moment, the absurdity of a belief in any kind of spirits, whether good
or bad. I now understood, if I did not believe, what was meant by the
term, though I still persisted in hoping that it would finally prove
some physical derangement or nervous hallucination. To fortify my
unbelief the more, I tried to bring back to my memory all the arguments
used against a faith in such superstitions, that I had ever read or
heard. I recalled the biting sarcasms of Voltaire, the calm reasoning
of Hume, and I repeated to myself _ad nauseam_ the words of Rousseau,
who said that superstition, “the disturber of Society,” could never
be too strongly attacked. “Why should the sight, the phantasmagoria,
rather”—I argued—“of that which we know in a waking sense to be false,
come to affect us at all?” Why should—
Names, whose sense we see not
Fray us with things that be not?
One day the old captain was narrating to us the various superstitions
to which sailors were addicted; a pompous English missionary remarked
that Fielding had declared long ago that “superstition renders a man a
fool,”—after which he hesitated for an instant, and abruptly stopped.
I had not taken any part in the general conversation; but no sooner
had the reverend speaker relieved himself of the quotation, than I saw
in that halo of vibrating light, which I now noticed almost constantly
over every human head on the steamer, the words of Fielding’s next
proposition—“and _scepticism makes him mad_.”
I had heard and read of the claims of those who pretend to seership,
that they often see the thoughts of people traced in the aura of those
present. Whatever “aura” may mean with others, I had now a personal
experience of the truth of the claim, and felt sufficiently disgusted
with the discovery! I—a _clairvoyant_! a new horror added to my life,
an absurd and ridiculous gift developed, which I shall have to conceal
from all, feeling ashamed of it as if it were a case of leprosy. At
this moment my hatred to the Yamabooshi, and even to my venerable old
friend, the Bonze, knew no bounds. The former had evidently by his
manipulations over me while I was lying unconscious, touched some
unknown physiological spring in my brain, and by loosing it had called
forth a faculty generally hidden in the human constitution; and it was
the Japanese priest who had introduced the wretch into my house!
But my anger and my curses were alike useless, and could be of no
avail. Moreover, we were already in European waters, and in a few
more days we should be at Hamburg. Then would my doubts and fears be
set at rest, and I should find, to my intense relief, that although
clairvoyance, as regards the reading of human thoughts on the spot, may
have some truth in it, the discernment of such events at a distance,
as I had _dreamed of_, was an impossibility for human faculties.
Notwithstanding all my reasoning, however, my heart was sick with
fear, and full of the blackest presentiments; I _felt_ that my doom
was closing. I suffered terribly, my nervous and mental prostration
becoming intensified day by day.
The night before we entered port I had a dream.
I fancied I was dead. My body lay cold and stiff in its last sleep,
whilst its dying consciousness, which still regarded itself as “I,”
realizing the event, was preparing to meet in a few seconds its own
extinction. It had been always my belief that as the brain preserved
heat longer than any of the other organs, and was the last to cease its
activity, the thought in it survived bodily death by several minutes.
Therefore, I was not in the least surprised to find in my dream that
while the frame had already crossed that awful gulf “no mortal e’er
repassed,” its consciousness was still in the gray twilight, the
first shadows of the great Mystery. Thus my THOUGHT wrapped, as I
believed, in the remnants, of its now fast retiring vitality, was
watching with intense and eager curiosity the approaches of its own
dissolution, _i.e._, of its _annihilation_. “I” was hastening to
record my last impressions, lest the dark mantle of eternal oblivion
should envelope me, before I had time to feel and _enjoy_, the great,
the supreme triumph of learning that my life-long convictions were
true, that death is a complete and absolute cessation of conscious
being. Everything around me was getting darker with every moment. Huge
gray shadows were moving before my vision, slowly at first, then with
accelerated motion, until they commenced whirling around with an almost
vertiginous rapidity. Then, as though that motion had taken place only
for purposes of brewing darkness, the object once reached, it slackened
its speed, and as the darkness became gradually transformed into
intense blackness, it ceased altogether. There was nothing now within
my immediate perceptions, but that fathomless black Space, as dark as
pitch: to me it appeared as limitless and as silent as the shoreless
Ocean of Eternity upon which Time, the progeny of man’s brain, is for
ever gliding, but which it can never cross.
