CHAPTER III. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE_The Unknown Guest

Premonition or precognition leads us to still more mysterious

regions, where stands, half merging from an intolerable darkness,

the gravest problem that can thrill mankind, the knowledge of the

future. The latest, the best and the most complete study devoted

to it is, I believe, that recently published by M. Ernest

Bozzano, under the title Des Phenomenes Premonitoires. Availing

himself of excellent earlier work, notably that of Mrs. Sidgwick

and Myers[1] and adding the result of his own researches, the

author collects some thousand cases of precognition, of which he

discusses one hundred and sixty, leaving the great majority of

the others on one side. Not because they are negligible, but

because he does not wish to exceed too flagrantly the normal

limits of a monograph.

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

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 a spot where he will find

something which he has mislaid, or an uncommon plant, or an

insect sought for in vain, or of 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 in which there is a really

clear and incontestable perception of a fragment of the future

remains large enough, contrary to what is generally believed, to

make it impossible for us to speak of extraordinary accidents or

wonderful coincidences. There must be a limit to everything, even

to distrust, even to the most extensive incredulity, otherwise

all historical research and a good deal of scientific research

would become decidedly impracticable. And this remark applies as

much to the nature of the incidents related as to the actual

authenticity of the narratives. We can contest or suspect any

story whatever, any written proof, any evidence; but

thenceforward we must abandon all certainty or knowledge that is

not acquired by means of mathematical operations or laboratory

experiments, that is to say, three-fourths of the human phenomena

which interest us most. Observe that the records collected by the

investigators of the S. P. R., like those discussed by M.

Bozzano, are all told at first hand and that those stories of

which the narrators were not the protagonists or the direct

witnesses have been ruthlessly rejected. Furthermore, some of

these narratives are necessarily of the nature of medical

observations; as for the others, if we attentively examine the

character of those who have related them and the circumstances

which corroborate them, we shall agree that it is more just and

more reasonable to believe in them than to look upon every man

who has an extraordinary experience as being a 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, most take it for granted that most of the

materials which it examines are familiar. I therefore refer the

reader who may wish to form an opinion for himself to the

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 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. Amidee Latour. On the 12th of May, he calls on M. and

Mme.--, finds them at table and puts Mme.-- to sleep again,

whereupon she repeats word for word what she told him four days

before. They wake her up. The dangerous hour is drawing near.

They take every imaginable precaution and even close the

shutters. Mme.--, made uneasy by these extraordinary measures

which she is quite unable to understand, asks what they are going

to do to her. 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 enable us to note once and for all the objections which

can be raised and the precautions which we should take before

entering these suspicious and obscure regions.

We now come to an infinitely more significant and less

questionable case related by Dr. Joseph Maxwell, the learned and

very scrupulous author of Les Phenomenes Psychiques, a work which

has been translated into English under the title of Metapsychical

Phenomena. It concerns a vision which was described to him eight

days before the event and which he told to many people before it

was accomplished. A sensitive perceived in a crystal the

following scene: a large steamer, flying a flag of three

horizontal bars, black, white and red, and bearing the name

Leutschland, was sailing in 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 dramatization, 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."[1]

[1] Maxwell: Metapsychical Phenomena, p. 202.

Another and perhaps more convincing case, more strictly

investigated and established, a case which clearly does not admit

of explanation, by the theory of coincidence, worthy of all

respect though this theory be, is that related by M. Theodore

Flournoy, science professor at the university of Geneva, in his

remarkable work, Esprits et Mediums. Professor Flournoy is known

to be one of the most learned and most critical exponents of the

new science of metapsychics. He even carries his fondness for

natural explanations and his repugnance to admit the intervention

of superhuman powers to a point where it is often difficult to

follow him. I will give the narrative as briefly as possible. It

will be found in full on pp. 348 to 362 of his masterly book.

In August, 1883, a certain Mme. Buscarlet, whom he knew

personally, returned to Geneva after spending three years with

the Moratief family at Kazan as governess to two girls. She

continued to correspond with the family and also with a Mme.

