It must be confessed that this mystery, _The Unknown Guest

where we least expected to come upon the unknown, bears enough

within itself to scatter all our convictions. Remember that,

since man appeared upon this earth, he has lived among creatures

which, from immemorial experience, he thought that he knew as

perfectly as he knows an object fashioned by his hands. Out of

these creatures he chose the most docile and, as he called them,

the most intelligent, attaching in this case to the word

intelligence a sense so narrow as to be almost ridiculous. He

observed them, scrutinized them, tried them, analyzed them and

dissected them in every imaginable way; and whole lives were

devoted to nothing but the study of their habits, their

faculties, their nervous system, their pathology, their

psychology, their instincts. All this led to certainties which,

among those supported by our unexplained little existence on an

inexplicable planet, would seem to be the least doubtful, the

least subject to revision. There is no disputing, for instance,

that the horse is gifted with an extraordinary memory, that he

possesses the sense of direction, that he understands a few signs

and even a few words and that he obeys them. It is equally

undeniable that the anthropoid apes are capable of imitating a

great number of our actions and of our attitudes: but it is also

manifest that their bewildered and feverish imagination perceives

neither their object nor their scope. As for the dog, the one of

all these privileged animals who lives closest to us, who for

thousands and thousands of years has eaten at our table and

worked with us and been our friend, it is manifest that, now and

then, we catch a rather uncanny gleam in his deep, watchful eyes.

It is certain that he sometimes wanders in a curious fashion

along the mysterious border that separates our own intelligence

from that which we grant to the other creatures inhabiting this

earth with us. But it is no less certain that he has never

definitely passed it. We know exactly how far he can go; and we

have invariably found that our efforts, our patience, our

encouragement, our passionate appeals, have hitherto failed to

draw him out of the somewhat narrow, darkly enchanted circle

wherein nature seems to have imprisoned him once and for all.

There remains, it is true, the insect-world, in which marvellous

things happen. It includes architects, geometricians,

mechanicians, engineers, weavers, physicists, chemists and

surgeons who have forestalled most of our human inventions. I

need not here remind the reader of the wasps' and bees' genius

for building, the social and economic organization of the hive

and the ant-hill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' nest and

hanging egg, the odynerus' cell with its neat stacks of game, the

sacred beetle's filthy but ingenius ball, the leafcutter's

faultless disks, the brick-laying of the mason-bee, the three

dagger-thrusts which the aphex administers to the three

nerve-centres of the cricket, the lancet of the cerceris, who

paralyses her victims without killing them and preserves them for

an indefinite period as fresh meat, nor a thousand other features

which it would be impossible to enumerate without recapitulating

the whole of Henri Fabre's work and completely altering the

proportions of the present essay. But here such silence and such

darkness reign that we have nothing to hope for. There exists, so

to speak, no bench-mark, no means of communication between the

world of insects and our own; and we are perhaps less far from

grasping and fathoming what takes place in Saturn or Jupiter than

what is enacted in the ant-hill or the hive. We know absolutely

nothing of the quality, the number, the extent or even the nature

of their senses. Many of the great laws on which our life is

based do not exist for them: those, for instance, which govern

fluids are completely reversed. They seem to inhabit our planet,

but in reality move in an entirely different world. Understanding

nothing of their intelligence pierced with disconcerting gaps, in

which the blindest stupidity suddenly comes and destroys the

ablest and most inspired schemes, we have given the name of

instinct to that which we could not apprehend, postponing our

interpretation of a word that touches upon life's most insoluble

riddles. There is, therefore, from the point of view of the

intellectual faculties, nothing to be gathered from those

extraordinary creatures who are not, like the other animals, our

"lesser brothers," but strangers, aliens from we know not where,

survivors or percursors of another world.

We were at this stage, slumbering peacefully in our

long-established convictions, when a man entered upon the scene

and suddenly showed us that we were wrong and that, for long

centuries, we had over looked a truth which was scarcely even

covered with a very thin veil. And the strangest thing is that

this astonishing discovery, is in no wise the natural consequence

of a new invention, of processes or methods hitherto unknown. It

owes nothing to the latest acquirements of our knowledge. It

springs from the humblest idea which the most primitive man might

have conceived in the first days of the earth's existence. It is

simply a matter of having a little more patience, confidence and

respect for all that which shares our lot in a world whereof we

know none of the purposes. It is simply a matter of having a

little less pride and of looking a little more fraternally upon

existences that are much more fraternal than we believed. There

is no secret about the almost puerile ingenuousness of Von

Osten's methods and Krall's. They start with the principle that

the horse is an ignorant but intelligent child; and they treat

him as such. They speak, explain, demonstrate, argue and mete out

rewards or punishments like a schoolmaster addressing little boys

of five or six. They begin by placing a few skittle-pins in front

of their strange pupil. They count them and make him count them

by alternately lifting and lowering the horse's hoof. He thus

obtains his first notion of numbers. They next add one or two

more skittles and say, for instance:

"Three skittles and two skittles are five skittles."

In this way, they explain and teach addition; next, by the

reverse process, subtraction, which is followed by

multiplication, division and all the rest.

At the beginning, the lessons are extremely laborious and demand

an untiring and loving patience, which is the whole secret of the

miracle. But; as soon as the first barrier of darkness is passed,

the progress becomes bewilderingly rapid.

All this is incontestable; and the facts are there, before which

we must need bow. But what upsets all our convictions or, more

correctly, all the prejudices which thousands of years have made

as invincible as axioms, what we do not succeed in understanding

is that the horse at once understands what we want of him; it is

that first step, the first tremor of an unexpected intelligence,

which suddenly reveals itself as human. At what precise second

did the light appear and was the veil rent under? It is

impossible to say; but it is certain that, at a given moment,

without any visible sign to reveal the prodigious inner

transformation, the horse acts and replies as though he suddenly

understood the speech of man. What is it that sets the miracle

working? We know that, after a time, the horse associates certain

words with certain objects that interest him or with three or

four events whose infinite repetition forms the humble tissue of

his daily life. This is only a sort of mechanical memory which

has nothing in common with the most elementary intelligence. But

behold, one fine day, without any perceptible transition, he

seems to know the meaning of a host of words which possess no

interest for him; which represent to him no picture, no memory;

which he has never had occasion to connect with any sensation,

agreeable or disagreeable. He handles figures, which even to man

are nothing but obscure and abstract ideas. He solves problems

that cannot possibly be made objective or concrete. He reproduces

letters which, from his point of view, correspond with nothing

actual. He fixes his attention and makes observations on things

or circumstances which in no way affect him, which remain and

always will remain alien and indifferent to him. In a word, he

steps out of the narrow ring in which he was made to turn by

hunger and fear--which have been described as the two great

moving powers of all that is not human--to enter the immense

circle in which sensations go on being shed till ideas come into

view.

