1
We have now studied certain manifestations of that which we have
called in turn and more or less indiscriminately the subconscious
mind, the subliminal consciousness and the unknown guest, names
to which we might add that of the superior subconsciousness or
superior psychism invented by Dr. Geley. Granting that these
manifestations are really proved, it is no longer possible to
explain them or rather to classify them without having recourse
to fresh theories. Now we can entertain doubts on many points, we
can cavil and argue; but I defy anyone approaching these facts in
a serious and honest spirit to reject them all. It is permissible
to neglect the most extraordinary; but there are a multitude of
others which have become or, to speak more accurately, are
acknowledged to be as frequent and habitual as any fact whatever
in normal, everyday life. It is not difficult to reproduce them
at will, provided we place ourselves in the condition demanded by
their very nature; and, this being so, there remains no valid
reason for excluding them from the domain of science in the
strict sense of the word.
Hitherto, all that we have learnt regarding these occurrences is
that their origin is unknown. It will be said that this is not
much and that the discovery is nothing to boast of. I quite
agree: to imagine that one can explain a phenomena by saying that
it is produced by an unknown agency would indeed be childish. But
it is already something to have marked its source; not to be
still lingering in the thick of a fog, trying any and every
direction in order to find a way out, but to be concentrating our
attention on a single spot which is the starting-point of all
these wonders, so that at each instant we recognize in each
phenomenon the characteristic customs, methods or features of the
same unknown agency. It is very nearly all that we can do for the
moment; but this first effort is not wholly to be despised.
2
It has seemed to us then that it was our unknown guest that
expressed itself in the name of the dead in table-turning and in
automatic writing and speaking. This unknown guest has appeared
to us to take within us the place of those who are no more, to
unite itself perhaps with forces that do not die, to visit the
grave with the object of bringing thence inexplicable phantoms
which rise up in front of us fruitlessly or haunt our houses
without telling us why. We have seen it, in experiments in
clairvoyance and intuition, suppressing all the obstacles that
banish or conceal thought and, through bodies that have become
transparent, reading in our very souls forgotten secrets of the
past, sentiments that have not yet taken shape, intentions as yet
unborn. We have discovered that some object once handled by a
person now far away is enough to make it take part in the
innermost life of that person, to go deeper and rise higher than
he does, to see what he sees and even what he does not see: the
landscape that surrounds him, the house which he inhabits and
also the dangers that threaten him and the secret passions by
which he is stirred. We have surprised it wandering hither and
thither, at haphazard, in the future, confounding it with the
present and the past, not conscious of where it is but seeing far
and wide, knowing perhaps everything but unaware of the
importance of what it knows, or as yet incapable of turning it to
account or of making itself understood, at once neglectful and
overscrupulous, prolix and reticent, useless and indispensable.
We have seen it, lastly, although we had hitherto looked upon it
as indissolubly and unchangeably human, suddenly emerge from
other creatures and there reveal faculties akin to ours, which
commune with them deep down in the deepest mysteries and which
equal them and sometimes surpass them in a region that wrongly
appeared to us the only really unassailable province of mankind,
I mean the obscure and abstruse province of numbers.
It has many other no less strange and perhaps more important
manifestations, which we propose to examine in a later volume,
notably its surprising therapeutic virtues and its phenomena of
materialization. But, without expressing a premature judgment on
what we do not yet know, perhaps we have sketched it with
sufficient clearness in the foregoing pages to enable us
henceforward to disentangle certain general and characteristic
features from a confusion of often contradictory lines.
