Gleanings from Maeterlinck

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Title: Gleanings from Maeterlinck
Author: Maeterlinck, Maurice
Language: English
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MAETERLINCK ***

Methuen’s Shilling Novels

1 The Mighty Atom Marie Corelli
2 Jane Marie Corelli
3 Boy Marie Corelli
4 Spanish Gold G. A. Birmingham
5 The Search Party G. A. Birmingham
6 Teresa of Watling Street Arnold Bennett
9 The Unofficial Honeymoon Dolf Wyllarde
12 The Demon C. N. and A. M. Williamson
17 Joseph Frank Danby
18 Round the Red Lamp Sir A. Conan Doyle
20 Light Freights W. W. Jacobs
22 The Long Road John Oxenham
71 The Gates of Wrath Arnold Bennett
72 Short Cruises W. W. Jacobs
81 The Card Arnold Bennett
87 Lalage’s Lovers G. A. Birmingham
92 White Fang Jack London
105 The Wallet of Kai Lung Ernest Bramah
108 The Adventures of Dr. Whitty G. A. Birmingham
113 Lavender and Old Lace Myrtle Reed
115 Old Rose and Silver Myrtle Reed
122 The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton E. Phillips Oppenheim
125 The Regent Arnold Bennett
127 Sally Dorothea Conyers
129 The Lodger Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
135 A Spinner in the Sun Myrtle Reed
137 The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu Sax Rohmer
139 The Golden Centipede Louise Gerard
140 The Love Pirate C. N. and A. M. Williamson
142 The Way of these Women E. Phillips Oppenheim
143 Sandy Married Dorothea Conyers
145 Chance Joseph Conrad
148 Flower of the Dusk Myrtle Reed
150 The Gentleman Adventurer H. C. Bailey
154 The Hyena of Kallu Louise Gerard
190 The Happy Hunting Ground Mrs. Alice Perrin
191 My Lady of Shadows John Oxenham
211 Max Carrados Ernest Bramah
212 Under Western Eyes Joseph Conrad
213 The Kloof Bride Ernest Glanville
215 Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo E. Phillips Oppenheim
216 The Wonder of Love E. M. Albanesi
217 A Weaver of Dreams Myrtle Reed
219 The Family Elinor Mordaunt
220 A Heritage of Peril A. W. Marchmont
221 The Kinsman Mrs. Sidgwick
222 Emmanuel Burden Hilaire Belloc
224 Broken Shackles John Oxenham
225 A Knight of Spain Marjorie Bowen
227 Byeways Robert Hichens
228 Gossamer G. A. Birmingham
229 My Friend the Chauffeur C. N. and A. M. Williamson
230 The Salving of a Derelict Maurice Drake
231 Cameos Marie Corelli
232 The Happy Valley B. M. Croker
233 Victory Joseph Conrad

A Selection only.

Methuen’s Shilling Library

36 De Profundis Oscar Wilde
37 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime Oscar Wilde
38 Selected Poems Oscar Wilde
39 An Ideal Husband Oscar Wilde
40 Intentions Oscar Wilde
41 Lady Windermere’s Fan Oscar Wilde
42 Charmides and other Poems Oscar Wilde
43 Harvest Home E. V. Lucas
44 A Little of Everything E. V. Lucas
45 Vailima Letters Robert Louis Stevenson
46 Hills and the Sea Hilaire Belloc
47 The Blue Bird Maurice Maeterlinck
50 Charles Dickens G. K. Chesterton
53 Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to
his Son George Horace Lorimer
54 The Life of John Ruskin W. G. Collingwood
57 Sevastopol and other Stories Leo Tolstoy
58 The Lore of the Honey-Bee Tickner Edwardes
60 From Midshipman to Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood
62 John Boyes, King of the Wa-Kikuyu John Boyes
63 Oscar Wilde Arthur Ransome
64 The Vicar of Morwenstow S. Baring-Gould
65 Old Country Life S. Baring-Gould
76 Home Life in France M. Betham-Edwards
77 Selected Prose Oscar Wilde
78 The Best of Lamb E. V. Lucas
80 Selected Letters Robert Louis Stevenson
83 Reason and Belief Sir Oliver Lodge
85 The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde
91 Social Evils and their Remedy Leo Tolstoy
93 The Substance of Faith Sir Oliver Lodge
94 All Things Considered G. K. Chesterton
95 The Mirror of the Sea Joseph Conrad
96 A Picked Company Hilaire Belloc
116 The Survival of Man Sir Oliver Lodge
126 Science from an Easy Chair Sir Ray Lankester
141 Variety Lane E. V. Lucas
144 A Shilling for my Thoughts G. K. Chesterton
146 A Woman of No Importance Oscar Wilde
149 A Shepherd’s Life W. H. Hudson
193 On Nothing Hilaire Belloc
200 Jane Austen and her Times G. E. Mitton
214 Select Essays Maurice Maeterlinck
223 Two Generations Leo Tolstoy
226 On Everything Hilaire Belloc
234 Records and Reminiscences Sir Francis Burnand

A Selection only.

GLEANINGS FROM MAETERLINCK

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE BLUE BIRD
OUR ETERNITY
DEATH
MARY MAGDALENE
THE UNKNOWN GUEST
THE WRACK OF THE STORM
THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
WISDOM AND DESTINY
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
THE BURIED TEMPLE
THE DOUBLE GARDEN
LIFE AND FLOWERS
AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
MONNA VANNA
JOYZELLE
SISTER BEATRICE; AND ARIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
MY DOG
OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS
HOURS OF GLADNESS

GLEANINGS FROM
MAETERLINCK

TRANSLATED AND COMPILED BY
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

_First Published in 1917_

_All rights reserved_

_Copyright U.S.A. by Dodd, Mead & Co. Inc.
1913 to 1917._

INTRODUCTION

In the first act of _The Blue Bird_, the fairy Bérylune sends Mytyl
and Tyltyl in search of happiness. Shepherded and protected by Light,
they explore the Past and the Future, the Palace of Night, the Kingdoms
of the Dead and of the Unborn. At one moment they find themselves in
a graveyard; and Mytyl grows fearful at her first contact with the
great mystery of Death. Yet the graveyard with its wooden crosses and
grass-covered mounds is moonlit and tranquil; and of a sudden, as the
revealing diamond is turned in Tyltyl’s fingers, even the tombstones
and ‘all the grand investiture of death’ disappear, to be replaced by
luxuriant, swaying clusters of Madonna lilies.

“Where are the dead?” asks Mytyl, in amazement, searching in the grass
for traces of even one tombstone.

Her brother also looks:

“There are no dead,” is his reply.

Any one who was present on the first night of the play at the Haymarket
Theatre, in 1909, will not easily forget the audience’s little gasp of
delighted surprise. Yet the two lines of dialogue were more than a stage
effect, more than an aspect of mysticism; almost they may be regarded
as the essence of Maeterlinck’s later work. Since the _Life of the
Bee_, since the earlier essays and such pure drama as _Monna Vanna_,
_The Blind_ and _Pelléas and Mélisande_, his mind seems to have been
brooding more and more on the part which Death, the great twin mystery
of the world, plays in the life of man and of the race. In _The Death of
Tintagiles_ there is a barred and studded door, through which, for all
its studs and bars, there steals a miasma of dread. And, when the door
opens, it is to release a spirit of annihilation which the concerted
efforts of Tintagiles’ sisters can neither restrain nor force back.

In _The Blue Bird_ we are shown that a man cannot die so long as
he dwells in the memory of those who loved him. In his latest work
Maeterlinck gives to the dead an objective existence. In part each
generation survives its own death and transmits to its successors the
heritage of aspiration and achievement, of knowledge and passion, which
it has received from its predecessors; in greater part the objective
existence is founded on new modes of communication, a new study of
psychic relationship and a new belief in a subliminal state.

I have collected in the present volume a selection of essays illustrating
the later stages of Maeterlinck’s quest. Never in history have so
many women and men, stricken suddenly and without warning, sought so
unanimously and painfully to penetrate the veil wherein the world’s
oldest mystery is shrouded. The finality of death was a challenge flung
down and eagerly taken up by all whom the loss of son or brother had
taken unawares. To Maeterlinck the war has brought in great part the
annihilation of a people, his own people; it has inspired him to a
splendour of indignation and pity; but, more gravely and urgently than
ever before, it has demanded of him an answer to the question of the
Sadducees, who “say there is no resurrection.”

Readers wishing to study the complete series of essays from which the
sixteen in this volume are taken will find them in the three books
entitled, _Our Eternity_, _The Unknown Guest_ and _The Wrack of the
Storm_, all of which are issued by the present publishers.

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

CHELSEA, _9 April 1917_

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION vii

I. OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 13

II. ANNIHILATION 31

III. COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD 37

IV. OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 63

V. THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 75

VI. OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES 89

VII. CONCLUSIONS 105

VIII. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 115

IX. HEROISM 181

X. ON RE-READING THUCYDIDES 193

XI. THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 205

XII. IN MEMORIAM 213

XIII. THE LIFE OF THE DEAD 217

XIV. THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 225

XV. THE WILL OF EARTH 237

XVI. WHEN THE WAR IS OVER 247

OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH

It has been well said:

“Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some
vague future or survival, where we shall not be. It is our own end; and
everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk
to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish
spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of
societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration,
save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast,
show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech
and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!”[1]

That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in
our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes
our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our
thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around
it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it but
thrives upon our fears. He who seeks to forget it has his memory filled
with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. It clouds everything
with its shadow. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so
unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention
to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head.
All the forces which might avail to face death we exhaust in averting
our will from it. We deliver it into the groping hands of instinct and
we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the
idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous
of ideas—being the most persistent and the most inevitable—remains the
flimsiest and the only one that is a laggard? How should we know the one
power which we never look in the face? How could it have profited by
gleams kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait
until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive.
We do not begin to think of death until we have no longer the strength,
I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us
from another century would have difficulty in recognizing, in the depths
of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of his love
or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything has changed
around it and when even that which composes it and upon which it depends
has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by
our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence,
grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has not, so to
speak, retouched it in any way. Though we may no longer believe in the
tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most sceptical among
us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the
pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it may no longer be lighted
by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life and, if
less known, is all the more formidable. And therefore, when the impending
hour strikes to which we dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us
at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas whereon, without
examining them, we had meant to lean give way like rushes beneath the
weight of the last minutes. In vain we seek a refuge among reflections
which are illusive or are strange to us and which do not know the roads
to our heart. No one awaits us on the last shore where all is unprepared,
where naught remains afoot save terror.

Bossuet, the great poet of the tomb, says:

“It is not worthy of a Christian”—and I would add, of a man—“to postpone
his struggle with death until the moment when it arrives to carry him
off.”

It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in
the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and stand by
it. He would say to death:

“I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my
eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you were not: that is enough
to prevent you from becoming mine.”

He would thus bear, graven on his memory, a tried image against which the
last agony would not prevail and from which the phantom-stricken eyes
would draw fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying,
which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that
of the peaks of his existence, where would be gathered, like angels of
peace, the most lucid, the most rarefied thoughts of his life. Is not
that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer,
if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the
unknown?

“The doctors and the priests,” said Napoleon, “have long been making
death grievous.”

And Bacon wrote:

“_Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa._”

Let us, then, learn to look upon death as it is in itself, free from
the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination.
Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.
Thus we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not
just. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They
form part of life and not of death. We readily forget the most cruel
sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of convalescence
destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let
death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before
it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of
pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of
the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly
prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts a term to
them.

In point of fact, whereas sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the
agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now
what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the
last, terrible second of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching
during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, naked,
disarmed, abandoned by all and stripped of everything, into an unknown
that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the soul of man has
ever felt.

It is doubly unjust to impute the torments of that second to death.
We shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would
remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown
into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last
struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most
dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the
watchers, at least; for very often the consciousness of him whom death,
in Bossuet’s phrase, has “brought to bay” is already greatly dulled and
perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which it
seems to be enduring. All doctors consider it their first duty to prolong
to the uttermost even the cruellest pangs of the most hopeless agony.
Who has not, at the bedside of a dying man, twenty times wished and not
once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy?
They are filled with so great a certainty and the duty which they obey
leaves so little room for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded
by tears, curb their revolt and recoil before a law which all recognize
and revere as the highest law of man’s conscience.

One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarous. Its roots go down
to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have
long since died out in the intelligence of men. That is why the doctors
act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is
preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that
every minute gained amid the most intolerable sufferings is snatched from
the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the
hereafter reserve for men; and of two evils, to avoid that which they
know to be imaginary, they choose the only real one. Besides, in thus
postponing the end of a torture, which, as old Seneca says, is the best
part of that torture, they are but yielding to the unanimous error which
makes its enclosing circle more iron-bound every day: the prolongation
of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death
demanding the prolongation of the agony.

The doctors, on their side, say or might say that, in the present stage
of science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty
of death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of
insupportable torments, might be murder. Doubtless there is not one
chance in a hundred thousand that the patient escape. No matter: if that
chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a few days,
or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not be the real life,
but much rather, as the Romans called it, “an extended death,” those
hundred thousand useless torments will not have been in vain. A single
hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

Here we have, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if
we mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which
we see with all that remains to us, that is to say, with every imaginable
pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts and
which is heavy enough to raise by a hair’s-breadth the other scale that
dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of
another world.

Swollen by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes such
that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors’ reasons. And yet there
is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree. They are
slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to deaden, at least
to dull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them would have dared to do
so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate and, like misers, measure
out niggardly drops of the clemency and peace which they ought to lavish
and which they grudge in their dread of weakening the last resistance,
that is to say, the most useless and painful quiverings of reluctant life
refusing to give place to on-coming rest.

It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater daring.
It is enough to state once more that all this has no concern with death.
It happens before it and beneath it. It is not the arrival of death but
the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death but life that
we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it is life that
wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten from every side at the approach of
death, but not at its call; and, though they gather round it, they did
not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of the fatigue that oppresses you
if you do not yield to it? All those strugglings, those waitings, those
tossings, those tragic cursings are on the side of the slope to which
we cling and not on the other side. They are, indeed, accidental and
temporary and emanate only from our ignorance. All our knowledge merely
helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.
A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer
hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act
with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour,
knowing that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently every
evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and the sick
man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no physical nor
metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be as salutary as
that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be nothing else to take into
consideration, it will be possible to surround death with profounder
ecstasies and fairer dreams. In any case and from this day, with death
once acquitted of that which goes before, it will be easier to look upon
it without fear and to lighten that which comes after.

Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it. The
first has neither face nor form and permeates the whole region of our
mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as powerful.
The latter strikes all our senses. Let us examine it first.

Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add
to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing it
the same injustice at its going as at its coming. Is it death that digs
our graves and orders us to keep that which is made to disappear? If we
cannot think without horror of what befalls the beloved in the grave, is
it death or we that placed him there? Because death carries the spirit
to some place unknown, shall we reproach it with our bestowal of the
body which it leaves with us? Death descends into our midst to change
the place of a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does
and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone. For it is
already far away when we begin the frightful work which we try hard to
prolong to the very utmost, as though we were persuaded that it is our
only security against forgetfulness. I am well aware that, from any
other than the human point of view, this proceeding is very innocent;
and that, looked upon from a sufficient height, decomposing flesh is no
more repulsive than a fading flower or a crumbling stone. But, when all
is said, it offends our senses, shocks our memory, daunts our courage,
whereas it would be so easy for us to avoid the foul ordeal. Purified
by fire, the remembrance lives enthroned as a beautiful idea; and death
is naught but an immortal birth cradled in flames. This has been well
understood by the wisest and happiest nations in history. What happens
in our graves poisons our thoughts together with our bodies. The figure
of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form
of burial; and the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who
depart but also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the
ultimate background of life the great image upon which men’s eyes linger
in consolation or despair.

There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the
unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us lose no time in
putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left there.
Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they are not
proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not one of them
brings us a proof before which an honest intelligence can bow. Nor would
it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for man lawfully to
believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the proof would need to
be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best and strongest of them
has given us our reason to employ loyally and fully, that is to say, to
try to attain, before all and in all things, that which appears to be the
truth. Can He exact that we should accept, in spite of it, a belief whose
doubtfulness, from the human point of view, is not denied by its wisest
and most ardent defenders? He only offers us a very uncertain story,
which, even if scientifically substantiated, would be merely a beautiful
lesson in morality and which is buttressed by prophecies and miracles
no less doubtful. Must we here call to mind that Pascal, to defend that
creed which was already tottering at a time when it seemed at its zenith,
vainly attempted a demonstration the mere aspect of which would be enough
to destroy the last remnant of faith in a wavering mind? Better than any
other, he knew the stock proofs of the theologians, for they had been
the sole study of the last years of his life. If but one of these proofs
could have resisted examination, his genius, one of the three or four
most profound and lucid geniuses ever known to mankind, must have given
it an irresistible force. But he does not linger over these arguments,
whose weakness he feels too well; he pushes them scornfully aside, he
glories and, in a manner, rejoices in their futility:

“Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for
their faith, those who profess a religion for which they cannot give
a reason? They declare, in presenting it to the world, that it is a
foolishness, _stultitiam_; and then you complain that they do not prove
it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word; it is in
being destitute of proofs that they are not destitute of sense.”

His solitary argument, the one to which he clings desperately and
devotes all the power of his genius, is the very condition of man in the
universe, that incomprehensible medley of greatness and wretchedness, for
which there is no accounting save by the mystery of the first fall:

“For man is more incomprehensible without that mystery than the mystery
itself is incomprehensible to man.”

He is therefore reduced to establishing the truth of the Scriptures by
an argument drawn from the very Scriptures in question; and—what is more
serious—to explain a wide and great and indisputable mystery by another,
small, narrow and crude mystery that rests only upon the legend which
it is his business to prove. And, let us observe in passing, it is a
fatal thing to replace one mystery by another and lesser mystery. In
the hierarchy of the unknown, mankind always ascends from the smaller
to the greater. On the other hand, to descend from the greater to the
smaller is to relapse into the condition of primitive man, who carries
his barbarism to the point of replacing the infinite by a fetish or an
amulet. The measure of man’s greatness is the greatness of the mysteries
which he cultivates or on which he dwells.

To return to Pascal, he feels that everything is crumbling around him;
and so, in the collapse of human reason, he at last offers us the
monstrous wager that is the supreme avowal of the bankruptcy and despair
of his faith. God, he says, meaning his God and the Christian religion
with all its precepts and all its consequences, exists or does not exist.
We are unable, by human arguments, to prove that He exists or that He
does not exist.

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, because, having
neither divisions nor bounds, He has no relation to us. We are therefore
incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is.”

God is or is not.

“But to which side shall we lean? Reason can determine nothing about it.
There is an infinite gulf that separates us. A game is played at the
uttermost part of this infinite distance, in which heads may turn up or
tails. Which will you wager? There is no reason for betting on either one
or the other; you cannot reasonably defend either.”

The correct course would be not to wager at all.

“Yes, but you must wager: this is not a matter for your will; you are
launched in it.”

Not to wager that God exists means wagering that He does not exist, for
which He will punish you eternally. What then do you risk by wagering,
at all hazards, that He exists? If He does not, you lose a few small
pleasures, a few wretched comforts of this life, because your little
sacrifice will not have been rewarded; if He exists, you gain an eternity
of unspeakable happiness.

“‘It is true, but, in spite of all, I am so made that I cannot believe.’

“Never mind, follow the way in which they began who believe and who at
first did not believe either, taking holy water, having masses said, etc.
That in itself will make you believe and will reduce you to the level of
the beasts.”