Nitchinof, who kept a school at Kazan to which Mlles. Moratief,

Mme. 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 postmark 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,

which however is fully in accordance with the habits of our

unknown guest. The date is fixed precisely; but only a veiled and

mysterious allusion (the woman lying across the carriage and

cloaked in white) is made to the essential part of the

prediction, the 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

everywhere else, but would be very extraordinary in this case. As

for telepathic influence, we should have to suppose that, on the

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

her subconsciousness a presentiment of her end and that she

transmitted this presentiment across some thousands of miles,

from Kazan to Geneva, to a person with whom she had never been

intimate. It is very complex, but possible, for telepathy often

has these disconcerting ways. If this were so, the case which

would be one of latent illness or even of 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

of the importance of precognitions, by Messrs. Pickering and

Sadgrove, which appeared in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques

for 1 February 1908, the summary of an experiment by Mrs. A. W.

Verrall told in full detail in Vol. XX of the Proceedings. Mrs.

Verrall is a celebrated "automatist"; and her

"cross-correspondence" 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. {greek

here} A. W. V. {greek here}. calx pedibus inhaerens difficultatem

superavit. magnopere adiuvas persectando semper. Nomen inscribere

iam possum--sic, en tibi!"[1]

[1] Xenoglossy is well known not to be unusual in automatic

writing; sometimes even the 'automatist' speaks or writes

languages of which he is completely ignorant. The Latin and Greek

passages are translated as follows:

"This is what I have wanted at last. Justice and joy speak a word

to the wise. A.W.V. and perhaps someone else. Chalk sticking to

the feet has got over the difficulty. You help greatly by always

persevering. Now I can write a name--thus, here it is!"

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 rooms. Precautions were taken

to prevent intrusion and powdered chalk was spread on the floor

of the two smaller rooms, "to trace anybody or anything that

might come or go." Mrs. Verrall knew nothing of the matter. The

phenomena began at 12:43 A.M. and ended at 2:09 A.M. The watchers

noticed marks on the powdered chalk. On examination it was seen

that the marks were "clearly defined bird's footprints in the

middle of the floor, three in the left-hand room and five in the

right-hand room." The marks were identical and exactly 2 3/4

inches in width; they might be compared to the footprints of a

bird about the size of a turkey. The footprints were observed at

2:30 A. M.; the unexplained phenomena had begun at 12:43 that

same morning. The words about "chalk sticking to the feet" are a

singularly appropriate comment on the events; but the remarkable

point is that Mrs. Verrall wrote what we 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 wry curious prediction of an event, insignificant

in itself, which is to happen, in a house unknown to the one who

foretells it, to people whom she does not know either. The

spiritualists, who score in this case, not without some reason,

will have it that a spirit, in order to prove its existence and

its intelligence, organized this little scene in which the

future, the present and the past are all mixed up together. Are

they right? Or is Mrs. Verrall's subconsciousness roaming like

this, at random, in the future? It is certain that the 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.[1] Early in September, 1893,

Annette, wife of Walter Jones, tobacconist, of Old Gravel Lane,

East London, had her little boy ill. One night she dreamt that

she saw a cart drive up and stop near when she was. It contained

three coffins, "two white and one blue. One white coffin was

bigger than the other; and the blue was the biggest of the

three." The driver took out the bigger white coffin and left it

at the mother's feet, driving off with the others. Mrs. Jones

told her dream to her husband and to a neighbour, laying

particular stress on the curious circumstance that one of the

coffins was blue.

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 493.

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.[1] The report is written by Mr. Alfred

Cooper and attested by the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duke of

Manchester and another gentleman to whom the duchess related the

incident before the fulfilment of the prophetic vision:

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 505.

"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 near 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 in

the same plane as the most dramatic death. The roads by which it

reaches us are also unexpected and varied. Often, as in the

examples quoted, it comes to us in a dream. Sometimes, it is an

auditory or visual hallucination which seizes upon us while

awake; sometimes, an indefinable but clear and irresistible

presentiment, a shapeless but powerful obsession, an absurd but

imperative certainty which rises from the depths of our inner

darkness, where perhaps lies hidden 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.[1] A young peasant from

the neighbourhood of Ghent, two months before the drawing for the

conscription, announces to all and sundry that he will draw

number 90 from the urn. On entering the presence of the

district-commissioner in charge, he asks if number 90 is still

in. The answer is yes.

