CHAPTER X

SUPERNORMAL APPEARANCES

The mediumship of Mlle. Smith is full of facts supernormal in

appearance, and the question which offers itself for our solution is

that of determining to what extent they are supernormal in reality.

The title of this chapter, I must assert, is not to be understood in a

partisan sense. The term “appearances” is not used in its unfavorable

acceptation, as meaning that they are deceptive, and that there is

nothing behind them. It is taken in a frank and impartial sense, to

designate simply the exterior and immediate aspect of a thing, without

prejudging its real nature, in order, by the very force of this

neutrality, to provoke investigation destined to separate the true

from the false, the pure gold from the dross. It is precisely this

investigation which constitutes my present task.

A rather difficult task, for it is always risky to touch upon a

subject which is an apple of discord among psychologists, and which

has even been considered the “Dreyfus case of science.” The matter

is complicated, too, in this particular case, by the absolute faith

of Mlle. Smith and her friends in the supernormal character of her

phenomena; a state of mind extremely worthy of respect, but which is

not calculated to facilitate research, all desire of ordinary analysis

and explanation being resented by them as an unjustifiable suspicion,

interpreted as being an indication of invincible skepticism.

I. THE STUDY OF THE SUPERNORMAL

The term “supernormal” has been used for some years by the

investigators of the Society for Psychical Research to take the place

of the old word “supernatural,” which has become impracticable on

account of interloping connections, which finally caused its use to

be limited to theological and philosophical environments. Mr. Meyers,

to whom the credit is due, if I am not mistaken, of coining this as

well as many other new terms used to-day in the psychical vocabulary,

applies it to every phenomenon or faculty which passes beyond ordinary

experience, and reveals either a degree of higher evolution not yet

attained by the mass of humanity, or an order of transcendental things

superior to the world of sense. In these two cases one finds one’s

self, indeed, in the presence of facts which are above the normal, but

which are by no means to be taken as foreign or contrary to the true

laws of human nature (as the word “supernatural” would imply).

It is to be observed that the definition of Mr. Meyers lays stress

upon the character of superiority of supernormal phenomena. I shall,

however, separate this character from it in the present chapter, and

in spite of the etymology, and for lack of any better term, shall

simply use the word “supernormal” to designate facts which come within

the actual framework of the science of to-day, and the application of

which would necessitate principles not yet admitted—without occupying

myself, however, with endeavoring to ascertain whether these facts

are messengers of a superior economy or forerunners of a future

evolution rather than the survival of a condition of things which has

disappeared, or whether they are purely accidental, _lusus naturae_,

denuded of signification.

It goes without saying that in treating of the supernormal we must

admit theoretically its possibility, or—which amounts to about the

same thing—fail to believe in the infallibility and perfection

of present-day science. If I consider it, _à priori_, absolutely

impossible for an individual to know, some time before the arrival of

a telegram containing the news, of an accident by which his brother at

the antipodes has been killed, or that another can voluntarily move

an object at a distance without having a string attached to it, and

contrary to the laws of mechanics and physiology, it is clear that I

will shrug my shoulders at every mention of telepathy, and I shall not

move a step to be present at a seance of Eusapia Paladino. What an

excellent means of enlarging one’s horizon and of discovering something

new, by being satisfied with one’s ready-made science and preconceived

opinion, quite convinced beforehand that the universe ends at the wall

opposite, and that there is nothing to be obtained beyond that which

the daily routine has accustomed us to look upon as the limit of the

Real! This philosophy of the ostrich, illustrated formerly by those

grotesque monuments of erudition—over whom Galileo did not know whether

to laugh or weep—who refused to put their eyes to the glass for fear

of seeing something that had no official right to existence; and,

again, that of many brains petrified by the unseasonable reading of

works of scientific vulgarization, and the unintelligent frequenting of

universities—these are the two great intellectual dangers of our time.

If, on the other hand, the philosophical doubt degenerates in

the presence of these scientific impossibilities into blind

credulity; if it suffices that a thing be unheard of, upsetting,

contrary to common-sense and to accepted truths, in order to be

immediately admitted, practical existence, without speaking of other

considerations, becomes unbearable. The convinced occultist ought never

to allow the creaking of a piece of furniture to pass without assuring

himself that it is not the desperate call of some great-grandaunt

trying to enter into conversation with him; nor to complain to the

police when he finds his house upset during his absence—for how is he

to know that it is not some “elementals” from the world beyond who have

done the deed? It is by the fortunate failure of consequences alone,

and a continual forgetting of the doctrine, that one can continue to

live in a universe constantly exposed to the capricious incursions of

the “invisibles.”

These opposite turns of the mind—the invincible fatuity of some and

the silly superstition of others—inspire many people with an equal

repugnance. The need of a happy medium between these opposed excesses

has been felt for some time. Here are, for example, a few lines, which

have lost nothing after the lapse of two centuries:

“What are we to think of magic and witchcraft [to-day we would

say ‘occultism’ and ‘spiritism’]? Their theory is obscure, their

principles vague, uncertain, approaching the visionary; but—they are

embarrassing facts, affirmed by grave men, who have seen them, or who

have heard of them from persons like themselves; to admit them all, or

to deny them all, seems equally embarrassing, and I dare to assert that

in this, as in all extraordinary things which depend upon customary

rules, there is a happy medium to be found between credulous souls and

strong minds.”

It is the voice of reason itself that the sagacious author of _Les

Caractères_ permits us to hear. We must, however, add that this

“happy medium to be found” would not consist in a theory, a doctrine,

a ready-made and entire system, from the height of which, as from a

tribunal of arbitration, we would judge the “embarrassing cases” which

reality places in the path of the seeker; for this system—however

perfect it might be—would again be one more infallibility added to all

those which already encumber the road to truth. The “happy medium”

dreamed of by La Bruyère can be but a “method” always perfectible in

its application and prejudging in nothing the results of investigation

which go against the grain of the dogmatic points of view, equally

authoritative and sterile, which characterize the two extremes of the

“credulous souls” and “strong minds.”

To develop here this methodology of psychical research which

might guide the investigator struggling with the apparent or real

supernormal, would take me too far from Mlle. Smith. But I will briefly

indicate its essence and general spirit, of which an excellent summary

may be found in the following passage of Laplace:

“We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature and their divers

modes of action that it would not be philosophical to deny phenomena

solely because they are inexplicable in the actual state of our

knowledge. But we ought to examine them with an attention all the more

scrupulous as it appears more difficult to admit them.”

In writing these words Laplace hardly thought of telepathy, of the

spirits, or the movements of objects without contact, but only of

animal magnetism, which represented the supernormal of his time. This

passage remains none the less the rule of conduct to be followed

concerning all the possible manifestations of this multiform subject.

Two inseparable facts, completing each other, as the faces of a medal,

may be distinguished in it; but it is advisable, in order to place

them the better in the light, to formulate them separately into two

propositions representing the governing principles, the axioms of

all investigations of the supernormal. The one, which I shall call

“PRINCIPLE OF HAMLET,” may be condensed. in these words: _All is

possible_. The other, to which it is but just to leave the name of

“PRINCIPLE OF LAPLACE,” is susceptible of many forms of expression.

I shall express it thus: _The weight of the evidence should be

proportioned to the strangeness of the facts_.

The forgetfulness of the “Principle of Hamlet” makes the “strong

minds,” for whom the limits of nature would not exceed those of their

system, the simpleton popes of all times and of all kinds, from the

burlesque adversaries of Galileo to the poor Auguste Comte, declaring

that the physical constitution of the stars would never be known, and

to his noble rivals of the learned societies, denying the aërolites

or condemning railroads beforehand. In its turn, the ignorance of the

“Principle of Laplace” makes the “credulous souls,” who have never

reflected that, if all is possible to the eyes of the modest seeker,

all is, however, not certain, or even equally possible, and that some

evidence would yet be necessary in order to suppose that a stone

falling on the floor in an occult reunion arrived there through the

walls by the aid of a dematerialization, rather than to admit that it

came there in the pocket of a joker.

Thanks to these axioms, the investigator will avoid the doubly

signalled danger, and will advance without fear into the labyrinth

of the supernormal in advance of the monsters of the occult. However

fantastic and magical the things may be which will spring up before

his eyes or which will fill his ears, he will never be taken unawares,

but, expecting all in the name of the “Principle of Hamlet,” he will

not be astonished at anything, and simply say: “Be it so! Why not? We

shall see.” On the other hand, he will not allow the wool to be pulled

over his eyes, and he will not easily be satisfied in the matter of

evidence; but, firmly intrenched behind the “Principle of Laplace,” he

will show himself all the more exacting as to the proofs, in proportion

to the degree in which the phenomena or the conclusion, which they

may wish him to accept, may be extraordinary, and he will oppose

a merciless _non liquet_ to every demonstration which still seems

suspicious or lame.

I wish to speak a word here of the inevitable rôle which the

personal coefficient of the turn of mind and character plays in the

concrete application of the “Principle of Laplace.” This latter is

of a vagueness and a deplorable elasticity which opens the door to

all divergences of individual appreciation. If we could express in

a precise manner and translate in ciphers, on the one hand, the

_strangeness_ of a fact, which makes it improbable; on the other

hand, the _weight of evidence_ which tends to make it admissible;

and, finally, the demandable _proportion_ between these two contrary

factors, so that the second may counterbalance the first and secure

assent—that would be perfect, and everybody would soon come to an

agreement. Unhappily, the means to accomplish this result is not yet

perceived.

We must pass now to the weight of the evidence. We may, up to a

certain point, submit it to an objective judgment and to an impartial

estimation by following the rules and methods of logic, in the broadest

sense of the term. But the strangeness of the facts, or, as Laplace

said, the difficulty in admitting them! Who, then, is to be the judge

of them, and by what universal standard can we measure them?

We must recognize that we are here in presence of an eminently

subjective and emotional factor, changeable from one individual to

another.

It is necessary to take some stand. In the matter of the supernormal

there are too many interior and personal factors (intellectual

idiosyncrasies, æsthetic temperaments, moral and religious sentiments,

metaphysical tendencies, etc.) tending to determine the quality and

intensity of the characteristic of the strangeness in the facts in

litigation, to enable one to flatter himself upon a disinterested,

objective, and _quasi_-scientific verdict upon their degree of

probability or improbability. It is only when, after the accumulation

of cases and evidences of similar character, a tacit agreement shall

finally have been reached by those who have studied the subject, that

the problem can be said to be solved, either by the relegation of

pretended supernormal phenomena to the domain of vanished illusions

and abandoned superstitions, or by the recognition of new laws and

forces in nature. The phenomena considered till then as supernatural

will cease to be so; they will form a part of established science, they

will have nothing more in them that is strange, and will be admitted

by everybody. As long as this mile-post is not reached, as long as the

supernormal phenomenon is discussed as such, there are but individual

opinions on this subject, subjective certitudes or probabilities,

verdicts in which reality is only reflected as closely welded to the

personality of their authors.

Two suggestions seem to me to spring from this. First, authors who

take it upon themselves to give their advice upon the extraordinary

facts coming to their knowledge ought always to begin by making their

confession, so that the reader may the better distinguish the intimate

factors which may have influenced them. It is true that we are not

always thoroughly acquainted with ourselves, but it would be something

to say frankly what we believe we have discovered in ourselves as to

the position involuntarily taken by us, obscure inclinations for or

against the hypothesis involved in the phenomena in question. This

is what I shall try to do here, by confining myself to the problems

raised by the mediumship of Mlle. Smith, and without entering upon the

boundless domain of “psychical research.” I shall, therefore, begin

each of the following paragraphs by giving my personal advice and my

subjective sentiment on the point upon which Hélène’s supernormal

appearances touch.

