The Unknown Guest

nomena themselves. It is by this time incontestable that a violent or deep emotion can be transmitted instantaneously from one mind to another, however great the distance that separates the mind experiencing the emotion from the mind receiving the communication. It is most often manifested by a visual hallucination, more rarely by an auditory hallucination; and, as the most violent emotion which man can undergo is that which grips and overwhelms him at the approach or at the very moment of death, it is nearly always this supreme e

portionate number of apparitions observed at various periods before and after death shows that they increase very rapidly for the few hours which pre

d, as far as anything can be proved, by abundant testimony of a very precise charac

ion or a friend of whom he was not thinking at the time and whom he knows to be thousands of miles away, in America, Asia or Africa as the case may be, for distance does not count. As a rule, the phantom says nothing; its presence, which is always brief, is but a sort of silent warning. Sometimes it

no clanking chains, nor any of the time-honoured trappings that characterize this rather feeble literature of the supernatural. On the contrary, the scenes enacted in houses that appear to be really haunted are generally very simple and insignificant, not to say dull and commonplace. The ghosts are quite unpretentious and go to no expense in the matter of staging or costume. They are clad as they were when, sometimes many years ago, they led their quiet, unadventurous life within their own home. We find in one case an old woman, with a thin grey shawl meekly folded over her breast, who bends at night over the sleeping occupants of her old home, or who is frequently encountered in the hall or on the stairs, silent, mysterious, a little grim. Or else it is the gentleman with a lacklustre eye and a figured dressing-gown

101-115; vol. ii., pp. 137-151

dmit that it is a subconscious suggestion emitted without the

esses, upsetting furniture and so forth. These matters are always open to suspicion and really appear to be nothing but quaint frolics of hysterical subjects or of mediums indulging the

tulate my general impression, that probably the dead did not enter into any of these conversations. We are here concerned with purely mediumistic phenomena, more curious and mere su

us, incoherent and, above all, not very long. To this the objection is raised that it only appears so to our feeble eyes. The dead among whom we move without knowing it struggle to make themselves understood, to manifest themselves, but dash themselves against the inpenetrable wall of our senses, which, created solely to perceive matter, remain hopelessly ignorant of all the rest, though this is doubtless the essential part of the universe. That which will survive in us, imprisoned in our body, is absolutely inaccessible to that which survives in them. The utmost that they can do is occasionally to cause a few glimmers of their existence to penetrate the fissures of those singular organisms known as mediums. But these vagrant, fleeting, venturous, stifled, deformed glimmers can but give us a ludicrous idea of a life which has no longer anything in common with the life-purely animal for the most part- which we lead on this earth. It is possible; and there is something to be said for the theory. It is at any rate remarkable that certain communications, certain manifestations have shaken the scepticism of the coldest and most dispassionate men of science, men utterly hostile to supernatural influences. In order to some extent to understand their uneasiness and their astonis

y calling for an act of adherence, of blind faith. Its explanations, though often ingenious, are no more than forcibl

ences Psychiques: A

s for the faithful adherents of the unknown, who had long understood that we must resign ourselves to understanding nothing and he prepared for every sort of surprise there was here, all the same, even for them, a mys

to say of the ghosts that spring up more than a year, nay, more than ten years after the disappearance of the corpse? They are very rare, I know, but after all there are some that are extremely difficult to deny, for the accounts of their actions are attested and corroborated by numerous and trustworthy witnesses. It is true that here again, where it is in most cases a question of apparitions to relations or friends, we may be told that we are in the presence of telepath

scarcely known. It has happened fairly often, for instance, that ghosts come to disturb a dwelling whose occupiers find, in response to their indications, bones hidden in the walls or under the floors. It is even possible, as in the case of William

ngs, vol. vi

n which certainly is profoundly mysterious-makes him experience the last emotion of the deceased and sometimes allows him to conjure up the picture and the circumstances of the suicide or murder, even as, in telepathy between living persons, the contact of an

d whose evidence was above suspicion, went to reside in a large old house, part of which was occupied by his friend Mr. G-. Mr. X. Z. knew nothing of the history of the place except that two servants of Mr. G-'s had given him notice on account of strange noises which they had heard. One night-it was the 22nd of September-Mr. X. Z., on his way up to his bedroom in the dark, saw the whole passage filled with a dazzling and uncanny light, and in this strange light he saw the figure of an old man in a flowered dressing-gown. As he looked, both figure and

wn, pale and tired, and announced his intention of leaving immediately. On being questioned, he confessed that he was afraid, that he had be

ved in London, and saw over the mantelpiece a picture which bore a striking resemblance to

the man w

at the painting was a portrait of his grandfather,

s it was set going by the stories of the two servants, insignificant gossip to which no attention was paid at the time, but which probably found its way down into the weird and fertile depths of the subconsciousness. The image was ne

to the uttermost and perhaps stretching too far the elastic powers of that amiable maid-of-all-work, telepathy. For that matter, there are ca

rve that, in view of the character of Miss Morton, a lady of scientific training, and

, been any question of its being haunted. Three months afterwards, Miss Morton was in her room and on the point of getting into bed, when she heard some one at the door and went to it, thinking that it might be her mother. On opening the door, she found no on

ther, by the other sister, by a little boy, by a neighbour, General A-, who saw a lady crying in the orchard and, thinking that one of the daughte

ody and inspired no terror. It was immaterial, it could not be touched, but yet it intercepted the light. After making enquiries, they succeeded in identifying it as the second wife of the Anglo-Indian. The Morton family had never seen the lady, but, from the description which t

t the dead do not survive their death, then we must admit that the hallucination took birth spontaneously in the imagination of Miss Morton, an unconscious medium, and was subsequently trained by telepathy to all those around her. In my opinion, this ex

an one thing which we are still far from understanding. If the dead interfere at one point, there is a reason why they should not interfere at every other point. We should no longer be alone, among ourselves, in our hermetically-closed sphere, as we are perhaps only too ready to imagine it. We should have to alter more than one of our physical and moral laws, more than one of our ideas; and it would no doubt be the most important and the most extraordinary revelation that would be expected in the present state of our knowledge and since the disapp

bstacles that limit and paralyse our existence. It acts at a distance and so to speak without organs. It passes through matter, disaggregates it and reconstitutes it. It seems to possess, the gift of ubiquity. It is not subject to the laws of gravity and lifts weights out of all proportion with the real and measurable strength of the body whence it is believed to emanate. It releases and removes itself from that body; it comes and goes freely and takes to itself substances and shap

perhaps

to be embraced in the telepathic or psychometric theory, why not frankly accept the spiritualistic explanation,

haste, leave by the roadside a host of things that appear to be unknown or unknowable only because the necessary effort has not yet been made to know them. After all, while we must not eliminate the spiritualistic theory, neither must we content ourselves with it. It is even preferable not to linger over it until it has supplied us with decisive arguments, for it is the duty of this theory which sweeps us roughly out of our sphere to furnish us with such arguments. For the present, it simply relegates to posthumous regions, phenomena that appear to occur within ourselves; it adds superfluous mystery and needless difficulty to the mediumistic mystery whence it springs. If we were concerned with facts that had no footing in this world, we should certainly have to turn our eyes in another direction; but we see a large number of actions performed which are of the same nature as those attributed to the spirits and equally inexplicable, actions with which, however, we know that they have nothing to do. When it is proved that the dead exercise some