1

This is where things stood when, of late years, the mediums, the spiritualists, or, rather, it appears, the spirits themselves—for one cannot tell exactly with whom we have to do—perhaps dissatisfied at not being more definitely recognized and understood, invented, for a more effectual proof of their existence, what has been called “cross correspondence.” Here, the position is reversed: it is no longer a question of various and more or less numerous spirits revealing themselves through the agency of one and the same medium, but of a single spirit manifesting itself almost simultaneously through several mediums often at great distances from one another and without any preliminary understanding among themselves. Each of these messages, taken alone, is usually unintelligible and yields a meaning only when laboriously combined with all the others.

As Sir Oliver Lodge says:

“The object of this ingenious and complicated effort clearly is to prove that there is some definite intelligence underlying the phenomena, distinct from that of any of the automatists, by sending fragments of a message or literary reference which shall be unintelligible to each separately—so that no effective mutual telepathy is possible between them—thus eliminating or trying to eliminate what had long been recognized by all members of the Society for Psychical Research as the most troublesome and indestructible of the semi-normal hypotheses. And the further object is evidently to prove as far as possible, by the substance and quality of the message, that it is characteristic of the one particular personality who is ostensibly communicating, and of no other.”^[13]

The experiments are still in their early stages; and the most recent volumes of the Proceedings are devoted to them. Although the accumulated mass of evidence is already considerable, there is no conclusion to be drawn from it as yet; and, in any case, whatever the spiritualists may say, the suspicion of telepathy seems to me to be in no way removed. The experiments form a rather fantastic literary exercise, one much superior, intellectually, to the ordinary manifestations of the mediums; but, up to the present, there is no reason for placing their mystery in the other world rather than in this. Men have tried to see in them a proof that somewhere, in time or space, or else beyond both, there is a sort of immense cosmic reserve of knowledge upon which the spirits go and draw freely. But, if the reserve exist, which is very possible, nothing tells us that it is not the living rather than the dead who repair to it. It is very strange that the dead, if they really have access to the immeasurable treasure, should bring back nothing from it but a kind of ingenious child’s puzzle, although it ought to contain myriads of lost or forgotten notions and acquirements, heaped up during thousands and thousands of years in abysses which our mind, weighed down by the body, can no longer penetrate, but which nothing seems to close against the investigations of freer and more subtle activities. They are evidently surrounded by innumerable mysteries, by unsuspected and formidable truths that loom large on every side. The smallest astronomical or biological revelation, the least secret of olden time, such as that of the temper of copper, possessed by the ancients, an archÆological detail, a poem, a statue, a recovered remedy, a shred of one of those unknown sciences which flourished in Egypt or Atlantis: any of these would form a much more decisive argument than hundreds of more or less literary reminiscences. Why do they speak to us so seldom of the future? And for what reason, when they do venture upon it, are they mistaken with such disheartening regularity? One would think, rather, that, in the sight of a being delivered from the trammels of the body and of time, the years, whether past or future, ought all to lie outspread on one and the same plane.^[14] We may, therefore, say that the ingenuity of the proof turns against it.

All things considered, as in the other attempts and notably those of the famous medium Stainton Moses, there is the same characteristic inability to bring us the veriest particle of truth or knowledge of which no vestige could be found in a living brain or in a book written on this earth. And yet it is inconceivable that there should not somewhere exist a knowledge that is not as ours and truths other than those which we possess here below.

The case of Stainton Moses, whose name we have just mentioned, is a very striking one in this respect. This Stainton Moses was a dogmatic, hard-working clergyman, whose learning, Myers tells us, in the normal state, did not exceed that of an ordinary schoolmaster. But he was no sooner “entranced” before certain spirits of antiquity or of the middle ages, who are hardly known save to profound scholars, among others St. Hippolytus, Bishop of Ostia, Plotinus, Athenodorus, the tutor of Augustus, and, more particularly, Grocyn, the friend of Erasmus, took possession of his person and manifested themselves through his agency. Now Grocyn, for instance, furnished certain information about Erasmus which was at first thought to have been gathered in the other world, but which was subsequently discovered in forgotten, but nevertheless accessible books. On the other hand, Stainton Moses’ integrity was never questioned for an instant by those who knew him; and we may therefore take his word for it when he declares that he had not read the books in question. Here again, the mystery, inexplicable though it be, seems really to lie hidden in the midst of ourselves. It is unconscious reminiscence, if you will, suggestion at a distance, subliminal reading, but, no more than in cross correspondence, is it indispensable to have recourse to the dead and to drag them by main force into the riddle, which, seen from our side of the grave, is dark and impassioned enough as it is. Furthermore, we must not insist unduly on this cross correspondence. We must remember that the whole thing is in its earliest stages and that the dead appear to have no small difficulty in grasping the requirements of the living.