It seems to me, in the second place, that the only rational position

to take, concerning the supernormal, is, if not a complete suspension

of judgment, which is not always psychologically possible, at least

that of a wise probability, exempt from all dogmatic obstinacy. The

fixed beliefs, the unshakable opinions as to the reality and the

meaning of life, are certainly subjective conditions, indispensable

to all properly moral conduct, to all human existence truly worthy

of this name—that is to say, all that which pretends to be above the

animal routine of inherited instincts and social slavery. But these

firm convictions would be absolutely misplaced on the objective

ground of science, and consequently also that of supernormal facts,

which, though still situated outside of the scientific realm, hope

shortly to be received within its pale. Practical necessities make

us but too often forget that our knowledge of the phenomenal world

never attains absolute certitude, and as soon as one passes beyond

the brutal facts of the senses, the best-established truths, as well

as the most thoroughly refuted propositions, do not rise above a

probability which, however great or insignificant we may suppose it

to be, never equals infinity or zero. The intellectual attitude which

common-sense prescribes in the supernormal consists, for very strong

reasons, in never absolutely and irrevocably denying or affirming,

but provisionally and by hypothesis, as it were. Even in cases when,

after having examined everything scrupulously, one imagines he has

finally reached certitude, it must not be forgotten that this word

is but a mode of expressing one’s self; because, in point of fact,

one does not rise above a probable opinion, and the possibility of an

unsuspected error, vitiating the most apparently evident experimental

demonstration, is never mathematically excluded.

This reserve is particularly indicated in cases of phenomena like

those of Mlle. Smith, which often leave much to be desired concerning

accessory information, which would be necessary in order to express

one’s self categorically on their account. My appreciation of these

phenomena, far from pretending to an infallible and definite character,

demands, therefore, from the start, the right of modification under

the influence of new facts which may be produced subsequently.

For the sake of clearness I shall set off again in four groups the

supernormal appearances with which I shall have to occupy myself in

this chapter—viz., so-called physical phenomena, telepathy, lucidity,

and spirit messages. The boundaries of these three last categories are

but poorly defined and might easily be fused into one. But my division

is but a kind of a measure of order, and not a classification.

II. PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

This designation again covers several rather diverse categories of

strange facts. I shall only speak of the two kinds of which Mlle.

Smith has furnished samples (and which I have never personally

witnessed)—that is to say, “apports” and “movements of objects without

contact.”

1. _Apports._[29]—Besides the unknown causes presiding over their

aërial transportation, the arrival of exterior objects in a closed

space, often coming from a considerable distance, implies, in order

that they may pass through the walls of the room, either the subterfuge

of a fourth dimension of space, or the penetration of the matter—that

is to say, the passage of the molecules or atoms of the object (its

momentary _dematerialization_) between the molecules or atoms of

the wall. All these impediments to our vulgar conception as to the

stability of matter, or, what is worse, to our geometrical intuition,

seem to me so hard to digest that I am tempted to apply to them the

words of Laplace: “There are things that are so extraordinary that

nothing can counterbalance their improbability.” This is not to declare

as false, _à priori_, all the stories of this kind, for we know that

the true is not always the probable; but assuredly, even in the case of

the good Mr. Stainton Moses, the weight of the proof does not, in my

opinion, equal the strangeness of the facts.

So far as concerns the _apports_ obtained at the seances of Mlle.

Smith, they all took place in 1892-93, in the reunions of the N. group,

where the obscurity favored the production of marvellous things in

close relation with the visions and typtological messages.

I will cite from memory certain acoustic phenomena mentioned in the

reports: The piano sounded several times under the touch of the

favorite disincarnate spirits of the group; the same happened to a

violin and to a bell; once we also heard metallic sounds that seemed

to come from a small musical box, although there was none in the room.

As to the _apports_, always received with delight by the members of

the group, who are ever anxiously wishing for them and asking their

spirit friends for them, they were frequent and varied enough. In

mid-winter roses showered upon the table, handfuls of violets, pinks,

white lilacs, etc., also green branches; among other things there

was an ivy leaf having engraved upon it in letters, as though by a

punching-machine, the name of one of the principal disincarnate

spirits at play. Again, at the tropical and Chinese visions sea-shells

were obtained that were still shining and covered with sand, Chinese

coins, a little vase containing water, in which there was a superb

rose, etc. These last objects were brought in a straight line from the

extreme East by the spirits, in proof of which they had the honor of

a public presentation at a seance of La Société d’Études Psychiques

de Genève, and were placed upon the desk of the president, where all,

myself included, could satisfy themselves at their leisure as to their

reality.

2. _Movements of objects without contact._—The displacing, without

contact and in the absence of all known mechanical processes, of

objects situated at a distance (telekinesis), is very strange. However,

it only upsets physiological notions, and does not, as is the case with

the _apports_, go as far as to overthrow our conceptions in regard

to the constitution of matter or our spatial intuitions. It only

supposes that the living being possesses forces acting at a distance,

or the power of putting forth at intervals a species of invisible

supernumerary prehensile organs, capable of handling objects, as our

hands do (ectenic forces of Thury, ectoplasms of Richet, dynamic

members of Ochorowicz, etc.). Such are the ephemeral but visible

pseudopodes that the amœba puts forth in all directions.

It may be conceived that, as the atom and the molecule are the centre

of a more or less radiating influence of extension, so the organized

individual, isolated cell or colony of cells, is originally in

possession of a sphere of action, where it concentrates at times its

efforts more especially on one point, and again on others _ad libitum_.

Through repetition, habit, selection, hereditary and other principles

loved by biologists, certain more constant lines of force would be

differentiated in this homogeneous primordial sphere, and little by

little could give birth to motor organs. For example—our four members

of flesh and blood, sweeping the space around us, would be but a more

economic expedient invented by nature, a machine wrought in the course

of better adapted evolution, to obtain at the least expense the same

useful effects as this vague primitive spherical power. Thus supplanted

or transformed, these powers would thereafter manifest themselves only

very exceptionally, in certain states, or with abnormal individuals, as

an atavic reapparition of a mode of acting long ago fallen into disuse,

because it is really very imperfect and necessitates, without any

advantage, an expenditure of vital energy far greater than the ordinary

use of arms and limbs. Unless it is the cosmic power itself, the amoral

and stupid demiurge, the unconsciousness of M. de Hartman, which comes

directly into play upon contact with a deranged nervous system, and

realizes its disordered dreams without passing through the regular

channels of muscular movements.

But enough of these vapory metaphysical or pseudo-biological

speculations to give an account of a phenomenon for which it will be

time enough to find precise explanation when its authenticity shall be

beyond dispute, if that time shall ever arrive.

Three groups of proofs, of a diverse nature, have gradually brought me

to look upon the reality of these phenomena—in spite of the instinctive

difficulty of admitting them—as an infinitely more probable hypothesis

than its opposite.

First: I was first unsettled by the reading of the too-much-neglected

memoir of Professor Thury, which seems to me to be a model of

scientific observations, the weight of which I could only overlook by

rejecting, _à priori_—in the name of their strangeness—the possibility

itself of the facts in question, which would have been against the

Principle of Hamlet. The conversations which it was my privilege

to hold with M. Thury have greatly contributed to arouse in me a

presumption in favor of these phenomena, which the book would evidently

not have done in the same degree if the author had not been personally

known to me.

Secondly: Once created, my idea of the probability of these facts

became rather strengthened than weakened by a number of foreign works

of more recent date; but I doubt whether any, or all of these combined,

would have been sufficient to create it. The displacement of objects

without contact being once hypothetically admitted, it seems easier to

me to explain Crookes’s observations on the modifications of the weight

of bodies in the presence of Home by authentic phenomena of this kind

(in spite of the well-deserved criticisms that Crookes’s publications

brought upon him) than to suppose that he was simply Home’s dupe. The

same is true with the cases of _Esprits tapageurs_ (_Poltergeister_),

published by the Society for Psychical Research, the exclusive

hypothesis of the “_naughty little girl_,” without the addition of

any trace of telekinesis, which seems to me a less adequate and more

improbable explanation than that of real phenomena, which would have

tempted fraud. Naturally all depends on the preconceived opinion one

may have as to the general possibility or impossibility of these facts,

and my feeling in regard to the matter would certainly be different

without the preceding or the following groups of evidence.

Thirdly: The probability of the movement of objects without contact

has reached with me a degree practically equivalent to certitude,

thanks to M. Richet, to whom I am indebted for my presence at his house

last year at several seances of Eusapia Paladino, under conditions of

control which gave no room for doubt—at least without challenging the

combined witness of the senses of sight, hearing, and touch, as well

as the average quantity of critical sense and perspicacity with which

every ordinary intelligence flatters itself it is endowed; or, again,

of suspecting the walls of M. Richet’s study had been tampered with,

and he himself, with his attending colleagues, of being impostors,

in collusion with the amiable Neapolitan herself—a supposition which

the most elementary sense of propriety would absolutely forbid me to

entertain. From that moment I believed in telekinesis by constraint

of the perception, _sensata et oculata certitudine_, to borrow

the expression of Galileo, who certainly did not mean by that an

unreflecting adhesion to the evidences of the senses, like that of the

casual onlooker at the tricks of the prestidigitator, but rather the

final crowning of an edifice having for its rational framework the

reasoned analysis of the conditions of observation, and of the concrete

circumstances surrounding the production of the phenomenon.

In saying that I believe in these facts, I will add that there

is no question here of a conviction, in the moral, religious, or

philosophical sense of the term. This belief is for me devoid of all

vital importance; it does not move any essential fibre of my being,

and I would not feel the least inclination to submit to the slightest

martyrdom in its defence. Whether the objects move or do not move

without contact is absolutely indifferent to me. Should any one

some day succeed in unveiling the physical tricks or the fallacious

psychological processes which have led into error the best observers of

telekinesis, from M. Thury down to M. Richet, with a number of other

witnesses, myself included, I would be the first to laugh at the trick

that art and nature had played upon me, to applaud the perspicacity of

the one who discovered it, to congratulate myself, above all, in seeing

supernormal appearances returning to the ordinary course of things.

This is a disproportionally lengthy preamble to facts of which I shall

have to speak here, for they are reduced to a few displacements of

objects without contact (raising of tables, transporting or projecting

of flowers and diverse things placed out of reach), of which Hélène

and her mother were witnesses on several occasions at their house. I

cannot be accused of stubborn skepticism, since I admit the reality

of telekinesis. In the present case, however, all the stories which

have been told me leave much to be desired from an evidential point

of view. Without suspecting in any way the perfect good faith of

both Mme. and Mlle. Smith, it suffices to recall the possibility of

malobservation and errors of memory in the stories of supernormal

events in order not to attribute a great evidential value to the

absolutely sincere evidence of these ladies.

Incapacitated as I am from pronouncing judgment upon phenomena of which

I was not a witness, I shall, however, put forth a fact which might

militate in favor of their authenticity (their possibility having

been first hypothetically admitted)—namely, that these phenomena have

always been produced under exceptional conditions, at a time when

Hélène was in an abnormal state and a prey to a deep emotion. On the

one side, this circumstance increases the chances of malobservation,

while, on the other, the day on which it shall be well established

that (as divers observations cause us to think) certain abnormal and

emotional states set at liberty in the organism latent forces capable

of acting at a distance, it will be permitted us to suppose that

perhaps something analogous has taken place in Mlle. Smith’s case. Here

is, as an example of these perplexing cases, a fact which happened to

her during a period of general indisposition. Abridging the story, I

reproduce it as Hélène sent it to me the following day:

“Last night I had a visit from M. H. I do not need to give you an

analysis of my impressions; you will understand them as well as I do.

He came to tell me that he had held a seance with a lady who was a

stranger to me, and that this lady had seen Leopold, who had given her

a remedy for the indisposition from which I was suffering. I could not

refrain from telling him that Leopold had assured me that he manifested

himself only to me, and that it would consequently be difficult for me

to admit his alleged utterances to others.” But that is not the most

interesting part of the story.

