378. “‘_How can you_ expect me to accept your explanation, when a table touched very lightly by the ends of the fingers, presses _against_ my hand and _against_ my legs to such a degree as to repel me and almost break itself? How believe that the person whose hands touch it could impart to it a force equal to such efforts, and _especially when that person_ is myself? Accept, then, freely and with courage, the facts as THEY ARE, the facts well seen and satisfactorily produced by myself, in whom you have, I think, as much confidence as in yourself. The explanation will come hereafter, rest assured. Believe firmly that in these phenomena of _turning tables_ there is something more than you see—a _physical reality_ outside of the imagination and of the faith of those who appear to make them move.’ 379. “It is impossible, as we see, to be more positive, or better to defend the _physical_ evidence on the ground of facts. M. Seguin has a thousand times the advantage over his learned antagonist; but let us see if M., the Abbé Moigno, defeated on this ground, will not take his revenge on another. 380. “Referring to a communication made to the academy by one M. Vauquelin, about one of these _enchanted tables_, which in his hands was able to reply to the most mysterious questions, divine the most secret thoughts, &c., M. Meigno exclaims in _Le Cosmos Revue Encyclopédique des Sciences_: ‘This time _it is too strong_; we find ourselves definitively at the mercy of magic, and the moment has come to proclaim it at Rome. Then there is neither magnetism nor electricity; not even the influence of human volition on matter; but supposing the fact to be certain—WHICH IS HARD TO SWALLOW—there must be in it _the intervention of spirits_, or _magic_. Intelligence that can refuse these deductions of common sense, would be DISORDERED intelligence, as useless to dispute with as _with fools_. If you have not been mistaken, if the extraordinary facts which you affirm are true, we ourselves are believers. The intervention of spirits and of magic became the sorrowful but great realities.’ 381. “M. Agenor De Gasparin, one of our most sedate philosophers, writes what follows in _La Gazette de France_:—‘I will not insist on this point. The phenomenon of rotation, if alone, would not appear to me entirely satisfactory. I am mistrustful, though not an academician, and, I admit, that it may be possible (at a pinch) that a mechanical impulsion might be communicated. But the rotation only serves to _present_ other phenomena, the explanation of which it is impossible to refer to any kind of muscular action.