by Maurice Maeterlinck

We will abridge our subject still further, referring readers who wish to know the details to the originals, lest we should never have done; or rather, instead of attempting an abridgment, which would still be too long, so plentiful are the materials, we will content ourselves with enumerating a few instances, all taken from Bozzano’s Des Phenomenes premonitoires. We read there of a funeral procession seen on a high-road several days before it actually passed that way; or, again, of a young mechanic who, in the beginning of November, dreamt that he came home at half-past five in the afternoon and saw his sister’s little girl run over by a tram-car while crossing the street in front of the house. He told his dream, in great distress; and, on the 13th of the same month, in spite of all the precautions that had been taken, the child was run over by the tram-car and killed at the hour named. We find the ghost, the phantom animal or the mysterious noise which, in certain families, is the traditional herald of a death or of an imminent catastrophe. We find the celebrated vision which the painter Segantini had thirteen days before his decease, every detail of which remained in his mind and was represented in his last picture, Death. We find the Messina disaster clearly foreseen, twice over, by a little girl who perished under the ruins of the ill-fated city; and we read of a dream which, three months before the French invasion of Russia, foretold to Countess Toutschkoff that her husband would fall at Borodino, a village so little known at the time that those interested in the dream looked in vain for its name on the maps. Until now we have spoken only of the spontaneous manifestations of the future. It would seem as though coming events, gathered in front of our lives, bear with crushing weight upon the uncertain and deceptive dike of the present, which is no longer able to contain them. They ooze through, they seek a crevice by which to reach us. But, side by side with these passive, independent and intractable premonitions, which are but so many vagrant and furtive emanations of the unknown, are others which do yield to entreaty, allow themselves to be directed into channels, are more or less obedient to our orders and will sometimes reply to the questions which we put to them. They come from the same inaccessible reservoir, are no less mysterious, but yet appear a little more human than the others; and, without drugging ourselves with puerile or dangerous illusions, we may be permitted to hope that, if we follow them and study them attentively, they will one day open to us the hidden paths that join that which is no more to that which is not yet.

It is true that here, where we must needs mix with the somewhat lawless world of professional mystery-mongers, we have to increase our caution and walk with measured steps on very suspicious ground. But in this region of pitfalls we glean a certain number of facts that cannot reasonably be contested. It will be enough to recall, for instance, the symbolic premonitions of the famous “seeress of Prevorst,” Frau Hauffe, whose prophetic spirit was awakened by soap bubbles, crystals and mirrors; the clairvoyant who, eighteen years before the event, foretold the death of a girl by the hand of her rival in 1907, in a written prophecy which was presented to the court by the mother of the murdered girl; the gypsy who, also in writing, foretold all the events in Miss Isabel Arundel’s life, including the name of her husband, Burton, the famous explorer; the sealed letter addressed to M. Morin, vice-president of the Societe du Mesmerisme, describing the most unexpected circumstances of a death that occurred a month later; the famous “Marmontel prediction,” obtained by Mrs. Verrall’s cross-correspondences, which gives a vision, two months and a half before their accomplishment, of the most insignificant actions of a traveler in an hotel bedroom; and many others.

I will not review the various and very often grotesque methods of interrogating the future that are most frequently practiced today: cards, palmistry, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling by means of coffee-grounds, tea-leaves, magnetic needles and white of egg, graphology, astrology and the rest. These methods, as I have already said, are worth exactly what the medium who employs them is worth. They have no other object than to arouse the medium’s subconsciousness and to bring it into relation with that of the person questioning him. As a matter of fact, all these purely empirical processes are but so many, often puerile forms of self-manifestation adopted by the undeniable gift which is known as intuition, clairvoyance or, in certain cases, psychometry. I have spoken at sufficient length of this last faculty not to linger over it now. All that we have still to do is to consider it for a moment in its relations with the foretelling of the future.

A large number of investigations, notably those conducted by M. Duchatel and Dr. Osty, show that, in psychometry, the notion of time, as Dr. Joseph Maxwell observes, is very loose, that is to say, the past, present and future nearly always overlap. Most of the clairvoyant or psychometric subjects, when they are honest, do not know, “do not feel,” as M. Duchatel very ably remarks, “what the future is. They do not distinguish it from the other tenses; and consequently they succeed in being prophets, but unconscious prophets.” In a word— and this is a very important indication from the point of view of the probable coexistence of the three tenses—it appears that they see that which is not yet with the same clearness and on the same plane as that which is no more, but are incapable of separating the two visions and picking out the future which alone interests us. For a still stronger reason, it is impossible for them to state dates with precision. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, when we take the trouble to sift their evidence and have the patience to await the realization of certain events which are sometimes not due for a long time to come, the future is fairly often perceived by some of these strange soothsayers.