“While M. H. spoke to me I felt a sharp pain in my left temple, and,

perhaps two minutes afterwards, my eyes, constantly directed towards

the piano, on which I had placed two oranges the evening before, were

entirely fascinated with I know not what. Then, suddenly, at the

moment when we least expected it—we were all three (M. H., my father,

and myself) seated at a reasonable distance from the piano—one of the

oranges displaced itself and rolled to my feet. My father maintained

that it had no doubt been placed too near the edge of the lid, and at

a certain moment had fallen in a natural way. M. H. saw immediately

in this incident the intervention of some spirit. I myself dared not

pass my opinion on it. Finally, I picked up the orange, and we spoke of

other things.

“M. H. remained about an hour; he went away exactly at nine. I went

to my mother’s room to give her a few details of M. H.’s visit. I

described to her the fall of the orange, and what was my surprise when,

on returning to the drawing-room and stepping up to the piano to take

the lamp I had placed on it, I found the famous orange no longer there.

There was but one left; the one I had picked up and replaced by the

side of the other had disappeared. I looked for it everywhere, but

without success. I went back to my mother, and while I spoke to her

we heard something fall in the vestibule. I took the lamp to see what

might have fallen. I distinguished at the farthest end (towards the

door of the entrance to the apartment) the much-sought-for orange!

“Then I asked myself quite frankly whether I was in presence of some

spiritistic manifestation. I tried not to be frightened. I took the

orange to show it to my mother. I returned to the piano to take the

second orange, so as not to be frightened in a similar way. But it,

in its turn, had disappeared! Then I felt a considerable sensation of

trembling. I returned to my mother’s room, and, while we discussed the

matter, we heard again something thrown with violence, and, rushing out

to see what had happened, I saw the second orange placed in exactly the

same spot where the other had been, and considerably bruised. Imagine

how astonished we were! I took both oranges, and, without losing an

instant, went to the kitchen and put them in a cupboard, where I found

them again the following morning; they had not moved. I did not go to

bed without some fear, but fortunately I quickly went to sleep. My

mother is sure that it is M. H. who brought some evil spirit into the

house, and she is quite uneasy....”

From the oral explanations of Mlle. Smith and her mother, and also

from the location of the places, it follows that the oranges had

been thrown at a distance of ten yards from the piano, through the

wide-open parlor door leading to the vestibule, against the door of the

apartment, as if to follow and strike fictitiously M. H., who a few

moments before had left by this door.

One has undoubtedly always the right of discarding at the outset, as

presenting too little guarantee of genuineness, the extraordinary

stories of a person subject to hallucinations. In the present case, all

that I know of Mlle. Smith and her parents keeps me from doing so, and

persuades me that her story is thoroughly exact, which, however, does

not amount to saying that there is anything of the supernormal about

it. One has, in fact, the choice between two interpretations.

First: In the hypothesis of veritable telekinesis, the following is

the manner in which the adventure would be summed up: the emotion due

to the unexpected and unpleasant visit of M. H. had brought about

a division of consciousness. The feeling of irritation, anger, and

repulsion against him had condensed themselves into some secondary

personality, which, in the general perturbation of the entire

psychophysiological organism, had momentarily recovered the use of

these primitive forces of action at a distance, entirely removed from

the will, and without the participation of the ordinary self, and thus

automatically accomplished outwardly the instinctive idea of bombarding

this ill-bred visitor. Notice is to be taken of the painful _aura_ at

the temple and the fascination of gaze, which, according to Hélène’s

story, preceded the first signs of the phenomenon, the orange falling

and rolling at her feet.

Secondly: But the most natural supposition is certainly that Mlle.

Smith, by the ordinary use of her limbs, had taken and thrown these

projectiles in an access of unconscious muscular automatism. It is true

that this would not agree with the presence of her father, mother,

or M. H., who did not see her make the supposed movements. But an

absent-mindedness of even normal witnesses will seem easier to admit

than the authentic production of a supernormal phenomenon.

These episodes which have happened to Mlle. Smith and her mother since

I have known them are very few, amounting to half a dozen at the most,

and I will not dwell longer upon this subject. Hélène is not conscious

of possessing any faculty of movement at a distance, and she always

attributes these phenomena to spirit intervention. Leopold, on the

other hand, has never acknowledged that he is the author of them. He

claims that Hélène possesses within herself supernormal powers, and

that, in order to succeed, she would only have to set them to work,

but that she did not wish to do so. All my suggestions and repeated

entreaties with Leopold and Hélène—either awake or in a state of

somnambulism—in the hope of obtaining in my presence some physical

phenomenon, have been in vain up to the present time.

III. TELEPATHY

One may almost say that if telepathy did not exist one would have to

invent it. I mean by this that a direct action between living beings,

independent of the organs of the senses, is a matter of such conformity

to all that we know of nature that it would be hard not to suppose it

_à priori_, even if we had no perceptible indication of it. How is it

possible to believe that the foci of chemical phenomena, as complex as

the nervous centres, can be in activity without giving forth diverse

undulations, _x_, _y_, or _z_ rays, traversing the cranium as the sun

traverses a pane of glass, and acting at a distance on their homologues

in other craniums? It is a simple matter of intensity.

The gallop of a horse or the leap of a flea in Australia causes

the terrestrial globe to rebound on its opposite side to an extent

proportional to the weight of these animals compared to that of our

planet. This is little, even without taking into account the fact

that this infinitesimal displacement runs the risk at every moment

of being neutralized by the leaps of horses and fleas on the other

hemisphere, so that, on the whole, the shocks to our terrestrial globe

resulting from all that moves on its surface are too feeble to prevent

our sleeping. Perhaps it is the same with the innumerable waves which

coming from all other living beings, shock at every moment a given

brain: their efforts are counterbalanced, or their resultant too

slight to be perceived. But they exist none the less in reality, and

I confess I do not understand those who reproach telepathy with being

strange, mystical, occult, supernormal, etc.

As to the knowledge whether this theoretical telepathy offers results

open to experimental demonstration—that is to say, whether this chain

of intercerebral vibrations into which we are plunged exercises any

notable influence on the course of our psychic life; and whether, in

certain cases, we happen to feel emotions, impulses, hallucinations,

which the psychological state of one or another of our own kind

exercises directly upon us, across the ether and without the ordinary

intermediary of the channel of our senses—that is a question of fact

arising from observation and experience. We know how much this question

has actually been discussed, and how difficult it is to solve it in

a decisive way, as much on account of all the sources of errors and

illusions, to which one is exposed in this domain, as on account of a

probably always necessary concurrence of very exceptional circumstances

(which we do not as yet know how to accomplish at will), in order

that the particular action of a determined _agent_ should sweep away

all rival influences, and betray itself in a manner sufficiently

marked and distinct in the life of the _percipient_. Everything

considered, I strongly lean towards the affirmative. The reality of

telepathic phenomena seems to me difficult to reject in presence of

the cluster of very diverse evidences, entirely independent of each

other, that militate in its favor. Undoubtedly none of these evidences

is absolutely convincing when taken separately; but their striking

convergence towards the same result gives to their entirety a new

and considerable weight, which tips the scale, in my opinion, while

awaiting an inverse oscillation, which may some day destroy this

convergence, or explain it by a common source of error. Besides, I

understand very well why those to whom telepathy remains a mystic,

and to our scientific conceptions heterogeneous, principle, should

obstinately resist it. But, seeing nothing strange in it myself, I

do not hesitate to admit it, not as an intangible dogma, but as a

provisional hypothesis, corresponding better than any other to the

condition of my certainly very incomplete knowledge of this department

of psychological research.

Although predisposed in favor of telepathy, I have failed in finding

striking proofs of it in Mlle. Smith, and the few experiments I have

attempted with her on this subject offered nothing encouraging.

I tried several times to make an impression upon Hélène from a distance

and to appear before her during the evening, when I thought she had

returned to her home, which is a kilometre distant from mine. I

obtained no satisfactory result. My only case of striking success, lost

among a number of nonsuccesses, can be explained by mere coincidence

as well, and, after taking all the accessory circumstances into

consideration, does not deserve a lengthy discussion.

As to spontaneous telepathy, a few indications would make me think

that Mlle. Smith sometimes involuntarily submits to my influence. The

most curious is a dream (or a vision) that she had one night at a

time when I had suddenly fallen ill during a stay in the country some

twenty leagues distant from Geneva. She heard the ringing of a bell at

her door, then saw me entering, so emaciated and apparently so tired

that she could not refrain from speaking to her mother on the following

morning of her uneasiness concerning me. Unfortunately these ladies

took no note of the exact date of this incident, and Hélène did not

speak of it to M. Lemaître until three weeks later, when he told her

about my illness, the beginning of which dated back to the approximate

time of the dream. The evidential value of this case is weak. On other

occasions Mlle. Smith announced to me that, to judge from her dreams

or vague intuition in a waking state, I was to have on a certain day

an unexpected vexation, a painful preoccupation, etc. But the cases

in which she was right were counterbalanced by those in which she was

wrong. It does not appear that Hélène’s telepathic relations with other

persons are closer than with me, and among the cases known to me there

is not one that deserves the trouble of being related. An exception

must, however, be made on behalf of a M. Balmès (pseudonym), who was

for some time employed in the same business house as Mlle. Smith, and

concerning whom she had several really curious phenomena. This M.

Balmès was himself “a sensitive medium” of a very nervous and vibrating

nature. He was working in the story above that of Hélène, and stopped

sometimes to talk concerning spiritism with her. Their relations, which

they did not extend beyond the office, ended there. There never seemed

to be any personal sympathy or special affinity between them, and it is

not known how to account for the telepathic bond that seemed to exist

between them. The following are examples:

1. One morning M. Balmès lent a newspaper to Hélène in which there was

an article on spiritism. He himself had received this paper from one

of his friends, M. X., a Frenchman who had been in Geneva for some

three weeks only and who did not know Hélène even by name. This M. X.

had marked the interesting article in red and had added on the margin

an annotation in black. During her noon meal at home Hélène read the

article rapidly, but for lack of time did not read the annotation

marked in black. Having returned to her office she began again to work.

However, at a quarter-past three her eyes fell on the annotation of the

paper, and as she was taking up her pen to make some calculation in

her note-book, “I do not know,” she wrote to me, “either how or why I

began to draw on this writing-tablet the head of a man entirely unknown

to me. At the same time I heard the voice of a man, of a high, clear,

and harmonious quality, but unfortunately I could not understand the

words. A great desire came over me to run and show this drawing to M.

Balmès. He examined it, and seemed astonished, for the head drawn in

ink was no other than that of his friend who had lent him the paper

marked in pencil. The voice and the French accent were, as it seems,

entirely correct also. How was it that at the sight of an annotation I

found myself in communication with a stranger? M. Balmès, in presence

of this curious phenomenon, hastened that very evening to his friend

and learned that at the time when I drew his portrait there was a very

serious discussion in progress concerning him (M. Balmès) between M. X.

and other persons.”

Strictly speaking, this case may be normally explained by supposing:

First, that Mlle. Smith, without consciously noticing or remembering

him, had seen M. X. during his short stay in Geneva, walking in the

street with M. Balmès, and that the paper, which she knew had been lent

to M. Balmès by one of his friends, had, by means of a subconscious

induction, awakened the latent memory of the face and voice of the

stranger whom she had seen with him. Secondly, that there is but a

fortuitous coincidence in the fact that M. X. spoke of M. Balmès at

precisely the hour when Hélène traced the face and heard the voice of

the aforesaid M. X. in an access of automatism, set free at the sight

of his annotation on the paper.

In the telepathic hypothesis, on the contrary, the incident would

have been explained somewhat as follows: The conversation of M.

X. concerning M. Balmès (which was, as it appears, of an excited

nature) had telepathically impressed the latter and awakened in him

subliminally the remembrance of M. X. M. Balmès, in his turn, without

consciously suspecting it, had transmitted this remembrance to Mlle.

