The Unknown Guest...........................................................................................................................................1

Maurice Maeterlinck ................................................................................................................................1

My Essay on Death[1] led me to make a conscientious enquiry into the present position of the great mystery,

an enquiry which I have endeavoured to render as complete as possible. I had hoped that a single volume

would be able to contain the result of these investigations, which, I may say at once, will teach nothing to

those who have been over the same ground and which have nothing to recommend them except their

sincerity, their impartiality and a certain scrupulous accuracy. But, as I proceeded, I saw the field widening

under my feet, so much so that I have been obliged to divide my work into two almost equal parts. The first is

now published and is a brief study of veridical apparitions and hallucinations and haunted houses, or, if you

will, the phantasms of the living and the dead; of those manifestations which have been oddly and not very

appropriately described as "psychometric"; of the knowledge of the future: presentiments, omens,

premonitions, precognitions and the rest; and lastly of the Elberfeld horses. In the second, which will be

published later, I shall treat of the miracles of Lourdes and other places, the phenomena of so called

materialization, of the diviningrod and of fluidic asepsis, not unmindful withal of a diamond dust of the

miraculous that hangs over the greater marvels in that strange atmosphere into which we are about to pass.

[1] Published in English, in an enlarged form, under the title of Our Eternity (London and New York,

When I speak of the present position of the mystery, I of course do not mean the mystery of life, its end and

its beginnings, nor yet the great riddle of the universe which lies about us. In this sense, all is mystery, and, as

I have said elsewhere, is likely always to remain so; nor is it probable that we shall ever touch any point of

even the utmost borders of knowledge or certainty. It is here a question of that which, in the midst of this

recognized and usual mystery, the familiar mystery of which we are almost oblivious, suddenly disturbs the

regular course of our general ignorance. In themselves, these facts which strike us as supernatural are no

more so than the others; possibly they are rarer, or, to be more accurate, less frequently or less easily

observed. In any case, their deepseated cause, while being probably neither more remote nor more difficult

access, seem to lie hidden in an unknown region less often visited by our science, which after all is but a

reassuring and conciliatory espression of our ignorance. Today, thanks to the labours of the Society for

Psychical Research and a host of other seekers, we are able to approach these phenomena as a whole with a

certain confidence. Leaving the realm of legend, of afterdinner stories, old wives' tales, illusions and

exaggerations, we find ourselves at last on circumscribed but fairly safe ground. This does not mean that

there are no other supernatural phenomena besides those collected in the publications of the society in

question and in a few of the more weighty reviews which have adopted the same methods. Notwithstanding

all their diligence, which for over thirty years has been ransacking the obscure corners of our planet, it is

inevitable that a good many things escape their notice, besides which the rigour of their investigations makes

them reject three fourths of those which are brought before them. But we may say that the twentysix

volumes of the society is Proceedings and the fifteen or sixteen volumes of its Journal, together with the

twentythree annuals of the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, to mention only this one periodical of signal

excellence, embrace for the moment the whole field of the extraordinary and offer some instances of all the

abnormal manifestations of the inexplicable. We are henceforth able to classify them, to divide and subdivide

them into general, species and varieties. This is not much, you may say; but it is thus that every science

begins and furthermore that many a one ends. We have therefore sufficient evidence, facts that can scarcely

be disputed, to enable us to consult them profitably, to recognize whither they lead, to form some idea of their

general character and perhaps to trace their sole source by gradually removing the weeds and rubbish which

Truth to tell, these supernatural manifestations seem less marvelous and less fantastic than they did some

centuries ago; and we are at first a little disappointed. One would think that even the mysterious has its ups

and downs and remains subject to the caprices of some strange extra mundane fashion; or perhaps, to be more

exact, it is evident that the majority of those legendary miracles could not withstand the rigorous scrutiny of

our day. Those which emerge triumphant from the test and defy our less credulous and more penetrating

vision are all the more worthy of holding our attention. They are not the last survivals of the riddle, for this

continues to exist in its entirety and grows greater in proportion as we throw light upon it; but we can perhaps

see in them the supreme or else the first efforts of a force which does not appear to reside wholly in our

sphere. They suggest blows struck from without by an Unknown even more unknown than that which we

think we know, an Unknown which is not that of the universe, not that which we have gradually made into an

inoffensive and amiable Unknown, even as we have made the universe a son of province of the earth, but a

stranger arriving from another world, an unexpected visitor who comes in a rather sinister way to trouble the

comfortable quiet in which we were slumbering, rocked by the firm and watchful hand of orthodox science.

Let us first be content to enumerate them. We shall find that we have tableturning, with its raps; the

movements and transportations of inanimate objects without contact; luminous phenomena; lucidite, or

clairvoyance; veridical apparitions or hallucinations; haunted houses; bilocations and so forth;

communications with the dead; the diviningrod; the miraculous cures of Lourdes and elsewhere; fluidic

asepsis; and lastly the famous thinking animals of Elberfeld and Mannheim. These, if I be not mistaken, after

eliminating all that is in, sufficiently attested, constitute the residue or caput mortuum of this latterday

Everybody has heard of tableturning, which may be called the A B C of occult science. It is so common and

so easily produced that the Society for Psychical Research has not thought it necessary to devote special

attention to the subject. I need hardly add that we must take count only of movements or "raps" obtained

without the hands touching the table, so as to remove every possibility of fraud or unconscious complicity.

To obtain these movements it is enough, but it is also indispensable that those who form the "chain" should

include a person endowed with mediumistic faculties. I repeat, the experiment is within the reach of any one

who cares to try it under the requisite conditions; and it is as incontestable as the polarization of light or as

In the same group may be placed the movement and transportation of objects without contact, the touches of

spirit hands, the luminous phenomena and materialization. Like tableturning, they demand the presence of a

medium. I need not observe that we here find ourselves in the happy huntingground of the impostor and that

even the most powerful mediums, those possessing the most genuine and undeniable gifts, such as the

celebrated Eusapia Paladino, are upon occasionand the occasion occurs but too oftenincorrigible cheats.

But, when we have made every allowance for fraud, there nevertheless remains a considerable number of

incidents so rigorously attested that we most needs accept them or else abandon all human certainty.

The case is not quite the same with levitation and the wonders performed, so travelers tell us, by certain

Indian jugglers. Though the prolonged burial of a living being is very nearly proved and can doubtless be

physiologically explained, there are many other tricks on which we have so far no authoritative

pronouncement. I will not speak of the "mangotree" and the "baskettrick," which are mere conjuring; but

The firewalk, or walk on redhot bricks or glowing coals, is a sort of religious ceremony practiced in the

Indies, in some of the Polynesian islands, in Mauritius and elsewhere. As the result of incantations uttered by

the high priest, the bare feet of the faithful who follow him upon the bed of burning pebbles or brands seem

to become almost insensible to the touch of fire. Travelers are anything but agreed whether the heat of the

surface traversed is really intolerable, whether the extraordinary power of endurance is explained by the

thickness of the horny substance which protects the soles of the natives' feet, whether the feet are burnt or

whether the skin remains untouched; and, under present conditions, the question is too uncertain to make it

"Ropeclimbing" is more extraordinary. The juggler takes his stand in an open space, far from any tree or

house. He is accompanied by a child; and his only impedimenta are a bundle of ropes and an old canvas sack.

The juggler throws one end of the rope up in the air; and the rope, as though drawn by an invisible hook,

uncoils and rises straight into the sky until the end disappears; and, soon after, there come tumbling from the

blue two arms, two legs, a head and so on, all of which the wizard picks up and crams into the sack. He next

utters a few magic words over it and opens it; and the child steps out, bowing and smiling to the spectators.

This is the usual form taken by this particular sorcery. It is pretty rare and seems to be practised only by one

sect which originated in the NorthWest Provinces. It has not yet perhaps been sufficiently investigated to

take its place among the evidence mentioned show. If it were really as I have described, it could hardly be

explained save by some strange hallucinatory power emanating from the juggler or illusionist, who influences

the audience by suggestion and makes it see what he wishes. In that case the suggestion or hallucination

covers a very extensive area. In point of fact, onlookers, Europeans, on the balconies of houses at some

distance from the crowd of natives, have been known to experience the same influence. This would be one of

the most curious manifestations of that "unknown guest" of which we shall speak again later when, after

enumerating its acts and deeds, we try to investigate and note down the eccentricities of its character.

Levitation in the proper sense of the word, that is to say, the raising, without contact, and floating of an

inanimate object or even of a person, might possibly be due to the same hallucinatory power; but hitherto the

instances have not been sufficiently numerous or authentic to allow us to draw any conclusions. Also we shall

meet with it again when we come to the chapter treating of the materializations of which it forms part.

This brings us without any break to the consideration of veridical apparitions and hallucinations and finally to

haunted houses. We all know that the phantasms of the living and the dead have now a whole literature of

their own, a literature which owes its birth to the numerous and conscientious enquiries conducted in

England, France, Belgium and the United States at the instance of the Society for Psychical Research. In the

presence of the mass of evidence collected, it would be absurd to persist in denying the reality of the

phenomena themselves. It is by this time incontestable that a violent or deep emotion can be transmitted

instantaneously from one mind to another, however great the distance that separates the mind experiencing

the emotion from the mind receiving the communication. It is most often manifested by a visual

hallucination, more rarely by an auditory hallucination; and, as the most violent emotion which man can

undergo is that which grips and overwhelms him at the approach or at the very moment of death, it is nearly

always this supreme emotion which he sends forth and directs with incredible precision through space, if

necessary across seas and continents, towards an invisible and moving goal. Again, though this occurs less

frequently, a grave danger, a serious crisis can beget and transmit to a distance a similar hallucination. This is

what the S. P. R. calls "phantasms of the living." When the hallucination takes place some time after the

decease of the person whom it seems to evoke, be the interval long or short, it is classed among the

The latter, the socalled "phantasms of the dead," are the rarest. As F. W. H. Myers pointed out in his Human

Personality, a consideration of the proportionate number of apparitions observed at various periods before

and after death shows that they increase very rapidly for the few hours which precede death and decrease

gradually during the hours and days which follow; while after about a year's time they become extremely rare

However exceptional they may be, these apparitions nevertheless exist and are proved, as far as anything can

be proved, by abundant testimony of a very precise character. Instances will be found in the Proceedings,

Whether it be a case of the living, the dying, or the dead, we are familiar with the usual form which these

hallucinations take. Indeed their main outlines hardly ever vary. Some one, in his bedroom, in the street, on a

journey, no matter where, suddenly see plainly and clearly the phantom of a relation or a friend of whom he

was not thinking at the time and whom he knows to be thousands of miles away, in America, Asia or Africa

as the case may be, for distance does not count. As a rule, the phantom says nothing; its presence, which is

always brief, is but a sort of silent warning. Sometimes it seems a prey to futile and trivial anxieties. More

rarely, it speaks, though saying but little after all. More rarely still, it reveals something that has happened, a

crime, a hidden treasure of which no one else could know. But we will return to these matters after

The phenomenon of haunted houses resembles that of the phantasms of the dead, except that here the ghost

clings to the residence, the house, the building and in no way to the persons who inhabit it. By the second

year of its existence, that is to say, 1884, the Committee on Haunted Houses of the S. P. R. had selected and

made an analysis of some sixtyfive cases out of hundreds submitted to it, twentyeight of which rested upon

firsthand and superior evidence.[1] It is worthy of remark, in the first place, that these authentic narratives

bear no relation whatever to the legendary and sensational ghoststories that still linger in many English and

American magazines, especially in the Christmas numbers. They mention no windingsheets, coffins,

skeletons, graveyards, no sulphurous flames, curses, bloodcurdling groans, no clanking chains, nor any of

the timehonoured trappings that characterize this rather feeble literature of the supernatural. On the contrary,

the scenes enacted in houses that appear to be really haunted are generally very simple and insignificant, not

to say dull and commonplace. The ghosts are quite unpretentious and go to no expense in the matter of

staging or costume. They are clad as they were when, sometimes many years ago, they led their quiet,

unadventurous life within their own home. We find in one case an old woman, with a thin grey shawl meekly

folded over her breast, who bends at night over the sleeping occupants of her old home, or who is frequently

encountered in the hall or on the stairs, silent, mysterious, a little grim. Or else it is the gentleman with a

lacklustre eye and a figured dressinggown who walks along a passage brilliantly illuminated with an

inexplicable light. Or again we have another elderly lady, dressed in black, who is often found seated in the

bay window of her drawingroom. When spoken to, she rises and seems on the point of replying, but says

nothing. When pursued or met in a corner, she eludes all contact and vanishes. Strings are fastened across the

staircase with glue; she passes and the strings remain as they were. The ghostand this happens in the

majority of casesis seen by all the people staying in the house: relatives, friends, old servants and new. Can

it be a matter of suggestion, of collective hallucination? At any rate, strangers, visitors who have had nothing

said to them, see it as the others do and ask, innocently: "Who is the lady in mourning whom I met in the

[1] Proceedings, vol. i., pp. 101115; vol. ii., pp. 137151; vol. viii., pp. 311, 332, etc.

If it is a case of collective suggestion, we should have to admit that it is a subconscious suggestion emitted

Though they belong to the same order, I will not here mention the exploits of what the Germans call the

Poltergeist, which take the form of flinging stones, ringing bells, turning mattresses, upsetting furniture and

so forth. These matters are always open to suspicion and really appear to be nothing but quaint frolics of

hysterical subjects or of mediums indulging their sense of humour. The manifestations of the Poltergeist are

fairly numerous and the reader will find several instances in the Proceedings and especially in the Journal of

As for communications with the dead, I devoted a whole chapter to these in my own essay entitled Our

Eternity and will not return to them now. It will be enough to recall and recapitulate my general impression,

that probably the dead did not enter into any of these conversations. We are here concerned with purely

mediumistic phenomena, more curious and mere subtle than those of tablerapping, but of the same

character; and these manifestations, however astonishing they may be, do not pierce the terrestrial sphere

Setting aside the religious hypotheses, which we are not examining here, for they belong to a different order

of ideas,[1] we find, as an explanation of the Majority of these phenomena, or at least as a means of avoiding

an absolute and depressing silence in regard to them, two hypotheses which reach the unknown by more or

less divergent paths, to wit, the spiritualistic hypothesis and the mediumistic hypothesis. The spiritualists, or

rather the neospiritualists or scientific spiritualists, who must not be confused with the somewhat

overcredulous disciples of Allan Kardec, maintain that the dead do not die entirely, that their spiritual or

animistic entity neither departs nor disperses into space after the dissolution of the body, but continues an

active though invisible existence around us. The neospiritualistic theory, however, professes only very vague

notions as to the life led by these discarnate spirits. Are they more intelligent than they were when they

inhabited their flesh? Do they possess a wider understanding and mightier faculties than ours? Up to the

present, we have not the unimpeachable facts that would permit us to say so. It would seem, on the contrary,

if the discarnate spirits really continue to exist, that their life is circumscribed, frail, precarious, incoherent

and, above all, not very long. To this the objection is raised that it only appears so to our feeble eyes. The

dead among whom we move without knowing it struggle to make themselves understood, to manifest

themselves, but dash themselves against the inpenetrable wall of our senses, which, created solely to perceive

matter, remain hopelessly ignorant of all the rest, though this is doubtless the essential part of the universe.

That which will survive in us, imprisoned in our body, is absolutely inaccessible to that which survives in

them. The utmost that they can do is occasionally to cause a few glimmers of their existence to penetrate the

fissures of those singular organisms known as mediums. But these vagrant, fleeting, venturous, stifled,

deformed glimmers can but give us a ludicrous idea of a life which has no longer anything in common with

the lifepurely animal for the most part which we lead on this earth. It is possible; and there is something

to be said for the theory. It is at any rate remarkable that certain communications, certain manifestations have

shaken the scepticism of the coldest and most dispassionate men of science, men utterly hostile to

supernatural influences. In order to some extent to understand their uneasiness and their astonishment, we

need only readto quote but one instance among a thousanda disquieting but unassailable article, entitled,

Dans les regions inexplorees de la biologic humaine. Observations et experiences sur Eusapia Paladino, by

Professor Bottazzi, Director of the Physiological Institute of the University of Naples.[2] Seldom have

experiments in the domain of mediums or spirits been conducted with more distrustful suspicion or with more

implacable scientific strictness. Nevertheless, scattered limbs, pale, diaphanous but capable hands, suddenly

appeared in the little physiological laboratory of Naples University, with its doors heavily padlocked and

sealed, as it were, mathematically excluding any possibility of fraud; these same hands worked apparatus

specially intended to register their touches; lastly, the outline of something black, of a head, uprose between

the curtains of the mediumistic cabinet, remained visible for several seconds and did not retire until itself

apparently frightened by the exclamations of surprise drawn from a group of scientists who, after all, were

prepared for anything; and Professor Bottazzi confesses that it was then that, to quote his own

wordsmeasured words, as beseems a votary of science, but expressivehe felt "a shiver all through his

[1] On the same grounds, we will also leave on one side the theosophical hypothesis, which, like the others,

begins by calling for an act of adherence, of blind faith. Its explanations, though often ingenious, are no more

than forcible but gratuitous asservations and, as I said in Our Eternity, do not give us the shadow of the

It was one of those moments in which a doubt which one had thought for ever abolished grips the most

unbelieving. For the first time, perhaps, he looked around him with uncertainty and wondered in what world

he was. As for the faithful adherents of the unknown, who had long understood that we must resign ourselves

to understanding nothing and he prepared for every sort of surprise there was here, all the same, even for

them, a mystery of another character, a bewildering mystery, the only really strange mystery, more torturing

than all the others together, because it verges upon ancestral fears and touches the most sensitive point of our

The spiritualistic argument most worthy of attention is that supplied by the apparitions of the dead and by

haunted houses. We will take no account of the phantasms that precede, accompany or follow hard upon

death: they are explained by the transmission of a violent motion from one subconsciousness to another; and,

even when they are not manifested until several days after death, it may still he contended that they are

delayed telepathic communications. But what are we to say of the ghosts that spring up more than a year, nay,

more than ten years after the disappearance of the corpse? They are very rare, I know, but after all there are

some that are extremely difficult to deny, for the accounts of their actions are attested and corroborated by

numerous and trustworthy witnesses. It is true that here again, where it is in most cases a question of

apparitions to relations or friends, we may be told that we are in the presence of telepathic incidents or of

hallucinations of the memory. We thus deprive the spiritualists of a new and considerable province of their

realm. Nevertheless, they retain certain private desmesnes into which our telepathic explanations do not

penetrate so easily. There have in fact been ghosts that showed themselves to people who had never known or

seen them in the flesh. They are more or less closely connected with the ghosts in haunted houses, to which

As I said above, it is almost impossible honestly to deny the existence of these houses. Here again the

telepathic interpretation enforces itself in the majority of cases. We may even allow it a strange but justifiable

extension, for its limits are scarcely known. It has happened fairly often, for instance, that ghosts come to

disturb a dwelling whose occupiers find, in response to their indications, bones hidden in the walls or under

the floors. It is even possible, as in the case of William Moir,[1] which was as strictly conducted and

supervised as a judicial enquiry, that the skeleton is buried at some distance from the house and dates more

than forty years back. When the remains are removed and decently interred, the apparitions cease.

But even in the case of William Moir there is no sufficient reason for abandoning the telepathic theory. The

medium, the "sensitive," as the English say, feels the presence or the proximity of the bones; some relation

established between them and hima relation which certainly is profoundly mysteriousmakes him

experience the last emotion of the deceased and sometimes allows him to conjure up the picture and the

circumstances of the suicide or murder, even as, in telepathy between living persons, the contact of an

inanimate object is able to bring him into direct relation with the subconsciousness of its owner. The slender

chain connecting life and death is not yet entirely broken; and we might even go so far as to say that

But are there cases in which every link, however thin, however subtle we may deem it, is definitely shattered?

Who would venture to maintain this? We are only beginning to suspect the elasticity, the flexibility, the

complexity of those invisible threads which bind together objects, thoughts, lives, emotions, all that is on this

earth and even that which does not yet exist to that which exists no longer. Let us take an instance in the first

volume of the Proceedings: M, X. Z., who was known to most of the members of the Committee on Haunted

Houses, and whose evidence was above suspicion, went to reside in a large old house, part of which was

occupied by his friend Mr. G. Mr. X. Z. knew nothing of the history of the place except that two servants

of Mr. G's had given him notice on account of strange noises which they had heard. One nightit was the

22nd of SeptemberMr. X. Z., on his way up to his bedroom in the dark, saw the whole passage filled with

a dazzling and uncanny light, and in this strange light he saw the figure of an old man in a flowered

dressinggown. As he looked, both figure and light vanished and he was left in pitch darkness. The next day,

remembering the tales told by the two servants, he made enquiries in the village. At first he could find out

nothing, but finally an old lawyer told him that he had heard that the grandfather of the present owner of the

house had strangled his wife and then cut his own throat on the very spot where Mr. X. Z. had seen the

apparition. He was unable to give the exact date of this double event; but Mr. X. Z. consulted the parish

On the 22nd of September of the following year, a friend of Mr. G's arrived to make a short stay. The

morning after his arrival, he came down, pale and tired, and announced his intention of leaving immediately.

On being questioned, he confessed that he was afraid, that he had been kept awake all night by the sound of

groans, blasphemous oaths and cries of despair, that his bedroom door had been opened, and so forth.

Three years afterwards, Mr. X. Z. had occasion to call on the landlord of the house, who lived in London, and

saw over the mantelpiece a picture which bore a striking resemblance to the figure which he had seen in the

The landlord, in reply to their questions, said that the painting was a portrait of his grandfather, adding that he

Evidently, this does not in any way prove the existence of ghosts or the survival of man. It is quite possible

that, in spite of Mr. X. Z.'s undoubted good faith, imagination played a subtle but powerful part in these

marvels. Perhaps it was set going by the stories of the two servants, insignificant gossip to which no attention

was paid at the time, but which probably found its way down into the weird and fertile depths of the

subconsciousness. The image was next transmitted by suggestion to the visitor frightened by a sleepless

night. As for the recognition of the portrait, this is either the weakest or the most impressive part of the story,

It is none the less certain that there is some unfairness in suggesting this explanation for every incident of the

kind. It means stretching to the uttermost and perhaps stretching too far the elastic powers of that amiable

maidofallwork, telepathy. For that matter, there are cases in which the telepathic interpretation is even

more uncertain, as in that described by Miss R. C. Morton in vol. viii. of the Proceedings.

The story is too long and complicated to be reproduced here. It is unnecessary to observe that, in view of the

character of Miss Morton, a lady of scientific training, and of the quality of the corroborative testimony, the

The case is that of a house built in 1860, whose first occupier was an AngloIndian, the next tenant being an

old man and the house then remaining unlet for four years. In 1882, when Captain Morton and big family

moved in, there had never, so far as they knew, been any question of its being haunted. Three months

afterwards, Miss Morton was in her room and on the point of getting into bed, when she heard some one at

the door and went to it, thinking that it might be her mother. On opening the door, she found no one there,

but, going a few steps along the passage, she saw a tall lady, dressed in black, standing at the head of the

stair. She did not wish to make the others uneasy and mentioned the occurrence to no one except a friend,

But soon the same figure dressed in black was seen by the various members of the household, by a married

sister on a visit to the house, by the father, by the other sister, by a little boy, by a neighbour, General A,

who saw a lady crying in the orchard and, thinking that one of the daughters of the house was ill, sent to

enquire after her. Even the Mortons' two dogs on more than one occasion clearly showed that they saw the

It was, as a matter of fact very harmonious: it said nothing; it wanted nothing; it wandered from room to

room, without any apparent object; and, when it was spoken to, it did not answer and only made its escape.