Dream is defined by Cato as “but the image of our hopes and fears.”
Having never feared death when awake, I felt, in this dream of mine,
calm and serene at the idea of my speedy end. In truth, I felt
rather relieved at the thought—probably owing to my recent mental
suffering—that the end of all, of doubt, of fear for those I loved,
of suffering, and of every anxiety, was close at hand. The constant
anguish that had been gnawing ceaselessly at my heavy, aching heart
for many a long and weary month, had now become unbearable; and
if as Seneca thinks, death is but “the ceasing to be what we were
before,” it was better that I should die. The body is dead; “I,” its
consciousness—that which is all that remains of me now, for a few
moments longer—am preparing to follow. Mental perceptions will get
weaker, more dim and hazy with every second of time, until the longed
for oblivion envelopes me completely in its cold shroud. Sweet is the
magic hand of Death, the great World-Comforter; profound and dreamless
is sleep in its unyielding arms. Yea, verily, it is a welcome
guest.... A calm and peaceful haven amidst the roaring billows of the
Ocean of life, whose breakers lash in vain the rock-bound shores of
Death. Happy the lonely bark that drifts into the still waters of its
black gulf, after having been so long, so cruelly tossed about by the
angry waves of sentient life. Moored in it for evermore, needing no
longer either sail or rudder, my bark will now find rest. Welcome then,
O Death, at this tempting price; and fare thee well, poor body, which,
having neither sought it nor derived pleasure from it, I now readily
give up!...
While uttering this death-chant to the prostrate form before me, I bent
over, and examined it with curiosity. I felt the surrounding darkness
oppressing me, weighing on me almost tangibly, and I fancied I found
in it the approach of the Liberator I was welcoming. And yet ... how
very strange! If real, final Death takes place in our consciousness;
if after the bodily death, “I” and my conscious perceptions are
one—how is it that these perceptions do not become weaker, why does
my _brain_-action seem as vigorous as ever now ... that I am _de
facto_ dead?... Nor does the usual feeling of anxiety, the “heavy
heart” so-called, decrease in intensity; nay, it even seems to become
worse ... unspeakably so!... How long it takes for full oblivion to
arrive!... Ah, here’s my body again!... Vanished out of sight for a
second or two, it reappears before me once more.... How white and
ghastly it looks! Yet ... its brain cannot be quite dead, since “I,”
its consciousness, am still acting, since we two fancy that we still
are, that we live and think, disconnected from our creator and its
ideating cell.
Suddenly I felt a strong desire to see how much longer the progress
of dissolution was likely to last, before it placed its last seal on
the brain and rendered it inactive. I examined my brain in its cranial
cavity, through the (to me) entirely transparent walls and roof of the
skull, and even _touched the brain-matter_.... How, or with _whose
hands_, I am now unable to say; but the impression of the slimy,
intensely cold matter produced a very strong impression on me, in that
dream. To my great dismay, I found that the blood having entirely
congealed and the brain-tissues having themselves undergone a change
that would no longer permit any molecular action, it became impossible
for me to account for the phenomena now taking place with myself.
Here was I,—or my consciousness, which is all one—standing apparently
entirely disconnected from my brain which could no longer function....
But I had no time left for reflection. A new and most extraordinary
change in my perceptions had taken place and now engrossed my whole
attention.... What _does_ this signify?...
The same darkness was around me as before, a black, impenetrable space,
extending in every direction. Only now, right before me, in whatever
direction I was looking, moving with me which way soever I moved,
there was a gigantic round clock; a disk, whose large white face shone
ominously on the ebony-black background. As I looked at its huge dial,
and at the pendulum moving to and fro regularly and slowly in Space, as
if its swinging meant to divide eternity, I saw its needles pointing to
_seven minutes past five_. “The hour at which my torture had commenced
at Kioto!” I had barely found time to think of the coincidence, when,
to my unutterable horror, I felt myself going through the same, the
identical, process that I had been made to experience on that memorable
and fatal day. I swam underground, dashing swiftly through the earth;
I found myself once more in the pauper’s grave and recognized my
brother-in-law in the mangled remains; I witnessed his terrible death;
entered my sister’s house; followed her agony, and saw her go mad. I
went over the same scenes without missing a single detail of them. But,
alas! I was no longer iron-bound in the calm indifference that had then
been mine, and which in that first vision had left me as unfeeling to
my great misfortune as if I had been a heartless thing of rock. My
mental tortures were now becoming beyond description and well-nigh
unbearable. Even the settled despair, the never ceasing anxiety I was
constantly experiencing when awake, had become now, in my dream and
in the face of this repetition of visions and events, as an hour of
darkened sunlight compared to a deadly cyclone. Oh! how I suffered in
this wealth and pomp of infernal horrors, to which the conviction of
the survival of man’s consciousness after death—for in that dream I
firmly believed that my body was dead—added the most terrifying of all!
