incantations, haruspication, “possession,” evocation of the dead, apparitions, ghosts, miraculous cures, levitation, transmission of thought, apparent resurrections and the rest are the exact equivalent, though magnified by the aid of plentiful and obvious frauds of our latter-day supernaturalism. Turning in another direction, we are able to see that psychical phenomena are very evenly distributed over the whole surface of the globe. At all events, there does not appear to be any race that is absolutely or peculiarly refractory to them. One would be inclined to say, however, that they manifest themselves by preference among the most civilized nations–perhaps because that is where they are most carefully sought after–and among the most primitive. In short, it cannot be denied that we are in the presence of faculties or senses, more or less latent but at the same time universally distributed, which form part of the general and unvarying inheritance of mankind. But have these faculties or senses undergone evolution, like most of the others? And, if they have not done so on our earth, do they show traces of an extraplanetary evolution? Is there progress or reaction? Are they withered and useless branches, or buds swollen with sap and promise? Are they retreating before the march of intelligence or invading its domain?
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M. Ernest Bozzano, one of the most learned, most daring and most subtle exponents of the new science that is in process of formation, in the course of a remarkable essay in the Annales des sciences psychiques,[1] gives it as his opinion that they have remained stationary and unchanged. He considers that they have become in no way diffused, generalized and refined, like so many others that are much less important and useful from the point of view of the struggle for life, such as the musical faculty, for instance. It does not even seem, says M. Bozzano, that it is possible to cultivate or develop them systematically. The Hindu race in particular, who for thousands of years have been devoting themselves to the study of these manifestations, have arrived at nothing but a better knowledge of the empirical methods calculated to produce them in individuals already endowed with these supernormal faculties. I do not know to what extent M. Bozzano’s assertions are beyond dispute. They concern historical or remote facts which it is very difficult to verify. In any case, it is something to have perfected , as has been done in India, the empirical methods favourable to the production of supernormal phenomena. One might even say that it is about all that we have the right to expect, seeing that, by the author’s own admission, these faculties are latent in every man and that, as has frequently been seen, it needs but an illness, a lesion, or sometimes even the slightest emotion or a mere passing faintness to make them suddenly reveal themselves in an individual who seemed most hopelessly devoid of them. It is therefore quite possible that, by improving the methods, by attacking the mystery from other quarters, we might obtain more decisive results than the Hindus. We must remember that our western science has but lately interested itself in these problems and that it has means of investigating and experimenting which the Asiatics never possessed. It may even be declared that at no time in the existence of our world has the scientific mind been better-equipped, better-suited to cope with every task, or more exact, more skilful and more penetrating than it is today. Because the oriental empirics have failed, there is no reason to believe that it will not succeed in awakening and cultivating in every man those faculties which would often be of greater use to him than those of the intellect itself. It is not overbold to suggest that, from certain points of view, the true history of mankind has hardly begun.
[1] September, 1906.
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Nevertheless, in so far as concerns the natural evolution of those faculties, M. Bozzano’s assertion seem fairly well- justified. We do not, in fact, observe a startling or even appreciable difference between what they were and what they are. And this anomaly is the more surprising in as much as it is almost universally accepted that a sense or a faculty becomes developed in proportion to its usefulness; and there are few, I think, that would have been not only more useful but even more necessary to man. He has always had a keen and primitive interest in knowing without delay the most secret thoughts of his fellow-man, who is often his adversary and sometimes his mortal enemy. He has always had an interest no less great in immediately transmitting those thoughts through space, in seeing beyond the continents and seas, in going back into the past, in advancing into the future, in being able to find in his memory at will not only all the acquirements of his personal experience but also those of his ancestors, in communicating with the dead and perhaps with the sovereign intelligence diffused over the universe, in discovering hidden springs and treasures, in escaping the harsh and depressing laws of matter and gravity, in relieving pain, in curing the greater number of his disorders and even in restoring his limbs, not to mention many other miracles which he could work if he knew all the mighty forces that doubtless slumber in the dark recesses of his life.