3
But, in the first place, does it really exist, this tragic and
comical, evasive and unavoidable figure which we make no claim to
portray, but at most to divest of some of its shadows? It were
rash to affirm it too loudly; but meanwhile, in the realms where
we suppose it to reign, everything happens as though it did
exist. Do away with it and you are obliged to people the world
and burden your life with a host of hypothetical and imaginary
beings: gods, demigods, angels, demons, saints, spirits, shells,
elementals, etherial entities, interplanetary intelligences and
so on; except it and all those phantoms, without disappearing,
for they may very well continue to live in its shadow, become
superfluous or accessory. It is not intolerant and does not
definitely eliminate any of the hypotheses by the aid of which
man has hitherto striven to explain what he did not understand,
hypotheses which, in regard to some matters, are not
inadmissible, although not one of them is confirmed; but it
brings him back to itself, absorbs them and rules them without
annihilating them. If, for instance, to select the most
defensible theory, one which it is sometimes difficult to dismiss
absolutely, if you insist that the discarnate spirits take part
in your actions, haunt your house, inspire your thoughts, reveal
your future, it will answer:
"That is true, but it is still I; I am discarnate, or rather I am
not wholly incarnate: it is only a small part of my being that is
embodied in your flesh; and the rest, which is nearly all of me,
comes and goes freely both among those who once were and among
those who are yet to be; and, when they seem to speak to you, it
is my own speech that borrows their customs and their voice in
order to make you listen and to amuse your often slumbering
attention. If you prefer to deal with superior entities of
unknown origin, with interplanetary or supernatural
intelligences, once more it is I; for, since I am not entirely in
your body, I must needs be elsewhere; and to be elsewhere when
one is not held back by the weight of the flesh is to be
everywhere if one so pleases."
We see, it has a reply to everything, it takes every name that we
wish and there is nothing to limit it, because it lives in a
world wherein bounds are as illusory as the useless words which
we employ on earth.
4
While it has a reply to everything, certain manifestations which
it deliberately ascribes to the spirits have brought upon it a
not undeserved reproach. To begin with, as Dr. Maxwell observes,
it has no absolutely fixed doctrine. In nearly every country in
the world, when it speaks in the name of the spirits, it declares
that they undergo reincarnation and readily relates their past
existences. In England, on the contrary, it usually asserts that
they do not become reincarnated. What does this mean? Surely this
ignorance or this inconsistency on the part of that which appears
to know everything is very strange! And worse, sometimes it
attributes to the spirits, sometimes to itself or any one or
anything the revelations which it makes to us. When exactly is it
speaking the truth? At least on two occasions out of three, it
deludes itself or deludes us. If it deceive itself, if it is
mistaken about a matter in which it should be easy for it to know
the truth, what can it teach us on the subject of a world of
whose most elementary laws it is ignorant, since it does not even
know whether it is itself or another that speaks to us in the
name of that world? Are we to believe that it was in the same
darkness as our poor superficial ego, which it pretends so often
to enlighten and which it does in fact inspire in most of the
great events of life? If it deceives us, why does it do so? We
can see no object: it asks for nothing, not for alms, nor
prayers, nor thoughts, on behalf of those whose mantle it assumes
for the sole purpose of leading us astray. What is the use of
those mischievous and puerile pranks, of those ghastly graveyard
pleasantries? It must lie then for the mere pleasure of lying;
and our unknown guest, that infinite and doubtless immortal
subconsciousness in which we have placed out last hopes, is after
all but an imbecile, a buffoon or a rank swindler!
5
I do not believe that the truth is as hideous as this. Our
unknown guest does not deceive itself any more than it deceives
us; but it is we who deceive ourselves. It has not the stage to
itself; and its voice is not the voice that sounds in our ears,
which were never made to catch the echoes of a world that is not
like ours. If it could speak to us itself and tell us what it
knows, we should probably at that instant cease to be on this
earth. But we are immersed in our bodies, entombed prisoners with
whom it cannot communicate at will. It roams around the walls, it
utters warning cries. It knocks at every door, but all that
reaches us is a vague disquiet, an indistinct murmur that is
sometimes translated to us by a half-awakened gaoler who, like
ourselves, is a lifelong captive. The gaoler does his best; he
has his own way of speaking, his familiar expressions; he knows,
and, with the aid of the words which he possesses and those which
he hears repeated, he tries to make us understand what he hardly
understands himself. He does not know exactly whence the sounds
come which he hears; and, according as tempests, wars or riots
happen to be uppermost at the moment, he attributes them to the
winds, to tramping soldiers or to frenzied crowds. In other words
and speaking without metaphor, it is the medium who draws from
his habitual language and from that suggested to him by his
audience the wherewithal to clothe and identify the strange
presentiments, the unfamiliar visions that come from some unknown
region. If he believes that the dead survive, he will naturally
imagine that it is the dead who speak to him. If he has a
favourite spirit, angel, demon or god, he will express himself in
its name; if he has no preconceived opinion, he will not even
allude to the origin of the revelations which he is making. The
inarticulate language of the subconsciousness necessarily borrows
that of the normal consciousness; and the two become confused
into a sort of shifting and multiform jargon. And our unknown
guest, which is not thinking of delivering a course of lectures
upon its entity, but simply giving us as best it can a more or
less warning or mark of its existence, seems to care but little
as to the garments in which it is rigged out, having indeed no
choice in the matter, for, either because it is unable to
manifest itself or because we are incapable of understanding it,
it has to be content with whatever comes to hand.