The relative relief I felt, when, after going over the last scene,
I saw once more the great white face of the dial before me was not
of long duration. The long, arrow-shaped needle was pointing on the
colossal disk at—_seven minutes and a-half past five_ o’clock. But,
before I had time to well realize the change, the needle moved slowly
backwards, stopped at precisely the seventh minute, and—O cursed
fate!... I found myself driven into a repetition of the same series
over again! Once more I swam underground, and saw, and heard, and
suffered every torture that hell can provide; I passed through every
mental anguish known to man or fiend. I returned to see the fatal dial
and its needle—after what appeared to me an eternity—moved, as before,
only half a minute forward. I beheld it, with renewed terror, moving
back again, and felt myself propelled forward anew. And so it went
on, and on, and on, time after time, in what seemed to me an endless
succession, a series which never had any beginning, nor would it ever
have an end....
Worst of all; my consciousness, my “I,” had apparently acquired the
phenomenal capacity of trebling, quadrupling, and even of decuplating
itself. I lived, felt and suffered, in the same space of time, in
half-a-dozen different places at once, passing over various events
of my life, at different epochs, and under the most dissimilar
circumstances; though predominant over all was my _spiritual_
experience at Kioto. Thus, as in the famous _fugue_ in _Don Giovanni_,
the heart-rending notes of Elvira’s _aria_ of despair ring high above,
but interfere in no way with the melody of the minuet, the song of
seduction, and the chorus, so I went over and over my travailed woes,
the feelings of agony unspeakable at the awful sights of my vision,
the repetition of which blunted in no wise even a single pang of my
despair and horror; nor did these feelings weaken in the least scenes
and events entirely disconnected with the first one, that I was living
through again, or interfere in any way the one with the other. It was a
maddening experience! A series of contrapuntal, mental phantasmagoria
from real life. Here was I, during the same half-a-minute of time,
examining with cold curiosity the mangled remains of my sister’s
husband; following with the same indifference the effects of the
news on her brain, as in my first Kioto vision, and feeling _at the
same time_ hell-torture for these very events, as when I returned to
consciousness. I was listening to the philosophical discourses of the
Bonze, every word of which I heard and understood, and was trying
to laugh him to scorn. I was again a child, then a youth, hearing my
mother’s and my sweet sister’s voices, admonishing me and teaching duty
to all men. I was saving a friend from drowning, and was sneering at
his aged father who thanks me for having saved a “soul” yet unprepared
to meet his Maker.
“Speak of _dual_ consciousness, you psycho-physiologists!”—I cried, in
one of the moments when agony, mental and as it seemed to me physical
also, had arrived at a degree of intensity which would have killed
a dozen living men; “speak of your psychological and physiological
experiments, you schoolmen, puffed up with pride and book-learning!
Here am I to give you the lie....” And now I was reading the works and
holding converse with learned professors and lecturers, who had led
me to my fatal scepticism. And, while arguing the impossibility of
consciousness divorced from its brain, I was shedding tears of blood
over the supposed fate of my nieces and nephews. More terrible than
all: I knew, _as only a liberated consciousness can know_, that all I
had seen in my vision at Japan, and all that I was seeing and hearing
over and over again now, was true in every point and detail, that it
was a long string of ghastly and terrible, still of real, actual, facts.
