The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

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;[1] 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;[1] A. J. C. Kerner: Die Scherin von Prevorst 141 [1] 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;[2] 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;[3] 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 traveller in an hotel bedroom;[4] and many others.

[1] Light, 1907, p. 219. The crime was committed in Paris and made a great stir at the time.

[2] Lady Burton: The Life of Captain Sir Richd. F. Burton, K.C.M.G., vol.i., p.253.

[3] Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. ix., p. 15.

[4] Proceedings, vol. xx., p. 331.

I will not review the various and very often grotesque methods of interrogating the future that are most frequently practised to-day: 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 practising 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 extenso 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 almost readable. 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 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 forsee 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 favourable. 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, 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 centre of every event; and every event is fixed in its centre; 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, erewhile, after, before, tomorrow, soon, never, later fall like childish masks, whereas to-day 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 hanted 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 interest 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 preexistence 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 preexistence 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 take 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 to-day, 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 centre 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[1] 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.”

[1] Proceedings, vol. xiv., p. 266.

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 that we have to do with a neurotic who has drawn upon her imagination for all the elements that give a dramatic setting to the story and surround with a halo of mystery a sad but commonplace domestic accident. This is quite possible; and it is perfectly allowable to dismiss the case. 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 neighbour and a sister. This is insufficient, I agree; but we must at the same time confess that the circumstances are hardly favourable 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, and by weakening the most inveterate distrust.[1]

[1] See, in particular, Bozzano’s cases xlix. and lxvii. These two, especially case xlix., which tells of a personal experience of the late W. T. Stead, are supported by more substantial proofs. I have quoted Professor Hyslop’s case, because the reticence is more striking.

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, dosed 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.

Lastly, to complicate the question, it may be very justly objected that, though premonitions in general are useless and appear systematically to withhold the only indispensable and decisive words, there are, nevertheless, some that often seem to save those who obey them. These, it is true, are rarer than the first, but still they include a certain number that are well authenticated. It remains to be seen how far they imply a knowledge of the future.

Here, for instance, is a traveler who, arriving at night in a small unknown town and walking along the ill-lighted dock in the direction of an hotel of which he roughly knows the position, at a given moment tech an irresistible impulse to turn and go the other way. He instantly obeys, though his reason protests and “berates him for a fool” in taking a roundabout way to his destination. The next day he discovers that, if he had gone a few feet farther, he would certainly have slipped into the river; and, as he was but a feeble swimmer, he would just as certainly, being alone and unaided in the extreme darkness, have been drowned.[1]

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 422.

But is this a prevision of an event? No, for no event is to take place. There is simply an abnormal perception of the proximity of some unknown water and consequently of an imminent danger, an unexplained but fairly frequent subliminal sensitiveness. In a word, the problem of the future is not raised in this case, nor in any of the numerous cases that resemble it.

Here is another which evidently belongs to the same class, though at first sight it seems to postulate the preexistence of a fatal event and a vision of the future corresponding exactly with a vision of the past. A traveler in South America is descending a river in a canoe; the party are just about to run close to a promontory when a sort of mysterious voice, which he has already heard at different momentous times of his life, imperiously orders him immediately to cross the river and gain the other shore as quickly as possible. This appears so absurd that he is obliged to threaten the Indians with death to force them to take this course. They have scarcely crossed more than half the river when the promontory falls at the very place where they meant to round it.[1]

[1] Flournoy: Esprits et mediums, p. 316.

The perception of imminent danger is here, I admit, even more abnormal than in the previous example, but it comes under the same heading. It is a phenomenon of subliminal hypersensitiveness observed more than once, a sort of premonition induced by subconscious perceptions, which has been christened by the barbarous name of “cryptaesthesia.” But the interval between the moment when the peril is signalled and that at which it is consummated is too short for those questions which relate to a knowledge or a preexistence of the future to arise in this instance.

The case is almost the same with the adventure of an American dentist, very carefully investigated by Dr. Hodgson. The dentist was bending over a bench on which was a little copper in which he was vulcanizing some rubber, when he heard a voice calling, in a quick and imperative manner, these words:

“Run to the window, quick! Run to the window, quick!”

He at once ran to the window and looked out to the street below, when suddenly he heard a tremendous report and, looking round, saw that the copper had exploded, destroying a great part of the workroom.[1]

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 424.

Here again, a subconscious cautiousness was probably amused by certain indications imperceptible to our ordinary senses. It is even possible that there exists between things and ourselves a sort of sympathy or subliminal communion which makes us experience the trials and emotions of matter that has reached the limits of its existence, unless, as is more likely, there is merely a simple coincidence between the chance idea of a possible explosion and its realization.

A last and rather more complicated case is that of Jean Dupre, the sculptor, who was driving alone with his wife along a mountain road, skirting a perpendicular cliff. Suddenly they both heard a voice that seemed to come from the mountain crying:

“Stop!”

They turned round, saw nobody and continued their road. But the cries were repeated again and again, without anything to reveal the presence of a human being amid the solitude. At last the sculptor alighted and saw that the left wheel of the carriage, which was grazing the edge of the precipice, had lost its linch-pin and was on the point of leaving the axle-tree, which would almost inevitably have hurled the carriage into the abyss.

Need we, even here, relinquish the theory of subconscious perceptions? Do we know and can the author of the anecdote, whose good faith is not in question, tell us that certain unperceived circumstances, such as the grating of the wheel or the swaying of the carriage, did not give him the first alarm? After all, we know how easily stories of this kind involuntarily take a dramatic turn even at the actual moment and especially afterwards.

These examples–and there are many more of a similar kind–are enough, I think, to illustrate this class of premonitions. The problem in these cases is simpler than when it relates to fruitless warnings; at least it is simpler so long as we do not bring into discussion the question of spirits, of unknown intelligences, or of an actual knowledge of the future; otherwise the same difficulty reappears and the warning, which this time seems efficacious, is in reality just as vain. In fact, the mysterious entity which knows that the traveler will go to the water’s edge, that the wheel will be on the point of leaving the axle, that the copper will explode, or that the promontory will fall at a precise moment, must at the same time know that the traveler will not take the last fatal step, that the carriage will not be overturned, that the copper will not hurt anybody and that the canoe will pull away from the promontory. It is inadmissible that, seeing one thing, it will not see the other, since everything happens at the same point, in the course of the same second. Can we say that, if it had not given warning, the little saving movement would not have been executed? How can we imagine a future which, at one and the same time, has parts that are steadfast and others that are not? If it is foreseen that the promontory will fall and that the traveler will escape, thanks to the supernatural warning, it is necessarily foreseen that the warning will be given; and, if so, what is the point of this futile comedy? I see no reasonable explanation of it in the spiritist or spiritualistic theory, which postulates a complete knowledge of the future, at least at a settled point and moment. On the other hand, if we adhere to the theory of a subliminal consciousness, we find there an explanation which is quite worthy of acceptation. This subliminal consciousness, though, in the majority of cases, it has no clear and comprehensive vision of the immediate future, can nevertheless possess an intuition of imminent danger, thanks to indications that escape our ordinary perception. It can also have a partial, intermittent and so to speak flickering vision of the future event and, if doubtful, can risk giving an incoherent warning, which, for that matter, will change nothing in that which already is.

