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
I will add, finally that we did not content ourselves with a single
experience. A careful inspection following each of several
levitations, always showed that the dust-like layer of flour was
absolutely untouched; and no portion of the table had escaped its
tell-tale coat of white.
The author of these reports himself estimates as follows the results he
has recorded:
The phenomena observed confirm and elucidate each other. Large
four-legged tables compete with three-legged ones. Inert weights,
placed on these, come forward as substitutes for persons suspected of
giving a helping hand to the table charged with the task of lifting
them. At last the great discovery arrives in its turn: we begin by
continuing without contact movements already initiated, and we end by
producing them; we succeed almost in creating the process, to such an
extent that these extraordinary facts manifest themselves sometimes in
an uninterrupted series of fifteen or thirty performances. The
glidings round out the subject by throwing light on one phase of
action at a distance: they reveal it as powerless (at times) to lift
the table, but able to draw it along over the floor.
Such is the rapidly sketched account of our progress. Taken just by
itself alone, it constitutes a solid proof and I recommend a study of
it to serious men. It is not thus that error proceeds. Illusions
originating in accident, or chance, do not thus resist a long study,
and do not pass unmasked through a long series of experiments that
justify them more and more.
The reading of numbers in others' minds, and the balance of forces,
merit special consideration.
When all the operators but one are ignorant of the number to be
materialized by raps, the operation (unless it is fluidic) ought to
proceed either from the person who knows the number and furnishes at
once the movement and the arrest, or else it ought to proceed from a
relation instinctively established between that person who furnishes
the arrest and his vis-a-vis who furnishes the movement. Let us
examine both hypotheses.
The first is untenable; for, in the case where some one chooses a leg
of the table upon which the operator who knows the number can exercise
no muscular action, the leg thus designated none the less rises at his
command.
The second is untenable; for, in the case where some one indicates a
zero, the movement which ought to take place does not do so. Nay more.
If you place at loggerheads two persons placed on opposite sides of
the table and enjoin each to make a different number triumph, the more
powerful operator secures the execution of the chief number although
his vis-a-vis is interested not only in not furnishing it to him, but
in arresting it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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