2

In regard to this subject, as to the others, the spiritualists are fond of saying:

“If you refuse to admit the agency of spirits, the majority of these phenomena are absolutely inexplicable.”

Agreed; nor do we pretend to explain them, for hardly anything is to be explained upon this earth. We are content simply to ascribe them to the incomprehensible power of the mediums, which is no more improbable than the survival of the dead and has the advantage of not going outside the sphere which we occupy and of bearing relation to a large number of similar facts that occur among living people. Those singular faculties are baffling only because they are still sporadic and because but a very short time has elapsed since they received scientific recognition. Properly speaking, they are no more marvellous than those which we use daily without marvelling at them: our memory, for instance, our understanding, our imagination and so forth. They form part of the great miracle that we are; and, having once admitted the miracle, we should be surprised not so much at its extent as at its limits.

Nevertheless, to close this chapter, I am not at all of opinion that we must definitely reject the spiritualistic theory: that would be both unjust and premature. Hitherto, everything remains in suspense. We may say that things are still very little removed from the point marked by Sir William Crookes, in 1874, in an article which he contributed to the Quarterly Journal of Science:

“The difference between the advocates of Psychic Force and the Spiritualists consists in this—that we contend that there is as yet insufficient proof of any other directing agent than the Intelligence of the Medium, and no proof whatever of the agency of Spirits of the Dead; while the Spiritualists hold it as a faith, not demanding further proof, that Spirits of the Dead are the sole agents in the production of all the phenomena. Thus the controversy resolves itself into a pure question of fact, only to be determined by a laborious and long-continued series of experiments and an extensive collection of psychological facts, which should be the first duty of the Psychological Society, the formation of which is now in progress.”

Meanwhile, it is saying a good deal that rigorous scientific investigations have not utterly shattered a theory which so radically confounds the idea which we were wont to form of death. We shall see presently why, in considering our destinies beyond the grave, we need have no reason to linger too long over these apparitions or these revelations, even though they should really be incontestable and to the point. They would seem, all told, to be but the incoherent and precarious manifestations of a transitory state. They would at best prove, if we were bound to admit them, that a reflexion of ourselves, an after-vibration of the nerves, a bundle of emotions, a spiritual silhouette, a grotesque and forlorn image, or, more correctly, a sort of truncated and uprooted memory can, after our death, linger and float in a space where nothing remains to feed it, where it gradually becomes wan and lifeless, but where a special fluid, emanating from an exceptional medium, succeeds, at moments, in galvanizing it. Perhaps it exists objectively, perhaps it subsists and revives only in the recollection of certain sympathies. It would, after all, be not unlikely that the memory which represents us during our life should continue to do so for a few weeks or even a few years after our decease. This would explain the evasive and deceptive character of those spirits which, possessing but a mnemonic existence, are naturally able to interest themselves only in matters within their reach. Hence their irritating and maniacal energy in clinging to the slightest facts, their sleepy dulness, their incomprehensible indifference and ignorance and all the wretched absurdities which we have noticed more than once.

But, I repeat, it is much simpler to attribute these absurdities to the special character and the as yet imperfectly-recognized difficulties of telepathic communication. The unconscious suggestions of the most intelligent among those who take part in the experiment are impaired, disjointed and stripped of their main virtues in passing through the obscure intermediary of the medium. It may be that they stray, make their way into certain forgotten corners which the intelligence no longer visits and thence bring back more or less surprising discoveries; but the intellectual quality of the aggregate will always be inferior to that which a conscious mind would yield. Besides, once more, it is not yet time to draw conclusions. We must not lose sight of the fact that we have to do with a science which was born but yesterday and which is groping for its implements, its paths, its methods and its aim in a darkness denser than the earth’s. The boldest bridge that men have yet undertaken to throw across the river of death is not to be built in thirty years. Most sciences have centuries of thankless efforts and barren uncertainties behind them; and there are, I imagine, few among the younger of them that can show from the earliest hour, as this one does, promises of a harvest which may not be the harvest of their conscious sowing, but which already bids fair to yield much unknown and wondrous fruit.^[15]