In conclusion, let us state once more that fruitful premonitions necessarily annihilate events in the bud and consequently work their own destruction, so that any control becomes impossible. They would have an existence only if they prophesied a general event which the subject would not escape but for the warning. If they had said to any one intending to go to Messina two or three months before the catastrophe, “Don’t go, for the town will be destroyed before the month is out,” we should have an excellent example. But it is a remarkable thing that genuine premonitions of this kind are very rare and nearly always rather indefinite in regard to events of a general order. In M. Bozzano’s excellent collection, which is a sort of compendium of Premonitory phenomena, the only pretty clear cases are nos. cli, and clviii., both of which are taken from the Journal of the S.P.R. In the first,[1] a mother sent a servant to bring home her little daughter, who had already left the house with the intention of going through the “railway garden,” a strip of ground between the se. wall and the railway embankment, in order to sit on the great stone, by the seaside and see the trains pass by. A few minutes after the little girl’s departure, the mother had distinctly and repeatedly heard a voice within her say:

“Send for her back, or something dreadful will happen to her.”

[1] Journal, vol. viii., p. 45.

Now, soon after, a train ran off the line and the engine and tender fell, breaking through the protecting wall and crashing down on the very stones where the child was accustomed to sit.

In the other case,[1] into which Professor W. F. Barrett made a special enquiry, Captain MacGowan was in Brooklyn with his two boys, then on their holidays. He promised the boys that he would take them to the theatre and booked seats on the previous day; but on the day of the proposed visit he heard a voice within him constantly saying:

“Do not go to the theatre; take the boys back to school.”

[1] Ibid., vol. i., p. 283.

He hesitated, gave up his plan and resumed it again. But the words kept repeating themselves and impressing themselves upon him; and, in the end, he definitely decided not to go, much to the two boys’ disgust. That night the theatre was destroyed by fire, with a loss of three hundred lives.

We may add to this the prevision of the Battle of Borodino, to which I have already alluded, I will give the story in fuller detail, as told in the journal of Stephen Grellet the Quaker.

About three months before the French army entered Russia, the wife of General Toutschkoff dreamt that she was at an inn in a town unknown to her and that her father came into her room, holding her only son by the hand, and said to her, in a pitiful tone:

“Your happiness is at an end. He”–meaning Countess Toutschkoff’s husband–“has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.”

The dream was repeated a second and a third time. Her anguish of mind was such that she woke her husband and asked him:

“Where is Borodino?” They looked for the name on the map and did not find it.

Before the French armies reached Moscow, Count Toutschkoff was placed at the head of the army of reserve; and one morning her father, holding her son by the hand, entered her room at the inn where she was staying. In great distress, as she had beheld him in her dream, he cried out:

“He has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.”

Then she saw herself in the very same room and through the windows beheld the very same objects that she had seen in her dreams. Her husband was one of the many who perished in the battle fought near the River Borodino, from which an obscure village takes its name.[1]

[1] Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Stephen Grellet, vol i., p. 434.

This is evidently a very rare and perhaps solitary example of a long-dated prediction of a great historic event which nobody could foresee. It stirs more deeply than any other the enormous problems of fatality, free-will and responsibility. But has it been attested with sufficient rigour for us to rely upon it? That I cannot say. In any case, it has not been sifted by the S.P.R. Next, from the special point of view that interests us for the moment, we are unable to declare that this premonition had any chance of being of avail and preventing the general from going to Borodino. It is highly probable that he did not know where he was going or where he was; besides, the irresistible machinery of war held him fast and it was not his part to disengage his destiny. The premonition, therefore, could only have been given because it was certain not to be obeyed.

As for the two previous cases, nos. clv. and clviii., we must here again remark the usual strange reservations and observe how difficult it is to explain these premonitions save by attributing them to our subconsciousness. The main, unavoidable event is not precisely stated; but a subordinate consequence seems to be averted, as though to make us believe in some definite power of free will. Nevertheless, the mysterious entity that foresaw the catastrophe must also have foreseen that nothing would happen to the person whom it was warning; and this brings us back to the useless farce of which we spoke above. Whereas, with the theory of a subconscious self, the latter may have–as in the case of the traveler, the promontory, the copper or the carriage-not this time by inferences or indications that escape our perception, but by other unknown means, a vague presentiment of an impending peril, or, as I have already said, a partial, intermittent and unsettled vision of the future event, and, in its doubt, may utter its cry of alarm.

Whereupon let us recognize that it is almost forbidden to human reason to stray in these regions; and that the part of a prophet is, next to that of a commentator of prophecies, one of the most difficult and thankless that a man can attempt to sustain the world’s stage.

I am not sure if it is really necessary, before closing this chapter, to follow in the wake of many others and broach the problem of the preexistence of the future, which includes those of fatality, of free will, of time and of space, that is to say, all the points that touch the essential sources of the great mystery of the universe. The theologians and the metaphysicians have tackled these problems from every side without giving us the least hope of solving them. Among those which life sets us, there is none to which our brain seems more definitely and strictly closed; and they remain, if not as unimaginable, at least as incomprehensible as on the day when they were first perceived. What corresponds, outside us, with what we call time and space? We know nothing about it; and Kant, speaking in the name of the “apriorists,” who hold that the idea of time is innate in us, does not teach us much when he tells us that time, like space, is an a priori form of our sensibility, that is to say, an intuition preceding experience, even as Guyau, among the “empiricists,” who consider that this idea is acquired only by experience, does not enlighten us any more by declaring that this same time is the abstract formula of the changes in the universe. Whether space, as Leibnitz maintains, be an order of coexistence and time an order of sequences, whether it be by space that we succeed in representing time or whether time be an essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and to-day–Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf, James Ward, William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillee, Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmes, Dunan and endless others–have been unable to tame it; and that, however much their theories may contradict one another, they are all equally defensible and alike struggle vainly in the darkness against shadows that are not of our world.

