Mr. Squire.

— As usual, several newspapers mocked this new medium, a compatriot of Mr. Home, under whose influence phenomena of an order that is, so to speak, exceptional are also produced. They present as a peculiarity the fact that they occur only in the deepest darkness, a circumstance that the incredulous never fail to allege. As is known, Mr. Home produced quite varied phenomena, among which the most notable was, incontestably, that of tangible apparitions. We reported on them in detail in the Spiritist Review of the months of February, March, and April of 1858. Mr. Squire produces only two, or rather only one, with certain variants, though no less worthy of attention. Darkness being an essential condition for obtaining the phenomenon, it goes without saying that all the precautions indispensable to guaranteeing its reality are duly taken. Here is what it consists of: Mr. Squire places himself in front of a table weighing 35 to 40 kilos, similar to a solid kitchen table; both of his legs are bound tightly, so that he cannot make use of them; in this position, his muscular force would be considerably paralyzed, were he to resort to it. Another person, the first to come forward, or the most incredulous, gives him one hand, so as to leave free only the other. He then sets it gently on the edge of the table. This done, the lights are extinguished, and at that very instant the table rises, passes over his head, and falls behind him, legs in the air, upon a divan or upon cushions previously arranged to receive it, so that it does not break in the fall. Once the effect is produced, the light is lit immediately: it is a matter of a few seconds. He can repeat the experiment as many times as one wishes in the same session. Here is a variant of this phenomenon: a person places himself beside Mr. Squire; the table being raised and turned over, as has just been described, instead of falling backward it rests horizontally and in equilibrium upon the person's head, who feels only a slight pressure; but as soon as the light is lit, he feels its full weight and it would fall, were two other people not ready to receive it and to support it by its two extremities.

Such is, in essence and with the greatest simplicity, without emphases or reticences, the account of these singular facts that we gathered from the newspaper Patrie of December 23, 1860, as well as from a great number of witnesses, for we confess that we did not witness them ourselves. Nevertheless, the honorability of the persons who recounted them to us leaves us no doubt as to their exactness. We have another motive, perhaps more powerful, for giving them credit: it is that theory demonstrates their possibility to us. Now, nothing is better for establishing a conviction than to perceive the truthfulness of these facts; nothing provokes more doubt than to say: I saw, but I do not understand.

— Let us try, then, to make it understood.

Let us begin by raising some preliminary objections. The first to arise quite naturally to the mind is that Mr. Squire employs some secret means or, in other words, that he is a skillful prestidigitator; or further, as those persons who do not mind passing for ill-bred harshly say, that he is a charlatan. A single word suffices to answer such a supposition: having come to Paris as a simple tourist, Mr. Squire draws no profit from his strange faculty. Now, as there are no disinterested charlatans, this is to us the best guarantee of sincerity. If Mr. Squire held sessions at so much per head; if he were moved by any interest whatsoever, all suspicions would be perfectly legitimate. We do not have the honor of knowing him, but we know, through persons worthy of trust who have known him personally for several years, that he is a most respectable man, of an affable and benevolent character, a distinguished man of letters, who writes in several American newspapers. Criticism rarely takes into consideration the character of persons and the motive that makes them act. And it is mistaken; for this surely constitutes an essential basis of appraisal. There are cases in which the accusation of fraud is not only an offense, but a lack of logic. This being established, and every presumption of fraudulent means set aside, it remains to be known whether the phenomenon could be produced with the aid of muscular force. The experiment was carried out by men endowed with an exceptional force, and all recognized the absolute impossibility of lifting the table with one hand and, still less, of making it pirouette in the air. We add that Mr. Squire's physical constitution does not accord with a herculean force. Since the employment of physical force is impossible, and since a scrupulous examination has set aside the employment of any mechanical means, it becomes necessary to admit the action of a superhuman force. Every effect has a cause; if the cause is not in Humanity, it must necessarily be outside it; in other words, in the intervention of invisible beings that surround us, that is, of the Spirits. For the Spiritists the phenomenon produced by Mr. Squire has nothing new about it, except for the form in which it is produced; as for its essence, it falls into the category of all the other known phenomena of the lifting and displacement of objects, with or without contact, of the suspension of heavy bodies in space. It has its principle in the elementary phenomenon of the turning tables, whose complete theory is found in our new work: The Mediums' Book. Whoever has well meditated upon this theory will be able easily to have the explanation of the effect produced by Mr. Squire; for, certainly, the fact of a table detaching itself from the ground without the aid of any person, and holding itself in the air without a point of support, is still more extraordinary. If we perceive its cause, all the more easily shall we be able to explain the other phenomenon. It will be asked, in all this, where is the proof of the intervention of the Spirits. If the effects were purely mechanical, nothing, it is true, would prove such intervention, it being enough to resort to the hypothesis of an electrical or other fluid; but since an effect is intelligent, it must have an intelligent cause. Now, it was by the signs of intelligence of these effects that it was possible to recognize that their cause was not exclusively material. We speak of the Spiritist effects in general, for there are others whose intelligent character is almost nil, and this is the case of Mr. Squire. One might then suppose him endowed, like so many persons, with a natural electrical potential; but we should never know that light was an obstacle to the action of electricity or of the magnetic fluid. On the other hand, the attentive examination of the circumstances of the phenomenon excludes such a supposition, while its analogy with those that can be produced only by the intervention of hidden intelligences is manifest. It is, then, more rational to place it among the latter. It remains to be known how the Spirit, or the invisible being, acts upon inert matter.

