Part 2 (1/2)
Let us add that it can be extended much further. If, for instance, I had acted as I did in similar cases and asked the medium questions about the young girl's home-circle, about the character of her father, the health of her mother, the tastes and habits of her brothers 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 have felt and expressed all that this girl's subconsciousness would have felt with regard to the persons mentioned. But it must be admitted that, as we are here no longer speaking of facts that are easily verified, confirmation becomes infinitely more difficult.
There could be no question, in the circ.u.mstances, of transmission of thought, since both the medium and I were ignorant of everything. Besides, other experiments, easily devised and repeated and more rigourously controlled, do away with that theory entirely. For instance, I took three letters written by intimate friends, put each of them in a double envelope and gave them to a messenger unacquainted with the 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 written the letter; followed this up with an absolutely faithful description of her character, her habits, her tastes, her intellectual and moral qualities; and ended by adding a few details concerning her private life, of which I myself was entirely unaware and of which I obtained the confirmation shortly afterwards. The experiment yielded just as remarkable results when continued with the two other letters.
In the face of this mystery, two explanations may be offered, both equally perplexing. On the one hand, we shall have to admit that the sheet of paper handed to the psychometer and impregnated with human ”fluid” contains, after the manner of some prodigiously compressed gas, all the incessantly renewed, incessantly recurring images that surround a person, all 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 influences, good or bad, latent or manifest, of all who approach him. We should have here a mystery as unfathomable and at least as vast as that of generation, which transmits, in an infinitesimal particle, the mind and matter, with all the qualities and all the faults, all the acquirements and all the history, of a series of lives of which none can tell the number.
On the other hand, if we do not admit that so much energy can lie concealed in a sheet of paper, continuing to exist and develop indefinitely there, we must necessarily suppose that an inconceivable network of nameless forces is perpetually radiating from this same paper, forces which, cleaving time and s.p.a.ce, detect instantaneously, 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 the experiments with mediums in automatic speech or writing, who believe themselves to be inspired by the dead. Yet, here it is no longer a discarnate spirit, but an object of any kind imbued with a living ”fluid”
that works the miracle; and this, we may remark in pa.s.sing, deals a severe blow to the spiritualistic theory.
Nevertheless, there are two rather curious objections to this second explanation. Granting that the object really places the medium in communication with an unknown ent.i.ty discovered in s.p.a.ce, how comes it that the image or the spectacle created by that communication hardly ever corresponds with the reality at the actual moment? On the other hand, 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 there is an actual, living communication with a human being who is no more, who sometimes--, for instance, in a case of incineration--has left no trace of himself on earth, in short, with a dead man who continues to live at the place and at the moment at which he impregnated the object with his ”fluid” and who seems to be unaware that he is dead?
But these objections are perhaps less serious than one might believe. To begin with, there are seers, so-called ”telepsychics,” who are not psychometers, that is to say, they are able to communicate with an unknown and distant person without the intermediary of an object; and in these seers, as in the psychometers, 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 when it concerns revelations on the subject of the dead man's private deeds and actions, which are unknown to any living person or else communication will be established not with the deceased, but with the living person, who necessarily knows the facts which he is called upon to confirm. As Dr. Osty very rightly says:
”The conditions are then those of perception by the intermediary of the thoughts of a living person; and the deceased is perceived through a mental representation. The experiment, for this reason, is valueless as evidence of the reality of retrospective psychometry and consequently of the recording part played by the object.
”The only cla.s.s of experiment that could be of value from this point of view, would be that in which confirmation would come subsequently from doc.u.ments whose contents remained 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 it and that it is sufficient in itself to allow of a mental reconstruction of those personalities through the interpretation of the register by a clairvoyant or psychometer.”
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It may be imagined that experiments of this sort, in which there is no crack, no leak on the side of the living, are anything but easy to carry through. In the case of a murder, for instance, it can always be maintained that the medium discovers the body and the circ.u.mstances 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 precision of detail and the most scrupulous verification in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques of April, 1914, perhaps supplies us with one of those experiments which we have not been able to achieve until this day. I give the facts in a few words.
On the 2nd of March of this year, M. Etienne Lerasle, an old man of eighty-two, left his son's house at Cours-les-Barres (Cher) for his daily walk and was not seen again. The house stands in the middle of a forest on Baron Jaubert's estate. Vain searches were made in every direction 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, Baron Jaubert's agent, thought of applying to Dr. Osty, and supplied him with a scarf which the old man had worn. Dr. Osty went to his favourite medium, Mme. M--. He knew only one thing, that the matter concerned an old man of eighty-two, who walked with a slight stoop; and that was all.
As soon as Mme. M-- had taken the scarf in her hands, she saw the dead body of an old man lying on the damp ground, in a wood, in the middle of a coppice, beside a horse-shoe pond, near a sort of rock. She traced the road taken by the victim, depicted the buildings which he had pa.s.sed, his mental condition impaired by age, his fixed intention of dying, his physical appearance, his habitual and characteristic way of carrying his stick, his soft striped s.h.i.+rt, and so on.
