The newspapers took the matter up; and a
fierce controversy broke forth between those who believed in the
genuineness of the phenomenon and those who saw no more in it
than a barefaced fraud. A scientific committee was appointed in
1904, consisting of professors of psychology and physiology, of
the director of a zoological garden, of a circus manager and of
veterinary surgeons and cavalry-officers. The committee
discovered nothing suspicious, but ventured upon no explanation.
A second committee was then appointed, numbering among its
members Herr Oskar Pfungst, of the Berlin psychological
laboratory. Herr Pfungst, after a long series of experiments,
drew up a voluminous and crushing report, in which he maintained
that the horse was gifted with no intelligence, that it did not
recognize either letters or figures, that it really knew neither
how to calculate nor how to count, but merely obeyed the
imperceptible, infinitesimal and unconscious signs which escaped
from its master.
Public opinion veered round suddenly and completely. People felt
a sort of half-cowardly relief at beholding the prompt collapse
of a miracle which was threatening to throw confusion into the
self satisfied little fold of established truths. Poor Von Osten
protested in vain: no one listened to him; the verdict was given.
He never recovered from this official blow; he became the
laughing-stock of all those whom he had at first astounded; and
he died, lonely and embittered, on the 29th of June, 1909, at the
age of seventy-one.
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