experiment suffices to show that the well-known and continuous heat-radiation from the living body—that is to say, the dispersal from the body of ultra-red etheric undulations—undergoes notable and easily measurable changes, in association with every change in the intellectual or emotional equilibrium, just as the arterial pulse, which changes under the influence of emotional disturbance, gives rise to varying oscillations in the air. But we do not possess sense-organs adequate to detect either these atmospheric or these etheric undulations. We were unable to establish their existence until physiology had given us Mosso’s plethysmograph and Zamboni’s dry battery.
There was a very powerful subjective reason why Lombroso did not apply a strenuous criticism to the occult phenomena of Eusapia, of Pickmann, etc. His own most important ideas had at first encountered doubt from the learned world, and in many cases contempt and ridicule. For this reason he was free from the tendency, traditional in academic circles, towards an extreme reserve in relation to completely new facts and theories contrary to the dominant views, and therefore dangerous to those advocating them. On the contrary, to doubt the good faith of those who were producing the new hypnotic and other mediumistic phenomena was not only contrary to his natural disposition, incapable of any pettiness and indisposed to mistrust anything that was unusual, but it also conflicted with the tendencies resulting from his own personal experiences.
In the year 1872, when he brought before the Medical Academy of Milan his experiments and investigations regarding the etiology of pellagra through the consumption of spoilt maize, he was accused by the surgeon Porta, Dean of the medical faculty of Pavia and an advocate of the interests of the great landlords, of having falsified his experiments, and of having artificially induced lesions in the animals he experimented on—the result being that the whole matter was turned to ridicule, and he and his pellagrous chickens were made fun of at the next carnival.
Lombroso was accustomed to quote a verse from Dante, “Io non piangea, si dentro impetrai” (“I did not weep, but my heart was turned to stone”), in order to explain the impression left upon him by this experience. The controversies about pellagra continued for about thirty years, until at length, in the year 1902, official recognition was given to his theory by the legislation carried in that year for the prevention of the disease.[[52]] The déclassé, the Jew, the self-taught man, could not be allowed to take an equal rank in the university life amongst the sons of the well-to-do classes of Northern Italy, so closely allied with the landed interest; and for this reason the most distinguished and influential member of the academic circle described his laborious and tedious researches as falsified. It was this experience which made it psychologically impossible for him, when he came to study occult phenomena, to take into consideration the possibility of fraud.