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Bergson begins by saying that he is puzzled by the honor that the society has bestowed on him because he “has done nothing to deserve it,” in that, as he claims, “it is only by reading” that he knows “anything of the phenomena with which the Society deals” (ME 75). This claim, which is itself rather interesting given his experiences with Palladino, becomes even more puzzling when he goes on to assert in this public forum that “I have seen nothing myself, I have examined nothing myself” (ME 75). Whether reluctant to reveal his own admittedly rather scanty background in this area or simply demurring modestly to the “ingenuity, the penetration, the patience, the tenacity” that has been shown by those present in the hall while studying psi phenomena, it is clear that Bergson admires those who have persevered in their research, especially in the face of “the prejudices of a great part of the scientific world” (ME 75, 76). Bergson clearly opposes these prejudices, pointing out how behind the mockery of those who even refuse to examine critically the evidence for psychical phenomena “there is, present and invisible, a certain metaphysic unconscious of itself,—unconscious and therefore inconsistent, unconscious and therefore incapable of continually remodeling itself on observation and experience as every philosophy worthy of the name must do” (ME 77). Bergson will, later in the talk, offer his own philosophy as a more conscious and therefore more supple and ideally valuable alternative to the taken-forgranted mechanistic materialism that was so prevalent during his day. But before proceeding in this direction, Bergson examines several important methodological issues. Bergson first asserts (without bothering to give any reasons to support his assertion) that psi phenomena are facts, facts similar to those studied by natural science. For him, these facts are subject to laws and can therefore be repeated again and again, unlike the specificity and particularity of historical facts (e.g., the Battle of Austerlitz) that happen only once and can never repeat themselves. He postulates that, similar to electricity and magnetism, telepathy “is operating at every moment and everywhere, but with too little intensity to be noticed or else in such a way that a cerebral mechanism stops the effect, for our benefit, at the very moment at which it is about to clear the threshold of consciousness” (ME 79–80). He also claims that, if and when we finally understand the underlying dynamics of the operation of telepathy, then in much the same way as it is now no longer necessary to wait for a thunderstorm in order to see the effect of electricity, it will no longer be necessary to wait for spontaneous telepathic events, such as the appearance of a “phantasm of the living”—that is, apparitions of individuals, often sick or dying, who appear unexpectedly to friends or loved ones, often miles away, apparitions that were studied in the monumental twovolume work Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886, and spearheaded by Edmund Gurney, a founding figure of the Society for Psychical Research.30 BERGSON AND NON-ORDINARY EXPERIENCES 253 What Bergson notes, however, is that even though telepathy, to his mind at least, is a lawful and entirely natural phenomenon, nonetheless, it appears that the only way to study it is with “an entirely different method, one which stands midway between that of the historian and that of the magistrate”—that is, a method in which researchers study documents, examine witnesses, assess their reliability, and so forth (ME 80). Bergson comments that, after becoming aware of the sheer number of reliable cases and after seeing the care and thoroughness in which these cases were examined, he is “led to believe in telepathy, just as [he] believe[s] in the defeat of the Invincible Armada” (ME 81). He admits that this belief has neither “the mathematical certainty” given by a demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem nor the empirical certainty seen in the verification of one of Galileo’s laws; however, “it has at least all the certainty which we can obtain in historical or judicial matters” (ME 81). Nonetheless, as Bergson notes, this level of evidence is simply not compelling to most scientists. Therefore, as he notes, because “psychical research” is unable to be produced under strict laboratory conditions, it is considered as not only unscientific, but even unreal. (Bergson was actually incorrect in his assertion that paranormal phenomena are unable to be studied experimentally. Even by the time of this talk there had been...

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