Is it possible to believe that the horses really do what they

appear to do? Is there no precedent for the marvel? Is there no

transition between the Elberfeld stallions and the horses which

we have known until this day? It is not easy to answer these

questions, for it is only since yesterday that the intellectual

powers of our defenseless brothers have been subjected to

strictly scientific experiments. We have, it is true more than

one collection of anecdotes in which the intelligence of animals

is lauded to the skies; but we cannot rely upon these

ill-authenticated stories. To find genuine and incontestable

instances we must have recourse to the works, rare as yet, of

scientific men who have made a special study of the subject. M.

Hachet-Souplet, for example, the director of the Institut de

Psychologie Zoologique, mentions the case of a dog who learnt to

acquire an abstract idea of weight. You put in front of him eight

rounded and polished stones, all of exactly the same size and

shape, but of different weights. You tell him to fetch the

heaviest or the lightest; he judges their weight by lifting them

and, without mistake, picks out the one required.

The same writer also tells the story of a parrot to whom he had

taught the word "cupboard" by showing him a little box that could

be hung up on the wall at different heights and in which his

daily allowance of food was always ostentatiously put away;

"I next taught him the names of a number of objects," says M.

Hachet-Souplet, "by holding them out to him. Among them was a

ladder; and I prevailed upon the bird to say, 'Climb,' each time

that he saw me mount the steps. One morning, when the parrot's

cage was brought into the laboratory, the cupboard was hanging

near the ceiling, while the little ladder was stowed away in a

corner among other objects familiar to the bird. Now the parrot,

every day, when I opened the cupboard, used to scream, 'Cupboard!

Cupboard! Cupboard!' with all his might. My problem was,

therefore, this: seeing that the cupboard was out of my reach and

that, therefore, I could not take his food out of it; knowing, on

the other hand, that I was able to raise myself above the level

of the floor by climbing the ladder; and having the words 'climb'

and 'ladder' at his disposal: would he employ them to suggest to

me the idea of using them in order to reach the cupboard? Greatly

excited, the parrot flapped his wings, bit the bars of his cage,

and screamed:

"'Cupboard! Cupboard! Cupboard!'"

"And I got no more out of him that day. The next day, the bird,

having received nothing but millet, for which he did not much

care, instead of the hemp-seed contained in the cupboard, was in

paroxysms of anger; and, after he had made numberless attempts to

force open his bars, his attention was at last caught by the

ladder and he said:

"'Ladder, climb, cupboard!'"

We have here, as the author remarks, a marvellous intellectual

effort. There is an evident association of ideas; cause is linked

with effect; and examples such as this lesson appreciably the

distance separating our learned horses from their less celebrated

brethren. We must admit, however, that this intellectual effort,

if we observe, animals a little carefully, is much less uncommon

than we think. It surprises us in this case because a special

and, when all is said, purely mechanical arrangement of the

parrot's organ gives him a human voice. At every moment, I find

in my own dog associations of ideas no less evident and often

more complex. For instance, if he is thirsty, he seeks my eyes

and next looks at the tap in the dressing-room, thus showing that

he very plainly connects the notions of thirst, running water and

human intervention. When I dress to go out, he evidently watches

all my movements. While I am lacing my boots, he conscientiously

licks my hands, in order that my divinity may be good to him and

especially to congratulate me on my capital idea of going out for

a constitutional. It is a sort of general and as yet vague

approval. Boots promise an excursion out of doors, that is to

say, space, fragrant roads, long grass full of surprises, corners

scented with offal, friendly or tragic encounters and the pursuit

of wholly illusory, game. But the fair vision is still in anxious

suspense. He does not yet know if he is going with me. His fate

is now being decided; and his eyes, melting with anguish, devour

my mind. If I buckle on my leather gaiters, it means the sudden

and utter extinction, of all that constitutes the joy of life.

They leave not a ray of hope. They herald the hateful, lonely

motorcycle, which he cannot keep up with; and he stretches

himself sadly in a dark corner, where he goes back to the gloomy

dreams of an unoccupied, forsaken dog. But, when I slip my arms

into the sleeves of my heavy great-coat, one would think that

they were opening the gates of the most dazzling paradise. For

this implies the car, the obvious, indubitable motor-car, in

other words, the radiant summit of the most superlative delight.

And delirious barks, inordinate bounds, riotous, embarrassing

demonstrations of affection greet a happiness which, for all

that, is but an immaterial idea, built up of artless memories and

ingenuous hopes.

I mention these matters only because they are quite ordinary and

because there is nobody who has not made a thousand similar

observations. As a rule, we do not notice that these humble

manifestations represent sentiments, associations of ideas,

inferences, deductions, an absolute and altogether human mental

effort. They lack only speech; but speech is merely a mechanical

accident which reveals the operations of thought more clearly to

us. We are amazed that Mohammed or Zarif should recognize the

picture of a horse, a donkey, a hat, or a man on horseback, or

that they should spontaneously report to their master the little

events that happen in the stable; but it is certain that our own

dog is incessantly performing a similar work and that his eyes,

if we could read them, would tell us a great deal more. The

primary miracle of Elberfeld is that the stallions should have

been given the means of expressing what they think and feel. It

is momentous; but, when closely looked into, it is not

incomprehensible. Between the talking horses and my silent dog

there is an enormous distance, but not an abyss. I am saying this

not to detract from the nature or extent of the prodigy, but to

call attention to the fact that the theory of animal intelligence

is more justifiable and less fanciful than one is at first

inclined to think.

But the second and greater miracle is that man should have been

able to rouse the horse from his immemorial sleep, to fix and

direct his attention and to interest him in matters that are more

foreign and indifferent to him than the variations of temperature

in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It really seems, when we

consider our preconceived ideas, that there is not in the animal

an organic and insurmountable inability to do what man's brain

does, a total and irremediable absence of intellectual faculties,

but rather a profound lethargy and torpor of those faculties. It

lives in a sort of undisturbed stolidity, of nebulous slumber. As

Dr. Ochorowicz very justly remarks, "its waking state is very

near akin to the state of a man walking in his sleep." Having no

notion of space or time, it spends its life, one may say, in a

perpetual dream. It does what is strictly necessary to keep

itself alive; and all the rest passes over it and does not

penetrate at all into its hermetically closed imaginings.