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 545.

"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 declared that, two months ago, just after he had

gone to bed, he saw a huge, indescribable form appear in a corner

of his room, with the number 90 standing out plainly in the

middle, in figures the size of a man's hand. He sat up in bed and

shut and opened his eyes to persuade himself that he was not

dreaming. The apparition remained in the same 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 we constant witness of these little

dramas of fate; and all admitted that, on the whole, they are

much clearer than one would believe. Next, we must not forget

that there can be no question here of scientific proofs. We are

in the midst of a slippery and nebulous region, where we would

not dare to risk a step if we were not allowing ourselves to be

guided by our feelings rather than by certainties which we are

not forbidden to hope for, but 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 Phenomenes premonitoires. 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 dearly

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 that join that which is no more to

that which is not yet.

It is true that here, where we must needs mix with the somewhat

lawless world of professional mystery-mongers, we have to

increase our caution and walk with measured steps on very

suspicious ground. But in this region of pitfalls we glean a

certain number of facts that cannot reasonably be contested. It

will be enough to recall, for instance, the symbolic premonitions

of the famous "seeress of Prevorst," Frau Hauffe, whose prophetic

spirit was awakened by soap bubbles, crystals and mirrors;[1] the

clairvoyant who, eighteen years before the event, foretold the

death of a girl by the hand of her rival in 1907, in a written

prophecy which was presented to the court by the mother of the

murdered girl;[1] A. J. C. Kerner: Die Scherin von Prevorst 141

[1] the gypsy who, also in writing, foretold all the events in

Miss Isabel Arundel's life, including the name of her husband,

Burton, the famous explorer;[2] the sealed letter addressed to M.

Morin, vice-president of the Societe du Mesmerisme, describing

the most unexpected circumstances of a death that occurred a

month later;[3] the famous "Marmontel prediction," obtained by

Mrs. Verrall's 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;[4] and

many others.

[1] Light, 1907, p. 219. The crime was committed in Paris and

made a great stir at the time.

[2] Lady Burton: The Life of Captain Sir Richd. F. Burton,

K.C.M.G., vol.i., p.253.

[3] Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. ix., p.

15.

[4] Proceedings, vol. xx., p. 331.

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 already said, are worth exactly what the medium who employs

them is worth. They have no other object than to arouse the

medium's subconsciousness and to bring it into relation with that

of the person questioning him. As a matter of fact, all these

purely empirical processes are but so many, often puerile forms

of self-manifestation adopted by the undeniable gift which is

known as intuition, clairvoyance or, in certain cases,

psychometry. I have spoken at sufficient length of this last

faculty not to linger over it now. All that we have still to do

is to consider it for a moment in its relations with the

foretelling of the future. A large number of investigations,

notably those conducted by M. Duchatel and Dr. Osty, show that,

in psychometry, the notion of time, as Dr. Joseph Maxwell

observes, is very loose, that is to say, the past, present and

future nearly always overlap. Most of the clairvoyant or

psychometric subjects, when they are honest, do not know, "do not

feel," as M. Duchatel very ably remarks, "what the future is.

They do not distinguish it from the other tenses; and

consequently they succeed in being prophets, but unconscious

prophets." In a 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

favorite medium, who never confuse the future and the past. Mme.