There are psychometers, however, and notably Mme. M—, Dr. Osty’s favorite medium, who never confuse the future and the past. Mme. M— places her visions in time according to the position which they occupy in space. Thus she sees the future in front of her, the past behind her and the present beside her. But, notwithstanding these distinctly-graded visions, she also is incapable of naming her dates exactly; in fact, her mistakes in this respect are so general that Dr. Osty looks upon it as a pure chronological coincidence when a prediction is realized at the moment foretold.

We should also observe that, in psychometry, only those events can be perceived which relate directly to the individual communicating with the percipient, for it is not so much the percipient that sees into us as we that read in our own subconsciousness, which is momentarily lighted by his presence. We must not therefore ask him for predictions of a general character, whether, for instance, there will be a war in the spring, an epidemic in the summer or an earthquake in the autumn. The moment the question concerns events, however important, with which we are not intimately connected, he is bound to answer, as do all the genuine mediums, that he sees nothing.

The area of his vision being thus limited, does he really discover the future in it? After three years of numerous, cautious and systematic experiments with some twenty mediums, Dr. Osty categorically declares that he does:

“All the incidents,” he says, “which filled these three years of my life, whether wished for by me or not, or even absolutely contrary to the ordinary routine of my life, had always been foretold to me, not all by each of the clairvoyant subjects, but all by one or other of them. As I have been practicing these tests continually, it seems to me that the experience of three years wholly devoted to this object should give some weight to my opinion on the subject of predictions.”

This is incontestable; and the sincerity, scientific conscientiousness and high intellectual value of Dr. Osty’s fine work inspire one with the most entire confidence. Unfortunately, he contents himself with quoting too summarily a few facts and does not, as he ought, give us in extense the details of his experiments, controls and tests. I am well aware that this would be a thankless and wearisome task, necessitating a large volume which a mass of puerile incidents and inevitable repetitions would make it almost unreadable. Moreover, it could scarcely help taking the form of an intimate and indiscreet autobiography; and it is not easy to bring one’s self to make this sort of public confession. But it has to be done. In a science which is only in its early stages, it is not enough to show the object attained and to state one’s conviction; it is necessary above all to describe every path that has been taken and, by an incessant and infinite accumulation of investigated and attested facts, to enable every one to draw his own conclusions. This has been the cumbrous and laborious method of the Proceedings for over thirty years; and it is the only right one. Discussion is possible and fruitful only at that price. In all these extraconscious matters, we have not yet reached the stage of definite deduction, we are still bringing up materials to the scene of operations.

Once more, I know that, in these cases, as I have seen for myself, the really convincing facts are necessarily very rare; indeed, nowhere else do we meet with the same difficulty. If the medium tells you, for instance, as Mme. M. seems easily to do, how you will employ your day from the morning onwards, if she sees you in a certain house in a certain street meeting this or that person, it is impossible to say that, on the one hand, she is not already reading your as yet unconscious plans or intentions, or that, on the other hand, by doing what she has foreseen, you are not obeying a suggestion against which you could not fight except by violently doing the opposite to what it demands of you, which again would be a case of inverted suggestion. None therefore would have any value save predictions of unlikely happenings, clearly defined and outside the sphere of the person interested. As Dr. Osty says:

“The ideal prognostication would obviously be that of an event so rare, so sudden and unexpected, implying such a change in one’s mode of life that the theory of coincidence could not decently be put forward. But, as everybody is not, in the peaceful course of his life threatened by such an absolutely convincing event, the clairvoyant cannot always reveal to the person experimenting—and reveal it for a more or less approximate date—one of those incidents whose accomplishment would carry irresistible conviction.”

In any case, the question of psychometric prognostications calls for further enquiry, although it is easy even at the present day to foresee the results.