Exceptional circumstances--some extraordinary need, wish, passion

or shock--are required to produce what M. Hachet-Souplet calls

"the psychic flash" which suddenly thaws and galvanizes its

brain, placing it for a minute in the waking state in which the

human brain works normally. Nor is this surprising. It does not

need that awakening in order to exist; and we know that nature

never makes great superfluous efforts.. "The intellect," as

Professor Clarapede well says, "appears only as a makeshift, an

instrument which betrays that the organism is not adapted to its

environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of

impotence."

It is probable that our brain at first suffered from the same

lethargy, a condition, for that matter, from which many men have

not yet emerged; and it is even more probable that, compared with

other modes of existence, with other psychic phenomena, on

another plane and in another sphere, the dense sleep in which we

move is similar to that in which the lower animals have their

being. It also is traversed, with increasing frequency, by

psychic flashes of a different order and a different scope.

Seeing, on the one side, the intellectual movement that seems to

be spreading among our lesser brothers and, on the other, the

ever more constantly repeated manifestations of our

subconsciousness, we might even ask ourselves if we have not

here, on two different planes, a tension, a parallel pressure, a

new desire, a new attempt of the mysterious spiritual force which

animates the universe and which seems to be incessantly seeking

fresh outlets and fresh conducting rods. Be this as it may, when

the flash has passed, we behave very much as the animals do: we

promptly lapse into the indifferent sleep which suffices also for

our miserable ways. We ask no more of it, we do not follow the

luminous trail that summons us to an unknown world, we go on

turning in our dismal circle, like contented sleep-walkers, while

Isis' sistrum rattles without respite to rouse the faithful.

I repeat, the great miracle of Elberfeld is that of having been

able to prolong and reproduce at will those isolated "psychic

flashes." The horses, in comparison with the other animals, are

here in the state of a man whose subliminal consciousness had

gained the upper hand. That man would lead a higher existence, in

an almost immaterial atmosphere, of which the phenomena of

metaphysics, sparks falling from a region which we shall perhaps

one day reach, sometimes give us an uncertain and fleeting

glimpse. Our intelligence, which is really lethargy and which

keeps us imprisoned in a little hollow of space and time, would

there be replaced by intuition, or rather by a sort of imminent

knowledge which would forthwith make us sharers in all that is

known to a universe which perhaps knows all things.

Unfortunately, we have not, or at least, unlike the horses, we

are not acquainted with a superior being who interests himself in

us and helps us to throw off our torpor. We have to become our

own god, to rise above ourselves and to keep ourselves raised by

our unaided strength. It is almost certain that the horse would

never have come out of his nebulous sphere without man's

assistance; but it is not forbidden to hope that man, with no

other help than his own courage and high purpose, may yet succeed

in breaking through the sleep that cramps him and blinds him.

To come back then to our horses and to the main point, which is

the isolated "psychic flash," it is admitted that they know the

values of figures, that they can distinguish and identify smells,

colours, forms, objects and even graphic reproductions of those

objects. They also understand a large number of words, including

some of which they were, never taught the meaning, but which they

picked up as they went along by hearing them spoken around them.

They have learnt, with the assistance of an exceedingly

complicated alphabet, to reproduce the words, thanks to which

they manage to convey impressions, sensations, wishes,

associations of ideas, observations and even spontaneous

reflections. It has been held that all this implies real acts of

intelligence. It is, in fact, often very difficult to decide

exactly how far it is intelligence and how far memory, instinct,

imitative genius, obedience or mechanical impulse, the effects of

training, or happy coincidences.

There are cases, however, which admit of little or no hesitation.

I give a few.

One day Krall and his collaborator, Dr. Scholler, thought that

they would try and teach Mohammed to express himself in speech.

The horse, a docile and eager pupil, made touching and fruitless

efforts to reproduce human sounds. Suddenly, he stopped and, in

his strange phonetic spelling, declared, by striking his foot on

the spring-board:

"Ig hb kein gud Sdim. I have not a good voice."

Observing that he did not open his mouth, they strove to make him

understand, by the example of a dog, with pictures, and so on,

that, in order to speak, it is necessary to separate the jaws.

They next asked him:

"What must you do to speak?"

He replied, by striking with his foot:

"Open mouth."

"Why don't you open yours?"

"Weil kan nigd: because I can't."

A few days after, Zarif was asked how he talks to Mohammed.

"Mit Munt: with mouth."

"Why don't you tell me that with your mouth?"

"Weil ig kein Stim hbe: because I have no voice." Does not this

answer, as Krall remarks, allow us to suppose that he has other

means than speech of conversing with his stable-companion?

In the course of another lesson, Mohammed was shown the portrait

of a young girl whom he did not know.

"What's that?" asked his master.

"Metgen: a girl?"

On the black-board:

"Why is it a girl?"

"Weil lang Hr hd: because she has long hair."

"And what has she not?"

"Moustache."

They next produced the likeness of man with no moustache.

"What's this?"

"Why is it a man?"

"Weil kurz Hr hd: because he has short hair."

I could multiply these examples indefinitely by drawing on the

voluminous Elberfeld minutes, which, I may say in passing, have

the convincing force of photographic records. All this, it must

be agreed, is unexpected and disconcerting, had never been

foreseen or suspected and may be regarded as one of the strangest

prodigies, one of the most stupefying revelations that have taken

place since man has dwelt in this world of riddles, Nevertheless,

by reflecting, by comparing, by investigating, by regarding

certain forgotten or neglected landmarks and starting-points, by

taking into consideration the thousand imperceptible gradations

between the greatest and the least, the highest and the lowest,

it is still possible to explain, admit and understand. We can, if

it comes to that, imagine that, in his secret self, in his tragic

silence, our dog also makes similar remarks and reflections. Once

again, the miraculous bridge which, in this instance, spans the

gulf between the animal and man is much more the expression of

thought than thought itself. We may go further and grant that

certain elementary calculations, such as little additions, little

subtractions of one or two figures, are, after all, conceivable;

and I, for my part, am inclined to believe that the horse really

executes them. But where we get out of our depth, where we enter

into the realm of pure enchantment is when it becomes a matter of

mathematical operations on a large scale, notably of the finding

of roots. We know, for instance, that the extraction of the

fourth root of a number of six figures calls for eighteen

multiplications, ten subtractions and three divisions and that

the horse does thirty-one sums in five or six seconds, that is to

say, during the brief, careless glance which he gives at the

black-board on which the problem is inscribed, as though the

answer came to him intuitively and instantaneously.

