The Unknown Guest Part 11

It is possible, therefore, in the last resort, to explain the Elberfeld mystery by the no less obscure mystery that surrounds numbers. This really only means moving to another spot in the gloom; but it is often just by that moving to another spot that we end by discovering the little gleam of light which shows us a thoroughfare. In any case, and to return to more precise ideas, more than one instance has been cited to prove that the gift of handling great groups of figures is almost independent of the intelligence proper. One of the most curious is that of an Italian shepherd boy, Vito Mangiamele, who was brought before the Paris Academy of Science in 1837 and who, at the age of ten, though devoid of the most rudimentary education, was able in half a minute to extract the cubic root of a number of seven figures.

Another, more striking still, also mentioned by Dr. Clarapede in his paper on the learned horses, is that of a man blind from birth, an inmate of the lunatic-asylum, at Armentieres. This blind man, whose name is Fleury, a degenerate and nearly an idiot, can calculate in one minute and fifteen seconds the number of seconds in thirty-nine years, three months and twelve days, not forgetting the leap-years. They explain to him what a square root is, without telling him the conventional method of finding it; and soon he extracts almost as rapidly as Inaudi himself, without a blunder, the square roots of numbers of four figures, giving the remainder. On the other hand, we know that a mathematical genius like Henri Pomcare confessed himself incapable of adding up a column of figures without a mistake.

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>From the maybe enchanted atmosphere that surrounds numbers we shall pa.s.s more easily to the even more magic mists of the final theory, the only one remaining to us for the moment: the mediumistic or subliminal theory. This, we must remember, is not the telepathic theory proper which decisive experiments have made us reject. Let us have the courage to venture upon it. When one can no longer interpret a phenomenon by the known, we must needs try to do so by the unknown. We, therefore, now enter a new province of a great unexplored kingdom, in which we shall find ourselves without a guide.

Mediumistic phenomena, manifestations of the secondary or the subliminal consciousness, between man and man, are, as we have more than once had occasion to a.s.sure ourselves, capricious, undisciplined, evasive and uncertain, but more frequent than one thought and, to one who examines, them seriously and honestly, often undeniable. Have similar manifestations been discovered between man and the animals? The study of these manifestations, which is very difficult even in the case of man, becomes still more so when we question witnesses doomed to silence. There are, however, some animals which are looked upon as "psychic," which, in other words, seem indisputably to be sensitive to certain subliminal influences. One usually cla.s.ses the cat, the dog and the horse in this somewhat ill-defined category. To these superst.i.tious animals one might perhaps add certain birds, more or less birds of omen, and even a few insects, notably the bees.

Other animals, such as, for instance, the elephant and the monkey, appear to be proof against mystery. Be this as it may, M.

Ernest Bozzano, in an excellent article on Les Perceptions psychiques des animaux,[1] collected in 1905 sixty-nine cases of telepathy, presentiments and hallucinations of sight or hearing in which the princ.i.p.al actors are cats, dogs and horses. There are, even among them, ghosts or phantoms of dogs which, after their death, return to haunt the homes in which they were happy.

Most of these cases are taken from the Proceedings of the S. P.

R., that is to say, they have nearly all been very strictly investigated. It is impossible, short of filling these pages with often striking and touching but rather c.u.mbersome anecdotes, to enumerate them here, however briefly. It will be sufficient to note that sometimes the dog begins to howl at the exact moment when his master loses his life, for instance, on a battlefield, hundreds of miles from the place where the dog is. More commonly, the cat, the dog and the horse plainly manifest that they perceive, often before men do, telepathic apparitions, phantasms of the living or the dead. Horses in particular seem very sensitive to places that pa.s.s as haunted or uncanny. On the whole, the result of these observations is that we can hardly dispute that these animals communicate as much as we do and perhaps in the same fas.h.i.+on with the mystery that lies around us.

There are moments at which, like man, they see the invisible and perceive events, influences and emotions that are beyond the range of their normal senses. It is, therefore, permissible to believe that their nervous system or some remote or secret part of their being contains the same psychic elements connecting them with an unknown that inspires them with as much terror as it does ourselves. And, let us say in pa.s.sing, this terror is rather strange; for, after all, what have they to fear from a phantom or an apparition, they who, we are convinced have no after-life and who ought, therefore, to remain perfectly indifferent to the manifestations, of a world in which they will never set foot?

