Let us add that it can be extended much further. If, for instance, I had acted as I did in similar cases and asked the medium questions about the young girl's home-circle, about the character of her father, the health of her mother, the tastes and habits of her brothers and sisters, she would have answered with the same certainty, the same precision as one might do who was not only a close acquaintance of the girl's, but endowed with much more penetrating faculties of intuition than a normal observer. In short, she would have felt and expressed all that this girl's subconsciousness would have felt with regard to the persons mentioned. But it must be admitted that, as we are here no longer speaking of facts that are easily verified, confirmation becomes infinitely more difficult.

There could be no question, in the circ.u.mstances, of transmission of thought, since both the medium and I were ignorant of everything. Besides, other experiments, easily devised and repeated and more rigourously controlled, do away with that theory entirely. For instance, I took three letters written by intimate friends, put each of them in a double envelope and gave them to a messenger unacquainted with the contents of the envelopes and also with the persons in question to take to Mme.

M--. On arriving at the house, the messenger handed the clairvoyant one of the letters, selected at random, and did nothing further beyond putting the indispensable questions, likewise at random, and taking down the medium's replies in shorthand. Mme. M-- began by giving a very striking physical portrait of the lady who had written the letter; followed this up with an absolutely faithful description of her character, her habits, her tastes, her intellectual and moral qualities; and ended by adding a few details concerning her private life, of which I myself was entirely unaware and of which I obtained the confirmation shortly afterwards. The experiment yielded just as remarkable results when continued with the two other letters.

In the face of this mystery, two explanations may be offered, both equally perplexing. On the one hand, we shall have to admit that the sheet of paper handed to the psychometer and impregnated with human "fluid" contains, after the manner of some prodigiously compressed gas, all the incessantly renewed, incessantly recurring images that surround a person, all his past and perhaps his future, his psychology, his state of health, his wishes, his intentions, often unknown to himself, his most secret instincts, his likes and dislikes, all that is bathed in light and all that is plunged in darkness, his whole life, in short, and more than his personal and conscious life, besides all the lives and all the influences, good or bad, latent or manifest, of all who approach him. We should have here a mystery as unfathomable and at least as vast as that of generation, which transmits, in an infinitesimal particle, the mind and matter, with all the qualities and all the faults, all the acquirements and all the history, of a series of lives of which none can tell the number.

On the other hand, if we do not admit that so much energy can lie concealed in a sheet of paper, continuing to exist and develop indefinitely there, we must necessarily suppose that an inconceivable network of nameless forces is perpetually radiating from this same paper, forces which, cleaving time and s.p.a.ce, detect instantaneously, anywhere and at any distance, the life that gave them life and place themselves in complete communication, body and soul, senses and thoughts, past and future, consciousness and subconsciousness, with an existence lost amid the innumerous host of men who people this earth. It is, indeed, exactly what happens in the experiments with mediums in automatic speech or writing, who believe themselves to be inspired by the dead. Yet, here it is no longer a discarnate spirit, but an object of any kind imbued with a living "fluid"

that works the miracle; and this, we may remark in pa.s.sing, deals a severe blow to the spiritualistic theory.

Nevertheless, there are two rather curious objections to this second explanation. Granting that the object really places the medium in communication with an unknown ent.i.ty discovered in s.p.a.ce, how comes it that the image or the spectacle created by that communication hardly ever corresponds with the reality at the actual moment? On the other hand, it is indisputable that the psychometer's clairvoyance, his gift of seeing at a distance the pictures and scenes surrounding an unknown being, is exercised with the same certainty and the same power when the object that sets his strange faculty at work has been touched by a person who has been dead for years. Are we, then, to admit that there is an actual, living communication with a human being who is no more, who sometimes--, for instance, in a case of incineration--has left no trace of himself on earth, in short, with a dead man who continues to live at the place and at the moment at which he impregnated the object with his "fluid" and who seems to be unaware that he is dead?