Still, if we admit the theory of intelligence, we must also admit

that the horse knows what he is doing, since it is not until

after learning what a squared number or a square root means that

he appears to understand or that, at any rate, he gradually works

out correctly the ever more complicated calculations required of

him. It is not possible to give here the details of this

instruction, which was astonishingly rapid. The reader will find

them on pages 117 et seq. of Krall's book, Denkende Tiere. Krall

begins by explaining to Mohammed that 2 squared is equal to 2 X 2

= 4; that 2 cubed is equal to 2 X 2 X 2 = 6; that 2 is the square

root of 4; and so on. In short, the explanations and

demonstrations are absolutely similar to those which one would

give to an extremely intelligent child, with this difference,

that the horse is much more attentive than the child and that,

thanks to his extraordinary memory, he never forgets what he

appears to have understood. Let us add, to complete the magical

and incredible character of the phenomenon that, according to

Krall's own statement, the horse was not taught beyond the point

of extracting the square root of the number 144 and that he

spontaneously invented the manner of extracting all the others.

Must we once more repeat, in connection with these startling

performances, that those who speak of audible or visible signals,

of telegraphy and wireless telegraphy, of expedients, trickery or

deceit, are speaking of what they do not know and of what they

have not seen? There is but one reply to be made to any one who

honestly refuses to believe:

"Go to Elberfeld---the problem is sufficiently important,

sufficiently big with consequences to make the journey worth

while--and, behind closed doors, alone with the horse, in the

absolute solitude and silence of the stable, set Mohammed to

extract half-a dozen roots which, like that which I have

mentioned, require thirty-one operations. You must yourself be

ignorant of the solutions, so as to do away with any transmission

of unconscious thought. If he then gives you, one after the

other, five or six correct solutions, as he did to me and many

others, you will not go away with the conviction that the animal

is able by its intelligence to extract those roots, because that

conviction would upset too thoroughly the greater part of the

certainties on which your life is based; but you will, at any

rate, be persuaded that you have been for a few minutes in the

presence of one of the greatest and strangest riddles that can

disturb the mind of man; and it is always a good and salutary

thing to come into contact with emotions of this order."

Truth to say, the theory of intelligence in the animal would be

so extraordinary as to be almost untenable. If we are determined,

at whatever cost, to pin our faith to it, we are bound to call in

the aid of other ideas, to appeal, for instance, to the extremely

mysterious and essentially uncomprehended and incomprehensible

nature of numbers. It is almost certain that the science of

mathematics lies outside the intelligence. It forms a mechanical

and abstract whole, more spiritual than material and more

material than spiritual, visible only through its shadow and yet

constituting the most immovable of the realities that govern the

universe. From first to last it declares itself a very strange

force and, as it were, the sovereign of another element than that

which nourishes our brain. Secret, indifferent, imperious and

implacable, it subjugates and oppresses us from a great height or

a great depth, in any case, from very far, without telling us

why. One might say that figures place those who handle them in a

special condition. They draw the cabalistic circle around their

victim. Henceforth, he is no longer his own master, he renounces

his liberty, he is literally "possessed" by the powers which he

invokes. He is dragged he knows not whither, into a formless,

boundless immensity, subject to laws that have nothing human

about them, in which each of those lively and tyrannical little

signs which move and dance in their thousands under the pen

represents nameless, but eternal, invincible and inevitable

verities. We think that we are directing them and they enslave

us. We become weary and breathless following them into their

uninhabitable spaces. When we touch them, we let loose a force

which we are no longer able to control. They do with us what they

will and always end by hurling us, blinded and benumbed, into

blank infinity or upon a wall of ice against which every effort

of our mind and will is shattered.

It is possible, therefore, in the last resort, to explain the

Elberfeld mystery by the no less obscure mystery that surrounds

numbers. This really only means moving to another spot in the

gloom; but it is often just by that moving to another spot that

we end by discovering the little gleam of light which shows us a

thoroughfare. In any case, and to return to more precise ideas,

more than one instance has been cited to prove that the gift of

handling great groups of figures is almost independent of the

intelligence proper. One of the most curious is that of an

Italian shepherd boy, Vito Mangiamele, who was brought before the

Paris Academy of Science in 1837 and who, at the age of ten,

though devoid of the most rudimentary education, was able in half

a minute to extract the cubic root of a number of seven figures.

Another, more striking still, also mentioned by Dr. Clarapede in

his paper on the learned horses, is that of a man blind from

birth, an inmate of the lunatic-asylum, at Armentieres. This

blind man, whose name is Fleury, a degenerate and nearly an

idiot, can calculate in one minute and fifteen seconds the number

of seconds in thirty-nine years, three months and twelve days,

not forgetting the leap-years. They explain to him what a square

root is, without telling him the conventional method of finding

it; and soon he extracts almost as rapidly as Inaudi himself,

without a blunder, the square roots of numbers of four figures,

giving the remainder. On the other hand, we know that a

mathematical genius like Henri Pomcare confessed himself

incapable of adding up a column of figures without a mistake.

>From the maybe enchanted atmosphere that surrounds numbers we

shall pass more easily to the even more magic mists of the final

theory, the only one remaining to us for the moment: the

mediumistic or subliminal theory. This, we must remember, is not

the telepathic theory proper which decisive experiments have made

us reject. Let us have the courage to venture upon it. When one

can no longer interpret a phenomenon by the known, we must needs

try to do so by the unknown. We, therefore, now enter a new

province of a great unexplored kingdom, in which we shall find

ourselves without a guide.

Mediumistic phenomena, manifestations of the secondary or the

subliminal consciousness, between man and man, are, as we have

more than once had occasion to assure ourselves, capricious,

undisciplined, evasive and uncertain, but more frequent than one

thought and, to one who examines, them seriously and honestly,

often undeniable. Have similar manifestations been discovered

between man and the animals? The study of these manifestations,

which is very difficult even in the case of man, becomes still

more so when we question witnesses doomed to silence. There are,

however, some animals which are looked upon as "psychic," which,

in other words, seem indisputably to be sensitive to certain

subliminal influences. One usually classes the cat, the dog and

the horse in this somewhat ill-defined category. To these

superstitious animals one might perhaps add certain birds, more

or less birds of omen, and even a few insects, notably the bees.

Other animals, such as, for instance, the elephant and the

monkey, appear to be proof against mystery. Be this as it may, M.