“‘But that is just what I am afraid of.’

“Why? What have you to lose?”

Nearly three centuries of apologetics have not added one useful argument
to that terrible and despairing page of Pascal. And this is all that
human intelligence has found to compel our life. If the God who demands
our faith will not have us decide by our reason, by what then must our
choice be made? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some
æsthetic or sentimental pitch-and-toss? Or has He set within us another
higher and surer faculty, before which the understanding must yield? If
so, where is it? What is its name? If this God punishes us for not having
blindly followed a faith that does not force itself irresistibly upon
the intelligence which He gave us; if He chastises us for not having
made, in the presence of the great enigma with which He confronts us,
a choice which is rejected by that best and most divine part which He
has implanted in us, we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of
a cruel and incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible
snare and an immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith that
injustice may load us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal
presence of its Author.

ANNIHILATION

And now we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with
which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was there;
we know only what is not there. It is the vaster by all that we have
learned to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific certainty to
break through its darkness—for man has the right to hope for that which
he does not yet conceive—the only point that interests us, because it is
situated in the little circle which our actual intelligence traces in the
thickest blackness of the night, is to know whether the unknown for which
we are bound will be dreadful or not.

Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no more:
total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day; survival
without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival in the universal
consciousness, or with a consciousness different from that which we
possess in this world.

Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity
without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is
dispersed but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out
of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a
quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there is no
place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star extinguished
millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where our eyes will
perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless road. It is the
same with all that we see, as with all that we do not see. To be able
to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it into nothingness,
nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exists, under whatever form,
it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to analyse it, to define
it, or to understand it, thoughts and expressions fail us, or create that
which they are struggling to deny. It is as contrary to the nature of our
reason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as
to conceive limits to infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative
infinity, a sort of infinity of darkness opposed to that which our
intelligence strives to illumine, or rather it is but a child-name or
nickname which our mind has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted
to embrace, for we call nothingness all that escapes our senses or our
reason and exists without our knowledge.

But, it will perhaps be said, though the annihilation of every world
and every thing be impossible, it is not so certain that their death is
impossible; and, to us, what is the difference between nothingness and
everlasting death? Here again we are led astray by our imagination and by
words. We can no more conceive death than we can conceive nothingness.
We use the word death to cover those fragments of nothingness which we
believe that we understand; but, on closer examination, we are bound to
recognize that our idea of death is much too puerile to contain the least
truth. It reaches no higher than our own bodies and cannot measure the
destinies of the universe. We give the name of death to anything that has
a life a little different from ours. Even so do we act towards a world
that appears to us motionless and frozen, the moon, for instance, because
we are persuaded that any form of existence, animal or vegetable, is
extinguished upon it for ever. But it is now some years since we learned
that the most inert matter, to outward seeming, is animated by movements
so powerful and furious that all animal or vegetable life is no more than
sleep and immobility by the side of the swirling eddies and immeasurable
energy locked up in a wayside stone.

“There is no room for death!” cried Emily Brontë.

But, even if, in the infinite series of the centuries, all matter should
really become inert and motionless, it would none the less persist under
one form or another; and persistence, though it were in total immobility,
would, after all, be but a form of life stable and silent at last. All
that dies falls into life; and all that is born is of the same age as
that which dies. If death carried us to nothingness, did birth then draw
us out of that same nothingness? Why should the second be more impossible
than the first? The higher human thought rises and the wider it expands,
the less comprehensible do nothingness and death become. In any case—and
this is what matters here—if nothingness were possible, since it could
not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.

III

COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD

The spiritualists communicate or think that they communicate with the
dead by means of what they call automatic speech and writing. These are
obtained by the agency of a medium[2] in a state of ecstasy, or rather
“trance,” to employ the vocabulary of the new science. This condition
is not one of hypnotic sleep, nor does it seem to be an hysterical
manifestation; it is often associated, as in the case of the medium
Mrs. Piper, with perfect health and complete intellectual and physical
balance. It is rather the more or less voluntary emergence of a second or
subliminal personality or consciousness of the medium; or, if we admit
the spiritualistic hypothesis, his occupation, his “psychic invasion,” as
Myers calls it, by forces from another world. In the “entranced” subject,
the normal consciousness and personality are entirely done away with;
and he replies “automatically,” sometimes by word of mouth, more often
in writing, to the questions put to him. It has happened that he speaks
and writes simultaneously, his voice being occupied by one spirit and
his hand by another, who thus carry on two independent conversations.
More rarely, the voice and the two hands are “possessed” at one and the
same time; and we receive three different communications. Obviously,
manifestations of this sort lend themselves, to frauds and impostures of
all kinds; and the distrust aroused is at first invincible. But there
are some that make their appearance encompassed with such guarantees of
good faith and sincerity, so often, so long and so rigorously checked by
scientific men of unimpeachable character and authority and of originally
inflexible scepticism, that it becomes difficult to maintain a suspicion
at the finish.[3] Unfortunately, I am not able to enter here into the
details of some of these purely scientific sittings, those for instance
of Mrs. Piper, the famous medium with whom F. W. H. Myers, Richard
Hodgson, Professor Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Oliver
Lodge and William James worked during a number of years. On the other
hand, it is precisely the accumulation and coincidences of these abnormal
details which gradually produce and confirm the conviction that we are in
the presence of an entirely new, improbable but genuine phenomenon, which
is sometimes difficult of classification among exclusively terrestrial
phenomena. I should have to devote to these “communications” a special
study which would exceed the limits of this essay; and I will therefore
content myself with referring those who care to know more of the subject
to Sir Oliver Lodge’s book, _The Survival of Man_; and, above all, to the
twenty-five bulky volumes of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R., notably to
the report and comments of William James on the Piper-Hodgson sittings
in Vol. XXIII. and to Vol. XIII., where Hodgson examines the facts and
arguments that may be adduced for or against the agency of the dead; and,
lastly, to Myers’ great work, _Human Personality and its Survival after
Bodily Death_.

The “entranced” mediums are invaded or possessed by different familiar
spirits to whom the new science gives the somewhat inappropriate and
ambiguous name of “controls.” Thus, Mrs. Piper is visited in succession
by Phinuit, George Pelham, or “G.P.,” Imperator, Doctor and Rector. Mrs.
Thompson, another very celebrated medium, has Nelly for her usual tenant,
while graver and more illustrious personages would take possession of
Stainton Moses, a clergyman. Each of these spirits retains a sharply
defined character, which is consistent throughout and which, moreover,
for the most part bears no relation to that of the medium. Amongst these,
Phinuit and Nelly are undoubtedly the most attractive, the most original,
the most living, the most active and, above all, the most talkative.
They centralize the communications after a fashion; they come and go
officiously; and, should any one of those present wish to be brought
into touch with the soul of a deceased relative or friend, they fly in
search of it, find it amid the invisible throng, usher it in, announce
its presence, speak in its name, transmit and, so to speak, translate
the questions and replies; for it seems that it is very difficult for the
dead to communicate with the living and that they need special aptitudes
and a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances. We will not yet examine
what they have to reveal to us; but to see them thus fluttering to and
fro amid the multitude of their discarnate brothers and sisters gives
us a first impression of the next world which is none too reassuring;
and we say to ourselves that the dead of to-day are strangely like those
whom Ulysses conjured up out of the Cimmerian darkness three thousand
years ago: pale and empty shades, bewildered, incoherent, puerile and
terror-stricken, like unto dreams, more numerous than the leaves that
fall in autumn and, like them, trembling in the unknown winds from the
vast plains of the other world. They no longer even have enough life to
be unhappy; and they seem to drag out, we know not where, a precarious
and idle existence, to wander aimlessly, to hover round us, slumbering,
or chattering among one another of the minor matters of this world; and,
when a gap is made in their darkness, to hasten from all sides, like
flocks of famished birds, hungering for light and the sound of a human
voice. And, in spite of ourselves, we think of the _Odyssey_ and the
sinister words of the shade of Achilles as it issued from Erebus:

“Do not, O illustrious Ulysses, speak to me of death; I would wish, being
on earth, to serve for hire with another man of no estate, who had not
much livelihood, rather than rule over all the departed dead.”

What have these latterday dead to tell us? To begin with, it is a
remarkable thing that they appear to be much more interested in events
here below than in those of the world wherein they move. They seem, above
all, jealous to establish their identity, to prove that they still exist,
that they recognize us, that they know everything; and, to convince us
of this, they enter into the most minute and forgotten details with
extraordinary precision, perspicacity and prolixity. They are also
extremely clever at unravelling the intricate family connections of the
person actually questioning them, of any of the sitters, or even of a
stranger entering the room. They recall this one’s little infirmities,
that one’s maladies, the eccentricities or personal tendencies of a
third. They have cognizance of events taking place at a distance:
they see, for instance, and describe to their hearers in London an
insignificant episode in Canada. In a word, they say and do almost all
the disconcerting and inexplicable things that are sometimes obtained
from a first-rate medium; perhaps they even go a little further; but
there comes from it all no breath, no glimmer of the hereafter, not even
the something vaguely promised and vaguely waited for.

We shall be told that the mediums are visited only by inferior spirits,
incapable of tearing themselves from earthly cares and soaring towards
greater and loftier ideas. It is possible; and no doubt we are wrong to
believe that a spirit stripped of its body can suddenly be transformed
and reach, in a moment, the level of our imaginings; but could they not
at least inform us where they are, what they feel and what they do?

And now it seems that death itself has elected to answer these
objections. Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson and William James, who so
often, for long and ardent hours, questioned Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson
and obliged the departed to speak by their mouths, are now themselves
among the shades, on the other side of the curtain of darkness. They
at least knew exactly what to do in order to reach us, what to reveal
in order to allay the uneasy curiosity of men. Myers in particular,
the most ardent, the most convinced, the most impatient of the veil
that parted him from the eternal realities, formally promised those who
were continuing his work that he would make every imaginable effort out
yonder, in the unknown, to come to their aid in a decisive fashion.
He kept his word. A month after his death, when Sir Oliver Lodge was
questioning Mrs. Thompson in her trance, Nelly, the medium’s familiar
spirit, suddenly declared that she had seen Myers, that he was not yet
fully awake, but that he hoped to come, at nine o’clock in the evening,
and “communicate” with his old friend of the Psychical Society.

The sitting was suspended and resumed at half past eight; and Myers’
“communication” was at last obtained. He was recognized by the first
few words he spoke; it was really he; he had not changed, Faithful to
his idiosyncracy when on earth, he at once insisted on the necessity
for taking notes. But he seemed dazed. They spoke to him of the Society
for Psychical Research, the sole interest of his life. He had lost all
recollection of it. Then memory gradually revived; and there followed
a quantity of post-mortem gossip on the subject of the society’s next
president, the obituary article in the _Times_, the letters that should
be published and so on. He complained that people would not let him rest,
that there was not a place in England where they did not ask for him:

“Call Myers! Bring Myers!”

He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also
complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the
mediums: “they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines
of Virgil.”[4] As for his present condition, “he groped his way as if
through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his
way in a strange town ... and, even when he saw people that he knew were
dead, he thought they were only visions.”

This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about
all that we obtained from Myers’ “control” or “impersonation,” of which
better things had been expected. The “communication” and many others
which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers’ habits, character
and ways of thinking and speaking would possess some value if none of
those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at
the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand, they
are most probably but reminiscences of a secondary personality of the
medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters.

A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the
names connected with it, is that which is known as “Mrs. Piper’s
Hodgson-Control.” Professor William James devotes an account of over
a hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the _Proceedings_.
Dr. Hodgson, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American branch of
the S.P.R., of which William James was vice-president. For many years,
he devoted himself to Mrs. Piper the medium, working with her twice a
week and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject
of posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been
exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death;
and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper
that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience
than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape
and that “he would make it hot for them.” He did come back, a week after
his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs.
Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during
several sittings at which William James was present. I should like to
give an idea of these manifestations. But, as the celebrated Harvard
professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sitting of this
kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain
for the emotion experienced on thus finding yourself in the presence of
an invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but
anticipates your thoughts, understands before you have finished speaking,
grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or smiling.
The life of the dead man, which, during a strange hour, had, so to speak,
surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for the second
time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt supplies the
best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion; but it is not certain
that here, as in many other cases where the unknown predominates, logic
is the only road that leads to the truth.

“When I first undertook,” says William James, “to collate this series of
sittings and make the present report, I supposed that my verdict would be
determined by pure logic. Certain minute incidents, I thought, ought to
make for spirit-return or against it in a ‘crucial’ way. But watching my
mind work as it goes over the data, convinces me that exact logic plays
only a preparatory part in shaping our conclusions here; and that the
decisive vote, if there be one, has to be cast by what I may call one’s
general sense of dramatic probability, which sense ebbs and flows from
one hypothesis to another—it does so in the present writer at least—in
a rather illogical manner. If one sticks to the detail, one may draw an
anti-spiritist conclusion; if one thinks more of what the whole mass may
signify, one may well incline to spiritist interpretations.”[5]

And, at the end of his article, he sums up in the following words:

“_I myself feel as if an external will to communicate were probably
there_, that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole
acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper’s dream-life,
even equipped with ‘telepathic’ powers, accounts for all the results
found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be Hodgson’s, or be
some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await
more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty
or a hundred years.”[6]

As we see, William James is inclined to waver; and at certain points in
his account he appears to waver still more and indeed to say deliberately
that the spirits “have a finger in the pie.” These hesitations on the
part of a man who has revolutionized our psychological ideas and who
possessed a brain as wonderfully organized and well-balanced as that
of our own Taine, for instance, are very significant. As a doctor
of medicine and a professor of philosophy, sceptical by nature and
scrupulously faithful to experimental methods, he was thrice qualified to
conduct investigations of this kind to a successful conclusion. It is not
a question of allowing ourselves, in our turn, to be unduly influenced
by those hesitations; but, in any case, they show that the problem is
a serious one, the gravest, perhaps, if the facts were beyond dispute,
which we have had to solve since the coming of Christ; and that we must
not expect to dismiss it with a shrug or a laugh.

I am obliged, for lack of space, to refer those who wish to form an
opinion of their own on the “Piper-Hodgson” case to the text of the
_Proceedings_. The case, at the same time, is far from being one of
the most striking; it should rather be classed, were it not for the
importance of the sitters concerned, among the minor successes of
the Piper series. Hodgson, according to the invariable custom of the
spirits, is, first of all, bent on making himself recognized; and the
inevitable, tedious string of trifling reminiscences begins twenty
times over again and fills page after page. As usual in such instances,
the recollections common to both the questioner and the spirit who is
supposed to be replying are brought out in their most circumstantial,
their most insignificant and also their most private details with
astonishing eagerness, precision and vivacity. And observe that, for all
these details, which he discloses with such extraordinary facility, the
dead man answering seeks by preference, one would say, the most hidden
and forgotten treasures of the living listener’s memory. He spares
him nothing; he harps on everything with childish satisfaction and
apprehensive solicitude, not so much to persuade others as to prove to
himself that he still exists. And the obstinacy of this poor invisible
being, in striving to manifest himself through the hitherto uncrannied
doors that separate us from our eternal destinies, is at once ridiculous
and tragic:

“Do you remember, William, when we were in the country at So-and-so’s,
that game we played with the children; do you remember my saying
such-and-such a thing when I was in that room where there was
such-and-such a chair or table?”

“Why, yes, Hodgson, I do remember now.”

“A good test, that?”

“First-rate, Hodgson!”

And so on, indefinitely. Sometimes, there is a more significant incident
that seems to surpass the mere transmission of subliminal thought. They
are talking, for instance, of a frustrated marriage which was always
surrounded with great mystery, even to Hodgson’s most intimate friends:

“Do you remember a lady-doctor in New York, a member of our society?”

“No, but what about her?”

“Her husband’s name was Blair ... I think.”

“Do you mean Dr. Blair Thaw?”

“Oh, yes. Ask Mrs. Thaw if I did not at a dinner-party mention something
about the lady. I may have done so.”

James writes to Mrs. Thaw, who declares that, as a matter of fact,
fifteen years before, Hodgson had said to her that he had just proposed
to a girl and been refused. Mrs. Thaw and Dr. Newbold were the only
people in the world who knew the particulars.

But to come to the further sittings. Among other points discussed is
the financial position of the American branch of the S.P.R., a position
which, at the death of the secretary, or rather factotum, Hodgson, was
anything but brilliant. And behold the somewhat strange spectacle of
different members of the society debating its affairs with their defunct
secretary. Shall they dissolve? Shall they amalgamate? Shall they send
the materials collected, most of which are Hodgson’s, to England? They
consult the dead man; he replies, gives good advice, seems fully aware
of all the complications, all the difficulties. One day, in Hodgson’s
lifetime, when the society was found to be short of funds, an anonymous
donor had sent the sum necessary to relieve it from embarrassment.
Hodgson alive did not know who the donor was; Hodgson dead picks him out
among those present, addresses him by name and thanks him publicly. On
another occasion, Hodgson, like all the spirits, complains of the extreme
difficulty which he finds in conveying his thought through the alien
organism of the medium:

“I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying
to find his hat,” he says.

But, when, after so much idle chatter, William James at last puts the
essential questions that burn our lips—“Hodgson, what have you to tell us
about the other life?”—the dead man becomes shifty and does nothing but
seek evasions:

“It is not a vague fantasy but a reality,” he replies.

“But,” Mrs. William James insists, “do you live as we do, as men do?”

“What does she say?” asks the spirit, pretending not to understand.

“Do you live as men do?” repeats William James.

“Do you wear clothing and live in houses?” adds his wife.

“Oh yes, houses, but not clothing. No, that is absurd. Just wait a
moment, I am going to get out.”

“You will come back again?”

“Yes.”

“He has got to go out and get his breath,” remarks another spirit, named
Rector, suddenly intervening.

It has not been waste of time, perhaps, to reproduce the general features
of one of these sittings which may be regarded as typical. I will add,
in order to give an idea of the farthest point which it is possible to
attain, the following instance of an experiment made by Sir Oliver Lodge
and related by him. He handed Mrs. Piper, in her “trance,” a gold watch
which had just been sent him by one of his uncles and which belonged
to that uncle’s twin brother, who had died twenty years before. When
the watch was in her possession, Mrs. Piper, or rather Phinuit, one
of her familiar spirits, began to relate a host of details concerning
the childhood of this twin brother, facts dating back for more than
sixty-six years and of course unknown to Sir Oliver Lodge. Soon after,
the surviving uncle, who lived in another town, wrote and confirmed the
accuracy of most of these details, which he had quite forgotten and of
which he was only now reminded by the medium’s revelations; while those
which he could not recollect at all were subsequently declared to be in
accordance with fact by a third uncle, an old sea-captain, who lived in
Cornwall and who had not the least notion why such strange questions were
put to him.

I quote this instance not because it has any exceptional or decisive
value, but simply, I repeat, by way of an example; for, like the case
connected with Mrs. Thaw, mentioned above, it marks pretty accurately the
extreme points to which people have up to now, thanks to spirit agency,
penetrated the mysteries of the unknown. It is well to add that cases
in which the supposed limits of the most far-reaching telepathy are so
manifestly exceeded are fairly uncommon.

