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.
21
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.
22
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]
23
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.
24
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.
25
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.
26
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.
27
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.
28
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.
29
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.