This helps us to understand how he came to enter upon these investigations, and how it was that he allowed himself in many cases to be deceived regarding the reality of the processes under observation.

But it was precisely his unmitigated positivism which led him a priori to regard many things as possible and open to discussion, from which others in their specialist narrowness would have (doubtless in this instance more wisely) turned away. In the year 1888, Lombroso believed himself to have proved the influence of the magnet upon suggested colour sensations. With this begins the series of his publications upon occult phenomena (“Studi sull’ ipnotismo e sulla credulità,” Archivio di psichiatria, 1888, ix., pp. 528–546). From these effects of the magnet (whose subjective causation he left an open question) he drew the following inference: “The magnet is an object known to have effect within the physical sphere. If a new result is seen to follow its application, this must also be of a physical character, and cannot be of any other. Thus in the hypnotized person, whose cerebral molecules are in a condition different from that in the brain of the non-hypnotized person, the magnet has given rise to a rearrangement of the cerebral molecules. If the observed effect is purely subjective, we must conclude that the subjective phenomena are dependent upon the physical conditions, and that the rearrangement of the cerebral molecules gives rise to the phenomenon of so-called polarization.”

Psychologically allied with this is Lombroso’s utterance regarding muscle-reading, to the effect that if an act of the will is effective at a distance, this proves that the will, far from being immaterial, is a phenomenon of movement, and is, therefore, a manifestation of matter. Indeed, he expresses his astonishment that thought-transference is so rarely observed: “May it be that in the forms of energy known under the names of electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and sound, there is produced the same thing as in thought; and if one admits this, may it not be that thought is simply a phenomenon of movement.”[[53]]

At the time when these first experimental studies were published, Lombroso was, however, still sceptical regarding spiritualistic phenomena, as is proved by the following utterance, which I publish here in full because in it we can already detect the psychological tendencies which ultimately led him to capitulate—i.e., to recognize the existence of telepathic phenomena at séances: “Every epoch is unripe for the discoveries which have had few precursors; and if it is unripe it is also unadapted to perceive its own incapacity. The repetition of the same discovery prepares the brain to make it its own, to accept it, and finds minds gradually becoming less hostile to its acceptance. For nearly twenty years the discoverer of the cause of pellagra was regarded throughout Italy as mad; to-day the academic world still laughs at criminal anthropology, at hypnotism, at homeopathy. Who knows whether we, who to-day laugh at spiritualism, may not also be in error? Thanks to the misoneism which lies concealed in us all, we are, as it were, hypnotized against the new ideas, incapable of understanding that we are in error, and like many insane persons, whilst the darkness hides the truth from us, we laugh at those who stand in the light” (“L’ influenza della civiltà e dell’ occasione sui genio,” Fanfulla della Domenica, 1883, Nr. 29).

In the year 1891, when Lombroso, in association with Bianchi and Tamburini, had held the first sittings with Eusapia Palladino, he wrote in a letter to Dr. Ciolfi: “I am ashamed and sorrowful that with so much obstinacy I have contested the possibility of the so-called spiritualistic facts. I say the facts, for I am inclined to reject the spiritualistic theory; but the facts exist, and as regards facts I glory in saying that I am their slave.”

There soon followed other sittings, most of them with Eusapia as medium, conducted by Von Aksakow and Du Prel. (To this period belong all the sittings in which I myself took part with Siemiradzki, and in which there took place Lombroso’s thorough investigation of the trance-state of both the male mediums mentioned above.) From 1896 onwards, after observations made on the “thought reader” Pickmann, Lombroso published in his Archivio di psichiatria a perpetual record of his mediumistic experiments.

His last work of all, published after his death (“Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotisi e spiritici,” pp. 320, Turin, Unione Editrice, 1910), might be regarded by the credulous as a “Greeting from the Spirit-World.” We, however, who renounce this “Spirit-World,” may well content ourselves with the undying intellectual achievements of the deceased investigator; to our enemies we freely give the Lombroso of senile decay, for the Lombroso of youth, for ever young, is ours.

APPENDIX B
LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED

Paola e Gina Lombroso: Cesare Lombroso, Appunti sulla vita. Turin, 1906.

C. Lombroso: Writings, 1854–1909.