Now what are we to think of all this? Must we, with Myers, Newbold,
Hyslop, Hodgson and many others, who studied this problem at length,
conclude in favour of the incontestable agency of forces and
intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which
it was deemed that none might cross. Must we acknowledge with them that
there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to
hesitate any longer between the telepathic theory and the spiritualistic
theory? I do not think so. I have no prejudices—what were the use of
having any, in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival
and the intervention of the dead; but it is wise and necessary, before
leaving the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the suppositions, all the
explanations there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between
two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof
one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region
which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless
spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It
is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world, as long as
it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from
it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the
adjoining 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 the medium, contrary
to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the
spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it
exists.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we know—transmission of
thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events
at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in
evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living
persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever
obtained among living people any series of communications or revelations
similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs.
Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can compare with them
for continuity or lucidity. But, though the quality of the phenomena
will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is
identical. Our logical inference is that the real cause lies not in the
source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the
power of the medium. For the rest, Mr. J. G. Piddington, who devoted an
exceedingly detailed study to Mrs. Thompson, plainly perceived in her,
when she was not “entranced” and when there were no spirits whatever in
question, manifestations inferior, it is true, but absolutely analogous
to those involving the dead.[7] These mediums are pleased, in all good
faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties,
to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names
which were borne by beings who have crossed to the farther side of the
mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither
lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts. Well, in
examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of
them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world
or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish,
phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has
been violated. In the story of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for instance,
which is one of the most characteristic and one which carries us farther
than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have ceased to
be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by perception of
events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from one subconscious
mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance, with the two
surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and, in the
past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each other,
she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they themselves had
forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust and darkness of
six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of this kind passes
the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse to credit it if,
first of all, the experiment had not been controlled and certified by a
man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge, and if, moreover, it did not
form one of a group of equally significant facts which clearly show that
we are not here concerned with an absolutely unique miracle or with an
unhoped-for and unprecedented concourse of coincidences. It is simply
a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance and telepathy
raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the
unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science,
which is not saying that they are explained: that is another question.
When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive,
negative, induction, potential and resistance, we are also applying
conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward essence we are
utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending any
better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary manifestations
and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the
dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of
extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind.

For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that no one,
neither the medium nor the witnesses, should ever have known of the
existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man, in other words,
that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this
has actually occurred up to the present, nor even that it is possible;
in any case, it would be very difficult to control such an experiment.
Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the
quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power
should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain
cases, of which—as the others were of very much the same nature—I will
merely mention one of the most striking.[8] In a course of excellent
sittings with Mrs. Piper the medium, he communicated with various dead
friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The
medium, the spirits and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating
mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact and easy. In this
extremely favourable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the
soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before and whom
he simply calls “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than
most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved
quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute,
vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now A “had been troubled much, for
years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion,
though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”

The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come
before death, as in cases of suicide.

“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr.
Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all
the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from
my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained
satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately
than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in
common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but
incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is
not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real,
living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the
hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal
consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its
suggestions and draws from its own resources the revelations which it
makes.”

The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained
only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness;
otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having
penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon
it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of
mind presupposed in the dead man.

Of a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these
extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly
everything, bar every road and all but deny to the spirits any power
of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have
chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict
themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which
memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but
indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there then no other
outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry around us, stagnant in
their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to
be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time?
Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they
survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of
the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is
that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour
is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us;
and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that
is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it
to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while
to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal
fields, in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and
that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric
complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august
and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult
for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a
strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details
about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not
about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about
the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our
body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things,
large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble
eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a
shadow separates us and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past that
they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to
seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would
nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which
nothing now enthrals some other discourse than that which it avoided when
it was still subject to matter.

OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS

Survival with our present consciousness is nearly as impossible and
incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover, even if it were
admissible, it could not be dreadful. This is certain that, when the body
disappears, all physical sufferings will disappear at the same time;
for we cannot imagine a spirit suffering in a body which it no longer
possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all that we call mental
or moral sufferings, seeing that all of them, if we examine them well,
spring from the ties and habits of our senses. Our spirit feels the
reaction of the sufferings of our body or of the bodies that surround
it; it cannot suffer in itself or through itself. Slighted affection,
shattered love, disappointments, failures, despair, betrayal, personal
humiliations, as well as the sorrows and the loss of those whom it
loves, acquire their potent sting only by passing through the body which
it animates. Outside its own pain, which is the pain of not knowing,
the spirit, once delivered from its flesh, could suffer only in the
recollection of the flesh. It is possible that it still grieves over the
troubles of those whom it has left behind on earth. But to its eyes,
since it no longer reckons the days, these troubles will seem so brief
that it will not grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and
knowing whither they lead, it will not behold their severity.

The spirit is insensible to all that is not happiness. It is made only
for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It can
grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those limits,
when there are no more bonds to space and time, is already to transcend
them.

It becomes a question of knowing whether that spirit, sheltered from all
sorrow, will remain itself, will perceive and recognize itself in the
bosom of infinity and up to what point it is important that it should
recognize itself. This brings us to the problems of survival without
consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of
to-day.

Survival without consciousness seems at first sight the more probable.
From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the other side
of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful, therefore, for
those who prefer the easiest solution and that most consistent with the
present state of human thought to limit their anxiety to that. They have
nothing to dread; for, on close inspection, every fear, if any remained,
should deck itself with hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer
suffer; the mind, separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is
extinguished, scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes
is the great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure,
without dreams and without awakening.

But this is only a solution that fosters indolence. If we press those who
speak of survival without consciousness, we perceive that they mean only
their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and we have just
seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of consciousness to
persist in infinity.

Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that
cosmic consciousness into which their own will fall. But this were to
solve very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the
night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a
man’s brain.

It is evident that, in the depths of our thought limited on every
side, we shall never be able to form the least idea of an infinite
consciousness. There is even an essential antinomy between the words
consciousness and infinity. To speak of consciousness is to mean the
most definite thing conceivable in the finite; consciousness, properly
speaking, is the finite self-concentrated in order to discover and feel
its closest limits, to the end that it may enjoy them as closely as
possible. On the other hand, it is impossible for us to separate the idea
of intelligence from the idea of consciousness. Any intelligence that
does not seem capable of transforming itself into consciousness becomes
for us a mysterious phenomenon to which we give names more mysterious
still, lest we should have to admit that we understand nothing of it at
all. Now, on this little earth of ours, which is but a dot in space, we
see expended in every scale of life, as for instance, in the wonderful
combinations and organisms of the insect world, a mass of intelligence
so vast that our human intelligence cannot even dream of assessing it.
Everything that exists—and man first of all—is incessantly drawing upon
that inexhaustible reserve. We are therefore irresistibly driven to
ask ourselves if that cosmic intelligence is not the emanation of an
infinite consciousness, or if it must not, sooner or later, elaborate
one. And this sets us tossing between two irreducible impossibilities.
What is most probable is that here again we are judging everything from
the lowlands of our anthropomorphism. At the summit of our infinitesimal
life, we see only intelligence and consciousness, the extreme point of
thought; and from this we infer that, at the summits of all lives, there
could be naught but intelligence and consciousness, whereas these perhaps
occupy only an inferior place in the hierarchy of spiritual or other
possibilities.

Survival absolutely denuded of consciousness would, therefore, be
possible only if we deny the existence of a cosmic consciousness.
When once we admit this consciousness, under whatsoever form, we are
bound to share in it; and, up to a certain point, the question is
indistinguishable from that of the continuance of a more or less modified
consciousness. There is, for the moment, no hope of solving it; but we
are free to grope in its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at
all points.

Here begins the open sea. Here begins the splendid adventure, the only
one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as its
highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a form of
life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look upon it with
the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind will be accompanied
to the steps of the tomb with the same glad expectation that greets a
birth.

Suppose that a child in its mother’s womb were endowed with a certain
consciousness; that unborn twins, for instance, could, in some obscure
fashion, exchange their impressions and communicate their hopes and
fears to each other. Having known naught but the warm maternal shades,
they would not feel straitened nor unhappy there. They would probably
have no other idea than to prolong as long as possible that life of
abundance free from cares and of sleep free from alarms. But, if, even
as we are aware that we must die, they too knew that they must be born,
that is to say, that they must suddenly leave the shelter of that gentle
darkness and abandon for ever that captive but peaceful existence, to be
precipitated into an absolutely different, unimaginable and boundless
world, how great would be their anxieties and their fears! And yet there
is no reason why our own anxieties and fears should be more justified
or less ridiculous. The character, the spirit, the intentions, the
benevolence or the indifference of the unknown to which we are subject do
not alter between our birth and our death. We remain always in the same
infinity, in the same universe. It is perfectly reasonable and legitimate
to persuade ourselves that the tomb is no more dreadful than the cradle.
It would even be legitimate and reasonable to accept the cradle only on
account of the tomb. If, before being born, we were permitted to choose
between the great peace of non-existence and a life that should not be
completed by the glorious hour of death, which of us, knowing what he
ought to know, would accept the disquieting problem of an existence
that would not lead to the reassuring mystery of its end? Which of us
would wish to come into a world where we can learn so little, if he did
not know that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more?
The best thing about life is that it prepares this hour for us, that
it is the one and only road leading to the magic gateway and into that
incomparable mystery where misfortunes and sufferings will no longer be
possible, because we shall have lost the body that produced them; where
the worst that can befall us is the dreamless sleep which we number among
the greatest boons on earth; where, lastly, it is almost unimaginable
that a thought should not survive to mingle with the substance of the
universe, that is to say, with infinity, which, if it be not a waste of
indifference can be nothing but a sea of joy.

Before fathoming that sea, let us remark to those who aspire to maintain
their ego that they are calling for the sufferings which they dread.
The ego implies limits. The ego cannot subsist except in so far as it
is separated from that which surrounds it. The stronger the ego, the
narrower its limits and the clearer the separation. The more painful too;
for the mind, if it remain as we know it—and we are not able to imagine
it different—will no sooner have seen its limits than it will wish to
overstep them; and, the more separated it feels, the greater will be its
longing to unite with that which lies outside. There will therefore be
an eternal struggle between its being and its aspirations. And really it
would have served no object to be born and die only to arrive at these
interminable contests. Have we not here yet one more proof that our ego,
as we conceive it, could never subsist in the infinity where it must
needs go, since it cannot go elsewhere? It behoves us therefore to clear
away conceptions that emanate only from our body, even as the mists that
veil the daylight from our sight emanate only from the lowlands. Pascal
has said, once and for all:

“The narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view.”

On the other hand—for we must keep nothing back, nor turn from the
adverse darkness should it seem nearest to the truth, nor show any
bias—on the other hand, we can grant to those who yearn to remain as they
are that the survival of an atom of themselves would suffice for a new
entrance into an infinity from which their body no longer separates them.

If it seems impossible that anything—a movement, a vibration, a
radiation—should stop or disappear, why then should thought be lost?
There will, no doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to
allure the new ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that
it will find in that boundless environment, just as the other ego, on
this earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since
we have been able to acquire our present consciousness, why should it
be impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear
to us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day;
it is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much more
chance than purpose has entered into it; and much more alien substance
than any inborn substance which it contained. It is but a long series
of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not become aware
until the awakening of our memory; and its kernel, of which we do not
know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less concrete than a
thought. If the new environment which we enter on leaving our mother’s
womb transforms us to such a point that there is, so to speak, no
connection between the embryo that we were and the man that we have
become, is it not right to think that the far newer, stranger, wider and
richer environment which we enter on quitting life will transform us even
more? We can see in what happens to us here a figure of what awaits us
elsewhere and can readily admit that our spiritual being, liberated from
its body, if it does not mingle at the first onset with the infinite,
will develop itself there gradually, will choose itself a substance and,
no longer trammelled by space and time, will go on for ever growing.
It is very possible that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become
the law of our future development. It is very possible that our best
thoughts will welcome us on the farther shore and that the quality of our
intellect will determine that of the infinite which crystallizes around
it. Every hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be
addressed to happiness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us.
It finds no place in the human imagination that methodically explores
the future. And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides
over our existence in the other world, this existence, to presume the
worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It
will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it
be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in
this world the only narrow, grudging, obscure and sorrowful moment of our
destiny.

We have said that the peculiar sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of
not knowing or not understanding, which includes the sorrow of being
powerless; for he who knows the supreme causes, being no longer paralysed
by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he who
understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a mistake,
which is not possible, an infinite mistake being inconceivable. I do not
believe that another sorrow of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only
one sorrow which, at first thought, might seem admissible—and which, in
any case, could be but ephemeral—would arise from the sight of the pain
and misery remaining on the earth which we have left. But this sorrow,
after all, would be but one aspect and an insignificant phase of the
sorrow of being powerless and of not understanding. As for the latter,
though it is not only beyond the domain of our intelligence, but even at
an insuperable distance from our imagination, we may say that it would
be intolerable only if it were without hope. But, for that, the universe
would have to abandon any attempt to understand itself, or else admit
within itself an object that remained for ever foreign to it. Either the
mind will not perceive its limits and, consequently, will not suffer from
them, or else it will overstep them as it perceives them; for how could
the universe have parts eternally condemned to form no part of itself
and of its knowledge? Hence we cannot understand that the torture of not
understanding, supposing it to exist for a moment, should not end by
absorption in the state of infinity, which, if it be not happiness as we
comprehend it, could be naught but an indifference higher and purer than
joy.

THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY

Let us turn our thoughts towards it. The problem goes beyond humanity and
embraces all things. It is possible, I think, to view infinity under two
distinct aspects. Let us contemplate the first of them. We are plunged in
a universe that has no limits in space or time. It can neither go forward
nor go back. It has no origin. It never began, nor will it ever end. The
myriads of years behind it are even as the myriads which it has yet to
unroll. From all time it has been at the boundless centre of the days.
It could have no aim, for, if it had one, it would have attained it in
the infinity of the years that lie behind us; besides, that aim would
lie outside itself and, if anything lay outside it, infinity would be
bounded by that thing and would cease to be infinity. It is not making
for anywhere, for it would have arrived there; consequently, all that the
worlds within its pale, all that we ourselves do can have no influence
upon it. All that it will do it has done. All that it has not done
remains undone because it can never do it. If it have no mind, it will
never have one. If it have one, that mind has been at its climax from all
time and will remain there, changeless and immovable. It is as young as
it has ever been and as old as it will ever be. It has made in the past
all the efforts and all the trials which it will make in the future; and,
as all the possible combinations have been exhausted since what we cannot
even call the beginning, it does not seem as if that which has not taken
place in the eternity that stretches before our birth can happen in the
eternity that will follow our death. If it have not become conscious,
it will never become conscious; if it know not what it wishes, it will
continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or knowing nothing and
remaining as near its end as its beginning.

This is the gloomiest thought to which man can attain. So far, I do not
think that its depths have been sufficiently sounded. If it were really
irrefutable—and some may contend that it is—if it actually contained the
last word of the great riddle, it would be almost impossible to live in
its shadow. Naught save the certainty that our conceptions of time and
space are illusive and absurd can lighten the abyss wherein our last hope
would perish.

The universe thus conceived would be, if not intelligible, at least
admissible by our reason; but in that universe float billions of
worlds limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are
born again. They form part of the whole; and we see, therefore, that
parts of that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and
end. We, in fact, know only those parts; and they are of a number so
infinite that in our eyes they fill all infinity. That which is going
nowhere teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That
which has always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems to be
eternally experimenting with more or less ill-success. At what goal is
it aiming, since it is already there? Everything that we discover in
that which could not possibly have an object looks as though it were
pursuing one with inconceivable ardour; and the mind that animates what
we see, in that which should know everything and possess itself, seems
to know nothing and to seek itself without intermission. Thus all that
is apparent to our senses in infinity gainsays that which our reason
is compelled to ascribe to it. According as we fathom it, we come to
understand how deep is our want of understanding; and, the more we strive
to penetrate the two incomprehensible problems that stand face to face,
the more they contradict each other.

What will become of us amid all this confusion? Shall we leave the finite
wherein we dwell to be swallowed up in this or the other infinite? In
other words, shall we end by absorption in the infinite which our reason
conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which our eyes behold,
that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral worlds? Shall we
never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and to be reborn
eternally, to enter at last into that which, from all eternity, can
neither have been born nor have died and which exists without either
future or past? Shall we one day escape, with all that surrounds us, from
this unhappy speculation, to find our way at last into peace, wisdom,
changeless and boundless consciousness, or into hopeless unconsciousness?
Shall we have the fate which our senses foretell, or that which our
intelligence demands? Or are both senses and intelligence only illusions,
puny implements, vain weapons of an hour, which were never intended to
examine or defy the universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it
wise to accept it and to deem impossible that which we do not understand,
seeing that we understand almost nothing? Is truth not at an immeasurable
distance from these inconsistencies which appear to us enormous and
irreducible and which, doubtless, are of no more importance than the rain
that falls upon the sea?

But, even to our poor understanding of to-day, the discrepancy between
the infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses
is perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe
that has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible
combination has been made; when we declare that there is no chance
that what has not taken place in the immeasurable past can take place
in the immeasurable future, our imagination perhaps attributes to the
infinity of time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth,
all that infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its
disposal; and the chances, encounters and combinations that lie therein
have not been exhausted in the eternity that has gone before us any
more than they could be in the eternity that will come after us. The
infinity of time is no vaster than the infinity of the substance of the
universe. Events, forces, chances, causes, effects, phenomena, fusions,
combinations, coincidences, harmonies, unions, possibilities, lives are
represented in it by countless numbers that entirely fill a bottomless
and vergeless abyss where they have been shaken together from what we
call the beginning of the world that had no beginning and where they
will be stirred up until the end of a world that will have no end.
There is, therefore, no climax, no changelessness, no immovability. It
is probable that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day,
that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what it
wants. It is possible that its ideal is still veiled by the shadow of its
immensity; it is also possible that experiments and chances are following
one upon the other in unimaginable worlds, compared wherewith all those
which we see on starry nights are no more than a pinch of gold-dust in
the ocean depths. Lastly, if either be true, it is also true that we
ourselves, or what remains of us—it matters not—will profit one day by
those experiments and those chances. That which has not yet happened may
suddenly supervene; and the next state, with the supreme wisdom which
will recognize and be able to establish that state, is perhaps ready to
arise from the clash of circumstances. It would not be at all astonishing
if the consciousness of the universe, in the endeavour to form itself,
had not yet encountered the combination of necessary chances and if human
thought were actually supporting one of those decisive chances. Here
there is a hope. Small as man and his brain may appear, they have exactly
the value of the most enormous forces that they are able to conceive,
since there is neither great nor small in the immensurable; and, if our
body equalled the dimensions of all the worlds which our eyes can see, it
would have exactly the same weight and the same importance, as compared
with the universe, that it has to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in
infinity a space which comparisons do not reduce to nothing.

For the rest, if everything must be said, at the cost of constantly
and shamelessly contradicting one’s self in the dark, and to return to
the first supposition, the idea of possible progress, it is extremely
probable that this again is one of those childish disorders of our brain
which prevent us from seeing the thing that is. It is quite as probable,
as we have seen above, that there never was, that there never will be any
progress, because there could not be a goal. At most there may occur a
few ephemeral combinations which, to our poor eyes, will seem happier or
more beautiful than the others. Even so we think gold more beautiful than
the mud in the street, or the flower in a splendid garden happier than
the stone at the bottom of a drain; but all this, obviously, is of no
importance, has no corresponding reality and proves nothing in particular.