The accuracy of the description caused the greatest astonishment among the missing man's friends. There was one detail that puzzled them 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 supplied by the clairvoyant. But all the rocks in a forest are more or less alike; the indications were not enough; and nothing was found.
It so happened that the second and third interviews with Mme. M-- had to be postponed until the 30th of March and the 6th of April following. At each of these sittings, the details of the vision and of the road taken became clearer and clearer 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 described, close to a huge stump of a tree all covered with moss, which might easily be mistaken for a rock, and on the edge of a crescent-shaped piece of water. I may add that these particular indications applied to no other part of the wood.
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I refer the reader to Dr. Osty's conscientious and exhaustive article for the numerous details which I have been obliged to omit; but those which I have given are enough to show the character of this extraordinary case. To begin with, we have one certainty which appears almost una.s.sailable, namely, that there can be no question of a crime. No one had the least interest in procuring the old man's death. The body bore no marks of violence; besides, the minds of those concerned did not for a moment entertain the thought of an a.s.sault. 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 that of any living person. Hence we are compelled to admit that the communication was established with the dead man or with his subconsciousness, which continued to live for nearly a month after his death and to wander around the same places; or else we must agree that all this coming tragedy, all that the old man was about to see, do and suffer was already irrevocably contained and inscribed in the scarf at the moment when he last wore it.
In this particular case, considering that all relations with the living were definitely and undeniably severed, I can see no other explanations beyond these two. They are both equally astounding and land us suddenly in a world of fable and enchantment which we thought that we had left for good and all. If we do not adopt the theory of the tell-tale scarf, we must accept that of the spiritualists, who maintain that the spirits communicate with us freely. It is possible that they may find a serious argument in this case. But a solitary fact is not enough to support a theory, all the more so as the one in question will never be absolutely safe from the objection 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, the best-known psychometers are very rarely spiritualists and claim no connection with the spirits. They care but little, as a rule, about the source of their intuitions and seem very little interested in their exact working and origin. Now it would be exceedingly surprising if, acting and speaking in the name of the departed, they should be so consistently ignorant of the existence of those who inspire them; and more surprising still if the dead, whom in other circ.u.mstances we see so jealously vindicating their ident.i.ty, should not here, when the occasion is so propitious, seek to declare themselves, to manifest themselves and to make themselves known.
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Dismissing for the time being the intervention of the dead, I believe then that, in most of the cases which I will call laboratory cases, because they can be reproduced at will, we are not necessarily reduced to the theory of the vitalized object representing wholly, indefinitely and inexhaustibly, through 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 as it has undergone contacts. It will never confuse or mix those different personalities. They will remain there in definite strata, distinct one from another; and, as Dr. Osty puts it, ”the medium can interpret each of them from beginning to end, as though he were in communication with the far-off ent.i.ty.”
All this makes the theory somewhat incredible, even though it be not much more so than the many other phenomena in which the shock of the miraculous has been softened by familiarity. We can find more or less everywhere in nature that prodigious faculty of storing away inexhaustible energies and ineffaceable tram, memories and impressions in s.p.a.ce. 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 pictures perceived by the sensitized plate, the vibrations of sound that acc.u.mulate in the disks of the gramophone, the Hertzian waves that lose none of their strength in s.p.a.ce, the mysteries of reproduction and, in a word, the incomprehensibility of everything around us?
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Personally, if I had to choose, I should, in most of these laboratory cases, frankly adopt the theory that the object touched serves simply to detect, among the prodigious crowd of human beings, the one who impregnated it with his ”fluid.”
”This object,” says Dr. Osty, ”has no other function than to allow the medium's sensitiveness to distinguish a definite force from among the innumerable forces that a.s.sail it.”
It seem more and more certain that, as the cells of an immense organism, we are connected with everything that exists by an inextricable network of vibrations, waves, influences, of nameless, numberless and uninterrupted fluids. Nearly always, in nearly all men, everything carried along by these invisible wires falls into the depths of the unconsciousness and pa.s.ses unperceived, which does not mean that it remains inactive. But sometimes an exceptional circ.u.mstance--in the present case, the marvellous sensibility of a first-cla.s.s 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 humbler world and one with more modest limits, the dog, for instance, is incessantly surrounded by different scents and smells to which he appears indifferent until his attention is aroused by one or other of these vagrant effluvia, when he extricates it from the hopeless tangle. It would seem as though the trail took life, vibrating like a chord in unison with the animal's wishes, becoming irresistible, and taking it to its goal after innumerable winds and turns.
We see the mysterious network revealed also in ”cross-correspondence.” Two or three mediums who do not know one another, who are often separated by seas; or continents, who are ignorant of the whereabouts of the one who is to complete their thought, each write a part of a sentence which, as it stands, conveys no meaning whatever. On piecing the fragments together, we perceive that 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 s.p.a.ce. It is true that, in these cases, the spiritualists maintain that the whole experiment is organized and directed by a discarnate intelligence, independent of the mediums, which means to prove its existence and its ident.i.ty in this manner. Without incontinently rejecting this theory, which is not necessarily indefensible, we will merely remark that, since the faculty is manifested in psychometry without the intervention of the spirits, there can be no sufficient reason for attributing it to them in cross-correspondence.
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