But these objections are perhaps less serious than one might believe. To begin with, there are seers, so-called "telepsychics," who are not psychometers, that is to say, they are able to communicate with an unknown and distant person without the intermediary of an object; and in these seers, as in the psychometers, the vision very rarely corresponds with the actual facts of the moment: they too perceive above all the general impression, the usual and characteristic actions. Next, as regards communications with a person long since dead, we are confronted with one of two things: either confirmation will be almost impossible when it concerns revelations on the subject of the dead man's private deeds and actions, which are unknown to any living person or else communication will be established not with the deceased, but with the living person, who necessarily knows the facts which he is called upon to confirm. As Dr. Osty very rightly says:

"The conditions are then those of perception by the intermediary of the thoughts of a living person; and the deceased is perceived through a mental representation. The experiment, for this reason, is valueless as evidence of the reality of retrospective psychometry and consequently of the recording part played by the object.

"The only cla.s.s of experiment that could be of value from this point of view, would be that in which confirmation would come subsequently from doc.u.ments whose contents remained unknown to any living person until after the clairvoyance sitting. It might then be proved that the object can latently register the human personalities which have touched it and that it is sufficient in itself to allow of a mental reconstruction of those personalities through the interpretation of the register by a clairvoyant or psychometer."

5

It may be imagined that experiments of this sort, in which there is no crack, no leak on the side of the living, are anything but easy to carry through. In the case of a murder, for instance, it can always be maintained that the medium discovers the body and the circ.u.mstances of the tragedy through the involuntary and unconscious intermediary of the murderer, even when the latter escapes prosecution and suspicion altogether. But a recent incident, related by Dr. Osty with the utmost precision of detail and the most scrupulous verification in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques of April, 1914, perhaps supplies us with one of those experiments which we have not been able to achieve until this day. I give the facts in a few words.

On the 2nd of March of this year, M. Etienne Lerasle, an old man of eighty-two, left his son's house at Cours-les-Barres (Cher) for his daily walk and was not seen again. The house stands in the middle of a forest on Baron Jaubert's estate. Vain searches were made in every direction for the missing man's traces; the ponds and pools were dragged to no purpose; and on the 8th of March a careful and systematical exploration of the wood, in which no fewer than twenty-four people took part, led to no result. At last, on the 18th of March, M. Louis Mirault, Baron Jaubert's agent, thought of applying to Dr. Osty, and supplied him with a scarf which the old man had worn. Dr. Osty went to his favourite medium, Mme. M--. He knew only one thing, that the matter concerned an old man of eighty-two, who walked with a slight stoop; and that was all.

As soon as Mme. M-- had taken the scarf in her hands, she saw the dead body of an old man lying on the damp ground, in a wood, in the middle of a coppice, beside a horse-shoe pond, near a sort of rock. She traced the road taken by the victim, depicted the buildings which he had pa.s.sed, his mental condition impaired by age, his fixed intention of dying, his physical appearance, his habitual and characteristic way of carrying his stick, his soft striped shirt, and so on.

The accuracy of the description caused the greatest astonishment among the missing man's friends. There was one detail that puzzled them a little: the mention of a rock in a part of the country that possessed none. The search was resumed on the strength of the data supplied by the clairvoyant. But all the rocks in a forest are more or less alike; the indications were not enough; and nothing was found.

It so happened that the second and third interviews with Mme. M-- had to be postponed until the 30th of March and the 6th of April following. At each of these sittings, the details of the vision and of the road taken became clearer and clearer and were given with startling precision, so much so that, by pursuing step by step the indications of the medium, the man's friends ended by discovering the body, dressed as stated, lying in the middle of a coppice, just as described, close to a huge stump of a tree all covered with moss, which might easily be mistaken for a rock, and on the edge of a crescent-shaped piece of water. I may add that these particular indications applied to no other part of the wood.

6

I refer the reader to Dr. Osty's conscientious and exhaustive article for the numerous details which I have been obliged to omit; but those which I have given are enough to show the character of this extraordinary case. To begin with, we have one certainty which appears almost una.s.sailable, namely, that there can be no question of a crime. No one had the least interest in procuring the old man's death. The body bore no marks of violence; besides, the minds of those concerned did not for a moment entertain the thought of an a.s.sault. The poor man, whose mental derangement was known to all those about him, obsessed by the desire and thought of death, had gone quietly and obstinately to seek it in the nearest coppice. There was therefore no criminal in the case, in other words, there was no possible or imaginable communication between the medium's subconsciousness, and that of any living person. Hence we are compelled to admit that the communication was established with the dead man or with his subconsciousness, which continued to live for nearly a month after his death and to wander around the same places; or else we must agree that all this coming tragedy, all that the old man was about to see, do and suffer was already irrevocably contained and inscribed in the scarf at the moment when he last wore it.

