"On the contrary, Bottazzi declares the phantoms also conformed to this
same law. He was determined upon educating 'John King,' and kept
insisting that the invisible hands press the rubber ball, or lower the
registry balance, or set the metronome going, and Eusapia repeatedly
moaned: '_I can't find_,' '_I can't see_,' or '_I don't know how_.' Once
she complained that the objects were _too far off--that she could not
reach them!_--all of which sustained Bottazzi in his belief that these
activities were absolutely under her psychic control, just as the
synchronism of movements convinced him that she was 'the physiologic
factor in the case.' All of this is very exciting to me, for I have had
the same feeling with regard to the several mediums whose activities I
have closely studied. Bottazzi says, with regard to the results of the
first two sittings: 'These first seances show that Eusapia needed to
learn how to make these movements with which her invisible hands were
unfamiliar, just as she would have had to learn to make them with her
visible hands. You will all observe that he did not permit awe or
superstitious reverence for the medium or her phantoms to balk his
experiments.' A convinced spiritist who attended one of the seances was
scandalized by the tone and character of the tests. These professors
were continually bobbing up to see what was going on, disturbing
conditions, stirring things up as with a spoon to see how it was all
going on. They broke the chain of hands whenever they wanted to see what
'the spirits' were doing. In other words, these scientists were
students, not devotees. They were experimenting, not communing with the
dead."
"Others have tried that," said Fowler. "But they succeeded in preventing
any manifestations whatsoever."
"It didn't work out so in this instance. Bottazzi says that during the
first seance Professor Scarpa irritated Eusapia greatly by his
impertinent curiosity, but Bottazzi himself quieted her by saying: 'You
see, dear Eusapia, we are not here only to admire the marvellous
phenomena you are able to produce, but also, and chiefly, to observe and
verify and criticise. We do not doubt you or suspect any fraud, but we
want to see clearly, and to follow the development of the phenomena.
That is why M. Scarpa surveys the cabinet between the curtains,
illuminating it occasionally with an electric pocket-lamp. Which do you
prefer, passive admiration, of which you must have had more than enough
already, or the calm affirmation of physicists who are accustomed to
extort from Nature secrets which she hides from physical eyes? 'In this
way,' adds the master, 'Eusapia's irritation was softened; she rebelled
no further, but yielded with docility to the sharp, attentive scrutiny
of the observer, who finally declared himself beaten, not having been
able to discover at any point a shadow of fraud.'"
"Hurrah for Eusapia!" shouted Howard. "She must be a wonder!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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