Smith, who was already predisposed to suggestion on that day by the

loan of the paper, and with whom the said remembrance broke forth into

a graphic, auditive, and impulsive (the desire of showing her drawing

to M. Balmès) automatism. The subconscious strata of M. Balmès had thus

served as a link between M. X. and Mlle. Smith.

2. “Some eight days after the preceding case, being a few minutes

after noon in an open street-car, I saw before me this same M. Balmès

talking to a lady in a room apparently close to the street-car. The

picture was not very clear. A kind of mist seemed to extend over the

whole, which was, however, not strong enough to hide from me the

personages. M. Balmès, especially, was quite recognizable, and his

somewhat subdued voice made me overhear these words: ‘It is very

curious, extraordinary.’ Then I felt a sudden, violent commotion, and

the picture vanished at the same time. Soon I found myself again riding

in the street-car, and, according to the progress which it had made, I

understood that the vision had lasted but three minutes at the most.

Notice must be taken of the fact that during these few minutes I did

not lose for a single moment the consciousness of my situation; I knew

and felt that I was riding home, as I was in the habit of doing each

day, and I felt entirely like myself, without the slightest mental

disturbance.

“Two hours later I went up to M. Balmès. Approaching him frankly—yes,

even a little abruptly—I said to him: ‘Were you satisfied with the

short visit you made a few minutes after twelve, and would it be

indiscreet to ask what you found so _curious_, so _extraordinary_?’ He

seemed confused, astonished, pretended even to be vexed, and looked

as if he wished to ask me by what right I permitted myself to control

his actions. This movement of indignation passed as quickly as it

came, to give way to a sentiment of the greatest curiosity. He made

me tell him in detail my vision, and confessed to me that he really

had gone at noon to call upon a lady, and that they had discussed the

incident about the newspaper. He had really pronounced the words that

I had heard: ‘It is curious, extraordinary,’ and, strange to say, I

also learned that at the end of these words a violent ringing of the

bell had been heard, and that the conversation between M. Balmès and

his friend had suddenly come to an end by the arrival of a visitor.

The commotion felt by me was, therefore, nothing more than the violent

ringing of the bell, which, putting an end to the conversation, had

also put an end to my vision.”

3. At the beginning of a seance one Sunday afternoon at a quarter to

four, I handed to Hélène a glass ball, of the kind used for developing

clairvoyance by means of gazing into a crystal. Shortly afterwards she

saw in it M. Balmès and his friend, and above their heads an isolated

pistol, but which seemed to have nothing to do with them. She told

me then that M. Balmès had received the day before at his office a

telegram which very much upset him, and which obliged him to leave

Geneva that very evening for S. She seemed to apprehend some misfortune

about to befall M. Balmès, but soon fell asleep. By his digital

dictations Leopold tells us that he sent her to sleep to save her some

painful visions seen in the crystal, and that she, Hélène, has a

mediumistic consciousness in regard to all that is passing at S., and

that the pistol is connected with M. Balmès. It was impossible to learn

more, and the remainder of the seance was taken up with other matters.

M. Balmès, who returned to Geneva on the following Monday, and whom

I saw the same evening, was very much struck with Hélène’s vision,

for, on Sunday afternoon he really took part in a scene which came

near being tragic, and in the course of which his friend X. had

offered him a pistol which he always carried with him. Mlle. Smith

and M. Balmès did not hesitate to see in this coincidence a highly

characterized supernormal phenomenon. This case offers, however, some

difficulty—viz., that the incident of the pistol at S. did not take

place till more than two hours after Hélène’s visions, and that M.

Balmès, as he affirms, had no premonition of the affair at the time

when Hélène had her vision. It follows from this that there was a

kind of anticipated telepathy, a premonition experienced by another

than the interested principal, and this raises the great question of

the supernormal knowledge of future events. I find it easier to admit

that, although M. Balmès did not consciously foresee the incident of

the pistol, he foresaw subconsciously the event, and that this idea

passed telepathically to Hélène. Perhaps this case might be explained

without having recourse to the supernormal at all. Mlle. Smith,

knowing M. Balmès’ character, and up to a certain point his personal

circumstances, having been present the evening before when M. Balmès

received the telegram, and foreseeing (as she said at the seance), the

gravity of the situation, could easily imagine the intervention of a

fire-arm in the affair. Besides, no detail of the vision indicates that

the pistol seen in the glass ball corresponds to that of M. X.

How far the delicate sense of probabilities can go, and how often

spontaneous inferences, with people of a quick imagination, are

correct, one never knows. Undoubtedly we often see a supernormal

connection where there is, in reality, only a striking coincidence, due

to a happy divination and prevision, which is very natural. I ought

to add that this manner of evicting the supernormal and reducing the

vision of the pistol to a mere creation of the subliminal fantasy,

seems inadmissible to Hélène, who remains absolutely certain that this

was a convincing case of telepathy.

The above example, 2, which is the best of all, in my opinion, is still

not irreproachable.

IV. LUCIDITY

All the facts of lucidity (clairvoyance, second-sight, etc.) which are

attributed to Mlle. Smith may be explained by telepathic impressions

proceeding from living persons. This means that I not only admit

from the start the _possibility_ of such phenomena by virtue of the

“Principle of Hamlet,” but, since telepathy is not, in my opinion,

anything very strange, I shall feel no subjective difficulty in

accepting the reality of Hélène’s supernormal intuitions, provided

that they present some serious guarantee of authenticity, and do not

explain themselves still more simply by normal and ordinary processes.

Leopold, who appears in almost all of these veridical messages—whether

he recognizes himself as the author or whether he accompanies simply by

his presence their manifestation through Hélène—has never deigned to

grant me one under entirely satisfactory conditions, and he censures

my insistence as vain and puerile curiosity. As to the innumerable

phenomena with which others more fortunate than myself have been

gratified, they have always offered this singularity: when they

appeared to be really of a nature calculated to furnish a decisive and

convincing proof as to their supernormal origin, I never succeeded in

obtaining a written, precise, and circumstantial account, but only

uncertain and incomplete tales, too intimate and too personal to be

divulged by those interested in them; and, again, when my friends were

quite willing to write out a detailed account and to answer to my

demand for exact information, the fact reduced itself to such a small

matter that it was beyond my power to see anything of the supernormal

in it.

Taking everything into consideration, I am inclined to believe that

Mlle. Smith, in truth, possesses real phenomena of clairvoyance, not,

however, passing beyond the possible limits of telepathy; only, in

order that they may be produced, it is necessary that Leopold—that is

to say, the special psychic state of Hélène which is necessary for the

reception and externalization of these telepathic impressions—be aided

from the outside by the influence of certain favorable temperaments,

more frequently met with among convinced spiritists than among persons

who are normal, and that he be not impeded, on the other hand, by the

paralyzing presence of hostile temperaments, such as that of a critical

observer. It is greatly to be regretted that the naïve believers who

inspire and succeed in obtaining magnificent phenomena of lucidity

usually care so little for the desiderata of science, and, above all,

refuse to submit themselves to an examination which might explain the

phenomena in a natural manner; while the investigators in search of

“convincing” proofs are not inspiring and obtain almost nothing.

However it may be, I shall give a few examples of Mlle. Smith’s proofs

of lucidity, which are not very varied, and can be divided into the

three categories of the medical prescriptions and diagnoses, of lost

objects found again, and of retrocognitions of events more or less

remote.

1. _Medical Consultations._—In promising specimens of extraordinary

facts of this kind I have gone too far. Many such have been told me—as,

for instance, Leopold dictating an unknown and complicated recipe

of a hair tonic for a gentleman living abroad, a single bottle of

which was sufficient to bring forth a full growth of hair on a head

which had become bald before middle age; or, again, Leopold, being

consulted about the health of a lady living at a great distance from

Geneva, revealing both the veridical nature of her illness, which was

unknown till then to her physicians, and its origin, which was due

to certain unsuspected but perfectly true incidents connected with

her childhood, and, finally, the treatment, which was crowned with

success. But the absence of written testimony and precise information

as to the concomitant circumstances of these marvellous cures reduce

them to the rank of amusing stories, the value of which cannot

positively be estimated. As to better-attested episodes, it is true

I have been able to obtain authentic stories, but they are those in

which the probability of a supernormal element has been reduced to a

minimum—imperceptible to me. I will cite but one case.

M. and Mme. G. having invited Mlle. Smith during the month of August

to pass a day with them in the country, a few leagues distant from

Geneva, took advantage of the visit to hold a seance in order to

consult Leopold on the health of one of their children. I will tell the

incident from a written account sent me by Mme. G. soon afterwards:

“Our little girl was suffering from anæmia, and fell frequently into a

state of weakness, in spite of intervals of improvement. Dr. d’Espine

had been recommended to us for the time of our return to Geneva. The

medium [Mlle. Smith] knew nothing of this; we had taken the precaution

to keep it from her.” The seance begins with a few kind words from

Leopold, whom M. G. then asks whether he would do well in consulting

Dr. d’Espine. “_And I_,” replied Leopold, “_can I do nothing for you?

Ungrateful people!_” But when he was asked to indicate some treatment,

he replied: “_Wait till your return to Geneva._” Then, upon being asked

whether an egg mixed with brandy would be good for the child, he

replied that the egg would be good, but the brandy was not necessary

in her case. Then he recommended that the child be taken for an hour’s

walk in the open air every day. As to the prescription relating to her

food, he repeated: “_I told you to wait till your return to Geneva._”

On their return to Geneva in the middle of September, M. and Mme. G.

held a second seance. This time Leopold was more exact; he advised:

“_Not too much milk, but rather a few glasses of good pure wine at each

meal._” Then he added: “_Treat the anæmia first and you will triumph

over the throat trouble, which would finally weaken her too much. Her

blood is so weak that the least cold, the slightest emotion, I will

go so far as to say that the expectation of a pleasure even, would be

sufficient to bring the angina to a crisis. You ought to have foreseen

that._” “Leopold,” M. G. notes here, “has enabled us to put our finger

upon such of the details as we did not know how to explain. At each

sentence my wife and I looked at each other with stupefaction.” Leopold

ordered also many green vegetables, warm salt-water douches of three

minutes’ duration in the evening, and: “_The principal thing now is

five drops of iron in half a glass of water twice a day before the

meal. Do this and you will see the result in a month._” In two weeks’

time the little girl was hardly recognizable.

I have cited this case because it is among those that have most struck

M. and Mme. G., and upon which they build their conviction of the

independent existence and supernormal knowledge of Leopold, and because

it shows how little is needed to kindle the faith among spiritists.

I forgot to say that the G. family was well known by Mlle. Smith, and

that during the whole winter and the preceding spring she had held

weekly seances at their home. There is but one thing that astonishes

me, and that is, that Leopold, at the time of the first improvised

consultation, should have been taken unawares up to the point of

postponing his orders until later, and adhering to such commonplace

things as a walk in the open air and the suppression of brandy. In the

second seance one sees the effect of a month’s incubation. Leopold

has had time to recover in Hélène’s memory the remembrance concerning

the little girl who was anæmic and subject to sore throat; also the

prescription which, in the given case, surely proved most efficacious,

but which hardly denotes a supernormal knowledge. One does not even

need here telepathy to explain messages which are amply accounted for

by the subconscious functions of Mlle. Smith’s ordinary faculties.

Examples of this kind, drawn from Mlle. Smith’s mediumship, might

be almost indefinitely multiplied; but _cui bono_? Once more, I do

not claim that Leopold has never given any medical consultation

surpassing Hélène’s latent knowledge and implying supernormal powers

of clairvoyance. I only say that I have not yet succeeded in finding a

single case where the proofs reached the height of that conclusion.

2. _Objects Recovered._—I do not know any case in which Mlle. Smith

has indicated the situation of an object which had been hidden, and as

to the location of which she could have had no information through

natural channels. All her discoveries consist, so far as I have been

able to judge, in the return, under a spiritistic and with a dramatic

aspect, of memories either simply forgotten or properly subliminal,

which depended upon the incidents concerned having first belonged to

the ordinary consciousness, or their having always escaped it and

having been from their origin registered in the subconsciousness.