[1] Annales des sciences psychiques, August, 1905, pp 422-469.

I shall perhaps be told that it is not certain that these apparitions are objective, that they correspond with an external reality, but that it is exceedingly possible that they spring solely from the man's or the animal's brain. This is not the moment to discuss this very obscure point, which raises the whole question of the supernatural and all the problems of the hereafter. The only important thing to observe is that at one time it is man who transmits his terror, his perception or his idea of the invisible to the animal and at another the animal which transmits its sensations to man. We have here, therefore, intercommunications which spring from a deeper common source than any that we know and which, to issue from it or go back to it, pa.s.s through other channels than those of our customary senses.

Now all this belongs to that unexplained sensibility, to that secret treasure, to that as yet undetermined psychic power which, for lack of a better term, we call subconsciousness or subliminal consciousness. Moreover, it is not surprising that in the animals, these subliminal faculties not only exist, but are perhaps keener and more active than in ourselves, because it is our conscious and abnormally individualized life that atrophies them by relegating them to a state of idleness wherein they have fewer and fewer opportunities of being exercised, whereas in our brothers who are less detached from the universe, consciousness--if we can give that name to a very uncertain and confused notion of the ego--is reduced to a few elementary actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from the whole of the circ.u.mambient life and they still possess a number of those more general and indeterminate senses whereof we have been deprived by the gradual encroachment of a narrow and intolerant special faculty, our intelligence. Among these senses which up to the present we have described as instincts, for want--and it is becoming a pressing want--of a more suitable and definite word, need I mention the sense of direction, migration, foreknowledge of the weather, of earthquakes and avalanches and many others which we doubtless do not even suspect? Does all this not belong to a subconsciousness which differs from ours only in being so much richer?

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I am fully aware that this explanation by means of the subliminal consciousness will not explain very much and will at most invoke the aid of the unknown to illuminate the incomprehensible. But to explain a phenomenon, a Dr. J. de Modzelwski very truly says, "is to put forward a theory which is more familiar and more easily comprehensible to us than the phenomenon at issue." This is really what we are constantly and almost exclusively doing in physics, chemistry, biology and in every branch of science without exception. To explain a phenomenon is not necessarily to make it as clear and lucid as that two and two are four; and, even so, the fact that two and two are four is not, when we go to the bottom of things, as clear and lucid as it seems. What in this case, as in most others, we wrongfully call explaining is simply confronting the unexpected mystery which these horses offer us with a few phenomena which are themselves unknown, but which have been perceived longer and more frequently. And this same mystery, thus explained, will serve one day to explain others. It is in this way that science goes to work. We must not blame it: it does what it can; and it does not appear that there are other ways.

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If we a.s.sent to this explanation by means of the subliminal consciousness, which is a sort of mysterious partic.i.p.ation in all that happens in this world and the others, many obstacles disappear and we enter into a new region in which we draw strangely nearer to the animals and really become their brothers by closer links, perhaps the only essential links in life. They take part from that moment in the great human problems, in the extraordinary actions of our unknown guest; and, if, since we have been observing the indwelling force more attentively, nothing any longer surprises us of that which it realizes in us, no more should anything surprise us of that which it realizes in them. We are on the same plane with them, in some as yet undetermined element, when it is no longer the intelligence that reigns alone, but another spiritual power, which pays no heed to the brain, which pa.s.ses by other roads and which might rather be the psychic substance of the universe itself, no longer set in grooves, isolated and specialized by man, but diffused, multiform and perhaps, if we could trace it, equal in everything that exists.

There is, henceforth, no reason why the horses should not partic.i.p.ate in most of the mediumistic, phenomena which we find existing between man and man; and their mystery ceases to be distinct from those of human metaphysics. If their subliminal is akin to ours, we can begin by extending to its utmost limits the telepathic theory, which has, so to speak, no limits, for, in the matter of telepathy, as Myers has said, all that we are permitted to declare is that "life has the power of manifesting itself to life." We may ask ourselves, therefore, if the problem which I set to the horse, without knowing the terms of it, is not communicated to my subliminal, which is ignorant of it, by that of the horse, who has read it. It is practically certain that this is possible between human subliminals. Is it I who see the solution and transmit it to the horse, who only repeats it to me?

