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These pictures show conclusively that the psychic had nothing to do with it at least, not in any ordinary way. Richet succeeded in fixing the apparition of a helmeted soldier on several plates. Crookes photographed 'Katie King' and her medium once or twice, and Fontenay has succeeded in getting clear-cut images of the 'spirit' hands which play round the head of Paladino.
The alleged experiences are still said to occur, and have been investigated by physiologists of the eminence of M. Richet. The question cannot but arise as to the residuum of fact in these narrations, and it keeps on arising. In the following chapter we discuss a mode of inducing hallucinations which has for anthropologists the interest of universal diffusion.
Are we not forced to conclude that the table was moved by some supernormal expenditure of force? Her hands were here, the table there. Does it not seem to you a case of the 'psychic force, such as Crookes and Richet describe?" Miller was confounded, but concealed it. "She may have shoved the table with her feet." "How? Your newspaper is unbroken. Not a tack is disturbed. But suppose she did!
"That's the spirit!" exclaimed Fowler. "That is the way the scientist should feel. What then? Aksakof told him all he needed to do was to go round the corner, didn't he?" "Not exactly. Two years later Aksakof wrote to him: 'You needn't come to the end of the world; Milan will do. So Richet went to Milan, and took part in those very celebrated séances with Eusapia.
Let us defer our discussion until after our séance. Have patience, and I believe we can duplicate, if not surpass, the marvellous doings of even Richet and Lombroso. We may be able some day to take flash-light photographs of the cone while it is floating in the air." "Has that ever been done?" asked Mrs. Miller. "Oh yes; Flammarion secured photos of a table floating in the air.
And what does this demonstrate, that these demonomaniacs were hystero-epileptics? Certainly. The observations of Dr. Richet, expert in such matters, are conclusive, but wherein do they invalidate possession? From the fact that the patients of La Salpêtrière are not possessed, though they are hysterical, does it follow that others, smitten with the same malady as they, are not possessed?
"Does this theory cover the whispering personalities we heard? What about 'Wilbur' and 'Maudie'?" "That's easy," retorted Howard. "Once you explain the manipulation of the cone, the rest is merely clever ventriloquism." "There is nothing 'easy' about any of these phenomena," I answered. "As Richet says, they are absurd, but they are observed facts.
You think you will, but you won't. Don't deceive yourself. I've been all through it. You can't believe until some fundamental change takes place in your mind. You must struggle just as Richet did." "Anyhow, let's turn the screws tighter. Let's devise some other plan to make ourselves doubly certain of her part in the performance."
Could it be possible that Viola, in common with hundreds of other apparently well-authenticated cases, possessed the "psychic force" which Maxwell, Richet, and Lombroso recognized? The hypothesis, difficult as it was, profoundly inexplicable from every point of view, was, after all, less of a wrench to the reason, came closer to the frame of his philosophy than the claims of Crookes and Wallace.
"Ah! Bottazzi provided against all that. He called in the aid of self-registering contrivances. It won't do, Miller he proved the objective reality of 'spirit phenomena. He lifted the whole performance to the plane of the test-tube, the electric light, and the barometer. His experiments, his deductions, came as a splendid sequence to an almost equally searching series by Crookes, Zöllner, Wallace, Thury, Flammarion, Maxwell, Lombroso, Richet, Fo
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