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 the survivors. 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.
3
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 represented under forms appropriate to the civilization of their
day, the latent, deep, instinctive, 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 all 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 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."[6]
There are many things which might be added to these lines, notably all
that the most recent of our sciences, metapsychics, 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: _Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Life_, chapter
xiv., "Some thoughts about Ancestor-Worship."]
* * * * *
IN MEMORIAM
XV
IN MEMORIAM
1
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 gracious than birth and exhales a beauty 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.
2
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 to 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.
* * * * *
SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN WAR-TIME
XVI
SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN WAR-TIME
1
In a volume entitled _The Unknown Guest_, published not long ago,
among other essays I devoted one in particular[7] to certain phenomena
of intuition, clairvoyance or clairaudience, vision at great distance
and even vision of the future. These phenomena were grouped together
under the somewhat unsuitable and none too well-constructed title of
"psychometry," which, to borrow Dr. Maxwell's excellent definition, is
"the faculty possessed by certain persons of placing themselves in
relation, either spontaneously or, for the most part, through the
intermediary of some object, with unknown and often very distant
things and people."
The existence of this faculty is no longer seriously denied by any one
who has given some little attention to metapsychics; and it is easily
verified by those who will take the necessary trouble, for its
possessors, though few in number, are not inaccessible. It has been
the subject of many experiments and of a few treatises, among which I
will name one by M. Duchatel, _Enquête sur des cas de psychométrie_,
and Dr. Osty's recent book, _Lucidité et intuition_, which is the most
complete and searching work that we have had upon this question until
now.
Psychometry is one of the most curious faculties of our
subconsciousness and doubtless contains the clue to many of those
manifestations which appear to proceed from another world. Let us see,
with the aid of a living example, how it is employed.
One of the best mediums of this class is a lady to whom I referred in
_The Unknown Guest_ as Mme. M. Her visitor gives her an object of some
kind that has belonged to or been touched or handled by the person
about whom he proposes to question her. Mme. M. operates in a state of
trance; but there are other celebrated psychometers who retain all
their normal consciousness, so that the hypnotic or somnambulistic
state is not, generally speaking, by any means indispensable when we
wish to arouse this extraordinary clairvoyance.
After placing the object, usually a letter, in the medium's hands, you
say to her:
"I wish you to put yourself in communication with the writer of this
letter," or "the owner of this article," as the case may be.
Forthwith the medium not only perceives the person in question, his
physical appearance, his character, his habits, his interests, his
state of health, but also, in a series of swift and changing visions
that follow one another like the pictures of a cinematograph, sees and
describes exactly that person's environment, the surrounding country,
the rooms in which he lives, the people who live with him and who wish
him well or ill, the mentality and the most secret and unexpected
intentions of all the various characters that figure in his existence.
If by means of your questions you direct her towards the past, she
traces the whole course of the subject's history. If you turn her
towards the future, she seems often to discover it as clearly as the
past.
But here we must make certain reservations. We are entering upon
forbidden tracts; errors are almost the rule and proper supervision is
all but impossible. It is better therefore not to venture into those
dangerous regions. Pending fuller investigation of the question, we
may say that the foretelling of the future, when it claims to cover a
definite space of time, is nearly always illusory. There is scarcely
any accuracy of vision, except when the events concerned are very near
at hand, already developing or actually being consummated; and it then
becomes difficult to distinguish it from presentiments, which in their
turn are rarely true except where the immediate future is concerned.
To sum up, in the present state of our experience, we observe that
what the psychometers and clairvoyants foretell us possesses a certain
value and some chance of proving correct only in so far as they put
into words our own forebodings, forebodings which again may be quite
unknown to us and which they discover deep down in our subconsciousness.
They confine themselves--I speak of the genuine mediums--to bringing
to light and revealing to us our unconscious and personal intuition
of an event that is hanging over us. But, when they venture to predict
a general event, such as the result of a war, an epidemic, an
earthquake, which does not interest ourselves exclusively or which is
too remote to come within the somewhat limited scope of our intuition,
they almost invariably deceive themselves and us.
It is very difficult to fathom the nature of this intuition. Does it
relate to events partly or wholly realized, but still in a latent
state and perceived before the knowledge of them reaches us through
the normal channels of the mind or brain? Does our ever-watchful
instinct of self-preservation notice causes or traces which escape our
ever-inattentive and slumbering reason? Are we to believe in a sort of
autosuggestion that induces us to realize things which we have been
foretold or of which we have had presentiments? This is not the place
to examine so complex a problem, which brings us into contact with
all the mysteries of subconsciousness and the preexistence of the
future.