For, perhaps, the hundredth time, I had rivetted my attention on
the needle of the clock, I had lost the number of my gyrations and
was fast coming to the conclusion that they would never stop, that
consciousness, is, after all, indestructible, and that this was to be
my punishment in Eternity. I was beginning to realize from personal
experience how the condemned sinners would feel—“were not eternal
damnation a logical and mathematical impossibility in an ever
progressing Universe”—I still found the force to argue. Yea, indeed; at
this hour of my ever-increasing agony, my consciousness—now my synonym
for “I”—had still the power of revolting at certain theological claims,
of denying all their propositions, all—save ITSELF.... No; I denied the
independent nature of my consciousness no longer, for I knew it now
to be such. But is it _eternal_ withal? O thou incomprehensible and
terrible Reality! But if thou art eternal, who then art thou?—since
there is no deity, no God. Whence dost thou come, and when didst thou
first appear, if thou art not a part of the cold body lying yonder?
And whither dost thou lead me, who am thyself, and shall our thought
and fancy have an end? What is thy real name, thou unfathomable
REALITY, and impenetrable MYSTERY! Oh, I would fain annihilate thee....
“Soul-Vision”!--who speaks of Soul, and whose voice is this?... It says
that I see now for myself, that there is a Soul in man, after all.... I
deny this. My Soul, my vital Soul, or the Spirit of life, has expired
with my body, with the gray matter of my brain. This “I” of mine, this
consciousness, is not yet proven to me as eternal. Reincarnation, in
which the Bonze felt so anxious I should believe may be true.... Why
not? Is not the flower born year after year from the same root? Hence
this “I” once separated from its brain, losing its balance, and calling
forth such a host of visions ... before reincarnating....
I was again face to face with the inexorable, fatal clock. And as I was
watching its needle, I heard the voice of the Bonze, coming out of the
depths of its white face, saying: “In this case, I fear, _you would
only have to open and to shut the temple door, over and over again,
during a period which, however short, would seem to you an
eternity_.”...
The clock had vanished, darkness made room for light, the voice of my
old friend was drowned by a multitude of voices overhead on deck; and
I awoke in my berth, covered with a cold perspiration, and faint with
terror.
VIII
A TALE OF WOE
We were at Hamburg, and no sooner had I seen my partners, who could
hardly recognize me, than with their consent and good wishes I started
for Nuremberg.
Half-an-hour after my arrival, the last doubt with regard to the
correctness of my vision had disappeared. The reality was worse than
any expectations could have made it, and I was henceforward doomed to
the most desolate life. I ascertained that I had seen the terrible
tragedy with all its heartrending details. My brother-in-law, killed
under the wheels of a machine; my sister, insane, and now rapidly
sinking towards her end; my niece—the sweet flower of nature’s fairest
work—dishonored, in a den of infamy; the little children dead of a
contagious disease in an orphanage; my last surviving nephew at sea,
no one knew where. A whole house, a home of love and peace, scattered;
and I, left alone, a witness of this world of death, of desolation
and dishonor. The news filled me with infinite despair, and I sank
helpless before this wholesale, dire disaster, which rose before me
all at once. The shock proved too much, and I fainted. The last thing
I heard before entirely losing my consciousness was a remark of the
Burgmeister: “Had you, before leaving Kioto, telegraphed to the city
authorities of your whereabouts, and of your intention of coming home
to take charge of your young relatives, we might have placed them
elsewhere, and thus have saved them from their fate. No one knew that
the children had a well-to-do relative. They were left paupers and
had to be dealt with as such. They were comparatively strangers in
Nuremberg, and under the unfortunate circumstances you could hardly
have expected anything else.... I can only express my sincere sorrow.”
It was this terrible knowledge that I might, at any rate, have saved
my young niece from her unmerited fate, but that through my neglect I
had not done so, that was killing me. Had I but followed the friendly
advice of the Bonze, Tamoora, and telegraphed to the authorities some
weeks previous to my return much might have been avoided. It was all
this, coupled with the fact that I could no longer doubt clairvoyance
and clairaudience—the possibility of which I had so long denied—that
brought me so heavily down upon my knees. I could avoid the censure
of my fellow-creatures, but I could never escape the stings of my
conscience, the reproaches of my own aching heart—no, not as long as I
lived. I cursed my stubborn scepticism, my denial of facts, my early
education, I cursed myself, and the whole world....