The household became accustomed to the apparition; it troubled nobody and inspired no terror. It was

immaterial, it could not be touched, but yet it intercepted the light. After making enquiries, they succeeded in

identifying it as the second wife of the AngloIndian. The Morton family had never seen the lady, but, from

the description which they gave of the phantom to those who had known her, it appeared that the likeness was

unmistakable. For the rest, they did not know why she came back to haunt a house in which she had not died.

After 1887, the appearances became less frequent, distinct, ceasing altogether in 1889.

Let us assume that the facts as reported in the Proceedings are certain and indisputable. We have very nearly

the ideal case, free from previous or ambient suggestion. If we refuse to believe in the existence of ghosts, if

we are absolutely positive that the dead do not survive their death, then we must admit that the hallucination

took birth spontaneously in the imagination of Miss Morton, an unconscious medium, and was subsequently

trained by telepathy to all those around her. In my opinion, this explanation, however arbitrary and severe it

may be, is the one which it behooves us to accept, pending further proofs. But it must be confessed that, in

thus extending our incredulity, we render it very difficult for the dead to make its existence known.

We possess a certain number of cases of kind, rigorously investigated, cases probably representing but an

infinitesimal part of those which might be collected. Is it possible that they one and all elude the telepathic

explanation? It would be necessary to make a study of them, conducted with the most scrupulous and

unremitting attention; for the question is not devoid of interest. If the existence of ghosts were

wellestablished, it would mean the entrance into this world, which we believe to be our world, of a new

force that would explain more than one thing which we are still far from understanding. If the dead interfere

at one point, there is a reason why they should not interfere at every other point. We should no longer be

alone, among ourselves, in our hermeticallyclosed sphere, as we are perhaps only too ready to imagine it.

We should have to alter more than one of our physical and moral laws, more than one of our ideas; and it

would no doubt be the most important and the most extraordinary revelation that would be expected in the

present state of our knowledge and since the disappearance of the old positive religions. But we are not there

yet: the proof of all this is still in the nurserystage; and I do not know if it will ever get beyond that.

Nevertheless the fact remains that, in these impenetrable regions of mystery which we are now exploring, the

one weak spot lies here, the one wall in which there seems to be a chinka strange one enoughgiving a

glimpse into the other world. It is narrow and vague and behind it there is still darkness; but it is not without

Let us observe that this survival of the dead, as the neospiritualists conceive it, seems much less improbable

since we have been studying more closely the manifestations of the extraordinary and incontestable spiritual

force that lies hidden within ourselves. It is not dependent in our thought, nor on our consciousness, nor on

our will; and very possibly it is not dependent either on our life. While we are still breathing on this earth it is

already surmounting most of the great obstacles that limit and paralyse our existence. It acts at a distance and

so to speak without organs. It passes through matter, disaggregates it and reconstitutes it. It seems to possess,

the gift of ubiquity. It is not subject to the laws of gravity and lifts weights out of all proportion with the real

and measurable strength of the body whence it is believed to emanate. It releases and removes itself from that

body; it comes and goes freely and takes to itself substances and shapes which it borrows all around it; and

therefore it is no longer so strange to see it surviving for a time that body to which it does not appear to be as

indissolubly bound as is our conscious existence. Is it necessary to add that this survival of a part of ourselves

which we hardly know and which besides seems incomplete, incoherent and ephemeral is wholly without

prejudice to nor fate in the eternity of the worlds? But this is a question which we are not called upon to study

"If it is becoming increasingly difficult for all these factsand there are more of them accumulating every

dayto be embraced in the telepathic or psychometric theory, why not frankly accept the spiritualistic

explanation, which is the simplest, which has an answer for everything and which is gradually encroaching

That is true: it is the simplest theory, perhaps too simple; and, like the religious theory, it dispenses as from

all effort or seeking. We have nothing to set against it but the mediumistic theory, which doubtless does not

account exactly for a good many things, but which at least is on the same side of the hill of life as ourselves

and remains among us, upon our earth, within reach of our eyes, our hands, our thoughts and our researches.

There was a time when lightning, epidemics and earthquakes were attributed without distinction to the wrath

of Heaven. Nowadays, when we are more or less familiar with the source of the great infectious diseases, the

hand of Providence knows them no more; and, though we are still ignorant of the nature of electricity and the

laws that regulate seismic shocks, we no longer dream, while waiting to learn more about them, of looking

for their causes in the judgment or anger of an imaginary Being. Let us act likewise in the present case. It

behooves us above all to avoid those rash explanations which, in their haste, leave by the roadside a host of

things that appear to be unknown or unknowable only because the necessary effort has not yet been made to

know them. After all, while we must not eliminate the spiritualistic theory, neither must we content ourselves

with it. It is even preferable not to linger over it until it has supplied us with decisive arguments, for it is the

duty of this theory which sweeps us roughly out of our sphere to furnish us with such arguments. For the

present, it simply relegates to posthumous regions, phenomena that appear to occur within ourselves; it adds

superfluous mystery and needless difficulty to the mediumistic mystery whence it springs. If we were

concerned with facts that had no footing in this world, we should certainly have to turn our eyes in another

direction; but we see a large number of actions performed which are of the same nature as those attributed to

the spirits and equally inexplicable, actions with which, however, we know that they have nothing to do.

When it is proved that the dead exercise some intervention, we will bow before the fact as willingly as we

bow before the mediumistic mysteries: it is a question of order, of internal policy and of scientific method

much more than of probability, preference or fear. The hour has not yet come to abandon the principle which

I have formulated elsewhere with respect to our communications with the dead, namely, that it is natural that

we should remain at home, in our own world, as long as we can, as long as we are not violently driven from it

by a series of irresistible and incontrovertible proofs coming from the neighbouring abyss. The survival of a

spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if

we deny them to the dead. But the existence of mediums is beyond dispute, whereas that of spirits is not; and

it is therefore for the spirits or for those who make use of their name to begin by proving that they must.

Before turning towards the mystery beyond the grave, let us first exhaust the possibilities of the mystery here

Now that we have eliminated the gods and the dead, what have we left? Ourselves and all the life around us;

and that is perhaps enough. It is, at any rate, much more than we are able to grasp.

Let us now study certain manifestations that are absolutely similar to those which we attribute to the spirits

and quite as surprising. As for these manifestations, there is not the least doubt of their origin. They do not

come from the other world; they are born and die upon this earth; and they arise solely and incontestably

from our own actual living mystery. They are, moreover, of all psychic manifestations, those which are

easiest to examine and verify, seeing that they can be repeated almost indefinitely and that a number of

excellent and wellknown mediums are always ready to reproduce them in the presence of any one interested

in the question. It is no longer a case of uncertain and casual observation, but of scientific experiment.

The manifestations in question are so many phenomena of intuition, of clairvoyance or clairaudience, of

seeing at a distance and even of seeing the future. These phenomena may either be due to pure, spontaneous

intuition on the part of the medium, in an hypnotic or waking state, or else produced or facilitated by one of

the various empirical methods which apparently see only to arouse the medium's subconscious faculties and

to release in some way his subliminal clairvoyance. Among such methods, those most often employed are, as

we all know, cards, coffeegrounds, pins, the lines of the hand, crystal globes, astrology, and so on. They

possess no importance in themselves, no intrinsic virtue, and are worth exactly what the medium who uses

"In reality, there is only one solitary MANCY. The faculty of seeing in TIME, like the faculty of seeing in

We will not linger now over those manifestations which, under appearances that are sometimes childish and

vulgar, often conceal surprising and incontestable truths, but will devote the present chapter exclusively to a

series of phenomena which includes almost all the others and which has been classed under the generic and

rather illchosen and illconstructed title of "psychometry." Psychometry, to borrow Dr. Maxwell's excellent

definition, is "the faculty possessed by certain persons of placing themselves in relation, either spontaneously

or, for the most part, through the intermediary of some object, with unknown and often very distant things

The existence of this faculty is no longer seriously denied; and it is easy for any one who cares to do so to

verify it for himself; for the mediums who possess it are not extremely rare, nor are they inaccessible. It has

formed the subject of a number of experiments (see, among others, M. Warcollier's report in the Annales des

Sciences Psychiques of July, 1911) and of a few treatises, in the front rank of which I would mention M.

Duchatel's Enquete sur des Cas de Psychometrie and Dr. Otty's recently published book, Lucidite et Intuition,

which is the fullest, most profound and most conscientious work that we possess on the matter up to the

present. Nevertheless it may be said that these regions quite lately annexed by metaphysical science are as yet

hardly explored and that fruitful surprises are doubtless awaiting earnest seekers.

The faculty in question is one of the strangest faculties of our subconsciousness and beyond a doubt contains

the key to most of the manifestations that seem to proceed from another world. Let us begin by seeing, with

Mme. M, one of the best mediums mentioned by Dr. Osty, is given an object which belonged to or which

has been touched and handled by a person about whom it is proposed to question her. Mme. M operates in

a state of trance; but there are other noted psychometers, such as Mme. F and M. Ph. M. de F, who

retain all their normal consciousness, so that hypnotism or the somnambulistic state is in no way

When the object, which is usually a letter, has been handed to Mme. M, she is asked to place herself in

communication with the writer of the letter or the owner of the object. Forthwith, Mme. M not only sees

the person in question, his physical appearance, his character, his habits, his interests, his state of health, but

also, in a series of rapid and changing visions that follow upon one another like cinematograph pictures,

perceives and describes exactly his immediate surroundings, the scenery outside his window, the rooms in

which he lives, the people who live with him and who wish him well or ill, the psychology and the most

secret and unexpected intentions of all those who figure in his existence. If, by means of your questions, you

direct her towards the past, she traces the whole course of the subject's history. If you turn her towards the

future, she seems often to discover it as clearly as the past. But we will for the moment reserve this latter

point, to which we shall return later in a chapter devoted to the knowledge of the future.

In the presence of these phenomena, the first thought that naturally occurs to the mind is that we are once

more concerned with that astonishing and involuntary communication between one subconsciousness and

another which has been invested with the name of telepathy. And there is no denying that telepathy plays a

great part in these intuitions. However, to explain their working, nothing is equal to an example based upon a

personal experience. Here is one which is in no way remarkable, but which plainly shows the normal course

of the operation. In September, 1913, while I was at Elberfeld, visiting Krall's horses, my wife went to

consult Mme. M, gave her a scrap of writing in my handa note dispatched previous to my journey and

containing no allusion to itand asked her where I was and what I was doing. Without a second's hesitation,

Mme. M declared that I was very far away, in a foreign country where they spoke a language which she

did not understand. She saw first a paved yard, shaded by a big tree, with a building on the left and a garden

at the back: a rough but not inapt description of Krall's stables, which my wife did not know and which I

myself had not seen at the time when I wrote the note. She next perceived me in the midst of the horses,

examining them, studying them with an absorbed, anxious and tired air. This was true, for I found those

visits, which overwhelmed me with a sense of the marvelous and kept my attention on the rack, singularly

exhausting and bewildering. My wife asked her if I intended to buy the horses. She replied:

And, seeking her words as though to express an unaccustomed and obscure thought, she added:

"I don't know why he is so much interested; it is not like him. He has no particular passion for horses. He has

She made two rather curious mistakes in this experiment. The first was that, at the time when she saw me in

Krall's stableyard, I was no longer there. She had received her vision just in the interval of a few hours

between two visits. Experience shows, however, that this is a usual error among psychometers. They do not,

properly speaking, see the action at the very moment of its performance, but rather the customary and

familiar action, the principal thing that preoccupies either the person about whom they are being consulted or

the person consulting them. They frequently go astray in time. There is not, therefore, necessarily any

simultaneity between the action and the vision; and it is well never to take their statements in this respect

The other mistake referred to our dress: Krall and I were in ordinary town clothes, whereas she saw us in

Let us now make every allowance for my wife's unconscious suggestions: she knew that I was at Elberfeld

and that I should be in the midst of the horses, and she knew or could easily conjecture my state of mind. The

transmission of thought is remarkable; but this is a recognized phenomenon and one of frequent occurrence

The real mystery begins with the description of a place which my wife had never seen and which I had not

seen either at the time of writing the note which established the psychometrical communication. Are we to

believe that the appearance of what I was one day to see was already inscribed on that prophetic sheet of

paper, or more simply and more probably that the paper which represented myself was enough to transmit

either to my wife's subconsciousness or to Mme. M, whom at that time I had never met, an exact picture of

what my eyes beheld three or four hundred miles away? But, although this description is exceedingly

accuratepaved yard, big tree, building on the left, garden at the backis it not too general for all idea of

chance coincidence to be eliminated? Perhaps, by insisting further, greater precision might have been

obtained; but this is not certain, for as a role the pictures follow upon one another so swiftly in the medium's

vision that he has no time to perceive the details. When all is said, experiences of this kind do not enable us to

go beyond the telepathic explanation. But here is a different one, in which subconscious suggestion cannot

Some days after the experiment which I have related, I received from England a request for my autograph.

Unlike most of those which assail an author of any celebrity, it was charming and unaffected; but it told me

nothing about its writer. Without even noticing from what town it was sent to me, after showing it to my

wife, I replaced it in its envelope and took it to Mme. M. She began by describing us, my wife and myself,

who both of us had touched the paper and consequently impregnated it with our respective "fluids."

I asked her to pass beyond us and come to the writer of the note. She then saw a girl of fifteen or sixteen,

almost a child, who had been in rather indifferent health, but who was now very well indeed. The girl was in

a beautiful garden, in front of a large and luxurious house standing in the midst of rather hilly country. She

was playing with a big, curlyhaired, longeared dog. Through the branches of the trees one caught a

On inquiry, all the details were found to be astonishingly accurate; but, as usual, there was a mistake in the

time, that is to say, the girl and her dog were not in the garden at the instant when the medium saw them

there. Here again an habitual action had obscured a casual movement; for, as I have already said, the vision

There is nothing exceptional in the above example; I selected it from among many others because it is simple

and clear. Besides, this kind of experience is already, so to speak, classical, or at least should be so, were it

not that everything relating to the manifestations of our subconsciousness is always received with

extraordinary suspicion. In any case, I cannot too often repeat that the experiment is within everybody's

reach; and it rarely fails to achieve absolute success with capable psychometers, who are pretty well known

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 homecircle, 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

There could be no question, in the circumstances, 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

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 space, 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 passing, deals a severe blow to the

Nevertheless, there are two rather curious objections to this second explanation. Granting that the object

really places the medium in communication with an unknown entity discovered in space, 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 incinerationhas 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

But these objections are perhaps less serious than one might believe. To begin with, there are seers, socalled

"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

"The only class of experiment that could be of value from this point of view, would be that in which

confirmation would come subsequently from documents 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."

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 circumstances 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

On the 2nd of March of this year, M. Etienne Lerasle, an old man of eightytwo, left his son's house at

CourslesBarres (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 twentyfour 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 eightytwo, 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 horseshoe pond, near a sort of rock. She traced

the road taken by the victim, depicted the buildings which he had passed, his mental condition impaired by

age, his fixed intention of dying, his physical appearance, his habitual and characteristic way of carrying his

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

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 crescentshaped piece of water. I may add that these

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 unassailable, 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 assault.

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

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 telltale 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 bestknown 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 circumstances we see so jealously vindicating their identity, should not here, when the

occasion is so propitious, seek to declare themselves, to manifest themselves and to make themselves known.

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

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 space. 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 accumulate in the disks of the gramophone, the

Hertzian waves that lose none of their strength in space, the mysteries of reproduction and, in a word, the

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

"This object," says Dr. Osty, "has no other function than to allow the medium's sensitiveness to distinguish a

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 passes unperceived, which does not mean that it remains inactive.

But sometimes an exceptional circumstancein the present case, the marvellous sensibility of a firstclass

mediumsuddenly 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 "crosscorrespondence." 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 space. 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 identity 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

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 wordsit 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 darkroom, the

developingbath 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 space: 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 assure

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 circumstances, 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

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

class, 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

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 accumulation 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 diviningrod, of materializations and miracles, in short, in every circumstance where

we pass 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 longforgotten 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 gods and the

interplanetary intelligences know them not. Hardly anywhere else, except in the equally perplexing

manifestations of the diviningrod 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 everyday life

provides phenomena as disturbing and of exactly the same kind and nature as those which, in other

circumstances, 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 passing 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.

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 title 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

He begins by carefully eliminating all the episodes which, though apparently premonitory, may be explained

by selfsuggestion (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

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, threefourths 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 circumstances 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

There could be no question of giving here even a brief analysis 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 easilyaccessible 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 documents 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.

On the 8th of May, Dr. Teste magnetizes Mme. Hortensein 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 faintingfit 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

On awaking, she retains no recollection of anything that has passed; 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. Halfpast 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.

"Well, then, doctor," she replies, with a smile, "if it is in the interest of my health, that is all the more reason

The excuse is a plausible one and even irresistible; but the husband, wishing to carry the struggle against

destiny to the last, declares that he will accompany his wife. The doctor remains alone, feeling somewhat

anxious, in spite of the rather farcical turn which the incident has taken. Suddenly, a piercing shriek is heard

and the noise of a body falling. He runs out and finds Mme. wild with fright and apparently dying in her

husband's arms. At the moment when, leaving him for an instant, she opened the door of the place where she

was going, a rat, the first seen there for twenty years, rushed at her and gave her so great a start that she fell

flat on her back. And all the rest of the prediction was fulfilled to the letter, hour by hour and detail by detail.

To make it quite clear in what spirit I am undertaking this study and to remove at the beginning any suspicion

of blind or systematic credulity, I am anxious, before going any further, to say that I fully realize that cases of

this kind by no means carry conviction. It is quite possible that everything happened in the subconscious

imagination of the subject and that she herself created, by selfsuggestion, her illness, her fright, her fall and

her miscarriage and adapted herself to most of the circumstances which she had foretold in her secondary

state. The appearance of the rat at the fatal moment is the only thing that would suggest a precise and

disquieting vision of an inevitable future event. Unfortunately, we are not told that the rat was perceived by

other witnesses than the patient, so that there is nothing to prove that it also was not imaginary. I have

therefore quoted this inadequate instance only because it represents fairly well the general aspect and the

indecisive value of many similar cases and enable us to note once and for all the objections which can be

raised and the precautions which we should take before entering these suspicious and obscure regions.

We now come to an infinitely more significant and less questionable case related by Dr. Joseph Maxwell, the

learned and very scrupulous author of Les Phenomenes Psychiques, a work which has been translated into

English under the title of Metapsychical Phenomena. It concerns a vision which was described to him eight

days before the event and which he told to many people before it was accomplished. A sensitive perceived in

a crystal the following scene: a large steamer, flying a flag of three horizontal bars, black, white and red, and

bearing the name Leutschland, was sailing in midocean. The boat was suddenly enveloped in smoke; a great

number of sailors, passengers and men in uniform rushed to the upper deck; and the boat went down.

Eight days afterwards, the newspapers announced the accident to the Deutschland, whose boiler had burst,

The evidence of a man like Dr. Maxwell, especially when we have to do with a sotospeak personal

incident, possesses an importance on which it is needless to insist. We have here, therefore, several days

beforehand, the very clear prevision of an event which, moreover, in no way concerns the percipient: a

curious detail, but one which is not uncommon in these cases. The mistake in reading Leutschland for

Deutschland, which would have been quite natural in real life, adds a note of probability and authenticity to

the phenomenon. As for the final act, the foundering of the vessel in the place of a simple heaving to, we

must see in this, as Dr. J. W. Pickering and W. A. Sadgrove suggest, "the subconscious dramatization of a

subliminal inference of the percipient." Such dramatization, moreover, are instinctive and almost general in

If this were an isolated case, it would certainly not be right to attach decisive importance to it; "but," Dr.

Maxwell observes, "the same sensitive has given me other curious instances; and these cases, compared with

others which I myself have observed or with those of which I have received firsthand accounts, render the

hypothesis of coincidence very improbable, though they do not absolutely exclude it."[1]

Another and perhaps more convincing case, more strictly investigated and established, a case which clearly

does not admit of explanation, by the theory of coincidence, worthy of all respect though this theory be, is

that related by M. Theodore Flournoy, science professor at the university of Geneva, in his remarkable work,

Esprits et Mediums. Professor Flournoy is known to be one of the most learned and most critical exponents

of the new science of metapsychics. He even carries his fondness for natural explanations and his repugnance

to admit the intervention of superhuman powers to a point where it is often difficult to follow him. I will give

the narrative as briefly as possible. It will be found in full on pp. 348 to 362 of his masterly book.

In August, 1883, a certain Mme. Buscarlet, whom he knew personally, returned to Geneva after spending

three years with the Moratief family at Kazan as governess to two girls. She continued to correspond with the

family and also with a Mme. Nitchinof, who kept a school at Kazan to which Mlles. Moratief, Mme.

On the night of the 9th of December (O. S.) of the same year, Mme. Buscarlet had a dream which she

described the following morning in a letter to Mme. Moratief, dated 10 December. She wrote, to quote her

"You and I were on a countryroad when a carriage passed in front of us and a voice from inside called to us.

When we came up to the carriage, we saw Mlle. Olga Popoi lying across it, clothed in white, wearing a

"'I called you to tell you that Mme. Nitchinof will leave the school on the 17th.'

A week later and three days before the letter reached Kazan, the event foreseen in the dream was fulfilled in a

tragic fashion. Mme. Nitchinof died on the 16th of an infectious disease; and on the 17th her body was

It is well to add that both Mme. Buscarlet's letter and the replies which came from Russia were

Such premonitory dreams are frequent; but it does not often happen that circumstances and especially the

existence of a document dated previous to their fulfilment give them such incontestable authenticity.

We may remark in passing the odd character of this premonition, which however is fully in accordance with

the habits of our unknown guest. The date is fixed precisely; but only a veiled and mysterious allusion (the

woman lying across the carriage and cloaked in white) is made to the essential part of the prediction, the

Was there a coincidence, a vision of the future pure and simple, or a vision of the future suggested by

telepathic influence? The theory of coincidence can be defended, if need be, here as everywhere else, but

would be very extraordinary in this case. As for telepathic influence, we should have to suppose that, on the

9th of December, a week before her death, Mme. Nitchinof had in her subconsciousness a presentiment of her

end and that she transmitted this presentiment across some thousands of miles, from Kazan to Geneva, to a

person with whom she had never been intimate. It is very complex, but possible, for telepathy often has these

disconcerting ways. If this were so, the case which would be one of latent illness or even of selfsuggestion;

and the preexistence of the future, without being entirely disproved, would be less clearly established.

Let us pass to other examples. I quote from an excellent article of the importance of precognitions, by Messrs.