There remains another point to which it is well to draw attention in
order to avoid misunderstanding and disappointment. Experience shows
us that the medium perceives the person in question quite clearly, in
his present and usual state, but not necessarily in the exact
accidental state of the moment. She will tell you, for instance, that
she sees him ailing slightly, lying in a deck-chair in a garden of
such and such a kind, surrounded by certain flowers and petting a dog
of a certain size and breed. On enquiring, you will find that all
these details are strictly correct, with one exception, that at that
precise moment this person, who ordinarily spends his time in the
garden, was inside his house or calling on a neighbour. Mistakes in
time therefore are comparatively frequent and simultaneity between
action and vision comparatively rare. In short, the habitual often
masks the accidental action. This, I insist, is a point of which we
must not lose sight, lest we ask of psychometry more than it is
obviously able to give us.
2
Having said so much, is it open to us, amid all the mental anguish and
suffering which this terrible war has engendered, without profaning
the sorrow of our fellow-men and women, to give to those who are in
mortal fear as to the fate of some one whom they love the hope of
finding, among those extrahuman phenomena which have been unjustly and
falsely disparaged, a consoling gleam of light that shall not be a
mere mockery or delusion? I venture to declare--and I am doing so not
thoughtlessly, but after studying the problem with the conscientious
attention which it demands and after personally making a number of
experiments or causing them to be made under my supervision--I venture
to declare, without for a moment losing sight of the respect due to
grief, that we possess here, in these indisputable cases where no
normal mode of communication is possible, a strange but real and
serious source of information and comfort. I could mention a large
number of tests that have been made, so to speak, before my eyes by
absolutely trustworthy relatives or friends.
As my space is limited, I will relate only one, which typifies and
summarizes all the others very fairly. A mother had three sons at the
front. She was hearing pretty regularly from the eldest and the
second; but for some weeks the youngest, who was in the Belgian
trenches, where the fighting was very fierce, had given no sign of
life. Wild with anxiety, she was already mourning him as dead when
her friends advised her to consult Mme. M. The medium consoled her
with the first words that she spoke and told her that she saw her son
wounded, but in no danger whatever, that he was in a sort of shed
fitted up as a hospital, that he was being very well looked after by
people who spoke a different language, that for the time being he was
unable to write, which was a great worry to him, but that she would
receive a letter from him in a few days. The mother did, in fact,
receive a card from this son a few days later, worded a little stiffly
and curtly and written in an unnatural hand, telling her that all was
well and that he was in good health. Greatly relieved, she dismissed
the matter from her mind, merely said to herself that of course the
medium, like all mediums, had been wrong and thought no more of it.
But two or three messages following on the first, all couched in
short, stilted phrases that seemed to be hiding something, ended by
alarming her so much that she was unable to bear the strain any longer
and entreated her son to tell her the whole truth, whatever it might
be. He then admitted that he had been wounded, though not seriously,
adding that he was in a sort of shed fitted up as a hospital, where he
was being capitally looked after by English doctors and nurses, in
short, just as the medium had seen him.
I repeat, mediumistic experience can show other instances of this
kind. If it stood alone, it would be valueless, for it might well be
explained by mere coincidence. But it forms part of a very normal
series; and I could easily enumerate many others within my own
knowledge. This, however, would merely mean repeating, with
uninteresting variations, the essential features of the present case,
a proceeding for which there would be no excuse save in a technical
work.
Is success then practically certain? Yes, rash and surprising though
the statement may seem, mistakes upon the whole are very rare,
provided that the medium be carefully chosen and that the object
serving as an intermediary have not passed through too many hands, for
it will contain and reveal as many distinct personalities as it has
undergone contacts. It will be necessary, therefore, first to
eliminate all these accessory personalities, so as to fix the medium's
attention solely on the subject of the consultation. On the other
hand, we must beware of calling for details which the nature of the
medium's vision does not allow her to give us. If asked, for instance,
about a soldier who is a prisoner in Germany, she will see the soldier
in question very plainly, will perceive his state of health and mind,
the manner in which he is treated, his companions, the fortress or
group of huts in which he is interned, the appearance of the camp, of
the town, of the surrounding district; but she will very seldom indeed
be able to mention the name of the camp, town or district. In fact,
she can describe only what she sees; and, unless the town or camp have
a board bearing its name, there will be nothing to enable her to
identify it with sufficient accuracy. Let us add, lastly, that, with
mediums in a state of trance, who are not conscious of what they are
saying, we are exposed to terrible shocks. If they see death, they
announce the fact bluntly, without suspecting that they are in the
presence of a horror-stricken mother, wife or sister, so much so that,
in the case of Mme. M. particularly, it has been found necessary to
take certain precautions to obviate any such shock.
