MESMERISM, ODYLISM, TABLE-TURNING, ETC. 167 



shapes,* of their departed friends it is perfectly conformable to sci- 

 entific probability that they should pass more or less completely (like 

 Reichenbach's " sensitives ") into a state which is neither waking nor 

 sleeping, but between the two, in which they see, hear, or feel, by 

 touch, anything they have been led to expect will present itself. And 

 the accordance of their testimony, in regard to such occurrences, is 

 only such as is produced by the community of the dominant idea 

 with which they are all " possessed," a community of which history 

 furnishes any amount of strangely-varied examples. And thus it 

 becomes obvious that the testimony of a single cool-headed skeptic, 

 who asserts that nothing extraordinary has really occurred, should 

 be accepted as more trustworthy than that of any number of believ- 

 ers, who have, as it were, created the sensorial result by their anticipa- 

 tion of it. 



1 have now to show you that the like expectancy can also produce 

 movements of various kinds, through the instrumentality of the 

 nervo-muscular apparatus, without the least consciousness on the part 

 of its subject of his being himself the instrument of their perform- 

 ance ; a physiological fact which is the key to the whole mystery of 

 table-turning and table-talking. I very well remember the prevalence 

 in my schoolboy days of a belief that, when a ring, a button, or any 

 other small body, suspended by a string over the end of the finger, 

 was brought near the outside or inside of a glass tumbler, it would 

 strike the hour of the day against its surface ; and the experiment 

 certainly succeeded in the hands of several of my schoolfellows, who 

 tried it in all good faith, getting up in the middle of the night to test 

 it, in entire ignorance, as they declared, of the real time. But, as 

 was pointed out by M. Chevreul, who investigated this subject in a 

 truly scientific spirit more than forty years ago,' it is impossible by 

 any voluntary effort to keep the hand absolutely still for a length of 

 time in the position required ; an involuntary tremulousness is always 

 observable in the suspended body, and if the attention be fixed on it 

 with the expectation that its vibrations will take a definite direction, 

 they are very likely to do so. But their persistence in that direction 

 is found to last only so long as they are guided by the sight of the 

 operator, at once and entirely losing their constancy if he closes or 

 turns away his eyes. Thus it became obvious that, in the striking 

 of the hour, the influence which determines the number of strokes 

 is really the knowledge or suspicion present to the mind of the oper- 

 ator, which involuntarily and unconsciously directs the action of his 

 muscles ; and the same rationale was applied by M. Chevreul to other 

 cases in which this pendule explorateur (the use of which can be traced 



' I put aside the question of fraud, to which recourse has doubtless often been had 

 for the production of these phenomena ; being satisfied that they are often genuinely 

 "subjective." 



2 See his letters to M. Ampere, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, May, 1833. 