To catch a glimpse of this strange problem of the preexistence of the future, as it shows itself to each of us, let us essay more humbly to translate it into tangible images, to place it as it were upon the stage. I am writing these lines sitting on a stone, in the shade of some tall beeches that overlook a little Norman village. It is one of those lovely summer days when the sweetness of life is almost visible in the azure vase of earth and sky. In the distance stretches the immense, fertile valley of the Seine, with its green meadows planted with restful trees, between which the river flows like a long path of gladness leading to the misty hills of the estuary. I am looking down on the village-square, with its ring of young lime-trees. A procession leaves the church and, amid prayers and chanting, they carry the statue of the Virgin around the sacred pile. I am conscious of all the details of the ceremony: the sly old cure perfunctorily bearing a small reliquary; four choirmen opening their mouths to bawl forth vacantly the Latin words which convey nothing to them; two mischievous serving-boys in frayed cassocks; a score of little girls, young girls and old maids in white, all starched and flounced, followed by six or seven village notables in baggy frockcoats. The pageant disappears behind the trees, comes into sight again at the bend of the road and hurries back into the church. The clock in the steeple strikes five, as though to ring down the curtain and mark in the infinite history of events which none will recollect the conclusion of a spectacle which never again, until the end of the world and of the universe of worlds, will be just what it was during those seconds when it beguiled my wandering eyes.

For in vain will they repeat the procession next year and every year after: never again will it be the same. Not only will several of the actors probably have disappeared, but all those who resume their old places in the ranks will have undergone the thousand little visible and invisible changes wrought by the passing days and weeks. In a word, this insignificant moment is unique, irrecoverable, inimitable, as are all the moments in the existence of all things; and this little picture, enduring for a few seconds suspended in boundless duration, has lapsed into eternity, where henceforth it will remain in its entirety to the end of time, so much so that, if a man could one day recapture in the past, among what some one has called the “astral negatives,” the image of what it was, he would find it intact, unchanged, ineffaceable and undeniable.

It is not difficult for us to conceive that one can thus go back and see again the astral negative of an event that is no more; and retrospective clairvoyance appears to us a wonderful but not an impossible thing. It astonishes but does not stagger our reason. But, when it becomes a question of discovering the same picture in the future, the boldest imagination flounders at the first step. How are we to admit that there exists somewhere a representation or reproduction of that which has not yet existed? Nevertheless, some of the incidents which we have just been considering seem to prove in an almost conclusive manner not only that such representations are possible, but that we may arrive at them more frequently, not to say more conveniently, than at those of the past. Now, once this representation preexists, as we are obliged to admit in the case of certain number of premonitions, the riddle remains the same whether the preexistence be one of a few hours, a few years or several centuries. It is therefore possible–for, in these matters, we must go straight to extremes or else leave them alone–it is therefore possible that a seer mightier than any of to-day, some god, demigod or demon, some unknown, universal or vagrant intelligence, saw that procession a million years ago, at a time when nothing existed of that which composes and surrounds it and when the very earth on which it moves had not yet risen from the ocean depths. And other seers, as mighty as the first, who from age to age contemplated the same spot and the same moment, would always have perceived, through the vicissitudes and upheavals of seas, shores and forests, the same procession going round the same little church that still lay slumbering in the oceanic ooze and made up of the same persons sprung from a race that was perhaps not yet represented on the earth.

It is obviously difficult for us to understand that the future can thus precede chaos, that the present is at the same time the future and the past, or that that which does not yet exists already at the same time at which it is no more. But, on the other hand, it is just as hard to conceive that the future does not preexist, that there is nothing before the present and that everything is only present or past. It is very probable that, to a more universal intelligence than ours, everything is but an eternal present, an immense punctum stans, as the metaphysicians say, in which all the events are on one plane; but it is no less probable that we ourselves, so long as we are men, in order to understand anything of this eternal present, will always be obliged to divide it into three parts. Thus caught between two mysteries equally baffling to our intelligence, whether we deny or admit the preexistence of the future, we are really only wrangling over words: in the one case, we give the name of “present,” from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, to that which to us is the future; in the other, we give the name of “future” to that which, from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, is the present. But, after all, it is incontestable in both cases that, at least from our point of view, the future preexists, since preexistence is the only name by which we can describe and the only form under which we can conceive that which we do not yet see in the present.

Attempts have been made to shed light on the riddle by transferring it to space. It is true that it there loses the greater part of its obscurity; but this apparently is because, in changing its environment, it has completely changed its nature and no longer bears any relation to what it was when it was placed in time. We are told, for instance, that innumerable cities distributed over the surface of the earth are to us as if they were not, so long as we have not seen them, and only begin to exist on the day when we visit them. That is true; but space, outside all metaphysical speculations, has realities for us which time does not possess. Space, although very mysterious and incomprehensible once we pass certain limits, is nevertheless not, like time, incomprehensible and illusory in all its parts. We are certainly quite able to conceive that those towns which we have never seen and doubtless never will see indubitably exist, whereas we find it much more difficult to imagine that the catastrophe which, fifty years hence, will annihilate one of them already exists as really as the town itself. We are capable of picturing a spot whence, with keener eyes than these which we boast to-day, we should see in one glance all the cities of the earth and even those of other worlds, but it is much less easy for us to imagine a point in the ages whence we should simultaneously discover the past, the present and the future because the past, the present and the future are three orders of duration which cannot find room at the same time in our intelligence and which inevitably devour one other. How can we picture to ourselves, for instance, a point in eternity at which our little procession already exists, while it is not yet and although it is no more? Add to this the thought that it is necessary and inevitable, from the millenaries which had no beginning, that, at a given moment, at a given place, the little procession should leave the little church in a given manner and that no known or imaginable will can change anything in it, in the future any more than in the past; and we begin to understand that there is no hope of understanding.

We find among the cases collected by M. Bozzano a singular premonition wherein the unknown factors of space and time are continued in a very curious fashion. In August, 1910, Cavalliere Giovanni de Figueroa, one of the most famous fencing masters at Palermo, dreamt that he was in the country, going along a road white with dust, which brought him to a broad ploughed field. In the middle of the field stood a rustic building, with a ground-floor used for store-rooms and cow-sheds and on the right a rough hut made of branches and a cart with some harness lying in it.

A peasant wearing dark trousers, with a black felt hat on his head, came forward to meet him, asked him to follow him and took him round behind the house. Through a low, narrow door they entered a little stable with a short, winding stone staircase leading to a loft over the entrance to the house. A mule fastened to a swinging manger was blocking the bottom step; and the chevalier had to push it aside before climbing the staircase. On reaching the loft, he noticed that from the ceiling were suspended strings of melons, tomatoes, onions and Indian corn. In this room were two women and a little girl; and through a door leading to another room he caught sight of an extremely high bed, unlike any that he had ever seen before. Here the dream broke off. It seemed to him so strange that he spoke of it to several of his friends, whom he mentions by name and who are ready to confirm his statements.