3
Now what is the nature of this strange and incredible faculty? In the
book which I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I tried to
examine the different theories that suggested themselves. The
argument, unfortunately, is infinitely too long to be republished
here, even if I were to compress it ruthlessly. I will give merely a
brief summary of the conclusions, or rather of the attempted
conclusions, for the mystery, like most of the world's mysteries, is
probably unfathomable. After dismissing the spiritualistic theory,
which implies the intervention of the dead or of discarnate entities
and is not as ridiculous as the profane would think, but which nothing
hitherto has adequately confirmed, we may reasonably ask ourselves
first of all whether this faculty exists in us or in the medium. Does
it simply decipher, as is probably the case where the future is
concerned, the latent ideas, knowledge and certainties which we bear
within us, or does it alone, of its own initiative and independently
of us, perceive what it reveals to us? Experience seems to show that
we must adopt the latter hypothesis, for the vision appears just as
distinctly when the illuminating object is brought by a third person
who knows nothing and has never heard of the individual to whom the
object once belonged. It seems therefore almost certain that the
strange virtue is contained solely in the object itself, which is
somehow galvanized by a complementary virtue in the medium. This being
so, we must presume that the object, having absorbed like a sponge a
portion of the spirit of the person who touched it, remains in
constant communication with him, or, more probably, that it serves to
track out, among the prodigious throng of human beings, the one who
impregnated it with his fluid, even as the dogs employed by the
police--at least so we are told--when given an article of clothing to
smell, are able to distinguish, among innumerable cross-trails, that
of the man who used to wear the garment in question. It seems more and
more certain that, as cells of one vast organism, we are connected
with everything that exists by an infinitely intricate network of
waves, vibrations, influences, currents and fluids, all nameless,
numberless and unbroken. Nearly always, in nearly all men, everything
transmitted by these invisible threads falls into the depths of the
subconsciousness and passes unperceived, which is not the same as
saying that it remains inactive. But sometimes an exceptional
circumstance, such as, in the present case, the marvellous sensibility
of a first-rate medium, suddenly reveals to us the existence of the
infinite living network by the vibrations and the undeniable operation
of one of its threads.
All this, I agree, sounds incredible, but really it is hardly any more
so than the wonders of radioactivity, of the Hertzian waves, of
photography, electricity or hypnotism, or of generation, which
condenses into a single particle all the physical, moral and
intellectual past and future of thousands of creatures. Our life would
be reduced to something very small indeed if we deliberately dismissed
from it all that our understanding is unable to embrace.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: Chap. ii.: "Psychometry."]
* * * * *
EDITH CAVELL
XVII
EDITH CAVELL[8]
1
To-day, in honouring the memory of Miss Edith Cavell, we honour not
only the heroine who fell in the midst of her labours of love and
piety, we honour also those, wherever they may be, who have
accomplished or will yet accomplish the same sacrifice and who are
ready, in like circumstances, to face a like death.
We are told by Thucydides that the Athenians of the age of
Pericles--who, to the honour of humanity be it said, had nothing in
common with the Athenians of to-day--were accustomed, each winter
during their great war, to celebrate at the cost of the State the
obsequies of those who had perished in the recent campaign. The bones
of the dead, arranged according to their tribes, were exhibited under
a tent and honoured for three days. In the midst of this host of the
known dead stood an empty bed, covered with tapestry and dedicated to
"the Invisible," that is, to those whose bodies it had been impossible
to recover. Let us too, before all else, in the quiet of this hall,
where none but almost religious words may be heard, raise in our midst
such an altar, a sacred and mysterious altar, to the invisible
heroines of this war, that is to say, to all those who have died an
obscure death and have left no traces and also to those who are yet
living, whose sacrifices and sufferings will never be told. Here, with
the eyes of the spirit, let us gaze upon all the heroic deeds of which
we know; but let us reserve an honoured place for those, incomparably
more numerous and perhaps more beautiful, of which we as yet know
nothing and, above all, for those of which we shall never know, for
glory has its injustices even as death has its fatalities.
2
Yet it is hardly probable that among these sacrifices we shall discern
any more admirable than that of Miss Edith Cavell. I need not recall
the circumstances of her death, for they are well-known to everybody
and will never be forgotten. Destiny left nothing undone for the
purest glory to emerge from the deepest shadow. In the depths of that
shadow it concentrated all imaginable hatred, horror, villainy,
cowardice and infamy, so that all pity, all innocent courage and
mercy, all well-doing and all sweet charity might shine forth above
it, as though to show us how low men may sink and how high a woman can
rise, as though its express and visible intention had been to trace,
with a single gesture, amid all the sorrows and the rare beauties of
this war, an outstanding and incomparable example which should at the
same time be an immortal and consoling symbol.
3
And one would say that destiny had taken pains to make this symbol as
truthful and as general as possible. It did not select a dazzling and
warlike heroine, as it would have done in the days of old: a Judith, a
Lucretia, nor even a Joan of Arc. There was no need of resounding
words, of splendid raiment, of tragic attitudes and accessories, of an
imposing background. The beauty which we find so touching has grown
simpler; it makes less stir and wins closer to our heart. And this is
why destiny sought out in obscurity a little hospital nurse, one of
many thousands of others. The sight of her unpretentious portrait does
not tell one whether she was rich or poor, a humble member of the
middle classes or a great lady. She would pass unnoticed anywhere
until the hour of trial, when glory recognizes its elect; and it seems
as though goodness had almost eliminated the individual contours of
her face, so that it might the more closely resemble the pensive and
sad smiling faces of all the good women in the world.