Pickering and Sadgrove, which appeared in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques for 1 February 1908, the

summary of an experiment by Mrs. A. W. Verrall told in full detail in Vol. XX of the Proceedings. Mrs.

Verrall is a celebrated "automatist"; and her "crosscorrespondence" occupy a whole volume of the

Proceedings. Her good faith, her sincerity, her fairness and her scientific precision are above suspicion; and

she is one of the most active and respected members of the Society for Psychical Research.

"Do not hurry date this hoc est quod voluitandem. {greek here} A. W. V. {greek here}. calx pedibus

inhaerens difficultatem superavit. magnopere adiuvas persectando semper. Nomen inscribere iam

[1] Xenoglossy is well known not to be unusual in automatic writing; sometimes even the 'automatist' speaks

or writes languages of which he is completely ignorant. The Latin and Greek passages are translated as

"This is what I have wanted at last. Justice and joy speak a word to the wise. A.W.V. and perhaps someone

else. Chalk sticking to the feet has got over the difficulty. You help greatly by always persevering. Now I can

That same night, as there were said to be "uncanny happenings" in some rooms near the London Law Courts,

the watchers arranged to sit through the night in the empty rooms. Precautions were taken to prevent intrusion

and powdered chalk was spread on the floor of the two smaller rooms, "to trace anybody or anything that

might come or go." Mrs. Verrall knew nothing of the matter. The phenomena began at 12:43 A.M. and ended

at 2:09 A.M. The watchers noticed marks on the powdered chalk. On examination it was seen that the marks

were "clearly defined bird's footprints in the middle of the floor, three in the lefthand room and five in the

righthand room." The marks were identical and exactly 2 3/4 inches in width; they might be compared to the

footprints of a bird about the size of a turkey. The footprints were observed at 2:30 A. M.; the unexplained

phenomena had begun at 12:43 that same morning. The words about "chalk sticking to the feet" are a

singularly appropriate comment on the events; but the remarkable point is that Mrs. Verrall wrote what we

The persons who watched in the two rooms were questioned by Mr. J. G. Piddington, a member of the

council of the S. P. R., and declared that they had not any expectation of what they discovered.

I need hardly add that Mrs. Verrall had never heard anything about the happenings in the haunted house and

Here then is a wry curious prediction of an event, insignificant in itself, which is to happen, in a house

unknown to the one who foretells it, to people whom she does not know either. The spiritualists, who score in

this case, not without some reason, will have it that a spirit, in order to prove its existence and its intelligence,

organized this little scene in which the future, the present and the past are all mixed up together. Are they

right? Or is Mrs. Verrall's subconsciousness roaming like this, at random, in the future? It is certain that the

We will now take another premonitory dream, strictly controlled by the committee of the S. P. R.[1] Early in

September, 1893, Annette, wife of Walter Jones, tobacconist, of Old Gravel Lane, East London, had her little

boy ill. One night she dreamt that she saw a cart drive up and stop near when she was. It contained three

coffins, "two white and one blue. One white coffin was bigger than the other; and the blue was the biggest of

the three." The driver took out the bigger white coffin and left it at the mother's feet, driving off with the

others. Mrs. Jones told her dream to her husband and to a neighbour, laying particular stress on the curious

On the 10th of September, a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Jones was confined of a boy, who died on the 29th of the

same month. Their own little boy died on the following Monday, the 2nd of October, being then sixteen

months old. It was decided to bury the two children on the same day. On the morning of the day chosen, the

parish priest informed Mr. and Mrs. Jones that another child had died in the neighbourhood and that its body

would be brought into church along with the two others. Mrs. Jones remarked to her husband:

"If the coffin is blue, then my dream will come true. For the two other coffins were white."

The third coffin was brought; it was blue. It remains to be observed that the dimensions of the coffins

corresponded exactly with the dream premonitions, the smallest being that of the child who died first, the

next that of the little Jones boy, who was sixteen months old, and the largest, the blue one, that of a boy six

Let us take, more or less at random, another case from the inexhaustible Proceedings.[1] The report is written

by Mr. Alfred Cooper and attested by the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duke of Manchester and another

gentleman to whom the duchess related the incident before the fulfilment of the prophetic vision:

"A fortnight before the death of the late Earl of L.," says Mr. Cooper, "in 1882, I called upon the Duke of

Hamilton, in Hill Street, to see him professionally. After I had finished seeing him, we went into the

"'That is very odd. I have had a most extraordinary vision. I went to bed, but, after being in bed a short time, I

was not exactly asleep, but thought I saw a scene as if from a play before me. The actors in it were Lord L,

in a chair, as if in a fit, with a man standing near him with a red beard. He was by the side of a bath, over

"'I am attending Lord L at present; there is very little the matter with him; he is not going to die; he will be

"Well, he got better for a week and was nearly well, but, at the end of six or seven days after this, I was called

"I called in Sir William Jenner, but in six days he was a dead man. There were two male nurses attending on

him; one had been taken ill. But, when I saw the other, the dream of the duchess was exactly represented. He

was standing near a bath over the earl and, strange to say, his beard was red. There was the bath with the red

"The vision seen by the duchess was told two weeks before the death of Lord L. It is a most remarkable

But it is impossible to find space for the many instances related. As I have said, there are hundreds of them,

making their tracks in every direction across the plains of the future. Those which I have quoted give a

sufficient idea of the predominating tone and the general aspect of this sort of story. It is nevertheless right to

add that many of them are not at all tragic and that premonition opens its mysterious and capricious vistas of

the future in connection with the most diverse and insignificant events. It cares but little for the human value

of the occurrence and puts the vision of a number in a lottery in the same plane as the most dramatic death.

The roads by which it reaches us are also unexpected and varied. Often, as in the examples quoted, it comes

to us in a dream. Sometimes, it is an auditory or visual hallucination which seizes upon us while awake;

sometimes, an indefinable but clear and irresistible presentiment, a shapeless but powerful obsession, an

absurd but imperative certainty which rises from the depths of our inner darkness, where perhaps lies hidden

One might illustrate each of these manifestations with numerous examples. I will mention only a few,

selected not among the most striking or the most attractive, but among those which have been most strictly

tested and investigated.[1] A young peasant from the neighbourhood of Ghent, two months before the

drawing for the conscription, announces to all and sundry that he will draw number 90 from the urn. On

entering the presence of the districtcommissioner in charge, he asks if number 90 is still in. The answer is

Questioned as to the manner in which he acquired this strange certainty, he declared that, two months ago,

just after he had gone to bed, he saw a huge, indescribable form appear in a corner of his room, with the

number 90 standing out plainly in the middle, in figures the size of a man's hand. He sat up in bed and shut

and opened his eyes to persuade himself that he was not dreaming. The apparition remained in the same

Professor Georges Hulin, of the university of Ghent, and M. Jules van Dooren, the district commissioner,

who report the incident, mention three other similar and equally striking cases witnessed by M. van Dooren

during his term of office. I am the less inclined to doubt their declaration inasmuch as I am personally

acquainted with them and know that their statements, as regards the objective reality of the facts, are so to

speak equivalent to a legal deposition. M. Bozzano mentions some previsions which are quite as remarkable

I repeat, I am aware that, in the case of these occurrences and those which resemble them, it is possible once

again to invoke the theory of coincidence. It will be contended that there are probably a thousand predictions

of this kind which are never talked about, because they were not fulfilled, whereas, if one of them is

accomplished, which is bound by the law of probabilities to happen some day or other, the astonishment is

general and free rein is given to the imagination. This is true; nevertheless, it is well to enquire whether these

predictions are as frequent as is loosely stated. In the matter of those which concern the

conscriptiondrawings, for instance, I have had the opportunity of interrogating more than we constant

witness of these little dramas of fate; and all admitted that, on the whole, they are much clearer than one

would believe. Next, we must not forget that there can be no question here of scientific proofs. We are in the

midst of a slippery and nebulous region, where we would not dare to risk a step if we were not allowing

ourselves to be guided by our feelings rather than by certainties which we are not forbidden to hope for, but

We will abridge our subject still further, referring readers who wish to know the details to the originals, lest

we should never have done; or rather, instead of attempting an abridgment, which would still be too long, so

plentiful are the materials, we will content ourselves with enumerating a few instances, all taken from

Bozzano's Des Phenomenes premonitoires. We read there of a funeral procession seen on a highroad several

days before it actually passed that way; or, again, of a young mechanic who, in the beginning of November,

dreamt that he came home at halfpast five in the afternoon and saw his sister's little girl run over by a

tramcar while crossing the street in front of the house. He told his dream, in great distress; and, on the 13th

of the same month, in spite of all the precautions that had been taken, the child was run over by the tramcar

and killed at the hour named. We find the ghost, the phantom animal or the mysterious noise which, in certain

families, is the traditional herald of a death or of an imminent catastrophe. We find the celebrated vision

which the painter Segantini had thirteen days before his decease, every detail of which remained in his mind

and was represented in his last picture, Death. We find the Messina disaster dearly foreseen, twice over, by a

little girl who perished under the ruins of the illfated city; and we read of a dream which, three months

before the French invasion of Russia, foretold to Countess Toutschkoff that her husband would fall at

Borodino, a village so little known at the time that those interested in the dream looked in vain for its name

on the maps. Until now we have spoken only of the spontaneous manifestations of the future. It would seem

as though coming events, gathered in front of our lives, bear with crushing weight upon the uncertain and

deceptive dike of the present, which is no longer able to contain them. They ooze through, they seek a crevice

by which to reach us. But, side by side with these passive, independent and intractable premonitions, which

are but so many vagrant and furtive emanations of the unknown, are others which do yield to entreaty, allow

themselves to be directed into channels, are more or less obedient to our orders and will sometimes reply to

the questions which we put to them. They come from the same inaccessible reservoir, are no less mysterious,

but yet appear a little more human than the others; and, without drugging ourselves with puerile or dangerous

illusions, we may be permitted to hope that, if we follow them and study them attentively, they will one day

open to us the hidden paths that join that which is no more to that which is not yet.

It is true that here, where we must needs mix with the somewhat lawless world of professional

mysterymongers, we have to increase our caution and walk with measured steps on very suspicious ground.

But in this region of pitfalls we glean a certain number of facts that cannot reasonably be contested. It will be

enough to recall, for instance, the symbolic premonitions of the famous "seeress of Prevorst," Frau Hauffe,

whose prophetic spirit was awakened by soap bubbles, crystals and mirrors;[1] the clairvoyant who, eighteen

years before the event, foretold the death of a girl by the hand of her rival in 1907, in a written prophecy

which was presented to the court by the mother of the murdered girl;[1] A. J. C. Kerner: Die Scherin von

Prevorst 141 [1] the gypsy who, also in writing, foretold all the events in Miss Isabel Arundel's life, including

the name of her husband, Burton, the famous explorer;[2] the sealed letter addressed to M. Morin,

vicepresident of the Societe du Mesmerisme, describing the most unexpected circumstances of a death that

occurred a month later;[3] the famous "Marmontel prediction," obtained by Mrs. Verrall's

crosscorrespondences, which gives a vision, two months and a half before their accomplishment, of the

most insignificant actions of a traveller in an hotel bedroom;[4] and many others.

[1] Light, 1907, p. 219. The crime was committed in Paris and made a great stir at the time.

[2] Lady Burton: The Life of Captain Sir Richd. F. Burton, K.C.M.G., vol.i., p.253.

I will not review the various and very often grotesque methods of interrogating the future that are most

frequently practised today: cards, palmistry, crystalgazing, fortunetelling by means of coffeegrounds,

tealeaves, magnetic needles and white of egg, graphology, astrology and the rest. These methods, as I have

already said, are worth exactly what the medium who employs them is worth. They have no other object than

to arouse the medium's subconsciousness and to bring it into relation with that of the person questioning him.

As a matter of fact, all these purely empirical processes are but so many, often puerile forms of

selfmanifestation adopted by the undeniable gift which is known as intuition, clairvoyance or, in certain

cases, psychometry. I have spoken at sufficient length of this last faculty not to linger over it now. All that we

have still to do is to consider it for a moment in its relations with the foretelling of the future. A large number

of investigations, notably those conducted by M. Duchatel and Dr. Osty, show that, in psychometry, the

notion of time, as Dr. Joseph Maxwell observes, is very loose, that is to say, the past, present and future

nearly always overlap. Most of the clairvoyant or psychometric subjects, when they are honest, do not know,

"do not feel," as M. Duchatel very ably remarks, "what the future is. They do not distinguish it from the other

tenses; and consequently they succeed in being prophets, but unconscious prophets." In a wordand this is a

very important indication from the point of view of the probable coexistence of the three tensesit appears

that they see that which is not yet with the same clearness and on the same plane as that which is no more, but

are incapable of separating the two visions and picking out the future which alone interests us. For a still

stronger reason, it is impossible for them to state dates with precision. Nevertheless, the fact remains that,

when we take the trouble to sift their evidence and have the patience to await the realization of certain events

which are sometimes not due for a long time to come, the future is fairly often perceived by some of these

There are psychometers, however, and notably Mme. M, Dr. Osty's favorite medium, who never confuse

the future and the past. Mme. M places her visions in time according to the position which they occupy in

space. Thus she sees the future in front of her, the past behind her and the present beside her. But,

notwithstanding these distinctlygraded visions, she also is incapable of naming her dates exactly; in fact, her

mistakes in this respect are so general that Dr. Osty looks upon it as a pure chronological coincidence when a

We should also observe that, in psychometry, only those events can be perceived which relate directly to the

individual communicating with the percipient, for it is not so much the percipient that sees into us as we that

read in our own subconsciousness, which is momentarily lighted by his presence. We must not therefore ask

him for predictions of a general character, whether, for instance, there will be a war in the spring, an epidemic

in the summer or an earthquake in the autumn. The moment the question concerns events, however important,

with which we are not intimately connected, he is bound to answer, as do all the genuine mediums, that he

The area of his vision being thus limited, does he really discover the future in it? After three years of

numerous, cautious and systematic experiments with some twenty mediums, Dr. Osty categorically declares

"All the incidents," he says, "which filled these three years of my life, whether wished for by me or not, or

even absolutely contrary to the ordinary routine of my life, had always been foretold to me, not all by each of

the clairvoyant subjects, but all by one or other of them. As I have been practising these tests continually, it

seems to me that the experience of three years wholly devoted to this object should give some weight to my

This is incontestable; and the sincerity, scientific conscientiousness and high intellectual value of Dr. Osty's

fine work inspire one with the most entire confidence. Unfortunately, he contents himself with quoting too

summarily a few facts and does not, as he ought, give us in extenso the details of his experiments, controls

and tests. I am well aware that this would be a thankless and wearisome task, necessitating a large volume

which a mass of puerile incidents and inevitable repetitions would make almost readable. Moreover, it could

scarcely help taking the form of an intimate and indiscreet autobiography; and it is not easy to bring one's self

to make this sort of public confession. But it has to be done. In a science which is only in its early stages, it is

not enough to show the object attained and to state one's conviction; it is necessary above all to describe

every path that has been taken and, by an incessant and infinite accumulation of investigated and attested

facts, to enable every one to draw his own conclusions. This has been the cumbrous and laborious method of

the Proceedings for over thirty years; and it is the only right one. Discussion is possible and fruitful only at

that price. In all these extraconscious matters, we have not yet reached the stage of definite deduction, we are

Once more, I know that, in these cases, as I have seen for myself, the really convincing facts are necessarily

very rare; indeed, nowhere else do we meet with the same difficulty. If the medium tells you, for instance, as

Mme. M. seems easily to do, how you will employ your day from the morning onwards, if she sees you in a

certain house in a certain street meeting this or that person, it is impossible to say that, on the one hand, she is

not already reading your as yet unconscious plans or intentions, or that, on the other hand, by doing what she

has foreseen, you are not obeying a suggestion against which you could not fight except by violently doing

the opposite to what it demands of you, which again would be a case of inverted suggestion. None therefore

would have any value save predictions of unlikely happenings, clearly defined and outside the sphere of the

"The ideal prognostication would obviously be that of an event so rare, so sudden and unexpected, implying

such a change in one's mode of life that the theory of coincidence could not decently be put forward. But, as

everybody is not, in the peaceful course of his threatened by such an absolutely convincing event, the

clairvoyant cannot always reveal to the person experimentingand reveal it for a more or less approximate

dateone of those incidents whose accomplishment would carry irresistible conviction."

In any case, the question of psychometric prognostications calls for further enquiry, although it is easy even

Let us now return to our spontaneous premonitions, in which the future comes to seek us of its own accord

and, so to speak, to challenge us at home. I know from personal experience that, when we embark upon these

disconcerting matters, the first impression is scarcely favourable. We are very much inclined to laugh, to treat

as wearisome tales, as hysterical hallucinations, as ingenious or interested fictions most or those incidents

which give too violent a shock to the narrow and limited idea which we have of our human life. To smile, to

reject everything beforehand and to pass by with averted head, as was done, I remember, in the time of

Galvani, and in the early days of hypnotism, is much more easy and seems more respectable and prudent than

to stop, admit and examine. Nevertheless we must not forget that it is to some who did not smile so lightly

that we owe the best part of the marvels from whose heights we are preparing to smile in our turn. For the

rest, I grant that, thus presented, hastily and summarily, without the details that throw light upon them and the

proofs that support them, the incidents in question do not show to advantage and, inasmuch as they are

isolated and sparingly chosen, lose all the weight and authority derived from the compact and imposing mass

whence they are arbitrarily detached. As I said above, nearly a thousand cases have been collected,

representing probably not the tenth part of those which a more active and general search might bring together.

The number is evidently of importance and denotes the enormous pressure of the mystery; but, if there were

only half a dozen genuine casesand Dr. Maxwell's, Professor Flournoy's, Mrs. Verrall's, the Marmontel,

Jones and Hamilton cases and some others are undoubtedly genuinethey would be enough to show that,

under the erroneous idea which we form of the past and the present, a new verity is living and moving, eager

The efforts of that verity, I need hardly say, display a very different sort of force after we have actually and

attentively read those hundreds of extraordinary stories which, without appearing to do so, strike to the very

roots of history. We soon lose all inclination to doubt. We penetrate into another world and come to a stop all

out of countenance. We no longer know where we stand; before and after overlap and mingle. We no longer

distinguish the insidious and factitious but indispensable line which separates the years that have gone by

from the years that are to come. We clutch at the hours and days of the past and present to reassure ourselves,

to fasten on to some certainty, to convince ourselves that we are still in our right place in this life where that

which is not yet seems as substantial, as real, as positive, as powerful as that which is no more. We discover

with uneasiness that time, on which we based our whole existence, itself no longer exists. It is no longer the

swiftest of our gods, known to us only by its flight across all things: it alters its position no more than space,

of which it is doubtless but the incomprehensible reflex. It reigns in the centre of every event; and every

event is fixed in its centre; and all that comes and all that goes passes from end to end of our little life without

moving by a hair's breadth around its motionless pivot. It is entitled to but one of the thousand names which

we have been wont to lavish upon its power, a power that seemed to us manifold and innumerable: yesterday,

recently, formerly, erewhile, after, before, tomorrow, soon, never, later fall like childish masks, whereas

today and always completely cover with their united shadows the idea which we form in the end of a

duration which has no subdivisions, no breaks and no stages, which is pulseless, motionless and boundless.

Many are the theories which men have imagined in their attempts to explain the working of the strange

As we have seen, selfsuggestion and telepathy explain certain cases which concern events already in

existence, but still latent and perceived before the knowledge of them can reach us by the normal process of

the senses or the intelligence. But, even by extending these two theories to their uttermost point and

positively abusing their accommodating elasticity, we do not succeed in illumining by their aid more than a

rather restricted portion of the vast undiscovered land. We must therefore look for something else.

The first theory which suggests itself and which on the surface seems rather attractive is that of spiritualism,

which may be extended until it is scarcely distinguishable from the theosophical theory and other religious

suppositions. It assumes the revival of spirits, the existence of discarnate or other superior and more

mysterious entities which surround us, interest themselves in our fate, guide our thoughts and our actions and,

above all, know the future. It is, as we recognized when speaking of ghosts and hanted houses, a very

acceptable theory; and any one to whom it appears can adopt it without doing violence to his intelligence. But

we must confess that it seems less necessary and perhaps even less clearly proved in this region than in that.

It starts by begging the question: without the intervention of discarnate beings, the spiritualists say, it is

impossible to explain the majority of the premonitory phenomena; therefore we must admit the existence of

these discarnate beings. Let us grant it for the moment, for to beg the question, which is merely an

indefensible trick of the superficial logic of our brain, does not necessarily condemn a theory and neither

takes away from nor adds to the reality of things. Besides, as we shall insist later, the intervention or

nonintervention of the spirits is not the point at issue; and the crux of the mystery does not lie there. What

most interest us is far less the paths or intermediaries by which prophetic warnings reach us than the actual

existence of the future in the present. It is trueto do complete justice to neospiritualismthat its position

offers certain advantages from the point of view of the almost inconceivable problem of the preexistence of

the future. It can evade or divert some of the consequences of that problem. The spirits, it declares, do not

necessarily see the future as a whole, as a total past or present, motionless and immovable, but they know

infinitely better than we do the numberless causes that determine any agent, so that, finding themselves at the

luminous source of those causes, they have no difficulty in foreseeing their effects. They are, with respect to

the incidents still in process of formation, in the position of an astronomer who foretells, within a second, all

the phases of an eclipse in which a savage sees nothing but an unprecedented catastrophe which he attributes

to the anger of his idols of straw or clay. It is indeed possible that this acquaintance with a greater number of

causes explains certain predictions; but there are plenty of others which presume a knowledge of so many

causes, causes so remote and so profound, that this knowledge is hardly to be distinguished from a knowledge

of the future pure and simple. In any case, beyond certain limits, the preexistence of causes seems no clearer

than that of effects. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the spiritualists gain a slight advantage here.

They believe that they gain another when they say or might say that it is still possible that the spirits stimulate

us to realize the events which they foretell without themselves clearly perceiving them in the future. After

announcing, for instance, that on a certain day we shall go to a certain place and do a certain thing, they urge

us irresistibly to proceed to the spot named and there to perform the act prophesied. But this theory, like those

of selfsuggestion and telepathy, would explain only a few phenomena and would leave in obscurity all those

cases, infinitely more numerous because they make up almost the whole of our future, in which either chance

intervenes or some event in no way dependent upon our will or the spirit's, unless indeed we suppose that the

latter possesses an omniscience and an omnipotence which take us back to the original mysteries of the

Besides, in the gloomy regions of precognition, it is almost always a matter of anticipating a misfortune and

very rarely, if ever, of meeting with a pleasure or a joy. We should therefore have to admit that the spirits

which drag me to the fatal place and compel me to do the act that will have tragic consequences are

deliberately hostile to me and find diversion only in the spectacle of my suffering. What could those spirits

be, from what evil world would they arise and how should we explain why our brothers and friends of

yesterday, after passing through the august and peacebestowing gates of death, suddenly become

transformed into crafty and malevolent demons? Can the great spiritual kingdom, in which all passions born

of the flesh should be stilled, be but a dismal abode of hatred, spite and envy? It will perhaps be said that they

lead us into misfortune in order to purify us; but this brings us to religious theories which it is not our

The only attempt at an explanation that can hold its own with spiritualism has recourse once again to the

mysterious powers of our subconsciousness. We must needs to recognize that, if the future exists today,

already such as it will be when it becomes for us the present and the past, the intervention of discarnate minds

or of any other spiritual entity adrift from another sphere is of little avail. We can picture an infinite spirit

indifferently contemplating the past and future in their coexistence; we can imagine a whole hierarchy of

intermediate intelligences taking a more or less extensive part in the contemplation and transmitting it to our

subconsciousness. But all this is practically nothing more than inconsistent speculation and ingenious

dreaming in the dark; in any case, it is adventitious, secondary and provisional. Let us keep to the facts as we

see them: an unknown faculty, buried deep in our being and generally inactive, perceives, on rare occasions,

events that have not yet taken place. We possess but one certainty on this subject, namely, that the

phenomenon actually occurs within ourselves; it is therefore within ourselves that we must first study it,

without burdening ourselves with suppositions which remove it from its centre and simply shift the mystery.

