The Unknown Guest Part 5

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It is true that this explanation does not explain much; but the others are just as ineffectual and are open to the same objections. These objections are many and various; and it is easier to raise them than to reply to them. For instance, we can ask ourselves why the subconsciousness or the spirits, seeing that they read the future and are able to announce an impending calamity, hardly ever give us the one useful and definite indication that would allow us to avoid it. What can be the childish or mysterious reason of this strange reticence? In many cases it is almost criminal; for instance, in a case related by Professor Hyslop[1] we see the foreboding of the greatest misfortune that can befall a mother germinating, growing, sending out shoots, developing, like some gluttonous and deadly plant, to stop short on the verge of the last warning, the one detail, insignificant in itself but indispensable, which would have saved the child. It is the case of a woman who begins by experiencing a vague but powerful impression that a grievous "burden" was going to fall upon her family. Next month, this premonitory feeling repeats itself very frequently, becomes more intense and ends by concentrating itself upon the poor woman's little daughter. Each time that she is planning something for the child's future, she hears a voice saying:

"She'll never need it."

[1] Proceedings, vol. xiv., p. 266.

A week before the catastrophe, a violent smell of fire fills the house. From that time, the mother begins to be careful about matches, seeing that they are in safe places and out of reach.

She looks all over the house for them and feels a strong impulse to burn all matches of the kind easily lighted. About an hour before the fatal disaster, she reaches for a box to destroy it; but she says to herself that her eldest boy is gone out, thinks that she may need the matches to light the gas-stove and decides to destroy them as soon as he comes back. She takes the child up to its crib for its morning sleep and, as she is putting it into the cradle, she hears the usual mysterious voice whisper in her ear:

"Turn the mattress."

But, being in a great hurry, she simply says that she will turn the mattress after the child has taken its nap. She then goes downstairs to work. After a while, she hears the child cry and, hurrying up to the room, finds the crib and its bedding on fire and the child so badly burnt that it dies in three hours.

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Before going further and theorizing about this case, let us once more state the matter precisely. I know that the reader may straightway and quite legitimately deny the value of anecdotes of this kind. He will say that we have to do with a neurotic who has drawn upon her imagination for all the elements that give a dramatic setting to the story and surround with a halo of mystery a sad but commonplace domestic accident. This is quite possible; and it is perfectly allowable to dismiss the case. But it is none the less true that, by thus deliberately rejecting everything that does not bear the stamp of mathematical or judicial certainty, we risk losing as we go along most of the opportunities or clues which the great riddle of this world offers us in its moments of inattention or graciousness. At the beginning of an enquiry we must know how to content ourselves with little. For the incident in question to be convincing, previous evidence in writing, more or less official statements would be required, whereas we have only the declarations of the husband, a neighbour and a sister. This is insufficient, I agree; but we must at the same time confess that the circ.u.mstances are hardly favourable to obtaining the proofs which we demand. Those who receive warnings of this kind either believe in them or do not believe in them. If they believe in them, it is quite natural that they should not think first of all of the scientific interest of their trouble, or of putting down in writing and thus authenticating its premonitory symptoms and gradual evolution. If they do not believe in them, it is no less natural that they should not proceed to speak or take notice of inanities of which they do not recognize the value until after they have lost the opportunity of supplying convincing proofs of them. Also, do not forget that the little story in question is selected from among a hundred others, which in their turn are equally indecisive, but which, repeating the same facts and the same tendencies with a strange persistency, and by weakening the most inveterate distrust.[1]

[1] See, in particular, Bozzano's cases xlix. and lxvii. These two, especially case xlix., which tells of a personal experience of the late W. T. Stead, are supported by more substantial proofs. I have quoted Professor Hyslop's case, because the reticence is more striking.