M-- places her visions in time according to the position which

they occupy in space. Thus she sees the future in front of her,

the past behind her and the present beside her. But,

notwithstanding these 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 most entire confidence. Unfortunately,

he contents himself with quoting too summarily a few facts and

does not, as he ought, give us in extenso the details of his

experiments, controls and tests. I am well aware that this would

be a thankless and wearisome task, necessitating a large volume

which a mass of puerile incidents and inevitable repetitions

would make almost readable. Moreover, it could scarcely help

taking the form of an intimate and indiscreet autobiography; and

it is not easy to bring one's self to make this sort of public

confession. But it has to be done. In a science which is only in

its early stages, it is not enough to show the object attained

and to state one's conviction; it is necessary above all to

describe every path that has been taken and, by an incessant and

infinite accumulation of investigated and attested facts, to

enable every one to draw his own conclusions. This has been the

cumbrous and laborious method of the Proceedings for over thirty

years; and it is the only right one. Discussion is possible and

fruitful only at that price. In all these extraconscious matters,

we have not yet reached the stage of definite deduction, we are

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, nowhere else do we meet with the same difficulty. If the

medium tells you, for instance, as Mme. M. seems easily to do,

how you will employ your day from the morning onwards, if she

sees you in a certain house in a certain street meeting this or

that person, it is impossible to say that, on the one hand, she

is not already reading your as yet unconscious plans or

intentions, or that, on the other hand, by doing what she has

foreseen, you are not obeying a suggestion against which you

could not fight except by violently doing the opposite to what it

demands of you, which again would be a case of inverted

suggestion. None therefore would have any value save predictions

of unlikely happenings, clearly defined and outside the sphere of

the 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 threatened by such an absolutely convincing event, the

clairvoyant cannot always reveal to the person experimenting--and

reveal it 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, although it is easy even at the present day

to forsee 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 or those incidents which

give too violent a shock to the narrow and limited idea which we

have of our human life. To smile, to reject everything beforehand

and to pass by with averted head, as was done, I remember, in the

time of Galvani, and in the early days of hypnotism, is much more

easy and seems more respectable and prudent than to stop, admit

and examine. Nevertheless we must not forget that it is to some

who did not smile so lightly that we owe the best part of the

marvels from whose heights we are preparing to smile in our turn.

For the rest, I grant that, thus presented, hastily and

summarily, without the details that throw light upon them and the

proofs that support them, the incidents in question do not show

to advantage and, inasmuch as they are isolated and sparingly

chosen, lose all the weight and authority derived from the

compact and imposing mass whence they are arbitrarily detached.

As I said above, nearly a thousand cases have been collected,

representing probably not the tenth part of those which a more

active and general search might bring together. The number is

evidently of importance and denotes the enormous pressure of the

mystery; but, if there were only half a dozen genuine 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, tomorrow, 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, which 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 revival of spirits, the existence of discarnate or other

superior and more mysterious entities which surround us, interest

themselves in our fate, guide our thoughts and our actions and,

above all, know the future. It is, as we recognized when speaking

of ghosts and hanted houses, a very acceptable theory; and any

one to whom it appears can adopt it without doing violence to his

intelligence. But we must confess that it seems less necessary

and perhaps even less clearly proved in this region than in that.

It starts by begging the question: without the intervention of

discarnate beings, the spiritualists say, it is impossible to

explain the majority of the premonitory phenomena; therefore we

must admit the existence of these discarnate beings. Let us grant

it for the moment, for to beg the question, which is merely an

indefensible trick of the superficial logic of our brain, does

not necessarily condemn a theory and neither takes away from nor

adds to the reality of things. Besides, as we shall insist later,

the intervention or non-intervention of the spirits is not the

point at issue; and the crux of the mystery does not lie there.

What most interest us is far less the paths or intermediaries by

which prophetic warnings reach us than the actual existence of

the future in the present. It is 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 take 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 to 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[1] we see the foreboding of the greatest

misfortune that can befall a mother germinating, growing, sending

out shoots, developing, like some gluttonous and deadly plant, to

stop short on the verge of the last warning, the one detail,

insignificant in itself but indispensable, which would have saved

the child. It is the case of a woman who begins by experiencing a

vague but powerful impression that a grievous "burden" was going

to fall upon her family. Next month, this premonitory feeling

repeats itself very frequently, becomes more intense and ends by

concentrating itself upon the poor woman's little daughter. Each

time that she is planning something for the child's future, she

hears a voice saying:

"She'll never need it."

[1] Proceedings, vol. xiv., p. 266.