Is this once more an unexpected character of the eccentric physiology of our unknown guest? Here are faculties more precious than the most precious faculties that have made us what we are, faculties whose magic buds sprout on every side underneath our intelligence but have never burst into flower, as though a wind from another sphere had killed them with its icy breath. Is it because it occupies itself first and foremost with the species that it thus neglects the individual? But, after all, the species is only an aggregate of successive individuals; and its evolution consequently depends upon their evolution. There would therefore have been an evident advantage to the species in developing faculties that would perhaps have carried it much farther and much higher than has been done by its brain-power, which alone has progressed. If there is no evolution for them here, do they develop elsewhere? What are those powers which exist outside and independent of the laws of this earth? Do they then belong to other worlds? But, if so, what are they doing in ours? One would sometimes think, at the sight of so much neglectfulness, uncertainty and inconsistency, that man’s evolution had been intentionally retarded by a superior will, as though that will feared that he was going too fast, that he was anticipating some pre established order and moving prematurely out of his appointed plane.
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And the riddles accumulate which we cannot hope to solve. It has been said that these abnormal faculties are communications or infiltrations, themselves abnormal, which have found their way through the partitions that separate our consciousness from our subconsciousness. This is very likely, but it is only a minor side of the question. It would be important before all to know what that subconsciousness represents, whither it tends and with what it itself is communicating. Is the impersonal form of knowledge a necessary or an accidental stage? Is the impersonal form which it takes in the subconsciousness the only true one? Is there really, as everything seems to prove, a hopeless incompatibility between our intellectual faculties and those families of uncertain origin, to such an extent that the latter are unable to manifest themselves except when the former are weakened or temporarily suspended? It has, at any rate, been observed that they are hardly ever exercised simultaneously. Are we to believe that, at a given moment, mankind or the genius that presides over its destinies had to make an exclusive and awful choice between cerebral energy and the mysterious forces of the subconsciousness and that we still find traces of its hesitations in our organism? What would have become of a race of man in which the subconsciousness had triumphed over the brain? Is not this the case with animals; and would not the race have remained purely animal? Or else would not this preponderance of a subconscious more powerful than that of the animals and almost independent of our body have resulted in the disappearance of life as we know it; and should we not even now be trading the life which we shall probably lead when we are dead? Here are a number of questions to which there are no answers and which are nevertheless perhaps not so idle as one might at first believe.
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Amidst this antagonism, whose triumph are we to hope for? Is any alliance between the two opposing forces for ever impossible so long as we are in the flesh? What are we to do meanwhile? If a choice be inevitable, which way will our choice incline; and which victim shall we sacrifice? Shall we listen to those who tell us that there is nothing more to be gained or learnt in those inhospitable regions where all our bewildering phenomena have been known since man first was man? Is it true that occultism–as it is very improperly called, for the knowledge which it seeks is no more occult than any other–is it true that occultism is marking time, that it is becoming hopelessly entangled in the same doubtful facts and that it has not taken a single step forward since its renaissance more than fifty years ago? One must be entirely ignorant of the wonderful efforts of those fruitful years to venture upon such an assertion. This is not the place to discuss the question, which would require full and careful treatment; but we may safely say that until now there is no science which in so short a time has brought order out of such a chaos, ascertained, checked and classified such a quantity of facts, or more rapidly awakened, cultivated and trained in man certain faculties which he had never seriously been believed to possess; and furthermore none which has caused to be recognized as incontestable and thus introduced into the circle of the realities whereon we base our lives a number of unlikely phenomena which had hitherto been contemptuously passed over. We are still, it is true, waiting for the domestication of the new force, its practical application to daily use. We are waiting for the all-revealing, decisive manifestation which will remove our last doubts and throw light upon the problem down to its very source. But let us admit that we are likewise waiting for this manifestation in the great majority of sciences. In my case, we are already in the presence of an astonishing mass of well-weighed and verified materials which, until now, had been taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments of wild legends, meaningless and unimportant. For more than three centuries, the science of electricity remained at very much the same point at which our psychical sciences stand to-day. Men were recording, accumulating, trying to interpret a host of odd and futile phenomena, toying with Ramsden’s machine, with Leyden jars, with Volta’s rough battery. They thought that they had discovered an agreeable pastime, an ingenious plaything for the laboratory or study; and they had not the slightest suspicion that they were touching the sources of an universal, irresistible, inexhaustible power, invisibly present and active in all things, that would soon invade the surface of our globe. Nothing tells us that the psychic forces of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse have not similar surprises in store for us, with this difference, that we are here concerned with energies and mysteries which are loftier, grander and doubtless fraught with graver consequences, since they affect our eternal destinies, traverse alike our life and our death and extend beyond our planet.