On the 12th of October in the same year, in order to support a fellow-townsman in a duel, he accompanied the seconds, by motorcar, from Naples to Marano, a place which he had never visited nor even heard of. As soon as they were some way in the country, he was curiously impressed by the white and dusty road. The car pulled up at the side of a field which he at once recognized. They lighted; and he remarked to one of the seconds: “This is not the first time that I have been here. There should be a house at the end of this path and on the right a hut and a cart with some harness in it.”

As a matter of fact, everything was as he described it. An instant later, at the exact moment foreseen by the dream, the peasant in the dark trousers and the black felt hat came up and asked him to follow him. But, instead of walking behind him, the chevalier went in front, for he already knew the way. He found the stable and, exactly at the place which it occupied two months before, near its swinging manger, the mule blocking the way to the staircase. The fencing master went up the steps and once more saw the loft, with the ceiling hung with melons, onions and tomatoes, and, in a corner on the right, the two silent women and the child, identical with the figures in his dream, while in the next room he recognized the bed whose extraordinary height had so much impressed him.

It really looks as if the facts themselves, the extramundane realities, the eternal verities, or whatever we may be pleased to call them, have tried to show us here that time and space are one and the same illusion, one and the same convention and have no existence outside our little day-spanned understanding; that “everywhere” and “always” are exactly synonymous terms and reign alone as soon as we cross the narrow boundaries of the obscure consciousness in which we live. We are quite ready to admit that Cavaliere de Figueroa may have had by clairvoyance an exact and detailed vision of places which he was not to visit until later: this is a pretty frequent and almost classical phenomenon, which, as it affects the realities of space, does not astonish us beyond measure and, in any case, does not take us out of the world which our senses perceive. The field, the house, the hut, the loft do not move; and it is no miracle that they should be found in the same place. But, suddenly, quitting this domain where all is stationary, the phenomenon is transferred to time and, in those unknown places, at the foretold second, brings together all the moving actors of that little drama in two acts, of which the first was performed some two and a half months before, in the depths of some mysterious other life where it seemed to be motionlessly and irrevocably awaiting its terrestrial realization. Any explanation would but condense this vapour of petty mysteries into a few drops in the ocean of mysteries. Let us note here again, in passing, the strange freakishness of the premonitions. They accumulate the most precise and circumstantial details as long as the scene remains insignificant, but come to a sudden stop before the one tragic and interesting scene of the drama: the duel and its issue. Here again we recognize the inconsistent, impotent, ironical or humorous habits of our unknown guest.

But we will not prolong these somewhat vain speculations concerning space and time. We are merely playing with words that represent very badly ideas which we do not put into form at all. To sum up, if it is difficult for us to conceive that the future preexists, perhaps it is even more difficult for us to understand that it does not exist; moreover, a certain number of facts tend to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in time and in eternity, the same permanence and the same vividness as the past. Now, from the moment that it preexists, it is not surprising that we should be able to know it; it is even astonishing, granted that it overhangs us on every side, that we should not discover it oftener and more easily. It remains to be learnt what would become of our life if everything were foreseen in it, if we saw it unfolding beforehand, in its entirety, with its events which would have to be inevitable, because, if it were possible for us to avoid them, they would not exist and we could not perceive them. Suppose that, instead of being abnormal, uncertain, obscure, debatable and very unusual, prediction became, so to speak, scientific, habitual, clear and infallible: in a short time, having nothing more to foretell, it would die of inanition. If, for instance, it was prophesied to me that I must die in the course of a journey in Italy, I should naturally abandon the journey; therefore it could not have been predicted to me; and thus all life would soon be nothing but inaction, pause and abstention, a soft of vast desert where the embryos of still-born events would be gathered in heaps and where nothing would grow save perhaps one or two more or less fortunate enterprises and the little insignificant incidents which no one would trouble to avoid. But these again are questions to which there is no solution; and we will not pursue them further.

CHAPTER IV. THE ELBERFELD HORSES

I will first sum up as briefly as possible, for who so may still be ignorant of them, the facts which it is necessary to know if one would fully understand the marvelous story of the Elberfeld horses. For a detailed account, I can refer him to Herr Karl Krall’s remarkable work, Denkende Tiere (Leipsig, 1912), which is the first and principal source of information amid a bibliography that is already assuming considerable dimensions.

Some twenty years ago there lived in Berlin an old misanthrope named Wilhelm von Osten. He was a man with a small private income, a little eccentric in his ways and obsessed by one idea, the intelligence of animals. He began by undertaking the education of a horse that gave him no very definite results. But, in 1900, he became the owner of a Russian stallion who, under the name of Hans, to which was soon added the Homeric and well-earned prefix of Kluge, or Clever, was destined to upset all our notions of animal psychology and to raise questions that rank among the most unexpected and the most absorbing problems which man has yet encountered.

Thanks to Von Osten, whose patience, contrary to what one might think, was in no wise angelic but resembled rather a frenzied obstinacy, the horse made rapid and extraordinary progress. This progress is very aptly described by Professor E. Clarapede, of the university of Geneva, who says, in his excellent monograph on the Elberfeld horses:

“After making him familiar with various common ideas, such as right, left, top, bottom and so on, his master began to teach him arithmetic by the intuitive method. Hans was brought to a table on which were placed first one, then two, then several small skittles. Von Osten, kneeling beside Hans, uttered the corresponding numbers, at the same time making him strike as many blows with his hoof as there were skittles on the table. Before long, the skittles were replaced by figures written on a blackboard. The results were astonishing. The horse was capable not only of counting (that is to say, of striking as many blows as he was asked), but also of himself making real calculations, of solving little problems. . . .

“But Hans could do more than mere sums: he knew how to read; he was a musician, distinguishing between harmonious and dissonant chords. He also had an extraordinary memory: he could tell the date of each day of the current week. In short, he got through all the tasks which an intelligent schoolboy of fourteen is able to perform.”

The rumour of these curious experiments soon spread; and visitors flocked to the little stable-yard in which Von Osten kept his singular pupil at work. The newspapers took the matter up; and a fierce controversy broke forth between those who believed in the genuineness of the phenomenon and those who saw no more in it than a barefaced fraud. A scientific committee was appointed in 1904, consisting of professors of psychology and physiology, of the director of a zoological garden, of a circus manager and of veterinary surgeons and cavalry-officers. The committee discovered nothing suspicious, but ventured upon no explanation. A second committee was then appointed, numbering among its members Herr Oskar Pfungst, of the Berlin psychological laboratory. Herr Pfungst, after a long series of experiments, drew up a voluminous and crushing report, in which he maintained that the horse was gifted with no intelligence, that it did not recognize either letters or figures, that it really knew neither how to calculate nor how to count, but merely obeyed the imperceptible, infinitesimal and unconscious signs which escaped from its master.