Let us now return to our spontaneous premonitions, in which the future comes to seek us of its own accord and, so to speak, to challenge us at home. I know from personal experience that, when we embark upon these disconcerting matters, the first impression is scarcely favorable. We are very much inclined to laugh, to treat as wearisome tales, as hysterical hallucinations, as ingenious or interested fictions most or those incidents which give too violent a shock to the narrow and limited idea which we have of our human life. To smile, to reject everything beforehand and to pass by with averted head, as was done, I remember, in the time of Galvani, and in the early days of hypnotism, it is much more easy and seems more respectable and prudent than to stop, admit and examine. Nevertheless we must not forget that it is to some who did not smile so lightly that we owe the best part of the marvels from whose heights we are preparing to smile in our turn. For the rest, I grant that, thus presented, hastily and summarily, without the details that throw light upon them and the proofs that support them, the incidents in question do not show to advantage and, inasmuch as they are isolated and sparingly chosen, lose all the weight and authority derived from the compact and imposing mass whence they are arbitrarily detached. As I said above, nearly a thousand cases have been collected, representing probably not the tenth part of those which a more active and general search might bring together. The number is evidently of importance and denotes the enormous pressure of the mystery; but, if there were only half a dozen genuine cases—and Dr. Maxwell’s, Professor Flournoy’s, Mrs. Verrall’s, the Marmontel, Jones and Hamilton cases and some others are undoubtedly genuine—they would be enough to show that, under the erroneous idea which we form of the past and the present, a new verity is living and moving, eager to come to light.

The efforts of that verity, I need hardly say, display a very different sort of force after we have actually and attentively read those hundreds of extraordinary stories which, without appearing to do so, strike to the very roots of history. We soon lose all inclination to doubt. We penetrate into another world and come to a stop all out of countenance. We no longer know where we stand; before and after overlap and mingle. We no longer distinguish the insidious and factitious but indispensable line which separates the years that have gone by from the years that are to come. We clutch at the hours and days of the past and present to reassure ourselves, to fasten on to some certainty, to convince ourselves that we are still in our right place in this life where that which is not yet seems as substantial, as real, as positive, as powerful as that which is no more. We discover with uneasiness that time, on which we based our whole existence, itself no longer exists. It is no longer the swiftest of our gods, known to us only by its flight across all things: it alters its position no more than space, of which it is doubtless but the incomprehensible reflex. It reigns in the center of every event; and every event is fixed in its center; and all that comes and all that goes passes from end to end of our little life without moving by a hair’s breadth around its motionless pivot. It is entitled to but one of the thousand names which we have been wont to lavish upon its power, a power that seemed to us manifold and innumerable: yesterday, recently, formerly, ere while, after, before, tomorrow, soon, never, later fall like childish masks, whereas today and always completely cover with their united shadows the idea which we form in the end of a duration which has no subdivisions, no breaks and no stages, which is pulseless, motionless and boundless.

Many are the theories which men have imagined in their attempts to explain the working of the strange phenomenon; and many others might be imagined.

As we have seen, self-suggestion and telepathy explain certain cases which concern events already in existence, but still latent and perceived before the knowledge of them can reach us by the normal process of the senses or the intelligence. But, even by extending these two theories to their uttermost point and positively abusing their accommodating elasticity, we do not succeed in illumining by their aid more than a rather restricted portion of the vast undiscovered land. We must therefore look for something else.