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Having said this much, in order to conciliate or part company with those who have no intention of leaving the terra firma of science, let us return to the case before us, which is all the more disquieting inasmuch as we may consider it a sort of prototype of the tragic and almost diabolical reticence which we find in most premonitions. It is probable that under the mattress there was a stray match which the child discovered and struck; this is the only possible explanation of the catastrophe, for there was no fire burning on that floor of the house. If the mother had turned the mattress, she would have seen the match; and, on the other hand, she would certainly have turned the mattress if she had been told that there was a match underneath it. Why did the voice that urged her to perform the necessary action not add the one word that was capable of ensuring that action? The problem moreover is equally perturbing and perhaps equally insoluble whether it concerns our own subconscious faculties, or spirits, or strange intelligences. Those who give these warnings must know that they will be useless, because they manifestly foresee the event as a whole; but they must also know that one last word, which they do not p.r.o.nounce, would be enough to prevent the misfortune that is already consummated in their prevision. They know it so well that they bring this word to the very edge of the abyss, hold it suspended there, almost let it fall and recapture it suddenly at the moment when its weight would have caused happiness and life to rise once more, to the surface of the mighty gulf. What then is this mystery? Is it incapacity or hostility? If they are incapable, what is the unexpected and sovereign force that interposes between them and us? And, if they are hostile, on what, on whom are they revenging themselves? What can be the secret of those inhuman games, of those uncanny and cruel diversions on the most slippery and dangerous peaks of fate? Why warn, if they know that the warning will be in vain? Of whom are they making sport? Is there really an inflexible fatality by virtue of which that which has to be accomplished is accomplished from all eternity? But then why not respect silence, since all speech is useless? Or do they, in spite of all, perceive a gleam, a crevice in the inexorable wall?

What hope do they find in it? Have they not seen more clearly than ourselves that no deliverance can come through that crevice?

One could understand this fluttering and wavering, all these efforts of theirs, if they did not know; but here it is proved that they know everything, since they foretell exactly that which they might prevent. If we press them with questions, they answer that there is nothing to be done, that no human power could avert or thwart the issue. Are they mad, bored, irritable, or accessory to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the happy solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the universe be the soul of a great baby?

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But, rather than pursue this subject, let us be just and admit that there is perhaps no way out of the maze and that our reproaches are as incomprehensible as the conduct of the spirits.

Indeed, what would you have them do in the circle in which our logic imprisons them? Either they foretell us a calamity which their predictions cannot avert, in which case there is no use in foretelling it, or, if they announce it to us and at the same time give us the means to prevent it, they do not really see the future and are foretelling nothing, since the calamity is not to take place, with the result that their action seems equally absurd in both cases.

It is obvious: to whichever side we turn, we find nothing but the incomprehensible. On the one hand, the preestablished, unshakable, unalterable future which we have called destiny, fatality or what you will, which suppresses man's entire independence and liberty of action and which is the most inconceivable and the dreariest of mysteries; on the other, intelligences apparently superior to our own, since they know what we do not, which, while aware that their intervention is always useless and very often cruel, nevertheless come hara.s.sing us with their sinister and ridiculous predictions. Must we resign ourselves once more to living with our eyes shut and our reason drowned in the boundless ocean of darkness; and is there no outlet?

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For the moment we will not linger in the dark regions of fatality, which is the supreme mystery, the desolation of every effort and every thought of man. What is clearest amid this incomprehensibility is that the spiritualistic theory, at first sight the most seductive, declares itself, on examination, the most difficult to justify. We will also once more put aside the theosophical theory or any other which a.s.sumes a divine intention and which might, to a certain extent, explain the hesitations and anguish of the prophetic warnings, at the cost, however, of other puzzles, a thousand times as hard to solve, which nothing authorizes us to subst.i.tute for the actual puzzle, formless and infinite, presented to our uninitiated vision.

When all is said, it is perhaps only in the theory which attributes those premonitions to our subconsciousness that we are able to find, if not a justification, at least a sort of explanation of that formidable reticence. They accord fairly well with the strange, inconsistent, whimsical and disconcerting character of the unknown ent.i.ty within us that seems to live on nothing but nondescript fare borrowed from worlds to which nor intelligence as yet has no access. It lives under our reason, in a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual guest, dropped from another planet, whose interests, ideas, habits, pa.s.sions have naught in common with ours. If it seems to have notions on the hereafter that are infinitely wider and more precise than those which we possess, it has only very vague notions on the practical needs of our existence. It ignores us for years, absorbed no doubt with the numberless relations which it maintains with all the mysteries of the universe; and, when suddenly it remembers us, thinking apparently to please us, it makes an enormous, miraculous, but at the same time clumsy and superfluous movement, which upsets all that we believed we knew, without teaching us anything. Is it making fun of us, is it jesting, is it amusing itself, is it facetious, teasing, arch, or simply sleepy, bewildered, inconsistent, absent-minded? In any case, it is rather remarkable that it evidently dislikes to make itself useful. It readily performs the most glamorous feats of sleight-of-hand, provided that we can derive no profit from them.

