Nor can you put your features into smiling position,
without experiencing a latent sense of amusement, though you would not
know what you were smiling at. But if six cool scientific intellects,
acquainted with the tricks of their own organisms and determined to
dissever thought from motion, were to sit round a table, they might sit
till doomsday without the "spirit" turning up. This is what the
spiritualists mean by unsympathetic persons, persons obnoxious to the
spirits, persons with antipathetic auras, and all the rest of the jargon.
But six intellects taken at random, being anything but cool and
scientific, are not able to prevent their ideas passing over into action
in the shape of muscular twitches; though if even the unscientific were
to look up at the ceiling and forget all about the table, the table would
probably forget to move. Now the majority of the replies of the table
deal with matters actively present to the consciousness of at least one
of the six owners of the superimposed hands. When the table raps out
something known only to this one person, and the startled person admits
that the table is right, an uncanny feeling is produced; the table seems
at least to be a thought-reader, and on this wave of astonishment the
hypothesis of "spirits" rides up triumphantly.
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