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.
12
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.
13
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.
14
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.
15
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?
16
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?
17
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.
18
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?
19
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.
20
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!”