The first theory which suggests itself and which on the surface seems rather attractive is that of spiritualism, which may be extended until it is scarcely distinguishable from the theosophical theory and other religious suppositions. It assumes the revival of spirits, the existence of discarnate or other superior and more mysterious entities which surround us, interest themselves in our fate, guide our thoughts and our actions and, above all, know the future. It is, as we recognized when speaking of ghosts and haunted houses, a very acceptable theory; and any one to whom it appears can adopt it without doing violence to his intelligence. But we must confess that it seems less necessary and perhaps even less clearly proved in this region than in that. It starts by begging the question: without the intervention of discarnate beings, the spiritualists say, it is impossible to explain the majority of the premonitory phenomena; therefore we must admit the existence of these discarnate beings. Let us grant it for the moment, for to beg the question, which is merely an indefensible trick of the superficial logic of our brain, does not necessarily condemn a theory and neither takes away from nor adds to the reality of things. Besides, as we shall insist later, the intervention or non-intervention of the spirits is not the point at issue; and the crux of the mystery does not lie there. What most interests us is far less the paths or intermediaries by which prophetic warnings reach us than the actual existence of the future in the present. It is true—to do complete justice to neospiritualism—that its position offers certain advantages from the point of view of the almost inconceivable problem of the pre-existence of the future. It can evade or divert some of the consequences of that problem. The spirits, it declares, do not necessarily see the future as a whole, as a total past or present, motionless and immovable, but they know infinitely better than we do the numberless causes that determine any agent, so that, finding themselves at the luminous source of those causes, they have no difficulty in foreseeing their effects. They are, with respect to the incidents still in process of formation, in the position of an astronomer who foretells, within a second, all the phases of an eclipse in which a savage sees nothing but an unprecedented catastrophe which he attributes to the anger of his idols of straw or clay. It is indeed possible that this acquaintance with a greater number of causes explains certain predictions; but there are plenty of others which presume a knowledge of so many causes, causes so remote and so profound, that this knowledge is hardly to be distinguished from a knowledge of the future pure and simple. In any case, beyond certain limits, the pre-existence of causes seems no clearer than that of effects. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the spiritualists gain a slight advantage here.

They believe that they gain another when they say or might say that it is still possible that the spirits stimulate us to realize the events which they foretell without themselves clearly perceiving them in the future. After announcing, for instance, that on a certain day we shall go to a certain place and do a certain thing, they urge us irresistibly to proceed to the spot named and there to perform the act prophesied. But this theory, like those of self-suggestion and telepathy, would explain only a few phenomena and would leave in obscurity all those cases, infinitely more numerous because they make up almost the whole of our future, in which either chance intervenes or some event in no way dependent upon our will or the spirit’s, unless indeed we suppose that the latter possesses an omniscience and an omnipotence which takes us back to the original mysteries of the problem.

Besides, in the gloomy regions of precognition, it is almost always a matter of anticipating a misfortune and very rarely, if ever, of meeting with a pleasure or a joy. We should therefore have to admit that the spirits which drag me to the fatal place and compel me to do the act that will have tragic consequences are deliberately hostile to me and find diversion only in the spectacle of my suffering. What could those spirits be, from what evil world would they arise and how should we explain why our brothers and friends of yesterday, after passing through the august and peace-bestowing gates of death, suddenly become transformed into crafty and malevolent demons? Can the great spiritual kingdom, in which all passions born of the flesh should be stilled, be but a dismal abode of hatred, spite and envy? It will perhaps be said that they lead us into misfortune in order to purify us; but this brings us to religious theories which it is not our intention to examine.

The only attempt at an explanation that can hold its own with spiritualism has recourse once again to the mysterious powers of our subconsciousness. We must needs to recognize that, if the future exists today, already such as it will be when it becomes for us the present and the past, the intervention of discarnate minds or of any other spiritual entity adrift from another sphere is of little avail. We can picture an infinite spirit indifferently contemplating the past and future in their coexistence; we can imagine a whole hierarchy of intermediate intelligences taking a more or less extensive part in the contemplation and transmitting it to our subconsciousness. But all this is practically nothing more than inconsistent speculation and ingenious dreaming in the dark; in any case, it is adventitious, secondary and provisional. Let us keep to the facts as we see them: an unknown faculty, buried deep in our being and generally inactive, perceives, on rare occasions, events that have not yet taken place. We possess but one certainty on this subject, namely, that the phenomenon actually occurs within ourselves; it is therefore within ourselves that we must first study it, without burdening ourselves with suppositions which remove it from its center and simply shift the mystery. The incomprehensible mystery is the preexistence of the future; once we admit this—and it seems very difficult to deny—there is no reason to attribute to imaginary intermediaries rather than to ourselves the faculty of descrying certain fragments of that future. We see, in regard to most of the mediumistic manifestations, that we possess within ourselves all the unusual forces with which the spiritualists endow discarnate spirits; and why should it be otherwise as concerns the powers of divination? The explanation taken from the subconsciousness is the most direct, the simplest, the nearest, whereas the other is endlessly circuitous, complicated and distant. Until the spirits testify to their existence in an unanswerable fashion, there is no advantage in seeking in the grave for the solution of a riddle that appears indeed to lie at the roots of our own life.