The incomprehensible mystery is the preexistence of the future; once we admit thisand it seems very

difficult to denythere is no reason to attribute to imaginary intermediaries rather than to ourselves the

faculty of descrying certain fragments of that future. We see, in regard to most of the mediumistic

manifestations, that we possess within ourselves all the unusual forces with which the spiritualists endow

discarnate spirits; and why should it be otherwise as concerns the powers of divination? The explanation

taken from the subconsciousness is the most direct, the simplest, the nearest, whereas the other is endlessly

circuitous, complicated and distant. Until the spirits testify to their existence in an unanswerable fashion,

there is no advantage in seeking in the grave for the solution of a riddle that appears indeed to lie at the roots

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

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 gasstove 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

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.

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 circumstances 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

[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

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 pronounce, 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 socalled 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?

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

harassing 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?

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 assumes 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

substitute 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 entity

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, passions 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, absentminded? In any case, it is rather remarkable that it evidently

dislikes to make itself useful. It readily performs the most glamorous feats of sleightofhand, 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 passes through solid matter, conjures up ghosts,

subjugates time and space, 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 diviningrod is almost the only one in which it lends us any regular assistance, 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 fashion. 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 assured, one might almost think, of an

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

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, crosscorrespondence, 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:

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

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

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

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

Here, for instance, is a traveler who, arriving at night in a small unknown town and walking along the

illlighted 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

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

Here is another which evidently belongs to the same class, 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 shore 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

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

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:

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]

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

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

They turned round, saw nobody 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 linchpin and

was on the point of leaving the axletree, which would almost inevitably have hurled the carriage into the

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 circumstances, 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

These examplesand there are many more of a similar kindare enough, I think, to illustrate this class of

premonitions. The problem in these cases is simpler than when it relates to fruitless warnings; at least it is

simpler so long as we do not bring into discussion the question of spirits, of unknown intelligences, or of an

actual knowledge of the future; otherwise the same difficulty reappears and the warning, which this time

seems efficacious, is in reality just as vain. In fact, the mysterious entity which knows that the traveler will go

to the water's edge, that the wheel will be on the point of leaving the axle, that the copper will explode, or that

the promontory will fall at a precise moment, must at the same time know that the traveler will not take the

last fatal step, that the carriage will not be overturned, that the copper will not hurt anybody and that the

canoe will pull away from the promontory. It is inadmissible that, seeing one thing, it will not see the other,

since everything happens at the same point, in the course of the same second. Can we say that, if it had not

given warning, the little saving movement would not have been executed? How can we imagine a future

which, at one and the same time, has parts that are steadfast and others that are not? If it is foreseen that the

promontory will fall and that the traveler will escape, thanks to the supernatural warning, it is necessarily

foreseen that the warning will be given; and, if so, what is the point of this futile comedy? I see no reasonable

explanation of it in the spiritist or spiritualistic theory, which postulates a complete knowledge of the future,

at least at a settled point and moment. On the other hand, if we adhere to the theory of a subliminal

consciousness, we find there an explanation which is quite worthy of acceptation. This subliminal

consciousness, though, in the majority of cases, it has no clear and comprehensive vision of the immediate

future, can nevertheless possess an intuition of imminent danger, thanks to indications that escape our

ordinary perception. It can also have a partial, intermittent and so to speak flickering vision of the future

event and, if doubtful, can risk giving an incoherent warning, which, for that matter, will change nothing in

In conclusion, let us state once more that fruitful premonitions necessarily annihilate events in the bud and

consequently work their own destruction, so that any control becomes impossible. They would have an

existence only if they prophesied a general event which the subject would not escape but for the warning. If

they had said to any one intending to go to Messina two or three months before the catastrophe, "Don't go, for

the town will be destroyed before the month is out," we should have an excellent example. But it is a

remarkable thing that genuine premonitions of this kind are very rare and nearly always rather indefinite in

regard to events of a general order. In M. Bozzano's excellent collection, which is a sort of compendium of

Premonitory phenomena, the only pretty clear cases are nos. cli, and clviii., both of which are taken from the

Journal of the S.P.R. In the first,[1] a mother sent a servant to bring home her little daughter, who had already

left the house with the intention of going through the "railway garden," a strip of ground between the se. wall

and the railway embankment, in order to sit on the great stone, by the seaside and see the trains pass by. A

few minutes after the little girl's departure, the mother had distinctly and repeatedly heard a voice within her

Now, soon after, a train ran off the line and the engine and tender fell, breaking through the protecting wall

In the other case,[1] into which Professor W. F. Barrett made a special enquiry, Captain MacGowan was in

Brooklyn with his two boys, then on their holidays. He promised the boys that he would take them to the

theatre and booked seats on the previous day; but on the day of the proposed visit he heard a voice within him

He hesitated, gave up his plan and resumed it again. But the words kept repeating themselves and impressing

themselves upon him; and, in the end, he definitely decided not to go, much to the two boys' disgust. That

We may add to this the prevision of the Battle of Borodino, to which I have already alluded, I will give the

About three months before the French army entered Russia, the wife of General Toutschkoff dreamt that she

was at an inn in a town unknown to her and that her father came into her room, holding her only son by the

"Your happiness is at an end. He"meaning Countess Toutschkoff's husband"has fallen. He has fallen at

The dream was repeated a second and a third time. Her anguish of mind was such that she woke her husband

Before the French armies reached Moscow, Count Toutschkoff was placed at the head of the army of reserve;

and one morning her father, holding her son by the hand, entered her room at the inn where she was staying.

Then she saw herself in the very same room and through the windows beheld the very same objects that she

had seen in her dreams. Her husband was one of the many who perished in the battle fought near the River

This is evidently a very rare and perhaps solitary example of a longdated prediction of a great historic event

which nobody could foresee. It stirs more deeply than any other the enormous problems of fatality, freewill

and responsibility. But has it been attested with sufficient rigour for us to rely upon it? That I cannot say. In

any case, it has not been sifted by the S.P.R. Next, from the special point of view that interests us for the

moment, we are unable to declare that this premonition had any chance of being of avail and preventing the

general from going to Borodino. It is highly probable that he did not know where he was going or where he

was; besides, the irresistible machinery of war held him fast and it was not his part to disengage his destiny.

The premonition, therefore, could only have been given because it was certain not to be obeyed.

As for the two previous cases, nos. clv. and clviii., we must here again remark the usual strange reservations

and observe how difficult it is to explain these premonitions save by attributing them to our

subconsciousness. The main, unavoidable event is not precisely stated; but a subordinate consequence seems

to be averted, as though to make us believe in some definite power of free will. Nevertheless, the mysterious

entity that foresaw the catastrophe must also have foreseen that nothing would happen to the person whom it

was warning; and this brings us back to the useless farce of which we spoke above. Whereas, with the theory

of a subconscious self, the latter may haveas in the case of the traveler, the promontory, the copper or the

carriagenot this time by inferences or indications that escape our perception, but by other unknown means, a

vague presentiment of an impending peril, or, as I have already said, a partial, intermittent and unsettled

Whereupon let us recognize that it is almost forbidden to human reason to stray in these regions; and that the

part of a prophet is, next to that of a commentator of prophecies, one of the most difficult and thankless that a

I am not sure if it is really necessary, before closing this chapter, to follow in the wake of many others and

broach the problem of the preexistence of the future, which includes those of fatality, of free will, of time and

of space, that is to say, all the points that touch the essential sources of the great mystery of the universe. The

theologians and the metaphysicians have tackled these problems from every side without giving us the least

hope of solving them. Among those which life sets us, there is none to which our brain seems more definitely

and strictly closed; and they remain, if not as unimaginable, at least as incomprehensible as on the day when

they were first perceived. What corresponds, outside us, with what we call time and space? We know nothing

about it; and Kant, speaking in the name of the "apriorists," who hold that the idea of time is innate in us,

does not teach us much when he tells us that time, like space, is an a priori form of our sensibility, that is to

say, an intuition preceding experience, even as Guyau, among the "empiricists," who consider that this idea is

acquired only by experience, does not enlighten us any more by declaring that this same time is the abstract

formula of the changes in the universe. Whether space, as Leibnitz maintains, be an order of coexistence and

time an order of sequences, whether it be by space that we succeed in representing time or whether time be an

essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing

is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neoKantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and

the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the

formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers

of yesterday and todayHerbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf, James Ward,

William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillee, Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmes, Dunan and endless

othershave been unable to tame it; and that, however much their theories may contradict one another, they

are all equally defensible and alike struggle vainly in the darkness against shadows that are not of our world.

To catch a glimpse of this strange problem of the preexistence of the future, as it shows itself to each of us,

let us essay more humbly to translate it into tangible images, to place it as it were upon the stage. I am writing

these lines sitting on a stone, in the shade of some tall beeches that overlook a little Norman village. It is one

of those lovely summer days when the sweetness of life is almost visible in the azure vase of earth and sky. In

the distance stretches the immense, fertile valley of the Seine, with its green meadows planted with restful

trees, between which the river flows like a long path of gladness leading to the misty hills of the estuary. I am

looking down on the villagesquare, with its ring of young limetrees. A procession leaves the church and,

amid prayers and chanting, they carry the statue of the Virgin around the sacred pile. I am conscious of all the

details of the ceremony: the sly old cure perfunctorily bearing a small reliquary; four choirmen opening their

mouths to bawl forth vacantly the Latin words which convey nothing to them; two mischievous servingboys

in frayed cassocks; a score of little girls, young girls and old maids in white, all starched and flounced,

followed by six or seven village notables in baggy frockcoats. The pageant disappears behind the trees,

comes into sight again at the bend of the road and hurries back into the church. The clock in the steeple

strikes five, as though to ring down the curtain and mark in the infinite history of events which none will

recollect the conclusion of a spectacle which never again, until the end of the world and of the universe of

worlds, will be just what it was during those seconds when it beguiled my wandering eyes.

For in vain will they repeat the procession next year and every year after: never again will it be the same. Not

only will several of the actors probably have disappeared, but all those who resume their old places in the

ranks will have undergone the thousand little visible and invisible changes wrought by the passing days and

weeks. In a word, this insignificant moment is unique, irrecoverable, inimitable, as are all the moments in the

existence of all things; and this little picture, enduring for a few seconds suspended in boundless duration, has

lapsed into eternity, where henceforth it will remain in its entirety to the end of time, so much so that, if a

man could one day recapture in the past, among what some one has called the "astral negatives," the image of

It is not difficult for us to conceive that one can thus go back and seeagain the astral negative of an event that

is no more; and retrospective clairvoyance appears to us a wonderful but not an impossible thing. It

astonishes but does not stagger our reason. But, when it becomes a question of discovering the same picture

in the future, the boldest imagination flounders at the first step. How are we to admit that there exists

somewhere a representation or reproduction of that which has not yet existed? Nevertheless, some of the

incidents which we have just been considering seem to prove in an almost conclusive manner not only that

such representations are possible, but that we may arrive at them more frequently, not to say more

conveniently, than at those of the past. Now, once this representation preexists, as we are obliged to admit in

the case of certain number of premonitions, the riddle remains the same whether the preexistence be one of a

few hours, a few years or several centuries. It is therefore possiblefor, in these matters, we must go straight

to extremes or else leave them aloneit is therefore possible that a seer mightier than any of today, some

god, demigod or demon, some unknown, universal or vagrant intelligence, saw that procession a million

years ago, at a time when nothing existed of that which composes and surrounds it and when the very earth

on which it moves had not yet risen from the ocean depths. And other seers, as mighty as the first, who from

age to age contemplated the same spot and the same moment, would always have perceived, through the

vicissitudes and upheavals of seas, shores and forests, the same procession going round the same little church

that still lay slumbering in the oceanic ooze and made up of the same persons sprung from a race that was

It is obviously difficult for us to understand that the future can thus precede chaos, that the present is at the

same time the future and the past, or that that which does not yet exists already at the same time at which it is

no more. But, on the other hand, it is just as hard to conceive that the future does not preexist, that there is

nothing before the present and that everything is only present or past. It is very probable that, to a more

universal intelligence than ours, everything is but an eternal present, an immense punctum stans, as the

metaphysicians say, in which all the events are on one plane; but it is no less probable that we ourselves, so

long as we are men, in order to understand anything of this eternal present, will always be obliged to divide it

into three parts. Thus caught between two mysteries equally baffling to our intelligence, whether we deny or

admit the preexistence of the future, we are really only wrangling over words: in the one case, we give the

name of "present," from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, to that which to us is the future; in the

other, we give the name of "future" to that which, from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, is the

present. But, after all, it is incontestable in both cases that, at least from our point of view, the future

preexists, since preexistence is the only name by which we can describe and the only form under which we

Attempts have been made to shed light on the riddle by transferring it to space. It is true that it there loses the

greater part of its obscurity; but this apparently is because, in changing its environment, it has completely

changed its nature and no longer bears any relation to what it was when it was placed in time. We are told, for

instance, that innumerable cities distributed over the surface of the earth are to us as if they were not, so long

as we have not seen them, and only begin to exist on the day when we visit them. That is true; but space,

outside all metaphysical speculations, has realities for us which time does not possess. Space, although very

mysterious and incomprehensible once we pass certain limits, is nevertheless not, like time, incomprehensible

and illusory in all its parts. We are certainly quite able to conceive that those towns which we have never seen

and doubtless never will see indubitably exist, whereas we find it much more difficult to imagine that the

catastrophe which, fifty years hence, will annihilate one of them already exists as really as the town itself. We

are capable of picturing a spot whence, with keener eyes than these which we boast today, we should see in

one glance all the cities of the earth and even those of other worlds, but it is much less easy for us to imagine

a point in the ages whence we should simultaneously discover the past, the present and the future because the

past, the present and the future are three orders of duration which cannot find room at the same time in our

intelligence and which inevitably devour one other. How can we picture to ourselves, for instance, a point in

eternity at which our little procession already exists, while it is not yet and although it is no more? Add to this

the thought that it is necessary and inevitable, from the millenaries which had no beginning, that, at a given

moment, at a given place, the little procession should leave the little church in a given manner and that no

known or imaginable will can change anything in it, in the future any more than in the past; and we begin to

We find among the cases collected by M. Bozzano a singular premonition wherein the unknown factors of

space and time are continued in a very curious fashion. In August, 1910, Cavalliere Giovanni de Figueroa,

one of the most famous fencing masters at Palermo, dreamt that he was in the country, going along a road

white with dust, which brought him to a broad ploughed field. In the middle of the field stood a rustic

building, with a groundfloor used for storerooms and cowsheds and on the right a rough hut made of

A peasant wearing dark trousers, with a black felt hat on his head, came forward to meet him, asked him to

follow him and took him round behind the house. Through a low, narrow door they entered a little stable with

a short, winding stone staircase leading to a loft over the entrance to the house. A mule fastened to a swinging

manger was blocking the bottom step; and the chevalier had to push it aside before climbing the staircase. On

reaching the loft, he noticed that from the ceiling were suspended strings of melons, tomatoes, onions and

Indian corn. In this room were two women and a little girl; and through a door leading to another room he

caught sight of an extremely high bed, unlike any that he had ever seen before. Here the dream broke off. It

seemed to him so strange that he spoke of it to several of his friends, whom he mentions by name and who

On the 12th of October in the same year, in order to support a fellowtownsman in a duel, he accompanied

the seconds, by motorcar, from Naples to Marano, a place which he had never visited nor even heard of. As

soon as they were some way in the country, he was curiously impressed by the white and dusty road. The car

pulled up at the side of a field which he at once recognized. They lighted; and he remarked to one of the

seconds: "This is not the first time that I have been here. There should be a house at the end of this path and

As a matter of fact, everything was as he described it. An instant later, at the exact moment foreseen by the

dream, the peasant in the dark trousers and the black felt hat came up and asked him to follow him. But,

instead of walking behind him, the chevalier went in front, for he already knew the way. He found the stable

and, exactly at the place which it occupied two months before, near its swinging manger, the mule blocking

the way to the staircase. The fencing master went up the steps and once more saw the loft, with the ceiling

hung with melons, onions and tomatoes, and, in a corner on the right, the two silent women and the child,

identical with the figures in his dream, while in the next room he recognized the bed whose extraordinary

It really looks as if the facts themselves, the extramundane realities, the eternal verities, or whatever we may

be pleased to call them, have tried to show us here that time and space are one and the same illusion, one and

the same convention and have no existence outside our little dayspanned understanding; that "everywhere"

and "always" are exactly synonymous terms and reign alone as soon as we cross the narrow boundaries of the

obscure consciousness in which we live. We are quite ready to admit that Cavaliere de Figueroa may have

had by clairvoyance an exact and detailed vision of places which he was not to visit until later: this is a pretty

frequent and almost classical phenomenon, which, as it affects the realities of space, does not astonish us

beyond measure and, in any case, does not take us out of the world which our senses perceive. The field, the

house, the hut, the loft do not move; and it is no miracle that they should be found in the same place. But,

suddenly, quitting this domain where all is stationary, the phenomenon is transferred to time and, in those

unknown places, at the foretold second, brings together all the moving actors of that little drama in two acts,

of which the first was performed some two and a half months before, in the depths of some mysterious other

life where it seemed to be motionlessly and irrevocably awaiting its terrestrial realization. Any explanation

would but condense this vapour of petty mysteries into a few drops in the ocean of mysteries. Let us note here

again, in passing, the strange freakishness of the premonitions. They accumulate the most precise and

circumstantial details as long as the scene remains insignificant, but come to a sudden stop before the one

tragic and interesting scene of the drama: the duel and its issue. Here again we recognize the inconsistent,

But we will not prolong these somewhat vain speculations concerning space and time. We are merely playing

with words that represent very badly ideas which we do not put into form at all. To sum up, if it is difficult

for us to conceive that the future preexists, perhaps it is even more difficult for us to understand that it does

not exist; moreover, a certain number of facts tend to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in time

and in eternity, the same permanence and the same vividness as the past. Now, from the moment that it

preexists, it is not surprising that we should be able to know it; it is even astonishing, granted that it

overhangs us on every side, that we should not discover it oftener and more easily. It remains to be learnt

what would become of our life if everything were foreseen in it, if we saw it unfolding beforehand, in its

entirety, with its events which would have to be inevitable, because, if it were possible for us to avoid them,

they would not exist and we could not perceive them. Suppose that, instead of being abnormal, uncertain,

obscure, debatable and very unusual, prediction became, so to speak, scientific, habitual, clear and infallible:

in a short time, having nothing more to foretell, it would die of inanition. If, for instance, it was prophesied to

me that I must die in the course of a journey in Italy, I should naturally abandon the journey; therefore it

could not have been predicted to me; and thus all life would soon be nothing but inaction, pause and

abstention, a soft of vast desert where the embryos of stillborn events would be gathered in heaps and where

nothing would grow save perhaps one or two more or less fortunate enterprises and the little insignificant

incidents which no one would trouble to avoid. But these again are questions to which there is no solution;

I will first sum up as briefly as possible, for who so may still be ignorant of them, the facts which it is

necessary to know if one would fully understand the marvelous story of the Elberfeld horses. For a detailed

account, I can refer him to Herr Karl Krall's remarkable work, Denkende Tiere (Leipsig, 1912), which is the

first and principal source of information amid a bibliography that is already assuming considerable

Some twenty years ago there lived in Berlin an old misanthrope named Wilhelm von Osten. He was a man

with a small private income, a little eccentric in his ways and obsessed by one idea, the intelligence of

animals. He began by undertaking the education of a horse that gave him no very definite results. But, in

1900, he became the owner of a Russian stallion who, under the name of Hans, to which was soon added the

Homeric and wellearned prefix of Kluge, or Clever, was destined to upset all our notions of animal

psychology and to raise questions that rank among the most unexpected and the most absorbing problems

Thanks to Von Osten, whose patience, contrary to what one might think, was in no wise angelic but

resembled rather a frenzied obstinacy, the horse made rapid and extraordinary progress. This progress is very

aptly described by Professor E. Clarapede, of the university of Geneva, who says, in his excellent monograph

"After making him familiar with various common ideas, such as right, left, top, bottom and so on, his master

began to teach him arithmetic by the intuitive method. Hans was brought to a table on which were placed first

one, then two, then several small skittles. Von Osten, kneeling beside Hans, uttered the corresponding

numbers, at the same time making him strike as many blows with his hoof as there were skittles on the table.

Before long, the skittles were replaced by figures written on a blackboard. The results were astonishing. The

horse was capable not only of counting (that is to say, of striking as many blows as he was asked), but also of

"But Hans could do more than mere sums: he knew how to read; he was a musician, distinguishing between

harmonious and dissonant chords. He also had an extraordinary memory: he could tell the date of each day of

the current week. In short, he got through all the tasks which an intelligent schoolboy of fourteen is able to

The rumour of these curious experiments soon spread; and visitors flocked to the little stableyard in which

Von Osten kept his singular pupil at work. The newspapers took the matter up; and a fierce controversy broke

forth between those who believed in the genuineness of the phenomenon and those who saw no more in it

than a barefaced fraud. A scientific committee was appointed in 1904, consisting of professors of psychology

and physiology, of the director of a zoological garden, of a circus manager and of veterinary surgeons and

cavalryofficers. The committee discovered nothing suspicious, but ventured upon no explanation. A second

committee was then appointed, numbering among its members Herr Oskar Pfungst, of the Berlin

psychological laboratory. Herr Pfungst, after a long series of experiments, drew up a voluminous and

crushing report, in which he maintained that the horse was gifted with no intelligence, that it did not

recognize either letters or figures, that it really knew neither how to calculate nor how to count, but merely

obeyed the imperceptible, infinitesimal and unconscious signs which escaped from its master.

Public opinion veered round suddenly and completely. People felt a sort of halfcowardly relief at beholding

the prompt collapse of a miracle which was threatening to throw confusion into the self satisfied little fold of

established truths. Poor Von Osten protested in vain: no one listened to him; the verdict was given. He never

recovered from this official blow; he became the laughingstock of all those whom he had at first astounded;

and he died, lonely and embittered, on the 29th of June, 1909, at the age of seventyone.

