Mysterious Psychic Forces: An Account of the Author's Investigations in Psychical Research, Together with Those of Other European Savants
John Stuart Mill · en
The result of this experiment (of June 4, 1853) showed that the force
which tends to make the table turn is in the individuals and not in
the ground. For the force exerted upon the table tends to draw along
the platform with it. If, then, the platform remains motionless, it
must be that an equal and contrary force is exerted by the operators.
It is therefore in them that the base of the seat of the force
resides. If, on the contrary, this force had emanated, wholly or in
large part, from the ground, if it had been a force directly telluric,
the platform would have turned, the effort which the table exerted
upon it being no longer counterbalanced by an equal reaction
proceeding from the individuals.
_Conditions of the Production and Action of the Force._--I have said
that the conditions for the production of the force are little known.
In the absence of precise laws, I shall present what has been verified
in a greater or less degree in the case of the three following points:
_a._ Conditions of action relative to the operators.
_b._ Conditions relative to the objects to be moved.
_c._ Conditions relative to the mode of action of the operators upon
the objects to be moved.
THE WILL. The first and the most indispensable condition, according to
M. Gasparin, is the will of the operator. "Without the will," he says,
"we obtain nothing; we might sit there in chain twenty-four hours in
succession without getting the slightest movement." Farther on, the
author speaks, it is true, of unexpected movements different from
those which the will prescribes; but it is evident that he is
referring to a necessary combination of prescribed movements and
external resistances, the effective movements being the _resultant_ of
those that have been willed and of forces of resistance developed in
external objects. In short, the will is always the prime mover and
originator.
Nothing, it is true, in the experiments at Valleyres gave any
authority for believing that it could be otherwise than this. But it
is also certain that this purely negative result, or provisional
generalization, deduced from a limited number of experiments,--cannot
invalidate the results of experiments inconsistent with those, in case
such should exist. In other words, the will may ordinarily be
necessary, without always being so. Similarly, contact is ordinarily
necessary, and _always_ has been so with a large number of operators,
without, however, giving them the right to conclude that contact is
the indispensable condition of the phenomenon, and that the different
results obtained at Valleyres were only illusions or error.