While opinion was agitated by these violent events, and contending hypotheses, while La Table Parlante took a Catholic view, and Science a negative view, M. Agenor de Gasparin, a Protestant, chose a via media.

M. de Gasparin, the husband of the well-known author of The Near and the Heavenly Horizons, was a table-turner, without being a spiritualist.  His experiments were made in Switzerland, in 1853; he published a book on them, as we said; M. Figuier attacked it in Les Mysteres de la Science, after M. de Gasparin’s death, and the widow of the author replied by republishing part of the original work.  M. de Gasparin, in the early Empire, was a Liberal, an anti-Radical, an opponent of negro slavery, a Christian, an energetic honest man, absolu et ardent, as he confesses.

His purpose was to demonstrate that tables turn, that the phenomenon is purely physical, that it cannot be explained by the mechanical action of the muscles, nor by that of ‘spirits’.  His allies were his personal friends, and it is pretty clear that two ladies were the chief ‘agents’.  The process was conducted thus:  a ‘chain’ of eight or ten people surrounded a table, lightly resting their fingers, all in contact, on its surface.  It revolved, and, by request, would raise one of its legs, and tap the floor.  All this, of course, can be explained either by cheating, or by the unconscious pushes administered.  If any one will place his hands on a light table, he will find that the mere come and go of pulse and breath have a tendency to agitate the object.  It moves a little, accompanying it you unconsciously move it more.  The experiment is curious because, on some days, the table will not budge, on others it instantly sets up a peculiar gliding movement, in which it almost seems to escape from the superimposed hands, while the most wakeful attention cannot detect any conscious action of the muscles.  If you try the opposite experiment, namely conscious pushing of the most gradual kind, you find that the exertion is very distinctly sensible.  The author has made the following simple experiment.

Two persons for whom the table would not move laid their hands on it firmly and flatly.  Two others (for whom it danced) just touched the hands of the former pair.  Any pressure or push from the upper hands would be felt, of course, by the under hands.  No such pressure was felt, yet the table began to rotate.  In another experiment with another subject, the pressure was felt (indeed the owner of the upper hands was conscious of pressing), yet the table did not move.  These experiments are, physiologically, curious, but, of course, they demonstrate nothing.  Muscles can move the table, muscles can apparently act without the consciousness of their owner, therefore the movement is caused, or may be irrefutably said to be caused, by unconscious muscular action.