But he left a disciple whose faith had not been shaken by the general defection. A welltodo Elberfeld

manufacturer, Herr Krall, had taken a great interest in Von Osten's labours and, during the latter years of the

old man's life, had eagerly followed and even on occasion directed the education of the wonderful stallion.

Von Osten left Kluge Hans to him by will; on his own side, Krall had bought two Arab stallions, Mohammed

and Zarif whose prowess soon surpassed that of the pioneer. The whole question was reopened, events took a

vigorous and decisive turn and, instead of a weary, eccentric old man, discouraged almost to sullenness and

with no weapons for the struggle, the critics of the miracle found themselves faced by a new adversary,

young and highspirited, endowed with remarkable scientific instinct, quickwitted, scholarly and well able

His educational methods also differ materially from Von Osten's. It was a strange thing, but deep down in the

rather queer, crossgrained soul of the old enthusiast there had grown up gradually a sort of hatred for his

fourlegged pupil. He felt the stallion's proud and nervous will resisting his with an obstinacy which he

qualified as diabolical. They stood up to each other like two enemies: and the lessons almost assumed the

form of a tragic and secret struggle in which the animal's soul rebelled against man's domination.

Krall, on the other hand, adores his pupils; and this atmosphere of affection has in a manner of speaking

humanized them. There are no longer those sudden movements of wild panic which reveal the ancestral dread

of man in the quietest and besttrained horse. He talks to them long and tenderly, as a father might talk to his

children; and we have the strange feeling that they listen to all that he says and understand it. If they appear

not to grasp an explanation or a demonstration, he will begin it all over again, analyze it, paraphrase it ten

times in succession, with the patience of a mother. And so their progress has been incomparably swifter and

more astounding than that of old Hans. Within a fortnight of the first lesson Mohammed did simple little

addition and subtraction sums quite correctly. He had learnt to distinguish the tens from the units, striking the

latter with his right foot and the former with his left. He knew the meaning of the symbols plus and minus.

Four days later, he was beginning multiplication and division. In four months' time, he knew how to extract

square and cubic roots; and, soon after, he learnt to spell and read by means of the conventional alphabet

This alphabet, at the first glance, seems rather complicated. For that matter, it is only a makeshift; but how

could one find anything better? The unfortunate horse, who is almost voiceless, has only one way in which to

express himself: a clumsy hoof, which was not created to put thought into words. It became necessary,

therefore, to contrive, as in tableturning, a special alphabet, in which each letter is designated by a certain

number of blows struck by the right foot and the left. Here is the copy handed to visitors at Elberfeld to

1 2 3 4 5 6 10 E N R S M C 20 A H L T A: CH 30 I D G W J SCH 40 O B F K O: 50 U V Z P U:

To mark the letter E, for instance, the stallion will strike one blow with his left foot and one with his right; for

the letter L, two blows with his left foot and three with his right; and so on. The horses have this alphabet so

deeply imprinted in their memory that, practically speaking, they never make a mistake; and they strike their

hoofs so quickly, one after the other, that at first one has some difficulty in following them.

Mohammed and Zariffor Zarif's progress was almost equal to that of his fellowpupil, though he seems a

little less gifted from the standpoint of higher mathematicsMohammed and Zarif in this way reproduce the

words spoken in their presence, spell the names of their visitors, reply to questions put to them and

sometimes make little observations, little personal and spontaneous reflections to which we shall return

presently. They have created for their own use an inconceivably fantastic and phonetic system of spelling

which they stubbornly refuse to relinquish and which often makes their writing rather difficult to read.

Deeming most of the vowels useless, they keep almost exclusively to the consonants; thus Zucker, for

I will not set forth in detail the many different proofs of intelligence lavished by the singular inhabitants of

this strange stable. They are not only firstclass calculators, for whom the most repellent fractions and roots

possess hardly any secrets: they distinguish sounds, colours, and scents, read the time on the face of a watch,

Following on these more and more conclusive experiments and especially after the publication of Krall's

great work, Denkende Tiere, a model of precision and arrangement, men's minds were faced with clear and

definite problem which, this time, could not be challenged. Scientific committees followed one another at

Elberfeld; and their reports became legion. Learned men of every countryincluding Dr. Edinger, the

eminent Frankfort neurologist; Professors Dr. H. Kraemer and H. E. Ziegler, of Stuttgart; Dr. Paul Saresin, of

Bale; Professor Ostwald, of Berlin; Professor A. Beredka, of the Pasteur Institute; Dr. E. Clarapede, of the

university of Geneva; Professor Schoeller and Professor Gehrke, the natural philosopher, of Berlin; Professor

Goldstein, of Darmstadt; Professor von ButtelReepen, of Oldenburg; Professor William Mackenzie, of

Genoa; Professor R. Assagioli, of Florence; Dr. Hartkopf, of Cologne; Dr. Freudenberg, of Brussels; Dr.

Ferrari, of Bologna, etc., etc., for the list is lengthening dailycame to study on the spot the inexplicable

phenomenon which Dr. Clarapede proclaims to be "the most sensational event that has ever happened in the

With the exception of two or three sceptics or convinced misoneists and of those who made too short a stay at

Elberfeld, all were unanimous in recognizing that the facts were as stated and that the experiments were

conducted with absolute fairness. Disagreement begins only when it becomes a matter of commenting on

To complete this short preamble, it is right to add that, for some time past, the case of the Elberfeld horses no

longer stands quite alone. There exists at Mannheim a dog of a rather doubtful breed who performs almost the

same feats as his equine rivals. He is less advanced than they in arithmetic, but does little additions,

subtractions and multiplications of one or two figures correctly. He reads and writes by tapping with his paw,

in accordance with an alphabet which, it appears, he has thought out for himself; and his spelling also is

simplified and phoneticized to the utmost. He distinguishes the colour in a bunch of flowers, counts the

money in a purse and separates the marks from the pfennigs. He knows how to seek and find words to define

the object or the picture placed before him. You show him, for instance, a bouquet in a vase and ask him what

And his answers are often curiously spontaneous and original. In the course of a readingexercise in which

the word Herbst, autumn, chanced to attract attention, Professor William Mackenzie asked him if he could

On the same occasion, the same professor, without knowing what it represented, held out to him a card

"Is there anything you would like me to do for you?" a lady of his acquaintance asked, one day.

Rolf, whose fame is comparatively young, has not yet, like his illustrious rivals of the Rhine Province, been

the object of minute enquiries and copious and innumerable reports. But the incidents which I have just

mentioned and which are vouched for by such men as Professor Mackenzie and M. Duchatel, the learned and

clearsighted vicepresident of the Societe Universelle d'Etudes Psychiques,[1] who went to Mannheim for

the express purpose of studying them, appear to be no more controvertible than the Elbenfeld occurrences, of

which they are a sort of replica or echo. It is not unusual to find these coincidences amongst abnormal

phenomena. They spring up simultaneously in different quarters of the globe, correspond with one another

and multiply as though in obedience to a word of command. It is probable therefore that we shall see still

more manifestations of the same class. One might almost say that a new spirit is passing over the world and,

after awakening in man forces whereof he was not aware, is now reaching other creatures who with us inhabit

this mysterious earth, on which they live, suffer and die, as we do, without knowing why.

[1] See the interesting lecture by M. Edmond Duchatel, published in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques,

I have not been to Mannheim, but I made my pilgrimage to Elberfeld and stayed long enough in the town to

carry away with me the conviction shared by all those who have undertaken the journey.

A few months ago, Herr Krall, whom I had promised the year before that I would come and see his wonderful

horses, was kind enough to repeat his invitation in a more pressing fashion, adding that his stable would

perhaps be broken up after the 15th of September and that, in any case, be would be obliged, by his doctor's

orders, to interrupt for an indefinite period a course of training which he found exceedingly fatiguing.

I at once left for Elberfeld, which, as everybody knows, is an important manufacturingtown in Rhenish

Prussia and is, in fact, more quaint, pleasing and picturesque than one might expect. I had long since read

everything that had been published on the question; and I was wholly persuaded of the genuineness of the

incidents. Indeed it would be difficult to have any doubts after the repeated and unremitting supervision and

verification to which the experiments are subjected, a supervision which is of the most rigorous type, often

hostile and almost illmannered. As for their interpretation, I was convinced that telepathy, that is to say, the

transmission of thought from one subconsciousness to another, remained, however strange it might be in this

new region, the only acceptable theory; and this in spite of certain circumstances that seemed plainly to

exclude it. In default of telepathy proper, I inclined toward the mediumistic or subliminal theory, which was

very ably outlined by M. de Vesmes in a remarkable lecture delivered, on the 22nd of December, 1912,

before the Societe Universelle d'Etudes Psychiques. It is true that telepathy, especially when carried to its

extreme limits, appeals above all to the subliminal forces, so that the two theories overlap at more than one

point and it is often difficult to make out where the first ends and the second begins. But this discussion will

I found Herr Krall in his goldsmith's shop, a sort of palace of Golconda, streaming and glittering with the

most precious pearls and stones on earth. Herr Krall, it is well to remember, in order to dispel any suspicion

of pecuniary interest, is a rich manufacturer whose family for three generations, from father to son, have

conducted one of the most important jewelry businesses in Germany. His researches, so far from bringing

him the least profit, cost him a great deal of money, take up all his leisure and some part of the time which he

would otherwise devote to his business and, as usually happens, procure him from his fellow citizens and

from not a few scientific men more annoyance, unfair criticism and sarcasm than consideration or gratitude.

His work is preeminently the disinterested and thankless task of the apostle and pioneer.

For the rest, Herr Kraft, though his faith is active, zealous and infectious, has nothing in common with the

visionaries or illuminati. He is a man of about fifty, vigorous, alert and enthusiastic, but at the same time

wellbalanced; accesible to every idea and even to every dream, yet practical and methodical, with a ballast

of the most invincible commonsense. He inspires from the outset that fine confidence, frank and

unrestrained, which instantly disperses the instinctive doubt, the strange uneasiness and the veiled suspicion

that generally separate two people who meet for the first time; and one welcomes in him, from the very

depths of one's being, the honest man, the staunch friend whom one can trust and whom one is sorry not to

We go together through the streets and along the bustling quays of Elberfeld to the stable, situated at a few

hundred steps from the shop. The horses are taking the air outside the doors of their boxes, in the yard shaded

by a limetree. There are four of them: Mohammed, the most intelligent, the most gifted of them all, the great

mathematician of the party; his double, Zarif, a little less advanced, less tractable, craftier, but at the same

time more fanciful, more spontaneous and capable of occasional disconcerting sallies; next, Hanschen, a little

Shetland pony, hardly bigger than a Newfoundland dog, the streeturchin of the band, always quivering with

excitement, roguish, flighty, uncertain and passionate, but ready in a moment to work you out the most

difficult addition and multiplication sums with a furious scrape of the hoof; and lastly the latest arrival, the

plump and placid Berto, an imposing black stallion, quite blind and lacking the sense of smell. He has been

only a few months at school and is still, so to speak, in the preparatory class, but already doesa little more

clumsily, but more good humouredly and conscientiouslysmall addition and subtraction sums quite as well

In a corner, Kama, a young elephant two or three years old, about the size of an outrageously "blown"

donkey, rolls his mischievous and almost knavish eye, under the shelter of his wide ears, each resembling a

great rhubarbleaf, and with his stealthy, insinuating trunk carefully picks up whatever he considers fit to eat,

that is to say, pretty well everything that lies about on the stones. Great things were hoped of him, but

hitherto he has disappointed all expectations: he is the dunce of the establishment. Perhaps he is too young

still: his little elephantsoul no doubt resembles that of a suckingbabe which, in the place of its feet and

hands, plays with the stupendous nose that must first explore and question the universe. It is impossible to

grip his attention; and, when they set out before him his alphabet of movable letters, instead of naming those

which are pointed out to him he applies himself to pulling them off their stems, in order to swallow them

surreptitiously. He has disheartened his kind master, who, pending the coming of the reason and wisdom

promised by the proboscidian legends, leaves him in a contented state of ignorance made more blissful by an

But I ask to see the great pioneer, Kluge Hans, Clever Hans. He is still alive. He is old: he must be sixteen or

seventeen; but his old age, alas, is not exempt from the baneful troubles from which men themselves suffer in

their decline! Hans has turned out badly, it appears, and is never mentioned save in ambiguous terms. An

imprudent or vindictive groom, I forget which, having introduced a mare into the yard, Hans the Pure, who

till then had led an austere and monkish existence, vowed to celibacy, science and the chaste delights of

figures, Hans the Irreproachable incontinently lost his head and cut himself open on the hangingrail of his

stall. They had to force back his intestines and sew up his belly. He is now rusticating miserably in a meadow

outside the town. So true it is that a life cannot be judged except at its close and that we are sure of nothing

Before the sitting begins, while the master is making his morning inspection, I go up to Muhamed, speak to

him and pat him, looking straight into his eyes meanwhile in order to catch a sign of his genius. The

handsome creature, wellbred and in hard condition, is as calm and trusting as a dog; he shows himself

excessively gracious and friendly and tries to give me some huge licks and mighty kisses which I do my best

to avoid because they are a little unexpected and overdemonstrative. The expression of his limpid

antelopeeyes is deep, serious and remote, but it differs in no wise from that of his brothers who, for

thousands of years, have seen nothing but brutality and ingratitude in man. If we were able to read anything

there, it would not be that insufficient and vain little effort which we call thought, but rather an indefinable,

vast anxiety, a teardimmed regret for the boundless, streamcrossed plains where his sires sported at will

before they knew man's yoke. In any case, to see him thus fastened by a halter to the stabledoor, beating off

the flies and absently pawing the cobbles, Muhamed is nothing more than a welltrained horse who seems to

be waiting for his saddle or harness and who hide, his new secret as profoundly as all the others which nature

But they are summoning me to take my place in the stable where the lessons are given. It is a small room,

empty and bare, with peatmoss litter bedding and whitewashed walls. The horse is separated from the

people present by breasthigh wooden partitions. Opposite the fourlegged scholar is a blackboard, nailed

to the wall; and on one side a cornbin which forms a seat for the spectators. Muhamed is led in. Krall, who

is a little nervous, makes no secret of his uneasiness. His horses are fickle animals, uncertain, capricious and

extremely sensitive. A trifle disturbs them, confuses them, puts them off. At such times, threats, prayers and

even the irresistible charm of carrots and good ryebread are useless. They obstinately refuse to do any work

and they answer at random. Everything depends on a whim, the state of the weather, the morning meal or the

impression which the visitor makes upon them. Still, Krall seems to know, by certain imperceptible signs,

that this is not going to be a bad day. Muhamed quivered with excitement, snorts loudly through his nostrils,

utters a series of indistinct little whinnyings: excellent symptoms, it appears. I take my seat on the cornbin.

The master, standing beside the blackboard, chalk in hand, introduces me to Muhamed in due form, as to a

"Muhamed, attention! This is your uncle"pointing to me"who has come all the way to honour you with

a visit. Mind you don't disappoint him. His name is Maeterlinck." Krall pronounced the first syllable

Germanfashion: Mah. "You understand: Maeterlinck. Now show him that you know your letters and that

you can spell a name correctly, like a clever boy. Go ahead, we're listening." Muhamed gives a short neigh

and, on the small, movable board at his feet, strikes first with his right hoof and then with his left the number

of blows which correspond with the letter M in the conventional alphabet used by the horses. Then, one after

the other, without stopping or hesitating, he marks the letters A D R L I N S H, representing the unexpected

aspect which my humble name assumes in the equine mind and phonetics. His attention is called to the fact

that there is a mistake. He readily agrees and replaces the S H by a G and then the G by a K. They insist that

he must put a T instead of the D; but Muhamed, content with his work, shakes his head to say no and refuses

I assure you that the first shock is rather disturbing, however much one expected it. I am quite aware that,

when one describes these things, one is taken for a dupe too readily dazzled by the doubtless childish illusion

of an ingeniously contrived scene. But what contrivances, what illusions have we here? Do they lie in the

spoken word? Why, to admit that the horse understands and translates his master's words is just to accept the

most extraordinary part of the phenomenon! Is it a case of surreptitious touches or conventional signs?

However simpleminded one may be, one would nevertheless notice them more easily than a horse, even a

horse of genius. Krall never lays a hand on the animal; he moves all round the little table, which contains no

appliances of any sort; for the most part, he stands behind the horse which is unable to see him, or comes and

sits beside his guest on the innocuous cornbin, busying himself, while lecturing his pupil, in writing up the

minutes of the lesson. He also welcomes with the most serene readiness any restrictions or tests which you

propose. I assure you that the thing itself is much simple, and clearer than the suspicions of the armchair

critics and that the most distrustful mind world not entertain the faintest idea of fraud in the frank, wholesome

"But," some one might have said, "Krall, who knew that you were coming to Elberfeld, had of course

thoroughly rehearsed his little exercise in spelling, which apparently is only an exercise in memory."

For conscience' sake, though I did not look upon the objection as serious, I submitted it to Krall, who at once

said: "Try it for yourself. Dictate to the horse any German word of two or three syllables, emphasizing it

Behold Muhamed and me by ourselves. I confess that I am a little frightened. I have many a time felt less

uncomfortable in the presence of the great ones or the kings of the earth. Whom am I dealing with exactly?

However, I summon my courage and speak aloud the first word that occurs to me, the name of the hotel at

which I am staying: Weidenhof. At first, Muhamed, who seems a little puzzled by his master's absence,

appears not to hear me and does not even deign to notice that I am there. But I repeat eagerly, in varying

At last, my mysterious companion suddenly makes up his mind to lend me his ears and straightway blithely

raps out the following letters, which I write down on the blackboard as they come:

It is a magnificent specimen of equine spelling! Triumphant and bewildered, I call in friend Krall, who,

accustomed as he is to the prodigy, thinks it quite natural, but knits his brows:

"What's this, Muhamed? You've made a mistake again. It's an F you want at the end of the word, not a Z. Just

And the docile Muhamed, recognizing his blunder, gives the three blows with his right hoof, followed by the

four blows with his left, which represent the most unexceptionable F that one could ask for.

Observe, by the way, the logic of his phonetic writing: contrary to his habit, he strikes the mute E after the W,

because it is indispensable; but, finding it included in the D, he considers it superfluous and suppresses it with

You rub your eyes, question yourself, ask yourself in the presence of what humanized phenomenon, of what

unknown force, of what new creature you stand. Was all this what they hid in their eyes, those silent brothers

of ours? You blush at arm's long injustice. You look around you for some sort of trace, obvious or subtle, of

the mystery. You feel yourself attacked in your innermost citadel, where you held yourself most certain and

most impregnable. You have felt a breath from the abyss upon your face. You would not be more astonished

if you suddenly heard the voice of the dead. But the most astonishing thing is that you are not astonished for

long. We all, unknown to ourselves, live in the expectation of the extraordinary; and, when it comes, it moves

us much less than did the expectation. It is as though a sort of higher instinct, which knows everything and is

not ignorant of the miracles that hang over our heads, were reassuring us in advance and helping us to make

an easy entrance into the regions of the supernatural. There is nothing to which we grow accustomed more

readily than to the marvellous; and it is only afterwards, upon reflection, that our intelligence, which knows

But Muhamed gives unmistakable signs of impatience to show that he has had enough of spelling.

Thereupon, as a diversion and a reward, his kind master suggests the extraction of a few square and cubic

roots. Muhamed appears delighted: these are his favourite problems: for he takes less interest than formerly in

the most difficult multiplications and divisions. He doubtless thinks them beneath him.

Krall therefore writes on the blackboard various numbers of which I did not take note. Moreover, as nobody

now contests the fact that the horse works them with ease, it would hardly be interesting to reproduce here

several rather grim problems of which numerous variants will be found in the accounts and reports of

experiments signed by Drs. Mackenzie and Hartkopff, by Overbeck, Clarapede and many others. What

strikes one particularly is the facility, the quickness, I was almost saying the joyous carelessness with which

the strange mathematician gives the answers. The last figure is hardly chalked upon the board before the right

hoof is striking off the units, followed immediately by the left hoof marking the tens. There is not a sign of

attention or reflection; one is not even aware of the exact moment at which the horse looks at the problem:

and the answer seems to spring automatically from an invisible intelligence. Mistakes are rare or frequent

according as it happens to be a good or bad day with the horse; but, when he is told of them, he nearly always

corrects them. Not unseldom, the number is reversed: 47, for instance, becomes 74; but he puts it right

I am manifestly dumbfounded; but perhaps these problems are prepared beforehand? If they were, it would be

very extraordinary, but yet less surprising than their actual solution. Krall does not read this suspicion in my

eyes, because they do not show it; nevertheless, to remove the least shade of it, he asks me to write a number

I must here confess the humiliating ignorance that is the disgrace of my life. I have not the faintest idea of the

mysteries concealed within these recondite and complicated operations. I did my humanities like everybody

else; but, after crossing the useful and familiar frontiers of multiplication and division I found it impossible to

advance any farther into the desolate regions, bristling with figures, where the square and cubic roots hold

sway, together with all sorts of other monstrous powers, without shapes or faces, which inspired me with

invincible terror. All the persecutions of my excellent instructors wore themselves out against a dead wall of

stolidity. Successively disheartened, they left me to my dismal ignorance, prophesying a most dreary future

for me, haunted with bitter regrets. I must say that, until now, I had scarcely experienced the effects of these

gloomy predictions; but the hour has come for me to expiate the sins of my youth. Nevertheless, I put a good

face upon it: and, taking at random the first figures that suggest themselves to my mind, I boldly write on the

blackboard an enormous and most daring number. Muhamed remains motionless. Krall speaks to him

sharply, telling him to hurry up. Muhamed lifts his right hoof, but does not let it fall. Krall loses patience,

lavishes prayers, promises and threats; the hoof remains poised, as though to bear witness to good intentions

that cannot be carried out. Then my host turns round, looks at the problem and asks me:

Exact? What does he mean? Are there roots which. . .? But I dare not go on: my shameful ignorance suddenly

flashes before my eyes. Krall smiles indulgently and, without making any attempt to supplement an education

which is too much in arrears to allow of the slightest hope, laboriously works out the problem and declares

Muhamed receives our thanks in the form of a lordly portion of carrots; and a pupil is introduced whose

attainments do not tower so high above mine: Hanschen, the little pony, quick and lively as a big rat. Like

me, he has never gone beyond elementary arithmetic: and so we shall understand each other better and meet

Krall asks me for two numbers to multiply. I give him 63 X 7. He does the sum and writes the product on the

board, followed by the sign of division: 441 / 7. Instantly Hanschen, with a celerity difficult to follow, gives

three blows, or rather three violent scrapes with his right hoof and six with his left, which makes 63, for we

must not forget that in German they say not sixtythree, but threeandsixty. We congratulate him; and, to

evince his satisfaction, he nimbly reverses the number by marking 36 and then puts it right again by scraping

63. He is evidently enjoying himself and juggling with the figures. And additions, subtractions,

multiplications and divisions follow one after the other, with figures supplied by myself, so as to remove any

idea of collusion. Hanschen seldom blunders; and, when he does, we receive a very clear impression that his

mistake is voluntary: he is like a mischievous schoolboy playing a practical joke upon his master. The

solutions fall thick as hail upon the little springboard; the correct answer is released by the question as

though you were pressing the button of an electric push. The pony's flippancy is as surprising as his skill. But

in this unruly flippancy, in this hastiness which seems inattentive there is nevertheless a fixed and permanent

idea. Hanschen paws the ground, kicks, prances, tosses his head, looks as if he cannot keep still, but never

leaves his springboard. Is he interested in the problems, does he enjoy them? It is impossible to say; but he

certainly has the appearance of one accomplishing a duty or a piece of work which we do not discuss, which

But the lesson suddenly ends with a joke carried rather too far by the pupil, who catches his good master by

the seat of his trousers, into which he plants disrespectful teeth. He is severely reprimanded, deprived of his

Next comes Bette, who is like a big, sleek Norman horse. He makes the calm, dignified, peaceful entrance of

a blind giant. His large, dark, brilliant eyes are quite dead, deprived of any reflex power. He feels about with

his hoof for the board on which he is to rap his answers. He has not yet gone beyond the rudiments of

mathematics; and the early part of his education was particularly difficult. They managed to make him

understand the value and meaning of the numbers and of the addition and multiplicationsigns by means of

little taps on his sides. Krall speaks to him as a father might speak to the youngest of his sons. He explains to

him fondly the easy sums which I suggest his doing: two plus three, eight minus four, four times three; he

"Mind! It's not plus three or minus three this time, but four multiplied by three!"