The more we reflect upon it, the more pronounced is the infirmity of our
intelligence which cannot succeed in reconciling the idea of progress and
even the idea of experiment with the supreme idea of infinity. Although
nature has been incessantly and indefatigably repeating herself before
our eyes for thousands of years, reproducing the same trees and the same
animals, we cannot contrive to understand why the universe indefinitely
recommences experiments that have been made billions of times. It is
inevitable that, in the innumerable combinations that have been and are
being made in termless time and boundless space, there have been and
still are millions of planets and consequently millions of human races
exactly similar to our own, side by side with myriads of others more
or less different from it. Let us not say to ourselves that it would
require an unimaginable concourse of circumstances to reproduce a globe
like unto our earth in every respect. We must remember that we are in
the infinite and that this unimaginable concourse must necessarily take
place in the innumerousness which we are unable to imagine. Though
it need billions and billions of cases for two features to coincide,
those billions and billions will encumber infinity no more than would a
single case. Place an infinite number of worlds in an infinite number
of infinitely diverse circumstances: there will always be an infinite
number for which those circumstances will be alike; if not, we should be
setting bounds to our idea of the universe, which would forthwith become
more incomprehensible still. From the moment that we insist sufficiently
upon that thought, we necessarily arrive at these conclusions. If they
have not struck us hitherto, it is because we never go to the farthest
point of our imagination. Now the farthest point of our imagination is
but the beginning of reality and gives us only a small, purely human
universe, which, vast as it may seem, dances in the real universe like an
apple on the sea. I repeat, if we do not admit that thousands of worlds,
similar in all points to our own, in spite of the billions of adverse
chances, have always existed and still exist to-day, we are sapping
the foundations of the only possible conception of the universe or of
infinity.

Now how is it that those millions of exactly similar human races, which
from all time suffer what we have suffered and are still suffering,
profit us nothing, that all their experiences and all their schools have
had no influence upon our first efforts and that everything has to be
done again and begun again incessantly?

As we see, the two theories balance each other. It is well to acquire
by degrees the habit of understanding nothing. There remains to us the
faculty of choosing the less gloomy of the two or persuading ourselves
that the mists of the other exist only in our brain. As that strange
visionary, William Blake, said:

“Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.”

Let us add that it is not possible for it to know anything other than
itself. What we do not know would be enough to create the world afresh;
and what we do know cannot add one moment to the life of a fly. Who can
tell but that our chief mistake lies in believing that an intelligence,
were it an intelligence thousands of times as great as ours, directs the
universe? It may be a force of quite another nature, a force that differs
as widely from that on which our brain prides itself as electricity, for
instance, differs from the wind that blows. That is why it is fairly
probable that our mind, however powerful it become, will always grope in
mystery. If it be certain that everything in us must also be in nature,
because everything comes to us from her, if the mind and all the logic
which it has placed at the culminating point of our being direct or
seem to direct all the actions of our life, it by no means follows that
there is not in the universe a force greatly superior to thought, a
force having no imaginable relation to the mind, a force which animates
and governs all things according to other laws and of which nothing is
found in us but almost imperceptible traces, even as almost imperceptible
traces of thought are all that can be found in plants and minerals.

In any case, there is nothing here to make us lose courage. It is
necessarily the human illusion of evil, ugliness, uselessness and
impossibility that is to blame. We must wait not for the universe to be
transformed, but for our intelligence to expand or to take part in the
other force; and we must maintain our confidence in a world which knows
nothing of our conceptions of purpose and progress, because it doubtless
has ideas whereof we have no idea, a world, moreover, which could
scarcely wish itself harm.

“These are but vain speculations,” it will be said. “What matters,
after all, the idea which we form of those things which belong to the
unknowable, seeing that the unknowable, were we a thousand times as
intelligent as we are, is closed to us for ever and that the idea which
we form of it will never have any value?”

That is true; but there are degrees in our ignorance of the unknowable;
and each of these degrees marks a triumph of the intelligence. To
estimate more and more completely the extent of what it does not know is
all that man’s knowledge can hope for. Our idea of the unknowable was and
always will be valueless, I admit; but it nevertheless is and will remain
the most important idea of mankind. All our morality, all that is in the
highest degree noble and profound in our existence has always been based
on this idea devoid of real value. To-day, as yesterday, even though
it be possible to recognize more clearly that it is too incomplete and
relative ever to have any actual value, it is necessary to carry it as
high and as far as we can. It alone creates the only atmosphere wherein
the best part of ourselves can live. Yes, it is the unknowable into which
we shall not enter; but that is no reason for saying to ourselves:

“I am closing all the doors and all the windows; henceforth, I shall
interest myself only in things which my everyday intelligence can
compass. Those things alone have the right to influence my actions and my
thoughts.”

Where should we arrive at that rate? What things can my intelligence
compass? Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from the
inconceivable? Since there is no means of eliminating that inconceivable,
it is reasonable and salutary to make the best of it and therefore to
imagine it as stupendously vast as we are able. The gravest reproach
that can be brought against the positive religions and notably against
Christianity is that they have too often, if not in theory, at least in
practice, encouraged such a narrowing of the mystery of the universe. By
broadening it, we broaden the space wherein our mind will move. It is for
us what we make it: let us then form it of all that we can reach on the
horizon of ourselves. As for the mystery itself, we shall, of-course,
never reach it; but we have a much greater chance of approaching it by
facing it and going whither it draws us than by turning our backs upon it
and returning to that place where we well know that it no longer is. Not
by diminishing our thoughts shall we diminish the distance that separates
us from the ultimate truths; but by enlarging them as much as possible we
are sure of deceiving ourselves as little as possible. And the loftier
our idea of the infinite, the more buoyant and the purer becomes the
spiritual atmosphere wherein we live and the wider and deeper the horizon
against which our thoughts and feelings stand out, the horizon which is
all their life and which they inspire.

“Perpetually to construct ideas requiring the utmost stretch of our
faculties,” wrote Herbert Spencer, “and perpetually to find that such
ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realize to us more
fully than any other course the greatness of that which we vainly strive
to grasp.... By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown
back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may
keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and
our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the
Unknowable.”

Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
absolute and perfect infinity—the changeless, immovable infinity which
has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our reason
tends—or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence, undeniable
here below, of our senses—the infinity which seeks itself, which is still
evolving and not yet established—it behoves us above all to foresee in it
our fate, which, for that matter, must, in either case, end by absorption
in that very infinity.

OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES

The first infinity, the ideal infinity, corresponds most nearly with
the requirements of our reason, which does not justify us in giving
it the preference. It is impossible for us to foresee what we shall
become in it, because it seems to exclude any becoming. It therefore but
remains for us to address ourselves to the second, to that which we see
and imagine in time and space. Furthermore, it is possible that it may
precede the other. However absolute our conception of the universe, we
have seen that we can always admit that what has not taken place in the
eternity before us will happen in the eternity after us and that there
is nothing save an untold number of chances to prevent the universe from
acquiring in the end that perfect consciousness which will establish it
at its zenith.

Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar infinity,
the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other things from our
eyes, but which cannot be a total illusion. It seems to us to be peopled
only with objects—planets, suns, stars, nebulæ, atoms, imponderous
fluids—which move, unite and separate, repel and attract one another,
which shrink and expand, are for ever shifting and never arrive, which
measure space in that which has no confines and number the hours in that
which has no term. In a word, we are in an infinity that seems to have
almost the same character and the same habits as that power in the midst
of which we breathe and which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.

What will be our fate in that infinity? We are asking ourselves no idle
question, even if we should unite with it after losing all consciousness,
all notion of the ego, even if we should exist there as no more than a
little nameless substance—soul or matter, we cannot tell—suspended in the
equally nameless abyss that replaces time and space. It is not an idle
question, for it concerns the history of the worlds or of the universe;
and this history, far more than that of our petty existence, is our own
great history, in which perhaps something of ourselves or something
incomparably better and vaster will end by meeting us again some day.

Shall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider the
ways of nature and remember that we form part of a universe that has
not yet gathered its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that good and
bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and that, when we
have lost the organ of suffering, we shall not meet any of the earthly
sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind,
lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to
world, unknown to itself in an unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly,
will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have
already spoken and which is doubtless the last that imagination can touch
with its wing? Finally, if there were nothing left of our body and our
mind, there would still remain the matter and the spirit (or, at least,
the obviously single force to which we give that double name) which
composed them and whose fate must be no more indifferent to us than our
own fate; for, let us repeat, from our death onwards, the adventure of
the universe becomes our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to
ourselves:

“What can it matter? We shall not be there.”

We shall be there always, because everything will be there.

And will this everything wherein we shall be included, in a world ever
seeking itself, continue a prey to new and perpetual and perhaps painful
experiences? Since the part that we were was unhappy, why should the part
that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that yonder
the unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful,
more stupid and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how
shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of
others which ought to have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity?
It is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our
sorrows are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that
they make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more
complete consciousness, a more just and serene understanding than on
this earth and in the worlds which we discern? And, if it be true that
it has somewhere attained that better understanding, why does the mind
that presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by it? Is no
communication possible between worlds which must have been born of the
same idea and which lie in its depths? What would be the mystery of that
isolation? Are we to believe that the earth marks the farthest stage and
the most successful experiment? What, then, can the mind of the universe
have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come
only to this? But, on the other hand, that darkness and those barriers
which can have come only from itself, since they could have arisen no
elsewhere, have they the power to stay its progress? Who then could have
set those insoluble problems to infinity and from what more remote and
profound region than itself could they have issued? Some one, after all,
must know the answer; and, as behind infinity there can be none that is
not infinity itself, it is impossible to imagine a malignant will in a
will that leaves no point around it which is not wholly covered. Or are
the experiments begun in the stars continued mechanically, by virtue of
the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and their pitiful
consequences, according to the custom of nature, who knows nothing of
our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as she does the seed on
earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again, is the whole question
of our peace and happiness, like that of the fate of the worlds, reduced
to knowing whether or not the infinity of endeavours and combinations be
equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly, to come to what is most likely, is
it we who deceive ourselves, who know nothing, who see nothing and who
consider imperfect that which is perhaps faultless, we who are but an
infinitesimal fragment of the intelligence which we judge by the aid of
the little shreds of understanding which it has vouchsafed to lend us?

How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
infinite and the invisible, we who do not understand nor even see the
thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds which
he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not perceive
the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment when they are
stopped by an object akin to those with which his eye is familiar upon
this earth: were it otherwise, the whole space filled with innumerable
suns and boundless forces, instead of being an abyss of absolute
darkness, absorbing and extinguishing shafts of light that shoot across
it from every side, would be but a monstrous and unbearable ocean of
flashes.

And, if we do not see the light, at least we think we know a few of its
rays or its reflections; but we are absolutely ignorant of that which is
unquestionably the essential law of the universe, namely, gravitation.
What is that force, the most powerful of all and the least visible,
imperceptible to our senses, without form, without colour, without
temperature, without substance, without savour and without voice, but
so awful that it suspends and moves in space all the worlds which we
see and all those which we shall never know? More rapid, more subtle,
more incorporeal than thought, it wields such sway over everything that
exists, from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, that there is
not a grain of sand upon our earth nor a drop of blood in our veins but
are penetrated, wrought upon and quickened by it until they act at every
moment upon the farthest planet of the last solar system that we struggle
to imagine beyond the bounds of our imagination.

Shakspeare’s famous lines,

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,”

have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer more
things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is none but
things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the unimaginable;
and, if we do not even see the light, which is the one thing that we
believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing all around us but
the invisible.

We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching, seeing
or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it is, just
as they would prevent us from understanding it if an intelligence of
a different order were to bethink itself of revealing or explaining
it to us. The number and volume of those mysteries is as boundless as
the universe itself. If mankind were one day to draw near to those
which to-day it deems the greatest and the most inaccessible, such
as the origin and the aim of life, it would at once behold rising up
behind them, like eternal mountains, others quite as great and quite
as unfathomable; and so on, without end. In relation to that which it
would have to know in order to hold the key to the riddle of this world,
it would always find itself at the same point of central ignorance. It
would be just the same if we possessed an intelligence several million
times greater and more penetrating than ours. All that its miraculously
increased power could discover would encounter limits no less impassable
than at present. All is boundless in that which has no bounds. We shall
be the eternal prisoners of the universe. It is therefore impossible for
us to appreciate in any degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable
respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we
are men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense
circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing
towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards that
which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny confines is
to struggle towards that which appears to us the best, and to remain
heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those confines can
ever be wholly lost.

But let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From the
point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way necessary
that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the universe have
already found its consciousness, whether it find it one day or seek it
everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of being unhappy and
of suffering, either in its entirety, or in any one of its parts; and it
matters little if the latter be invisible or incommensurable, considering
that the smallest is as great as the greatest in what has neither limit
nor measure. To torture a point is the same thing as to torture the
worlds; and, if it torture the worlds, it is its own substance that it
tortures. Its very fate, wherein we have our part, protects us; for we
are simply morsels of infinity. It is inseparable from us as we are
inseparable from it. Its breath is our breath, its aim is our aim and we
bear within us all its mysteries. We participate in it everywhere. There
is naught in us that escapes it; there is naught in it but belongs to
us. It extends us, fills us, traverses us on every side. In space and
time and in that which, beyond space and time, has as yet no name, we
represent it and summarize it completely, with all its properties and all
its future; and, if its immensity terrifies us, we are as terrifying as
itself.

If, therefore, we had to suffer in it, our sufferings could be but
ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible,
although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go
astray; but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting
and necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against
itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and its
sole master: if not, the law or the master whom it must obey would be
the universe alone; and the centre of a word which we pronounce without
being able to grasp its scope would be simply shifted. If it be unhappy,
that means that it wills its own unhappiness; if it will its unhappiness,
it is mad; and, if it appear to us mad, that means that our reason works
contrary to everything and to the only laws possible, seeing that they
are eternal, or, to speak more humbly, that it judges what it wholly
fails to understand.

Everything, therefore, must end, or perhaps already be, if not in a state
of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all suffering, all anxiety,
all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all, is our happiness upon this
earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow, anxiety and unhappiness?

But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is
in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is
something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our
stature and falls to dust as soon as we take it out of its little sphere.
It proceeds entirely from a few contingencies of our nerves, which are
made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have
felt everything the opposite way and taken pleasure in that which is now
pain.

I do not know if my readers remember the striking passage in which Sir
William Crookes shows how well-nigh all that we consider as essential
laws of nature would be falsified in the eyes of a microscopic man, while
forces of which we are almost wholly ignorant, such as surface-tension,
capillarity or the Brownian movements, would preponderate. Walking on
a cabbage-leaf, for instance, after the dew had fallen, and seeing it
studded with huge crystal globes, he would infer that water was a solid
body which assumes spherical form and rises in the air. At no great
distance, he might come to a pond, when he would observe that this
same matter, instead of rising upwards, now seems to slope downwards
in a vast curve from the brink. If he managed, with the aid of his
friends, to throw into the water one of those enormous steel bars which
we call needles, he would see that it made a sort of concave trough
on the surface and floated tranquilly. From these experiments and a
thousand others which he might make, he would naturally deduce theories
diametrically opposed to those upon which our entire existence is based.
It would be the same if the changes were made in the direction of time,
to take an hypothesis imagined by the philosopher William James:

“Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note distinctly
ten thousand events instead of barely ten, as now; if our life were then
destined to hold the same number of impressions it might be a thousand
times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know
nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe
in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era.
The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be
inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be
almost free from change and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis, and
suppose a being to get only one thousandth part of the sensations that we
get in a given time, and consequently to live a thousand times as long.
Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms
and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to
appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the
earth like restlessly boiling water-springs; the motions of animals will
be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls;
the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail
behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman
longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be
rash to deny.”

We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths,
torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great
interplanetary spaces, with their intense cold and their awful and gloomy
solitudes; and we imagine that the worlds that revolve through space are
as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or disaggregate, or clash
together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this
that the genius of the universe is an abominable tyrant, seized with a
monstrous madness, delighting only in the torture of itself and all that
it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than
our sun, to nebulæ whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our
language is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility,
the little ephemeral play of our nerves; and we are convinced that life
there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot
or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need
but a trifle, a few papillæ more or less to our skin, the slightest
modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature of space, its
silence and its darkness into a delicious springtime, an incomparable
music, a divine light.

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” said Faraday.

It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes
which our imagination sees there are life itself, the joy and one or
other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death,
thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit
us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt
or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of
a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an
unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What
though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one
another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard
that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but
birth and rebirth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful
promises and maybe an anticipation of some ineffable event.

VII

CONCLUSIONS

In order to retain a livelier image of all this and a more exact memory,
let us give a last glance at the road which we have travelled. We have
put aside, for reasons which we have stated, the religious solutions and
total annihilation. Annihilation is physically impossible; the religious
solutions occupy a citadel without doors or windows into which human
reason does not penetrate. Next comes the theory of the survival of
our ego, released from its body, but retaining a full and unimpaired
consciousness of its identity. We have seen that this theory, strictly
defined, has very little likelihood and is not greatly to be desired,
although, with the surrender of the body, the source of all our ills,
it seems less to be feared than our actual existence. On the other
hand, as soon as we try to extend or to exalt it, so that it may appear
less barbarous or less crude, we come back to the theory of a cosmic
consciousness or of a modified consciousness, which, together with that
of survival without any sort of consciousness, closes the field to every
supposition and exhausts every forecast of the imagination.

Survival without any sort of consciousness would be tantamount for us to
annihilation pure and simple, and consequently would be no more dreadful
than the latter, that is to say, than a sleep with no dreams and with
no awakening. The theory is unquestionably more acceptable than that of
annihilation; but it prejudges very rashly the questions of a cosmic
consciousness and of a modified consciousness.

Before replying to these, we must choose our universe, for we have the
choice. It is a matter of knowing how we propose to look at infinity. Is
it the moveless, immovable infinity, from all eternity perfect and at
its zenith, and the purposeless universe that our reason will conceive
at the farthest point of our thoughts? Do we believe that, at our death,
the illusion of movement and progress which we see from the depths of
this life will suddenly fade away? If so, it is inevitable that, at our
last breath, we shall be absorbed in what, for lack of a better term, we
call the cosmic consciousness. Are we, on the other hand, persuaded that
death will reveal to us that the illusion lies not in our senses but in
our reason and that, in a world incontestably alive, despite the eternity
preceding our birth, all the experiments have not been made, that is
to say that movement and evolution continue and will never and nowhere
stop? In that case, we must at once accept the theory of a modified
or progressive consciousness. The two aspects, after all, are equally
unintelligible but defensible; and, although really irreconcilable, they
agree on one point, namely, that unending pain and unredeemed misery are
alike excluded from them both for ever.

The theory of a modified consciousness does not necessitate the loss
of the tiny consciousness acquired in our body; but it makes it almost
negligible, flings, drowns and dissolves it in infinity. It is of course
impossible to support this theory with satisfactory proofs; but it is
not easy to shatter it like the others. Were it permissible to speak
of likeness to truth in this connexion, when our only truth is that we
do not see the truth, it is the most likely of the interim theories
and gives a magnificent opening for the most plausible, varied and
alluring dreams. Will our ego, our soul, our spirit, or whatever we call
that which will survive us in order to continue us as we are, will it
find again, on leaving the body, the innumerable lives which it must
have lived since the thousands of years that had no beginning? Will
it continue to increase by assimilating all that it meets in infinity
during the thousands of years that will have no end? Will it linger for
a time around our earth, leading, in regions invisible to our eyes, an
ever higher and happier existence, as the theosophists and spiritualists
contend? Will it move towards other planetary systems, will it emigrate
to other worlds, whose existence is not even suspected by our senses?
Everything seems permissible in this great dream, save that which might
arrest its flight.