Public opinion veered round suddenly and completely. People felt a sort of half-cowardly relief at beholding the prompt collapse of a miracle which was threatening to throw confusion into the self satisfied little fold of established truths. Poor Von Osten protested in vain: no one listened to him; the verdict was given. He never recovered from this official blow; he became the laughing-stock of all those whom he had at first astounded; and he died, lonely and embittered, on the 29th of June, 1909, at the age of seventy-one.

But he left a disciple whose faith had not been shaken by the general defection. A well-to-do Elberfeld manufacturer, Herr Krall, had taken a great interest in Von Osten’s labours and, during the latter years of the old man’s life, had eagerly followed and even on occasion directed the education of the wonderful stallion. Von Osten left Kluge Hans to him by will; on his own side, Krall had bought two Arab stallions, Mohammed and Zarif whose prowess soon surpassed that of the pioneer. The whole question was reopened, events took a vigorous and decisive turn and, instead of a weary, eccentric old man, discouraged almost to sullenness and with no weapons for the struggle, the critics of the miracle found themselves faced by a new adversary, young and high-spirited, endowed with remarkable scientific instinct, quick-witted, scholarly and well able to defend himself.

His educational methods also differ materially from Von Osten’s. It was a strange thing, but deep down in the rather queer, cross-grained soul of the old enthusiast there had grown up gradually a sort of hatred for his four-legged pupil. He felt the stallion’s proud and nervous will resisting his with an obstinacy which he qualified as diabolical. They stood up to each other like two enemies: and the lessons almost assumed the form of a tragic and secret struggle in which the animal’s soul rebelled against man’s domination.

Krall, on the other hand, adores his pupils; and this atmosphere of affection has in a manner of speaking humanized them. There are no longer those sudden movements of wild panic which reveal the ancestral dread of man in the quietest and best-trained horse. He talks to them long and tenderly, as a father might talk to his children; and we have the strange feeling that they listen to all that he says and understand it. If they appear not to grasp an explanation or a demonstration, he will begin it all over again, analyze it, paraphrase it ten times in succession, with the patience of a mother. And so their progress has been incomparably swifter and more astounding than that of old Hans. Within a fortnight of the first lesson Mohammed did simple little addition and subtraction sums quite correctly. He had learnt to distinguish the tens from the units, striking the latter with his right foot and the former with his left. He knew the meaning of the symbols plus and minus. Four days later, he was beginning multiplication and division. In four months’ time, he knew how to extract square and cubic roots; and, soon after, he learnt to spell and read by means of the conventional alphabet devised by Krall.

This alphabet, at the first glance, seems rather complicated. For that matter, it is only a makeshift; but how could one find anything better? The unfortunate horse, who is almost voiceless, has only one way in which to express himself: a clumsy hoof, which was not created to put thought into words. It became necessary, therefore, to contrive, as in table-turning, a special alphabet, in which each letter is designated by a certain number of blows struck by the right foot and the left. Here is the copy handed to visitors at Elberfeld to enable them to follow the horse’s operations:

— 1 2 3 4 5 6
10 E N R S M C
20 A H L T A: CH
30 I D G W J SCH
40 O B F K O: —
50 U V Z P U: —
60 EI AU EU X Q —

To mark the letter E, for instance, the stallion will strike one blow with his left foot and one with his right; for the letter L, two blows with his left foot and three with his right; and so on. The horses have this alphabet so deeply imprinted in their memory that, practically speaking, they never make a mistake; and they strike their hoofs so quickly, one after the other, that at first one has some difficulty in following them.

Mohammed and Zarif–for Zarif’s progress was almost equal to that of his fellow-pupil, though he seems a little less gifted from the standpoint of higher mathematics-Mohammed and Zarif in this way reproduce the words spoken in their presence, spell the names of their visitors, reply to questions put to them and sometimes make little observations, little personal and spontaneous reflections to which we shall return presently. They have created for their own use an inconceivably fantastic and phonetic system of spelling which they stubbornly refuse to relinquish and which often makes their writing rather difficult to read. Deeming most of the vowels useless, they keep almost exclusively to the consonants; thus Zucker, for instance, becomes Z K R; Pferd, P F R T, or F R T, and so on.

I will not set forth in detail the many different proofs of intelligence lavished by the singular inhabitants of this strange stable. They are not only first-class calculators, for whom the most repellent fractions and roots possess hardly any secrets: they distinguish sounds, colours, and scents, read the time on the face of a watch, recognize certain geometrical figures, likenesses and photographs.

Following on these more and more conclusive experiments and especially after the publication of Krall’s great work, Denkende Tiere, a model of precision and arrangement, men’s minds were faced with clear and definite problem which, this time, could not be challenged. Scientific committees followed one another at Elberfeld; and their reports became legion. Learned men of every country–including Dr. Edinger, the eminent Frankfort neurologist; Professors Dr. H. Kraemer and H. E. Ziegler, of Stuttgart; Dr. Paul Saresin, of Bale; Professor Ostwald, of Berlin; Professor A. Beredka, of the Pasteur Institute; Dr. E. Clarapede, of the university of Geneva; Professor Schoeller and Professor Gehrke, the natural philosopher, of Berlin; Professor Goldstein, of Darmstadt; Professor von Buttel-Reepen, of Oldenburg; Professor William Mackenzie, of Genoa; Professor R. Assagioli, of Florence; Dr. Hartkopf, of Cologne; Dr. Freudenberg, of Brussels; Dr. Ferrari, of Bologna, etc., etc., for the list is lengthening daily–came to study on the spot the inexplicable phenomenon which Dr. Clarapede proclaims to be “the most sensational event that has ever happened in the psychological world.”

With the exception of two or three sceptics or convinced misoneists and of those who made too short a stay at Elberfeld, all were unanimous in recognizing that the facts were as stated and that the experiments were conducted with absolute fairness. Disagreement begins only when it becomes a matter of commenting on them, interpreting them and explaining them.

To complete this short preamble, it is right to add that, for some time past, the case of the Elberfeld horses no longer stands quite alone. There exists at Mannheim a dog of a rather doubtful breed who performs almost the same feats as his equine rivals. He is less advanced than they in arithmetic, but does little additions, subtractions and multiplications of one or two figures correctly. He reads and writes by tapping with his paw, in accordance with an alphabet which, it appears, he has thought out for himself; and his spelling also is simplified and phoneticized to the utmost. He distinguishes the colour in a bunch of flowers, counts the money in a purse and separates the marks from the pfennigs. He knows how to seek and find words to define the object or the picture placed before him. You show him, for instance, a bouquet in a vase and ask him what it is.