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, and by weakening the most inveterate

distrust.[1]

[1] See, in particular, Bozzano's cases xlix. and lxvii. These

two, especially case xlix., which tells of a personal experience

of the late W. T. Stead, are supported by more substantial

proofs. I have quoted Professor Hyslop's case, because the

reticence is more striking.

Having said this much, in order to conciliate or part company

with those who have no intention of leaving the terra firma of

science, let us return to the case before us, which is all the

more disquieting inasmuch as we may consider it a sort of

prototype of the tragic and almost diabolical reticence which we

find in most premonitions. It is probable that under the mattress

there was a stray match which the child discovered and struck;

this is the only possible explanation of the catastrophe, for

there was no fire burning on that floor of the house. If the

mother had turned the mattress, she would have seen the match;

and, on the other hand, she would certainly have turned the

mattress if she had been told that there was a match underneath

it. Why did the voice that urged her to perform the necessary

action not add the one word that was capable of ensuring that

action? The problem moreover is equally perturbing and perhaps

equally insoluble whether it concerns our own subconscious

faculties, or spirits, or strange intelligences. Those who give

these warnings must know that they will be useless, because they

manifestly foresee the event as a whole; but they must also know

that one last word, which they do not pronounce, would be enough

to prevent the misfortune that is already consummated in their

prevision. They know it so well that they bring this word to the

very edge of the abyss, hold it suspended there, almost let it

fall and recapture it suddenly at the moment when its weight

would have caused happiness and life to rise once more, to the

surface of the mighty gulf. What then is this mystery? Is it

incapacity or hostility? If they are incapable, what is the

unexpected and sovereign force that interposes between them and

us? And, if they are hostile, on what, on whom are they revenging

themselves? What can be the secret of those inhuman games, of

those uncanny and cruel diversions on the most slippery and

dangerous peaks of fate? Why warn, if they know that the warning

will be in vain? Of whom are they making sport? Is there really

an inflexible fatality by virtue of which that which has to be

accomplished is accomplished from all eternity? But then why not

respect silence, since all speech is useless? Or do they, in

spite of all, perceive a gleam, a crevice in the inexorable wall?

What hope do they find in it? Have they not seen more clearly

than ourselves that no deliverance can come through that crevice?

One could understand this fluttering and wavering, all these

efforts of theirs, if they did not know; but here it is proved

that they know everything, since they foretell exactly that which

they might prevent. If we press them with questions, they answer

that there is nothing to be done, that no human power could avert

or thwart the issue. Are they mad, bored, irritable, or accessory

to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the happy

solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our

salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is

settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty

that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less

ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the universe be the soul

of a great baby?

But, rather than pursue this subject, let us be just and admit

that there is perhaps no way out of the maze and that our

reproaches are as incomprehensible as the conduct of the spirits.

Indeed, what would you have them do in the circle in which our

logic imprisons them? Either they foretell us a calamity which

their predictions cannot avert, in which case there is no use in

foretelling it, or, if they announce it to us and at the same

time give us the means to prevent it, they do not really see the

future and are foretelling nothing, since the calamity is not to

take place, with the result that their action seems equally

absurd in both cases.

It is obvious: to whichever side we turn, we find nothing but the

incomprehensible. On the one hand, the preestablished,

unshakable, unalterable future which we have called destiny,

fatality or what you will, which suppresses man's entire

independence and liberty of action and which is the most

inconceivable and the dreariest of mysteries; on the other,

intelligences apparently superior to our own, since they know

what we do not, which, while aware that their intervention is

always useless and very often cruel, nevertheless come harassing

us with their sinister and ridiculous predictions. Must we resign

ourselves once more to living with our eyes shut and our reason

drowned in the boundless ocean of darkness; and is there no

outlet?

For the moment we will not linger in the dark regions of

fatality, which is the supreme mystery, the desolation of every

effort and every thought of man. What is clearest amid this

incomprehensibility is that the spiritualistic theory, at first

sight the most seductive, declares itself, on examination, the

most difficult to justify. We will also once more put aside the

theosophical theory or any other which assumes a divine intention

and which might, to a certain extent, explain the hesitations and

anguish of the prophetic warnings, at the cost, however, of other

puzzles, a thousand times as hard to solve, which nothing

authorizes us to substitute for the actual puzzle, formless and

infinite, presented to our uninitiated vision.