In this particular case, considering that all relations with the living were definitely and undeniably severed, I can see no other explanations beyond these two. They are both equally astounding and land us suddenly in a world of fable and enchantment which we thought that we had left for good and all. If we do not adopt the theory of the tell-tale scarf, we must accept that of the spiritualists, who maintain that the spirits communicate with us freely. It is possible that they may find a serious argument in this case. But a solitary fact is not enough to support a theory, all the more so as the one in question will never be absolutely safe from the objection that could be raised if the case were one of murder, which is possible, after all, and cannot be actually disproved. We must, therefore, while awaiting other similar and more decisive facts, if any such are conceivable, return to those which are, so to speak, laboratory facts, facts which are only denied by those who will not take the trouble to verify them; and to interpret these facts there are only the two theories which we mentioned above, before this digression; for, in these cases, which are unlike those of automatic speech or writing, we have not as a rule to consider the possibility of any intervention of the dead. As a matter of fact, the best-known psychometers are very rarely spiritualists and claim no connection with the spirits. They care but little, as a rule, about the source of their intuitions and seem very little interested in their exact working and origin. Now it would be exceedingly surprising if, acting and speaking in the name of the departed, they should be so consistently ignorant of the existence of those who inspire them; and more surprising still if the dead, whom in other circ.u.mstances we see so jealously vindicating their ident.i.ty, should not here, when the occasion is so propitious, seek to declare themselves, to manifest themselves and to make themselves known.

7

Dismissing for the time being the intervention of the dead, I believe then that, in most of the cases which I will call laboratory cases, because they can be reproduced at will, we are not necessarily reduced to the theory of the vitalized object representing wholly, indefinitely and inexhaustibly, through all the vicissitudes of time and spice, every one of those who have held it in their hands for a little while. For we must not forget that, according to this theory, the object in question will conceal and, through the intermediary of the medium, will reveal as many distinct and complete personalities as it has undergone contacts. It will never confuse or mix those different personalities. They will remain there in definite strata, distinct one from another; and, as Dr. Osty puts it, "the medium can interpret each of them from beginning to end, as though he were in communication with the far-off ent.i.ty."

All this makes the theory somewhat incredible, even though it be not much more so than the many other phenomena in which the shock of the miraculous has been softened by familiarity. We can find more or less everywhere in nature that prodigious faculty of storing away inexhaustible energies and ineffaceable tram, memories and impressions in s.p.a.ce. There is not a thing in this world that is lost, that disappears, that ceases to be, to retain and to propagate life. Need we recall, in this connection, the incessant mission of pictures perceived by the sensitized plate, the vibrations of sound that acc.u.mulate in the disks of the gramophone, the Hertzian waves that lose none of their strength in s.p.a.ce, the mysteries of reproduction and, in a word, the incomprehensibility of everything around us?

8

Personally, if I had to choose, I should, in most of these laboratory cases, frankly adopt the theory that the object touched serves simply to detect, among the prodigious crowd of human beings, the one who impregnated it with his "fluid."

"This object," says Dr. Osty, "has no other function than to allow the medium's sensitiveness to distinguish a definite force from among the innumerable forces that a.s.sail it."

It seem more and more certain that, as the cells of an immense organism, we are connected with everything that exists by an inextricable network of vibrations, waves, influences, of nameless, numberless and uninterrupted fluids. Nearly always, in nearly all men, everything carried along by these invisible wires falls into the depths of the unconsciousness and pa.s.ses unperceived, which does not mean that it remains inactive. But sometimes an exceptional circ.u.mstance--in the present case, the marvellous sensibility of a first-cla.s.s medium--suddenly reveals to us, by the vibrations and the undeniable action of one of those wires, the existence of the infinite network. I will not speak here of trails discovered and followed in an almost mediumistic manner, after an object of some sort has been sniffed at. Such stories, though highly probable, as yet lack adequate support. But, within a similar order of ideas, and in a humbler world and one with more modest limits, the dog, for instance, is incessantly surrounded by different scents and smells to which he appears indifferent until his attention is aroused by one or other of these vagrant effluvia, when he extricates it from the hopeless tangle. It would seem as though the trail took life, vibrating like a chord in unison with the animal's wishes, becoming irresistible, and taking it to its goal after innumerable winds and turns.

