Count Agenor de Gasparin

1810-1871

          French politician, minister plenipotentiary, one of the first investigators of table turning and telekinetic movements. His book, Des Tables Tournantes, du Surnaturel en general, et des Esprits, published in 1854, describes his experiments at Velleyres, Switzerland, under stringent test conditions in a circle of friends some of whom were psychic. He established the reality of movement without contact, the alteration of weights and the intelligence manifesting behind the phenomena but did not accept the spirit hypothesis. His orthodoxy was absolute. The gospel was the only phase of the supernatural he believed in. He came to the following conclusions:

1. The will, in a certain condition of the human organism, can act, from a distance, upon inert bodies, and by an agency different from that of muscular action.

2. Under the same conditions thought can be communicated directly, though unconsciously, from one individual to another. In a preface to a later edition of his book in 1888 he says that the thirty years which had elapsed had not sufficed to solve the problem but that "some day an edifice would be erected on the same stone which was laid in 1854."

Source (with minor modifications): An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science by Nandor Fodor (1934).