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It is not true therefore that the psychical sciences have said their last word and that we have nothing more to expect from them. They have but just awakened or reawakened; and, to postdate Guyau’s prediction by a hundred years, we might say, with them in our minds, that the twentieth century “will end with discoveries as ill-formulated but perhaps as important in the moral world as those of Newton and Laplace in the astronomical world.” But, though we have much to hope from them, that is no reason why we should look to them for everything and abandon in their favour that which has brought us where we are. The choice of which we spoke, between the brain and the subconsciousness, has been made long ago; and it is not our part to make it over again. We are carried along by a force acquired in the course of two or three thousand years; and our methods, like our intellectual habits, have of themselves become transformed into sort of minor subconsciousness superposed upon the major subconsciousness and sometimes mingling with it. Henri Bergson, in his very fine presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research on the 28th of May, 1913, said that he had sometimes wondered what would have happened if modern science, instead of setting out from mathematics, instead of bringing all its forces to converge on the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of mind; if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for instance, had been psychologists:
“We should certainly,” said he, “have had a psychology of which to-day we can form no idea, any more than before Galileo we could have imagined what our physics would be; a psychology that probably would have been to our present psychology what our physics is to Aristotle’s. Foreign to every mechanistic idea, not even conceiving the possibility of an explanation, science would have enquired into, instead of dismissing a priori facts, such as those which you study; perhaps ‘psychical research’ would have stood out as its principal preoccupation. The most general laws of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental laws of mechanics were discovered), we should have passed from mind, properly so-called, to life; biology would have been constituted, but a vitalist biology, quite different from ours, which would have sought behind the sensible forms of living beings the inward, invisible force of which the sensible forms are the manifestations.”
It would therefore in the very first days of its activity have encountered all these strange problems: telepathy, materializations, clairvoyance, miraculous cures, knowledge of the future, the possibility of survival, interplanetary intelligence and many others, which it has neglected hitherto and which, thanks to its neglect, are still in their infancy. But, as the human mind is not able to follow two diametrically opposite directions at the same time, it would necessarily have rejected the mathematical sciences. A steamship coming from another hemisphere, one in which men’s minds had taken, unknown to ourselves, the road which our own has actually taken, would have seemed to us as wonderful, as incredible as the phenomena of our subconsciousness seem to us to-day. We should have gone very far in what at present we call the unknown or the occult; but we should have known hardly anything of physics, chemistry or mechanics, unless, which is very probable, we had come upon them by another road as we travelled round the occult. It is true that certain nations, the Hindus particularly, the Egyptians and perhaps the Incas, as well as others, in all probability, who have not left sufficient traces, thus went to work the other way and obtained nothing decisive. Is this again a consequence of the hopeless incompatibility between the faculties of the brain and those of the subconsciousness? Possibly; but we must not forget that we are speaking of nations which never possessed our intellectual habits, our passion for precision, for verification, for experimental certainty; indeed, this passion has only been fully developed in ourselves within the last two or three centuries. It is to be presumed therefore that the European would have gone much farther in the other direction than the Oriental. Where would he have arrived? Endowed with a different brain, naturally clearer, more exacting, more logical, less credulous, more practical, closer to realities, more attentive to details, but with the scientific side of his intelligence uncultivated, would he have gone astray or would he have met the truths which we are still seeking and which may well be more important than all our material conquests. Ill-prepared, ill-equipped, ill-balanced, lacking the necessary ballast of experiments and proofs, would he have been exposed to the dangers familiar to all the too-mystical nations? It is very difficult to imagine so. But the hour has now perhaps come to try without risk what he could not have done without grave peril. While abandoning no whit of his understanding, which is small compared with the boundless scope of the subconsciousness, but which is sure, tried and docile, he can now embark upon the great adventure and try to do that which has not been done before. It is a matter of discovering the connecting link between the two forces. We are still ignorant of the means of aiding, encouraging, developing and taming the greater of the two and of bringing it closer to us; the quest will be the most difficult, the most mysterious and, in certain respects, the most dangerous that mankind has ever undertaken. But we can say to ourselves, without fear of being very far wrong, that it is the best task at the moment. In any case, this is the first time since man has existed that he will be fronting the unknown with such good weapons, even as it is also the first time since its awakening that his intelligence, which has reached a summit from which it can understand almost everything, will at last receive help from outside and hear a voice that is something more than the echo of its own.