Ernest Bozzano, in an excellent article on Les Perceptions

psychiques des animaux,[1] collected in 1905 sixty-nine cases of

telepathy, presentiments and hallucinations of sight or hearing

in which the principal actors are cats, dogs and horses. There

are, even among them, ghosts or phantoms of dogs which, after

their death, return to haunt the homes in which they were happy.

Most of these cases are taken from the Proceedings of the S. P.

R., that is to say, they have nearly all been very strictly

investigated. It is impossible, short of filling these pages with

often striking and touching but rather cumbersome anecdotes, to

enumerate them here, however briefly. It will be sufficient to

note that sometimes the dog begins to howl at the exact moment

when his master loses his life, for instance, on a battlefield,

hundreds of miles from the place where the dog is. More commonly,

the cat, the dog and the horse plainly manifest that they

perceive, often before men do, telepathic apparitions, phantasms

of the living or the dead. Horses in particular seem very

sensitive to places that pass as haunted or uncanny. On the

whole, the result of these observations is that we can hardly

dispute that these animals communicate as much as we do and

perhaps in the same fashion with the mystery that lies around us.

There are moments at which, like man, they see the invisible and

perceive events, influences and emotions that are beyond the

range of their normal senses. It is, therefore, permissible to

believe that their nervous system or some remote or secret part

of their being contains the same psychic elements connecting them

with an unknown that inspires them with as much terror as it does

ourselves. And, let us say in passing, this terror is rather

strange; for, after all, what have they to fear from a phantom or

an apparition, they who, we are convinced have no after-life and

who ought, therefore, to remain perfectly indifferent to the

manifestations, of a world in which they will never set foot?

[1] Annales des sciences psychiques, August, 1905, pp 422-469.

I shall perhaps be told that it is not certain that these

apparitions are objective, that they correspond with an external

reality, but that it is exceedingly possible that they spring

solely from the man's or the animal's brain. This is not the

moment to discuss this very obscure point, which raises the whole

question of the supernatural and all the problems of the

hereafter. The only important thing to observe is that at one

time it is man who transmits his terror, his perception or his

idea of the invisible to the animal and at another the animal

which transmits its sensations to man. We have here, therefore,

intercommunications which spring from a deeper common source than

any that we know and which, to issue from it or go back to it,

pass through other channels than those of our customary senses.

Now all this belongs to that unexplained sensibility, to that

secret treasure, to that as yet undetermined psychic power which,

for lack of a better term, we call subconsciousness or subliminal

consciousness. Moreover, it is not surprising that in the

animals, these subliminal faculties not only exist, but are

perhaps keener and more active than in ourselves, because it is

our conscious and abnormally individualized life that atrophies

them by relegating them to a state of idleness wherein they have

fewer and fewer opportunities of being exercised, whereas in our

brothers who are less detached from the universe,

consciousness--if we can give that name to a very uncertain and

confused notion of the ego--is reduced to a few elementary

actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from the

whole of the circumambient life and they still possess a number

of those more general and indeterminate senses whereof we have

been deprived by the gradual encroachment of a narrow and

intolerant special faculty, our intelligence. Among these senses

which up to the present we have described as instincts, for

want--and it is becoming a pressing want--of a more suitable and

definite word, need I mention the sense of direction, migration,

foreknowledge of the weather, of earthquakes and avalanches and

many others which we doubtless do not even suspect? Does all this

not belong to a subconsciousness which differs from ours only in

being so much richer?

I am fully aware that this explanation by means of the subliminal

consciousness will not explain very much and will at most invoke

the aid of the unknown to illuminate the incomprehensible. But to

explain a phenomenon, a Dr. J. de Modzelwski very truly says, "is

to put forward a theory which is more familiar and more easily

comprehensible to us than the phenomenon at issue." This is

really what we are constantly and almost exclusively doing in

physics, chemistry, biology and in every branch of science

without exception. To explain a phenomenon is not necessarily to

make it as clear and lucid as that two and two are four; and,

even so, the fact that two and two are four is not, when we go to

the bottom of things, as clear and lucid as it seems. What in

this case, as in most others, we wrongfully call explaining is

simply confronting the unexpected mystery which these horses

offer us with a few phenomena which are themselves unknown, but

which have been perceived longer and more frequently. And this

same mystery, thus explained, will serve one day to explain

others. It is in this way that science goes to work. We must not

blame it: it does what it can; and it does not appear that there

are other ways.

If we assent to this explanation by means of the subliminal

consciousness, which is a sort of mysterious participation in all

that happens in this world and the others, many obstacles

disappear and we enter into a new region in which we draw

strangely nearer to the animals and really become their brothers

by closer links, perhaps the only essential links in life. They

take part from that moment in the great human problems, in the

extraordinary actions of our unknown guest; and, if, since we

have been observing the indwelling force more attentively,

nothing any longer surprises us of that which it realizes in us,

no more should anything surprise us of that which it realizes in

them. We are on the same plane with them, in some as yet

undetermined element, when it is no longer the intelligence that

reigns alone, but another spiritual power, which pays no heed to

the brain, which passes by other roads and which might rather be

the psychic substance of the universe itself, no longer set in

grooves, isolated and specialized by man, but diffused, multiform

and perhaps, if we could trace it, equal in everything that

exists.

There is, henceforth, no reason why the horses should not

participate in most of the mediumistic, phenomena which we find

existing between man and man; and their mystery ceases to be

distinct from those of human metaphysics. If their subliminal is

akin to ours, we can begin by extending to its utmost limits the

telepathic theory, which has, so to speak, no limits, for, in the

matter of telepathy, as Myers has said, all that we are permitted

to declare is that "life has the power of manifesting itself to

life." We may ask ourselves, therefore, if the problem which I

set to the horse, without knowing the terms of it, is not

communicated to my subliminal, which is ignorant of it, by that

of the horse, who has read it. It is practically certain that

this is possible between human subliminals. Is it I who see the

solution and transmit it to the horse, who only repeats it to me?

But, suppose that it is a problem which I myself am incapable of

solving? Whence does the solution come, then? I do not know if

the experiment has been attempted, under the same conditions,

with a human medium. For that matter, if it succeeded, it would

be very much the same as the no less subliminal phenomenon of the

arithmetical prodigies, or lightning calculators, with which, in

this rather superhuman atmosphere, we are almost forced to

compare the riddle of the mathematical horses. Of all the

interpretations, it is the one which, for the moment, appears to

me the least eccentric and the most natural.