When all is said, it is perhaps only in the theory which

attributes those premonitions to our subconsciousness that we are

able to find, if not a justification, at least a sort of

explanation of that formidable reticence. They accord fairly well

with the strange, inconsistent, whimsical and disconcerting

character of the unknown entity within us that seems to live on

nothing but nondescript fare borrowed from worlds to which nor

intelligence as yet has no access. It lives under our reason, in

a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual

guest, dropped from another planet, whose interests, ideas,

habits, passions have naught in common with ours. If it seems to

have notions on the hereafter that are infinitely wider and more

precise than those which we possess, it has only very vague

notions on the practical needs of our existence. It ignores us

for years, absorbed no doubt with the numberless relations which

it maintains with all the mysteries of the universe; and, when

suddenly it remembers us, thinking apparently to please us, it

makes an enormous, miraculous, but at the same time clumsy and

superfluous movement, which upsets all that we believed we knew,

without teaching us anything. Is it making fun of us, is it

jesting, is it amusing itself, is it facetious, teasing, arch, or

simply sleepy, bewildered, inconsistent, 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 up tables, moves the heaviest articles, produces flowers

and hair, sets strings vibrating, gives life to inanimate objects

and passes through solid matter, conjures up ghosts, subjugates

time and space, creates light; but all, it seems, on one

condition, that its performances should be without rhyme or

reason and keep to the province of supernaturally vain and

puerile recreations. The case of the 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 makes supple an arm or leg,

or even sets bones, but always as it were by accident, without

reason, method or object, in a deceitful, illogical and

preposterous fashion. One would set it down as a spoilt child

that has been allowed to lay hands on the most tremendous secrets

of heaven and earth; it has no suspicion of their power, jumbles

them all up together and turns them into paltry, inoffensive

toys. It knows everything, perhaps, but is ignorant of the uses

of its knowledge, It has its arms laden with treasures which it

scatters in the wrong manner and at the wrong time, giving bread

to the thirsty and water to the hungry, overloading those who

refuse and stripping the suppliant bare, pursuing those who flee

from it and fleeing from those who pursue it. Lastly, even at its

best moments, it behaves as though the fate of the being in whose

depths it dwells interested it hardly at all, as though it had

but an insignificant share in his misfortunes, feeling assured,

one might almost think, of an 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 our unknown guest alone

responsible? Does it explain itself badly or do we not understand

it? When we look into the matter closely, there is, under those

anomalous and confused manifestations, in spite of efforts which

we feel to be enormous and persevering, a sort of incapacity for

self expression and action which is bound to attract our

attention. Is our conscious and individual life separated by

impenetrable worlds from our subconscious and probably universal

life? Does our unknown guest speak an unknown language and do the

words which it speaks and which we think that we understand

disclose its thought? Is every direct road pitilessly barred and

is there nothing left to it but narrow, dosed paths in which the

best of what it had to reveal to us is lost? Is this the reason

why it seeks those odd, childish, roundabout ways of automatic

writing, 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 find the matches there 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 fall upon us, knowing all

the future as it does, necessarily knows that the calamity is

already accomplished. As our conscious and unconscious lives

blend in it, it distresses itself and flutters around our

overconfident ignorance. It tries to inform us, through

nervousness, through pity, so as to mitigate the lightning

cruelty of the blow. It speaks all the words that can prepare us

for its coming, define it and identify it; but it is unable to

say those which would prevent it from coming, seeing that it has

come, that it is already present and perhaps past, manifest,

ineffaceable, on another plane than that on which we live, the

only plane which we are capable of perceiving. It finds itself,

in a word, in the position of the man who, in the midst of

peaceful, happy and unsuspecting folk, alone knows some bad news.

