“Then I asked myself quite frankly whether I was in presence of some spiritistic manifestation. I tried not to be frightened. I took the orange to show it to my mother. I returned to the piano to take the second orange, so as not to be frightened in a similar way. But it, in its turn, had disappeared! Then I felt a considerable sensation of trembling. I returned to my mother’s room, and, while we discussed the matter, we heard again something thrown with violence, and, rushing out to see what had happened, I saw the second orange placed in exactly the same spot where the other had been, and considerably bruised. Imagine how astonished we were! I took both oranges, and, without losing an instant, went to the kitchen and put them in a cupboard, where I found them again the following morning; they had not moved. I did not go to bed without some fear, but fortunately I quickly went to sleep. My mother is sure that it is M. H. who brought some evil spirit into the house, and she is quite uneasy....”
From the oral explanations of Mlle. Smith and her mother, and also from the location of the places, it follows that the oranges had been thrown at a distance of ten yards from the piano, through the wide-open parlor door leading to the vestibule, against the door of the apartment, as if to follow and strike fictitiously M. H., who a few moments before had left by this door.
One has undoubtedly always the right of discarding at the outset, as presenting too little guarantee of genuineness, the extraordinary stories of a person subject to hallucinations. In the present case, all that I know of Mlle. Smith and her parents keeps me from doing so, and persuades me that her story is thoroughly exact, which, however, does not amount to saying that there is anything of the supernormal about it. One has, in fact, the choice between two interpretations.
First: In the hypothesis of veritable telekinesis, the following is the manner in which the adventure would be summed up: the emotion due to the unexpected and unpleasant visit of M. H. had brought about a division of consciousness. The feeling of irritation, anger, and repulsion against him had condensed themselves into some secondary personality, which, in the general perturbation of the entire psychophysiological organism, had momentarily recovered the use of these primitive forces of action at a distance, entirely removed from the will, and without the participation of the ordinary self, and thus automatically accomplished outwardly the instinctive idea of bombarding this ill-bred visitor. Notice is to be taken of the painful aura at the temple and the fascination of gaze, which, according to Hélène’s story, preceded the first signs of the phenomenon, the orange falling and rolling at her feet.
Secondly: But the most natural supposition is certainly that Mlle. Smith, by the ordinary use of her limbs, had taken and thrown these projectiles in an access of unconscious muscular automatism. It is true that this would not agree with the presence of her father, mother, or M. H., who did not see her make the supposed movements. But an absent-mindedness of even normal witnesses will seem easier to admit than the authentic production of a supernormal phenomenon.
These episodes which have happened to Mlle. Smith and her mother since I have known them are very few, amounting to half a dozen at the most, and I will not dwell longer upon this subject. Hélène is not conscious of possessing any faculty of movement at a distance, and she always attributes these phenomena to spirit intervention. Leopold, on the other hand, has never acknowledged that he is the author of them. He claims that Hélène possesses within herself supernormal powers, and that, in order to succeed, she would only have to set them to work, but that she did not wish to do so. All my suggestions and repeated entreaties with Leopold and Hélène—either awake or in a state of somnambulism—in the hope of obtaining in my presence some physical phenomenon, have been in vain up to the present time.
III. Telepathy
One may almost say that if telepathy did not exist one would have to invent it. I mean by this that a direct action between living beings, independent of the organs of the senses, is a matter of such conformity to all that we know of nature that it would be hard not to suppose it à priori, even if we had no perceptible indication of it. How is it possible to believe that the foci of chemical phenomena, as complex as the nervous centres, can be in activity without giving forth diverse undulations, x, y, or z rays, traversing the cranium as the sun traverses a pane of glass, and acting at a distance on their homologues in other craniums? It is a simple matter of intensity.
The gallop of a horse or the leap of a flea in Australia causes the terrestrial globe to rebound on its opposite side to an extent proportional to the weight of these animals compared to that of our planet. This is little, even without taking into account the fact that this infinitesimal displacement runs the risk at every moment of being neutralized by the leaps of horses and fleas on the other hemisphere, so that, on the whole, the shocks to our terrestrial globe resulting from all that moves on its surface are too feeble to prevent our sleeping. Perhaps it is the same with the innumerable waves which coming from all other living beings, shock at every moment a given brain: their efforts are counterbalanced, or their resultant too slight to be perceived. But they exist none the less in reality, and I confess I do not understand those who reproach telepathy with being strange, mystical, occult, supernormal, etc.