These are facts of cryptomnesia pure and simple—_i. e._, explicable by

a normal psychological process very common in its essence, while the

picturesque embellishments added by the mediumistic imagination give

to these teleological automatisms a certain mysterious and supernormal

appearance which in other surroundings would certainly create for

Hélène—or rather for Leopold—a place alongside St. Anthony of Padua.

I confine myself to two examples. Mlle. Smith being charged with the

duty of making ready the merchandise sent out from her department, was

handed a telegram one day from a customer who asked that four yards of

No. 13,459 be despatched to him immediately. “This brief order,” said

Hélène, “was not calculated to hasten the forwarding of the goods. How

could I readily find this No. 13,459, in the midst of six or seven

thousand others in the store? Pondering, telegram in hand, I was

wondering how I could find it, when a voice outside of but very near me

said to me: ‘_Not there, but here_,’ and involuntarily I turned round,

without knowing why, and my hand laid itself mechanically on a piece of

goods which I drew towards me, and which actually bore the No. 13,459.”

It is not necessary to be a medium to know by experience these happy

reminiscences or inspirations which sometimes come to free us from

embarrassment by shining forth like a light at an opportune moment;

but that which in the case of ordinary persons remains in the feeble

condition of an idea or internal image, among mediumistic temperaments

assumes readily the fixed and vivid form of an hallucination. Instead

of simply “suddenly recollecting” in the case of the No. 13,459, as

would have happened to any one else, Hélène hears an exterior voice,

and perceives her hand moving involuntarily in a given direction. It is

noted that this automatism assumed an auditive and motor form which is

the pendant of the vocal and visual automatism which I have referred to

on pp. 58-59. It is to this same class of facts, well known and almost

common to-day, that the following example likewise belongs, although

the subliminal imagination had surrounded it with the form of an

intervention on the part of Leopold.

One Sunday evening, on returning home, Mlle. Smith noticed that she

had lost a small breastpin which had been fastened to her corsage, and

which she greatly valued as a souvenir. The following day she returned

to look for it where she had been the evening before, but in vain,

and a notice which she caused to be inserted in the “lost” columns of

a daily newspaper gave no result. Here I leave the narration of the

story to her: “Persuaded that my pin was really lost, I did my best

to think no more about it, but this was a difficult matter, since one

night I was awakened suddenly by three raps struck against my bed.

Somewhat frightened, I looked around, but saw nothing. I tried to go

to sleep, but again many raps were struck, this time near my head. I

seated myself on my bed (I was agitated), trying to discover what was

happening, and hardly had I seated myself when I saw a hand shaking my

lost breastpin before my eyes. This vision lasted only a minute, but

that was long enough for it to make a deep impression upon me.”

The following Tuesday evening (ten days after the loss of the trinket)

Hélène held a seance at the house of M. Cuendet, at which two other

persons were also present. She told of the loss of her pin and the

curious vision above described; then all seated themselves at the

table. After a typtological dictation upon an altogether different

subject, the following incident occurred, the account of which I have

borrowed from notes taken by M. Cuendet (it was in 1894, and I only

knew Mlle. Smith by reputation at the time):

“We notice that from the beginning of the seance Mlle. Smith describes

to us our familiar spirit [Leopold] as holding a lantern in his

hand. Why? The table is shaken anew, about to tell us something. The

following is then dictated to us by it: ‘_Arise. Take a lantern. Extend

your walk to the Municipal Building. Take the path which crosses the

meadow, and which ends at the Street of the Baths. In the middle of the

path, to the left, a few yards distant, a block of white stone will be

found. Starting from the block of stone, only one yard away from it,

towards the setting sun, the pin so much sought for will be found. Go,

I accompany you._’

“I copy _verbatim_ this communication, which was obtained letter by

letter. I add nothing, take nothing from it. General stupefaction! We

hesitate! Finally, we all four rise, we light a lantern and set out. It

was twenty minutes to ten o’clock.

“We walk slowly; we arrive at the Municipal Building, and take the

path which leads from it to the Street of the Baths. In the middle,

to the left, some yards distant, we, in fact, find the block of stone

indicated. We search for a moment without result, and begin to fear

we shall find nothing. Finally, towards the setting sun, a yard from

the block of stone, I find buried in the grass, covered with sand, and

consequently badly soiled, the pin indicated.

“Some one had evidently stepped on it, as it was slightly bent. Mlle.

Smith uttered an exclamation of surprise, and we all four returned to

the house, to recover from our very natural emotion.”

This case has remained in the eyes of Mlle. Smith and her spiritistic

friends as one of the most striking and irrefragible proofs of the

objective and independent reality of Leopold. For the psychologist it

constitutes a very beautiful and interesting example of cryptomnesia,

well worthy to figure among the very instructive cases collected by

Mr. Myers, in which the memory of a subliminal perception (_i. e._,

registered immediately without striking the normal personality) appears

as a revelation in a dream of ordinary sleep, or under some other

equivalent form of automatism. Here is “Leopold”—the subconsciousness

of Hélène—who, having felt the pin fall and noticed where it rolled,

first manifested himself in a passing nocturnal vision, and then took

advantage of the next spiritistic gathering to restore completely her

latent memories. It is not necessary to see anything intentional in

this restitution, the simple play of association of ideas sufficing

to explain that the memory of the situation of the pin stored up in

a subliminal stratum and stimulated by a desire to recover the lost

object might have mechanically reappeared at the moment of the seance,

thanks to mediumistic autohypnotization, and gushed forth under

the dramatic form, naturally appropriate to the environment, of an

apparently supernormal piece of information furnished by Leopold.

3. _Retrocognitions._—The apparently supernormal revelations in regard

to the past, furnished at the seances of Mlle. Smith, can be divided

into two groups—namely, whether they concern universal history, or deal

with private interests relative to the families of the sitters.

First: The messages of the first group abound, under the form of

visions accompanied by typtological explanations, in Hélène’s seances

of 1894, but have almost wholly come to an end since I made her

acquaintance, and I have never been witness of any. According to the

reports which I have seen, all these retrocognitions have reference to

the history of Protestantism, or that of the French Revolution—_i. e._,

to two classes of facts which are among the best known in France to-day.

It goes without saying that the firmly convinced spiritistic group in

which these messages were received have never had a doubt that the

apparitions which Hélène perceived were the veritable personages they

asserted themselves to be, habited as they were in the costume of the

period to which they belonged, communicating by means of the table, and

speaking in the first person (except when Leopold acted as showman and

dictated in his own name the explanations asked for).

But as the content of these messages is always the _verbatim_

reproduction or almost exact equivalent of information which is to be

found in historical and biographical dictionaries, I cannot avoid being

inclined to the impression that we here are concerned with common facts

of cryptomnesia.

If the intervention of the supernormal be absolutely insisted upon in

this case, it can only be manifested under the form of a telepathic

transmission from the sitters to the medium. In favor of that

supposition two facts may be urged: first, that Mlle. Smith passed

in that group as devoid of all historical knowledge, and was very

much surprised at these revelations of facts totally unknown to her;

secondly, that there were regularly in attendance at these seances one

or more members of the teaching body, who by their general education

possessed, without any doubt whatever, either consciously or in a

latent manner, all the historical knowledge, which, after all, was not

very great, displayed by Leopold.

But these arguments are not of much weight in my opinion. To begin with

the second: as the sitters had their hands on the table at the same

time with the medium, according to the spiritistic custom, they could

themselves, without any telepathy, properly speaking, and simply by

their slight, unconscious muscular contractions, have directed, unknown

to themselves, the movements of that piece of furniture, Mlle. Smith

only augmenting these shocks proceeding from her neighbors.

As to the supposed ignorance of Mlle. Smith, it is not at all so great

as has been imagined, and the historical revelations obtained at her

seances do not in any degree surpass the level of that which she could

have absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, at school and in her

surroundings.

Moreover, the hypothesis which appears to me the most probable, and

on which I rest, is that the messages come essentially from Hélène

herself—I ought rather to say from her subliminal memory; that,

however, does not exclude a certain amount of co-operation on the

part of the sitters, whose conversation, on the one hand, and their

unconscious muscular action upon the table, on the other, have often

maintained and directed the course of the subconscious ideas of the

medium and the automatic unfolding of her latent memories.

Secondly: Retrocognition of family events, which are exhibited in

Mlle. Smith’s seances, have generally the savor of the unknown for the

sitters, from the fact that they concern incidents of the past which

have never been printed save in the memories of certain aged persons or

of a few lovers of local anecdotes.

I do not hesitate to see in these stories of other days, gushing forth

in visions and in dictations by the table in the course of Hélène’s

hemisomnambulisms, narratives heard in her childhood and long since

forgotten by her ordinary personality, but which reappear by the aid

of mediumistic autohypnotization, bringing the deepest strata to the

surface; the simple play of association, in an entirely natural manner,

then causes the memories relative to the families of the persons

present at the seance to be poured forth. There is nothing whatever of

the supernormal in all this, in spite of the dramatic form, the piquant

and unexpected art, the amusing embellishments, of which the subliminal

imagination bethinks itself—or I should rather say Leopold, in his rôle

of historiographer and scene-shifter of the past.

The judgment which I have pronounced is the result of a course of

inductive reasoning based on the retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith

concerning my own family. I trust it may be allowable for me to enter

upon some details designed to justify my opinion.

I note first that all these retrocognitions with which Leopold honored

me took place in the first six seances which I had with Hélène, after

which there has not been a single one in the whole five years which

have since elapsed. This argues in favor of a limited group of latent

memories, which my introduction to the seances set free, a sort of

subliminal sac or pocket which was emptied once for all on the first

occasions of my presence.

In the second place, this knowledge only concerns outside details,

susceptible of striking the attention of the gallery and of being

carried from mouth to mouth. Since family histories have no great

interest for the ordinary reader, I will confine myself to citing,

by way of example, the vision which so astonished me at my first

meeting with Hélène (p. 2), and which has already been published by M.

Lemaître. I reproduce his narrative, giving real names:

“The medium [Mlle. Smith] perceives a long trail of smoke, which

envelopes M. Flournoy. ‘A woman!’ cries the medium, and, a moment

after, ‘Two women ... quite pretty, brunettes ... both are in bridal

toilet!... This concerns you, M. Flournoy!’ [The table approves by a

rap.] They remain motionless; they have white flowers in their hair and

resemble each other a little; their eyes, like their hair, are black,

or, at all events, very dark. The one in the corner appears under two

different aspects; under both forms she is young—perhaps twenty-five

years old; on the one hand she remains with the appearance already

described (bridal toilet), and on the other she appears very luminous

in a great space, a little more slender of visage, and surrounded by

a number of pretty children, in the midst of whom she appears very

happy; her happiness manifests itself by her expression, but still more

in her surroundings. Both women seem ready to be married. The medium

then hears a name, which at first escapes her, then returns little by

little. ‘=An!... An!... Dan ... Ran ... Dandi ... Dandiran!=’

“‘To which of these two women does this name belong?’ demands M.

Flournoy—‘to the one you see under two aspects, or to the other?’

Answer: ‘To the one who is presented under two forms.’ The medium does

not see the other woman as distinctly as the first, but all at once

distinguishes a tall man by her side, who only passes by, when the

table dictates: ‘I am his sister; we will return!’ after which the

scene changes and we pass to another subject.”

This vision revolves altogether around the facts that my mother and her

sister were married on the same day; that they were brunettes, quite

pretty, and looked alike; that my father was tall; that my aunt married

M. Dandiran and died while still young, without children; all matters

which should have been of public notoriety in a small city like Geneva.

But the same is true of all the other retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith;

their content is always veridical, but at the same time is also such as

could not fail to be known to a host of people. This causes me to doubt

whether there is at the base of these phenomena a really supernormal

faculty of retrocognition.