But, suppose that it is a problem which I myself am incapable of solving? Whence does the solution come, then? I do not know if the experiment has been attempted, under the same conditions, with a human medium. For that matter, if it succeeded, it would be very much the same as the no less subliminal phenomenon of the arithmetical prodigies, or lightning calculators, with which, in this rather superhuman atmosphere, we are almost forced to compare the riddle of the mathematical horses. Of all the interpretations, it is the one which, for the moment, appears to me the least eccentric and the most natural.

We have seen that the gift of handling colossal figures is almost foreign to the intelligence proper; one can, even declare that, in certain cases, it is evidently and completely independent of such intelligence. In these cases, the gift is manifested prior to any education and from the earliest years of childhood. If we refer to the list of arithmetical prodigies given by Dr.

Scripure,[1] we see that the faculty made its appearance in Ampere at the age of three, in Colburn at six, in Gauss at three, in Mangiamele at ten, in Safford at six, in Whateley at three, and so on. Generally, it lasts for only a few years, becoming rapidly enfeebled with age and usually vanis.h.i.+ng suddenly at the moment when its possessor begins to go to school.

[1] American Journal of Psychology, 1 April 1891.

When you ask those children and even most of the lightning calculators who have come to man's estate how they go to work to solve the huge and complicated problems set them, they reply that they know nothing about it. Bidder, for instance, declares that it is impossible for him to say how he can instinctively tell the logarithm of a number consisting of seven or eight figures. It is the same with Safford, who, at the age of ten, used to do in his head, without ever making a mistake, multiplication-sums the result of which ran into thirty-six figures. The solution presents itself authoritatively and spontaneously; it is a vision, an impression, an inspiration, an intuition coming one knows not whence, suddenly and indubitably. As a role, they do not even try to calculate. Contrary to the general belief, they have no peculiar methods; or, if method there be, it is more a practical way of subdividing the intuition. One would think that the solution springs suddenly from the very enunciation of the problem, in the same way as a veridical hallucination. It appears to rise, infallible and ready-done, from a sort of eternal and cosmic reservoir wherein the answers to every question lie dormant. It must, therefore, be admitted that we have here a phenomenon that occurs above or below the brain, by the side of the consciousness and the mind, outside all the intellectual methods and habits; and it is precisely for phenomena of this kind that Myers invented the word "subliminal."[1]

[1] I have no need to recall the derivation of the term subliminal: beneath (sub) the threshold (limen) of consciousness.

Let us add, as M. de Vesme very rightly remarks, that the subliminal is not exactly what cla.s.sical psychology calls the subconsciousness, which latter records only notions that are normally perceived and possesses only normal faculties, that is to say, faculties recognized to-day by orthodox science.

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Does not all this bring us a little nearer to our calculating horses? From the moment that it is demonstrated that the solution of a mathematical problem no longer depends exclusively on the brain, but on another faculty, another spiritual power whose presence under various forms has been ascertained beyond a doubt in certain animals, it ceases to be wholly rash or extravagant to suggest that perhaps, in the horse, the same phenomenon is reproduced and developed in the same unknown, wherein moreover the mysteries of numbers and those of subconsciousness mingle in a like darkness. I am well aware that an explanation laden to such an extent with mysteries explains but very little more than silence does; nevertheless, it is at least a silence traversed by restless murmurs, and sedulous whispers that are better than the gloomy and hopeless ignorance to which we would have perforce to resign ourselves if we did not, in spite of all, to perform the great duty of man, which is to discover a spark in the darkness.

It goes without saying that objections are raised from every side. Among men, arithmetical prodigies are looked upon as monsters, as a sort of extremely rare teratological phenomenon.

