Mysterious Psychic Forces: An Account of the Author's Investigations in Psychical Research, Together with Those of Other European SavantsFlammarion, Camille
Philosophy
Mysterious Psychic Forces: An Account of the Author's Investigations in Psychical Research, Together with Those of Other European Savants
Flammarion, Camille
Parapsychology -- Investigation; Spiritualism
1. Movements of a chair at a distance, seen by the light of the moon,
and in circumstances which proved that there was no mechanical
connection.
2. The inflation and the movement of a curtain in the absence of wind
or of any other ostensible cause.
3. The automatic winding up and moving about of a music-box.
4. Sounds proceeding from a piano and from an accordion which had not
been touched.
5. A key turned in a lock, on the inside of the room where the seances
were held, then placed upon the table, and again put back into the
lock.
6. The overturning, by means of slow and correct evolutions, of a
heavy moving table, which was afterwards found thus turned upside
down.
7. The levitation of a heavy table, under conditions in which it would
have been impossible to lift it in ordinary circumstances.
8. The appearance of blue marks upon a table previously spotless, and
this done without the help of the ordinary methods of writing.
9. The sensation of blows, as if some one were striking the head, the
arms, or the back, while the head, the hands, and the feet of the
medium were plainly in view or held apart from the portions of the
body that were touched.
It is plain enough what part the above statements play in our argument.
They are throughout simply confirmations of the experiments described
above.
At Cambridge, Eusapia was taken in the very act of deception; namely, the
substitution of hands. While the controllers believed that they were
holding her two hands, they were only holding one of them: the other was
free. So these experimenters at Cambridge unanimously declared that
"everything was fraud, from the beginning to the end," in Eusapia
Paladino's _twenty seances_.
In a paper sent to M. de Rochas, M. Ochorowicz contested this radical
conclusion, for several reasons. Eusapia is very susceptible to
suggestion, and, by indulging her inclination to fraud and not hindering
it, they incite her to it still more by a kind of tacit encouragement.
Moreover, her fraud is generally of an unconscious kind. I append here, as
a particular illustration of this, a rather typical story about her:
One evening, at Varsovie (says M. Ochorowicz), Eusapia is sleeping in
her chamber by the side of ours. I have not yet gone to sleep, when
suddenly I hear her rising and moving about with bare feet in the
drawing-room. Then she enters her chamber again and approaches our
door. I make a sign to Mme. Ochorowicz, who has waked up, to be quiet
and to observe carefully what is going to take place. A moment after,
Eusapia gently opens the door, comes up to my wife's toilet-table,
opens a drawer, shuts it, and goes away, carefully avoiding making any
noise. I hastily dress myself and we enter her chamber. Eusapia is
quietly sleeping. The light of our candle seems to wake her.
"What were you hunting for in our sleeping-room?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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