SPIRITUALISM AS A SCIENTIFIC QUESTION. 585 



however, was excluded, since on that afternoon the air was perfectly 

 still. Several times during the seance Mr. Slade fell into convulsions 

 and asked me, who sat beside him, whether I felt anything, which, 

 however, was not the case. The other persons present occasionally 

 felt thrusts against their legs, and the tablet, which they held in their 

 hands under the table, was violently pushed away ; with myself this 

 did not take place. At the end of the sitting we arose, Mr. Slade laid 

 his hands upon ours and first lifted the table several inches from the 

 floor, then letting it suddenly fall again ; it was clearly perceptible 

 that the table was raised by a central force from beneath. With our 

 wish to perform some of the experiments in the presence of an observer 

 standing outside the circle Mr. Slade could not comply. He said that 

 under that condition the spirits did not obey him ; he was, moreover, a 

 perfectly passive observer, and must accommodate himself to the con- 

 ditions which he had accidentally discovered to be favorable for his 

 experiments. Incidentally he gave us intelligence concerning our own 

 mediumistic endowments ; me he declared to be a medium " of a 

 strong power." How he came to this knowledge he did not communi- 

 cate. To myself, as I will not neglect to mention, never in my life 

 has anything appeared or happened which might warrant such a diag- 

 nosis. 



If you ask me now whether I am in a condition to express a con- 

 jecture as to how these experiments were performed, I answer, No. 

 At the same time, however, I must state that phenomena' of this sort 

 lie entirely outside the domain of the special training which I have 

 acquired during my scientific career. It is known to every natural- 

 ist that one is able to judge an experiment correctly only when one 

 has one's self experimented in a similar direction, and thus has an in- 

 sight into the conditions of the origin of the phenomena. If I were 

 really a medium " of a strong power," as Mr. Slade asserts, I should 

 perhaps be in a better condition to answer your question ; but, since 

 this is not the case, you will certainly find it justifiable, if I do not go 

 into hypotheses as to how the phenomena produced by Mr. Slade were 

 brought about. What was surprising to me in the matter, however, 

 and what will also surprise you, is that Mr. Slade also refused to give 

 any information of this kind. He is a medium, he is an experimenter, 

 and he must therefore know under what conditions the phenomena 

 have their origin. He asserts that he knows nothing of them, but that 

 his relation is a perfectly passive one. The latter, however, is plainly 

 untrue, since the phenomena generally appear only in the seances held 

 by him, and also, as a rule, in the order in which he wishes to produce 

 them. 



But, although we can not determine how Mr. Slade performs his 

 experiments, I agree with you that we still may not in this case pass 

 the field by as one foreign to us. For, as you very justly remark, 

 natural science and philosophy are so actively interested in the ques- 