We can count, at most, half-a-dozen in a century, whereas, among horses, the faculty would appear to be almost general, or at least quite common. In fact, out of six or seven stallions whom Krall tried to initiate into the secrets of mathematics, he found only two that appeared to him too poorly gifted for him to waste time on their education. These were, I believe, two thoroughbreds that were presented to him by the Grand-duke of Mecklenburg and sent back by Krall to their sumptuous stables. In the four or five others, taken at random as circ.u.mstances supplied them, he met with apt.i.tudes unequal, it is true, but easily developed and giving the impression that they exist normally, latent and inactive, at the bottom of every equine soul. From the mathematical point of view, is the horse's subliminal consciousness then superior to man's? Why not? His whole subliminal being is probably superior to one, of greater range, younger, fresher, more alive and less heavy, since it is not incessantly attacked, coerced and humiliated by the intelligence which gnaws at it, stifles it, cloaks it and relegates it to a dark corner which neither light nor air can penetrate. His subliminal consciousness is always present, always alert; ours is never there, is asleep at the bottom of a deserted well and needs exceptional operations, results and events before it can be drawn from its slumber and its unremembered deeps. All this seems very extraordinary; but, in any case, we are here in the midst of the extraordinary; and this outlet is perhaps the least hazardous. It is not a question, we must remember, of a cerebral operation, an intellectual performance, but of a gift of divination closely allied to other gifts of the same nature and the same origin which are not the peculiar attribute of man. No observation, no experiment enables us, up to the present, to establish a difference between the subliminal of human beings and that of animals. On the contrary, the as yet restricted number of actual cases reveals constant and striking a.n.a.logies between the two. In most of those arithmetical operations, be it noted, the subliminal of the horse behaves exactly like that of the medium in a rate of trance. The horse readily reverses the figures of the solution; he replies, "37," for instance, instead of "73,"

which is a mediumistic phenomenon so well-known and so frequent that it has been styled "mirror-writing." He makes mistakes fairly often in the most elementary additions, and subtractions and much less frequently in the extraction of the most complicated roots, which again, in similar cases, such as "xenoglossy" and psychometry, is one of the eccentricities of human mediumism and is explained by the same cause, namely, the inopportune intervention of the ever fallible intelligence, which, by meddling in the matter, alters the certainties of a subliminal which, when left to itself, never makes a mistake. It is, in fact, quite probable that the horse, being really able to do the small sums, no longer relies solely on his intuition and, from that moment, gropes and flounders about. The solution hovers between the intelligence and the subliminal and, pa.s.sing from the one, which is not quite sure of it, to the other, which is not urgently appealed to, comes out of the conflict as best it may.

The case is the same with the psychometric or spiritualistic medium who seeks to profit by what he knows in the ordinary way, so as to complete the visions or revelations of his subconscious sensibility. He, too, in this instance, is nearly always guilty of flagrant and inexplicable blunders.

Many other similarities will be found to exist, notably the way in which the lessons vary. Nothing is more uncertain and capricious than manifestations of human mediumism. Whether it be a question of automatic writing, psychometry, materializations or anything else, we meet with series of sittings that yield none but absurd results. Then, suddenly, for reasons as yet obscure--the state of the weather, the presence of this or that witness, or I know not what--the most undeniable and bewildering manifestations occur one after the other. The case is precisely the same with the horses: their queer fancies, their unaccountable and disconcerting freaks drive poor Krall to despair. He never opens the door of that uncertain stable, on important days, without a sinking at the heart. Let the beard or the frown of some learned professor fail to please the horses: they will, forthwith, take an unholy delight in giving the most irrelevant answer to the most elementary question, for hours and even days on end.

Other common features are the strongly-marked personality of the mediumistic "raps" and the communications known as "deferred telepathic communications," that is to say, those in which the answer is obtained at the end of a sitting to a question put at the beginning and forgotten by all those present. What at first sight seems one of the strongest objections urged against the mediumism of the horse even tends to confirm it. If the reply comes from the horse's subconsciousness, it has been asked, how is it that it should be necessary first to teach him the elements of language, mathematics and so forth, and that Berto, for instance, is incapable of solving the same problems as Mohammed?

This objection has been very ably refuted by M. de Vesme, who writes:

"To produce automatic writing, a medium must have learnt to write; before Victorien Sardou or Mlle Helene Schmidt could produce their mediumistic drawings and paintings, they had to possess an elementary knowledge of drawing and painting; Tartini would never have composed The Devil's Sonata in a dream, if he had not known music; and so forth. Unconscious cerebration, however wonderful, can only take effect upon elements already acquired in some way or another. The subconscious cerebration of a man blind from birth will not make him see colours."