Besides, if we attribute too exclusively to the spirits that
which comes from another quarter, the mistake is doubtless no
great one in its eyes; for it is not madness to believe that it
lives with that which does not die in the dead even as with that
which does not die in ourselves, with that which does not descend
into the grave even as with that which does not take flesh at the
hour of birth.
6
There is no reason therefore to condemn the other theories
entirely. Most of them doubtless contain something more than a
particle of truth; in particular, the great quarrel between the
subconscious school and the spiritualists is based on the whole
upon a misunderstanding. It is quite possible and even very
probable that the dead are all around us, since it is impossible
that the dead do not live. Our subconsciousness must mingle with
all that does not die in them; and that which dies in them or
rather disperses and loses all its importance is but the little
consciousness accumulated on this earth and kept up until the
last hour by the frail bonds of memory. In all those
manifestations of our unknown guest, it is our posthumous ego
that already lives in us while we are still in the flesh and at
moments joins that which does not die in those who have quitted
their body. Then does the existence of our unknown guest presume
the immortality of a part of ourselves? Can one possibly doubt
it? Have you ever imagined that you would perish entirely? As for
me, what I cannot picture is the manner in which you would
picture that total annihilation. But, if you cannot perish
entirely, it is no less certain that those who came before you
have not perished either; and hence it is not altogether
improbable that we may be able to discover them and to
communicate with them. In this wider sense, the spiritualistic
theory is perfectly admissible; but what is not at all admissible
is the narrow and pitiful interpretation which its proponents too
often give it. They see the dead crowding around us like wretched
puppets indissolubly attached to the insignificant scene of their
death by the thousand little threads of insipid memories and
infantile hobbies. They are supposed to be here, blocking up our
homes, more abjectly human than if they were still alive, vague,
inconsistent, garrulous, derelict, futile and idle, tossing
hither and thither their desolate shadows, which are being slowly
swallowed up by silence and oblivion, busying themselves
incessantly with what no longer concerns them, but almost
incapable of doing us a real service, so much so that, in short,
they would end by persuading us that death serves no purpose,
that it neither purifies nor exalts, that it brings no
deliverance and that it is indeed a thing of terror and despair.
7
No, it is not the dead who thus speak and act. Besides, why bring
them into the matter unnecessarily? I could understand that we
should be obliged to do so if there were no similar phenomena
outside them; but in the intuition and clairvoyance of
nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we
obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another
and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which
are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and
tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct
persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity
inasmuch as they know that they do not exist.
It is infinitely more likely that there is strange medley of
heterogeneous forces in the uncertain regions into which we are
venturing. The whole of this ambiguous drama, with its incoherent
crowds, is probably enacted round about the dim estuary where our
normal consciousness flows into our subconsciousness. The
consciousness of the medium--for we must not forget that there is
necessarily always a medium at the sources of these
phenomena--the consciousness of the medium, obscured by the
condition of trance but yet the only one that possesses our human
speech and can make itself heard, takes in first and almost
exclusively what it best understands and what most interests it
in the stifled and mutilated revelations of our unknown guest,
which for its part communicates with the dead and the living and
everything that exists. The rest, which is the only thing that
matters, but which is less clear and less vivid because it comes
from afar, only very rarely makes its difficult way through a
forest of insignificant talk. We may add that our
subconsciousness, as Dr. Geley very rightly observes, is formed
of superposed elements, beginning with the unconsciousness that
governs the instinctive movements of the organic life of both the
species and the individual and passing by imperceptible degrees
till it rises to the superior psychism whose power and extent
appear to have no bounds. The voice of the medium, or that which
we hear within ourselves when, at certain moments of excitement
or crisis in our lives, we become our own medium, has therefore
to traverse three worlds or three provinces: that of the
atavistic instincts which connect us with the animal; that of
human or empirical consciousness; and lastly that of our unknown
guest or our superior subconsciousness which links us to immense
invisible realities and which we may, if we wish, call divine or
superhuman. Hence it is not surprising that the intermediary, be
he spiritualist, autonomist, palingenesist or what he will,
should lose himself in those wild and troubled eddies and that
the truth or message which he brings us, tossed and tumbled in
every direction, should reach us broken, shattered and pulverized
beyond recognition.
