The Unknown Guest

possible to explain them or rather to classify them without having recourse to fresh theories. Now we can entertain doubts on many points, we can cavil and argue; but I defy anyone approaching these facts in a serious and honest spirit to reject them all. It is permissible to neglect the most extraordinary; but there are a multitude of others which have become or, to

n unknown agency would indeed be childish. But it is already something to have marked its source; not to be still lingering in the thick of a fog, trying any and every direction in order to find a way out, but to be concentrating our attention on a single spot which is the

gotten secrets of the past, sentiments that have not yet taken shape, intentions as yet unborn. We have discovered that some object once handled by a person now far away is enough to make it take part in the innermost life of that person, to go deeper and rise higher than he does, to see what he sees and even what he does not see: the landscape that surrounds him, the house which he inhabits and also the dangers that threaten him and the secret passions by which he is stirred. We have surprised it wandering hither and thither, at haphazard, in the future, confounding it with the present and the past, not conscious of where it is but seeing far and wide, know

tues and its phenomena of materialization. But, without expressing a premature judgment on what we do not yet know, perhaps we have sketched it with sufficient cl

ngs: gods, demigods, angels, demons, saints, spirits, shells, elementals, etherial entities, interplanetary intelligences and so on; except it and all those phantoms, without disappearing, for they may very well continue to live in its shadow, become superfluous or accessory. It is not intolerant and does not definitely eliminate any of the hypotheses by the aid of which man has hitherto striven to explain what he did not understand, hypothes

g those who are yet to be; and, when they seem to speak to you, it is my own speech that borrows their customs and their voice in order to make you listen and to amuse your often slumbering attention. If you prefer to deal with superior entities of unknown o

and there is nothing to limit it, because it lives in a world wherein

sometimes it attributes to the spirits, sometimes to itself or any one or anything the revelations which it makes to us. When exactly is it speaking the truth? At least on two occasions out of three, it deludes itself or deludes us. If it deceive itself, if it is mistaken about a matter in which it should be easy for it to know the truth, what can it teach us on the subject of a world of whose most elementary laws it is ignorant, since it does not even know whether it is itself or another that speaks to us in the name of that world? Are we to believe that it was in the same darkness as our poor superficial ego, which it pr

e has his own way of speaking, his familiar expressions; he knows, and, with the aid of the words which he possesses and those which he hears repeated, he tries to make us understand what he hardly understands himself. He does not know exactly whence the sounds come which he hears; and, according as tempests, wars or riots happen to be uppermost at the moment, he attributes them to the winds, to tramping soldiers or to frenzied crowds. In other words and speaking without metaphor, it is the medium who draws from his habitual language and from that suggested to him by his audience the wherewithal to clothe and identify the strange presentiments, the unfamiliar visions that come from some unknown region. If he believes that the dead survive, he will naturally imagine that it is the dead who speak to him. If

in its eyes; for it is not madness to believe that it lives with that which does not die in the dead even as with that which does n

in the flesh and at moments joins that which does not die in those who have quitted their body. Then does the existence of our unknown guest presume the immortality of a part of ourselves? Can one possibly doubt it? Have you ever imagined that you would perish entirely? As for me, what I cannot picture is the manner in which you would picture that total annihilation. But, if you cannot perish entirely, it is no less certain that those who came before you have not perished either; and hence it is not altogether improbable that we may be able to discover them and to communicate with them. In this wider sense, the spiritualistic theory is perfectly admissible; but what is not at all admissible is the narrow and pitiful interpretation which its proponents too often give it. They s

tion and clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which are equa

guest, which for its part communicates with the dead and the living and everything that exists. The rest, which is the only thing that matters, but which is less clear and less vivid because it comes from afar, only very rarely makes its difficult way through a forest of insignificant talk. We may add that our subconsciousness, as Dr. Geley very rightly observes, is formed of superposed elements, beginning with the unconsciousness that governs the instinctive movements of the organic life of both the species and the individual and passing by imperceptible degrees till it rises to the superior psychism whose power and extent appear to have no bounds. The voice of the medium, or that which we hear within ourselves when, at certai

ce both life and death are incessantly joining and uniting in all things. There are assuredly dead people in all these manifestations, seeing that we are full of dead people a

ess future that will follow our departure from this earth. It is itself that future and that past, all those from whom we have sprung and all those who will spring from us. It represents the individual not only the species but that which preceded it and that which will follow it; and it has neither beginning nor end: that is why nothing touches it, nothing moves it which does not concern that which it represents. When a misfortune or a joy befall us, it knows their value instantly, knows if they are going to open or to dose the wells of life. It is the one thing that is never wrong. In vain does reason demonstrate to it, by irresistible arguments, that it is hopelessly at fault: silent under its immovable mask, whose expression we have not yet been able to react it pursues its way. It treats us as insignificant children, void of understanding, never answers our objections, refuses what we ask and lavishes upon us that which we refuse. If we go to the right, it reconducts us to the left. If we cultivate this or that faculty which we think that we possess or which we would like to possess, it hides it under some other which we did not expect and did not wish for. It saves us from a danger by imparting to our limbs u