— When a table moves, it is not the Spirit that takes it with the hands and lifts it with the force of the arm, for the simple reason that, although it has a body similar to ours, that body is fluidic and cannot exert a muscular action properly speaking. It saturates the table with its own fluid, combined with the animalized fluid of the medium; by this means the table becomes momentarily animated with an artificial life; it then obeys the will, as a living being would do, expressing, by its movements, joy, anger, and the diverse sentiments of the Spirit that makes use of it. It is not the table that thinks; it is neither joyful nor angered; it is not the Spirit that becomes incorporated in it, because it does not metamorphose into a table. For the Spirit the table is nothing but a docile instrument, obedient to its will, like a stick that a man brandishes and with which he expresses threats or makes other signs. In this case the stick is supported by the muscles, whereas the table, not being able to be set in motion by the muscles of the Spirit, is moved by the Spirit's own fluid, which plays the role of muscular force. Such is the fundamental principle of all the movements in similar cases. A question, at first sight more difficult, is this: how can a heavy body detach itself from the ground and hold itself in space, contrary to the law of gravity? To account for this it suffices to refer to what occurs daily before our eyes. It is known that in a solid body it is necessary to distinguish the weight itself and the force of gravity. The weight is always the same and depends on the sum of the molecules; the force of gravity varies according to the density of the medium. This is why a body weighs less in water than in air and still less in mercury. Let us suppose that a room, on whose floor rests a rather heavy table, suddenly fills with water; the table will rise of itself or, at the least, a man, or a child, will lift it without effort. Another comparison: Let a vacuum be made beneath the pneumatic bell jar, and at that very instant the air within it, no longer balancing with the atmospheric column, causes the bell jar to acquire such a weight that the strongest of men will not be able to lift it. Nevertheless, although neither the table nor the bell jar has gained or lost an atom of its substance, its relative weight has increased or diminished according to the medium, whether this be a liquid or a fluid. Do we know all the fluids of Nature, or even all the properties of those we do know? It would be much presumption to think so. The examples we have just cited are comparisons: we do not say similitudes; it is solely to show that the Spiritist phenomena, which seem so strange to us, are no more so than those mentioned, and that they can be explained, if not by the same causes, at least by analogous causes. Indeed, here is a table that, evidently, loses its apparent weight at a given moment and that, in other circumstances, acquires an increase of weight, such a fact not being able to be explained by the known laws. However, as is repeated, this proves that it is submitted to a law that, by the mere fact of being unknown, does not for that reason cease to exist. What law is this? The Spirits give it. Nevertheless, in the absence of their explanation, we can deduce it by analogy, without resorting to miraculous or supernatural causes. The universal fluid, as the Spirits call it, is the vehicle and the agent of all the Spiritist phenomena. It is known that the Spirits can modify its properties according to the circumstances; that it is the constitutive element of the perispirit or semimaterial envelope of the Spirit; that, in this latter state, it can acquire visibility and even tangibility. Is it, then, irrational to admit that, at a given moment, a Spirit can envelop a solid body in a fluidic atmosphere, whose properties, consequently modified, produce upon that body the effect of a denser or more rarefied medium? In this hypothesis, the lifting, so easy, of a heavy table by Mr. Squire is explained quite naturally, as are all the analogous phenomena.