It is true that this explanation does not explain much; but the others are just as ineffectual and are open to the same objections. These objections are many and various; and it is easier to raise them than to reply to them. For instance, we can ask ourselves why the subconsciousness or the spirits, seeing that they read the future and are able to announce an impending calamity, hardly ever give us the one useful and definite indication that would allow us to avoid it. What can be the childish or mysterious reason of this strange reticence? In many cases it is almost criminal; for instance, in a case related by Professor Hyslop we see the foreboding of the greatest misfortune that can befall a mother germinating, growing, sending out shoots, developing, like some gluttonous and deadly plant, to stop short on the verge of the last warning, the one detail, insignificant in itself but indispensable, which would have saved the child. It is the case of a woman who begins by experiencing a vague but powerful impression that a grievous “burden” was going to fall upon her family. Next month, this premonitory feeling repeats itself very frequently, becomes more intense and ends by concentrating itself upon the poor woman’s little daughter. Each time that she is planning something for the child’s future, she hears a voice saying:

“She’ll never need it.”

A week before the catastrophe, a violent smell of fire fills the house. From that time, the mother begins to be careful about matches, seeing that they are in safe places and out of reach. She looks all over the house for them and feels a strong impulse to burn all matches of the kind easily lighted. About an hour before the fatal disaster, she reaches for a box to destroy it; but she says to herself that her eldest boy is gone out, thinks that she may need the matches to light the gas-stove and decides to destroy them as soon as he comes back. She takes the child up to its crib for its morning sleep and, as she is putting it into the cradle, she hears the usual mysterious voice whisper in her ear:

“Turn the mattress.”

But, being in a great hurry, she simply says that she will turn the mattress after the child has taken its nap. She then goes downstairs to work. After a while, she hears the child cry and, hurrying up to the room, finds the crib and its bedding on fire and the child so badly burnt that it dies in three hours.

Before going further and theorizing about this case, let us once more state the matter precisely. I know that the reader may straightway and quite legitimately deny the value of anecdotes of this kind. He will say why should we listen to a neurotic who has drawn upon her imagination for all the elements that give a dramatic setting to a story and surround it with a halo of mystery that is but a sad but commonplace domestic accident. This is quite possible; and it is perfectly allowable to dismiss the case on that basis. But it is none the less true that, by thus deliberately rejecting everything that does not bear the stamp of mathematical or judicial certainty, we risk losing as we go along most of the opportunities or clues which the great riddle of this world offers us in its moments of inattention or graciousness. At the beginning of an enquiry we must know how to content ourselves with little. For the incident in question to be convincing, previous evidence in writing, more or less official statements would be required, whereas we have only the declarations of the husband, a neighbor and a sister. This is insufficient, I agree; but we must at the same time confess that the circumstances are hardly favorable to obtaining the proofs which we demand. Those who receive warnings of this kind either believe in them or do not believe in them. If they believe in them, it is quite natural that they should not think first of all of the scientific interest of their trouble, or of putting down in writing and thus authenticating its premonitory symptoms and gradual evolution. If they do not believe in them, it is no less natural that they should not proceed to speak or take notice of inanities of which they do not recognize the value until after they have lost the opportunity of supplying convincing proofs of them. Also, do not forget that the little story in question is selected from among a hundred others, which in their turn are equally indecisive, but which, repeating the same facts and the same tendencies with a strange persistency, are thereby weakening the most inveterate distrust.