It lifts up tables, moves the heaviest articles, produces flowers and hair, sets strings vibrating, gives life to inanimate objects and pa.s.ses through solid matter, conjures up ghosts, subjugates time and s.p.a.ce, creates light; but all, it seems, on one condition, that its performances should be without rhyme or reason and keep to the province of supernaturally vain and puerile recreations. The case of the divining-rod is almost the only one in which it lends us any regular a.s.sistance, this being a sort of game, of no great importance, in which it appears to take pleasure. Sometimes, to say all that can be said, it consents to cure certain ailments, cleanses an ulcer, closes a wound, heals a lung, strengthens or makes supple an arm or leg, or even sets bones, but always as it were by accident, without reason, method or object, in a deceitful, illogical and preposterous fas.h.i.+on. One would set it down as a spoilt child that has been allowed to lay hands on the most tremendous secrets of heaven and earth; it has no suspicion of their power, jumbles them all up together and turns them into paltry, inoffensive toys. It knows everything, perhaps, but is ignorant of the uses of its knowledge, It has its arms laden with treasures which it scatters in the wrong manner and at the wrong time, giving bread to the thirsty and water to the hungry, overloading those who refuse and stripping the suppliant bare, pursuing those who flee from it and fleeing from those who pursue it. Lastly, even at its best moments, it behaves as though the fate of the being in whose depths it dwells interested it hardly at all, as though it had but an insignificant share in his misfortunes, feeling a.s.sured, one might almost think, of an independent and endless existence.

It is not surprising, therefore, when we know its habits, that its communications on the subject of the future should be as fantastic as the other manifestations of its knowledge or its power. Let us add, to be quite fair, that, in those warnings which we would wish to see efficacious, it stumbles against the same difficulties as the spirits or other alien intelligences uselessly foretelling the event which they cannot prevent, or annihilating the event by the very fact of foretelling it.

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And now, to end the question, is our unknown guest alone responsible? Does it explain itself badly or do we not understand it? When we look into the matter closely, there is, under those anomalous and confused manifestations, in spite of efforts which we feel to be enormous and persevering, a sort of incapacity for self expression and action which is bound to attract our attention. Is our conscious and individual life separated by impenetrable worlds from our subconscious and probably universal life? Does our unknown guest speak an unknown language and do the words which it speaks and which we think that we understand disclose its thought? Is every direct road pitilessly barred and is there nothing left to it but narrow, dosed paths in which the best of what it had to reveal to us is lost? Is this the reason why it seeks those odd, childish, roundabout ways of automatic writing, cross-correspondence, symbolic premonition and all the rest? Yet, in the typical case which we have quoted, it seems to speak quite easily and plainly when it says to the mother:

"Turn the mattress."

If it can utter this sentence, why should it find it difficult or impossible to add:

"You will find the matches there that will set fire to the curtains."

What forbids it to do so and closes its mouth at the decisive moment? We relapse into the everlasting question: if it cannot complete the second sentence because it would be destroying in the womb the very event which it is foretelling, why does it utter the first?

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But it is well in spite of everything to seek an explanation of the inexplicable; it is by attacking it on every side, at all hazards, that we cherish the hope of overcoming it; and we may therefore say to ourselves that our subconsciousness, when it warns us of a calamity that is about to fall upon us, knowing all the future as it does, necessarily knows that the calamity is already accomplished. As our conscious and unconscious lives blend in it, it distresses itself and flutters around our overconfident ignorance. It tries to inform us, through nervousness, through pity, so as to mitigate the lightning cruelty of the blow. It speaks all the words that can prepare us for its coming, define it and identify it; but it is unable to say those which would prevent it from coming, seeing that it has come, that it is already present and perhaps past, manifest, ineffaceable, on another plane than that on which we live, the only plane which we are capable of perceiving. It finds itself, in a word, in the position of the man who, in the midst of peaceful, happy and unsuspecting folk, alone knows some bad news.