Berto hardly ever makes a mistake. When he does not understand the question, he waits for it to be written

with the finger on his side; and the careful way in which he works it out like some backward and afflicted

child is an infinitely pathetic sight. He is much more zealous and conscientious than his fellowpupils; and

we feel that, in the darkness wherein he dwells, this work is, next to his meals, the only spark of light and

interest in his existence. He will certainly never rival Muhamed, for instance, who is the arithmetical prodigy,

the Inaudi, of horses; but he is a valuable and living proof that the theory of unconscious and imperceptible

signs, the only one which the German theorists have hitherto seriously considered, is now clearly untenable.

I have not yet spoken of Zarif. He is not in the best of tempers; and besides, in arithmetic, he is only a less

learned and more capricious Muhamed. He answers most of the questions at random, stubbornly raising his

foot and declining to lower it, so as clearly to mark his disapproval; but he solves the last problem correctly

when he is promised a panful of carrots and no more lessons for that morning. The groom enters to lead him

away and makes some movement or other at which the horse starts, rears and shies.

And the expression assumes a singular meaning and importance in this hybrid atmosphere, steeped in an

But it is halfpast one, the sacred German dinnerhour. The horses are taken back to their racks and the men

"It is a pity that you did not see Zarif in one of his better moods. He is sometimes more startling than

Muhamed and has given me two or three surprises that seem incredible. One morning, for instance, I came to

the stable and was preparing to give him his lesson in arithmetic. He was no sooner in front of the

springboard than he began to stamp with his foot. I left him alone and was astounded to hear a whole

sentence, an absolutely human sentence, come letter by letter from his hoof: 'Albert has beaten Hanschen,'

was what he said to me that day. Another time, I wrote down from his dictation, 'Hanschen has bitten Kama.'

Like a child seeing its father after an absence, he felt the need to inform me of the little doings of the stable;

Krall, for that matter, living in the midst of his miracle, seems to think this quite natural and almost

inevitable. I, who have been immersed in it for only a few hours, accept it almost as calmly as he does. I

believe without hesitation what he tells me; and, in the presence of this phenomenon which, for the first time

in man's existence, gives us a sentence that has not sprung from a human brain, I ask myself whither we are

After dinner, the experiments begin again, for my host is untiring. First of all, pointing to me, he asks

Muhamed if he remembers what his uncle's name is. The horse raps out an H. Krall is astonished and utters

The horse raps out an E. Krall becomes a little impatient: he threatens, he implores, he promises in turn,

carrots and the direst punishments, such as sending for Albert, the groom, who, on special occasions, recalls

idle and inattentive pupils to a sense of duty and decorum, for Krall himself never chastises his horses, lest he

should lose their friendship or their confidence. So he continues his reproaches:

"Come now, are you going to be more careful and not rap out your letters anyhow?"

Muhamed obstinately goes his own way and strikes an R. Then Krall's open face lights up:

"He's right," he says. "You understand: H E R, standing for Herr. He wanted to give you the title to which

every man wearing a top hat or a bowler has the right. He does it only very rarely and I had forgotten all

about it. He probably heard me call you Herr Maeterlinck and wanted to get it perfectly. This special

politeness and this excess of zeal augur a particularly good lesson. You've done very well, Mohammed, my

But Mohammed, after giving his master a hearty kiss, still seems to be hesitating. Then Krall, to put him on

the right track observes that the first letter of my name is the same as the first letter of his own. Mohammed

strikes a K, evidently thinking of his master's name. At last, Krall draws a big M on the blackboard,

whereupon the horse, like one suddenly remembering a word which he could not think of, raps out, one after

the other and without stopping, the letters M A Z R L K, which, stripped of useless vowels, represent the

curious corruption which my name has undergone, since the morning, in a brain that is not a human brain. He

is told that this is not correct. He seems to agree, gropes about a little and writes, M A R Z L E G K. Krall

repeats my name and asks which is the first letter to be altered. The stallion marks an R.

"In the third," replies the horse; and the corrections continue until my patronomic comes out of its strange

And the spelling, the questioning, the sums, the problems are resumed and follow upon one another, as

wonderful, as bewildering as before, but already a little dimmed by familiarity, like any other prolonged

miracle. It is important, besides, to notice that the instances which I have given are not to be classed among

the most remarkable feats of our magic horses. Today's is a good ordinary lesson, a respectable lesson, not

illumined by flashes of genius. But in the presence of other witnesses the horses performed more startling

exploits which broke down even more decisively the barrier, which is undoubtedly an imaginary one,

between animal and human nature. One day, for instance, Zarif; the scamp of the party, suddenly stopped in

They recognize and identify pictures shown to them, distinguish colours and scents. I have made a point of

stating only what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears; and I declare that I have done so with

the same scrupulous accuracy as though I were reporting a criminal trial in which a man's life depended on

But I was practically convinced of the truth of the incidents before going to Elberfeld; and it was not to check

them that I made the journey. I was anxious to make certain if the telepathic theory, which was the only one

that I considered admissible, would withstand the tests which I intended to apply to it. I opened my mind on

the subject to Krall, who at first did not quite grasp what I was asking. Like most men who have not made a

special study of the questions, he imagined that telepathy meant above all a deliberate and conscious

transmission of thought; and he assured me that he never made any effort to transmit his and that, for the

most part, the horses gave a reply which was the exact opposite of what he was expecting. I did not doubt this

for a moment; in fact, direct and deliberate transmission of thought is, even among men, a very rare, difficult

and uncertain, phenomenon, whereas involuntary, unpremeditated and unsuspected communications between

one subconsciousness and another can no longer be denied except by those who of set purpose ignore studies

and experiments that are within the reach of any one who will take the trouble to engage in them. I was

persuaded therefore that the horses acted exactly like the "tippingtables" which simply translate the

subliminal ideas of one or another of those present by the aid of conventional little taps. When all is said, it is

much less surprising to see a horse than a table lift its foot and much more natural that the living substance of

an animal rather than the inert matter of a thing should be sensitive and susceptible to the mysterious

influence of a medium. I knew quite well that experiments had been made in order to eliminate this theory.

People, for instance, prepared a certain number of questions and put them in sealed envelopes. Then, on

entering the presence of the horse, they would take one of the envelopes at random, open it and write down

the problem on the blackboard; and Mohammed or Zarif would answer with the same facility and the same

readiness as though the solution had been known to all the onlookers. But was it really unknown to their

subconsciousness? Who could say for certain? Tests of this kind require extraordinary precautions and a

special dexterity; for the action of the subconsciousness is so subtle, takes such unexpected turns, delves in

the museum of so many forgotten treasures and operates at such distances that one is never sure of escaping

it. Were those precautions taken? I was not convinced that they were; and, without pretending to decide the

question, I said to myself that my blissful ignorance of mathematics might perhaps be of service in shedding

For this ignorance, however deplorable from other points of view, gave me a rare advantage in this case. It

was in fact extremely unlikely that my subliminal consciousness, which had never known what a cubic root

was or the root of any other power, could help the horse. I therefore took from a table a list containing several

problems, all different and all equally unpleasant looking, covered up the solutions, asked Krall to leave the

stable and, when alone with Zarif, copied out one of them on the blackboard. In order not to overload these

pages with details which would only be a repetition of one another, I will at once say that none of the

antitelepathic tests succeeded that day. It was the end of the lesson and late in the afternoon; the horses were

tired and irritable; and, whether Krall was there or not, whether the problem was elementary or difficult, they

gave only absurd replies, wilfully "putting their foot in it," as one might say with very good reason. But, next

morning, on resuming their task, when I proceeded as described above, Mohammed and Zarif, doubtless in a

better temper and already more accustomed to their new examiner, gave in rapid succession correct answers

to nearly every problem set them. I am bound in fairness to say that there was no appreciable difference

between these results and those which are obtained in the presence of Krall or other onlookers who,

I next thought of another and much simpler test, but one which, by virtue of its very simplicity, could not be

exposed to any elaborate and farfetched suspicions. I saw on one of the shelves in the stable a panel of cards,

about the size of an octavo volume, each bearing an arabic numeral on one of its sides. I once more asked my

good friend Krall, whose courtesy is inexhaustible, to leave me alone with his pupil. I then shuffled the cards

and put three of them in a row on the springboard in front of the horse, without looking at them myself.

There was therefore, at that moment, not a human soul on earth who knew the figures spread at the feet of my

companion, this creature so full of mystery that already I no longer dare call him an animal. Without

hesitation and unasked, he rapped out correctly the number formed by the cards. The experiment succeeded,

as often as I cared to try it, with Hanschen, Mohammed and Zarif alike. Mohammed did even more: as each

figure was of a different colour, I asked him to tell me the colourof which I myself was absolutely

ignorantof the first letter on the right. With the aid of the conventional alphabet, he replied that it was blue,

which proved to be the case. Of course, I ought to have multiplied these experiments and made them more

exhaustive and complicated by combining, with the aid of the cards and under the same conditions, exercises

in multiplication, division and the extracting of roots. I had not the time; but, a few days after I left, the

subject was resumed and completed by Dr. H. Hamel. I will sum up his report of the experiments: the doctor,

alone in the stable with the home (Krall was away, travelling), puts down on the blackboard the sign + and

then places before and after this sign, without looking at either of them, a card marked with a figure which he

does not know. He next asks Mohammed to add up the two numbers. Mohammed at first gives a few heedless

taps with his hoof. He is called to order and requested to be serious and to attend. He then gives fifteen

distinct taps. The doctor next replaces the sign + by X and, again without looking at them, places two cards

on the blackboard and asks the horse not to add up the two figures this time, but to multiply them.

Mohammed taps out, "27," which is right, for the blackboard says, "9 X 3." The same success follows with

other multiplication sums: 9 X 2, 8 X 6. Then the doctor takes from an envelope a problem of which he does

not know the solution: fourth root of 7890481. Mohammed replies, "53." The doctor looks at the back of the

Does this mean that every risk of telepathy is done away with? It would perhaps be rash to make a categorical

assertion. The power and extent of telepathy are as yet, we cannot too often repeat, indefinite, indiscernible,

untraceable and unlimited. We have but quite lately discovered it, we know only that its existence can no

longer be denied; but, as for all the rest, we are at much the same stage as that whereat Galvani was when he

gave life to the muscles of his dead frogs with two little plates of metal which roused the jeers of the

scientists of his time, but contained the germ of all the wonders, of electricity.

Nevertheless, as regards telepathy in the sense in which we understand and know it today, my mind is made

up. I am persuaded that it is not in this direction that we must seek for an explanation of the phenomenon; or,

if we are determined to find it there, the explanation becomes complicated with so many subsidiary mysteries

that it is better to accept the prodigy as it stands, in its original obscurity and simplicity. When, for instance, I

was copying out one of the grisly problems which I have mentioned, it is quite certain that my conscious

intelligence could make neither head nor tail of it. I did not so much as know what it meant or whether the

exponent 3. 4. 5 called for a multiplication, a division or some other mathematical operation which I did not

even try to imagine; and, rack MY memory as I may, I cannot remember any moment in my life when I knew

more about it than I do now. We should therefore have to admit that MY subliminal self is a born

mathematician, quick, infallible and endowed with boundless learning. It is possible and I feel a certain pride

at the thought. But the theory simply shifts the miracle by making it pass from the horse's soul to mine; and

the miracle becomes no clearer by the transfer, which, for that matter, does not sound probable. I need hardly

add that, a fortiori, Dr. Hamel's experiments and many others which I have not here the space to describe

Let us see how those who have interested themselves in these extraordinary manifestations have attempted to

As we go along, we will just shear through the feeble undergrowth of childish theories. I shall not, therefore,

linger over the suggestions of cheating, of manifest signs addressed to the eye or ear, of electrical installations

that are supposed to control the answers, nor other idle tales of an excessively clumsy character. To realize

their inexcusable inanity we have but to spend a few minutes in the honest Elberfeld stable.

At the beginning of this essay, I mentioned the attack made by Herr Pfungst. Herr Pfungst, the reader will

remember, claims to prove that all the horse's replies are determined by imperceptible and probably

unconscious movement on the part of the person putting the questions. This interpretation, which falls to the

ground, like all the others, in the face of the actual facts, would not deserve serious discussion, were it not

that the Berlin psychologist's report created an immense sensation some years ago and has succeeded in

intimidating the greater part of the official German scientific world to this day. It is true that the report in

question is a monument of useless pedantry, but we are none the less bound to admit that, such as it was, it

annihilated poor Von Oaten, who, being no controversialist and not knowing how to proclaim the truth which

To make an end of this cumbrous and puerile theory, is it necessary to emphasize again that experiments in

which the animal does not see the questioner are as regularly successful as the others? Krall, if you ask him,

will stand behind the horse, will speak from the end of the room, will leave the stable altogether; and the

results are just the same. They are the same again when the tests are made in the dark or when the animal's

head is covered with a closefitting hood. They do not vary either in the case of Berto, who is stoneblind, or

when any other person whatever sets the problem in Krall's absence. Will it be maintained that this outsider

or that stranger is acquainted beforehand with the imperceptible signs that are to dictate the solution which he

But what is the use of prolonging this fight against a cloud of smoke? None of it can bear examination; and it

calls for a genuine effort of the will to set one's self seriously to refute such pitiful objections.

On the ground thus cleared and at the portal of this unlookedfor riddle, which comes to disturb our peace in

a region which we thought to be finally explored and conquered, there are only two ways, if not of

explaining, at least of contemplating the phenomenon: to admit purely and simply the almost human

intelligence of the horse, or to have recourse to an as yet very vague and indefinite theory which, for lack of a

better designation, we will call the mediumistic or subliminal theory and of which we will strive

presentlyand no doubt vainlyto dispel the grosser darkness. But, whatever interpretation we adopt, we

are bound to recognize that it plunges us into a mystery which is equally profound and equally astonishing on

either side, one directly related to the greatest mysteries that overwhelm us; and it is open to us to accept it

with resignation or rejoicing, according as we prefer to live in a world wherein everything is within the reach

As for Krall, he does not doubt for an instant that his horses solve for themselves, without any assistance,

without any outside influence, simply by their own mental powers, the most arduous problems set them. He is

persuaded that they understand what is said to them and what they say, in short, that their brain and their will

perform exactly the same functions as a human brain and will. It is certain that the facts seem to prove him

right and that his opinion carries way great weight, for, after all, he knows his horses better than any one

does; he has beheld the birth or rather the awakening of that dormant intelligence, even as a mother beholds

the birth or the awakening of intelligence in her child; he has perceived its first gropings, known its first

resistance and its first triumphs; he has watched it taking shape, breaking away and gradually rising to the

point at which it stands today; in a word, he is the father and the principal and sole perpetual witness of the

Yes, but the miracle comes as such a surprise that, the moment we set foot in it, a sort of instinctive

aberration seizes us, refusing to accept the evidence and compelling us to search in every direction to see if

there is not another outlet. Even in the presence of those astounding horses and while they are working before

our eyes, we do not yet sincerely believe that which fills and subdues our gaze. We accept the facts, because

there is no means of escaping them; but we accept them only provisionally and with all reserve, putting off

till later the comfortable explanation which will give us back our familiar, shallow certainties. But the

explanation does not come; there is none in the homely and not very lofty regions wherein we hoped to find

one; there is neither fault nor flaw in the mighty evidence; and nothing delivers us from the mystery.

It must be confessed that this mystery, springing from a point where we least expected to come upon the

unknown, bears enough within itself to scatter all our convictions. Remember that, since man appeared upon

this earth, he has lived among creatures which, from immemorial experience, he thought that he knew as

perfectly as he knows an object fashioned by his hands. Out of these creatures he chose the most docile and,

as he called them, the most intelligent, attaching in this case to the word intelligence a sense so narrow as to

be almost ridiculous. He observed them, scrutinized them, tried them, analyzed them and dissected them in

every imaginable way; and whole lives were devoted to nothing but the study of their habits, their faculties,

their nervous system, their pathology, their psychology, their instincts. All this led to certainties which,

among those supported by our unexplained little existence on an inexplicable planet, would seem to be the

least doubtful, the least subject to revision. There is no disputing, for instance, that the horse is gifted with an

extraordinary memory, that he possesses the sense of direction, that he understands a few signs and even a

few words and that he obeys them. It is equally undeniable that the anthropoid apes are capable of imitating a

great number of our actions and of our attitudes: but it is also manifest that their bewildered and feverish

imagination perceives neither their object nor their scope. As for the dog, the one of all these privileged

animals who lives closest to us, who for thousands and thousands of years has eaten at our table and worked

with us and been our friend, it is manifest that, now and then, we catch a rather uncanny gleam in his deep,

watchful eyes. It is certain that he sometimes wanders in a curious fashion along the mysterious border that

separates our own intelligence from that which we grant to the other creatures inhabiting this earth with us.

But it is no less certain that he has never definitely passed it. We know exactly how far he can go; and we

have invariably found that our efforts, our patience, our encouragement, our passionate appeals, have hitherto

failed to draw him out of the somewhat narrow, darkly enchanted circle wherein nature seems to have

There remains, it is true, the insectworld, in which marvellous things happen. It includes architects,

geometricians, mechanicians, engineers, weavers, physicists, chemists and surgeons who have forestalled

most of our human inventions. I need not here remind the reader of the wasps' and bees' genius for building,

the social and economic organization of the hive and the anthill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' nest and

hanging egg, the odynerus' cell with its neat stacks of game, the sacred beetle's filthy but ingenius ball, the

leafcutter's faultless disks, the bricklaying of the masonbee, the three daggerthrusts which the aphex

administers to the three nervecentres of the cricket, the lancet of the cerceris, who paralyses her victims

without killing them and preserves them for an indefinite period as fresh meat, nor a thousand other features

which it would be impossible to enumerate without recapitulating the whole of Henri Fabre's work and

completely altering the proportions of the present essay. But here such silence and such darkness reign that

we have nothing to hope for. There exists, so to speak, no benchmark, no means of communication between

the world of insects and our own; and we are perhaps less far from grasping and fathoming what takes place

in Saturn or Jupiter than what is enacted in the anthill or the hive. We know absolutely nothing of the

quality, the number, the extent or even the nature of their senses. Many of the great laws on which our life is

based do not exist for them: those, for instance, which govern fluids are completely reversed. They seem to

inhabit our planet, but in reality move in an entirely different world. Understanding nothing of their

intelligence pierced with disconcerting gaps, in which the blindest stupidity suddenly comes and destroys the

ablest and most inspired schemes, we have given the name of instinct to that which we could not apprehend,

postponing our interpretation of a word that touches upon life's most insoluble riddles. There is, therefore,

from the point of view of the intellectual faculties, nothing to be gathered from those extraordinary creatures

who are not, like the other animals, our "lesser brothers," but strangers, aliens from we know not where,

We were at this stage, slumbering peacefully in our longestablished convictions, when a man entered upon

the scene and suddenly showed us that we were wrong and that, for long centuries, we had over looked a

truth which was scarcely even covered with a very thin veil. And the strangest thing is that this astonishing

discovery, is in no wise the natural consequence of a new invention, of processes or methods hitherto

unknown. It owes nothing to the latest acquirements of our knowledge. It springs from the humblest idea

which the most primitive man might have conceived in the first days of the earth's existence. It is simply a

matter of having a little more patience, confidence and respect for all that which shares our lot in a world

whereof we know none of the purposes. It is simply a matter of having a little less pride and of looking a little

more fraternally upon existences that are much more fraternal than we believed. There is no secret about the

almost puerile ingenuousness of Von Osten's methods and Krall's. They start with the principle that the horse

is an ignorant but intelligent child; and they treat him as such. They speak, explain, demonstrate, argue and

mete out rewards or punishments like a schoolmaster addressing little boys of five or six. They begin by

placing a few skittlepins in front of their strange pupil. They count them and make him count them by

alternately lifting and lowering the horse's hoof. He thus obtains his first notion of numbers. They next add

In this way, they explain and teach addition; next, by the reverse process, subtraction, which is followed by

At the beginning, the lessons are extremely laborious and demand an untiring and loving patience, which is

the whole secret of the miracle. But; as soon as the first barrier of darkness is passed, the progress becomes

All this is incontestable; and the facts are there, before which we must need bow. But what upsets all our

convictions or, more correctly, all the prejudices which thousands of years have made as invincible as

axioms, what we do not succeed in understanding is that the horse at once understands what we want of him;

it is that first step, the first tremor of an unexpected intelligence, which suddenly reveals itself as human. At

what precise second did the light appear and was the veil rent under? It is impossible to say; but it is certain

that, at a given moment, without any visible sign to reveal the prodigious inner transformation, the horse acts

and replies as though he suddenly understood the speech of man. What is it that sets the miracle working? We

know that, after a time, the horse associates certain words with certain objects that interest him or with three

or four events whose infinite repetition forms the humble tissue of his daily life. This is only a sort of

mechanical memory which has nothing in common with the most elementary intelligence. But behold, one

fine day, without any perceptible transition, he seems to know the meaning of a host of words which possess

no interest for him; which represent to him no picture, no memory; which he has never had occasion to

connect with any sensation, agreeable or disagreeable. He handles figures, which even to man are nothing but

obscure and abstract ideas. He solves problems that cannot possibly be made objective or concrete. He

reproduces letters which, from his point of view, correspond with nothing actual. He fixes his attention and

makes observations on things or circumstances which in no way affect him, which remain and always will

remain alien and indifferent to him. In a word, he steps out of the narrow ring in which he was made to turn

by hunger and fearwhich have been described as the two great moving powers of all that is not humanto

enter the immense circle in which sensations go on being shed till ideas come into view.

Is it possible to believe that the horses really do what they appear to do? Is there no precedent for the marvel?