For several days I contrived not to sink beneath my load, for I had
a duty to perform to the dead and to the living. But my sister once
rescued from the pauper’s asylum, placed under the care of the best
physicians, with her daughter to attend to her last moments, and
the Jewess, whom I had brought to confess her crime, safely lodged
in jail—my fortitude and strength suddenly abandoned me. Hardly a
week after my arrival I was myself no better than a raving maniac,
helpless in the strong grip of a brain fever. For several weeks I lay
between life and death, the terrible disease defying the skill of the
best physicians. At last my strong constitution prevailed, and—to my
life-long sorrow—they proclaimed me saved.
I heard the news with a bleeding heart. Doomed to drag the loathsome
burden of life henceforth alone, and in constant remorse; hoping for
no help or remedy on earth, and still refusing to believe in the
possibility of anything better than a short survival of consciousness
beyond the grave, this unexpected return to life added only one more
drop of gall to my bitter feelings. They were hardly soothed by the
immediate return, during the first days of my convalescence, of those
unwelcome and unsought for visions, whose correctness and reality I
could deny no more. Alas the day! they were no longer in my sceptical,
blind mind—
The children of an idle brain
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
but always the faithful photographs of the real woes and sufferings
of my fellow creatures, of my best friends.... Thus I found myself
doomed, whenever I was left for a moment alone, to the helpless
torture of a chained Prometheus. During the still hours of night,
as though held by some pitiless iron hand, I found myself led to my
sister’s bedside, forced to watch there hour after hour, and see the
silent disintegration of her wasted organism; to witness and feel the
sufferings that her own tenantless brain could no longer reflect or
convey to her perceptions. But there was something still more horrible
to barb the dart that could never be extricated. I had to look, by
day, at the childish innocent face of my young niece, so sublimely
simple and guileless in her pollution; and to witness, by night, how
the full knowledge and recollection of her dishonor, of her young life
now for ever blasted, came to her in her dreams, as soon as she was
asleep. These dreams took an objective form to me, as they had done
on the steamer; I had to live them over again, night after night,
and feel the same terrible despair. For now, since I believed in the
reality of seership, and had come to the conclusion that in our bodies
lies hidden, as in the caterpillar, the chrysalis which may contain
in its turn the butterfly—the symbol of the soul—I no longer remained
indifferent, as of yore, to what I witnessed in my Soul-life. Something
had suddenly developed in me, had broken loose from its icy cocoon.
Evidently I no longer saw only in consequence of the identification of
my inner nature with a Daij-Dzin; my visions arose in consequence of a
direct personal psychic development, the fiendish creatures only taking
care that I should see nothing of an agreeable or elevating nature.
Thus, now, not an unconscious pang in my dying sister’s emaciated body,
not a thrill of horror in my niece’s restless sleep at the recollection
of the crime perpetrated upon her, an innocent child, but found a
responsive echo in my bleeding heart. The deep fountain of sympathetic
love and sorrow had gushed out from the physical heart, and was now
loudly echoed by the awakened soul separated from the body. Thus had I
to drain the cup of misery to the very dregs! Woe is me, it was a daily
and nightly torture! Oh, how I mourned over my proud folly; how I was
punished for having neglected to avail myself at Kioto of the proffered
purification, for now I had come to believe even in the efficacy of
the latter. The Daij-Dzin had indeed obtained control over me; and the
fiend had let loose all the dogs of hell upon his victim....
At last the awful gulf was reached and crossed. The poor insane
martyr dropped into her dark, and now welcome grave, leaving behind
her, but for a few short months, her young, her first-born, daughter.
Consumption made short work of that tender girlish frame. Hardly a year
after my arrival, I was left alone in the whole wide world, my only
surviving nephew having expressed a desire to follow his sea-faring
career.
And now, the sequel of my sad, sad story is soon told. A wreck, a
prematurely old man, looking at thirty as though sixty winters had
passed over my doomed head, and owing to the never-ceasing visions,
myself daily on the verge of insanity, I suddenly formed a desperate
resolution. I would return to Kioto and seek out the Yamabooshi. I
would prostrate myself at the feet of the holy man, and would not
leave him until he had recalled the Frankenstein he had raised, the
Frankenstein with whom at the time, it was I, myself, who would not
part, through my insolent pride and unbelief.