We see the mysterious network revealed also in "cross-correspondence." Two or three mediums who do not know one another, who are often separated by seas; or continents, who are ignorant of the whereabouts of the one who is to complete their thought, each write a part of a sentence which, as it stands, conveys no meaning whatever. On piecing the fragments together, we perceive that they fit to perfection and acquire an intelligible and obviously premeditated sense. We here find once more the same faculty that permits the medium to detect, among thousands of others, a definite force which was wandering in s.p.a.ce. It is true that, in these cases, the spiritualists maintain that the whole experiment is organized and directed by a discarnate intelligence, independent of the mediums, which means to prove its existence and its ident.i.ty in this manner. Without incontinently rejecting this theory, which is not necessarily indefensible, we will merely remark that, since the faculty is manifested in psychometry without the intervention of the spirits, there can be no sufficient reason for attributing it to them in cross-correspondence.

9

But in whom does it reside? Is it hidden in ourselves or in the medium? According to Dr. Osty, the clairvoyants are mirrors reflecting the intuitive thought that is latent in each of us. In other words--it is we ourselves who are clairvoyant, and they but reveal to us nor own clairvoyance. Their mission is to stir, to awaken, to galvanize, to illumine the secrets of our subconsciousness and to bring them to the surface of our normal lives. They act upon our inner darkness exactly as, in the photographic dark-room, the developing-bath acts upon the sensitized plate, I am convinced that the theory is accurate as regards intuition and clairvoyance proper, that is to say, in all cases where we are in the medium's presence and more or less directly in touch with him. But is it so in psychometry? Is it we who, unknown to ourselves, know all that the object contains, or is it the medium alone who discovers it in the object itself, independently of the person who produces the object? When, for instance, we receive a letter from a stranger, does this letter, which has absorbed like a sponge the whole life and by choice the subconscious life of the writer, disgorge all that it contained into our subconsciousness? Do we instantly learn all that concerns its author, absolutely as though he were standing before us in the flesh and, above all, with his soul laid bare, though we remain profoundly ignorant of the fact that we have learnt it until the medium's intervention tells us so?

This, if you like, is simply shifting the question. Let it be the medium or myself that discovers the unknown personality in the object or tracks it across time and s.p.a.ce: all that we do is to widen the scope of our riddle, while leaving it no less obscure.

Nevertheless, there is some interest in knowing whether we have to do with a general faculty latent in all men or an inexplicable privilege reserved to rare individuals. The exceptional should always be eliminated, if possible, and not left to hang over the abyss like an unfinished bridge leading to nothing. I am well aware that the compulsory intervention of the medium implies that, in spite of all, we recognize his possession of abnormal faculties; but at any rate we reduce their power and their extent appreciably and we return sooner and more easily to the ordinary laws of the great human mystery. And it is of importance that we should be ever coming back to that mystery and ever bringing all things back to it. But, unfortunately, actual experience does not admit of this generalization. It is clearly a case of a special faculty, one peculiar to the medium, one which is wholly unknown to our latent intuition. We can easily a.s.sure ourselves of this by causing the medium to receive through a third party and enclosed in a series of three envelopes, as in the experiment described above, a letter of which we know the writer, but of which both the source and the contents are absolutely unknown to the messenger. These unusual circ.u.mstances, in which all subconscious communications between consultant and consulted are strictly cut off, will in no way hamper the medium's clairvoyance; and we may fairly conclude that it is actually the medium himself who discovers directly, without any intermediary, without "relays," to use M. Duchatel's expression, all that the object holds concealed. It, therefore, seems certain that there is, at least in psychometry, something more than the mere mirror of which Dr. Osty speaks.