Is there no transition between the Elberfeld stallions and the horses which we have known until this day? It is

not easy to answer these questions, for it is only since yesterday that the intellectual powers of our

defenseless brothers have been subjected to strictly scientific experiments. We have, it is true more than one

collection of anecdotes in which the intelligence of animals is lauded to the skies; but we cannot rely upon

these illauthenticated stories. To find genuine and incontestable instances we must have recourse to the

works, rare as yet, of scientific men who have made a special study of the subject. M. HachetSouplet, for

example, the director of the Institut de Psychologie Zoologique, mentions the case of a dog who learnt to

acquire an abstract idea of weight. You put in front of him eight rounded and polished stones, all of exactly

the same size and shape, but of different weights. You tell him to fetch the heaviest or the lightest; he judges

The same writer also tells the story of a parrot to whom he had taught the word "cupboard" by showing him a

little box that could be hung up on the wall at different heights and in which his daily allowance of food was

"I next taught him the names of a number of objects," says M. HachetSouplet, "by holding them out to him.

Among them was a ladder; and I prevailed upon the bird to say, 'Climb,' each time that he saw me mount the

steps. One morning, when the parrot's cage was brought into the laboratory, the cupboard was hanging near

the ceiling, while the little ladder was stowed away in a corner among other objects familiar to the bird. Now

the parrot, every day, when I opened the cupboard, used to scream, 'Cupboard! Cupboard! Cupboard!' with all

his might. My problem was, therefore, this: seeing that the cupboard was out of my reach and that, therefore,

I could not take his food out of it; knowing, on the other hand, that I was able to raise myself above the level

of the floor by climbing the ladder; and having the words 'climb' and 'ladder' at his disposal: would he employ

them to suggest to me the idea of using them in order to reach the cupboard? Greatly excited, the parrot

"And I got no more out of him that day. The next day, the bird, having received nothing but millet, for which

he did not much care, instead of the hempseed contained in the cupboard, was in paroxysms of anger; and,

after he had made numberless attempts to force open his bars, his attention was at last caught by the ladder

We have here, as the author remarks, a marvellous intellectual effort. There is an evident association of ideas;

cause is linked with effect; and examples such as this lesson appreciably the distance separating our learned

horses from their less celebrated brethren. We must admit, however, that this intellectual effort, if we

observe, animals a little carefully, is much less uncommon than we think. It surprises us in this case because a

special and, when all is said, purely mechanical arrangement of the parrot's organ gives him a human voice.

At every moment, I find in my own dog associations of ideas no less evident and often more complex. For

instance, if he is thirsty, he seeks my eyes and next looks at the tap in the dressingroom, thus showing that

he very plainly connects the notions of thirst, running water and human intervention. When I dress to go out,

he evidently watches all my movements. While I am lacing my boots, he conscientiously licks my hands, in

order that my divinity may be good to him and especially to congratulate me on my capital idea of going out

for a constitutional. It is a sort of general and as yet vague approval. Boots promise an excursion out of doors,

that is to say, space, fragrant roads, long grass full of surprises, corners scented with offal, friendly or tragic

encounters and the pursuit of wholly illusory, game. But the fair vision is still in anxious suspense. He does

not yet know if he is going with me. His fate is now being decided; and his eyes, melting with anguish,

devour my mind. If I buckle on my leather gaiters, it means the sudden and utter extinction, of all that

constitutes the joy of life. They leave not a ray of hope. They herald the hateful, lonely motorcycle, which he

cannot keep up with; and he stretches himself sadly in a dark corner, where he goes back to the gloomy

dreams of an unoccupied, forsaken dog. But, when I slip my arms into the sleeves of my heavy greatcoat,

one would think that they were opening the gates of the most dazzling paradise. For this implies the car, the

obvious, indubitable motorcar, in other words, the radiant summit of the most superlative delight. And

delirious barks, inordinate bounds, riotous, embarrassing demonstrations of affection greet a happiness

which, for all that, is but an immaterial idea, built up of artless memories and ingenuous hopes.

I mention these matters only because they are quite ordinary and because there is nobody who has not made a

thousand similar observations. As a rule, we do not notice that these humble manifestations represent

sentiments, associations of ideas, inferences, deductions, an absolute and altogether human mental effort.

They lack only speech; but speech is merely a mechanical accident which reveals the operations of thought

more clearly to us. We are amazed that Mohammed or Zarif should recognize the picture of a horse, a

donkey, a hat, or a man on horseback, or that they should spontaneously report to their master the little events

that happen in the stable; but it is certain that our own dog is incessantly performing a similar work and that

his eyes, if we could read them, would tell us a great deal more. The primary miracle of Elberfeld is that the

stallions should have been given the means of expressing what they think and feel. It is momentous; but,

when closely looked into, it is not incomprehensible. Between the talking horses and my silent dog there is an

enormous distance, but not an abyss. I am saying this not to detract from the nature or extent of the prodigy,

but to call attention to the fact that the theory of animal intelligence is more justifiable and less fanciful than

But the second and greater miracle is that man should have been able to rouse the horse from his immemorial

sleep, to fix and direct his attention and to interest him in matters that are more foreign and indifferent to him

than the variations of temperature in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It really seems, when we consider our

preconceived ideas, that there is not in the animal an organic and insurmountable inability to do what man's

brain does, a total and irremediable absence of intellectual faculties, but rather a profound lethargy and torpor

of those faculties. It lives in a sort of undisturbed stolidity, of nebulous slumber. As Dr. Ochorowicz very

justly remarks, "its waking state is very near akin to the state of a man walking in his sleep." Having no

notion of space or time, it spends its life, one may say, in a perpetual dream. It does what is strictly necessary

to keep itself alive; and all the rest passes over it and does not penetrate at all into its hermetically closed

imaginings. Exceptional circumstancessome extraordinary need, wish, passion or shockare required to

produce what M. HachetSouplet calls "the psychic flash" which suddenly thaws and galvanizes its brain,

placing it for a minute in the waking state in which the human brain works normally. Nor is this surprising. It

does not need that awakening in order to exist; and we know that nature never makes great superfluous

efforts.. "The intellect," as Professor Clarapede well says, "appears only as a makeshift, an instrument which

betrays that the organism is not adapted to its environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of

It is probable that our brain at first suffered from the same lethargy, a condition, for that matter, from which

many men have not yet emerged; and it is even more probable that, compared with other modes of existence,

with other psychic phenomena, on another plane and in another sphere, the dense sleep in which we move is

similar to that in which the lower animals have their being. It also is traversed, with increasing frequency, by

psychic flashes of a different order and a different scope. Seeing, on the one side, the intellectual movement

that seems to be spreading among our lesser brothers and, on the other, the ever more constantly repeated

manifestations of our subconsciousness, we might even ask ourselves if we have not here, on two different

planes, a tension, a parallel pressure, a new desire, a new attempt of the mysterious spiritual force which

animates the universe and which seems to be incessantly seeking fresh outlets and fresh conducting rods. Be

this as it may, when the flash has passed, we behave very much as the animals do: we promptly lapse into the

indifferent sleep which suffices also for our miserable ways. We ask no more of it, we do not follow the

luminous trail that summons us to an unknown world, we go on turning in our dismal circle, like contented

sleepwalkers, while Isis' sistrum rattles without respite to rouse the faithful.

I repeat, the great miracle of Elberfeld is that of having been able to prolong and reproduce at will those

isolated "psychic flashes." The horses, in comparison with the other animals, are here in the state of a man

whose subliminal consciousness had gained the upper hand. That man would lead a higher existence, in an

almost immaterial atmosphere, of which the phenomena of metaphysics, sparks falling from a region which

we shall perhaps one day reach, sometimes give us an uncertain and fleeting glimpse. Our intelligence, which

is really lethargy and which keeps us imprisoned in a little hollow of space and time, would there be replaced

by intuition, or rather by a sort of imminent knowledge which would forthwith make us sharers in all that is

known to a universe which perhaps knows all things. Unfortunately, we have not, or at least, unlike the

horses, we are not acquainted with a superior being who interests himself in us and helps us to throw off our

torpor. We have to become our own god, to rise above ourselves and to keep ourselves raised by our unaided

strength. It is almost certain that the horse would never have come out of his nebulous sphere without man's

assistance; but it is not forbidden to hope that man, with no other help than his own courage and high

purpose, may yet succeed in breaking through the sleep that cramps him and blinds him.

To come back then to our horses and to the main point, which is the isolated "psychic flash," it is admitted

that they know the values of figures, that they can distinguish and identify smells, colours, forms, objects and

even graphic reproductions of those objects. They also understand a large number of words, including some

of which they were, never taught the meaning, but which they picked up as they went along by hearing them

spoken around them. They have learnt, with the assistance of an exceedingly complicated alphabet, to

reproduce the words, thanks to which they manage to convey impressions, sensations, wishes, associations of

ideas, observations and even spontaneous reflections. It has been held that all this implies real acts of

intelligence. It is, in fact, often very difficult to decide exactly how far it is intelligence and how far memory,

instinct, imitative genius, obedience or mechanical impulse, the effects of training, or happy coincidences.

One day Krall and his collaborator, Dr. Scholler, thought that they would try and teach Mohammed to

express himself in speech. The horse, a docile and eager pupil, made touching and fruitless efforts to

reproduce human sounds. Suddenly, he stopped and, in his strange phonetic spelling, declared, by striking his

Observing that he did not open his mouth, they strove to make him understand, by the example of a dog, with

pictures, and so on, that, in order to speak, it is necessary to separate the jaws. They next asked him:

"Weil ig kein Stim hbe: because I have no voice." Does not this answer, as Krall remarks, allow us to suppose

In the course of another lesson, Mohammed was shown the portrait of a young girl whom he did not know.

I could multiply these examples indefinitely by drawing on the voluminous Elberfeld minutes, which, I may

say in passing, have the convincing force of photographic records. All this, it must be agreed, is unexpected

and disconcerting, had never been foreseen or suspected and may be regarded as one of the strangest

prodigies, one of the most stupefying revelations that have taken place since man has dwelt in this world of

riddles, Nevertheless, by reflecting, by comparing, by investigating, by regarding certain forgotten or

neglected landmarks and startingpoints, by taking into consideration the thousand imperceptible gradations

between the greatest and the least, the highest and the lowest, it is still possible to explain, admit and

understand. We can, if it comes to that, imagine that, in his secret self, in his tragic silence, our dog also

makes similar remarks and reflections. Once again, the miraculous bridge which, in this instance, spans the

gulf between the animal and man is much more the expression of thought than thought itself. We may go

further and grant that certain elementary calculations, such as little additions, little subtractions of one or two

figures, are, after all, conceivable; and I, for my part, am inclined to believe that the horse really executes

them. But where we get out of our depth, where we enter into the realm of pure enchantment is when it

becomes a matter of mathematical operations on a large scale, notably of the finding of roots. We know, for

instance, that the extraction of the fourth root of a number of six figures calls for eighteen multiplications, ten

subtractions and three divisions and that the horse does thirtyone sums in five or six seconds, that is to say,

during the brief, careless glance which he gives at the blackboard on which the problem is inscribed, as

Still, if we admit the theory of intelligence, we must also admit that the horse knows what he is doing, since it

is not until after learning what a squared number or a square root means that he appears to understand or that,

at any rate, he gradually works out correctly the ever more complicated calculations required of him. It is not

possible to give here the details of this instruction, which was astonishingly rapid. The reader will find them

on pages 117 et seq. of Krall's book, Denkende Tiere. Krall begins by explaining to Mohammed that 2

squared is equal to 2 X 2 = 4; that 2 cubed is equal to 2 X 2 X 2 = 6; that 2 is the square root of 4; and so on.

In short, the explanations and demonstrations are absolutely similar to those which one would give to an

extremely intelligent child, with this difference, that the horse is much more attentive than the child and that,

thanks to his extraordinary memory, he never forgets what he appears to have understood. Let us add, to

complete the magical and incredible character of the phenomenon that, according to Krall's own statement,

the horse was not taught beyond the point of extracting the square root of the number 144 and that he

Must we once more repeat, in connection with these startling performances, that those who speak of audible

or visible signals, of telegraphy and wireless telegraphy, of expedients, trickery or deceit, are speaking of

what they do not know and of what they have not seen? There is but one reply to be made to any one who

"Go to Elberfeldthe problem is sufficiently important, sufficiently big with consequences to make the

journey worth whileand, behind closed doors, alone with the horse, in the absolute solitude and silence of

the stable, set Mohammed to extract halfa dozen roots which, like that which I have mentioned, require

thirtyone operations. You must yourself be ignorant of the solutions, so as to do away with any transmission

of unconscious thought. If he then gives you, one after the other, five or six correct solutions, as he did to me

and many others, you will not go away with the conviction that the animal is able by its intelligence to extract

those roots, because that conviction would upset too thoroughly the greater part of the certainties on which

your life is based; but you will, at any rate, be persuaded that you have been for a few minutes in the presence

of one of the greatest and strangest riddles that can disturb the mind of man; and it is always a good and

Truth to say, the theory of intelligence in the animal would be so extraordinary as to be almost untenable. If

we are determined, at whatever cost, to pin our faith to it, we are bound to call in the aid of other ideas, to

appeal, for instance, to the extremely mysterious and essentially uncomprehended and incomprehensible

nature of numbers. It is almost certain that the science of mathematics lies outside the intelligence. It forms a

mechanical and abstract whole, more spiritual than material and more material than spiritual, visible only

through its shadow and yet constituting the most immovable of the realities that govern the universe. From

first to last it declares itself a very strange force and, as it were, the sovereign of another element than that

which nourishes our brain. Secret, indifferent, imperious and implacable, it subjugates and oppresses us from

a great height or a great depth, in any case, from very far, without telling us why. One might say that figures

place those who handle them in a special condition. They draw the cabalistic circle around their victim.

Henceforth, he is no longer his own master, he renounces his liberty, he is literally "possessed" by the powers

which he invokes. He is dragged he knows not whither, into a formless, boundless immensity, subject to laws

that have nothing human about them, in which each of those lively and tyrannical little signs which move and

dance in their thousands under the pen represents nameless, but eternal, invincible and inevitable verities. We

think that we are directing them and they enslave us. We become weary and breathless following them into

their uninhabitable spaces. When we touch them, we let loose a force which we are no longer able to control.

They do with us what they will and always end by hurling us, blinded and benumbed, into blank infinity or

upon a wall of ice against which every effort of our mind and will is shattered.

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

lunaticasylum, 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 thirtynine years, three months and

twelve days, not forgetting the leapyears. 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

>From the maybe enchanted atmosphere that surrounds numbers we shall pass 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

Mediumistic phenomena, manifestations of the secondary or the subliminal consciousness, between man and

man, are, as we have more than once had occasion to assure 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 classes the cat,

the dog and the horse in this somewhat illdefined category. To these superstitious 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 sixtynine cases of telepathy, presentiments and hallucinations of sight or hearing in which the

principal 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 cumbersome 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 pass 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 fashion 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 passing, 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 afterlife and who ought, therefore, to remain perfectly

indifferent to the manifestations, of a world in which they will never set foot?

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, pass 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, consciousnessif we can give that name to a very uncertain and confused

notion of the egois reduced to a few elementary actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from

the whole of the circumambient 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

wantand it is becoming a pressing wantof 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

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

If we assent to this explanation by means of the subliminal consciousness, which is a sort of mysterious

participation 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 passes 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

There is, henceforth, no reason why the horses should not participate 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

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, multiplicationsums the result of which ran into

thirtysix 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 readydone, 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

classical psychology calls the subconsciousness, which latter records only notions that are normally perceived

and possesses only normal faculties, that is to say, faculties recognized today by orthodox science.

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

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,

halfadozen 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 Grandduke of

Mecklenburg and sent back by Krall to their sumptuous stables. In the four or five others, taken at random as

circumstances supplied them, he met with aptitudes 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 analogies

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 wellknown and so

frequent that it has been styled "mirrorwriting." 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, passing 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

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 obscurethe state of the weather, the presence of this or

that witness, or I know not whatthe 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

Other common features are the stronglymarked 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

"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

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.

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

circumstances, 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 circumstances 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 space and time, passes 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 scrap 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.

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

mass 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, astonishing 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.

Let us now briefly sum up what the Elberfeld experiments have yielded us. Having put aside telepathy in the

narrow sensewhich perhaps enters into more than one phenomenon but is not indispensable to it, for we

see these same phenomena repeated when telepathy is practically impossiblewe 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.

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 horseand hence most probably in everything that lives on this eartha psychic power similar to that

which is hidden beneath the veil of our reason and which, as we learn to know it, astonishes, surpasses 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 allwise, allseeing and

allpowerful. 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 space, 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 class, which are jealously kept from us by the toowatchful 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

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 appetite or attitude of the sacred or prophetic animals, among which horses were

often numbered. We here find one of those innumerous instances of a lost or anticipated 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 dimlyseen truth at the bottom of

the most eccentric and wildest creeds, superstitions 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

"A spiritual"I should have said, a psychic"epoch is perhaps upon us, an epoch to which a certain number

of analogies 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 today, all

that lives with it on this earth"were on the point of struggling from beneath the crushing burden of matter

One might in fact believe that a shudder which we have not yet experienced is passing 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 niggardly 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 passed 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

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

classify 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 multitude 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

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

startingpoint 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

It has seemed to us then that it was our unknown guest that expressed itself in the name of the dead in

tableturning and in automatic writing and speaking. This unknown guest has appeared to us to take within

us the place of those who are no more, to unite itself perhaps with forces that do not die, to visit the grave

with the object of bringing thence inexplicable phantoms which rise up in front of us fruitlessly or haunt our

houses without telling us why. We have seen it, in experiments in clairvoyance and intuition, suppressing all

the obstacles that banish or conceal thought and, through bodies that have become transparent, reading in our

very souls forgotten secrets of the past, sentiments that have not yet taken shape, intentions as yet unborn. We

have discovered that some object once handled by a person now far away is enough to make it take part in the

innermost life of that person, to go deeper and rise higher than he does, to see what he sees and even what he

does not see: the landscape that surrounds him, the house which he inhabits and also the dangers that threaten

him and the secret passions by which he is stirred. We have surprised it wandering hither and thither, at

haphazard, in the future, confounding it with the present and the past, not conscious of where it is but seeing

far and wide, knowing perhaps everything but unaware of the importance of what it knows, or as yet

incapable of turning it to account or of making itself understood, at once neglectful and overscrupulous,

prolix and reticent, useless and indispensable. We have seen it, lastly, although we had hitherto looked upon

it as indissolubly and unchangeably human, suddenly emerge from other creatures and there reveal faculties

akin to ours, which commune with them deep down in the deepest mysteries and which equal them and

sometimes surpass them in a region that wrongly appeared to us the only really unassailable province of

It has many other no less strange and perhaps more important manifestations, which we propose to examine

in a later volume, notably its surprising therapeutic virtues and its phenomena of materialization. But, without

expressing a premature judgment on what we do not yet know, perhaps we have sketched it with sufficient

clearness in the foregoing pages to enable us henceforward to disentangle certain general and characteristic

But, in the first place, does it really exist, this tragic and comical, evasive and unavoidable figure which we

make no claim to portray, but at most to divest of some of its shadows? It were rash to affirm it too loudly;

but meanwhile, in the realms where we suppose it to reign, everything happens as though it did exist. Do

away with it and you are obliged to people the world and burden your life with a host of hypothetical and

imaginary beings: gods, demigods, angels, demons, saints, spirits, shells, elementals, etherial entities,

interplanetary intelligences and so on; except it and all those phantoms, without disappearing, for they may

very well continue to live in its shadow, become superfluous or accessory. It is not intolerant and does not

definitely eliminate any of the hypotheses by the aid of which man has hitherto striven to explain what he did

not understand, hypotheses which, in regard to some matters, are not inadmissible, although not one of them

is confirmed; but it brings him back to itself, absorbs them and rules them without annihilating them. If, for

instance, to select the most defensible theory, one which it is sometimes difficult to dismiss absolutely, if you

insist that the discarnate spirits take part in your actions, haunt your house, inspire your thoughts, reveal your

"That is true, but it is still I; I am discarnate, or rather I am not wholly incarnate: it is only a small part of my

being that is embodied in your flesh; and the rest, which is nearly all of me, comes and goes freely both

among those who once were and among those who are yet to be; and, when they seem to speak to you, it is

my own speech that borrows their customs and their voice in order to make you listen and to amuse your

often slumbering attention. If you prefer to deal with superior entities of unknown origin, with interplanetary

or supernatural intelligences, once more it is I; for, since I am not entirely in your body, I must needs be

elsewhere; and to be elsewhere when one is not held back by the weight of the flesh is to be everywhere if

We see, it has a reply to everything, it takes every name that we wish and there is nothing to limit it, because

it lives in a world wherein bounds are as illusory as the useless words which we employ on earth.