We have seen that the gift of handling colossal figures is almost

foreign to the intelligence proper; one can, even declare that,

in certain cases, it is evidently and completely independent of

such intelligence. In these cases, the gift is manifested prior

to any education and from the earliest years of childhood. If we

refer to the list of arithmetical prodigies given by Dr.

Scripure,[1] we see that the faculty made its appearance in

Ampere at the age of three, in Colburn at six, in Gauss at three,

in Mangiamele at ten, in Safford at six, in Whateley at three,

and so on. Generally, it lasts for only a few years, becoming

rapidly enfeebled with age and usually vanishing suddenly at the

moment when its possessor begins to go to school.

[1] American Journal of Psychology, 1 April 1891.

When you ask those children and even most of the lightning

calculators who have come to man's estate how they go to work to

solve the huge and complicated problems set them, they reply that

they know nothing about it. Bidder, for instance, declares that

it is impossible for him to say how he can instinctively tell the

logarithm of a number consisting of seven or eight figures. It is

the same with Safford, who, at the age of ten, used to do in his

head, without ever making a mistake, multiplication-sums the

result of which ran into thirty-six figures. The solution

presents itself authoritatively and spontaneously; it is a

vision, an impression, an inspiration, an intuition coming one

knows not whence, suddenly and indubitably. As a role, they do

not even try to calculate. Contrary to the general belief, they

have no peculiar methods; or, if method there be, it is more a

practical way of subdividing the intuition. One would think that

the solution springs suddenly from the very enunciation of the

problem, in the same way as a veridical hallucination. It appears

to rise, infallible and ready-done, from a sort of eternal and

cosmic reservoir wherein the answers to every question lie

dormant. It must, therefore, be admitted that we have here a

phenomenon that occurs above or below the brain, by the side of

the consciousness and the mind, outside all the intellectual

methods and habits; and it is precisely for phenomena of this

kind that Myers invented the word "subliminal."[1]

[1] I have no need to recall the derivation of the term

subliminal: beneath (sub) the threshold (limen) of consciousness.

Let us add, as M. de Vesme very rightly remarks, that the

subliminal is not exactly what classical psychology calls the

subconsciousness, which latter records only notions that are

normally perceived and possesses only normal faculties, that is

to say, faculties recognized to-day by orthodox science.

Does not all this bring us a little nearer to our calculating

horses? From the moment that it is demonstrated that the solution

of a mathematical problem no longer depends exclusively on the

brain, but on another faculty, another spiritual power whose

presence under various forms has been ascertained beyond a doubt

in certain animals, it ceases to be wholly rash or extravagant to

suggest that perhaps, in the horse, the same phenomenon is

reproduced and developed in the same unknown, wherein moreover

the mysteries of numbers and those of subconsciousness mingle in

a like darkness. I am well aware that an explanation laden to

such an extent with mysteries explains but very little more than

silence does; nevertheless, it is at least a silence traversed by

restless murmurs, and sedulous whispers that are better than the

gloomy and hopeless ignorance to which we would have perforce to

resign ourselves if we did not, in spite of all, to perform the

great duty of man, which is to discover a spark in the darkness.

It goes without saying that objections are raised from every

side. Among men, arithmetical prodigies are looked upon as

monsters, as a sort of extremely rare teratological phenomenon.

We can count, at most, half-a-dozen in a century, whereas, among

horses, the faculty would appear to be almost general, or at

least quite common. In fact, out of six or seven stallions whom

Krall tried to initiate into the secrets of mathematics, he found

only two that appeared to him too poorly gifted for him to waste

time on their education. These were, I believe, two thoroughbreds

that were presented to him by the Grand-duke of Mecklenburg and

sent back by Krall to their sumptuous stables. In the four or

five others, taken at random as circumstances supplied them, he

met with aptitudes unequal, it is true, but easily developed and

giving the impression that they exist normally, latent and

inactive, at the bottom of every equine soul. From the

mathematical point of view, is the horse's subliminal

consciousness then superior to man's? Why not? His whole

subliminal being is probably superior to one, of greater range,

younger, fresher, more alive and less heavy, since it is not

incessantly attacked, coerced and humiliated by the intelligence

which gnaws at it, stifles it, cloaks it and relegates it to a

dark corner which neither light nor air can penetrate. His

subliminal consciousness is always present, always alert; ours is

never there, is asleep at the bottom of a deserted well and needs

exceptional operations, results and events before it can be drawn

from its slumber and its unremembered deeps. All this seems very

extraordinary; but, in any case, we are here in the midst of the

extraordinary; and this outlet is perhaps the least hazardous. It

is not a question, we must remember, of a cerebral operation, an

intellectual performance, but of a gift of divination closely

allied to other gifts of the same nature and the same origin

which are not the peculiar attribute of man. No observation, no

experiment enables us, up to the present, to establish a

difference between the subliminal of human beings and that of

animals. On the contrary, the as yet restricted number of actual

cases reveals constant and striking analogies between the two. In

most of those arithmetical operations, be it noted, the

subliminal of the horse behaves exactly like that of the medium

in a rate of trance. The horse readily reverses the figures of

the solution; he replies, "37," for instance, instead of "73,"

which is a mediumistic phenomenon so well-known and so frequent

that it has been styled "mirror-writing." He makes mistakes

fairly often in the most elementary additions, and subtractions

and much less frequently in the extraction of the most

complicated roots, which again, in similar cases, such as

"xenoglossy" and psychometry, is one of the eccentricities of

human mediumism and is explained by the same cause, namely, the

inopportune intervention of the ever fallible intelligence,

which, by meddling in the matter, alters the certainties of a

subliminal which, when left to itself, never makes a mistake. It

is, in fact, quite probable that the horse, being really able to

do the small sums, no longer relies solely on his intuition and,

from that moment, gropes and flounders about. The solution hovers

between the intelligence and the subliminal and, passing from the

one, which is not quite sure of it, to the other, which is not

urgently appealed to, comes out of the conflict as best it may.

The case is the same with the psychometric or spiritualistic

medium who seeks to profit by what he knows in the ordinary way,

so as to complete the visions or revelations of his subconscious

sensibility. He, too, in this instance, is nearly always guilty

of flagrant and inexplicable blunders.