Having said this much, in order to conciliate or part company with those who have no intention of leaving the terra firma of science, let us return to the case before us, which is all the more disquieting inasmuch as we may consider it a sort of prototype of the tragic and almost diabolical reticence which we find in most premonitions. It is probable that under the mattress there was a stray match which the child discovered and struck; this is the only possible explanation of the catastrophe, for there was no fire burning on that floor of the house. If the mother had turned the mattress, she would have seen the match; and, on the other hand, she would certainly have turned the mattress if she had been told that there was a match underneath it. Why did the voice that urged her to perform the necessary action not add the one word that was capable of ensuring that action? The problem moreover is equally perturbing and perhaps equally insoluble whether it concerns our own subconscious faculties, or spirits, or strange intelligences. Those who give these warnings must know that they will be useless, because they manifestly foresee the event as a whole; but they must also know that one last word, which they do not pronounce, would be enough to prevent the misfortune that is already consummated in their prevision. They know it so well that they bring this word to the very edge of the abyss, hold it suspended there, almost let it fall and recapture it suddenly at the moment when its weight would have caused happiness and life to rise once more, to the surface of the mighty gulf. What then is this mystery? Is it incapacity or hostility? If they are incapable, what is the unexpected and sovereign force that interposes between them and us? And, if they are hostile, on what, on whom are they revenging themselves? What can be the secret of those inhuman games, of those uncanny and cruel diversions on the most slippery and dangerous peaks of fate? Why warn, if they know that the warning will be in vain? Of whom are they making sport? Is there really an inflexible fatality by virtue of which that which has to be accomplished is accomplished from all eternity? But then why not respect silence, since all speech is useless? Or do they, in spite of all, perceive a gleam, a crevice in the inexorable wall? What hope do they find in it? Have they not seen more clearly than ourselves that no deliverance can come through that crevice? One could understand this fluttering and wavering, all these efforts of theirs, if they did not know; but here it is proved that they know everything, since they foretell exactly that which they might prevent. If we press them with questions, they answer that there is nothing to be done, that no human power could avert or thwart the issue. Are they mad, bored, irritable, or accessory to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the happy solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the universe be the soul of a great baby?

But, rather than pursue this subject, let us be just and admit that there is perhaps no way out of the maze and that our reproaches are as incomprehensible as the conduct of the spirits. Indeed, what would you have them do in the circle in which our logic imprisons them? Either they foretell us a calamity which their predictions cannot avert, in which case there is no use in foretelling it, or, if they announce it to us and at the same time give us the means to prevent it, they do not really see the future and are foretelling nothing, since the calamity is not to take place, with the result that their action seems equally absurd in both cases.

It is obvious: to whichever side we turn, we find nothing but the incomprehensible. On the one hand, the preestablished, unshakable, unalterable future which we have called destiny, fatality or what you will, which suppresses man’s entire independence and liberty of action and which is the most inconceivable and the dreariest of mysteries; on the other, intelligences apparently superior to our own, since they know what we do not, which, while aware that their intervention is always useless and very often cruel, nevertheless come harassing us with their sinister and ridiculous predictions. Must we resign ourselves once more to living with our eyes shut and our reason drowned in the boundless ocean of darkness; and is there no outlet?

For the moment we will not linger in the dark regions of fatality, which is the supreme mystery, the desolation of every effort and every thought of man. What is clearest amid this incomprehensibility is that the spiritualistic theory, at first sight the most seductive, declares itself, on examination, the most difficult to justify. We will also once more put aside the theosophical theory or any other which assumes a divine intention and which might, to a certain extent, explain the hesitations and anguish of the prophetic warnings, at the cost, however, of other puzzles, a thousand times as hard to solve, which nothing authorizes us to substitute for the actual puzzle, formless and infinite, presented to our uninitiated vision.

When all is said, it is perhaps only in the theory which attributes those premonitions to our subconsciousness that we are able to find, if not a justification, at least a sort of explanation of that formidable reticence. They accord fairly well with the strange, inconsistent, whimsical and disconcerting character of the unknown entity within us that seems to live on nothing but nondescript fare borrowed from worlds to which nor intelligence as yet has no access. It lives under our reason, in a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual guest, dropped from another planet, whose interests, ideas, habits, passions have naught in common with ours. If it seems to have notions on the hereafter that are infinitely wider and more precise than those which we possess, it has only very vague notions on the practical needs of our existence. It ignores us for years, absorbed no doubt with the numberless relations which it maintains with all the mysteries of the universe; and, when suddenly it remembers us, thinking apparently to please us, it makes an enormous, miraculous, but at the same time clumsy and superfluous movement, which upsets all that we believed we knew, without teaching us anything. Is it making fun of us, is it jesting, is it amusing itself, is it facetious, teasing, arch, or simply sleepy, bewildered, inconsistent, absent-minded? In any case, it is rather remarkable that it evidently dislikes to make itself useful. It readily performs the most glamorous feats of sleight of-hand, provided that we can derive no profit from them. It lifts up tables, moves the heaviest articles, produces flowers and hair, sets strings vibrating, gives life to inanimate objects and passes through solid matter, conjures up ghosts, subjugates time and space, creates light; but all, it seems, on one condition, that its performances should be without rhyme or reason and keep to the province of supernaturally vain and puerile recreations. The case of the divining-rod is almost the only one in which it lends us any regular assistance, this being a sort of game, of no great importance, in which it appears to take pleasure. Sometimes, to say all that can be said, it consents to cure certain ailments, cleanses an ulcer, closes a wound, heals a lung, strengthens or makes supple an arm or leg, or even sets bones, but always as it were by accident, without reason, method or object, in a deceitful, illogical and preposterous fashion. One would set it down as a spoilt child that has been allowed to lay hands on the most tremendous secrets of heaven and earth; it has no suspicion of their power, jumbles them all up together and turns them into paltry, inoffensive toys. It knows everything, perhaps, but is ignorant of the uses of its knowledge. It has its arms laden with treasures which it scatters in the wrong manner and at the wrong time, giving bread to the thirsty and water to the hungry, overloading those who refuse and stripping the suppliant bare, pursuing those who flee from it and fleeing from those who pursue it. Lastly, even at its best moments, it behaves as though the fate of the being in whose depths it dwells interested it hardly at all, as though it had but an insignificant share in his misfortunes, feeling assured, one might almost think, of an independent and endless existence.