For the rest, I repeat, were it not for the absurd prominence
given to our dead in the spiritualistic interpretation, this
question of origin would have little importance, since both life
and death are incessantly joining and uniting in all things.
There are assuredly dead people in all these manifestations,
seeing that we are full of dead people and that the greater part
of ourselves is at this moment steeped in death, that is to say,
is already living the boundless life that awaits us on the
farther side of the grave.
8
We should be wrong, however, to fix all our attention on these
extraordinary phenomena, either those with which we unduly
connect the deceased or those no less striking ones in which we
do not believe that they take part. They are evidently precious
points of emergence that enable us approximately to mark the
extent, the forms and the habits of our mystery. But it is within
ourselves, in the silence of the darkness of our being, where it
is ever in motion, guiding our destiny, that we should strive to
surprise that mystery and to discover it. And I am not speaking
only of the dreams, the presumptions, the vague intuitions, the
room or less brilliant inspirations which are so many more
manifestations, specific as it were and analogous with those that
have occupied us. There is another, a more secret and much more
active existence which we have scarcely begun to study and which
is, if we descend to the bed-rock of truth, our only real
existence. From the darkest corners of our ego it directs our
veritable life, the one that is not to die, and pays no heed to
our thought or to anything emanating from our reason, which
believes that it guides nor steps. It alone knows the long past
that preceded our birth and the endless future that will follow
our departure from this earth. It is itself that future and that
past, all those from whom we have sprung and all those who will
spring from us. It represents the individual not only the species
but that which preceded it and that which will follow it; and it
has neither beginning nor end: that is why nothing touches it,
nothing moves it which does not concern that which it represents.
When a misfortune or a joy befall us, it knows their value
instantly, knows if they are going to open or to dose the wells
of life. It is the one thing that is never wrong. In vain does
reason demonstrate to it, by irresistible arguments, that it is
hopelessly at fault: silent under its immovable mask, whose
expression we have not yet been able to react it pursues its way.
It treats us as insignificant children, void of understanding,
never answers our objections, refuses what we ask and lavishes
upon us that which we refuse. If we go to the right, it
reconducts us to the left. If we cultivate this or that faculty
which we think that we possess or which we would like to possess,
it hides it under some other which we did not expect and did not
wish for. It saves us from a danger by imparting to our limbs
unforeseen and unerring movements and actions which they had
never made before and which are contrary to those which they had
been taught to make: it knows that the hour has not yet come when
it will be useless to defend ourselves. It chooses our love in
spite of the revolt of our intelligence or of our poor, ephemeral
heart. It smiles when we are frightened and sometimes it is
frightened when we smile. And it is always the winner,
humiliating our reason, crushing our wisdom and silencing
arguments and passions alike with the contemptuous hand of
destiny. The greatest doctors surround our sick-bed and deceive
themselves and us in foretelling our death or our recovery: it
alone whispers in our car the truth that will not be denied. A
thousand apparently mortal blows fall upon our head and not a
lash of its eyelids quivers; but suddenly a tiny shock, which our
senses had not even transmitted to our brain, wakes it with a
start. It sits up, looks around and understands. It has seen the
crack in the vault that separates the two lives. It gives the
signal for departure. Forthwith panic spreads from cell to cell;
and the innumerous city that we are utters yells of horror and
distress and hustles around the gates of death.