Here, then, in this comparison which might easily be extended, are several fairly well- defined features of resemblance. We receive a vivid impression of the same habits, the same contradictions, and the same eccentricities; and we once more recognize the strange and majestic shadow of our unknown guest.

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One great objection remains, based upon the very nature of the phenomenon, upon the really inseparable distance that separates the whole life of the horse from the abstract and impenetrable life of numbers. How can his subliminal consciousness interest itself for a moment in signs that represent nothing to him, have no relation to his organism and will never touch his existence?

But in the first place, it is just the same with the child or the illiterate calculator. He is not interested either in the figures which he lets loose. He is completely ignorant of the consequences of the problems which he solves. He juggles with digits which have hardly any more meaning to him than to the horse. He is incapable of accounting for what he does; and his subconsciousness also acts in a sort of indifferent and remote dream. It is true that, in his case, we can appeal to heredity and to memory; but is this difference enough to settle the difficulty and definitely to separate the two phenomena? To appeal to heredity is still to appeal to the subliminal; and it is not at all certain that the latter is limited by the interest of the organism sheltering it. It appears, on the contrary, in many circ.u.mstances, to spread and extend far beyond that organism in which it is domiciled, one would say, accidentally and provisionally. It likes to show, apparently, that it is in relation with all that exists. It declares itself, as often as possible, universal and impersonal. It has but a very indifferent care, as we have seen in the matter of apparitions and premonitions, for the happiness and even the safety of its host and protector. It prophesies to its companion of a lifetime events which he cannot avoid or which do not concern him. It makes him see beforehand, for instance, all the circ.u.mstances of the death of a stranger whom he will only hear of after the event, when this event is irrevocable. It brings a crowd of barren presentiments and conjures up veridical hallucinations that are wholly alien and idle. With psychometric, typtological or materializing mediums, it practises art for art's sake, mocks at s.p.a.ce and time, pa.s.ses through personalities, sees through solid bodies, brings into communication thoughts and motions worlds apart, reads souls and lives by the light of a flower, a rag of a sc.r.a.p of paper; and all this for nothing, to amuse itself, to astonish us, because it adores the superfluous, the incoherent, the unexpected, the improbable, the bewildering, or rather, perhaps, because it is a huge, rough, undisciplined force still struggling in the darkness and coming to the surface only by wild fits and starts, because it is an enormous expansion of a spirit striving to collect itself, to achieve consciousness, to make itself of service and to obtain a hearing. In any case, for the time being, it appeals just what we have described, and would be unlike itself if it behaved any otherwise in the case that puzzles us.

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Lastly, to close this chapter, let us remark that it is nearly certain that the solution given by calculating children and horses is not of a mathematical nature at all. They do not in any way consider the problem or the sum to be worked. They simply find the answer straight away to a riddle, the guessing of which is made easy by the actual nature of figures which keep their secrets badly. To any one in the requisite state of mind, it becomes a question of a sort of elementary charade, which hides its answer only from those who speak another language. It is evident that every problem, however complex it may appear, carries within its very enunciation its one, invariable solution, scarce veiled by the indiscreet signs that contain or cover it.

It is there, under the numbers that have no other object than to give it life, coming, stirring and ceaselessly proclaiming itself a necessity. It is not surprising therefore that eyes sharper than ours and ears open to other vibrations should see and hear it without knowing what it represents, what it implies or from what prodigious ma.s.s of figures and operations it merges. The problem itself speaks; and the horse but repeats the sign which he hears whispered in the mysterious life of numbers or deep down in, the abyss where the eternal verities hold sway. He understands none of it, he has no need to understand, he is but the unconscious medium who lends his voice or his limbs to the mind that inspires him. There is here but a bare and simple answer, bearing no precise significance, seized in an alien existence. There is here but a mechanical revelation, so to speak, a sort of special reflex which we can only record and which, for the rest, is as inexplicable as any other phenomenon of consciousness or instinct. After all, when we think of it, it is just as, astonis.h.i.+ng that we should not perceive the solution as it is that we should discover it. However, I grant that all this is but a venturesome interpretation to be taken for what it is worth, an experimental or interim theory with which we must needs content ourselves since all the others have hitherto been controverted by the facts.

