The Unknown Guest

left? Ourselves and all the life around us; and that is perhaps

they are born and die upon this earth; and they arise solely and incontestably from our own actual living mystery. They are, moreover, of all psychic manifestations, those which are easiest to examine and verify, seeing that they can be repeated al

or waking state, or else produced or facilitated by one of the various empirical methods which apparently see only to arouse the medium's subconscious faculties and to release in some way his subliminal clairvoyance. Among such methods, those most often employe

of seeing in TIME, like the faculty of seeing in SPACE, i

ies of phenomena which includes almost all the others and which has been classed under the generic and rather ill-chosen and ill-constructed title of "psychometry." Psychometry, to borrow Dr. Maxwell's excellent definitio

thers, M. Warcollier's report in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques of July, 1911) and of a few treatises, in the front rank of which I would mention M. Duchatel's Enquete sur des Cas de Psychometrie and Dr. Otty's recently published book, Lucidite et Intuition, which is the full

a doubt contains the key to most of the manifestations that seem to proceed from another worl

proposed to question her. Mme. M- operates in a state of trance; but there are other noted psychometers, such as Mme. F- and M. Ph. M. de F-, who retain all the

nd changing visions that follow upon one another like cinematograph pictures, perceives and describes exactly his immediate surroundings, the scenery outside his window, the rooms in which he lives, the people who live with him and who wish him well or ill, the psychology and the most secret and unexpected intentions of all those who figure in his exis

l course of the operation. In September, 1913, while I was at Elberfeld, visiting Krall's horses, my wife went to consult Mme. M-, gave her a scrap of writing in my hand-a note dispatched previous to my journey and containing no allusion to it-and asked her where I was and what I was doing. Without a second's hesitation, Mme. M- declared that I was very far away, in a foreign country where they spoke a language which she did not understand. She saw first a paved yard, shaded by a big tree, with a building on the left

he is not thi

gh to express an unaccustomed

like him. He has no particular passion for horses. He

however, that this is a usual error among psychometers. They do not, properly speaking, see the action at the very moment of its performance, but rather the customary and familiar action, the principal thing that preoccupies either the person about who

in ordinary town clothes, whereas she saw us in those lo

d be in the midst of the horses, and she knew or could easily conjecture my state of mind. The transmission of thought i

s enough to transmit either to my wife's subconsciousness or to Mme. M-, whom at that time I had never met, an exact picture of what my eyes beheld three or four hundred miles away? But, although this description is exceedingly accurate-paved yard, big tree, building on the left, garden at the back-is it not too general for all idea of chance coincidence to be eliminated? Perhaps, by insisting fu

harming and unaffected; but it told me nothing about its writer. Without even noticing from what town it was sent to me, after showing it to my wife, I replaced it in its enve

ndifferent health, but who was now very well indeed. The girl was in a beautiful garden, in front of a large and luxurious house standing in the mids

to say, the girl and her dog were not in the garden at the instant when the medium saw them there. Here again an habitual act

at least should be so, were it not that everything relating to the manifestations of our subconsciousness is always received with extraordinary suspicion. In any case, I cannot too often repea

rothers and sisters, she would have answered with the same certainty, the same precision as one might do who was not only a close acquaintance of the girl's, but endowed with much more penetrating faculties of intuition than a normal observer. In short, she would

he contents of the envelopes and also with the persons in question to take to Mme. M-. On arriving at the house, the messenger handed the clairvoyant one of the letters, selected at random, and did nothing further beyond putting the indispensable questions, likewise at random, and taking down the medium's replies in shorthand. Mme. M- began by giving a very striking physical portrait of the lady who had wr

ll his past and perhaps his future, his psychology, his state of health, his wishes, his intentions, often unknown to himself, his most secret instincts, his likes and dislikes, all that is bathed in light and all that is plunged in darkness, his whole life, in short, and more than his personal and conscious life, besides all the lives and all the influence

ntaneously, anywhere and at any distance, the life that gave them life and place themselves in complete communication, body and soul, senses and thoughts, past and future, consciousness and subconsciousness, with an existence lost amid the innumerous host of men who people this earth. It is, indeed, exactly what happens in

and, it is indisputable that the psychometer's clairvoyance, his gift of seeing at a distance the pictures and scenes surrounding an unknown being, is exercised with the same certainty and the same power when the object that sets his strange faculty at work has been touched by a person who has been dead for years. Are we, then, to admit that t

the vision very rarely corresponds with the actual facts of the moment: they too perceive above all the general impression, the usual and characteristic actions. Next, as regards communications with a person long since dead, we are confronted with one of two things: either confirmation will be almost impossible wh

deceased is perceived through a mental representation. The experiment, for this reason, is valueless as evi

ed unknown to any living person until after the clairvoyance sitting. It might then be proved that the object can latently register the human personalities which have touched

the body and the circumstances of the tragedy through the involuntary and unconscious intermediary of the murderer, even when the latter escapes prosecution and suspicion altogether. But a recent incident, related by Dr. Osty with the utmost pr

on for the missing man's traces; the ponds and pools were dragged to no purpose; and on the 8th of March a careful and systematical exploration of the wood, in which no fewer than twenty-four people took part, led to no result. At last, on the 18th of March, M. Louis Mirault, Baro

ide a horse-shoe pond, near a sort of rock. She traced the road taken by the victim, depicted the buildings which he had passed, his mental condition impaire

em a little: the mention of a rock in a part of the country that possessed none. The search was resumed on the strength of the data su

learer and were given with startling precision, so much so that, by pursuing step by step the indications of the medium, the man's friends ended by discovering the body, dressed as stated, lying in the middle of a coppice, just as descr

