1

So much for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go farther and attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to rely upon them with safety. Nor do I propose to pay attention to the proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant prodigies, aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which may nevertheless be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’ experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.

First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again suffers the pains of child-birth. Carried back to an age when she was learning to write, she writes like a child and her writing can be placed side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.

This in itself is very extraordinary; but, as Colonel de Rochas says:

“Up to the present, we have walked on firm ground; we have been observing a physiological phenomenon which is difficult of explanation, but which numerous experiments and verifications allow us to look upon as certain.”

We now enter a region where still more surprising enigmas await us. Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called JosÉphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of the IsÈre. By means of downward passes, she is brought back to the condition of a baby at its mother’s breast. The passes continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. JosÉphine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. JosÉphine no longer answers except by signs; she is not yet born, “she is floating in darkness.” They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first, he refuses to answer, saying that “of course he’s there, as he’s speaking;” that “he sees nothing;” and that “he’s in the dark.” They increase the number of passes and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bed-ridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen and served his time in the army with the 7th Artillery at BesanÇon; and he describes his gay times there, while the sleeping girl makes the gesture of twirling an imaginary moustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts) and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.

We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He “feels himself growing out of his body;” but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last, the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to him to reincarnate himself and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is to say, the mother of JosÉphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child’s body. Until about the seventh year, this body was surrounded by a sort of floating mist in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.

The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, another voice and an unexpected individual. This time, it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backwards and of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as Jean Claude did. Her name is PhilomÈne Carteron.

“By intensifying the sleep,” adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now quote, “I induce the manifestations of a living PhilomÈne. She no longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers very coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighbourhood, but no one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was PhilomÈne Charpigny; her grandfather on the mother’s side was called Pierre Machon and lived at Ozan. In 1732, she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carteron, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.

“Before her incarnation, PhilomÈne had been a little girl, who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who had committed murder; and it was to expiate this crime that she endured much suffering in the darkness, even after her life as a little girl, when she had had no time to do wrong. I did not think it necessary to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch.

“But, on the other hand, I noticed one thing which would tend to show that the revelations of these mediums rest on an objective reality. At Voiron, one of the regular attendants at my demonstrations is a young girl, Louise ——. She possesses a very sedate and thoughtful cast of mind, not at all open to hypnotic suggestion; and she has in a very high degree the capacity (which is comparatively common in a lesser degree) of perceiving the magnetic effluvia of human beings and, consequently, the fluidic body. When JosÉphine revives the memory of her past, a luminous aura is observed around her and is perceived by Louise. Now, to the eyes of Louise, this aura becomes dark when JosÉphine is in the phase separating two existences. In every instance, there is a strong reaction in JosÉphine when I touch points where Louise tells me that she perceives the aura, whether it be dark or light.”

I thought it well to give the report of one of these experiments almost in extenso, because those who maintain the palingenesic theory find in these the only appreciable argument which they possess. Colonel de Rochas renewed them more than once with different subjects. Among these, I will mention only one, a girl called Marie Mayo, whose history is more complicated than JosÉphine’s and whose successive reincarnations take us back to the seventeenth century and carry us suddenly to Versailles, among the historical personages moving around Louis XIV.

Let us add that Colonel de Rochas is not the only mesmerizer who has obtained revelations of this kind, which may be henceforth classed among the incontestable facts of hypnotism. I have mentioned his alone, because they offer the most substantial guarantees from every point of view.

What do they prove? We must begin, as in all questions of this kind, by entertaining a certain distrust of the medium. It goes without saying that all mediums, by the very nature of their faculties, are inclined to imposture, to trickery. I know that Colonel de Rochas, like Dr. Richet and like Professor Lombroso, was occasionally hoaxed. That is the inherent defect of the machinery which we must perforce employ; and experiments of this sort will never possess the scientific value of those made in a physical or chemical laboratory. But this is not an a priori reason for denying them any sort of interest. As a question of fact, are imposture and trickery possible here? Obviously, even though the experiments be conducted under the strictest supervision. However complicated it may be, the subject can have learnt his lesson and can cleverly avoid the traps laid for him. The best guarantee, when all is said, lies in his good faith and his moral sense, which the experimenters alone are in a position to test and to know; and for that we must trust to them. Besides, they neglect no precaution necessary to make imposture extremely difficult. After taking the subject, by means of transverse passes, up the stream of his life, they make him come down the same stream; and the same events pass in the reverse order. Repeated tests and counter-tests always yield identical results; and the medium never hesitates or goes astray in the labyrinth of names, dates and incidents.^[16]

Moreover, it would be requisite for these mediums, who are generally people of merely average intelligence, suddenly to become great poets in order thus to create, down to every detail, a series of characters, differing entirely one from the other, in which everything is in keeping—gestures, voice, temper, mind, thoughts, feeling—and ever ready to reply, in harmony with their inmost nature, to the most unexpected questions. It has been said that every man is a Shakspeare in his dreams; but have we not here to do with dreams which, in their uniformity, bear a singular resemblance to fact?

I think, therefore, that we may be allowed, until we receive evidence to the contrary, to leave fraud out of the question. Another objection that might be raised, as was done with respect to the Myers phantoms, is the insignificance of their revelations from beyond the grave. I would rather look on this as an argument in behalf of their good faith. Those whose imagination is rich enough to create the wonderful persons whom we see living in their sleep would doubtless find no great difficulty in inventing a few fantastic but plausible details on the subject of the next world. Not one of them thinks of it. They are Christians and therefore carry deep down in themselves the traditional terror of hell, the fear of purgatory and the vision of a paradise full of angels and palms. They never allude to any of it. Although they are most often ignorant of all the theories of reincarnation, they conform strictly to the theosophical or neospiritualistic hypothesis and are unconsciously faithful to it in their very indefiniteness: they speak vaguely of “the dark” in which they find themselves. They tell nothing, because they know nothing. It is impossible apparently for them to give any account of a state that is still illumined. In fact, it is very likely, if we admit the hypothesis of reincarnation and of evolution after death, that nature, here as elsewhere, does not proceed by bounds. There is no special reason why she should take a prodigious and inconceivable leap between life and death.

