But I do not intend, in the wake of so many others, to lose myself in
the most insoluble of enigmas. Let us say no more about it, except this
alone, that Time is a mystery which we have arbitrarily divided into a
Past and a Future, in order to try to understand something of it. In
itself we may be almost certain that it is but an immense eternal,
motionless Present, in which all that takes place and all that will take
place takes place immutably, in which To-Morrow, save in the ephemeral
mind of man, is indistinguishable from Yesterday or To-Day.
One would say that man had always the feeling that a mere infirmity of
his mind separates him from the Future. He knows it to be there, living,
actual, perfect, behind a kind of wall around which he has never ceased
to turn since the first days of his coming on this earth. Or rather, he
feels it within himself and known to a part of himself: only, that
importunate and disquieting knowledge is unable to travel, through the
too narrow channels of his senses, to his consciousness, which is the
only place where knowledge acquires a name, a useful strength and, so to
speak, the freedom of the human city. It is only by glimmers, by casual
and passing infiltrations that future years of which he is full, of
which the imperious realities surround him on every hand, penetrate to
his brain. He marvels that an extraordinary accident should have closed
almost hermetically to the Future that brain which plunges into it
entirely, even as a sealed vessel plunges, without mixing with it, into
the depths of a monstrous sea that overwhelms it, entreats it, teases it
and caresses it with a thousand billows.
At all times, man has tried to find crannies in that wall, to provoke
infiltrations into that vessel, to pierce the partitions that separate
his reason, which knows scarcely anything, from his instinct, which
knows all, but cannot make use of its knowledge. It seems as though he
must have succeeded more than once. There have been visionaries,
prophets, sibyls, pythonesses, in whom a distemper, a spontaneously or
artificially hypertrophied nervous system permitted unwonted
communications to be established between consciousness and
unconsciousness, between the life of the individual and that of the
species, between man and his hidden god. They have left evidences of
this capacity which are as irrefutable as any other historical evidence.
On the other hand, as those strange interpreters, those great mysterious
hysterics, along whose nerves thus circulated and mingled the Present
and the Past, were rare, men discovered, or thought that they
discovered, empirical processes to enable them almost mechanically to
read the ever-present and irritating riddle of the Future. They
flattered themselves that, in this manner, they could consult the
unconscious knowledge of things and beasts. Thence came the
interpretation of the flight of birds, of the entrails of victims, of
the course of the stars, of fire, water, dreams and all the methods of
divination that have been handed down to us by the authors of antiquity.