Many other similarities will be found to exist, notably the way

in which the lessons vary. Nothing is more uncertain and

capricious than manifestations of human mediumism. Whether it be

a question of automatic writing, psychometry, materializations or

anything else, we meet with series of sittings that yield none

but absurd results. Then, suddenly, for reasons as yet

obscure--the state of the weather, the presence of this or that

witness, or I know not what--the most undeniable

and bewildering manifestations occur one after the other. The

case is precisely the same with the horses: their queer fancies,

their unaccountable and disconcerting freaks drive poor Krall to

despair. He never opens the door of that uncertain stable, on

important days, without a sinking at the heart. Let the beard or

the frown of some learned professor fail to please the horses:

they will, forthwith, take an unholy delight in giving the most

irrelevant answer to the most elementary question, for hours and

even days on end.

Other common features are the strongly-marked personality of the

mediumistic "raps" and the communications known as "deferred

telepathic communications," that is to say, those in which the

answer is obtained at the end of a sitting to a question put at

the beginning and forgotten by all those present. What at first

sight seems one of the strongest objections urged against the

mediumism of the horse even tends to confirm it. If the reply

comes from the horse's subconsciousness, it has been asked, how

is it that it should be necessary first to teach him the elements

of language, mathematics and so forth, and that Berto, for

instance, is incapable of solving the same problems as Mohammed?

This objection has been very ably refuted by M. de Vesme, who

writes:

"To produce automatic writing, a medium must have learnt to

write; before Victorien Sardou or Mlle Helene Schmidt could

produce their mediumistic drawings and paintings, they had to

possess an elementary knowledge of drawing and painting; Tartini

would never have composed The Devil's Sonata in a dream, if he

had not known music; and so forth. Unconscious cerebration,

however wonderful, can only take effect upon elements already

acquired in some way or another. The subconscious cerebration of

a man blind from birth will not make him see colours."

Here, then, in this comparison which might easily be extended,

are several fairly well- defined features of resemblance. We

receive a vivid impression of the same habits, the same

contradictions, and the same eccentricities; and we once more

recognize the strange and majestic shadow of our unknown guest.

One great objection remains, based upon the very nature of the

phenomenon, upon the really inseparable distance that separates

the whole life of the horse from the abstract and impenetrable

life of numbers. How can his subliminal consciousness interest

itself for a moment in signs that represent nothing to him, have

no relation to his organism and will never touch his existence?

But in the first place, it is just the same with the child or the

illiterate calculator. He is not interested either in the figures

which he lets loose. He is completely ignorant of the

consequences of the problems which he solves. He juggles with

digits which have hardly any more meaning to him than to the

horse. He is incapable of accounting for what he does; and his

subconsciousness also acts in a sort of indifferent and remote

dream. It is true that, in his case, we can appeal to heredity

and to memory; but is this difference enough to settle the

difficulty and definitely to separate the two phenomena? To

appeal to heredity is still to appeal to the subliminal; and it

is not at all certain that the latter is limited by the interest

of the organism sheltering it. It appears, on the contrary, in

many circumstances, to spread and extend far beyond that organism

in which it is domiciled, one would say, accidentally and

provisionally. It likes to show, apparently, that it is in

relation with all that exists. It declares itself, as often as

possible, universal and impersonal. It has but a very indifferent

care, as we have seen in the matter of apparitions and

premonitions, for the happiness and even the safety of its host

and protector. It prophesies to its companion of a lifetime

events which he cannot avoid or which do not concern him. It

makes him see beforehand, for instance, all the circumstances of

the death of a stranger whom he will only hear of after the

event, when this event is irrevocable. It brings a crowd of

barren presentiments and conjures up veridical hallucinations

that are wholly alien and idle. With psychometric, typtological

or materializing mediums, it practises art for art's sake, mocks

at space and time, passes through personalities, sees through

solid bodies, brings into communication thoughts and motions

worlds apart, reads souls and lives by the light of a flower, a

rag of a scrap of paper; and all this for nothing, to amuse

itself, to astonish us, because it adores the superfluous, the

incoherent, the unexpected, the improbable, the bewildering, or

rather, perhaps, because it is a huge, rough, undisciplined force

still struggling in the darkness and coming to the surface only

by wild fits and starts, because it is an enormous expansion of a

spirit striving to collect itself, to achieve consciousness, to

make itself of service and to obtain a hearing. In any case, for

the time being, it appeals just what we have described, and would

be unlike itself if it behaved any otherwise in the case that

puzzles us.

Lastly, to close this chapter, let us remark that it is nearly

certain that the solution given by calculating children and

horses is not of a mathematical nature at all. They do not in any

way consider the problem or the sum to be worked. They simply

find the answer straight away to a riddle, the guessing of which

is made easy by the actual nature of figures which keep their

secrets badly. To any one in the requisite state of mind, it

becomes a question of a sort of elementary charade, which hides

its answer only from those who speak another language. It is

evident that every problem, however complex it may appear,

carries within its very enunciation its one, invariable solution,

scarce veiled by the indiscreet signs that contain or cover it.

It is there, under the numbers that have no other object than to

give it life, coming, stirring and ceaselessly proclaiming itself

a necessity. It is not surprising therefore that eyes sharper

than ours and ears open to other vibrations should see and hear

it without knowing what it represents, what it implies or from

what prodigious mass of figures and operations it merges. The

problem itself speaks; and the horse but repeats the sign which

he hears whispered in the mysterious life of numbers or deep down

in, the abyss where the eternal verities hold sway. He

understands none of it, he has no need to understand, he is but

the unconscious medium who lends his voice or his limbs to the

mind that inspires him. There is here but a bare and simple

answer, bearing no precise significance, seized in an alien

existence. There is here but a mechanical revelation, so to

speak, a sort of special reflex which we can only record and

which, for the rest, is as inexplicable as any other phenomenon

of consciousness or instinct. After all, when we think of it, it

is just as, astonishing that we should not perceive the solution

as it is that we should discover it. However, I grant that all

this is but a venturesome interpretation to be taken for what it

is worth, an experimental or interim theory with which we must

needs content ourselves since all the others have hitherto been

controverted by the facts.

Let us now briefly sum up what the Elberfeld experiments have

yielded us. Having put aside telepathy in the narrow sense--which

perhaps enters into more than one phenomenon but is not

indispensable to it, for we see these same phenomena repeated

when telepathy is practically impossible--we cannot help

observing that, if we deny the existence or the influence of the

subliminal, it is all the more difficult to contest the existence

and the intervention of the intelligence, at any rate up to the

extracting of roots, after which there is a steep precipice which

ends in darkness. But, even if we stop at the roots, the sudden

discovery of an intellectual force so similar to our own, where

we were accustomed to see but an irremediable impotency, is no

doubt one of the most unexpected revelations that we have

received since the invisible and the unknown began to press upon

us with a persistence and an impatience which they had not

displayed heretofore. It is not easy to foresee as yet the

consequences and the promises of this new aspect which the great

riddle of the intelligence is suddenly adopting. But I believe

that we shall soon have to revise some of the essential ideas

which are the foundations of our life and that some rather

strange horizons are appearing out of the mists in the history of

psychology, of morality, of human destiny and of many other

things.