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Let us now briefly sum up what the Elberfeld experiments have yielded us. Having put aside telepathy in the narrow sense--which perhaps enters into more than one phenomenon but is not indispensable to it, for we see these same phenomena repeated when telepathy is practically impossible--we cannot help observing that, if we deny the existence or the influence of the subliminal, it is all the more difficult to contest the existence and the intervention of the intelligence, at any rate up to the extracting of roots, after which there is a steep precipice which ends in darkness. But, even if we stop at the roots, the sudden discovery of an intellectual force so similar to our own, where we were accustomed to see but an irremediable impotency, is no doubt one of the most unexpected revelations that we have received since the invisible and the unknown began to press upon us with a persistence and an impatience which they had not displayed heretofore. It is not easy to foresee as yet the consequences and the promises of this new aspect which the great riddle of the intelligence is suddenly adopting. But I believe that we shall soon have to revise some of the essential ideas which are the foundations of our life and that some rather strange horizons are appearing out of the mists in the history of psychology, of morality, of human destiny and of many other things.

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So much for the intelligence. On the other hand, what we deny to the intelligence we are constrained to grant to the subliminal; and the revelation is even more disconcerting. We should then have to admit that them is in the horse--and hence most probably in everything that lives on this earth--a psychic power similar to that which is hidden beneath the veil of our reason and which, as we learn to know it, astonishes, surpa.s.ses and dominates our reason more and more. This psychic power, in which no doubt we shall one day be forced to recognize the genius of the universe itself, appears, as we have often observed, to be all-wise, all-seeing and all-powerful. It has, when it is pleased to communicate with us or when we are allowed to penetrate into it, an answer for every question, and perhaps a remedy for every ill. We will not enumerate its virtues again. It will be enough for us to recall with what ease it mocks at s.p.a.ce, time and all the obstacles that beset our poor human knowledge and understanding. We believed it, like all that seems to us superior and marvellous, the intangible, inalienable and incommunicable attribute of man, with even better reason than his intelligence.

And now an accident, strangely belated, it is true, tells us that, at one precise point, the strangest and least foreseen of all, the horse and the dog draw more easily and perhaps more directly than ourselves upon its mighty reservoirs. By the most inexplicable of anomalies, though one that is fairly consistent with the fantastic character of the subliminal, they appear to have access to it only at the spot that is most remote from their habits and most unknown to their propensities, for there is nothing in the world about which animals trouble less than figures. But is this not, perhaps because we do not see what goes on elsewhere? It so happens that the infinite mystery of numbers can sometimes be expressed by a very few simple movements which are natural to most animals; but there is nothing to tell us that, if we could teach the horse and the dog to attach to these same movements the expression of other mysteries, they would not draw upon them with equal facility. It has been successfully attempted to give them a more or less clear idea of the value of a few figures and perhaps of the course and nature of certain elementary operations; and this appears to have been enough to open up to them the most secret regions of mathematics in which every question is answered beforehand. It is not wholly illusive to suppose that, if we could impart to them, for instance, a similar notion of the future, together with a manner of conveying to us what they see there, they might also have access to strange visions of another cla.s.s, which are jealously kept from us by the too-watchful guardians of our intelligence. There is an opportunity here for experiments which will doubtless prove exceedingly arduous, for the future is not so easily seen and above all not so easily interpreted and expressed as a number. It is possible, moreover, that, when we know how to set about it, we shall obtain most of the human mediumistic phenomena; rapping, the moving of objects, materialization even and Heaven knows what other surprises held in store for us by that astounding subliminal to whose fancy there appears to be no bounds. In any case, if we accept the divining of numbers, as we are almost forced to do, it is almost certain that the divining of other matters must follow. An unexpected breach is made in the wall behind which lie heaped the great secrets that seem to us, as our knowledge and our civilization increase, to become stronger and more inaccessible. True, it is a narrow breach; but it is the first that has been opened in that part of the hitherto uncrannied wall which is not turned towards mankind. What will issue through it? No one can foretell what we may hope.