It is not surprising, therefore, when we know its habits, that its communications on the subject of the future should be as fantastic as the other manifestations of its knowledge or its power. Let us add, to be quite fair, that, in those warnings which we would wish to see efficacious, it stumbles against the same difficulties as the spirits or other alien intelligences uselessly foretelling the event which they cannot prevent, or annihilating the event by the very fact of foretelling it.

And now, to end the question, is our unknown guest alone responsible? Does it explain itself badly or do we not understand it? When we look into the matter closely, there is, under those anomalous and confused manifestations, in spite of efforts which we feel to be enormous and persevering, a sort of incapacity for self expression and action which is bound to attract our attention. Is our conscious and individual life separated by impenetrable worlds from our subconscious and probably universal life? Does our unknown guest speak an unknown language and do the words which it speaks and which we think that we understand disclose its thought? Is every direct road pitilessly barred and is there nothing left to it but narrow, closed paths in which the best of what it had to reveal to us is lost? Is this the reason why it seeks those odd, childish, roundabout ways of automatic writing, cross-correspondence, symbolic premonition and all the rest? Yet, in the typical case which we have quoted, it seems to speak quite easily and plainly when it says to the mother:

“Turn the mattress.”

If it can utter this sentence, why should it find it difficult or impossible to add:

“You will find the matches there that will set fire to the curtains.”

What forbids it to do so and closes its mouth at the decisive moment? We relapse into the everlasting question: if it cannot complete the second sentence because it would be destroying in the womb the very event which it is foretelling, why does it utter the first?

But it is well, in spite of everything, to seek an explanation of the inexplicable; it is by attacking it on every side, at all hazards, that we cherish the hope of overcoming it; and we may therefore say to ourselves that our subconsciousness, when it warns us of a calamity that is about to fall upon us, knowing all the future as it does, necessarily knows that the calamity is already accomplished. As our conscious and unconscious lives blend in it, it distresses itself and flutters around our overconfident ignorance. It tries to inform us, through nervousness, through pity, so as to mitigate the lightning cruelty of the blow. It speaks all the words that can prepare us for its coming, define it and identify it; but it is unable to say those which would prevent it from coming, seeing that it has come, that it is already present and perhaps past, manifest, ineffaceable, on another plane than that on which we live, the only plane which we are capable of perceiving. It finds itself, in a word, in the position of the man who, in the midst of peaceful, happy and unsuspecting folk, alone knows some bad news. He is neither able nor willing to announce it nor yet to hide it completely. He hesitates, delays, makes more or less transparent allusions, but does not either say the last word that would, so to speak, let loose the catastrophe in the hearts of the people around him, for to those who do not know of it the catastrophe is still as though it were not there. Our subconsciousness, in that case, would act towards the future as we act towards the past, the two conditions being identical, so much so that it often confuses them, as we can see more particularly in the celebrated Marmontel case, where it evidently blunders and reports as accomplished an incident that will not take place until several months later. It is of course impossible for us, at the stage which we have reached, to understand this confusion or this coexistence of the past, the present and the future; but that is no reason for denying it; on the contrary, what man understands least is probably that which most nearly approaches the truth.

Excerpt from The Unknown Guest

See Part I here. Part III coming soon.