So much for the intelligence. On the other hand, what we deny to

the intelligence we are constrained to grant to the subliminal;

and the revelation is even more disconcerting. We should then

have to admit that them is in the horse--and hence most probably

in everything that lives on this earth--a psychic power similar

to that which is hidden beneath the veil of our reason and which,

as we learn to know it, astonishes, surpasses and dominates our

reason more and more. This psychic power, in which no doubt we

shall one day be forced to recognize the genius of the universe

itself, appears, as we have often observed, to be all-wise,

all-seeing and all-powerful. It has, when it is pleased to

communicate with us or when we are allowed to penetrate into it,

an answer for every question, and perhaps a remedy for every

ill. We will not enumerate its virtues again. It will be enough

for us to recall with what ease it mocks at space, time and all

the obstacles that beset our poor human knowledge and

understanding. We believed it, like all that seems to us superior

and marvellous, the intangible, inalienable and incommunicable

attribute of man, with even better reason than his intelligence.

And now an accident, strangely belated, it is true, tells us

that, at one precise point, the strangest and least foreseen of

all, the horse and the dog draw more easily and perhaps more

directly than ourselves upon its mighty reservoirs. By the most

inexplicable of anomalies, though one that is fairly consistent

with the fantastic character of the subliminal, they appear to

have access to it only at the spot that is most remote from their

habits and most unknown to their propensities, for there is

nothing in the world about which animals trouble less than

figures. But is this not, perhaps because we do not see what goes

on elsewhere? It so happens that the infinite mystery of numbers

can sometimes be expressed by a very few simple movements which

are natural to most animals; but there is nothing to tell us

that, if we could teach the horse and the dog to attach to these

same movements the expression of other mysteries, they would not

draw upon them with equal facility. It has been successfully

attempted to give them a more or less clear idea of the value of

a few figures and perhaps of the course and nature of certain

elementary operations; and this appears to have been enough to

open up to them the most secret regions of mathematics in which

every question is answered beforehand. It is not wholly illusive

to suppose that, if we could impart to them, for instance, a

similar notion of the future, together with a manner of conveying

to us what they see there, they might also have access to strange

visions of another class, which are jealously kept from us by the

too-watchful guardians of our intelligence. There is an

opportunity here for experiments which will doubtless prove

exceedingly arduous, for the future is not so easily seen and

above all not so easily interpreted and expressed as a number. It

is possible, moreover, that, when we know how to set about it, we

shall obtain most of the human mediumistic phenomena; rapping,

the moving of objects, materialization even and Heaven knows what

other surprises held in store for us by that astounding

subliminal to whose fancy there appears to be no bounds. In any

case, if we accept the divining of numbers, as we are almost

forced to do, it is almost certain that the divining of other

matters must follow. An unexpected breach is made in the wall

behind which lie heaped the great secrets that seem to us, as our

knowledge and our civilization increase, to become stronger and

more inaccessible. True, it is a narrow breach; but it is the

first that has been opened in that part of the hitherto

uncrannied wall which is not turned towards mankind. What will

issue through it? No one can foretell what we may hope.

What astonishes us most is that this revelation has been so long

delayed. How are we to explain that man has lived to this day

with his domestic animals never suspecting that they harboured

mediumistic or subliminal faculties as extraordinary as those

which he vaguely felt himself to possess. One would have in this

connection to study the mysterious practices of ancient India and

of Egypt; the numerous and persistent legends of animals talking,

guiding their masters and foretelling the future; and, nearer to

ourselves, in history proper, all that science of augury and

soothsaying which derived its omens from the flight of birds, the

inspection of entrails, the appetite or attitude of the sacred or

prophetic animals, among which horses were often numbered. We

here find one of those innumerous instances of a lost or

anticipated power which make us suspect that mankind has

forestalled or forgotten all that we believe ourselves to be

discovering. Remember that there is almost always some distorted,

misapprehended or dimly--seen truth at the bottom of the most

eccentric and wildest creeds, superstitions and legends. All this

new science of metaphysics or of the investigation of our

subconsciousness and of unknown powers, which has scarcely begun

to unveil its first mysteries, thus finds landmarks and defaced

but recognizable traces in the old religions, the most

inexplicible traditions and the most ancient history. Besides,

the probability of a thing does not depend upon undeniably

established precedents. While it is almost certain that there is

nothing new under the sun or in the eternity preceding the suns,

it is quite possible that the same forces do not always act with

the same energy. As I observed, nearly twenty years ago, in The

Treasure of the Humble, at a time when I hardly knew at all what

I know so imperfectly to-day:

"A spiritual"--I should have said, a psychic-"epoch is perhaps

upon us, an epoch to which a certain number of analogies are

found in history. For there are periods recorded when the soul,

in obedience to unknown laws, seemed to rise to the very surface

of humanity, whence it gave clearest evidence of its existence

and of its power. . . . It would seem, at moments such as these,

as though humanity," --and, I would add to-day, all that lives

with it on this earth--"were on the point of struggling from

beneath the crushing burden of matter that weighs it down."

One might in fact believe that a shudder which we have not yet

experienced is passing over everything that breathes; that a new

activity, a new restlessness is permeating the spiritual

atmosphere which surrounds our globe; and that the very animals

have felt its thrill. One might say that, by the side of the

niggardly private spring which would only supply our

intelligence, other streams are spreading and rising to the same

level in every form of existence. A sort of word of command is

being passed from rank to rank; and the same phenomena are

bursting forth in every quarter of the globe in order to attract

our attention, as though the obstinately dumb genius that lay

hidden in the pregnant silence of the universe, from that of the

stones, the flowers and the insects to the mighty silence of the

stars, were at last trying to tell us some secret whereby it

would be better known to us or to itself. It is possible that

this is but an illusion. Perhaps we are simply more attentive and

better informed than of old. We learn at the very instant what

happens in every part of our earth and we have acquired the habit

of more minutely observing and examining the things that happen.

But the illusion would in this case have all the force, all the

value and all the meaning of the reality and would enjoin the

same hopes and the same obligation.

It must be confessed that this mystery, springing from a point