“A glass with little flowers,” he replies.

And his answers are often curiously spontaneous and original. In the course of a reading-exercise in which the word Herbst, autumn, chanced to attract attention, Professor William Mackenzie asked him if he could explain what autumn was.

“It is the time when there are apples,” Rolf replied.

On the same occasion, the same professor, without knowing what it represented, held out to him a card marked with red and blue squares:

“What’s this?”

“Blue, red, lots of cubes,” replied the dog.

Sometimes his repartees are not lacking in humour.

“Is there anything you would like me to do for you?” a lady of his acquaintance asked, one day.

And Master Rolf gravely answered:

“Wedelen,” which means, “Wag your tail!”

Rolf, whose fame is comparatively young, has not yet, like his illustrious rivals of the Rhine Province, been the object of minute enquiries and copious and innumerable reports. But the incidents which I have just mentioned and which are vouched for by such men as Professor Mackenzie and M. Duchatel, the learned and clear-sighted vice-president of the Societe Universelle d’Etudes Psychiques,[1] who went to Mannheim for the express purpose of studying them, appear to be no more controvertible than the Elbenfeld occurrences, of which they are a sort of replica or echo. It is not unusual to find these coincidences amongst abnormal phenomena. They spring up simultaneously in different quarters of the globe, correspond with one another and multiply as though in obedience to a word of command. It is probable therefore that we shall see still more manifestations of the same class. One might almost say that a new spirit is passing over the world and, after awakening in man forces whereof he was not aware, is now reaching other creatures who with us inhabit this mysterious earth, on which they live, suffer and die, as we do, without knowing why.

[1] See the interesting lecture by M. Edmond Duchatel, published in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, October 1913.

I have not been to Mannheim, but I made my pilgrimage to Elberfeld and stayed long enough in the town to carry away with me the conviction shared by all those who have undertaken the journey.

A few months ago, Herr Krall, whom I had promised the year before that I would come and see his wonderful horses, was kind enough to repeat his invitation in a more pressing fashion, adding that his stable would perhaps be broken up after the 15th of September and that, in any case, be would be obliged, by his doctor’s orders, to interrupt for an indefinite period a course of training which he found exceedingly fatiguing.

I at once left for Elberfeld, which, as everybody knows, is an important manufacturing-town in Rhenish Prussia and is, in fact, more quaint, pleasing and picturesque than one might expect. I had long since read everything that had been published on the question; and I was wholly persuaded of the genuineness of the incidents. Indeed it would be difficult to have any doubts after the repeated and unremitting supervision and verification to which the experiments are subjected, a supervision which is of the most rigorous type, often hostile and almost ill-mannered. As for their interpretation, I was convinced that telepathy, that is to say, the transmission of thought from one subconsciousness to another, remained, however strange it might be in this new region, the only acceptable theory; and this in spite of certain circumstances that seemed plainly to exclude it. In default of telepathy proper, I inclined toward the mediumistic or subliminal theory, which was very ably outlined by M. de Vesmes in a remarkable lecture delivered, on the 22nd of December, 1912, before the Societe Universelle d’Etudes Psychiques. It is true that telepathy, especially when carried to its extreme limits, appeals above all to the subliminal forces, so that the two theories overlap at more than one point and it is often difficult to make out where the first ends and the second begins. But this discussion will be more appropriate a little later.

I found Herr Krall in his goldsmith’s shop, a sort of palace of Golconda, streaming and glittering with the most precious pearls and stones on earth. Herr Krall, it is well to remember, in order to dispel any suspicion of pecuniary interest, is a rich manufacturer whose family for three generations, from father to son, have conducted one of the most important jewelry businesses in Germany. His researches, so far from bringing him the least profit, cost him a great deal of money, take up all his leisure and some part of the time which he would otherwise devote to his business and, as usually happens, procure him from his fellow citizens and from not a few scientific men more annoyance, unfair criticism and sarcasm than consideration or gratitude. His work is preeminently the disinterested and thankless task of the apostle and pioneer.

For the rest, Herr Kraft, though his faith is active, zealous and infectious, has nothing in common with the visionaries or illuminati. He is a man of about fifty, vigorous, alert and enthusiastic, but at the same time well-balanced; accesible to every idea and even to every dream, yet practical and methodical, with a ballast of the most invincible common-sense. He inspires from the outset that fine confidence, frank and unrestrained, which instantly disperses the instinctive doubt, the strange uneasiness and the veiled suspicion that generally separate two people who meet for the first time; and one welcomes in him, from the very depths of one’s being, the honest man, the staunch friend whom one can trust and whom one is sorry not to have known earlier in life.

We go together through the streets and along the bustling quays of Elberfeld to the stable, situated at a few hundred steps from the shop. The horses are taking the air outside the doors of their boxes, in the yard shaded by a lime-tree. There are four of them: Mohammed, the most intelligent, the most gifted of them all, the great mathematician of the party; his double, Zarif, a little less advanced, less tractable, craftier, but at the same time more fanciful, more spontaneous and capable of occasional disconcerting sallies; next, Hanschen, a little Shetland pony, hardly bigger than a Newfoundland dog, the street-urchin of the band, always quivering with excitement, roguish, flighty, uncertain and passionate, but ready in a moment to work you out the most difficult addition and multiplication sums with a furious scrape of the hoof; and lastly the latest arrival, the plump and placid Berto, an imposing black stallion, quite blind and lacking the sense of smell. He has been only a few months at school and is still, so to speak, in the preparatory class, but already does–a little more clumsily, but more good humouredly and conscientiously–small addition and subtraction sums quite as well as many a child of the same age.

In a corner, Kama, a young elephant two or three years old, about the size of an outrageously “blown” donkey, rolls his mischievous and almost knavish eye, under the shelter of his wide ears, each resembling a great rhubarb-leaf, and with his stealthy, insinuating trunk carefully picks up whatever he considers fit to eat, that is to say, pretty well everything that lies about on the stones. Great things were hoped of him, but hitherto he has disappointed all expectations: he is the dunce of the establishment. Perhaps he is too young still: his little elephant-soul no doubt resembles that of a sucking-babe which, in the place of its feet and hands, plays with the stupendous nose that must first explore and question the universe. It is impossible to grip his attention; and, when they set out before him his alphabet of movable letters, instead of naming those which are pointed out to him he applies himself to pulling them off their stems, in order to swallow them surreptitiously. He has disheartened his kind master, who, pending the coming of the reason and wisdom promised by the proboscidian legends, leaves him in a contented state of ignorance made more blissful by an almost insatiable appetite.