While it has a reply to everything, certain manifestations which it deliberately ascribes to the spirits have

brought upon it a not undeserved reproach. To begin with, as Dr. Maxwell observes, it has no absolutely

fixed doctrine. In nearly every country in the world, when it speaks in the name of the spirits, it declares that

they undergo reincarnation and readily relates their past existences. In England, on the contrary, it usually

asserts that they do not become reincarnated. What does this mean? Surely this ignorance or this

inconsistency on the part of that which appears to know everything is very strange! And worse, sometimes it

attributes to the spirits, sometimes to itself or any one or anything the revelations which it makes to us. When

exactly is it speaking the truth? At least on two occasions out of three, it deludes itself or deludes us. If it

deceive itself, if it is mistaken about a matter in which it should be easy for it to know the truth, what can it

teach us on the subject of a world of whose most elementary laws it is ignorant, since it does not even know

whether it is itself or another that speaks to us in the name of that world? Are we to believe that it was in the

same darkness as our poor superficial ego, which it pretends so often to enlighten and which it does in fact

inspire in most of the great events of life? If it deceives us, why does it do so? We can see no object: it asks

for nothing, not for alms, nor prayers, nor thoughts, on behalf of those whose mantle it assumes for the sole

purpose of leading us astray. What is the use of those mischievous and puerile pranks, of those ghastly

graveyard pleasantries? It must lie then for the mere pleasure of lying; and our unknown guest, that infinite

and doubtless immortal subconsciousness in which we have placed out last hopes, is after all but an imbecile,

I do not believe that the truth is as hideous as this. Our unknown guest does not deceive itself any more than

it deceives us; but it is we who deceive ourselves. It has not the stage to itself; and its voice is not the voice

that sounds in our ears, which were never made to catch the echoes of a world that is not like ours. If it could

speak to us itself and tell us what it knows, we should probably at that instant cease to be on this earth. But

we are immersed in our bodies, entombed prisoners with whom it cannot communicate at will. It roams

around the walls, it utters warning cries. It knocks at every door, but all that reaches us is a vague disquiet, an

indistinct murmur that is sometimes translated to us by a halfawakened gaoler who, like ourselves, is a

lifelong captive. The gaoler does his best; he has his own way of speaking, his familiar expressions; he

knows, and, with the aid of the words which he possesses and those which he hears repeated, he tries to make

us understand what he hardly understands himself. He does not know exactly whence the sounds come which

he hears; and, according as tempests, wars or riots happen to be uppermost at the moment, he attributes them

to the winds, to tramping soldiers or to frenzied crowds. In other words and speaking without metaphor, it is

the medium who draws from his habitual language and from that suggested to him by his audience the

wherewithal to clothe and identify the strange presentiments, the unfamiliar visions that come from some

unknown region. If he believes that the dead survive, he will naturally imagine that it is the dead who speak

to him. If he has a favourite spirit, angel, demon or god, he will express himself in its name; if he has no

preconceived opinion, he will not even allude to the origin of the revelations which he is making. The

inarticulate language of the subconsciousness necessarily borrows that of the normal consciousness; and the

two become confused into a sort of shifting and multiform jargon. And our unknown guest, which is not

thinking of delivering a course of lectures upon its entity, but simply giving us as best it can a more or less

warning or mark of its existence, seems to care but little as to the garments in which it is rigged out, having

indeed no choice in the matter, for, either because it is unable to manifest itself or because we are incapable

Besides, if we attribute too exclusively to the spirits that which comes from another quarter, the mistake is

doubtless no great one in its eyes; for it is not madness to believe that it lives with that which does not die in

the dead even as with that which does not die in ourselves, with that which does not descend into the grave

There is no reason therefore to condemn the other theories entirely. Most of them doubtless contain

something more than a particle of truth; in particular, the great quarrel between the subconscious school and

the spiritualists is based on the whole upon a misunderstanding. It is quite possible and even very probable

that the dead are all around us, since it is impossible that the dead do not live. Our subconsciousness must

mingle with all that does not die in them; and that which dies in them or rather disperses and loses all its

importance is but the little consciousness accumulated on this earth and kept up until the last hour by the frail

bonds of memory. In all those manifestations of our unknown guest, it is our posthumous ego that already

lives in us while we are still in the flesh and at moments joins that which does not die in those who have

quitted their body. Then does the existence of our unknown guest presume the immortality of a part of

ourselves? Can one possibly doubt it? Have you ever imagined that you would perish entirely? As for me,

what I cannot picture is the manner in which you would picture that total annihilation. But, if you cannot

perish entirely, it is no less certain that those who came before you have not perished either; and hence it is

not altogether improbable that we may be able to discover them and to communicate with them. In this wider

sense, the spiritualistic theory is perfectly admissible; but what is not at all admissible is the narrow and

pitiful interpretation which its proponents too often give it. They see the dead crowding around us like

wretched puppets indissolubly attached to the insignificant scene of their death by the thousand little threads

of insipid memories and infantile hobbies. They are supposed to be here, blocking up our homes, more

abjectly human than if they were still alive, vague, inconsistent, garrulous, derelict, futile and idle, tossing

hither and thither their desolate shadows, which are being slowly swallowed up by silence and oblivion,

busying themselves incessantly with what no longer concerns them, but almost incapable of doing us a real

service, so much so that, in short, they would end by persuading us that death serves no purpose, that it

neither purifies nor exalts, that it brings no deliverance and that it is indeed a thing of terror and despair.

No, it is not the dead who thus speak and act. Besides, why bring them into the matter unnecessarily? I could

understand that we should be obliged to do so if there were no similar phenomena outside them; but in the

intuition and clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain

communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future

incidents which are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and tedium reminiscences with

which we are overwhelmed by defunct persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity inasmuch

It is infinitely more likely that there is strange medley of heterogeneous forces in the uncertain regions into

which we are venturing. The whole of this ambiguous drama, with its incoherent crowds, is probably enacted

round about the dim estuary where our normal consciousness flows into our subconsciousness. The

consciousness of the mediumfor we must not forget that there is necessarily always a medium at the

sources of these phenomenathe consciousness of the medium, obscured by the condition of trance but yet

the only one that possesses our human speech and can make itself heard, takes in first and almost exclusively

what it best understands and what most interests it in the stifled and mutilated revelations of our unknown

guest, which for its part communicates with the dead and the living and everything that exists. The rest,

which is the only thing that matters, but which is less clear and less vivid because it comes from afar, only

very rarely makes its difficult way through a forest of insignificant talk. We may add that our

subconsciousness, as Dr. Geley very rightly observes, is formed of superposed elements, beginning with the

unconsciousness that governs the instinctive movements of the organic life of both the species and the

individual and passing by imperceptible degrees till it rises to the superior psychism whose power and extent

appear to have no bounds. The voice of the medium, or that which we hear within ourselves when, at certain

moments of excitement or crisis in our lives, we become our own medium, has therefore to traverse three

worlds or three provinces: that of the atavistic instincts which connect us with the animal; that of human or

empirical consciousness; and lastly that of our unknown guest or our superior subconsciousness which links

us to immense invisible realities and which we may, if we wish, call divine or superhuman. Hence it is not

surprising that the intermediary, be he spiritualist, autonomist, palingenesist or what he will, should lose

himself in those wild and troubled eddies and that the truth or message which he brings us, tossed and

tumbled in every direction, should reach us broken, shattered and pulverized beyond recognition.

For the rest, I repeat, were it not for the absurd prominence given to our dead in the spiritualistic

interpretation, this question of origin would have little importance, since both life and death are incessantly

joining and uniting in all things. There are assuredly dead people in all these manifestations, seeing that we

are full of dead people and that the greater part of ourselves is at this moment steeped in death, that is to say,

is already living the boundless life that awaits us on the farther side of the grave.

We should be wrong, however, to fix all our attention on these extraordinary phenomena, either those with

which we unduly connect the deceased or those no less striking ones in which we do not believe that they

take part. They are evidently precious points of emergence that enable us approximately to mark the extent,

the forms and the habits of our mystery. But it is within ourselves, in the silence of the darkness of our being,

where it is ever in motion, guiding our destiny, that we should strive to surprise that mystery and to discover

it. And I am not speaking only of the dreams, the presumptions, the vague intuitions, the room or less brilliant

inspirations which are so many more manifestations, specific as it were and analogous with those that have

occupied us. There is another, a more secret and much more active existence which we have scarcely begun

to study and which is, if we descend to the bedrock of truth, our only real existence. From the darkest

corners of our ego it directs our veritable life, the one that is not to die, and pays no heed to our thought or to

anything emanating from our reason, which believes that it guides nor steps. It alone knows the long past that

preceded our birth and the endless future that will follow our departure from this earth. It is itself that future

and that past, all those from whom we have sprung and all those who will spring from us. It represents the

individual not only the species but that which preceded it and that which will follow it; and it has neither

beginning nor end: that is why nothing touches it, nothing moves it which does not concern that which it

represents. When a misfortune or a joy befall us, it knows their value instantly, knows if they are going to

open or to dose the wells of life. It is the one thing that is never wrong. In vain does reason demonstrate to it,

by irresistible arguments, that it is hopelessly at fault: silent under its immovable mask, whose expression we

have not yet been able to react it pursues its way. It treats us as insignificant children, void of understanding,

never answers our objections, refuses what we ask and lavishes upon us that which we refuse. If we go to the

right, it reconducts us to the left. If we cultivate this or that faculty which we think that we possess or which

we would like to possess, it hides it under some other which we did not expect and did not wish for. It saves

us from a danger by imparting to our limbs unforeseen and unerring movements and actions which they had

never made before and which are contrary to those which they had been taught to make: it knows that the

hour has not yet come when it will be useless to defend ourselves. It chooses our love in spite of the revolt of

our intelligence or of our poor, ephemeral heart. It smiles when we are frightened and sometimes it is

frightened when we smile. And it is always the winner, humiliating our reason, crushing our wisdom and

silencing arguments and passions alike with the contemptuous hand of destiny. The greatest doctors surround

our sickbed and deceive themselves and us in foretelling our death or our recovery: it alone whispers in our

car the truth that will not be denied. A thousand apparently mortal blows fall upon our head and not a lash of

its eyelids quivers; but suddenly a tiny shock, which our senses had not even transmitted to our brain, wakes

it with a start. It sits up, looks around and understands. It has seen the crack in the vault that separates the two

lives. It gives the signal for departure. Forthwith panic spreads from cell to cell; and the innumerous city that

we are utters yells of horror and distress and hustles around the gates of death.

That great figure, that new being has been there, in our darkness, from all time, though its awkward and

extravagant actions, until recently attributed to the gods, the demons or the dead, am only now asking for our

serious attention. It has been likened to an immense block of which our personality is but a diminutive facet;

to an iceberg of which we see a few glistening prisms that represent our life, while ninetenths of the

enormous mass remain buried in the shadows of the sea. According to Sir Oliver Lodge, it is that part of our

being that has not become carnate; according to Gustave Le Bon, it is the "condensed" soul of our ancestors,

which is true, beyond a doubt, but only a part of the truth, for we find in it also the soul of the future and

probably of many other forces which are not necessarily human. William James saw in it a diffuse cosmic

consciousness and the chance intrusion into our scientifically organized world of remnants and bestiges of the

primordial chaos. Here are a number of images striving to give us an idea of a reality so vast that we are

unable to grasp it. It is certain that what we see from our terrestrial life is nothing compared with what we do

not see. Besides, if we think of it, it would be monstrous and inexplicable that we should be only what we

appear to be, nothing but ourselves, whole and complete in ourselves, separated, isolated, circumscribed by

our body, our mind, our consciousness, our birth and our death. We become possible and probable only on

the conditions that we project beyond ourselves on every side and that we stretch in every direction

But how shall we explain the incredible contrast between the immeasurable grandeur of our unknown guest,

the assurance, the calmness, the gravity of the inner life which it leads in us and the puerile and sometimes

grotesque incongruities of what one might call its public existence? Inside us, it is the sovereign judge, the

supreme arbiter, the prophet, almost the god omnipotent; outside us, from the moment that it quits its shelter

and manifests itself in external actions, it is nothing more than a fortuneteller, a bonesetter, a sort of

facetious conjuror or telephoneoperator, I was on the verge of saying a mountebank or clown. At what

particular instant is it really itself? Is it seized with giddiness when it leaves its lair? Is it we who no longer

hear it, who no longer understand it, as soon as it ceases to speak in a whisper and to act in the dark recesses

of our life? Are we in regard to it the terrified hive invaded by a huge and inexplicable hand, the maddened

anthill trampled by a colossal and incomprehensible foot? Let us not venture yet to solve the strange riddle

with the aid of the little that we know. Let us confine ourselves, for the moment, to noting on the way some

First of all, are the facts at issue really new? Was it only yesterday that the existence of our unknown guest

and its external manifestations were revealed to us? Is it our attention that makes them appear more

numerous, or is it the increase in their number that at last attracts out attention?

It does indeed seem that, however far we go back in history, we everywhere find the same extraordinary

phenomena, under other names and often in a more glamorous setting. Oracles, prophecies, incantations,

haruspication, "possession," evocation of the dead, apparitions, ghosts, miraculous cures, levitation,

transmission of thought, apparent resurrections and the rest are the exact equivalent, though magnified by the

aid of plentiful and obvious frauds of our latterday supernaturalism. Turning in another direction, we are

able to see that psychical phenomena are very evenly distributed over the whole surface of the globe. At all

events, there does not appear to be any race that is absolutely or peculiarly refractory to them. One would be

inclined to say, however, that they manifest themselves by preference among the most civilized

nationsperhaps because that is where they are most carefully sought afterand among the most primitive.

In short, it cannot be denied that we are in the presence of faculties or senses, more or less latent but at the

same time universally distributed, which form part of the general and unvarying inheritance of mankind. But

have these faculties or senses undergone evolution, like most of the others? And, if they have not done so on

our earth, do they show traces of an extraplanetary evolution? Is there progress or reaction? Are they

withered and useless branches, or buds swollen with sap and promise? Are they retreating before the march

M. Ernest Bozzano, one of the most learned, most daring and most subtle exponents of the new science that is

in process of formation, in the course of a remarkable essay in the Annales des sciences psychiques,[1] gives

it as his opinion that they have remained stationary and unchanged. He considers that they have become in no

way diffused, generalized and refined, like so many others that are much less important and useful from the

point of view of the struggle for life, such as the musical faculty, for instance. It does not even seem, says M.

Bozzano, that it is possible to cultivate or develop them systematically. The Hindu race in particular, who for

thousands of years have been devoting themselves to the study of these manifestations, have arrived at

nothing but a better knowledge of the empirical methods calculated to produce them in individuals already

endowed with these supernormal faculties. I do not know to what extent M. Bozzano's assertions are beyond

dispute. They concern historical or remote facts which it is very difficult to verify. In any case, it is

something to have perfected , as has been done in India, the empirical methods favourable to the production

of supernormal phenomena. One might even say that it is about all that we have the right to expect, seeing

that, by the author's own admission, these faculties are latent in every man and that, as has frequently been

seen, it needs but an illness, a lesion, or sometimes even the slightest emotion or a mere passing faintness to

make them suddenly reveal themselves in an individual who seemed most hopelessly devoid of them. It is

therefore quite possible that, by improving the methods, by attacking the mystery from other quarters, we

might obtain more decisive results than the Hindus. We must remember that our western science has but

lately interested itself in these problems and that it has means of investigating and experimenting which the

Asiatics never possessed. It may even be declared that at no time in the existence of our world has the

scientific mind been betterequipped, bettersuited to cope with every task, or more exact, more skilful and

more penetrating than it is today. Because the oriental empirics have failed, there is no reason to believe that

it will not succeed in awakening and cultivating in every man those faculties which would often be of greater

use to him than those of the intellect itself. It is not overbold to suggest that, from certain points of view, the

Nevertheless, in so far as concerns the natural evolution of those faculties, M. Bozzano's assertion seem fairly

well justified. We do not, in fact, observe a startling or even appreciable difference between what they were

and what they are. And this anomaly is the more surprising in as much as it is almost universally accepted

that a sense or a faculty becomes developed in proportion to its usefulness; and there are few, I think, that

would have been not only more useful but even more necessary to man. He has always had a keen and

primitive interest in knowing without delay the most secret thoughts of his fellowman, who is often his

adversary and sometimes his mortal enemy. He has always had an interest no less great in immediately

transmitting those thoughts through space, in seeing beyond the continents and seas, in going back into the

past, in advancing into the future, in being able to find in his memory at will not only all the acquirements of

his personal experience but also those of his ancestors, in communicating with the dead and perhaps with the

sovereign intelligence diffused over the universe, in discovering hidden springs and treasures, in escaping the

harsh and depressing laws of matter and gravity, in relieving pain, in curing the greater number of his

disorders and even in restoring his limbs, not to mention many other miracles which he could work if he

knew all the mighty forces that doubtless slumber in the dark recesses of his life.

Is this once more an unexpected character of the eccentric physiology of our unknown guest? Here are

faculties more precious than the most precious faculties that have made us what we are, faculties whose

magic buds sprout on every side underneath our intelligence but have never burst into flower, as though a

wind from another sphere had killed them with its icy breath. Is it because it occupies itself first and foremost

with the species that it thus neglects the individual? But, after all, the species is only an aggregate of

successive individuals; and its evolution consequently depends upon their evolution. There would therefore

have been an evident advantage to the species in developing faculties that would perhaps have carried it much

farther and much higher than has been done by its brainpower, which alone has progressed. If there is no

evolution for them here, do they develop elsewhere? What are those powers which exist outside and

independent of the laws of this earth? Do they then belong to other worlds? But, if so, what are they doing in

ours? One would sometimes think, at the sight of so much neglectfulness, uncertainty and inconsistency, that

man's evolution had been intentionally retarded by a superior will, as though that will feared that he was

going too fast, that he was anticipating some pre established order and moving prematurely out of his

And the riddles accumulate which we cannot hope to solve. It has been said that these abnormal faculties are

communications or infiltrations, themselves abnormal, which have found their way through the partitions that

separate our consciousness from our subconsciousness. This is very likely, but it is only a minor side of the

question. It would be important before all to know what that subconsciousness represents, whither it tends

and with what it itself is communicating. Is the impersonal form of knowledge a necessary or an accidental

stage? Is the impersonal form which it takes in the subconsciousness the only true one? Is there really, as

everything seems to prove, a hopeless incompatibility between our intellectual faculties and those families of

uncertain origin, to such an extent that the latter are unable to manifest themselves except when the former

are weakened or temporarily suspended? It has, at any rate, been observed that they are hardly ever exercised

simultaneously. Are we to believe that, at a given moment, mankind or the genius that presides over its

destinies had to make an exclusive and awful choice between cerebral energy and the mysterious forces of the

subconsciousness and that we still find traces of its hesitations in our organism? What would have become of

a race of man in which the subconsciousness had triumphed over the brain? Is not this the case with animals;

and would not the race have remained purely animal? Or else would not this preponderance of a subconscious

more powerful than that of the animals and almost independent of our body have resulted in the

disappearance of life as we know it; and should we not even now be trading the life which we shall probably

lead when we are dead? Here are a number of questions to which there are no answers and which are

Amidst this antagonism, whose triumph are we to hope for? Is any alliance between the two opposing forces

for ever impossible so long as we are in the flesh? What are we to do meanwhile? If a choice be inevitable,

which way will our choice incline; and which victim shall we sacrifice? Shall we listen to those who tell us

that there is nothing more to be gained or learnt in those inhospitable regions where all our bewildering

phenomena have been known since man first was man? Is it true that occultismas it is very improperly

called, for the knowledge which it seeks is no more occult than any otheris it true that occultism is marking

time, that it is becoming hopelessly entangled in the same doubtful facts and that it has not taken a single step

forward since its renaissance more than fifty years ago? One must be entirely ignorant of the wonderful

efforts of those fruitful years to venture upon such an assertion. This is not the place to discuss the question,

which would require full and careful treatment; but we may safely say that until now there is no science

which in so short a time has brought order out of such a chaos, ascertained, checked and classified such a

quantity of facts, or more rapidly awakened, cultivated and trained in man certain faculties which he had

never seriously been believed to possess; and furthermore none which has caused to be recognized as

incontestable and thus introduced into the circle of the realities whereon we base our lives a number of

unlikely phenomena which had hitherto been contemptuously passed over. We are still, it is true, waiting for

the domestication of the new force, its practical application to daily use. We are waiting for the allrevealing,

decisive manifestation which will remove our last doubts and throw light upon the problem down to its very

source. But let us admit that we are likewise waiting for this manifestation in the great majority of sciences.

In my case, we are already in the presence of an astonishing mass of wellweighed and verified materials

which, until now, had been taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments of wild legends, meaningless and

unimportant. For more than three centuries, the science of electricity remained at very much the same point at

which our psychical sciences stand today. Men were recording, accumulating, trying to interpret a host of

odd and futile phenomena, toying with Ramsden's machine, with Leyden jars, with Volta's rough battery.

They thought that they had discovered an agreeable pastime, an ingenious plaything for the laboratory or

study; and they had not the slightest suspicion that they were touching the sources of an universal, irresistible,

inexhaustible power, invisibly present and active in all things, that would soon invade the surface of our

globe. Nothing tells us that the psychic forces of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse have not similar

surprises in store for us, with this difference, that we are here concerned with energies and mysteries which

are loftier, grander and doubtless fraught with graver consequences, since they affect our eternal destinies,

It is not true therefore that the psychical sciences have said their last word and that we have nothing more to

expect from them. They have but just awakened or reawakened; and, to postdate Guyau's prediction by a

hundred years, we might say, with them in our minds, that the twentieth century "will end with discoveries as

illformulated but perhaps as important in the moral world as those of Newton and Laplace in the

astronomical world." But, though we have much to hope from them, that is no reason why we should look to

them for everything and abandon in their favour that which has brought us where we are. The choice of

which we spoke, between the brain and the subconsciousness, has been made long ago; and it is not our part

to make it over again. We are carried along by a force acquired in the course of two or three thousand years;

and our methods, like our intellectual habits, have of themselves become transformed into sort of minor

subconsciousness superposed upon the major subconsciousness and sometimes mingling with it. Henri

Bergson, in his very fine presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research on the 28th of May, 1913,

said that he had sometimes wondered what would have happened if modern science, instead of setting out

from mathematics, instead of bringing all its forces to converge on the study of matter, had begun by the

consideration of mind; if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for instance, had been psychologists:

"We should certainly," said he, "have had a psychology of which today we can form no idea, any more than

before Galileo we could have imagined what our physics would be; a psychology that probably would have

been to our present psychology what our physics is to Aristotle's. Foreign to every mechanistic idea, not even

conceiving the possibility of an explanation, science would have enquired into, instead of dismissing a priori

facts, such as those which you study; perhaps 'psychical research' would have stood out as its principal

preoccupation. The most general laws of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental laws of

mechanics were discovered), we should have passed from mind, properly socalled, to life; biology would

have been constituted, but a vitalist biology, quite different from ours, which would have sought behind the

sensible forms of living beings the inward, invisible force of which the sensible forms are the

It would therefore in the very first days of its activity have encountered all these strange problems: telepathy,

materializations, clairvoyance, miraculous cures, knowledge of the future, the possibility of survival,

interplanetary intelligence and many others, which it has neglected hitherto and which, thanks to its neglect,

are still in their infancy. But, as the human mind is not able to follow two diametrically opposite directions at

the same time, it would necessarily have rejected the mathematical sciences. A steamship coming from

another hemisphere, one in which men's minds had taken, unknown to ourselves, the road which our own has

actually taken, would have seemed to us as wonderful, as incredible as the phenomena of our

subconsciousness seem to us today. We should have gone very far in what at present we call the unknown

or the occult; but we should have known hardly anything of physics, chemistry or mechanics, unless, which is

very probable, we had come upon them by another road as we travelled round the occult. It is true that certain

nations, the Hindus particularly, the Egyptians and perhaps the Incas, as well as others, in all probability, who

have not left sufficient traces, thus went to work the other way and obtained nothing decisive. Is this again a

consequence of the hopeless incompatibility between the faculties of the brain and those of the

subconsciousness? Possibly; but we must not forget that we are speaking of nations which never possessed

our intellectual habits, our passion for precision, for verification, for experimental certainty; indeed, this

passion has only been fully developed in ourselves within the last two or three centuries. It is to be presumed

therefore that the European would have gone much farther in the other direction than the Oriental. Where

would he have arrived? Endowed with a different brain, naturally clearer, more exacting, more logical, less

credulous, more practical, closer to realities, more attentive to details, but with the scientific side of his

intelligence uncultivated, would he have gone astray or would he have met the truths which we are still

seeking and which may well be more important than all our material conquests. Illprepared, illequipped,

illbalanced, lacking the necessary ballast of experiments and proofs, would he have been exposed to the

dangers familiar to all the toomystical nations? It is very difficult to imagine so. But the hour has now

perhaps come to try without risk what he could not have done without grave peril. While abandoning no whit

of his understanding, which is small compared with the boundless scope of the subconsciousness, but which

is sure, tried and docile, he can now embark upon the great adventure and try to do that which has not been

done before. It is a matter of discovering the connecting link between the two forces. We are still ignorant of

the means of aiding, encouraging, developing and taming the greater of the two and of bringing it closer to

us; the quest will be the most difficult, the most mysterious and, in certain respects, the most dangerous that

mankind has ever undertaken. But we can say to ourselves, without fear of being very far wrong, that it is the

best task at the moment. In any case, this is the first time since man has existed that he will be fronting the

unknown with such good weapons, even as it is also the first time since its awakening that his intelligence,

which has reached a summit from which it can understand almost everything, will at last receive help from