A third striking feature is, that all Hélène’s retrocognitions

concerning me are relative to the family of my mother, and are

connected with two quite precise and brief periods, the first of which

is many years previous to Mlle. Smith’s birth. This limitation as to

times and persons seems to me significant.

To clear up the matter, if possible, I addressed myself to the last

representative of the present generation of my family, Professor

Dandiran, of Lausanne, and laid the case before him. He did not

immediately remember whether my grandparents Claparède had any

communication, nearly half a century before, with the Smith family,

but on the following day he wrote me that he distinctly recalled a

young woman of that name in whom his mother and aunt had been greatly

interested, and who had been employed by them as a dressmaker previous

to her marriage to a Hungarian.

One understands that I had a reason for not addressing myself first to

Mme. Smith herself; but I must do her the justice to state that when I

questioned her in turn, she very obligingly gave me all the information

I desired, and which was in perfect accord with the statements of M.

Dandiran.

Without entering into details wearisome to the reader, it will be

sufficient for me to state that all the retrocognitions in which I

was involved were connected with two periods in which Mme. Smith had

relations with my mother’s family, periods separated by an interval

during which these relations were suspended by the fact of M. and Mme.

Smith making a sojourn of several years in a foreign country. It would

have been possible for Hélène to know directly the facts of the second

period, at which time she was about five or six years of age. As to the

first period, which was many years prior to her birth (the time of the

double marriage of my mother and her sister in 1853), it is evident

that Mme. Smith has had many opportunities at a later date to narrate

these facts to her daughter; and it would have been altogether natural

for her to have done so.

_Ab uno disce omnes._ Although I am less familiar with the

retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith concerning other families, everything

contributes to prove to me that they are explicable in the same

manner. In two cases, at least, proof has been obtained that the

mother of Mlle. Smith was found to have been in direct and personal

communication with the families concerned, exactly as was the case

with my grandparents, and this circumstance is sufficient to account

for the knowledge, very astonishing at first sight, contained in the

revelations of Leopold.

To sum up—pure cryptomnesia seems to me to furnish a sufficient and

adequate explanation for Hélène’s retrocognitions, both as to family

events as well as historic facts.

And no more in this domain of knowledge of the past than in those of

recovered objects and medical consultations have I thus far succeeded

in discovering in her the least serious indication of supernormal

faculties.

V. INCARNATIONS AND SPIRIT MESSAGES

The time having arrived to speak of spiritism, I feel ill at ease and

embarrassed by my surroundings, for divers reasons, some of which

I will set forth, without, however, endeavoring to explain them at

length, since my aim is simply, as has been seen above (p. 373), to

indicate my subjective ideas as to the standing of that doctrine, in

order that the reader may share, if he pleases, in my appreciation of

the phenomena of this class presented by Mlle. Smith. 1 confess, in

the first place, that spiritism is a subject which has the faculty of

arousing my mirth, and develops a spirit of playfulness. I really do

not know why this should be the case, since that which concerns the

dead and the great beyond ought not to be a matter for joking. Perhaps

the cause is to be found in the nature of the intermediaries, and

the character of the messages with which the spirits are accustomed

to favor us. However it may be, I have ordinarily much difficulty in

preserving a serious countenance in the presence of manifestations of

“disincarnates.”

But I reproach myself bitterly with this facetious humor when I reflect

that it is indulged in at the expense of conceptions and beliefs

which supported the first steps of our race on its painful ascent,

the survival or atavic reapparition of which is yet, even to-day, a

source of moral strength, of happy certitude, of supreme consolation

for a host of my contemporaries, many of whom I have learned to know,

and who, moreover, inspire me with respect as well as admiration by

their uprightness of life, their nobility of character, the purity and

elevation of their sentiments.

In the second place, I have often had the deceptive experience that,

when it comes to a discussion of it, spiritism possesses a great

advantage for its defenders, but which is most inconvenient for those

who would investigate it closely—of being fugitive and incapable of

being grasped on account of the fact of its double nature—a science

and religion at the same time—which never permits it to be wholly and

entirely the one or the other.

When we come to analyze and criticise, according to strict scientific

methods, the positive facts upon which it pretends to base its

fundamental argument —the reality of communication with the spirits

of the departed, through the intervention of mediums—as soon as the

adepts begin to unpack for you their stock of theories (I was about

to say their stock theories!) they are astonished at the lack of

ideal on the part of these terrible materialist-scientists, who are

intent upon searching for the “hidden rat” in the demonstrations of

spiritism, instead of falling on their knees before the splendor of its

revelations.

A third cause of my uneasiness whenever obliged to approach this

subject is the fear of being misunderstood or misinterpreted, thanks to

the naïve and simple classification which prevails in the environments

which the “disincarnates” frequent.

Spiritism or materialism—these are the brutal alternatives to which one

finds himself driven in spite of himself. If you do not admit that the

spirits of the dead reveal themselves by raps on the table or visions

of the mediums, you are, therefore, a materialist! If you do not

believe that the destiny of the human personality is terminated at the

grave, you are a spiritist! This mode of nomenclature and labelling is

surely puerile. Moreover, no one willingly consents to be thrust into

the company of those with whom, no matter how honorable they may be, he

is not in sympathy.

I also wish to state that I absolutely repudiate the above alternative.

There is greater variety of choice in the cabinet of human thought. In

the last century, for example, outside the spiritism of Swedenborg and

the materialism of Baron d’Holbach, there was yet the criticism of one

named Kant, who made some noise in the world and whose vogue is even

now not absolutely extinct. I should not fear to range myself among his

followers. And in our own times, if it was necessary for me to choose

between Büchner and Allan Kardec, as the spiritist seems sometimes to

believe, I would not hesitate to choose—in favor of M. Renouvier, or my

deceased compatriot Charles Secrétan.

I hold to no other philosophy, and it suffices me, in order to repulse

the whole of materialism and spiritism, to be the disciple—unworthy,

but convinced—of the Nazarene, who replied to the materialists of his

time, not by spiritistic evocations, but by the simple words, “God is

not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live unto Him.” I am

not sure whether this argument convinced the Sadducees, but it pleases

me by its simplicity, and I have no desire for any other.

If God exists—I should say, if the supreme reality is not the

unconscious and blind force-substance of conventional monism, but that

sovereign personality (or _supra_ personality) which in the clear

consciousness of Christ made its paternal presence to be continually

felt—if God exists, it is not, apparently, in order to play the rôle of

a perpetual undertaker of funereal pomp that he consents to exist, or

to allow to fall forever into nothingness the poor creatures who wait

upon Him.

They may disappear from before our eyes, but they do not disappear from

before His; for they are dead to us, but for Him, and, consequently,

in actual reality, they are living. Otherwise He would not be God.

This is all I need. I see nothing clearly, it is true, as to the

concrete conditions of that other existence, of which the manner even,

if it were revealed to me, would probably remain a sealed book to my

intelligence, hampered by the bonds of space and time. But of what

importance is it? That which I am ignorant of, God knows; and while

waiting for Him to call me to rejoin those who have preceded me, He

is great enough for me to leave to Him the mysterious fate of our

personalities. “Since all live unto Him,” I ask no more than that, and

as for the pretended demonstrations of spiritism, true or false, I do

not care a farthing.

Or I would prefer them to be false. And if they are true, if it is

actually a law of nature that during long years to come, after this

terrestrial existence, we must drag ourselves miserably from table to

table and medium to medium, the best of us (not to speak of the others)

displaying without shame the proofs of our mental decrepitude in

pitiable nonsense and wretched verses—oh, so much the worse!

It is one misery and shame the more added to all those of which this

satanic world is made up, a new calamity coming to crown the physical

and moral ills of a world against which the Christian continually

protests as he repeats “_Thy kingdom come_,” an additional scandal

condemned to disappear when “His kingdom shall have come.”

There is nothing in common between the empirical, spatial, and temporal

survivals which spiritism pretends to establish and that “eternal life”

proclaimed by the Prophet of Nazareth. These things, said Pascal, are

not of the same order. That is why I am not a spiritist.

Here rises a last point, which worries me when I ought to speak my

mind in regard to spiritism in the presence of spiritists. “You do

not personally hold,” it has been often objected to me, “to these

communications of the living with those who have gone before us into

the great unknown, and you cry out against spiritistic demonstrations.

It is all very well for you, who are a mystic, and to whom the

existence of God in Jesus Christ seems a sufficient guarantee of the

destinies of human personality and its ultimate palingenesis. But

every one has not the same temperament, and does not take so blithely

his ignorance of the kind of life which awaits him beyond the tomb.

To believe in God, and to abandon to Him with closed eyes the fate of

those who leave us, carrying away with them the best portions of our

being, is all very well, but it is very difficult. The times of the

psalmist who could say ‘_Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him_’

are no more; and as for Christ, He was certainly a very remarkable

medium, but His simple affirmation would scarcely be taken to-day for

gospel words. The solid and the palpable are necessary to the ‘fools’

of our epoch. They are not capable of admitting a higher world than

that of sense, unless they are enabled to touch it with their finger

by means of messages and the return of the dead themselves. Whence it

results that every attack, every hostile attitude towards spiritism

tends directly to break down the only rampart which might henceforth

be efficacious against materialism and its disastrous consequences

—infidelity, egotism, vice, despair, suicide, and, finally, the

destruction and annihilation of the entire social organism. On the

other hand, when science at length shall recognize and consecrate

spiritism officially, thereupon, simultaneously with the tangible

certainty of another life, courage and strength will return to the

hearts of individuals, devotion and all virtues will begin to flourish

once again, and an elevated humanity will soon see heaven descend upon

the earth, thanks to the connection established and daily practised

between the living and the spirits of the dead.”

My embarrassment is easily seen. On the one hand, I do not in any way

admit the foregoing objection. I do not think that the gospel has had

its day or is above the reach of “fools,” since it was for them that

its author designed it. I believe, on the contrary, that the Christian

faith, the faith of Christ or faith in Christ, is, in its inmost

essence, a psychological reality, a personal experience accessible to

the most humble, a fact of consciousness which will survive when all

theological systems shall have been forgotten and all the clergy shall

have been abolished. That vital and regenerating power will save our

civilization (if anything can save it) by means of the individuals

whom it shall have regenerated, without owing anything to spiritistic

theories or practices. Inversely, I do not share the optimism of those

who would make of spiritism a social panacea, and who imagine that when

the moral consciousness on the one side and the religious consciousness

on the other have ceased to make themselves heard, the messages of the

“disincarnates” will have better success. (“If they hear not Moses and

the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the

dead.”)

But, on the other hand, there are individual cases which are

interesting and which certainly merit consideration. And for millions,

and by a hundred different titles—religious belief, moral consolation,

solemn and mysterious rites, old habit, etc.—spiritism is to-day the

pivot around which existence turns, and also its only support; would

not the destruction of it, then, be productive of more harm than good,

and would it not be better to let matters take their course? Why

prevent man from delighting in dreams, if he so pleases?

_All things are possible_, and was it not of the revenants that Hamlet

was thinking in his celebrated apostrophe, from which I have taken this

principle?

These are the things which perplex me: while waiting to find a way

out of them, and by way of summing up, it seems to me indispensable

to separate distinctly spiritism-religion, which is an assemblage

of beliefs and practices dear to many, from spiritism-science, a

simple hypothesis designed to explain certain phenomena arising from

observation. The first tells me nothing, or rather it amuses me or

repels me according to circumstances; but the more elevated sentiments,

and those worthy of all respect, which it inspires in its adepts,

impose upon me the duty of passing it by and ignoring it here. The

second, on the contrary, does not fail to interest me, as it does all

who are curious in regard to natural phenomena.

