"I do not believe you because you have done nothing but see!" "I do not believe you because I have not seen with my own eyes!" So many pedants, so many objections. They hardly take the trouble to agree among themselves; in a war waged against the tables any weapon is fair, nothing comes amiss.
I do not wish to forget that scientists were still talking only of rotations at the moment when Faraday invented his disks.[54] In the presence of a phenomenon so inadequate, and, let us admit it, so suspicious, we can understand how the savants showed themselves sceptical and contented themselves with flimsy refutations. They proportioned the number and size of their weapons to the appearance of the enemy. The one among them who showed the most penetration, and who proposed the most plausible explanation, is most assuredly Chevreul. His theory of the tendency to movement is incontestably true. It explains how the objects we suspend from our finger finally take a vibratory movement in the direction indicated by our will. I am not astonished that some have thought this theory sufficient to explain how experimenters can, in the end, impart a rotation to the table and participate in the movement themselves. I need not say that our proved levitations of weights, and our movements without contact, will not henceforth permit anyone to take refuge in such an explanation. If all the tendencies to movement were united into one they would not be able to produce at a distance an impelling power, nor move a mass that mechanical action could not set in motion.
Really, the learned doctors ought not to throw out to the public these explanations which do not explain. They ought rather to get to work and show us, in fact, how to set about the lifting directly and mechanically of a weight of 220 pounds without applying to the task a force of 220 pounds.
But they prefer to use insulting expressions, and then proceed to invent some theory or other which has only one little fault--that it has no legs to walk with. The recent article of M. Babinet in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ is a masterpiece in its way. If I needed to be convinced of the reality of the phenomena of table-turning, etc., I should most assuredly have been convinced by the reading of this refutation of it.