But I ask to see the great pioneer, Kluge Hans, Clever Hans. He is still alive. He is old: he must be sixteen or seventeen; but his old age, alas, is not exempt from the baneful troubles from which men themselves suffer in their decline! Hans has turned out badly, it appears, and is never mentioned save in ambiguous terms. An imprudent or vindictive groom, I forget which, having introduced a mare into the yard, Hans the Pure, who till then had led an austere and monkish existence, vowed to celibacy, science and the chaste delights of figures, Hans the Irreproachable incontinently lost his head and cut himself open on the hanging-rail of his stall. They had to force back his intestines and sew up his belly. He is now rusticating miserably in a meadow outside the town. So true it is that a life cannot be judged except at its close and that we are sure of nothing until we are dead.

Before the sitting begins, while the master is making his morning inspection, I go up to Muhamed, speak to him and pat him, looking straight into his eyes meanwhile in order to catch a sign of his genius. The handsome creature, well-bred and in hard condition, is as calm and trusting as a dog; he shows himself excessively gracious and friendly and tries to give me some huge licks and mighty kisses which I do my best to avoid because they are a little unexpected and overdemonstrative. The expression of his limpid antelope-eyes is deep, serious and remote, but it differs in no wise from that of his brothers who, for thousands of years, have seen nothing but brutality and ingratitude in man. If we were able to read anything there, it would not be that insufficient and vain little effort which we call thought, but rather an indefinable, vast anxiety, a tear-dimmed regret for the boundless, stream-crossed plains where his sires sported at will before they knew man’s yoke. In any case, to see him thus fastened by a halter to the stable-door, beating off the flies and absently pawing the cobbles, Muhamed is nothing more than a well-trained horse who seems to be waiting for his saddle or harness and who hide, his new secret as profoundly as all the others which nature has buried in him.

But they are summoning me to take my place in the stable where the lessons are given. It is a small room, empty and bare, with peat-moss litter bedding and white-washed walls. The horse is separated from the people present by breast-high wooden partitions. Opposite the four-legged scholar is a black-board, nailed to the wall; and on one side a corn-bin which forms a seat for the spectators. Muhamed is led in. Krall, who is a little nervous, makes no secret of his uneasiness. His horses are fickle animals, uncertain, capricious and extremely sensitive. A trifle disturbs them, confuses them, puts them off. At such times, threats, prayers and even the irresistible charm of carrots and good rye-bread are useless. They obstinately refuse to do any work and they answer at random. Everything depends on a whim, the state of the weather, the morning meal or the impression which the visitor makes upon them. Still, Krall seems to know, by certain imperceptible signs, that this is not going to be a bad day. Muhamed quivered with excitement, snorts loudly through his nostrils, utters a series of indistinct little whinnyings: excellent symptoms, it appears. I take my seat on the corn-bin. The master, standing beside the black-board, chalk in hand, introduces me to Muhamed in due form, as to a human being:

“Muhamed, attention! This is your uncle”–pointing to me–“who has come all the way to honour you with a visit. Mind you don’t disappoint him. His name is Maeterlinck.” Krall pronounced the first syllable German-fashion: Mah. “You understand: Maeterlinck. Now show him that you know your letters and that you can spell a name correctly, like a clever boy. Go ahead, we’re listening.” Muhamed gives a short neigh and, on the small, movable board at his feet, strikes first with his right hoof and then with his left the number of blows which correspond with the letter M in the conventional alphabet used by the horses. Then, one after the other, without stopping or hesitating, he marks the letters A D R L I N S H, representing the unexpected aspect which my humble name assumes in the equine mind and phonetics. His attention is called to the fact that there is a mistake. He readily agrees and replaces the S H by a G and then the G by a K. They insist that he must put a T instead of the D; but Muhamed, content with his work, shakes his head to say no and refuses to make any further corrections.

I assure you that the first shock is rather disturbing, however much one expected it. I am quite aware that, when one describes these things, one is taken for a dupe too readily dazzled by the doubtless childish illusion of an ingeniously contrived scene. But what contrivances, what illusions have we here? Do they lie in the spoken word? Why, to admit that the horse understands and translates his master’s words is just to accept the most extraordinary part of the phenomenon! Is it a case of surreptitious touches or conventional signs? However simple-minded one may be, one would nevertheless notice them more easily than a horse, even a horse of genius. Krall never lays a hand on the animal; he moves all round the little table, which contains no appliances of any sort; for the most part, he stands behind the horse which is unable to see him, or comes and sits beside his guest on the innocuous corn-bin, busying himself, while lecturing his pupil, in writing up the minutes of the lesson. He also welcomes with the most serene readiness any restrictions or tests which you propose. I assure you that the thing itself is much simple, and clearer than the suspicions of the arm-chair critics and that the most distrustful mind world not entertain the faintest idea of fraud in the frank, wholesome atmosphere of the old stable.

“But,” some one might have said, “Krall, who knew that you were coming to Elberfeld, had of course thoroughly rehearsed his little exercise in spelling, which apparently is only an exercise in memory.”

For conscience’ sake, though I did not look upon the objection as serious, I submitted it to Krall, who at once said: “Try it for yourself. Dictate to the horse any German word of two or three syllables, emphasizing it strongly. I’ll go out of the stable and leave you alone with him.”

Behold Muhamed and me by ourselves. I confess that I am a little frightened. I have many a time felt less uncomfortable in the presence of the great ones or the kings of the earth. Whom am I dealing with exactly? However, I summon my courage and speak aloud the first word that occurs to me, the name of the hotel at which I am staying: Weidenhof. At first, Muhamed, who seems a little puzzled by his master’s absence, appears not to hear me and does not even deign to notice that I am there. But I repeat eagerly, in varying tones of voice, by turns insinuating, threatening, beseeching and commanding:

“Weidenhof! Weidenhof! Weidenhof!”

At last, my mysterious companion suddenly makes up his mind to lend me his ears and straightway blithely raps out the following letters, which I write down on the black-board as they come:

WEIDNHOZ.

It is a magnificent specimen of equine spelling! Triumphant and bewildered, I call in friend Krall, who, accustomed as he is to the prodigy, thinks it quite natural, but knits his brows:

“What’s this, Muhamed? You’ve made a mistake again. It’s an F you want at the end of the word, not a Z. Just correct it at once, please.”

And the docile Muhamed, recognizing his blunder, gives the three blows with his right hoof, followed by the four blows with his left, which represent the most unexceptionable F that one could ask for.

Observe, by the way, the logic of his phonetic writing: contrary to his habit, he strikes the mute E after the W, because it is indispensable; but, finding it included in the D, he considers it superfluous and suppresses it with a high hand.