hat has not become carnate; according to Gustave Le Bon, it is the "condensed" soul of our ancestors, which is true, beyond a doubt, but only a part of the truth, for we find in it also the soul of the future and probably of many other forces which are not necessarily human. William James saw in it a diffuse cosmic consciousness and the chance intrusion into our scientifically organized world of remnants and bestiges of the primordial chaos. Here are a number of images striving to give us an idea of a reality so vast that we are unable to gr

its shelter and manifests itself in external actions, it is nothing more than a fortune-teller, a bone-setter, a sort of facetious conjuror or telephone-operator, I was on the verge of saying a mountebank or clown. At what particular instant is it really itself? Is it seized with giddiness when it leaves its lair? Is it we who no longer hear it, who no longer understand it, as soon as it ceases to speak in a whisper and

nknown guest and its external manifestations were revealed to us? Is it our attention that makes t

direction, we are able to see that psychical phenomena are very evenly distributed over the whole surface of the globe. At all events, there does not appear to be any race that is absolutely or peculiarly refractory to them. One would be inclined to say, however, that they manifest themselves by preference among the most civilized nations-perhaps because that is where they are most carefully sought after-and among the most primitive. In short, it cannot be denied that we are in the presence of faculties

hem in individuals already endowed with these supernormal faculties. I do not know to what extent M. Bozzano's assertions are beyond dispute. They concern historical or remote facts which it is very difficult to verify. In any case, it is something to have perfected , as has been done in India, the empirical methods favourable to the production of supernormal phenomena. One might even say that it is about all that we have the right to expect, seeing that, by the author's own admission, these faculties are latent in every man and that, as has frequently been seen, it needs but an illness, a lesion, or sometimes even the slightest emotion or a mere passing faintness to make them suddenly reveal themselves in an individual who seemed most hopelessly devoid of them. It is therefore quite possible that, by improving the methods, by attac

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necessary to man. He has always had a keen and primitive interest in knowing without delay the most secret thoughts of his fellow-man, who is often his adversary and sometimes his mortal enemy. He has always had an interest no less great in immediately transmitting those thoughts through space, in seeing beyond the continents and seas, in going back into the past, in advancing into the future, in being able to find in his memory at will not only all the acquirements of his personal exper

e individual? But, after all, the species is only an aggregate of successive individuals; and its evolution consequently depends upon their evolution. There would therefore have been an evident advantage to the species in developing faculties that would perhaps have carried it much farther and much higher than has been done by its brain-power, which alone has progressed. If there is no evolution for them here, do they develop elsewhere? What are those powers whi

e? Is there really, as everything seems to prove, a hopeless incompatibility between our intellectual faculties and those families of uncertain origin, to such an extent that the latter are unable to manifest themselves except when the former are weakened or temporarily suspended? It has, at any rate, been observed that they are hardly ever exercised simultaneously. Are we to believe that, at a given moment, mankind or the genius that presides over its destinies had to make an exclusive and awful choice between cerebral energy and the mysterious forces of the subconsciousness and that we still find traces of its hesitat

e is no science which in so short a time has brought order out of such a chaos, ascertained, checked and classified such a quantity of facts, or more rapidly awakened, cultivated and trained in man certain faculties which he had never seriously been believed to possess; and furthermore none which has caused to be recognized as incontestable and thus introduced into the circle of the realities whereon we base our lives a number of unlikely phenomena which had hitherto been contemptuously passed over. We are still, it is true, waiting for the domestication of the new force, its practical application to daily use. We are waiting for the all-revealing, decisive manifestation which will remove our last doubts and throw light upon the problem down to its very source. But let us admit that we are likewise waiting for this manifestation in the great majority of sciences. In my case, we are already in the presence of an astonishing mass of well-weighed and verified materials which, until now, had been taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments of wild legen

that is no reason why we should look to them for everything and abandon in their favour that which has brought us where we are. The choice of which we spoke, between the brain and the subconsciousness, has been made long ago; and it is not our part to make it over again. We are carried along by a force acquired in the course of two or three thousand years; and our methods, like our intellectual habits, have of themselves become transformed into sort of minor subconsciousness superp

ceiving the possibility of an explanation, science would have enquired into, instead of dismissing a priori facts, such as those which you study; perhaps 'psychical research' would have stood out as its principal preoccupation. The most general laws of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental laws of

es, thus went to work the other way and obtained nothing decisive. Is this again a consequence of the hopeless incompatibility between the faculties of the brain and those of the subconsciousness? Possibly; but we must not forget that we are speaking of nations which never possessed our intellectual habits, our passion for precision, for verification, for experimental certainty; indeed, this passion has only been fully developed in ourselves within the last two or three centuries. It is to be presumed therefore that the European would have gone much farther in the other direction than the Oriental. Where would he have arrived? Endowed with a different brain, naturally clearer, more exacting, more logical, less credulous, more practical, closer to realities, more attentive to details, but with the scientific side of his intelligence uncultivated, would he have gone astray or would he have met the truths which we are still seeking and which may well be more important than all our material conquests. Ill-prepared, ill-equipped, ill-balanced, lacking the necessary ballast of experiments and proofs, would he have been exposed to the dangers familiar to all the too-mystical nations? It is very d