He is neither able nor willing to announce it nor yet to hide it completely. He hesitates, delays, makes more or less transparent allusions, but does not either say the last word that would, so to speak, let loose the catastrophe in the hearts of the people around him, for to those who do not know of it the catastrophe is still as though it were not there. Our subconsciousness, in that case, would act towards the future as we act towards the past, the two conditions being identical, so much so that it often confuses them, as we can see more particularly in the celebrated Marmontel case, where it evidently blunders and reports as accomplished an incident that will not take place until several months later. It is of course impossible for us, at the stage which we have reached, to understand this confusion or this coexistence of the past, the present and the future; but that is no reason for denying it; on the contrary, what man understands least is probably that which most nearly approaches the truth.

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Lastly, to complicate the question, it may be very justly objected that, though premonitions in general are useless and appear systematically to withhold the only indispensable and decisive words, there are, nevertheless, some that often seem to save those who obey them. These, it is true, are rarer than the first, but still they include a certain number that are well authenticated. It remains to be seen how far they imply a knowledge of the future.

Here, for instance, is a traveler who, arriving at night in a small unknown town and walking along the ill-lighted dock in the direction of an hotel of which he roughly knows the position, at a given moment tech an irresistible impulse to turn and go the other way. He instantly obeys, though his reason protests and "berates him for a fool" in taking a roundabout way to his destination. The next day he discovers that, if he had gone a few feet farther, he would certainly have slipped into the river; and, as he was but a feeble swimmer, he would just as certainly, being alone and unaided in the extreme darkness, have been drowned.[1]

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 422.

But is this a prevision of an event? No, for no event is to take place. There is simply an abnormal perception of the proximity of some unknown water and consequently of an imminent danger, an unexplained but fairly frequent subliminal sensitiveness. In a word, the problem of the future is not raised in this case, nor in any of the numerous cases that resemble it.

Here is another which evidently belongs to the same cla.s.s, though at first sight it seems to postulate the preexistence of a fatal event and a vision of the future corresponding exactly with a vision of the past. A traveler in South America is descending a river in a canoe; the party are just about to run close to a promontory when a sort of mysterious voice, which he has already heard at different momentous times of his life, imperiously orders him immediately to cross the river and gain the other sh.o.r.e as quickly as possible. This appears so absurd that he is obliged to threaten the Indians with death to force them to take this course. They have scarcely crossed more than half the river when the promontory falls at the very place where they meant to round it.[1]

[1] Flournoy: Esprits et mediums, p. 316.

The perception of imminent danger is here, I admit, even more abnormal than in the previous example, but it comes under the same heading. It is a phenomenon of subliminal hypersensitiveness observed more than once, a sort of premonition induced by subconscious perceptions, which has been christened by the barbarous name of "cryptaesthesia." But the interval between the moment when the peril is signalled and that at which it is consummated is too short for those questions which relate to a knowledge or a preexistence of the future to arise in this instance.

The case is almost the same with the adventure of an American dentist, very carefully investigated by Dr. Hodgson. The dentist was bending over a bench on which was a little copper in which he was vulcanizing some rubber, when he heard a voice calling, in a quick and imperative manner, these words:

"Run to the window, quick! Run to the window, quick!"

He at once ran to the window and looked out to the street below, when suddenly he heard a tremendous report and, looking round, saw that the copper had exploded, destroying a great part of the workroom.[1]

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 424.

Here again, a subconscious cautiousness was probably amused by certain indications imperceptible to our ordinary senses. It is even possible that there exists between things and ourselves a sort of sympathy or subliminal communion which makes us experience the trials and emotions of matter that has reached the limits of its existence, unless, as is more likely, there is merely a simple coincidence between the chance idea of a possible explosion and its realization.

A last and rather more complicated case is that of Jean Dupre, the sculptor, who was driving alone with his wife along a mountain road, skirting a perpendicular cliff. Suddenly they both heard a voice that seemed to come from the mountain crying:

"Stop!"

They turned round, saw n.o.body and continued their road. But the cries were repeated again and again, without anything to reveal the presence of a human being amid the solitude. At last the sculptor alighted and saw that the left wheel of the carriage, which was grazing the edge of the precipice, had lost its linch-pin and was on the point of leaving the axle-tree, which would almost inevitably have hurled the carriage into the abyss.

Need we, even here, relinquish the theory of subconscious perceptions? Do we know and can the author of the anecdote, whose good faith is not in question, tell us that certain unperceived circ.u.mstances, such as the grating of the wheel or the swaying of the carriage, did not give him the first alarm? After all, we know how easily stories of this kind involuntarily take a dramatic turn even at the actual moment and especially afterwards.

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