9
That great figure, that new being has been there, in our
darkness, from all time, though its awkward and extravagant
actions, until recently attributed to the gods, the demons or the
dead, am only now asking for our serious attention. It has been
likened to an immense block of which our personality is but a
diminutive facet; to an iceberg of which we see a few glistening
prisms that represent our life, while nine-tenths of the enormous
mass remain buried in the shadows of the sea. According to Sir
Oliver Lodge, it is that part of our being that has not become
carnate; according to Gustave Le Bon, it is the "condensed" soul
of our ancestors, which is true, beyond a doubt, but only a part
of the truth, for we find in it also the soul of the future and
probably of many other forces which are not necessarily human.
William James saw in it a diffuse cosmic consciousness and the
chance intrusion into our scientifically organized world of
remnants and bestiges of the primordial chaos. Here are a number
of images striving to give us an idea of a reality so vast that
we are unable to grasp it. It is certain that what we see from
our terrestrial life is nothing compared with what we do not see.
Besides, if we think of it, it would be monstrous and
inexplicable that we should be only what we appear to be, nothing
but ourselves, whole and complete in ourselves, separated,
isolated, circumscribed by our body, our mind, our consciousness,
our birth and our death. We become possible and probable only on
the conditions that we project beyond ourselves on every side and
that we stretch in every direction throughout time and space.
10
But how shall we explain the incredible contrast between the
immeasurable grandeur of our unknown guest, the assurance, the
calmness, the gravity of the inner life which it leads in us and
the puerile and sometimes grotesque incongruities of what one
might call its public existence? Inside us, it is the sovereign
judge, the supreme arbiter, the prophet, almost the god
omnipotent; outside us, from the moment that it quits its shelter
and manifests itself in external actions, it is nothing more than
a fortune-teller, a bone-setter, a sort of facetious conjuror or
telephone-operator, I was on the verge of saying a mountebank or
clown. At what particular instant is it really itself? Is it
seized with giddiness when it leaves its lair? Is it we who no
longer hear it, who no longer understand it, as soon as it ceases
to speak in a whisper and to act in the dark recesses of our
life? Are we in regard to it the terrified hive invaded by a huge
and inexplicable hand, the maddened ant-hill trampled by a
colossal and incomprehensible foot? Let us not venture yet to
solve the strange riddle with the aid of the little that we know.
Let us confine ourselves, for the moment, to noting on the way
some other, rather easier questions which we can at least try to
answer.
First of all, are the facts at issue really new? Was it only
yesterday that the existence of our unknown guest and its
external manifestations were revealed to us? Is it our attention
that makes them appear more numerous, or is it the increase in
their number that at last attracts out attention?
It does indeed seem that, however far we go back in history, we
everywhere find the same extraordinary phenomena, under other
names and often in a more glamorous setting. Oracles, prophecies,
incantations, haruspication, "possession," evocation of the dead,
apparitions, ghosts, miraculous cures, levitation, transmission
of thought, apparent resurrections and the rest are the exact
equivalent, though magnified by the aid of plentiful and obvious
frauds of our latter-day supernaturalism. Turning in another
direction, we are able to see that psychical phenomena are very
evenly distributed over the whole surface of the globe. At all
events, there does not appear to be any race that is absolutely
or peculiarly refractory to them. One would be inclined to say,
however, that they manifest themselves by preference among the
most civilized nations--perhaps because that is where they are
most carefully sought after--and among the most primitive. In
short, it cannot be denied that we are in the presence of
faculties or senses, more or less latent but at the same time
universally distributed, which form part of the general and
unvarying inheritance of mankind. But have these faculties or
senses undergone evolution, like most of the others? And, if they
have not done so on our earth, do they show traces of an
extraplanetary evolution? Is there progress or reaction? Are they
withered and useless branches, or buds swollen with sap and
promise? Are they retreating before the march of intelligence or
invading its domain?