He is neither able nor willing to announce it nor yet to hide it

completely. He hesitates, delays, makes more or less transparent

allusions, but does not either say the last word that would, so

to speak, let loose the catastrophe in the hearts of the people

around him, for to those who do not know of it the catastrophe is

still as though it were not there. Our subconsciousness, in that

case, would act towards the future as we act towards the past,

the two conditions being identical, so much so that it often

confuses them, as we can see more particularly in the celebrated

Marmontel case, where it evidently blunders and reports as

accomplished an incident that will not take place until several

months later. It is of course impossible for us, at the stage

which we have reached, to understand this confusion or this

coexistence of the past, the present and the future; but that is

no reason for denying it; on the contrary, what man understands

least is probably that which 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 traveler 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 tech an irresistible impulse to turn and go the

other way. He instantly obeys, though his reason protests and

"berates him for a fool" in taking a roundabout way to his

destination. The next day he discovers that, if he had gone a few

feet farther, he would certainly have slipped into the river;

and, as he was but a feeble swimmer, he would just as certainly,

being alone and unaided in the extreme darkness, have been

drowned.[1]

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 422.

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 traveler in South America is descending a

river in a canoe; the party are just about to run close to a

promontory when a sort of mysterious voice, which he has already

heard at different momentous times of his life, imperiously

orders him immediately to cross the river and gain the other

shore as quickly as possible. This appears so absurd that he is

obliged to threaten the Indians with death to force them to take

this course. They have scarcely crossed more than half the river

when the promontory falls at the very place where they meant to

round it.[1]

[1] Flournoy: Esprits et mediums, p. 316.

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.[1]

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 424.

Here again, a subconscious cautiousness was probably amused by

certain indications imperceptible to our ordinary senses. It is

even possible that there exists between things and ourselves a

sort of sympathy or subliminal communion which makes us

experience the trials and emotions of matter that has reached the

limits of its existence, unless, as is more likely, there is

merely a simple coincidence between the chance idea of a possible

explosion and its realization.

A last and rather more complicated case is that of Jean Dupre,

the sculptor, who was driving alone with his wife along a

mountain road, skirting a perpendicular cliff. Suddenly they both

heard a voice that seemed to come from the mountain crying:

"Stop!"

They turned round, saw nobody and continued their road. But the

cries were repeated again and again, without anything to reveal

the presence of a human being amid the solitude. At last the

sculptor alighted and saw that the left wheel of the carriage,

which was grazing the edge of the precipice, had lost its

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 traveler will go to the

water's edge, that the wheel will be on the point of leaving the

axle, that the copper will explode, or that the promontory will

fall at a precise moment, must at the same time know that the

traveler will not take the last fatal step, that the carriage

will not be overturned, that the copper will not hurt anybody and

that the canoe will pull away from the promontory. It is

inadmissible that, seeing one thing, it will not see the other,

since everything happens at the same point, in the course of the

same second. Can we say that, if it had not given warning, the

little saving movement would not have been executed? How can we

imagine a future which, at one and the same time, has parts that

are steadfast and others that are not? If it is foreseen that the

promontory will fall and that the traveler will escape, thanks to

the supernatural warning, it is necessarily foreseen that the

warning will be given; and, if so, what is the point of this

futile comedy? I see no reasonable explanation of it in the

spiritist or spiritualistic theory, which postulates a complete

knowledge of the future, at least at a settled point and moment.

On the other hand, if we adhere to the theory of a subliminal

consciousness, we find there an explanation which is quite worthy

of acceptation. This subliminal consciousness, though, in the

majority of cases, it has no clear and comprehensive vision of

the immediate future, can nevertheless possess an intuition of

imminent danger, thanks to indications that escape our ordinary

perception. It can also have a partial, intermittent and so to

speak flickering vision of the future event and, if doubtful, can

risk giving an incoherent warning, which, for that matter, will

change nothing in 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. cli, and clviii.,

both of which are taken from the Journal of the S.P.R. In the

first,[1] a mother sent a servant to bring home her little

daughter, who had already left the house with the intention of

going through the "railway garden," a strip of ground between the

se. wall and the railway embankment, in order to sit on the great

stone, by the seaside and see the trains pass by. A few minutes

after the little girl's departure, the mother had distinctly and

repeatedly heard a voice within her say:

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

[1] Journal, vol. viii., p. 45.