10

I consider it necessary to declare for the last time that these psychometric phenomena, astonishing though they appear at first, are known, proved and certain and are no longer denied or doubted by any of those who have studied them seriously. I could have given full particulars of a large number of conclusive experiments; but this seemed to me as superfluous and tedious as would be, for instance, a string of names of the recognized chemical reactions that can be obtained in a laboratory. Any one who pleases is at liberty to convince himself of the reality of the facts, provided that he applies to genuine mediums and keeps aloof from the inferior "seers" and especially the shams and imposters who swarm in this region more than in any other. Even with the best of them, he will have to be careful of the involuntary, unconscious and almost inevitable interference of telepathy, which is also very interesting, though it is a phenomenon of a different cla.s.s, much less surprising and debatable than pure psychometry. He must also learn the art of interrogating the medium and refrain from asking incoherent and random questions about casual or future events. He will not forget that "clairvoyance is strictly limited to the perception of human personality," according to the role so well formulated by Dr. Osty. Experiments have been made in which a psychometer, on touching the tooth of a prehistoric animal, saw the landscapes and the cataclysms of the earth's earliest ages displayed before his eyes; in which another medium, on handling a jewel, conjured up, it would seem with marvellous exactness, the games and processions of ancient Greece, as though the objects permanently retained the recollection or rediscovered the "astral negatives"

of all the events which they once witnessed. But it will be understood that, in such cases, any effective control is, so to speak, impossible and that the part played by telepathy cannot be decided. It is important, therefore, to keep strictly to that which can be verified.

Even when thus limiting his scope, the experimenter will meet with many surprises. For instance, though the revelations of two psychometers to whom the same letter is handed in succession most often agree remarkably in their main outlines, it can also happen that one of them perceives only what concerns the writer of the letter, whereas the other will be interested only in the person to whom the letter was addressed or to a third person who was in the room where the letter was written. It is well to be forearmed against these first mistakes, which, for that matter, in the frequent cases where strict control is possible, but confirm the existence and the independence of the astounding faculty.

11

As for the theories that attempt to explain it, I am quite willing to grant that they are still somewhat confused. The important thing for the moment is the acc.u.mulation of claims and experiments that go feeling their way farther and farther along all the paths of the unknown. Meanwhile, that one unexpected door which sheds at the back of our old convictions more than one unexpected door, which sheds upon the life and habits of our secret being sufficient light to puzzle us for many a long day.

This brings us back once more to the omniscience and perhaps the omnipotence of our hidden guest, to the brink of the mysterious reservoir of every manner of knowledge which we shall meet with again when we come to speak of the future, of the talking horses, of the divining-rod, of materializations and miracles, in short, in every circ.u.mstance where we pa.s.s beyond the horizon of our little daily life. As we thus advance, with slow and cautious footsteps, in them as yet deserted and very nebulous regions of metapsychics, we are compelled to recognize that there must exist somewhere, in this world or in others, a spot in which everything is known, in which everything is possible, to which everything goes, from which everything comes, which belongs to all, to which all have access, but of which the long-forgotten roads must be learnt again by our stumbling feet. We shall often meet those difficult roads in the course of our present quest and we shall have more than one occasion to refer again to those depths into which all the supernatural facts of our existence flow, unless indeed they take their source there. For the moment, that which most above all engage our attention in these psychometric phenomena is their purely and exclusively human character. They occur between the living and the living, on this solid earth of ours, in the world that lies before our eyes; and the spirits, the dead, the G.o.ds and the interplanetary intelligences know them not. Hardly anywhere else, except in the equally perplexing manifestations of the divining-rod and in certain materializations, shall we find with the same clearness this same specific character, if we may call it so. This is a valuable lesson. It tells us that our every-day life provides phenomena as disturbing and of exactly the same kind and nature as those which, in other circ.u.mstances, we attribute to other forces than ours. It teaches us also that we must first direct and exhaust our enquiries here below, among ourselves, before pa.s.sing to the other side; for our first care should be to simplify the interpretations and explanations and not to seek elsewhere, in opposition, what probably lies hidden within us in reality.

Afterwards, if the unknown overwhelm us utterly, if the darkness engulf us beyond all hope, there will still be time to go, none can tell where, to question the deities or the dead.

CHAPTER III. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE

1

Premonition or precognition leads us to still more mysterious regions, where stands, half merging from an intolerable darkness, the gravest problem that can thrill mankind, the knowledge of the future. The latest, the best and the most complete study devoted to it is, I believe, that recently published by M. Ernest Bozzano, under the t.i.tle Des Phenomenes Premonitoires. Availing himself of excellent earlier work, notably that of Mrs. Sidgwick and Myers[1] and adding the result of his own researches, the author collects some thousand cases of precognition, of which he discusses one hundred and sixty, leaving the great majority of the others on one side. Not because they are negligible, but because he does not wish to exceed too flagrantly the normal limits of a monograph.