You rub your eyes, question yourself, ask yourself in the presence of what humanized phenomenon, of what unknown force, of what new creature you stand. Was all this what they hid in their eyes, those silent brothers of ours? You blush at arm’s long injustice. You look around you for some sort of trace, obvious or subtle, of the mystery. You feel yourself attacked in your innermost citadel, where you held yourself most certain and most impregnable. You have felt a breath from the abyss upon your face. You would not be more astonished if you suddenly heard the voice of the dead. But the most astonishing thing is that you are not astonished for long. We all, unknown to ourselves, live in the expectation of the extraordinary; and, when it comes, it moves us much less than did the expectation. It is as though a sort of higher instinct, which knows everything and is not ignorant of the miracles that hang over our heads, were reassuring us in advance and helping us to make an easy entrance into the regions of the supernatural. There is nothing to which we grow accustomed more readily than to the marvellous; and it is only afterwards, upon reflection, that our intelligence, which knows hardly anything, appreciates the magnitude of certain phenomena.

But Muhamed gives unmistakable signs of impatience to show that he has had enough of spelling. Thereupon, as a diversion and a reward, his kind master suggests the extraction of a few square and cubic roots. Muhamed appears delighted: these are his favourite problems: for he takes less interest than formerly in the most difficult multiplications and divisions. He doubtless thinks them beneath him.

Krall therefore writes on the blackboard various numbers of which I did not take note. Moreover, as nobody now contests the fact that the horse works them with ease, it would hardly be interesting to reproduce here several rather grim problems of which numerous variants will be found in the accounts and reports of experiments signed by Drs. Mackenzie and Hartkopff, by Overbeck, Clarapede and many others. What strikes one particularly is the facility, the quickness, I was almost saying the joyous carelessness with which the strange mathematician gives the answers. The last figure is hardly chalked upon the board before the right hoof is striking off the units, followed immediately by the left hoof marking the tens. There is not a sign of attention or reflection; one is not even aware of the exact moment at which the horse looks at the problem: and the answer seems to spring automatically from an invisible intelligence. Mistakes are rare or frequent according as it happens to be a good or bad day with the horse; but, when he is told of them, he nearly always corrects them. Not unseldom, the number is reversed: 47, for instance, becomes 74; but he puts it right without demur when asked.

I am manifestly dumbfounded; but perhaps these problems are prepared beforehand? If they were, it would be very extraordinary, but yet less surprising than their actual solution. Krall does not read this suspicion in my eyes, because they do not show it; nevertheless, to remove the least shade of it, he asks me to write a number of my own on the black-board for the horse to find the root.

I must here confess the humiliating ignorance that is the disgrace of my life. I have not the faintest idea of the mysteries concealed within these recondite and complicated operations. I did my humanities like everybody else; but, after crossing the useful and familiar frontiers of multiplication and division I found it impossible to advance any farther into the desolate regions, bristling with figures, where the square and cubic roots hold sway, together with all sorts of other monstrous powers, without shapes or faces, which inspired me with invincible terror. All the persecutions of my excellent instructors wore themselves out against a dead wall of stolidity. Successively disheartened, they left me to my dismal ignorance, prophesying a most dreary future for me, haunted with bitter regrets. I must say that, until now, I had scarcely experienced the effects of these gloomy predictions; but the hour has come for me to expiate the sins of my youth. Nevertheless, I put a good face upon it: and, taking at random the first figures that suggest themselves to my mind, I boldly write on the black-board an enormous and most daring number. Muhamed remains motionless. Krall speaks to him sharply, telling him to hurry up. Muhamed lifts his right hoof, but does not let it fall. Krall loses patience, lavishes prayers, promises and threats; the hoof remains poised, as though to bear witness to good intentions that cannot be carried out. Then my host turns round, looks at the problem and asks me:

“Does it give an exact root?”

Exact? What does he mean? Are there roots which. . .? But I dare not go on: my shameful ignorance suddenly flashes before my eyes. Krall smiles indulgently and, without making any attempt to supplement an education which is too much in arrears to allow of the slightest hope, laboriously works out the problem and declares that the horse was right in refusing to give an impossible solution.

Muhamed receives our thanks in the form of a lordly portion of carrots; and a pupil is introduced whose attainments do not tower so high above mine: Hanschen, the little pony, quick and lively as a big rat. Like me, he has never gone beyond elementary arithmetic: and so we shall understand each other better and meet on equal terms.

Krall asks me for two numbers to multiply. I give him 63 X 7. He does the sum and writes the product on the board, followed by the sign of division: 441 / 7. Instantly Hanschen, with a celerity difficult to follow, gives three blows, or rather three violent scrapes with his right hoof and six with his left, which makes 63, for we must not forget that in German they say not sixty-three, but three-and-sixty. We congratulate him; and, to evince his satisfaction, he nimbly reverses the number by marking 36 and then puts it right again by scraping 63. He is evidently enjoying himself and juggling with the figures. And additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions follow one after the other, with figures supplied by myself, so as to remove any idea of collusion. Hanschen seldom blunders; and, when he does, we receive a very clear impression that his mistake is voluntary: he is like a mischievous schoolboy playing a practical joke upon his master. The solutions fall thick as hail upon the little spring-board; the correct answer is released by the question as though you were pressing the button of an electric push. The pony’s flippancy is as surprising as his skill. But in this unruly flippancy, in this hastiness which seems inattentive there is nevertheless a fixed and permanent idea. Hanschen paws the ground, kicks, prances, tosses his head, looks as if he cannot keep still, but never leaves his spring-board. Is he interested in the problems, does he enjoy them? It is impossible to say; but he certainly has the appearance of one accomplishing a duty or a piece of work which we do not discuss, which is important, necessary and inevitable.

But the lesson suddenly ends with a joke carried rather too far by the pupil, who catches his good master by the seat of his trousers, into which he plants disrespectful teeth. He is severely reprimanded, deprived of his carrots and sent back in disgrace to his private apartments.

Next comes Bette, who is like a big, sleek Norman horse. He makes the calm, dignified, peaceful entrance of a blind giant. His large, dark, brilliant eyes are quite dead, deprived of any reflex power. He feels about with his hoof for the board on which he is to rap his answers. He has not yet gone beyond the rudiments of mathematics; and the early part of his education was particularly difficult. They managed to make him understand the value and meaning of the numbers and of the addition- and multiplication-signs by means of little taps on his sides. Krall speaks to him as a father might speak to the youngest of his sons. He explains to him fondly the easy sums which I suggest his doing: two plus three, eight minus four, four times three; he says:

“Mind! It’s not plus three or minus three this time, but four multiplied by three!”

Berto hardly ever makes a mistake. When he does not understand the question, he waits for it to be written with the finger on his side; and the careful way in which he works it out like some

The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck (page 2)