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What astonishes us most is that this revelation has been so long delayed. How are we to explain that man has lived to this day with his domestic animals never suspecting that they harboured mediumistic or subliminal faculties as extraordinary as those which he vaguely felt himself to possess. One would have in this connection to study the mysterious practices of ancient India and of Egypt; the numerous and persistent legends of animals talking, guiding their masters and foretelling the future; and, nearer to ourselves, in history proper, all that science of augury and soothsaying which derived its omens from the flight of birds, the inspection of entrails, the appet.i.te or att.i.tude of the sacred or prophetic animals, among which horses were often numbered. We here find one of those innumerous instances of a lost or antic.i.p.ated power which make us suspect that mankind has forestalled or forgotten all that we believe ourselves to be discovering. Remember that there is almost always some distorted, misapprehended or dimly--seen truth at the bottom of the most eccentric and wildest creeds, superst.i.tions and legends. All this new science of metaphysics or of the investigation of our subconsciousness and of unknown powers, which has scarcely begun to unveil its first mysteries, thus finds landmarks and defaced but recognizable traces in the old religions, the most inexplicible traditions and the most ancient history. Besides, the probability of a thing does not depend upon undeniably established precedents. While it is almost certain that there is nothing new under the sun or in the eternity preceding the suns, it is quite possible that the same forces do not always act with the same energy. As I observed, nearly twenty years ago, in The Treasure of the Humble, at a time when I hardly knew at all what I know so imperfectly to-day:

"A spiritual"--I should have said, a psychic-"epoch is perhaps upon us, an epoch to which a certain number of a.n.a.logies are found in history. For there are periods recorded when the soul, in obedience to unknown laws, seemed to rise to the very surface of humanity, whence it gave clearest evidence of its existence and of its power. . . . It would seem, at moments such as these, as though humanity," --and, I would add to-day, all that lives with it on this earth--"were on the point of struggling from beneath the crus.h.i.+ng burden of matter that weighs it down."

One might in fact believe that a shudder which we have not yet experienced is pa.s.sing over everything that breathes; that a new activity, a new restlessness is permeating the spiritual atmosphere which surrounds our globe; and that the very animals have felt its thrill. One might say that, by the side of the n.i.g.g.ardly private spring which would only supply our intelligence, other streams are spreading and rising to the same level in every form of existence. A sort of word of command is being pa.s.sed from rank to rank; and the same phenomena are bursting forth in every quarter of the globe in order to attract our attention, as though the obstinately dumb genius that lay hidden in the pregnant silence of the universe, from that of the stones, the flowers and the insects to the mighty silence of the stars, were at last trying to tell us some secret whereby it would be better known to us or to itself. It is possible that this is but an illusion. Perhaps we are simply more attentive and better informed than of old. We learn at the very instant what happens in every part of our earth and we have acquired the habit of more minutely observing and examining the things that happen.

But the illusion would in this case have all the force, all the value and all the meaning of the reality and would enjoin the same hopes and the same obligation.

CHAPTER V. THE UNKNOWN GUEST

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We have now studied certain manifestations of that which we have called in turn and more or less indiscriminately the subconscious mind, the subliminal consciousness and the unknown guest, names to which we might add that of the superior subconsciousness or superior psychism invented by Dr. Geley. Granting that these manifestations are really proved, it is no longer possible to explain them or rather to cla.s.sify them without having recourse to fresh theories. Now we can entertain doubts on many points, we can cavil and argue; but I defy anyone approaching these facts in a serious and honest spirit to reject them all. It is permissible to neglect the most extraordinary; but there are a mult.i.tude of others which have become or, to speak more accurately, are acknowledged to be as frequent and habitual as any fact whatever in normal, everyday life. It is not difficult to reproduce them at will, provided we place ourselves in the condition demanded by their very nature; and, this being so, there remains no valid reason for excluding them from the domain of science in the strict sense of the word.

Hitherto, all that we have learnt regarding these occurrences is that their origin is unknown. It will be said that this is not much and that the discovery is nothing to boast of. I quite agree: to imagine that one can explain a phenomena by saying that it is produced by an unknown agency would indeed be childish. But it is already something to have marked its source; not to be still lingering in the thick of a fog, trying any and every direction in order to find a way out, but to be concentrating our attention on a single spot which is the starting-point of all these wonders, so that at each instant we recognize in each phenomenon the characteristic customs, methods or features of the same unknown agency. It is very nearly all that we can do for the moment; but this first effort is not wholly to be despised.

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