11
M. Ernest Bozzano, one of the most learned, most daring and most
subtle exponents of the new science that is in process of
formation, in the course of a remarkable essay in the Annales des
sciences psychiques,[1] gives it as his opinion that they have
remained stationary and unchanged. He considers that they have
become in no way diffused, generalized and refined, like so many
others that are much less important and useful from the point of
view of the struggle for life, such as the musical faculty, for
instance. It does not even seem, says M. Bozzano, that it is
possible to cultivate or develop them systematically. The Hindu
race in particular, who for thousands of years have been devoting
themselves to the study of these manifestations, have arrived at
nothing but a better knowledge of the empirical methods
calculated to produce them in individuals already endowed with
these supernormal faculties. I do not know to what extent M.
Bozzano's assertions are beyond dispute. They concern historical
or remote facts which it is very difficult to verify. In any
case, it is something to have perfected , as has been done in
India, the empirical methods favourable to the production of
supernormal phenomena. One might even say that it is about all
that we have the right to expect, seeing that, by the author's
own admission, these faculties are latent in every man and that,
as has frequently been seen, it needs but an illness, a lesion,
or sometimes even the slightest emotion or a mere passing
faintness to make them suddenly reveal themselves in an
individual who seemed most hopelessly devoid of them. It is
therefore quite possible that, by improving the methods, by
attacking the mystery from other quarters, we might obtain more
decisive results than the Hindus. We must remember that our
western science has but lately interested itself in these
problems and that it has means of investigating and experimenting
which the Asiatics never possessed. It may even be declared that
at no time in the existence of our world has the scientific mind
been better-equipped, better-suited to cope with every task, or
more exact, more skilful and more penetrating than it is today.
Because the oriental empirics have failed, there is no reason to
believe that it will not succeed in awakening and cultivating in
every man those faculties which would often be of greater use to
him than those of the intellect itself. It is not overbold to
suggest that, from certain points of view, the true history of
mankind has hardly begun.
[1] September, 1906.
12
Nevertheless, in so far as concerns the natural evolution of
those faculties, M. Bozzano's assertion seem fairly well-
justified. We do not, in fact, observe a startling or even
appreciable difference between what they were and what they are.
And this anomaly is the more surprising in as much as it is
almost universally accepted that a sense or a faculty becomes
developed in proportion to its usefulness; and there are few, I
think, that would have been not only more useful but even more
necessary to man. He has always had a keen and primitive interest
in knowing without delay the most secret thoughts of his
fellow-man, who is often his adversary and sometimes his mortal
enemy. He has always had an interest no less great in immediately
transmitting those thoughts through space, in seeing beyond the
continents and seas, in going back into the past, in advancing
into the future, in being able to find in his memory at will not
only all the acquirements of his personal experience but also
those of his ancestors, in communicating with the dead and
perhaps with the sovereign intelligence diffused over the
universe, in discovering hidden springs and treasures, in
escaping the harsh and depressing laws of matter and gravity, in
relieving pain, in curing the greater number of his disorders and
even in restoring his limbs, not to mention many other miracles
which he could work if he knew all the mighty forces that
doubtless slumber in the dark recesses of his life.
Is this once more an unexpected character of the eccentric
physiology of our unknown guest? Here are faculties more precious
than the most precious faculties that have made us what we are,
faculties whose magic buds sprout on every side underneath our
intelligence but have never burst into flower, as though a wind
from another sphere had killed them with its icy breath. Is it
because it occupies itself first and foremost with the species
that it thus neglects the individual? But, after all, the species
is only an aggregate of successive individuals; and its evolution
consequently depends upon their evolution. There would therefore
have been an evident advantage to the species in developing
faculties that would perhaps have carried it much farther and
much higher than has been done by its brain-power, which alone
has progressed. If there is no evolution for them here, do they
develop elsewhere? What are those powers which exist outside and
independent of the laws of this earth? Do they then belong to
other worlds? But, if so, what are they doing in ours? One would
sometimes think, at the sight of so much neglectfulness,
uncertainty and inconsistency, that man's evolution had been
intentionally retarded by a superior will, as though that will
feared that he was going too fast, that he was anticipating some
pre established order and moving prematurely out of his appointed
plane.