Nevertheless, so soon as it ventures too far in the ultramondane spaces,
it crashes into strange obstacles and breaks its wings against them. If
we admit that our ego does not remain eternally what it was at the moment
of our death, we can no longer imagine that, at a given second, it stops,
ceases to expand and rise, attains its perfection and its fulness, to
become no more than a sort of motionless wreck suspended in eternity and
a finished thing in the midst of that which will never finish. That would
indeed be the only real death and the more fearful inasmuch as it would
set a limit to an unparalleled life and intelligence, beside which those
which we possess here below would not even weigh what a drop of water
weighs when compared with the ocean, or a grain of sand when placed in
the scales with a mountain-chain. In a word, either we believe that our
evolution will one day stop, implying thereby an incomprehensible end
and a sort of inconceivable death; or we admit that it has no limit,
whereupon, being infinite, it assumes all the properties of infinity
and must needs be lost in infinity and united with it. This, withal,
is the latter end of theosophy, spiritualism and all the religions in
which man, in his ultimate happiness, is absorbed by God. And this again
is an incomprehensible end, but at least it is life. And then, taking
one incomprehensibility with another, after doing all that is humanly
possible to understand one or the other riddle, let us by preference
leap into the greatest and therefore the most probable, the one which
contains all the others and after which nothing more remains. If not, the
questions reappear at every stage and the answers are always conflicting.
And questions and answers lead us to the same inevitable abyss. As we
shall have to face it sooner or later, why not make for it straightway?
All that happens to us in the interval interests us beyond a doubt, but
does not detain us, because it is not eternal.

Behold us then before the mystery of the cosmic consciousness. Although
we are incapable of understanding the act of an infinity that would have
to fold itself up in order to feel itself and consequently to define
itself and separate itself from other things, this is not an adequate
reason for declaring it impossible; for, if we were to reject all the
realities and impossibilities that we do not understand, there would be
nothing left for us to live upon. If this consciousness exist under the
form which we have conceived, it is evident that we shall be there and
take part in it. If there be a consciousness somewhere, or some thing
that takes the place of consciousness, we shall be in that consciousness
or that thing, because we cannot be elsewhere. And as this consciousness
or this thing cannot be unhappy, because it is impossible that infinity
should exist for its own unhappiness, neither shall we be unhappy when
we are in it. Lastly, if the infinity into which we shall be projected
have no sort of consciousness nor anything that stands for it, the reason
will be that consciousness, or anything that might replace it, is not
indispensable to eternal happiness.

That, I think, is about as much as we may be permitted to declare,
for the moment, to the spirit anxiously facing the unfathomable space
wherein death will shortly hurl it. It can still hope to find there
the fulfilment of its dreams; it will perhaps find less to dread than
it had feared. If it prefer to remain expectant and to accept none of
the theories which I have expounded to the best of my power and without
prejudice, it nevertheless seems difficult not to welcome, at least, this
great assurance which we find at the bottom of every one of them, namely,
that infinity could not be malevolent, seeing that, if it eternally
tortured the least among us, it would be torturing something which it
cannot tear out of itself and that it would therefore be torturing its
very self.

I have added nothing to what was already known. I have simply tried to
separate what may be true from that which is assuredly not true; for, if
we do not know where truth is, we nevertheless learn to know where it is
not. And perhaps, in seeking for that undiscoverable truth, we shall have
accustomed our eyes to pierce the terror of the last hour by looking it
full in the face. Many things, beyond a doubt, remain to be said which
others will say with greater force and brilliancy. But we need have no
hope that any one will utter on this earth the word that shall put an end
to our uncertainties. It is very probable, on the contrary, that no one
in this world, nor perhaps in the next, will discover the great secret of
the universe. And, if we reflect upon this even for a moment, it is most
fortunate that it should be so. We have not only to resign ourselves to
living in the incomprehensible, but to rejoice that we cannot go out of
it. If there were no more insoluble questions nor impenetrable riddles,
infinity would not be infinite; and then we should have for ever to curse
the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence.
All that exists would be but a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and
mistake. The unknown and the unknowable are necessary and will perhaps
always be necessary to our happiness. In any case, I would not wish
my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousandfold loftier and a
thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a
world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a
man, he had begun to grasp the least tittle.

VIII

THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE

What is known as premonition or precognition leads us to mysterious
regions, where stands, half-emerging 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 published by M. Ernest Bozzano under the title _Des Phénomènes
prémonitoires_. Availing himself of excellent earlier work, notably
that of Mrs. Sidgwick and Myers,[9] and adding the result of his own
researches, the author collects some thousand cases of precognition, of
which he discusses one hundred and sixty, leaving the great majority of
the others on one side, not because they are negligible, but because he
does not wish to exceed too flagrantly the normal limits of a monograph.

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

In all these cases, we have not, properly speaking, to do with a pure
future, but rather with a present that is not yet known. Thus reduced
and stripped of all foreign influences and intrusions, the number of
instances wherein there is a really clear and incontestable perception
of a fragment of the future remains large enough, contrary to what
is generally believed, to make it impossible for us to speak of
extraordinary accidents or wonderful coincidences. There must be a limit
to everything, even to distrust, even to the most extensive incredulity,
otherwise all historical research and a good deal of scientific research
would become decidedly impracticable. And this remark applies as much
to the nature of the incidents related as to the actual authenticity
of the narratives. We can contest or suspect any story whatever, any
written proof, any evidence; but thenceforward we must abandon all
certainty or knowledge that is not acquired by means of mathematical
operations or laboratory experiments, that is to say, three-fourths of
the human phenomena that chiefly interest us. 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 priori_ a liar, the
victim of an hallucination, or a wag.

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, must take it for granted that most of the materials which
it examines are familiar. I therefore refer the reader who may wish to
form an opinion for himself to the easily-accessible sources which I have
mentioned above. It will suffice to give an accurate idea of the gravity
of the problem to any one who has not time or opportunity to consult
the original 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 as to authenticity, nevertheless do not imply a real knowledge of
the future and can be interpreted in another manner. I give one, to serve
as an instance; it is reported by Dr. Alphonse Teste in his _Manuel
pratique du magnetisme animal_.

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

On awaking, she retains no recollection of anything that has passed; it
is kept from her; and Dr. Teste communicates his notes to Dr. Amédée
Latour. On the 12th of May, he calls on M. and Mme. ⸺, finds them at
table and puts Mme. ⸺ to sleep again, whereupon she repeats word for word
what she told him four days before. They wake her up. The dangerous hour
is drawing near. They take every imaginable precaution and even close the
shutters. Mme. ⸺, made uneasy by these extraordinary measures which she
is quite unable to understand, asks what they are going to do to her.
Half-past three o’clock strikes. Mme. ⸺ rises from the sofa on which they
have made her sit and wants to leave the room. The doctor and her husband
try to prevent her.

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

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

“Well, then, doctor,” she replies, with a smile, “if it is in the
interest of my health, that is all the more reason why you should let me
go out.”

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 self-suggestion 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 enables 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 Phénomènes 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 mid-ocean; 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, obliging the steamboat to stand
to.

The evidence of a man like Dr. Maxwell, especially when we have to do
with a so-to-speak 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
dramatizations, moreover, are instinctive and almost general in this
class of visions.

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 first-hand accounts, render the hypothesis of coincidence very
improbable, though they do not absolutely exclude it.”[10]

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. Théodore Flournoy, professor of science
at the university of Geneva, in his remarkable work, _Esprits et
médiums_. Professor Flournoy is known to be one of the most learned
and 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 whither 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. Buscarlet’s former pupils, went after her
departure.

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 own
words:

“You and I were on a country-road 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 bonnet
trimmed with yellow ribbons. She said to you:

“‘I called you to tell you that Mme. Nitchinof will leave the school on
the 17th.’

“The carriage then drove on.”

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
carried out of the school for fear of infection.

It is well to add that both Mme. Buscarlet’s letter and the replies which
came from Russia were communicated to Professor Flournoy and bear the
post-mark dates.

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. 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 illness and death. 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 every elsewhere, 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 would be one of latent illness or even of self-suggestion;
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 on
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 “cross-correspondences” 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.

On the 11th of May 1901, at 11.10 P.M., Mrs. Verrall wrote as follows:

“Do not hurry ____ date this ____ hoc est quod volui—tandem. δικαιοσύνη
καὶ χαρὰ συμφωνεῖ συνετοῖσιν. A. W. V. καὶ ἄλλῳ τινὶ ἴσως. calx pedibus
inhaerens difficultatem superavit. magnopere adiuvas persectando semper.
Nomen inscribere iam possum—sic, en tibi!”[11]

After the writing comes a humorous drawing representing a bird walking.

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 chambers. 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 2.9 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 left-hand room and
five in the right-hand room.” The marks were identical and exactly 2¾
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 have said one hour and thirty-three minutes before the events took
place.

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 that the watchers were completely ignorant of Mrs.
Verrall’s existence.

Here then is a very 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 problem has
seldom appeared under a more baffling aspect.

We will now take another premonitory dream, strictly controlled by the
committee of the S. P. R.[12] 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 where 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 circumstance that one of the coffins was blue.

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 years of age.

Let us take, more or less at random, another case from the inexhaustible
_Proceedings_.[13] 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
drawing-room, where the duchess was, and the duke said to me:

“‘Oh, Cooper, how is the earl?’

“The duchess said, ‘What earl?’ and, on my answering, ‘Lord L⸺,’ she
replied:

“‘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 over him with a
red beard. He was by the side of a bath, over which bath a red lamp was
distinctly shown.’

“I then said:

“‘I am attending Lord L⸺ at present; there is very little the matter with
him; he is not going to die; he will be all right very soon.’

“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 to see him suddenly. He had
inflammation of both lungs.

“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 lamp over it; and this brought the
story to my mind.

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

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 on 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 the final answer to every riddle.

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.[14] 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 district-commissioner in charge, he asks if number 90 is still in.
The answer is yes.

“Well, then, I shall have it!”

And to the general amazement, he does draw number 90.

Questioned as to the manner in which he acquired this strange certainty,
he declares 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 place,
distinctly and undeniably.

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 in connection with the
gaming-tables at Monte Carlo.

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 conscription-drawings, for instance, I have had the opportunity of
interrogating more than one constant witness of these little dramas of
fate; and all admitted that, on the whole, they are much rarer 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 which are not yet in sight.

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 Phénomènes
prémonitoires_. We read there of a funeral procession seen on a high-road
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
half-past five in the afternoon and saw his sister’s little girl run
over by a tram-car 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 tram-car 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
clearly foreseen, twice over, by a little girl who perished under the
ruins of the ill-fated 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 joining 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 mystery-mongers, we have to increase our caution
and walk with measured steps on very suspicious ground. But even 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;[15] 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;[16] the gipsy who, also in writing, foretold all
the events in Miss Isabel Arundel’s life, including the name of her
husband, Burton the famous explorer;[17] the sealed letter addressed
to M. Morin, vice-president of the Société du mesmerisme, describing
the most unexpected circumstances of a death that occurred a month
later;[18] the famous “Marmontel prediction,” obtained by Mrs. Verrall’s
cross-correspondences, which gives a vision, two months and a half
before their accomplishment, of the most insignificant actions of a
traveller in an hotel bedroom;[19] and many others.

I will not review the various and very often grotesque methods
of interrogating the future that are most frequently practised
to-day: cards, palmistry, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling by means
of coffee-grounds, tea-leaves, magnetic needles and white of egg,
graphology, astrology and the rest. These methods, as I have said before,
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 self-manifestation adopted by the undeniable gift which is known
as intuition, clairvoyance or, in certain cases, psychometry. I have
written at length, in my volume entitled _The Unknown Guest_, of this
last faculty and need not 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 word—and this is a very
important indication from the point of view of the probable coexistence
of the three tenses—it 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 strange soothsayers.

There are psychometers, however, and notably Mme. M⸺, Dr. Osty’s
favourite 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 distinctly-graded
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 prediction is realized at the
moment foretold.

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 sees nothing.

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
that he does:

“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 opinion on the subject of predictions.”

This is incontestable; and the sincerity, scientific conscientiousness
and high intellectual value of Dr. Osty’s fine work inspire one with the
utmost 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 unreadable. 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 extra-conscious matters, we have not yet reached the stage of
definite deductions, we are still bringing up materials to the scene of
operations.

Once more, I know that, in these cases, as I have seen for myself, the
really convincing facts are necessarily very rare; indeed, no elsewhere
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 person interested. As Dr. Osty says:

“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 existence, threatened by
such an absolutely convincing event, the clairvoyant cannot always reveal
to the person experimenting—and reveal for a more or less approximate
date—one of those incidents whose accomplishment would carry irresistible
conviction.”

In any case, the question of psychometric prognostications calls for
further enquiry, though it is easy even at the present day to foresee the
results.

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 of the incidents
that 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, 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 cases—and Dr.
Maxwell’s, Professor Flournoy’s, Mrs. Verrall’s, the Marmontel, Jones
and Hamilton cases and some others are undoubtedly genuine—they 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 to come to
light.

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,” “to-morrow,” “soon,” “never,”
“later” fall like childish masks, whereas “to-day” 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, but
is pulseless, motionless and boundless.

Many are the theories which men have imagined in their attempts to
explain the working of the strange phenomenon; and many others might be
imagined.

As we have seen, self-suggestion 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 survival 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 recognize
when we speak of ghosts and haunted houses, a very acceptable theory;
and any one to whom it appeals 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 tell us, 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 non-intervention of the spirits is
not the point at issue; and the crux of the mystery does not lie there.
What must 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 true—to do complete justice to neospiritualism—that
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 self-suggestion 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 takes us
back to the original mysteries of the problem.

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 peace-bestowing 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 intention to examine.

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 recognize that, if the future exists
to-day, 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 this—and it seems very difficult to deny—there
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 of our own life.

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[20] we see the foreboding of the greatest misfortune than 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”
is going to fall upon her family. Next month, this premonitory feeling
repeats itself very frequently, becomes more intense and ends by
concentrating itself upon the poor woman’s little daughter. Each time
that she is planning something for the child’s future, she hears a voice
saying:

“She’ll never need it.”

A week before the catastrophe, a violent smell of fire fills the house.
From that time the mother begins to be careful about matches, seeing
that they are in safe places and out of reach. She looks all over the
house for them and feels a strong impulse to burn all matches of the kind
easily lighted. About an hour before the fatal disaster, she reaches for
a box to destroy it; but she says to herself that her eldest boy is gone
out, thinks that she may need the matches to light the gas-stove and
decides to destroy them as soon as he comes back. She takes the child
up to its crib for its morning sleep and, as she is putting it into the
cradle, she hears the usual mysterious voice whisper in her ear:

“Turn the mattress.”

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

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, end by weakening the most
inveterate distrust.

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 concern 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 sovran force that interposes between them and us?
And, if they are hostile, on what, on whom are they revenging themselves?
What can be the secret of those inhuman games, of those uncanny and cruel
diversions on the most slippery and dangerous peaks of fate? Why warn,
if they know that the warning will be in vain? Of whom are they making
sport? Is there really an inflexible fatality by virtue of which that
which has to be accomplished is accomplished from all eternity? But then
why not respect silence, since all speech is useless? Or do they, in
spite of all, perceive a gleam, a crevice in the inexorable wall? What
hope do they find in it? Have they not seen more clearly than ourselves
that no deliverance can come through that crevice? One could understand
this fluttering and wavering, all these efforts of theirs, if they did
not know; but here it is proved that they know everything, since they
foretell exactly that which they might prevent. If we press them with
questions, they answer that there is nothing to be done, that no human
power could avert or thwart the issue. Are they mad, bored, irritable
or accessory to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the
happy solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our
salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religions, 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 our intelligence as yet has no access. It lives under our
reason, in a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual,
unknown 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, absent-minded? In any case, it is rather
remarkable that it evidently dislikes to make itself useful. It readily
performs the most glamorous feats of sleight-of-hand, provided that we
can derive no profit from them. It lifts 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 divining-rod 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 unstiffens 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 independent
and endless existence.

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

And now, to end the question, is this unknown guest of ours 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, closed paths, in which the best of what it had
to reveal to us is lost? Is this the reason why it seeks those odd,
childish, roundabout ways of automatic writing, cross-correspondence,
symbolic premonition and all the rest? Yet, in the typical case which we
have quoted, it seems to speak quite easily and plainly when it says to
the mother:

“Turn the mattress.”

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

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

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

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 befall 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
refrains from saying 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 instance, would act towards the future as we
act towards the past, the two conditions being identical, so much so that
it often confuses them, as we can see more particularly in the celebrated
Marmontel case, where it evidently blunders and reports as accomplished
an incident that will not take place until several months later. It is
of course impossible for us, at the stage which we have reached, to
understand this confusion or this coexistence of the past, the present
and the future; but that is no reason for denying it; on the contrary,
what man understands least is probably that which most nearly approaches
the truth.

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

Here, for instance, is a traveller who, arriving at night in a small
unknown town and walking along the ill-lighted dock in the direction
of an hotel of which he roughly knows the position, at a given moment
feels an irresistible impulse to turn and go the other way. He instantly
obeys, though his reason protests and “berates him for a fool” in taking
a roundabout way to his destination. The next day he discovers that, if
he had gone a few feet farther, he would certainly have slipped into the
river; and, as he was but a feeble swimmer, he would just as certainly,
being alone and unaided in the extreme darkness, have been drowned.[21]

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

Here is another which evidently belongs to the same 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 traveller 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 meant to round it.[22]

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

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

“Run to the window, quick! Run to the window, quick!”

He at once ran to the window and looked out to the street below, when
suddenly he heard a tremendous report and, looking round, saw that the
copper had exploded, destroying a great part of the workroom.[23]

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

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

‘Stop!’

They turned round, and 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 linch-pin and was on the point of leaving the
axle-tree, which would almost inevitably have hurled the carriage into
the abyss.

Need we, even here, relinquish the theory of subconscious perceptions?
Do we know and can the author of the anecdote, whose good faith is not
in question, tell us that certain unperceived 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 afterwards.

These examples—and there are many more of a similar kind—are 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 traveller 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 traveller 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 traveller 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 that which already is.

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. clv. and clviii., both of which are taken from
the _Journal of the S.P.R._ In the first,[24] 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 sea-wall and the railway-embankment, in order to sit
on the great stones 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 say:

“Send for her back, or something dreadful will happen to her.”

Now, soon after, a train ran off the line and the engine and tender fell,
breaking through the protecting wall and crashing down on the very stones
where the child was accustomed to sit.

In the other case,[25] 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 constantly saying:

“Do not go to the theatre; take the boys back to school.”

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
night, the theatre was destroyed by fire, with a loss of three hundred
lives.

We may add to this the prevision of the Battle of Borodino, to which I
have already alluded. I will give the story in fuller detail, as told in
the journal of Stephen Grellet the Quaker.

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
hand, and said to her, in a pitiful tone:

“Your happiness is at an end. He”—meaning Countess Toutschkoff’s
husband—“has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.”

The dream was repeated a second and a third time. Her anguish of mind was
such that she woke her husband and asked him:

“Where is Borodino?”

They looked for the name on the map and did not find it.

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. In
great distress, as she had beheld him in her dream, he cried out:

“He has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.”

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
Borodino, from which an obscure village takes its name.[26]

This is evidently a very rare and perhaps solitary example of a
long-dated prediction of a great historic event which nobody could
foresee. It stirs more deeply than any other the enormous problems of
fatality, free-will 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 have—as in the case of the traveller,
the promontory, the copper or the carriage—not 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 vision of the future event, and, in
its doubt, may utter its cry of alarm.