For the question, Do human or animal individualities continue to

intervene in an effective manner in the physical, physiological, or

psychological phenomena of this universe after the loss of their

corporeal and visible organism? is not an ordinary one. If there

are facts which peremptorily establish an affirmative answer, what

problems will arise, what an unexpected field of investigation will it

not open up to our experimental sciences! And even if the hypothesis

is false, how captivating the study of the singular phenomena which

have been able to give it birth, which simulate the return of the

dead to our observable world! It is understood, therefore, that, even

despoiled of all the emotional accessories in which it so easily wraps

itself in the heart and imagination of men, the empirical question of

immortality and spiritistic interventions, apparent or real, preserves

its scientific importance, and merits being discussed with the calm

serenity, independence, and strictness of analysis which belong to the

experimental method.

It goes without saying that, _à priori_, the hypothesis of _spirits_

to explain the phenomena of mediums has in it nothing of the

impossible or the absurd. It does not even necessarily contradict,

as is sometimes imagined, the directing principle of physiological

psychology—the psychological parallelism—which demands that every

mental phenomenon shall have a physical correlative. For, in spite

of our habit of considering the molecular or atomic phenomena of

the brain, the katabolism of the nerves, as the true concomitant of

conscious processes, it may well be—it is even very probable—that

these molecular movements do not constitute the ultimate physical term

immediately paralleling the mental world, but that the real physical

correlatives (spatial) of the (non-spatial) psychological phenomena

should be sought for in the vibrations of imponderable matter, the

ether, in which the ponderable atoms and molecules are plunged somewhat

like grains of dust in the atmosphere, in order to make a sensible

though somewhat inaccurate comparison.

The ethereal body, perispiritistic, astral, fluid, etc., of the

occultists, and of many thinkers who are not believers in occultism, is

only a notion scientifically absurd when it is made to be an equivocal

and cloudy intermediary between the soul and the body, an unassignable

_tertium quid_, a plastic mediator of which nothing is known as to

its being material or spiritual or something else. But conceived as

a system of movements of the ether, it contains nothing absolutely

anti-or extra-scientific in its nature; the connection between the

subjective facts of consciousness and the objective, material facts,

remains essentially the same whether one considers the material world

under the imponderable form of ether or under the ponderable form of

chemical atoms, of physical molecules, and of anatomical elements.

Nothing, then, would be radically opposed, from the point of view

of the natural sciences, to the existence of disincarnate spirits

wandering through space.

The foregoing will doubtless please my spiritistic friends. Here are

two facts which will please them less. First: I separate myself from

them when they pass prematurely from mere abstract possibilities to

the affirmation of actualities. Perhaps the outcome will prove them

right some day; perhaps in the near future, but we have not yet reached

that point. I freely admit that never have circumstances been so

favorable for the spiritistic doctrines as at present. The authentic

return of George Pelham and other deceased persons, through Mrs. Piper

entranced, as intermediary, seems to be admitted by so many acute

observers, the phenomena observed for fifteen years past in the case of

this incomparable medium are at times so marvellous and surrounded with

such solid scientific guarantees—the case is, in a word, so unheard of

and astounding in all respects, that those who are only acquainted with

it from a distance, by printed reports and oral narratives of immediate

witnesses, feel themselves in a poor position for formulating their

doubts and reservations upon this subject.

I fear, in the second place, for mediums and practical spiritists, that

when their hypothesis shall have been scientifically demonstrated the

result may be very different from that which they now imagine it will

be.

It might well happen that the cult of the table, mechanical writing,

seances, and all other mediumistic exercises, may receive their

death-blow from the official recognition of spirits by science.

Suppose, in fact, that contemporaneous researches should at last have

proved clearly that messages actually come from the disincarnate;

it has already followed from the same researches that in the most

favorable cases the veritable messages are very difficult to

distinguish from those which are not authentic. When people come to

understand that this sorting of messages is almost always beyond their

power, they will, perhaps, be put out of conceit with experiments in

which they have ninety-nine chances against one of being dupes of

themselves or others, and in which—a still more vexatious matter—if

they should even be so fortunate as to light upon the hundredth chance,

they would have no certain means of knowing it.

This subject, decidedly, is fatal to me. I lose myself in digressions

when discussing it—very useless they are, too, since the verdict which

the future will pronounce upon the theory of spirits, with or without

an ethereal body, matters little as far as the actual examination of

the messages furnished by Mlle. Smith is concerned. Even having become

scientifically verified, spiritism will never absolve us from bringing

to the analysis of the pretended communications less care and rigor

than while it was only an undemonstrated hypothesis; each particular

case will always demand to be scrutinized by itself, in order to make

the distinction between that which in all probability only arises from

many non-spiritistic causes, and the residue eventually proceeding from

the disincarnate.

I ought to state at the outset that, as far as Hélène’s mediumistic

phenomena are concerned, their careful analysis has not revealed

to me in them any evident vestige of the other world, not even of

traces of a telepathic transmission on the part of the living. I have

only succeeded in perceiving in them very beautiful and instructive

examples of the well-known tendency of the subliminal imagination

to reconstruct the deceased and to feign their presence, especially

when the favorable suggestions of the surrounding environment incites

them to do so. Not being infallible, and bearing in mind Hamlet’s

principle, I will guard myself well from affirming that these

subliminal imitations and simulacra are absolutely free from any

spirit collaboration; I content myself with repeating that I have

not discovered any, and that it seems to me in the highest degree

improbable, and with leaving it to others to demonstrate its reality,

if they think they are able to do so. Some examples taken from the

principal incarnations of Mlle. Smith will enable me to show after a

more concrete fashion my manner of regarding them.

1. _Case of Mlle. Vignier._—This case has no evidential value whatever,

since (as has been seen, p. 411), there were formerly relations

between the Vignier family and Mme. Smith which suffice to explain the

veridical knowledge manifested by Hélène in this incarnation.

I give an abridged recital of it, nevertheless, for the sake of

certain points of psychological interest. None of the spectators had

any suspicion of these relations at the time of this scene, which was

absolutely enigmatical to all of them.

In a seance at my house (on March 3, 1895, after a Hindoo vision,

described p. 280), Mlle. Smith saw an unknown lady appear, of whom she

gave the following description: “A nose bent and hooked like the beak

of an eagle; small gray eyes, very close together; a mouth with three

teeth only; a wicked smile, mocking expression; simple dress; a collar

not of the fashion of to-day; she draws near to this portrait,[30] and

gazes at it not ill-naturedly.”

The name of this person is asked, and the table (Leopold) commences to

spell: “_Mademoiselle_”—but refuses to go further, while Hélène sees

the apparition laughing, “with a sly air”; as the name is insisted on,

the table dictates: “_That does not concern you_,” then she begins to

jump and skip as though glad of an opportunity to mock us.

Presently Hélène falls asleep and enters into somnambulism; she leaves

the table and moves towards the portrait in question, before which she

remains fixed, completely incarnating the unknown lady of her vision.

I take down the portrait and place it in its frame upon an easy-chair;

immediately she kneels before it and contemplates it with affection;

then, taking the frame in her right hand, while the left, very much

agitated, plays with the cord, she ends, after many vain attempts, by

saying with a great stammering, “_J—j—je l’aimais b—b—beaucoup: je

n’aime pas l’autre—j—j—je ne l’ai jamais aimée l’autre—j’amais bien mon

neveu—adieu!—je le vois._” “I liked it very much: I do not like the

other one: I never liked the other one. I was very fond of my nephew.

Adieu! I see him.”

It was impossible to obtain any explanation of this incomprehensible

scene, until, having slipped a pencil and a writing-tablet into

Hélène’s hand, she scribbled feverishly, in a hand not her own, these

two words “_Mademoiselle Vignier_”; then she fell into a cataleptic

phase, from which she awakened without memory at the end of half an

hour.

This name of Vignier evoked in me far-off memories and vaguely recalled

to my mind the fact that Professor Dandiran (who had married, as we

have seen, my mother’s sister) had an ancestress of that name; was it

she who returned to express to me by means of Mlle. Smith her affection

for my mother, whose portrait she had so attentively regarded, and her

regrets, perhaps, that her nephew had not been preferred to my aunt?

On the other hand, M. Cuendet recollected a Mlle. Vignier who had been

a friend of his family, but who did not correspond at all with the

description of Hélène’s visions; he promised to obtain information,

and, in fact, wrote me on the following day: “Dear Sir,—Here is some

information on the subject of our seance of yesterday. This morning I

asked my mother: ‘Did you ever know another Mlle. Vignier than the one

who was your friend?’ After an instant of reflection: ‘Yes,’ replied

she; ‘I did know another. She was M. Dandiran’s aunt, of Lausanne, his

mother’s sister. She stammered, and was not always very good-natured;

she had three large teeth which projected, and a hooked nose.’ It is

useless to state to you that this was the first time I had heard her

spoken of.”

This information, coinciding with my remembrances and Hélène’s

vision, was later confirmed by M. Dandiran, who gave me the following

information: “Your aunt, Mlle. Vignier, who died about thirty-five

or forty years ago, loved her nephew very much; but she was made very

angry by his marriage, and the sentence uttered before my mother’s

portrait could not have referred to a difference of sentiment in

regard to the two sisters, for whom she always had an equal affection.

This sentence, on the contrary, is wonderfully well explained by the

following facts: My mother and her sister having become betrothed at

the same time, oil-paintings of both, of natural size, were made by

the same painter. These portraits were not of equal merit, and Mlle.

Vignier, who was herself something of an artist, always considered

that of my mother excellent, while the other, that of my aunt, she did

not like at all. Mlle. Vignier was very lively, and M. Dandiran finds

that the epithet ‘sly’ and the table dictating ‘_That does not concern

you_,’ very well express her character; she was, however, not at all

malicious or mocking at heart, but it is true that persons who knew

her slightly could easily have gained that impression of her. She had

three or four prominent teeth and stammered badly. In her photograph

she wears a white collar, has a nose long and arched, but the eyes are

rather large and wide apart. She always wore gold eye-glasses, of which

the medium did not speak.”

If the reader has had patience to read these details, he will have

remarked that the distinctive traits of Mlle. Vignier in the vision

and her incarnation by Hélène (the stammering, the teeth, the shape

of the nose, the ill-natured air) coincide with those spontaneously

indicated by M. Cuendet, who had known her slightly; and that while

M. Dandiran, better posted as to his aunt’s character, finds the note

of maliciousness or want of good-nature false, he acknowledges that

people outside of her family could have been deceived concerning it.

That is to say, has not the imagination of Mlle. Smith produced the

exterior memory, the description according to public notoriety, as it

were, which Mlle. Vignier left behind her? And if it be recalled that

at the period at which the two _fiancées_ were painted, Mme. Smith was

in communication with my maternal grandparents through the only sister

of Mlle. Vignier, there would be a probability amounting almost to a

certainty that these are contemporary remembrances, narrated some time

or other to Hélène by her mother, and which furnished the material for

this somnambulic personification.

In this example, to which I might add several analogous ones, the

apparent _spirit control_ is reduced to latent memories of recitals

formerly heard by Hélène.

In other cases, in which, for lack of information, it has hitherto been

impossible to discover this wholly natural filiation of facts, simple

analysis of the circumstances and of the content of the communications

indicates that, in all probability, they proceed from reminiscences

and impressions appertaining to living individuals much rather than

from disincarnates. In other words, these messages and personifications

too evidently reflect the point of view of the medium or other

living persons for it to be permissible to regard them as due to the

intervention of deceased persons, whose attitude towards them would,

in all probability, be wholly different.

2. _Case of Jean the Quarryman._—We have here to deal with a very

curious spirit message concerning Mme. Mirbel, in which I cannot fail

to see actual memories of the latter—transmitted I know not how (but

not necessarily in a supernormal manner) to Mlle. Smith—rather than an

authentic communication from a pretended disincarnate.