[1] Proceedings, Vols. V. and XI.

He begins by carefully eliminating all the episodes which, though apparently premonitory, may be explained by self-suggestion (as in the case, for instance, where some one smitten with a disease still latent seems to foresee this disease and the death which will be its conclusion), by telepathy (when a sensitive is aware beforehand of the arrival of a person or a letter), or lastly by clairvoyance (when a man dreams of a spot where he will find something which he has mislaid, or an uncommon plant, or an insect sought for in vain, or of the unknown place which he will visit at some later date).

In all these cases, we have not, properly speaking, to do with a pure future, but rather with a present that is not yet known.

Thus reduced and stripped of all foreign influences and intrusions the number of instances in which there is a really clear and incontestable perception of a fragment of the future remains large enough, contrary to what is generally believed, to make it impossible for us to speak of extraordinary accidents or wonderful coincidences. There must be a limit to everything, even to distrust, even to the most extensive incredulity, otherwise all historical research and a good deal of scientific research would become decidedly impracticable. And this remark applies as much to the nature of the incidents related as to the actual authenticity of the narratives. We can contest or suspect any story whatever, any written proof, any evidence; but thenceforward we must abandon all certainty or knowledge that is not acquired by means of mathematical operations or laboratory experiments, that is to say, three-fourths of the human phenomena which interest us most. Observe that the records collected by the investigators of the S. P. R., like those discussed by M.

Bozzano, are all told at first hand and that those stories of which the narrators were not the protagonists or the direct witnesses have been ruthlessly rejected. Furthermore, some of these narratives are necessarily of the nature of medical observations; as for the others, if we attentively examine the character of those who have related them and the circ.u.mstances which corroborate them, we shall agree that it is more just and more reasonable to believe in them than to look upon every man who has an extraordinary experience as being a priori a liar, the victim of an hallucination, or a wag.

2

There could be no question of giving here even a brief a.n.a.lysis of the most striking cases. It would require a hundred pages and would alter the whole nature of this essay, which, to keep within its proper dimensions, most take it for granted that most of the materials which it examines are familiar. I therefore refer the reader who may wish to form an opinion for himself to the easily-accessible sources which I have mentioned above. It will suffice, to give an accurate idea of the gravity of the problem to any one who has not time or opportunity to consult the original doc.u.ments if I sum up in a few words some of these pioneer adventures, selected among those which seem least open to dispute; for it goes without saying that all have not the same value, otherwise the question would be settled. There are some which, while exceedingly striking at first sight and offering every guarantee that could be desired to authenticity, nevertheless do not imply a real knowledge of the future and can be interpreted in another manner. I give one, to serve as an instance; it is reported by Dr. Alphonse Teste in his Manuel pratique du magnetisme animal.

On the 8th of May, Dr. Teste magnetizes Mme. Hortense--in the presence of her husband. She is no sooner asleep than she announces that she has been pregnant for a fortnight, that she will not go her full time, that "she will take fright at something," that she will have a fall and that the result will be a miscarriage. She adds that, on the 12th of May, after having had a fright, she will have a fainting-fit which will last for eight minutes; and she then describes, hour by hour, the course of her malady, which will end in three days' loss of reason, from which she will recover.

On awaking, she retains no recollection of anything that has pa.s.sed; it is kept from her; and Dr. Teste communicates his notes to Dr. Amidee Latour. On the 12th of May, he calls on M. and Mme.--, finds them at table and puts Mme.-- to sleep again, whereupon she repeats word for word what she told him four days before. They wake her up. The dangerous hour is drawing near.

They take every imaginable precaution and even close the shutters. Mme.--, made uneasy by these extraordinary measures which she is quite unable to understand, asks what they are going to do to her. Half-past three o'clock strikes. Mme.-- rises from the sofa on which they have made her sit and wants to leave the room. The doctor and her husband try to prevent her.

"But what is the matter with you?" she asks. "I simply must go out."

"No, madame, you shall not: I speak in the interest of your health."