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 man can attempt to sustain on the world’s stage.

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 neo-Kantian 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 to-day—Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf,
James Ward, William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillée, Guyau, Bain,
Lechalas, Balmès, Dunan and endless others—have 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 village-square,
with its ring of young lime-trees. 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 curé perfunctorily bearing a small reliquary; four choirmen
opening their mouths to bawl forth vacantly the Latin words which convey
nothing to them; two mischievous serving-boys 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 what
it was, he would find it intact, unchanged, ineffaceable and undeniable.

It is not difficult for us to conceive that one can thus go back and see
again 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 a 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 possible—for, in these matters, we must go
straight to extremes or else leave them alone—it is therefore possible
that a seer mightier than any of to-day, 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 perhaps not yet represented on the earth.

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 is 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 can
conceive that which we do not yet see in the present.

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 those which we boast to-day, 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 another. 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 understand that there is no hope
of understanding.

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, Cavaliere 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 ground-floor used for store-rooms and cow-sheds and on the right a
rough hut made of branches and a cart with some harness lying in it.

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 are ready to
confirm his statements.

On the 12th of October in the same year, in order to support a
fellow-townsman in a duel, he accompanied the seconds, by motor-car, 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 alighted; 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 on the right a hut and a cart with some
harness in it.”

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 uncommon height had so much impressed him.

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 day-spanned 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 again, in passing, the strange freakishness of these
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. We here once more recognize the inconsistent, impotent,
ironical or humorous habits of our unknown guest.

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, while 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 sort of
vast desert where the embryos of still-born 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; and we will not pursue them further.

HEROISM

One of the consoling surprises of the war is the unlooked-for and, so
to speak, universal heroism which it has revealed among all the nations
taking part in it.

We were rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral
fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of
comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death
belonged only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less intelligent
nations, to the nations least capable of reasoning, of appreciating
danger and of picturing in their imagination the dreadful abyss that
separates this life from the life unknown. We were even almost persuaded
that war would one day cease for lack of soldiers, that is to say,
of men foolish enough or unhappy enough to risk the only absolute
realities—health, physical comfort, an unimpaired body and, above all,
life, the greatest of earthly possessions—for the sake of an ideal which,
like all ideals, is more or less invisible.

And this argument seemed the more natural and convincing because,
as existence grew gentler and men’s nerves more sensitive, the means
of destruction by war showed themselves more cruel, ruthless and
irresistible. It seemed more and more probable that no man would ever
again endure the infernal horrors of a battlefield and that, after the
first slaughter, the opposing armies, officers and men alike, all seized
with insuppressible panic, would turn their backs upon one another, in
simultaneous, supernatural affright, and flee from unearthly terrors
exceeding the most monstrous anticipations of those who had let them
loose.

To our great astonishment the very opposite is now proclaimed.

We realize with amazement that until to-day we had but an incomplete and
inaccurate idea of man’s courage. We looked upon it as an exceptional
virtue and one which is the more admired as being also the rarer the
farther we go back in history.

Remember, for instance, Homer’s heroes, the ancestors of all the heroes
of our day. Study them closely. These models of antiquity, the first
professors, the first masters of bravery, are not really very brave.
They have a wholesome dread of being hit or wounded and an ingenuous
and manifest fear of death. Their mighty conflicts are declamatory and
decorative but not so very bloody; they inflict more noise than pain
upon their adversaries, they deliver many more words than blows. Their
defensive weapons—and this is characteristic—are greatly superior to
their arms of offence; and death is an unusual, unforeseen and almost
indecorous event which throws the ranks into disorder and most often
puts a stop to the combat or provokes a headlong flight that seems quite
natural. As for the wounds, these are enumerated and described, sung and
deplored as so many remarkable phenomena. On the other hand, the most
discreditable routs, the most shameful panics are frequent; and the old
poet relates them without condemning them, as ordinary incidents to be
ascribed to the gods and inevitable in any warfare.

This kind of courage is that of all antiquity, more or less. We will
not linger over it, nor delay to consider the battles of the Middle
Ages or the Renascence, in which the fiercest hand-to-hand encounters
of the mercenaries often left not more than half-a-dozen victims
on the field. Let us rather come straight to the great wars of the
Empire. Here the courage displayed begins to resemble our own, but with
notable differences. In the first place, those concerned were solely
professionals. We see not a whole nation fighting, but a delegation, a
martial selection, which, it is true, becomes gradually more extensive,
but never, as in our time, embraces every man between eighteen and fifty
years of age capable of shouldering a weapon. Again—and above all—every
war was reduced to two or three pitched battles, that is to say, two
or three culminating moments: immense efforts, but efforts of a few
hours, or a day at most, towards which the combatants directed all the
vigour and all the heroism accumulated during long weeks or months of
preparation and waiting. Afterwards, whether the result was victory or
defeat, the fighting was over; relaxation, respite and rest followed; men
went back to their homes. Destiny must not be defied more than once; and
they knew that in the most terrible affray the chances of escaping death
were as twenty to one.

Nowadays, everything is changed; and death itself is no longer what it
was. Formerly, you looked it in the face, you knew whence it came and
who sent it to you. It had a dreadful aspect, but one that remained
human. Its ways were not unknown: its long spells of sleep, its brief
awakenings, its bad days and dangerous hours. At present, to all these
horrors it adds the great, intolerable fear of mystery. It no longer
has any aspect, no longer has habits or spells of sleep and it is never
still. It is always ready, always on the watch, everywhere present,
scattered, intangible and dense, stealthy and cowardly, diffuse,
all-encompassing, innumerous, looming at every point of the horizon,
rising from the waters and falling from the skies, indefatigable,
inevitable, filling the whole of space and time for days, weeks and
months without a minute’s lull, without a second’s intermission. Men
live, move and sleep in the meshes of its fatal web. They know that the
least step to the right or left, a head bowed or lifted, a body bent or
upright, is seen by its eyes and draws its thunder.

Hitherto we had no example of this preponderance of the destructive
forces. We should never have believed that man’s nerves could resist so
great a trial. The nerves of the bravest man are tempered to face death
for the space of a second, but not to live in the hourly expectation
of death and nothing else. Heroism was once a sharp and rugged peak,
reached for a moment but quitted forthwith, for mountain-peaks are not
inhabitable. To-day it is a boundless plain, as uninhabitable as the
peaks; but we are not permitted to descend from it. And so, at the very
moment when man appeared most exhausted and enervated by the comforts and
vices of civilization, at the moment when he was happiest and therefore
most selfish, when, possessing the minimum of faith and vainly seeking
a new ideal, he seemed less capable of sacrificing himself for an idea
of any kind, he finds himself suddenly confronted with an unprecedented
danger, which he is almost certain that the most heroic nations of
history would not have faced nor even dreamed of facing, whereas he does
not even dream that it is possible to do aught but face it. And let it
not be said that we had no choice, that the danger and the struggle were
thrust upon us, that we had to defend ourselves or die and that in such
cases there are no cowards. It is not true: there was, there always has
been, there still is a choice.

It is not man’s life that is at stake, but the idea which he forms of the
honour, the happiness and the duties of his life. To save his life he
had but to submit to the enemy; the invader would not have exterminated
him. You cannot exterminate a great people; it is not even possible to
enslave it seriously or to inflict great sorrow upon it for long. He had
nothing to be afraid of except disgrace. He did not so much as see the
infamous temptation appear above the horizon of his most instinctive
fears; he does not even suspect that it is able to exist; and he will
never perceive it, whatever sacrifices may yet await him. We are not,
therefore, speaking of a heroism that would be but the last resource of
despair, the heroism of the animal driven to bay and fighting blindly
to delay death’s coming for a moment. No, it is heroism freely donned,
deliberately and unanimously hailed, heroism on behalf of an idea and
a sentiment, in other words, heroism in its clearest, purest and most
virginal form, a disinterested and wholehearted sacrifice for that which
men regard as their duty to themselves, to their kith and kin, to mankind
and to the future. If life and personal safety were more precious than
the idea of honour, of patriotism and of fidelity to the tradition and
the race, there was, I repeat, and there is still a choice to be made;
and never perhaps in any war was the choice easier, for never did men
feel more free, never indeed were they more free, to choose.

But this choice, as I have said, did not dare show its faintest shadow
on the lowest horizons of even the most ignoble consciences. Are you
quite sure that in other times which we think better and more virtuous
than our own men would not have seen it, would not have spoken of it? Can
you find a nation, even among the greatest, which, after six months of a
war compared with which all other wars seem child’s-play, of a war which
threatens and uses up all that nation’s life and all its possessions, can
you find, I say, in history, not an instance—for there is no instance—but
some similar case which allows you to presume that the nation would not
have faltered, would not at least, were it but for a second, have looked
down and cast its eyes upon an inglorious peace?

Nevertheless, they seemed much stronger than we are, all those who came
before us. They were rude, austere, much closer to nature, poor and
often unhappy. They had a simpler and a more rigid code of thought;
they had the habit of physical suffering, of hardship and of death.
But I do not believe that any one dares contend that these men would
have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured
what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude
from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from
enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates
him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of
acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before?
The fact is that civilization, even when it seems to entail corruption,
brings intelligence with it and that intelligence, in days of trial,
stands for potential pride, nobility and heroism. That, as I said in the
beginning, is the unexpected and consoling revelation of this horrible
war: we can rely on man implicitly, place the greatest trust in him, nor
fear lest, in laying aside his primitive brutality, he should lose his
manly qualities. The greater his progress in the conquest of nature and
the greater his apparent attachment to material welfare, the more does he
become capable nevertheless, unconsciously, deep down in the best part of
him, of self-detachment and of self-sacrifice for the common safety and
the more does he understand that he is nothing when he compares himself
with the eternal life of his forbears and his children.

It was so great a trial that we dared not, before this war, have
contemplated it. The future of the human race was at stake; and the
magnificent response that comes to us from every side reassures us fully
as to the issue of other struggles, more formidable still, which no doubt
await us when it will be a question no longer of fighting our fellow-men
but rather of facing the more powerful and cruel of the great mysterious
enemies that nature holds in reserve against us. If it be true, as I
believe, that humanity is worth just as much as the sum total of latent
heroism which it contains, then we may declare that humanity was never
stronger nor more exemplary than now and that it is at this moment
reaching one of its highest points and capable of braving everything and
hoping everything. And it is for this reason that, despite our present
sadness, we are entitled to congratulate ourselves and to rejoice.

ON RE-READING THUCYDIDES

At moments above all when history is in the making, in these times when
great and as yet incomplete pages are being traced, pages by the side
of which all that had already been written will pale, it is a good and
salutary thing to turn to the past in search of instruction, warning
and encouragement. In this respect, the unwearying and implacable war
which Athens kept up against Sparta for twenty-seven years, with the
hegemony of Greece for a stake, presents more than one analogy with that
which we ourselves are waging and teaches lessons that should make us
reflect. The counsels which it gives us are all the more precious, all
the more striking or profound inasmuch as the war is narrated to us by
a man who remains, with Tacitus, despite the striving of the centuries,
the progress of life and all the opportunities of doing better, the
greatest historian that the earth has ever known. Thucydides is in fact
the supreme historian, at the same time swift and detailed, scrupulously
sifting his evidence but giving free play to intuition, setting forth
none but incontestable facts, yet divining the most secret intentions and
embracing at a glance all the present and future political consequences
of the events which he relates. He is withal one of the most perfect
writers, one of the most admirable artists in the literature of mankind;
and from this point of view, in an entirely different and almost
antagonistic world, he has not an equal save Tacitus.

But Tacitus is before everything a wonderful tragic poet, a painter of
foul abysses, of fire and blood, who can lay bare the souls of monsters
and their crimes, whereas Thucydides is above all a great political
moralist, a statesman endowed with extraordinary perspicacity, a painter
of the open air and of a free state, who portrays the minds of those
sane, ingenious, subtle, generous and marvellously intelligent men
who peopled ancient Greece. The one piles on the gloom with a lavish
hand, gathers dark shadows which he pierces at each sentence with
lightning-flashes, but remains sombre and oppressed on the very summits,
whereas the other condenses nothing but light, groups together judgments
that are so many radiant sheaves and remains luminous and breathes freely
in the very depths. The first is passionate, violent, fierce, indignant,
bitter, sincerely but pitilessly unjust and all made up of magnificent
animosities; the second is always even, always at the same high level,
which is that which the noblest endeavour of human reason can attain. He
has no passion but a passion for the public weal, for justice, glory and
intelligence. It is as though all his work were spread out in the blue
sky; and even his famous picture of the plague of Athens seems covered
with sunshine.

But there is no need to follow up this parallel, which is not my object.
I will not dwell any longer—though perhaps I may return to them one
day—upon the lessons which we might derive from that Peloponnesian War,
in which the position of Athens towards Lacedæmon provides more than one
point of comparison with that of France towards Germany. True, we do
not there see, as in our own case, civilized nations fighting a morally
barbarian people: it was a contest between Greeks and Greeks, displaying,
however, in the same physical race two different and incompatible
spirits. Athens stood for human life in its happiest development,
gracious, cheerful and peaceful. She took no serious interest except in
the happiness, the imponderous riches, the innocent and perfect beauties,
the sweet leisures, the glories and the arts of peace. When she went to
war, it was as though in play, with the smile still on her face, looking
upon it as a more violent pleasure than the rest, or as a duty joyfully
accepted. She bound herself down to no discipline, she was never ready,
she improvised everything at the last moment, having, “with habits not
of labour but of ease and courage not of art but of nature,” as Pericles
said, “the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in
anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as
those who are never free from them.”[27]

For Sparta, on the other hand, life was nothing but endless work, an
incessant strain, having no other objective than war. She was gloomy,
austere, strict, morose, almost ascetic, an enemy to everything that
excuses man’s presence on this earth, a nation of spoilers, looters,
incendiaries and devastators, a nest of wasps beside a swarm of bees,
a perpetual menace and danger to everything around her, as hard upon
herself as upon others and boasting an ideal which may appear lofty if
it be man’s ideal to be unhappy and the contented slave of unrelenting
discipline. On the other hand, she differed entirely from those whom we
are now fighting in that she was generally honest, loyal and upright and
showed a certain respect for the gods and their temples, for treaties and
for international law. It is none the less true that, if she had from the
beginning reigned alone or without encountering a long resistance, Hellas
would never have been the Hellas that we know. She would have left in
history but a precarious trace of useless warlike virtues and of minor
combats without glory; and mankind would not have possessed that centre
of light towards which it turns to this day.

What was to be the issue of this war? Here begins the lesson which it
were well to study thoroughly. It would seem indeed as if, with the
first encounters in that conflict, as in our own, the inexplicable will
that governs nations was favourable to the less civilized; and in fact
Lacedæmon gained the upper hand, at least temporarily and sufficiently
to abuse her victory to such a degree that she soon lost its fruits.
But Athens held the evil will in check for seven-and-twenty years;
for twenty-seven summers and twenty-seven winters, to use Thucydides’
reckoning, she proved to us that it is possible, in defiance of
probability, to fight against what seems written in the book of heaven
and hell. Nay more, at a time when Sparta, whose sole industry, whose
sole training, whose only reason for existence and whose only ideal was
war, was hugging the thought of crushing in a few weeks, under the weight
of her formidable hoplites, a frivolous, careless and ill-organized city,
Athens, notwithstanding the treacherous blow which fate dealt her by
sending a plague that carried off a third of her civil population and a
quarter of her army, Athens for seventeen years definitely held victory
in her grasp. During this period, she more than once had Lacedæmon at
her mercy and did not begin to descend the stony path of ruin and defeat
until after the disastrous expedition to Sicily, in which, carried away
by her rhetoricians and bitten with inconceivable folly, she hurled
all her fleet, all her soldiers and all her wealth into a remote,
unprofitable, unknown and desperate adventure. She resisted the decline
of her fortunes for yet another ten years, heaping up her sins against
wisdom and simple common sense and with her own hands drawing tighter
the knot that was to strangle her, as though to show us that destiny is
for the most part but our own madness and that what we call unavoidable
fatality has its root only in mistakes that might easily be avoided.

To point this moral was again not my real object. In these days when we
have so many sorrows to assuage and so many deaths to honour, I wished
merely to recall a page written over two thousand years ago, to the glory
of the Athenian heroes who fell for their country in the first battles of
that war. According to the custom of the Greeks, the bones of the dead
that had been burnt on the battlefield were solemnly brought back to
Athens at the end of the year; and the people chose the greatest speaker
in the city to deliver the funeral oration. This honour fell to Pericles
son of Xanthippus, the Pericles of the golden age of human beauty. After
pronouncing a well-merited and magnificent eulogium on the Athenian
nation and institutions, he concluded with the following words:

“Indeed, if I have dwelt at some length upon the character
of our country, it has been to show that our stake in the
struggle is not the same as theirs who have no such blessing
to lose and also that the panegyric of the men over whom I am
now speaking might be by definite proofs established. That
panegyric is now in a great measure complete; for the Athens
that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of these and
their like have made her, men whose fame, unlike that of most
Hellenes, will be found to be only commensurate with their
deserts. And, if a test of worth be wanted, it is to be found
in their closing scene; and this not only in the cases in which
it set the final seal upon their merit, but also in those
in which it gave the first intimation of their having any.
For there is justice in the claim that steadfastness in his
country’s battles should be as a cloak to cover a man’s other
imperfections, since the good action has blotted out the bad
and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as
an individual. But none of these allowed either wealth with its
prospect of future enjoyment to unnerve his spirit, or poverty
with its hope of a day of freedom and riches to tempt him to
shrink from danger. No, holding that vengeance upon their
enemies was more to be desired than any personal blessings
and reckoning this to be the most glorious of hazards, they
joyfully determined to accept the risk, to make sure of their
vengeance and to let their wishes wait; and, while committing
to hope the uncertainty of final success, in the business
before them they thought fit to act boldly and trust in
themselves. Thus choosing to die resisting rather than to live
submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face
to face and, after one brief moment, while at the summit of
their fortune, escaped not from their fear but from their glory.

“So died these men as became Athenians. You, their survivors,
must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the
field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue.
And, not contented with ideas derived only from words of
the advantages which are bound up with the defence of your
country, though these would furnish a valuable text to a
speaker even before an audience so alive to them as the
present, you must yourselves realize the power of Athens and
feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills
your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon
you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty and
a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win
all this and that no personal failure in an enterprise could
make them consent to deprive their country of their valour,
but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution
that they could offer. For by this offering of their lives made
in common by them all they each of them individually received
that renown which never grows old and, for a sepulchre, not
so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but
that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be
eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story
shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole
earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where
the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in
every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it,
except that of the heart. These take as your model and, judging
happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour,
never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the miserable
that would most justly be unsparing of their lives: these
have nothing to hope for; it is rather they to whom continued
life may bring reverses as yet unknown and to whom a fall, if
it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences. And
surely, to a man of spirit, the degradation of cowardice must
be immeasurably more grievous than the unfelt death which
strikes him in the midst of his strength and patriotism!

“Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is what I have to offer
to the parents of the dead who may be here. Numberless are the
chances to which, as they know, the life of man is subject;
but fortunate indeed are they who draw for their lot a death
so glorious as that which has caused your mourning and to
whom life has been so exactly measured as to terminate in the
happiness in which it has been passed. Still I know that this
is a hard saying, especially when those are in question of
whom you will be constantly reminded by seeing in the homes of
others blessings of which once you also boasted; for grief is
felt not so much for the want of what we have never known as
for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed. Yet
you who are still of an age to beget children must bear up in
the hope of having others in their stead: not only will they
help you to forget those whom you have lost, but they will be
to the state at once a reinforcement and a security; for never
can a fair or just policy be expected of the citizen who does
not, like his fellows, bring to the decision the interests and
apprehensions of a father. While those of you who have passed
your prime must congratulate yourselves with the thought that
the best part of your life was fortunate and that the brief
span that remains will be cheered by the fame of the departed.
For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and
honour it is, not gain, as some would have felt it, that
rejoices the heart of age and helplessness....

“And, now that you have brought to a close your lamentations
for your relatives, you may depart.”

These words spoken twenty-three centuries ago ring in our hearts as
though they were uttered yesterday. They celebrate our dead better than
could any eloquence of ours, however poignant it might be. Let us bow
before their paramount beauty and before the great people that could
applaud and understand.

THE DEAD DO NOT DIE

When we behold the terrible loss of so many young lives, when we see
so many incarnations of physical and moral vigour, of intellect and of
glorious promise pitilessly cut off in their first flower, we are on the
verge of despair. Never before have the fairest energies and aspirations
of men been flung recklessly and incessantly into an abyss whence comes
no sound or answer. Never since it came into existence has humanity
squandered its treasure, its substance and its prospects so lavishly.
For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where the bravest,
the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily the
first to die and where the less courageous, the less generous, the weak,
the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone possess some chance of
escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a sort of monstrous inverse
selection has been in operation, one which seems to be deliberately
seeking the downfall of the human race. And we wonder uneasily what the
state of the world will be after the great trial and what will be left of
it and what will be the future of this stunted race, shorn of all the
best and noblest part of it.

The problem is certainly one of the darkest that has ever vexed the minds
of men. It contains a material truth before which we remain defenceless;
and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no remedy for the
evil that threatens us. But material and tangible truths are never
anything but a more or less salient angle of greater and deeper-lying
truths. And on the other hand mankind appears to be such a necessary and
indestructible force of nature that it has always, hitherto, not only
survived the most desperate ordeals, but succeeded in benefiting by them
and emerging greater and stronger than before.

We know that peace is better than war; it were madness to compare the
two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of unutterable
folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless have reached
ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose manifestations it is
impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a third or a fourth part of
the fabulous sums expended on extermination and destruction had been
devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities that poison the air we
breathe would have been triumphantly redressed and that the social
question, the one great question, that matter of life and death which
justice demands that posterity should face, would have found its definite
solution, once and for all, in a happiness which now perhaps even our
sons and grandsons will not realize. We know that the disappearance
of two or three million young existences, cut down when they were on
the point of bearing fruit, will leave in history a void that will not
be easily filled, even as we know that among those dead were mighty
intellects, treasures of genius which will not come back again and which
contained inventions and discoveries that will now perhaps be lost to us
for centuries. We know that we shall never grasp the consequences of this
thrusting back of progress and of this unprecedented devastation. But,
granting all this, it is a good thing to recover our balance and stand
upon our feet. There is no irreparable loss. Everything is transformed,
nothing perishes and that which seems to be hurled into destruction is
not destroyed at all. Our moral world, even as our physical world, is
a vast but hermetically-sealed sphere, whence naught can issue, whence
naught can fall to be dissolved in space. All that exists, all that comes
into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and the most
appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches flung away for an
instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There is no escape or
leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the mark, not even waste
or neglect. All this heroism poured out on every side does not leave our
planet; and the reason why the courage of our fighters seems so general
and yet so extraordinary is that all the might of the dead has passed
into those who survive. All those forces of wisdom, patience, honour and
self-sacrifice which increase day by day and which we ourselves, who
are far from the field of danger, feel rising within us without knowing
whence they come are nothing but the souls of the heroes gathered and
absorbed by our own souls.

It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw them
with our eyes. This was the aim of all the great religions, when they
but represented under forms appropriate to the manners of their day the
latent deep, instinctive truths, the general and essential truths which
are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and recognized that
loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead, and
have given it various names designating the same mysterious verity: the
Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as reincarnation,
or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as Shintoism, or
ancestor-worship. The last are more fully convinced than any other nation
that the dead do not cease to live and that they direct our actions, are
exalted by our virtues and become gods.

Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood
that wonderful ancestor-worship, says:

“One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a return to beliefs
and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere assumption that they contained
no truth—beliefs still called barbarous, pagan, mediæval, by those who
condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of
science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater,
the monk, each and all have arrived, by different paths, as near to some
one point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We
are now learning, also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the
alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to
suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed,—that
no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined,—which future science
will not prove to have contained some germ of reality.”[28]

There are many things which might be added to these lines, notably
all that the most recent of our sciences, metaphysics, is engaged
in discovering with regard to the miraculous faculties of our
subconsciousness.

But, to return more directly to what we were saying, was it not observed
that, after the great battles of the Napoleonic era, the birth-rate
increased in an extraordinary manner, as though the lives suddenly cut
short in their prime were not really dead and were eager to be back again
in our midst and complete their career? If we could follow with our eyes
all that is happening in the spiritual world that rises above us on every
side, we should no doubt see that it is the same with the moral force
that seems to be lost on the field of slaughter. It knows where to go,
it knows its goal, it does not hesitate. All that our wonderful dead
relinquish they bequeath to us; and, when they die for us, they leave us
their lives not in any strained, metaphorical sense, but in a very real
and direct way. Virtue goes out of every man who falls while performing
a deed of glory; and that virtue drops down upon us; and nothing of him
is lost and nothing evaporates in the shock of a premature end. He gives
us in one solitary and mighty stroke what he would have given us in a
long life of duty and love. Death does not injure life; it is powerless
against it. Life’s aggregate never changes. What death takes from those
who fall enters into those who are left standing. The number of lamps
grows less, but the flame rises higher. Death is in no wise the gainer
so long as there are living men. The more it exercises its ravages, the
more it increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the more
it pursues its phantom victories, the better does it prove to us that man
will end by conquering death.

XII

IN MEMORIAM

Those who die for their country should not be numbered with the dead. We
must call them by another name. They have nothing in common with those
who end in their beds a life that is worn out, a life almost always too
long and often useless. Death, which every elsewhere is but the object of
fear and horror, bringing naught but nothingness and despair, this death,
on the field of battle, in the clash of glory, becomes more beautiful
than birth and exhales a grace greater than that of love. No life will
ever give what their youth is offering us, that youth which gives in one
moment the days and the years that lay before it. There is no sacrifice
to be compared with that which they have made; for which reason there is
no glory that can soar so high as theirs, no gratitude that can surpass
the gratitude which we owe them. They have not only a right to the
foremost place in our memories: they have a right to all our memories and
to everything that we are, since we exist only through them.

And now it is in us that their life, so suddenly cut short, must resume
its course. Whatever be our faith and whatever the God whom it adores,
one thing is almost certain and, in spite of all appearances, is daily
becoming more certain: it is that death and life are commingled; the dead
and the living alike are but moments, hardly dissimilar, of a single
and infinite existence and members of one immortal family. They are not
beneath the earth, in the depths of their tombs; they lie deep in our
hearts, where all that they once were will continue to live and to act;
and they live in us even as we die in them. They see us, they understand
us more nearly than when they were in our arms; let us then keep a watch
upon ourselves, so that they witness no actions and hear no words but
words and actions that shall be worthy of them.

XIII

THE LIFE OF THE DEAD

The other day I went to see a woman whom I knew before the war—she was
happy then—and who had lost her only son in one of the battles in the
Argonne. She was a widow, almost a poor woman; and, now that this son,
her pride and her joy, was no more, she no longer had any reason for
living. I hesitated to knock at her door. Was I not about to witness one
of those hopeless griefs at whose feet all words fall to the ground like
shameful and insulting lies? Which of us to-day is not familiar with
these mournful interviews, this dismal duty?

To my great astonishment, she offered me her hand with a kindly smile.
Her eyes, to which I hardly dared raise my own, were free of tears.

“You have come to speak of him,” she said, in a cheerful tone; and it was
as though her voice had grown younger.

“Alas, yes! I had heard of your sorrow; and I have come....”

“Yes, I too believed that my unhappiness was irreparable; but now I know
that he is not dead.”

“What! He is not dead? Do you mean that the news...? But I thought that
the body....”

“Yes, his body is over there; and I have even a photograph of his grave.
Let me show it to you. See, that cross on the left, the fourth cross:
that is where he is lying. One of his friends, who buried him, sent me
this card and gave me all the details. He suffered no pain. There was
not even a death-struggle. And he has told me so himself. He is quite
astonished that death should be so easy, so slight a thing.... You do not
understand? Yes, I see what it is: you are just as I used to be, as all
the others are. I do not explain the matter to the others; what would be
the use? They do not wish to understand. But you, you will understand. He
is more alive than he ever was; he is free and happy. He does just as he
likes. He tells me that one cannot imagine what a release death is, what
a weight it removes from you, nor the joy which it brings. He comes to
see me when I call him. He loves especially to come in the evening; and
we chat as we used to. He has not altered; he is just as he was on the
day when he went away, only younger, stronger, handsomer. We have never
been happier, more united, nearer to one another. He divines my thoughts
before I utter them. He knows everything; he sees everything; but he
cannot tell me everything he knows. He maintains that I must be wanting
to follow him and that I must wait for my hour. And, while I wait, we are
living in a happiness greater than that which was ours before the war, a
happiness which nothing can ever trouble again....”

Those about her pitied the poor woman; and, as she did not weep, as she
was gay and smiling, they believed her mad.

Was she as mad as they thought? At the present moment, the great
questions of the world beyond the grave are pressing upon us from every
side. It is probable that, since the world began, there have never
been so many dead as now. The empire of death was never so mighty, so
terrible; it is for us to defend and enlarge the empire of life. In the
presence of this mother, which are right and which are wrong, those who
are convinced that their dead are for ever swept out of existence, or
those who are persuaded that their dead do not cease to live, who believe
that they see them and hear them? Do we know what it is that dies in
our dead, or even if anything dies? Whatever our religious faith may
be, there is at any rate one place where they cannot die. That place is
within ourselves; and, if this unhappy mother went beyond the truth, she
was yet nearer to it than those despairing ones who nourish the mournful
certainty that nothing survives of those whom they loved. She felt too
keenly what we do not feel keenly enough. She remembered too much; and we
do not know how to remember. Between the two errors there is room for a
great truth; and, if we have to choose, hers is the error towards which
we should lean. Let us learn to acquire through reason that which a wise
madness bestowed on her. Let us learn from her to live with our dead and
to live with them without sadness and without terror. They do not ask for
tears, but for a happy and confident affection. Let us learn from her to
resuscitate those whom we regret. She called to hers, while we repulse
ours; we are afraid of them and are surprised that they lose heart and
pale and fade away and leave us for ever. They need love as much as do
the living. They die, not at the moment when they sink into the grave,
but gradually as they sink into oblivion; and it is oblivion alone that
makes the separation irrevocable. We should not allow it to heap itself
above them. It would be enough to vouchsafe them each day a single one of
those thoughts which we bestow uncounted upon so many useless objects:
they would no longer think of leaving us; they would remain around us and
we should no longer understand what a tombstone is, for there is no tomb,
however deep, whose stone may not be raised and whose dust dispersed by a
thought.

There would be no difference between the living and the dead if we but
knew how to remember. There would be no more dead. The best of what they
were dwells with us after fate has taken them from us; all their past is
ours; and it is wider than the present, more certain than the future.
Material presence is not everything in this world; and we can dispense
with it without despairing. We do not mourn those who live in lands which
we shall never visit, because we know that it depends on us whether we
go to find them. Let it be the same with our dead. Instead of believing
that they have disappeared never to return, tell yourselves that they are
in a country to which you yourself will assuredly go soon, a country not
so very far away. And while waiting for the time when you will go there
once and for all, you may visit them in thought as easily as if they were
still in a region inhabited by the living. The memory of the dead is even
more alive than that of the living; it is as though they were assisting
our memory, as though they, on their side, were making a mysterious
effort to join hands with us on ours. One feels that they are far more
powerful than the absent who continue to breathe as we do.

Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late,
before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come much
closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly, that they
are as real as when they were in the flesh. In putting off this last,
they have but discarded the moments in which they loved us least or in
which we did not love at all. Now they are pure; they are clothed only in
the fairest hours of life; they no longer possess faults, littlenesses,
oddities; they can no longer fall away, or deceive themselves, or give
us pain. They care for nothing now but to smile upon us, to encompass us
with love, to bring us a happiness drawn without stint from a past which
they live again beside us.

XIV

THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS

At the end of an essay occurring in _The Unknown Guest_ and entitled,
_The Knowledge of the Future_, in which I examined a certain number
of phenomena relating to the anticipatory perception of events, such
as presentiments, premonitions, precognitions, predictions, etc., I
concluded in nearly the following terms:

“To sum up, if it is difficult for us to conceive that the
future preexists, perhaps it is just as difficult for us to
understand that it does not exist; moreover, many facts tend
to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in
time and 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 from every side, that
we should not discover it oftener and more easily.”

Above all is it astonishing and almost inconceivable that this universal
war, the most stupendous catastrophe that has overwhelmed humanity since
the origin of things, should not, while it was approaching, bearing in
its womb innumerable woes which were about to affect almost every one of
us, have thrown upon us more plainly, from the recesses of those days
in which it was making ready, its menacing shadow. One would think that
it ought to have overcast the whole horizon of the future, even as it
will overcast the whole horizon of the past. A secret of such weight,
suspended in time, ought surely to have weighed upon all our lives; and
presentiments or revelations should have arisen on every hand. There was
none of these. We lived and moved without uneasiness beneath the disaster
which, from year to year, from day to day, from hour to hour, was
descending upon the world; and we perceived it only when it touched our
heads. True, it was more or less foreseen by our reason; but our reason
hardly believed in it; and besides I am not for the moment speaking of
the inductions of the understanding, which are always uncertain and which
are resigned beforehand to the capricious contradictions which they are
daily accustomed to receive from facts.

But I repeat, beside or above these inductions of our everyday logic,
in the less familiar domain of supernatural intuitions, of divination,
prediction or prophecy properly so-called, we find that there was
practically nothing to warn us of the vast peril. This does not mean that
there was any lack of predictions or prophecies collected after the
event; these number, it appears, no fewer than eighty-three; but none of
them, excepting those of Léon Sonrel and the Rector of Ars, which we will
examine in a moment, is worthy of serious discussion. I shall therefore
mention, by way of a reminder, only the most widely known; and, first of
all, the famous prophecy of Mayence or Strasburg, which is supposed to
have been discovered by a certain Jecker in an ancient convent founded
near Mayence by St. Hildegarde, of which the original text could not
be found and of which no one until lately had ever heard. Then there
is another prophecy of Mayence or Fiensberg, published in the _Neue
Metaphysische Rundschau_ of Berlin in February 1912, in which the end of
the German Empire is announced for the year 1913. Next, we have various
predictions uttered by Mme. de Thèbes, by Dom Bosco, by Blessed Andrew
Bobola, by Korzenicki the Polish monk, by Tolstoy, by Brother Hermann
and so on, which are even less interesting; and, lastly, the prophecy of
“Brother Johannes,” published by M. Joséphin Peladan in the _Figaro_ of
16 September 1914, which contains no evidence of genuineness and must
therefore meanwhile be regarded merely as an ingenious literary conceit.

All these, on examination, leave but a worthless residuum; but the
prophecies of the Rector of Ars and Léon Sonrel are more curious and
worthy of a moment’s attention.

Father Jean-Baptiste Vianney, Rector of Ars, was, as everybody knows, a
very saintly priest, who appears to have been endowed with extraordinary
mediumistic faculties. The prophecy in question was made public in 1862,
three years after the miracle-worker’s death, and was confirmed by a
letter which Mgr. Perriet addressed to the Very Rev. Dom Gréa on the
24th of February 1908. Moreover it was printed, as far back as 1872, in
a collection entitled, _Voix prophétiques, ou signes, apparitions et
prédictions modernes_. It therefore has an incontestable date. I pass
over the part relating to the war of 1870, which does not offer the same
safeguards; but I give that which concerns the present war, quoting from
the 1872 text:

“The enemies will not go altogether; they will return again and destroy
everything upon their passage; we shall not resist them, but will allow
them to advance; and, after that, we shall cut off their provisions and
make them suffer great losses. They will retreat towards their country;
we shall follow them and there will be hardly any who return home. Then
we shall take back all that they took from us and much more.”

As for the date of the event, it is stated definitely and rather
strikingly in these words:

“They will want to canonize me, but there will not be time.”

Now the preliminaries to the canonization of the Rector of Ars were begun
in July 1914, but abandoned because of the war.

I now come to the Sonrel prediction. I will summarize it as briefly as
possible from the admirable article which M. de Vesme devoted to it in
the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_.[29]

On the 3rd of June 1914—observe the date—Professor Charles Richet handed
M. de Vesme, from Dr. Amédée Tardieu, a manuscript of which the following
is the substance: on the 23rd or 24th of July 1869, Dr. Tardieu was
strolling in the gardens of the Luxembourg with his friend Léon Sonrel,
a former pupil of the Higher Normal School and teacher of natural
philosophy at the Paris Observatory, when the latter had a kind of vision
in the course of which he predicted various precise and actual episodes
of the war of 1870, such as the collection on behalf of the wounded
at the moment of departure and the amount of the sum collected in the
soldiers’ képis; incidents of the journey to the frontier; the battle of
Sedan, the rout of the French, the civil war, the siege of Paris, his own
death, the birth of a posthumous child, the doctor’s political career and
so on: predictions all of which were verified, as is attested by numerous
witnesses who are worthy of the fullest credence. But I will pass over
this part of the story and consider only that portion which refers to the
present war:

“I have been waiting for two years,” to quote the text of Dr. Tardieu’s
manuscript of the 3rd of June, “I have been waiting for two years for the
sequel of the prediction which you are about to read. I omit everything
that concerns my friend Léon’s family and my own private affairs. Yet
there is in my life at this moment a personal matter, which, as always
happens, agrees too closely with general occurrences for me to be able to
doubt what follows:

“‘O my God! My country is lost: France is dead!... What a disaster!...
Ah, see, she is saved! She extends to the Rhine! O France, O my beloved
country, you are triumphant; you are the queen of nations!... Your genius
shines forth over the world.... All the earth wonders at you....”

These are the words contained in the document written at the Mont-Dore on
the 3rd and handed to M. de Vesme on the 13th of June 1914, at a moment
when no one was thinking of the terrible war which to-day is ravaging
half the world.

When questioned, after the declaration of war, by M. de Vesme on the
subject of the prophetic phrase, “I have been waiting for two years for
the sequel of the prediction which you are about to read,” Dr. Tardieu
replied, on the 12th of August:

“I had been waiting for two years; and I will tell you why. My friend
Léon did not name the year, but the more general events are described
simultaneously with the events of my own life. Now the events which
concern me privately and which were doubtful two years ago became
certain in April or May last. My friends know that since May last I have
been announcing war as due before September, basing my prediction on
coincidences with events in my private life of which I do not speak.”