13
And the riddles accumulate which we cannot hope to solve. It has
been said that these abnormal faculties are communications or
infiltrations, themselves abnormal, which have found their way
through the partitions that separate our consciousness from our
subconsciousness. This is very likely, but it is only a minor
side of the question. It would be important before all to know
what that subconsciousness represents, whither it tends and with
what it itself is communicating. Is the impersonal form of
knowledge a necessary or an accidental stage? Is the impersonal
form which it takes in the subconsciousness the only true one? Is
there really, as everything seems to prove, a hopeless
incompatibility between our intellectual faculties and those
families of uncertain origin, to such an extent that the latter
are unable to manifest themselves except when the former are
weakened or temporarily suspended? It has, at any rate, been
observed that they are hardly ever exercised simultaneously. Are
we to believe that, at a given moment, mankind or the genius that
presides over its destinies had to make an exclusive and awful
choice between cerebral energy and the mysterious forces of the
subconsciousness and that we still find traces of its hesitations
in our organism? What would have become of a race of man in which
the subconsciousness had triumphed over the brain? Is not this
the case with animals; and would not the race have remained
purely animal? Or else would not this preponderance of a
subconscious more powerful than that of the animals and almost
independent of our body have resulted in the disappearance of
life as we know it; and should we not even now be trading the
life which we shall probably lead when we are dead? Here are a
number of questions to which there are no answers and which are
nevertheless perhaps not so idle as one might at first believe.
14
Amidst this antagonism, whose triumph are we to hope for? Is any
alliance between the two opposing forces for ever impossible so
long as we are in the flesh? What are we to do meanwhile? If a
choice be inevitable, which way will our choice incline; and
which victim shall we sacrifice? Shall we listen to those who
tell us that there is nothing more to be gained or learnt in
those inhospitable regions where all our bewildering phenomena
have been known since man first was man? Is it true that
occultism--as it is very improperly called, for the knowledge
which it seeks is no more occult than any other--is it true that
occultism is marking time, that it is becoming hopelessly
entangled in the same doubtful facts and that it has not taken a
single step forward since its renaissance more than fifty years
ago? One must be entirely ignorant of the wonderful efforts of
those fruitful years to venture upon such an assertion. This is
not the place to discuss the question, which would require full
and careful treatment; but we may safely say that until now there
is no science which in so short a time has brought order out of
such a chaos, ascertained, checked and classified such a quantity
of facts, or more rapidly awakened, cultivated and trained in man
certain faculties which he had never seriously been believed to
possess; and furthermore none which has caused to be recognized
as incontestable and thus introduced into the circle of the
realities whereon we base our lives a number of unlikely
phenomena which had hitherto been contemptuously passed over. We
are still, it is true, waiting for the domestication of the new
force, its practical application to daily use. We are waiting for
the all-revealing, decisive manifestation which will remove our
last doubts and throw light upon the problem down to its very
source. But let us admit that we are likewise waiting for this
manifestation in the great majority of sciences. In my case, we
are already in the presence of an astonishing mass of
well-weighed and verified materials which, until now, had been
taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments of wild legends,
meaningless and unimportant. For more than three centuries, the
science of electricity remained at very much the same point at
which our psychical sciences stand to-day. Men were recording,
accumulating, trying to interpret a host of odd and futile
phenomena, toying with Ramsden's machine, with Leyden jars, with
Volta's rough battery. They thought that they had discovered an
agreeable pastime, an ingenious plaything for the laboratory or
study; and they had not the slightest suspicion that they were
touching the sources of an universal, irresistible, inexhaustible
power, invisibly present and active in all things, that would
soon invade the surface of our globe. Nothing tells us that the
psychic forces of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse have
not similar surprises in store for us, with this difference, that
we are here concerned with energies and mysteries which are
loftier, grander and doubtless fraught with graver consequences,
since they affect our eternal destinies, traverse alike our life
and our death and extend beyond our planet.
