More confiding than Faraday, Lakhovsky has told me the gist of his ideas on radiations and their effects on living beings. He thought, and rightly, that his ideas could not shock an experimenter who, for the past thirty-five years, had studied the effects of the full range of Hertzian waves on animals and microbes.
In scientific research it is advisable to encourage what appears to be the most daring ideas. I have lived in the intimacy of two great men: Claude Bernard and Brown-Sequard, who revelled in new ideas. And it did not pay them too badly!
The phenomena of resonance have long been familiar to physiologists. We all know the acoustic resonators of the organ of Corti, the optic resonators of the retina since the famous researches of Helmholtz. And still more familiar to us, the biological resonators of Charles Henry. Lapicque, Latzareff and myself nave invoked on several occasions the phenomena of cellular resonance in order to explain the action of nervous influences or other physical agents in living beings.
That space is full of forces which are unknown to us, and that living beings emit radiations or effluvia of which we are not aware, but whose significance has attracted the attention of certain observers, are facts that I have long since accepted. Anything is possible. But one must not accept anything except that which can be experimentally proved. The ideas of an insane person differ from the conceptions of a genius mainly because experiment invalidates the former and confirms the latter.
Lakhovsky, encouraged by his own researches and the practical results he has obtained, is particularly anxious that his theories should rouse interest and stimulate experimental work among independent investigators. Lakhovsky's theories constitute what Claude Bernard called "working hypotheses."
In the "Secret of Life" Lakhovsky confines himself to the study of electromagnetic waves, deeply penetrating waves and unknown waves.
There are certainly many more processes of energy transmission besides those revealed to us by Newton and Fresnel. It is in the study of human beings that the chances of discovering such processes are most promising. Therefore, let us experiment by using the methods of physicists and chemists, and let us aim at discovering the special detector mentioned in the conclusion of this work.