These, up to the present, are the only prophecies known to us that
deserve any particular attention. The prediction in both is timid and
laconic; but, in those regions where the least gleam of light assumes
extraordinary importance, it is not to be neglected. I admit, for the
rest, that there has so far been no time to carry out a serious enquiry
on this point, but I should be greatly surprised if any such enquiry
gave positive results and if it did not allow us to state that the
gigantic event, as a whole, as a general event, was neither foreseen
nor divined. On the other hand, we shall probably learn, when the
enquiry is completed, that hundreds of deaths, accidents, wounds and
cases of individual ruin and misfortune included in the great disaster
were predicted by clairvoyants, by mediums, by dreams and by every
other manner of premonition with a definiteness sufficient to eliminate
any kind of doubt. I have said elsewhere what I think of individual
predictions of this kind, which seem to be no more than the reading
of the presentiments which we carry within us, presentiments which
themselves, in the majority of cases, are but the perception, by the as
yet imperfectly known senses of our subconsciousness, of events in course
of formation or in process of realization which escape the attention
of our understanding. However, it would still remain to be explained
how a wholly accidental death or wound could be perceived by these
subliminal senses as an event in course of formation. In any case, it
would once more be confirmed, after this great test, that the knowledge
of the future, so soon as it ceases to refer to a strictly personal fact
and one, moreover, not at all remote, is always illusory, or rather
impossible.

Apart then from these strictly personal cases, which for the moment we
will agree to set aside, it appears more than ever certain that there is
no communication between ourselves and the vast store of events which
have not yet occurred and which nevertheless seem already to exist at
some place, where they await the hour to advance upon us, or rather
the moment when we shall pass before them. As for the exceptional and
precarious infiltrations which belong not merely to the present that is
still unknown, veiled or disguised, but really to the future, apart from
the two which we have just examined, which are inconclusive, I, for my
part, know of but four or five that appear to be rigorously verified;
and these I have discussed in the essay which I have already mentioned.
For that matter, they have no bearing upon the present war. They are,
when all is said, so exceptional that they do not prove much; at the
most, they seem to confirm the idea that a store exists filled with
future events as real, as distinct and as immutable as those of the past;
and they allow us to hope that there are paths leading thither which
as yet we do not know, but which it will not be for ever impossible to
discover.

THE WILL OF EARTH

To-day’s conflict is but a revival of that which has not ceased to
drench the west of Europe in blood since the historical birth of the
continent. The two chief episodes in this conflict, as we all know,
are the invasion of Roman Gaul, including the north of Italy, by the
Franks and the successive conquests of England by the Anglo-Saxons and
the Normans. Without delaying to consider questions of race, which are
complex, uncertain and always open to discussion, we may, regarding
the matter from another aspect, perceive in the persistency and the
bitterness of this conflict the clash of two wills, of which one or the
other succumbs for a moment, only to rise up again with increased energy
and obstinacy. On the one hand is the will of earth or nature, which,
in the human species as in all others, openly favours brute or physical
force; and on the other hand is the will of humanity, or at least of a
portion of humanity, which seeks to establish the empire of other more
subtle and less animal forces. It is incontestable that hitherto the
former has always won the day. But it is equally incontestable that
its victory has always been only apparent and of brief duration. It
has regularly suffered defeat in its very triumph. Gaul, invaded and
overrun, presently absorbs her victor, even as England little by little
transforms her conquerors. On the morrow of victory, the instruments
of the will of earth turn upon her and arm the hand of the vanquished.
It is probable that the same phenomenon would recur once more to-day,
were events to follow the course prescribed by destiny. Germany, after
crushing and enslaving the greater part of Europe, after driving her back
and burdening her with innumerable woes, would end by turning against the
will which she represents; and that will, which until to-day had always
found in this race a docile tool and its favourite accomplices, would be
forced to seek these elsewhere, a task less easy than of old.

But now, to the amazement of all those who will one day consider them in
cold blood, events are suddenly ascending the irresistible current and,
for the first time since we have been in a position to observe it, the
adverse will is encountering an unexpected and insurmountable resistance.
If this resistance, as we can now no longer doubt, maintains itself
victoriously to the end, there will never perhaps have been such a sudden
change in the history of mankind; for man will have gained, over the will
of earth or nature or fatality, a triumph infinitely more significant,
more heavily fraught with consequences and perhaps more decisive than
all those which, in other provinces, appear to have crowned his efforts
more brilliantly.

Let us not then be surprised that this resistance should be stupendous,
or that it should be prolonged beyond anything that our experience of
wars has taught us to expect. It was our prompt and easy defeat that
was written in the annals of destiny. We had against us all the forces
accumulated since the birth of Europe. We have to set history revolving
in the reverse direction. We are on the point of succeeding; and, if it
be true that intelligent beings watch us from the vantage-point of other
worlds, they will assuredly witness the most curious spectacle that our
planet has offered them since they discovered it amid the dust of stars
that glitters in space around it. They must be telling themselves in
amazement that the ancient and fundamental laws of earth are suddenly
being transgressed.

Suddenly? That is going too far. This transgression of a lower law,
which was no longer of the stature of mankind, had been preparing for a
very long time; but it was within an ace of being hideously punished.
It succeeded only by the aid of a part of those who formerly swelled
the great wave which they are to-day resisting by our side, as though
something in the history of the world or the plans of destiny had
altered; or rather as though we ourselves had at last succeeded in
altering that something and in modifying laws to which until this day we
were wholly subject.

But it must not be thought that the conflict will end with the victory.
The deep-seated forces of earth will not be at once disarmed; for a
long time to come the invisible war will be waged under the reign of
peace. If we are not careful, victory may even be more disastrous to
us than defeat. For defeat, indeed, like previous defeats, would have
been merely a victory postponed. It would have absorbed, exhausted,
dispersed the enemy, by scattering him about the world, whereas our
victory will bring upon us a twofold peril. It will leave the enemy
in a state of savage isolation in which, thrown back upon himself,
cramped, purified by misfortune and poverty, he will secretly reinforce
his formidable virtues, while we, for our part, no longer held in check
by his unbearable but salutary menace, will give rein to failings and
vices which sooner or later will place us at his mercy. Before thinking
of peace, then, we must make sure of the future and render it powerless
to injure us. We cannot take too many precautions, for we are setting
ourselves against the manifest desire of the power that bears us.

This is why our efforts are difficult and worthy of praise. We are
setting ourselves—we cannot too often repeat it—against the will of
earth. Our enemies are urged forward by a force that drives us back.
They are marching with nature, whereas we are striving against the great
current that sweeps the globe. The earth has an idea, which is no longer
ours. She remains convinced that man is an animal in all things like
other animals. She has not yet observed that he is withdrawing himself
from the herd. She does not yet know that he has climbed her highest
mountain-peaks. She has not yet heard tell of justice, pity, loyalty
and honour; she does not realize what they are, or confounds them with
weakness, clumsiness, fear and stupidity. She has stopped short at
the original certitudes which were indispensable to the beginnings of
life. She is lagging behind us; and the interval that divides us is
rapidly increasing. She thinks less quickly; she has not yet had time
to understand us. Moreover, she does not reckon as we do; and for her
the centuries are less than our years. She is slow because she is almost
eternal, while we are prompt because we have not many hours before us.
It may be that one day her thought will overtake ours; in the meantime,
we have to vindicate our advance and to prove to ourselves, as we are
beginning to do, that it is lawful to be in the right as against her,
that our advance is not fatal and that it is possible to maintain it.

For it is becoming difficult to argue that earth or nature is always
right and that those who do not blindly follow earth’s impulses are
necessarily doomed to perish. We have learned to observe her more
attentively and we have won the right to judge her. We have discovered
that, far from being infallible, she is continually making mistakes.
She gropes and hesitates. She does not know precisely what she wants.
She begins by making stupendous blunders. She first peoples the world
with uncouth and incoherent monsters, not one of which is capable of
living; these all disappear. Gradually she acquires, at the cost of
the life which she creates, an experience that is the cruel fruit of
the immeasurable suffering which she unfeelingly inflicts. At last she
grows wiser, curbs and amends herself, corrects herself, returns upon
her footsteps, repairs her errors, expending her best energies and her
highest intelligence upon the correction. It is incontestable that she is
improving her methods, that she is more skilful, more prudent and less
extravagant than at the outset. And yet the fact remains that, in every
department of life, in every organism, down to our own bodies, there is a
survival of bad workmanship, of twofold functions, of oversights, changes
of intention, absurdities, useless complications and meaningless waste.
We therefore have no reason to believe that our enemies are in the right
because earth is with them. Earth does not possess the truth any more
than we do. She seeks it, as do we, and discovers it no more readily.
She seems to know no more than we whither she is going or whither she is
being led by that which leads all things.

We must not listen to her without enquiry; and we need not distress
ourselves or despair because we are not of her opinion. We are not
dealing with an infallible and unchangeable wisdom, to oppose which in
our thoughts would be madness. We are actually proving to her that it is
she who is in fault; that man’s reason for existence is loftier than that
which she provisionally assigned to him; that he is already outstripping
all that she foresaw; and that she does wrong to delay his advance.
She is, indeed, full of goodwill, is able on occasion to recognize
her mistakes and to obviate their disastrous results and by no means
takes refuge in majestic and inflexible self-conceit. If we are able to
persevere, we shall be able to convince her. Much time will be needed,
for, I repeat, she is slow, though in no wise obstinate. Much time will
be needed because a very long future is in question, a very great change
and the most important victory that man has ever hoped to win.

XVI

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER

Before closing this book, I wish to weigh for the last time in my
conscience the words of hatred and malediction which the war has made me
utter in spite of myself. We have to do with the strangest of enemies.
He has knowingly and deliberately, while in the full possession of his
faculties and without necessity or excuse, revived all the crimes which
we supposed to be for ever buried in the barbarous past. He has trampled
under foot all the precepts which man had so painfully won from the cruel
darkness of his beginnings; he has violated all the laws of justice,
humanity, loyalty and honour, from the highest, which are almost godlike,
to the simplest, the most elementary, which still belong to the lower
worlds. There is no longer any doubt on this point: it has been proved
over and over again until we have attained a final certitude.

On the other hand, it is no less certain that he has displayed virtues
which it would be unworthy of us to deny; for we honour ourselves in
recognizing the valour of those whom we are fighting. He has gone to
his death in deep, compact, disciplined masses, with a blind, hopeless,
obstinate heroism, of which no such lurid example had ever yet been
known and which has many times compelled our admiration and our pity.
He has known how to sacrifice himself, with unprecedented and perhaps
unequalled abnegation, to an idea which we know to be false, inhuman and
even somewhat mean, but which he believes to be just and lofty; and a
sacrifice of this kind, whatever its object, is always the proof of a
force which survives those who devote themselves to making it and must
command respect.

I know very well that this heroism is not like the heroism which we love.
For us, heroism must before all be voluntary, free from any constraint,
active, ardent, eager and spontaneous; whereas with our enemies it has
mingled with it a great deal of servility, passiveness, sadness, gloomy,
ignorant, massive submission and rather base fears. It is nevertheless
the fact that, in the moment of supreme peril, little remains of all
these distinctions, and that no force in the world can drive to its death
a people which does not bear within itself the strength to confront it.
Our soldiers make no mistake upon this point. Question the men returning
from the trenches: they detest the enemy, they abhor the aggressor, the
unjust and arrogant aggressor, uncouth, too often cruel and treacherous;
but they do not hate the man: they do him justice; they pity him; and,
after the battle, in the defenceless wounded soldier or disarmed prisoner
they recognize, with astonishment, a brother in misfortune who, like
themselves, is submitting to duties and laws which, like themselves, he
too believes lofty and necessary. Under the insufferable enemy they see
an unhappy man who likewise is bearing the burden of life. They forget
the things that divide them to recall only those which unite them in a
common destiny; and they teach us a great lesson. Better than ourselves,
who are far from danger, at the contact of profound and fearful verities
and realities they are already beginning to discern something that we
cannot yet perceive; and their obscure instinct is probably anticipating
the judgment of history and our own judgment, when we see more clearly.
Let us learn from them to be just and to distinguish that which we
are bound to despise and loathe from that which we may pity, love and
respect. Setting aside the unpardonable aggression and the inexpiable
violation of treaties, this war, despite its insanity, has come near
to being a bloody but magnificent proof of greatness, heroism and the
spirit of sacrifice. Humanity was ready to rise above itself, to surpass
all that it had hitherto accomplished. It has surpassed it. Never before
had nations been seen capable, for months on end, perhaps for years, of
renouncing their repose, their security, their wealth, their comfort,
all that they possessed and loved, down to their very life, in order
to do what they believed to be their duty. Never before had nations
been seen that were able as a whole to understand and admit that the
happiness of each of those who live in this time of trial is of no
consequence compared with the honour of those who live no more or the
happiness of those who are not yet alive. We stand on heights that had
not been attained before. And, if, on the enemies’ side, this unexampled
renunciation had not been poisoned at its source; if the war which
they are waging against us had been as fine, as loyal, as generous, as
chivalrous as that which we are waging against them, we may well believe
that it would have been the last and that it would have ended, not in
a battle, but, like the awakening from an evil dream, in a noble and
fraternal amazement. They have made that impossible; and this, we may be
sure, is the disappointment which the future will find it most difficult
to forgive them.

What are we to do now? Must we hate the enemy to the end of time? The
burden of hatred? is the heaviest that man can bear upon this earth; and
we should faint under the weight of it. On the other hand, we do not
wish once more to be the dupes and victims of confidence and love. Here
again our soldiers, in their simplicity, which is so clear-seeing and
so close to the truth, anticipate the future and teach us what to admit
and what to avoid. We have seen that they do not hate the man; but they
do not trust him at all. They discover the human being in him only when
he is unarmed. They know, from bitter experience, that, so long as he
possesses weapons, he cannot resist the frenzy of destruction, treachery
and slaughter; and that he does not become kindly until he is rendered
powerless.

Is he thus by nature, or has he been perverted by those who lead him?
Have the rulers dragged the whole nation after them, or has the whole
nation driven its rulers on? Did the rulers make the nation like unto
themselves, or did the nation select and support them because they
resembled itself? Did the evil come from above or below, or was it
everywhere? Here we have the great obscure point of this terrible
adventure. It is not easy to throw light upon it and still less easy to
find excuses for it. If our enemies prove that they were deceived and
corrupted by their masters, they prove, at the same time, that they are
less intelligent, less firmly attached to justice, honour and humanity,
less civilized, in a word, than those whom they claimed the right to
enslave in the name of a superiority which they themselves have proved
not to exist; and, unless they can establish that their errors, perfidies
and cruelties, which can no longer be denied, should be imputed only to
those masters, then they themselves must bear the pitiless weight. I do
not know how they will escape from this predicament, nor what the future
will decide, that future which is wiser than the past, even as, in the
words of an old Slav proverb, the dawn is wiser than the eve. In the
meanwhile, let us copy the prudence of our soldiers, who know what to
believe far better than we do.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Marie Lenéru, _Les Affranchis_, Act III., sc. iv.

[2] Those who take up the study of these supernormal manifestations
usually ask themselves:

“Why mediums? Why make use of these often questionable and always
inadequate intermediaries?”

The reason is that, hitherto, no way has been discovered of doing without
them. If we admit the spiritualistic theory, the discarnate spirits
which surround us on every side and which are separated from us by the
impenetrable and mysterious wall of death seek, in order to communicate
with us, the line of least resistance between the two worlds and find
it in the medium, without our knowing why, even as we do not know why
an electric current passes along copper wire and is stopped by glass or
porcelain. If, on the other hand, we admit the telepathic hypothesis,
which is the more probable, we observe that the thoughts, intentions
or suggestions transmitted are, in the majority of cases, not conveyed
from one subconscious intelligence to another. There is need of an
organism that is, at the same time, a receiver and a transmitter; and
this organism is found in the medium. Why? Once more, we know absolutely
nothing about it, even as we do not know why one body or combination of
bodies is sensitive to concentric waves in wireless telegraphy, while
another is not affected by it. We are here groping, as indeed we grope
almost everywhere, in the obscure domain of undisputed but inexplicable
facts. Those who care to possess more precise notions on the theory of
mediumism will do well to read the admirable address delivered by Sir
William Crookes, as president of the S.P.R., on the 29th of January 1897.

[3] The questions of fraud and imposture are naturally the first that
suggest themselves when we begin to study these phenomena. But the
slightest acquaintance with the life, habits and proceedings of the
three or four leading mediums is enough to remove even the faintest
shadow of suspicion. Of all the explanations conceivable, that one which
attributes everything to imposture and trickery is unquestionably the
most extraordinary and the least probable. Moreover, by reading Richard
Hodgson’s report entitled, _Observations of certain Phenomena of Trance_
(_Proceedings_, Vols. VIII. and XIII.) and also J. H. Hyslop’s report
(_Proceedings_, Vol. XVI.), we can observe the precautions taken, even
to the extent of employing special detectives, to make certain that Mrs.
Piper, for instance, was unable, normally and humanly speaking, to have
any knowledge of the facts which she revealed. I repeat, from the moment
that one enters upon this study, all suspicions are dispelled without
leaving a trace behind them; and we are soon convinced that the key to
the riddle must not be sought in imposture. All the manifestations of the
dumb, mysterious and oppressed personality that lies concealed in every
one of us have to undergo the same ordeal in their turn; and those which
relate to the divining-rod, to name no others, are at this moment passing
through the same crisis of incredulity. Less than fifty years ago, the
most of the hypnotic phenomena which are now scientifically classified
were likewise looked upon as fraudulent. It seems that man is loth to
admit that there lie within him many more things than he imagined.

[4] In this and other “communications,” I have quoted the actual English
words employed, whenever I have been able to discover them.—_Translator._

[5] _Proceedings_, Vol. XXIII., p. 33.

[6] _Ibid._ p. 120.

[7] For a discussion of these cases, which would take us too far from our
subject, see Mr. J. G. Piddington’s paper, _Phenomena in Mrs. Thompson’s
Trance_ (_Proceedings_, Vol. XVIII., pp. 180 _et seq._); also Professor
A. C. Pigou’s article in Vol. XXIII. (_Proceedings_, pp. 286 _et seq._).

[8] _Proceedings_, Vol. XIII., pp. 349-350 and 375.

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

[10] Maxwell, _Metapsychical Phenomena_, p. 202.

[11] 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
follows:

“This is what I have wanted, at last. Justice and joy speak a word to the
wise. A. W. V. and perhaps some one else. Chalk sticking to the feet has
got over the difficulty. You help greatly by always persevering. Now I
can write a name—thus, here it is!”

[12] _Proceedings_, Vol. XI., p. 493.

[13] _Proceedings_, Vol. XI., p. 505.

[14] _Proceedings_, Vol. XI., p. 545.

[15] A. J. C. KERNER, _Die Seherin von Prevorst_.

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

[17] LADY BURTON, _The Life of Captain Sir Richd. F. Burton. K.C.M.G._,
Vol. I., p. 253.

[18] _Journal of the Society for Psychical Research_, Vol. IX., p. 15.

[19] _Proceedings_, Vol. XX., p. 331.

[20] _Proceedings_, Vol. XIV., p. 266.

[21] _Proceedings_, Vol. XI., p. 422.

[22] Flournoy, _Esprits et médiums_, p. 316.

[23] _Proceedings_, Vol. XI., p. 424.

[24] _Journal_, Vol. VIII., p. 45.

[25] _Journal_, Vol. I., p. 283.

[26] _Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Stephen Grellet_, Vol. I., p.
434.

[27] This and the later passage from Pericles’ funeral oration I
have quoted from the late Richard Crawley’s admirable translation
of Thucydides’ _Peloponnesian War_ now published in the _Temple
Classics_.—A. T. de M.

[28] _Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Life_, chapter xiv.: “Some
Thoughts about Ancestor-Worship.”

[29] August, September and October 1915.

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