15
It is not true therefore that the psychical sciences have said
their last word and that we have nothing more to expect from
them. They have but just awakened or reawakened; and, to postdate
Guyau's prediction by a hundred years, we might say, with them in
our minds, that the twentieth century "will end with discoveries
as ill-formulated but perhaps as important in the moral world as
those of Newton and Laplace in the astronomical world." But,
though we have much to hope from them, that is no reason why we
should look to them for everything and abandon in their favour
that which has brought us where we are. The choice of which we
spoke, between the brain and the subconsciousness, has been made
long ago; and it is not our part to make it over again. We are
carried along by a force acquired in the course of two or three
thousand years; and our methods, like our intellectual habits,
have of themselves become transformed into sort of minor
subconsciousness superposed upon the major subconsciousness and
sometimes mingling with it. Henri Bergson, in his very fine
presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research on the
28th of May, 1913, said that he had sometimes wondered what would
have happened if modern science, instead of setting out from
mathematics, instead of bringing all its forces to converge on
the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of mind; if
Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for instance, had been psychologists:
"We should certainly," said he, "have had a psychology of which
to-day we can form no idea, any more than before Galileo we could
have imagined what our physics would be; a psychology that
probably would have been to our present psychology what our
physics is to Aristotle's. Foreign to every mechanistic idea, not
even conceiving the possibility of an explanation, science would
have enquired into, instead of dismissing a priori facts, such as
those which you study; perhaps 'psychical research' would have
stood out as its principal preoccupation. The most general laws
of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental
laws of mechanics were discovered), we should have passed from
mind, properly so-called, to life; biology would have been
constituted, but a vitalist biology, quite different from ours,
which would have sought behind the sensible forms of living
beings the inward, invisible force of which the sensible forms
are the manifestations."
It would therefore in the very first days of its activity have
encountered all these strange problems: telepathy,
materializations, clairvoyance, miraculous cures, knowledge of
the future, the possibility of survival, interplanetary
intelligence and many others, which it has neglected hitherto and
which, thanks to its neglect, are still in their infancy. But, as
the human mind is not able to follow two diametrically opposite
directions at the same time, it would necessarily have rejected
the mathematical sciences. A steamship coming from another
hemisphere, one in which men's minds had taken, unknown to
ourselves, the road which our own has actually taken, would have
seemed to us as wonderful, as incredible as the phenomena of our
subconsciousness seem to us to-day. We should have gone very
far in what at present we call the unknown or the occult; but we
should have known hardly anything of physics, chemistry or
mechanics, unless, which is very probable, we had come upon them
by another road as we travelled round the occult. It is true that
certain nations, the Hindus particularly, the Egyptians and
perhaps the Incas, as well as others, in all probability, who
have not left sufficient traces, thus went to work the other way
and obtained nothing decisive. Is this again a consequence of the
hopeless incompatibility between the faculties of the brain and
those of the subconsciousness? Possibly; but we must not forget
that we are speaking of nations which never possessed our
intellectual habits, our passion for precision, for verification,
for experimental certainty; indeed, this passion has only been
fully developed in ourselves within the last two or three
centuries. It is to be presumed therefore that the European would
have gone much farther in the other direction than the Oriental.
Where would he have arrived? Endowed with a different brain,
naturally clearer, more exacting, more logical, less credulous,
more practical, closer to realities, more attentive to details,
but with the scientific side of his intelligence uncultivated,
would he have gone astray or would he have met the truths which
we are still seeking and which may well be more important than
all our material conquests. Ill-prepared, ill-equipped,
ill-balanced, lacking the necessary ballast of experiments and
proofs, would he have been exposed to the dangers familiar to all
the too-mystical nations? It is very difficult to imagine so. But
the hour has now perhaps come to try without risk what he could
not have done without grave peril. While abandoning no whit of
his understanding, which is small compared with the boundless
scope of the subconsciousness, but which is sure, tried and
docile, he can now embark upon the great adventure and try to do
that which has not been done before. It is a matter of
discovering the connecting link between the two forces. We are
still ignorant of the means of aiding, encouraging, developing
and taming the greater of the two and of bringing it closer to
us; the quest will be the most difficult, the most mysterious
and, in certain respects, the most dangerous that mankind has
ever undertaken. But we can say to ourselves, without fear of
being very far wrong, that it is the best task at the moment. In
any case, this is the first time since man has existed that he
will be fronting the unknown with such good weapons, even as it
is also the first time since its awakening that his intelligence,
which has reached a summit from which it can understand almost
everything, will at last receive help from outside and hear a
voice that is something more than the echo of its own.