; besides, the minds of those concerned did not for a moment entertain the thought of an assault. The poor man, whose mental derangement was known to all those about him, obsessed by the desire and thought of death, had gone quietly and obstinately to seek it in the nearest coppice. There was therefore no criminal in the case, in other words, there was no possible or imaginable communication between the medium's subconsciousness, and th

jection that could be raised if the case were one of murder, which is possible, after all, and cannot be actually disproved. We must, therefore, while awaiting other similar and more decisive facts, if any such are conceivable, return to those which are, so to speak, laboratory facts, facts which are only denied by those who will not take the trouble to verify them; and to interpret these facts there are only the two theories which we mentioned above, before this digression; for, in these cases, which are unlike those of automatic speech or writing, we have not as a rule to consider the possibility of any intervention of the dead. As a matter of fact,

h all the vicissitudes of time and spice, every one of those who have held it in their hands for a little while. For we must not forget that, according to this theory, the object in question will conceal and, through the intermediary of the medium, will reveal as many distinct and complete personalities a

y inexhaustible energies and ineffaceable tram, memories and impressions in space. There is not a thing in this world that is lost, that disappears, that ceases to be, to retain and to propagate life. Need we recall, in this connection, the incessant mission of pictu

ankly adopt the theory that the object touched serves simply to detect, among t

to allow the medium's sensitiveness to distinguish a defin

tance-in the present case, the marvellous sensibility of a first-class medium-suddenly reveals to us, by the vibrations and the undeniable action of one of those wires, the existence of the infinite network. I will not speak here of trails discovered and followed in an almost mediumistic manner, after an object of some sort has been sniffed at. Such stories, though highly probable, as yet lack adequate support. But, within a similar order of ideas, and in a hu

hat they fit to perfection and acquire an intelligible and obviously premeditated sense. We here find once more the same faculty that permits the medium to detect, among thousands of others, a definite force which was wandering in space. It is true that, in these cases, the spiritualists maintain that the whole experiment is organized and directed by a discarnate intelligence,

otographic dark-room, the developing-bath acts upon the sensitized plate, I am convinced that the theory is accurate as regards intuition and clairvoyance proper, that is to say, in all cases where we are in the medium's presence and more or less directly in touch with him. But is it so in psychometry? Is it we who, unknown to ourselves, know all that the object contains, or is it the medium alone who discovers it in the object itself, independently of the person who produces the object? When

recognize his possession of abnormal faculties; but at any rate we reduce their power and their extent appreciably and we return sooner and more easily to the ordinary laws of the great human mystery. And it is of importance that we should be ever coming back to that mystery and ever bringing all things back to it. But, unfortunately, actual experience does not admit of this generalization. It is clearly a case of a special faculty, one peculiar to the medium, one which is wholly unknown to our latent intuition. We can easily assure ourselves of this by causing the medium to receive through a third party and enclosed in a series of three envelopes, as in

y the shams and imposters who swarm in this region more than in any other. Even with the best of them, he will have to be careful of the involuntary, unconscious and almost inevitable interference of telepathy, which is also very interesting, though it is a phenomenon of a different class, much less surprising and debatable than pure psychometry. He must also learn the art of interrogating the medium and refrain from asking incoherent and random questions about casual or future events. He will not forget that "clairvoyance is strictly limited to the perception of human personality," according to the role so well formulated by Dr. Osty. Experiments have been made in wh

lines, it can also happen that one of them perceives only what concerns the writer of the letter, whereas the other will be interested only in the person to whom the letter was addressed or to a third person who was in the room where

them as yet deserted and very nebulous regions of metapsychics, we are compelled to recognize that there must exist somewhere, in this world or in others, a spot in which everything is known, in which everything is possible, to which everything goes, from which everything comes, which belongs to all, to which all have access, but of which the long-forgotten roads must be learnt again by our stumbling feet. We shall often meet those difficult roads in the course of our present quest and we shall have more than one occasion to refer again to those depths into which all the supernatural facts of our existence flow, unless indeed they take their source there. For the moment, that which most above all engage our attention in these psychometric phenomena is their purely and exclusively human character. They occur between the living and the living, on this solid earth of ours, in the world that lies before our eyes; and the spirits, the dead, the gods a