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,[1] into which Professor W. F. Barrett made a

special enquiry, Captain MacGowan was in Brooklyn with his two

boys, then on their holidays. He promised the boys that he would

take them to the theatre and booked seats on the previous day;

but on the day of the proposed visit he heard a voice within him

constantly saying:

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

[1] Ibid., vol. i., p. 283.

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.[1]

[1] Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Stephen Grellet, vol i.,

p. 434.

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 traveler, 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 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, Fouillee,

Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmes, 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 cure perfunctorily bearing a small

reliquary; four choirmen opening their mouths to bawl forth

vacantly the Latin words which convey nothing to them; two

mischievous 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 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 does not yet exists

already at the same time at which it is no more. But, on the

other hand, it is just as hard to conceive that the future does

not preexist, that there is nothing before the present and that

everything is only present or past. It is very probable that, to

a more universal intelligence than ours, everything is but an

eternal present, an immense punctum stans, as the metaphysicians

say, in which all the events are on one plane; but it is no less

probable that we ourselves, so long as we are men, in order to

understand anything of this eternal present, will always be

obliged to divide it into three parts. Thus caught between two

mysteries equally baffling to our intelligence, whether we deny

or admit the preexistence of the future, we are really only

wrangling over words: in the one case, we give the name of

"present," from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, to

that which to us is the future; in the other, we give the name of

"future" to that which, from the point of view of a perfect

intelligence, is the present. But, after all, it is incontestable

in both cases that, at least from our point of view, the future

preexists, since preexistence is the only name by which we can

describe and the only form under which we 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 these 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 other. How can we

picture to ourselves, for instance, a point in eternity at which

our little procession already exists, while it is not yet and

although it is no more? Add to this the thought that it is

necessary and inevitable, from the millenaries which had no

beginning, that, at a given moment, at a given place, the little

procession should leave the little church in a given manner and

that no known or imaginable will can change anything in it, in

the future any more than in the past; and we begin to 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, Cavalliere

Giovanni de Figueroa, one of the most famous fencing masters at

Palermo, dreamt that he was in the country, going along a road

white with dust, which brought him to a broad ploughed field. In

the middle of the field stood a rustic building, with a

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

motorcar, from Naples to Marano, a place which he had never

visited nor even heard of. As soon as they were some way in the

country, he was curiously impressed by the white and dusty road.

The car pulled up at the side of a field which he at once

recognized. They lighted; and he remarked to one of the seconds:

"This is not the first time that I have been here. There should

be a house at the end of this path and 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 extraordinary 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 here again, in passing, the strange freakishness of the

premonitions. They accumulate the most precise and circumstantial

details as long as the scene remains insignificant, but come to a

sudden stop before the one tragic and interesting scene of the

drama: the duel and its issue. Here again we recognize the

inconsistent, 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, if it is difficult for us to conceive that the future

preexists, perhaps it is even more difficult for us to understand

that it does not exist; moreover, a certain number of facts tend

to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in time

and in eternity, the same permanence and the same vividness as

the past. Now, from the moment that it preexists, it is not

surprising that we should be able to know it; it is even

astonishing, granted that it overhangs us on every side, that we

should not discover it oftener and more easily. It remains to be

learnt what would become of our life if everything were foreseen

in it, if we saw it unfolding beforehand, in its entirety, with

its events which would have to be inevitable, because, if it were

possible for us to avoid them, they would not exist and we could

not perceive them. Suppose that, instead of being abnormal,

uncertain, obscure, debatable and very unusual, prediction

became, so to speak, scientific, habitual, clear and infallible:

in a short time, having nothing more to foretell, it would die of

inanition. If, for instance, it was prophesied to me that I must

die in the course of a journey in Italy, I should naturally

abandon the journey; therefore it could not have been predicted

to me; and thus all life would soon be nothing but inaction,

pause and abstention, a soft of vast desert where the embryos of

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.