INTRODUCTION.

...much like that peasant who mistook a learned professor of physics performing experiments for a clever sleight-of-hand artist. Even assuming that this could have occurred sometimes, would that be a reason to deny the fact? Should we deny physics because there are prestidigitatorsStage magicians or illusionists who use manual dexterity to perform tricks. who decorate themselves with the title of physicistsIn the mid-19th century, "physicist" often referred broadly to any scientist studying natural laws, sometimes overlapping with those who performed public demonstrations of "natural magic."? Furthermore, one must take into account the character of the individuals and the interest they might have in deceiving. Would it then be a joke? One can certainly enjoy oneself for a moment, but a joke indefinitely prolonged would be as tedious for the hoaxer as for the hoaxed. Moreover, in a mystificationoriginal: "mystification." In this context, a deliberate hoax or grand deception designed to mislead the public. that spreads from one end of the world to the other, among the most serious, honorable, and enlightened people, there would be something at least as extraordinary as the phenomenon itself.

IV

If the phenomena occupying our attention had been limited to the movement of objects, they would have remained, as we have said, within the domain of the physical sciences; but this is not the case: they were destined to set us on the path of facts of a strange order. It was discovered—we know not by whose initiative—that the impulse given to objects was not merely the product of a blind mechanical force, but that there was the intervention of an intelligent cause in this movement. This path once opened, it was an entirely new field of observation; it was the veil lifted from many mysteries. Is there indeed an intelligent power? That is the question. If this power exists, what is it, what is its nature, its origin? Is it above humanity? Such are the other questions that follow from the first.

The first intelligent manifestations took place by means of tables rising and striking a determined number of blows with one leg, and thus responding by yes or by no, according to a convention, to a question posed. Until then, there was certainly nothing convincing for the skeptics, for one could believe it to be the result of chance. More developed answers were then obtained through the letters of the alphabet: the moving object striking a number of blows corresponding to the numerical or-