— The necessity of darkness is more embarrassing. Why does the effect cease at the slightest contact with light? Would the luminous fluid exert here some mechanical action? This is not probable, since facts of the same kind are produced perfectly well in full light. One can attribute this singularity only to the wholly special nature of the Spirits who manifest themselves through this medium. But why through this medium, in preference to the others? Here is one of those mysteries penetrable only by those who have identified themselves with the phenomena, so numerous, and often so bizarre, of the world of the invisibles. They alone can comprehend the sympathies and antipathies existing between the dead and the living.

To what order do these Spirits belong? Are they good or evil? We know that we have wounded the self-love of certain earthly creatures, in depreciating the worth of the Spirits that produce physical manifestations; we were strongly criticized because we qualified them as mountebanks of the invisible world. By way of excuse, we will say that the expression is not ours, but that of the Spirits themselves. May we be forgiven, but it could never enter our head that elevated Spirits would come to amuse themselves by performing feats or other things of the kind, just as no one will convince us that clowns, athletes, tightrope dancers, and street improvisers are members of the Institute. Whoever knows the hierarchy of the Spirits knows that there are some of all degrees of intelligence and morality, and that we find in them as many varieties of aptitudes and characters as among men, which is not to be wondered at, for the Spirits are nothing more than the souls of those who have lived. Now, until proof to the contrary, allow us to doubt that Spirits like Pascal, Bossuet, and others, even less elevated, would submit to our orders to make the tables turn and to amuse a group of the curious. We ask those who think to the contrary whether they judge that, after their death, they would readily resign themselves to that decorative role. Even among those who are at Mr. Squire's orders there is a servility incompatible with the slightest intellectual superiority, whence we conclude that they must belong to the inferior classes, which is not to say that they are evil. One can very well be honest and good without knowing how to read or write. The evil Spirits are generally indocile, choleric, and take pleasure in doing evil. Now, it is not known to us that those of Mr. Squire have ever played him a prank in poor taste; they obey with a peaceful docility, which excludes all suspicion of malevolence, but they are not for that reason apt to make philosophical dissertations. We consider Mr. Squire too sensible a man to take offense at this appraisal. This submission of the Spirits who assist him led one of our colleagues to say that those Spirits had certainly known him in another life, in which Mr. Squire would have exercised over them a great authority, the reason why they still preserve toward him, in the present existence, a passive obedience. Besides, one must not confuse the Spirits who occupy themselves with physical effects properly speaking, and who are designated more specially as rapping Spirits, with those who communicate by means of raps. This means being a language, it can be employed as writing by the Spirits of any order. As we said, we saw many persons who attended Mr. Squire's experiments; but among those who were not initiated in the Spiritist science, many left little convinced, as if to show that the mere sight of the most extraordinary effects is not sufficient to bring about conviction. After having heard the explanations we gave them, their way of seeing was completely modified. Certainly we do not present this theory as the last word, as the definitive solution. But, in the impossibility of being able to explain these facts by the known laws, it is necessary to agree that the system we have formulated is not devoid of verisimilitude. We will admit it, if they so wish, by way of a simple hypothesis; when they present a better solution, we will be one of the first to accept it.