In a seance at which Mme. Mirbel was not present, Hélène had the

hallucination of a very strong odor of sulphur; then the vision of a

quarryman from the foot of Salève, in which she perceived and described

in detail an unknown man, who, by the dictations of the table, was

declared to be _Jean the Quarryman_, and charged the sitters with an

affectionate message for Mme. Mirbel. The latter, interrogated on the

following day, recognized in the very circumstantial description of

this man, and under all the features of Hélène’s vision, perfectly

correct facts connected with her childhood, and which had passed away

from the habitual circle of her ideas for more than twenty years. It

concerned a workman employed in her father’s quarries, and who, when

she was a little girl, had always evinced a special affection for her.

Let us suppose—in the absence of all proof that Mlle. Smith had ever

heard these remembrances of Mme. Mirbel’s childhood mentioned—that

recourse must be had to the supernormal in order to explain the case.

It still would not amount to an intervention of the deceased quarryman;

and M. Lemaître was perfectly right, in my opinion, in clinging to

telepathy and in hazarding the idea of an etheric influence, to which

Hélène was subjected by Mme. Mirbel, who at the hour of this seance

happened to be half a kilometre distant from the place of the seance.

Without going out of the domain of telepathy, I still would prefer

the hypothesis of a previous transmission in the course of one of the

seances at which Mme. Mirbel was present to that of telepathy at a

great distance at the time of the seance. It is, in fact, not contrary

to that which is believed to be known of mental suggestion, to admit

that Hélène’s subliminal, in the state of Esenale, for example, could

in some way draw from Mme. Mirbel’s subliminal the latent memories

which there lay buried for some time before being ready to reappear at

a seance at which she had some reason to think Mme. Mirbel would again

be present.

Whatever the mode of its transmission may have been, the content of

this vision seems to me to indicate clearly that it has its origin in

the personal memories of Mme. Mirbel rather than in the posthumous

memory of Jean the Quarryman. All the presumptions in this case are, to

my mind, in favor of a memory of Mme. Mirbel, and not of a veritable

communication from the other world. The personal aspect of the messages

supposed to be dictated by the quarryman do not constitute an obstacle

to my interpretation or a guarantee of spiritistic authenticity, this

aspect being the form that the automatisms habitually assume among

mediums.

3. _Case of the Syndic Chaumontet and of the Curé Burnier._—The

following case is the last. It is a very recent one, in which the

spiritistic and the cryptomnesiac hypotheses exist face to face,

apropos of signatures written by Mlle. Smith in somnambulism which do

not lack similarity to the authentic signatures of the deceased persons

to whom they are supposed to belong.

In a seance at my house (February 12, 1899), Mlle. Smith has a vision

of a village on a height covered with vines; by a rocky road, she sees

descending from it a little old man, who has the air of a _quasi_

gentleman; he wears shoes with buckles, a large felt hat, the collar

of his shirt is unstarched, and has points reaching up to his cheeks,

etc. A peasant in a blouse, whom he meets, makes reverences to him, as

to an important personage; they speak a patois which Hélène does not

understand She has the impression of being familiar with the village,

but vainly searches her memory to discover where she has seen it.

Presently the landscape fades away, and the little old man, now clothed

in white and in a luminous space (_i. e._, in his actual reality

of a disincarnate), appears to draw near to her. At this moment,

as she leans her right arm upon the table, Leopold dictates by the

index-finger: “_Kiss her arm._” I execute the order; Hélène’s arm at

first resists strenuously, then yields suddenly. She seizes a pencil,

and in the midst of the customary struggle relative to the manner of

holding it (see p. 100), “_You are holding my hand too tightly_,” says

she to the imaginary little old man, who, according to Leopold, wishes

to make use of it in order to write. “_You hurt me very badly; do not

hold it so firmly.... What difference does it make whether it is a

pencil or a pen?_” At these words she throws away the pencil and takes

up a pen, and, holding it between the thumb and index-finger, slowly

traces in an unknown hand: “_Chaumontet, syndic_” (see Fig. 44).

Then the vision of the village returns; at our desire to know the

name of it she ultimately perceives a sign-post on which she spells

“_Chessenaz_,” a name which is unknown to us. Then, having by my advice

asked the little old man, whom she still sees, at what period he was

syndic, she hears him answer, “1839.”

It is impossible to learn more; the vision vanishes and gives way to a

total incarnation of Leopold, who, in his deep Italian voice, speaks

to us at length of various matters. I take advantage of it in order

to question him upon the incident of the unknown village and syndic;

his replies, interrupted by long digressions, may be summed up about

as follows: “I am searching.... I traverse in thought the ascent of

this great mountain pierced through at its foot by something, the

name of which I do not know; I see the name of Chessenaz, a village

on a height, and a road which ascends to it. Search in this village;

you will certainly find the name (Chaumontet); seek to examine his

signature; this proof you will find there; you will find that the

handwriting was that of this man.”

To my question whether he sees this in Hélène’s memories and whether

she has ever been at Chessenaz, he replies in the negative as to the

first point and evasively as to the second: “Ask her; she has a good

memory for everything. I have not followed her in all her wanderings.”

Awakened, Hélène could not furnish us any information. But the

following day I found on the map a little village called Chessenaz, in

the Department of Haute-Savoie, twenty-six kilometres, in a straight

line, from Geneva, and not far from the Crédo. As the Chaumontets are

not rare in Savoy, there was nothing unlikely in the fact of a person

of that name having been syndic there in 1839.

Two weeks later I made a visit to Mme. and Mlle. Smith—there was

no seance held—when Hélène suddenly assumed the voice and accent

of Leopold, without being aware of the change, and believing me to

be joking when I sought to cause her to notice it. Presently the

hemisomnambulism becomes accentuated; Hélène sees the vision of the

other day, the village and then the little old man (the syndic)

reappear, but the latter is accompanied this time by a _curé_ with whom

he seemed on good terms and whom he called (which she repeats to me all

the while with Leopold’s Italian accent), “_My dear friend Burnier_”

As I ask whether this _curé_ could not write his name with Hélène’s

hand, Leopold promised me by a digital dictation that I should have

that satisfaction at the next seance; then he begins to talk to me of

something else by Hélène’s mouth, she being now entirely entranced.

At the following seance at my house (the 19th of March), I remind

Leopold of his promise. He answers at first by the finger: “_Do you

very much desire that signature?_” and it is only upon my insisting

that he consents. Hélène then is not long in again seeing the village

and the _curé_, who after divers incidents takes hold of her hand

as the syndic had done, and traces very slowly with the pen these

words, “_Burnier greets you_” (Fig. 44); then she passes into other

somnambulisms. The moment had arrived to clear up the matter. I wrote

at hazard to the mayor’s office at Chessenaz. The mayor, M. Saussier,

had the kindness to answer without delay: “During the years 1838-39,”

stated he to me, “the syndic of Chessenaz was a Chaumontet, Jean,

whose signature I find attached to divers documents of that period.

We also had as _curé_ M. Burnier, André, from November, 1824, up to

February, 1841; during this period all the certificates of births,

marriages, and deaths bear his signature.... But I have discovered in

our archives a document bearing both signatures, that of the syndic

Chaumontet and that of the _curé_ Burnier. It is an order for the

payment of money. I take pleasure in transmitting it to you.” I have

caused to be reproduced in the middle of Fig. 44 the fragment of this

original document (dated July 29, 1838), bearing the names of these

two personages; the reader can thus judge for himself in regard to the

quite remarkable similarity which there exists between these authentic

signatures and those automatically traced by the hand of Mlle. Smith.

My first idea was, as may be supposed, that Mlle. Smith must some time

or other have seen some certificates or documents signed by the syndic

or by the _curé_ of Chessenaz, and that it was these forgotten visual

flashes, reappearing in somnambulism, which had served her as inner

models when her entranced hand retraced these signatures. One may

likewise imagine how angry such a supposition would make Hélène, who

has no recollection whatever of having ever heard the name of Chessenaz

nor of any of its inhabitants, past or present. I only half regret

my imprudent supposition, since it has availed to furnish us a new

and more explicit manifestation of the _curé_, who, again taking hold

of Mlle. Smith’s arm at a later seance (May 21st, at M. Lemaître’s)

comes to certify to us as to his identity by the attestation, in due

and proper form, of Fig. 43. As is there seen, he makes it twice;

being deceived as to the signature, he incontinently, with disgust,

crosses out that which he had so carefully written, and recommences

on another sheet; this second draft, in which he has omitted the word

“_soussigné_” (“undersigned”) of the first, took him seven minutes to

trace, but leaves nothing to be desired as to precision and legibility.

This painstaking calligraphy is very like that of a country _curé_ of

sixty years ago, and in default of another specimen for comparison, it

presents an undeniable analogy of hand with the authentic receipt of

the order for payment of money of Fig. 44.

[Illustration: Fig. 43. Certificates written (May 21, 1899) by Mlle.

Smith while in a trance. The one above was feverishly crossed out in

finishing the faulty signature. The one below was afterwards written

in seven minutes. Natural size. [From the collection of M. Lemaître.]]

Neither Mlle. Smith nor her mother had the least notion in regard to

the _curé_ or the syndic of Chessenaz. They nevertheless informed me

that their family formerly had some relatives and connections in that

part of Savoy, and that they are still in communication with a cousin

who lives at Frangy, an important town nearest the little village of

Chessenaz. Hélène herself made only a short excursion in that region,

some dozen years ago; and if, in following the road from Seyssel to

Frangy, she traversed some parts of the country corresponding well to

certain details of her vision of the 12th of February (which she had

the feeling of recognizing, as we have seen, p. 432), she has not, on

the other hand, any idea of having been at Chessenaz itself, nor of

having heard it mentioned. “Moreover,” says she, “for those who can

suppose that I could have been at Chessenaz without remembering it, I

would affirm that even had I gone there I would not have been apt to

consult the archives in order to learn that a syndic Chaumontet and a

_curé_ Burnier had existed there at a period more or less remote. I

have a good memory, and I positively affirm that no one of the persons

around me during those few days while I was away from my family ever

showed me any certificate, paper—anything, in a word—which could

have stored away in my brain any such memory. My mother, at the age

of fourteen or fifteen, made a trip into Savoy, but nothing in her

remembrances recalls her ever having heard these two names uttered.”

The facts are now presented, and I leave to the reader the privilege of

drawing such conclusion from them as shall please him.

[Illustration: Fig. 44. Comparison of the signatures of the syndic

Chaumontet and of the curate Burnier, with their pretended signatures

as disincarnates given by Mlle. Smith in somnambulism. In the middle

of the figure, reproduction of a fragment of an order for payment of

money of 1838. Above and below, the signatures furnished by the hand

of Hélène. Natural size.]

This case seemed to me worthy to crown my rapid examination of the

supernormal appearances which embellish the mediumship of Mlle. Smith,

because it sums up and puts excellently in relief the irreconcilable

and hostile respective positions of the spiritistic circles and mediums

on the one side, perfectly sincere but too easily satisfied—and

investigators somewhat psychological on the other, always pursued by

the sacrosanct terror of taking dross for gold. To the first class,

the least curious phenomenon—an unexpected vision of the past, some

dictation of the table or the finger, an access of somnambulism, a

resemblance of handwriting—suffices to give the sensation of contact

with the unknown and to prove the actual presence of the disincarnate

world. They never ask themselves what proportion there could well

be between these premises, however striking they may be, and that

formidable conclusion. Why and how, for example, should the dead,

returning at the end of a half-century to sign by the hand of another

person in flesh and blood, have the same handwriting as when alive?

The same people who find this altogether natural, although they have

never seen any absolutely certain cases of it, fall from the clouds

when the possibility of latent memories is invoked before them, of

which the present life furnishes them, moreover, daily examples—which

they have not, it is true, ever taken the trouble to observe.

The psychologists, on the contrary, have the evil one in them in going

to look behind the scenes of the memory and the imagination, and when

the obscurity prevents them from seeing anything, they have the folly

to imagine that they will end by finding that which they are seeking—if

only a light could be had.

Between these two classes of temperaments so unlike, it will, I fear,

be very difficult ever to arrive at any satisfactory and lasting

understanding.