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 first four events, having taken place in full light, are
incontestable. I should put almost in the same rank Nos. 5 and 6. No.
7 may perhaps be due very often to fraud. The last in the list, having
been produced toward the end of the seance, at a time when attention
was necessarily relaxed, and being still more extraordinary than all
the others, I confess that I cannot admit it with certainty, although
I can not understand how it could have been due to fraud. The four
others seem genuine; but I should like to observe them anew; a man
could wager ninety-nine to one hundred that they are true. I was
absolutely sure of them during the seance. But the vividness of the
impressions grows weak, and we have a tendency to listen only to the
voice of plain common sense,--the most reasonable and the most
deceptive of our faculties.
The first impression we get upon the reading of these reports is that
these different manifestations are rather vulgar, altogether banal, and do
not tell us anything about the other world--or about other worlds. Surely
it does not seem probable that any _spiritual being_ would take part in
such performances. For these phenomena are of an absolutely material
class.
On the other hand, however, it is impossible not to recognize the
existence of unknown forces. The simple fact, for example, of the
levitation of a table to a height of six and one-half, eight, sixteen
inches from the floor is not banal at all. It seems to me, speaking for
myself alone, so extraordinary that my opinion is very well expressed when
I say that I do not dare to admit it without having seen it myself, with
my own eyes: I mean that which is called seeing, in full light and under
such conditions that it would be impossible to suspect. While we are very
sure that we have proved it, we are at the same time sure that in such
experiments there emanates from the human body a force that may be
compared with the magnetism of the loadstone, able to act upon wood, upon
matter (somewhat as the loadstone acts upon iron), and counterbalancing
for some moments the action of gravity. From the scientific point of view,
that is a weighty fact in itself. I am absolutely certain that the medium
did not lift that weight of fifteen pounds either by her hands or by her
legs, or by her feet, and, furthermore, no one of the company was able to
do it. The table was lifted by its upper surface. We are, therefore,
certainly in the presence of an unknown force here which emanates from the
persons present, and above all from the medium.