We did not find the dramatic change which, at first thought, we are rather inclined to expect. The spirit is first of all confused at losing its body and every one of its familiar ways; it only recovers itself by degrees. It resumes consciousness slowly. This consciousness is subsequently purified, exalted and extended, gradually and indefinitely, until, reaching other spheres, the principle of life that animates it ceases to reincarnate itself and loses all contact with us. This would explain why we never have any but minor and elementary revelations.

All that concerns this first phase of the survival is fairly probable, even to those who do not admit the theory of reincarnation. For the rest, we shall see presently that the solutions which man’s imagination finds there merely change the question and are inadequate and provisional.

We now come to the most serious objection, that of suggestion. Colonel de Rochas declares that he and all the other experimenters who have given themselves up to this study “have not only avoided everything that could put the subject on a definite tack, but have often tried in vain to lead him astray by different suggestions.” I am convinced of it: there can be no question of voluntary suggestion. But do we not know that, in these regions, unconscious and involuntary suggestion is often more powerful and effective than the other? In the hackneyed and rather childish experiment of table-turning, for instance, which, after all, is only a crude and elementary form of telepathy, the replies are nearly always dictated by the unconscious suggestion of a participant or a mere on-looker.^[17] We should therefore first of all have to make sure that neither the hypnotizer nor the onlookers, nor yet the subject himself, have ever heard of the reincarnated persons. It will be enough, I shall be told, to employ for the counter-tests another operator and different onlookers who are ignorant of the previous revelations. Yes, but the subject is not ignorant of them; and it is possible that the first suggestion has been so profound that it will remain for ever stamped upon the unconsciousness and that it will reproduce the same incarnations indefinitely, in the same order.

All this does not mean that the phenomena of suggestion are not themselves laden with mysteries; but that is another question. For the moment, as we see, the problem is almost insoluble and control impracticable. Meanwhile, since we have to choose between reincarnation and suggestion, it is right that we should confine ourselves, in the first instance, to the latter, in accordance with the principles which we have observed in the case of automatic speech and writing. Between two unknowns, common sense and prudence decree that we should turn first to the one on whose frontiers lie certain facts more frequently recorded, the one which shows a few familiar glimmers. Let us exhaust the mystery of our life before forsaking it for the mystery of our death. Throughout this vast expanse of treacherous ground, it is important that, until fresh evidence arrives, we should keep to one inflexible rule, namely, that thought-transference exists as long as it is not absolutely and physically impossible for the subject or some person in the room to have cognizance of the incident in question, whether the cognizance be conscious or not, forgotten or actual. Even this guarantee is not sufficient, for it is still possible, as we saw in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for some one taking no part in the sitting and even very far away from it to be placed in communication with the medium by some unknown means and to influence the medium at a distance and unwittingly. Lastly, to provide for every contingency, before letting death come upon the boards, it would be necessary to make certain that atavistic memory does not play an unforeseen part. Cannot a man, for instance, carry hidden in the depths of his being the recollection of events connected with the childhood of an ancestor whom he has never seen and communicate it to the medium by unconscious suggestion? It is not impossible. We carry in ourselves all the past, all the experience of our ancestors. If, by some magic, we could illumine the prodigious treasures of the subconscious memory, why should we not there discover the events and facts that form the sources of that experience? Before turning towards yonder unknown, we must utterly exhaust the possibilities of this terrestrial unknown. It is moreover remarkable but undeniable that, despite the strictness of a law which seems to shut out every other explanation, despite the almost unlimited and probably excessive scope allotted to the domain of suggestion, there nevertheless remain some facts which perhaps call for another interpretation.

But let us return to reincarnation and recognize, in passing, that it is very regrettable that the arguments of the theosophists and neospiritualists are not compelling, for there never was a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful and consoling, nor, to a certain point, a more probable creed than theirs. It alone, with its doctrine of successive expiations and purifications, accounts for all the physical and intellectual inequalities, all the social iniquities, all the hideous injustices of fate. But the quality of a creed is no evidence of its truth. Even though it is the religion of six hundred millions of mankind, the nearest to the mysterious origins, the only one that is not odious and the least absurd of all, it will have to do what the others have not done, to bring unimpeachable testimony; and what it has given us hitherto is but the first shadow of a proof begun.

And even that would not put an end to the riddle. In principle, reincarnation, sooner or later, is inevitable, since nothing can be lost nor remain stationary. What has not been demonstrated in any way and will perhaps remain indemonstrable is the reincarnation of the whole identical individual, notwithstanding the abolition of memory. But what matters to him that reincarnation, if he be unaware that he is still himself? All the problems of the conscious survival of man start up anew; and we have to begin all over again. Even if scientifically established, the doctrine of reincarnation, just like that of a survival, would not set a term to our questions. It replies to neither the first nor the last, those of the beginning and the end, the only ones that are essential. It simply shifts them, pushes them a few hundreds, a few thousands of years back, in the hope perhaps of losing or forgetting them in silence and space. But they have come from the depths of the most prodigious infinities and are not content with a tardy solution. I am most certainly interested in learning what is in store for me, what will happen to me immediately after my death. You tell me:

“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering, will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”

I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old religions; I am willing to believe it, but even then? What matters to me is not what will be for some time, but what will be for always; and your divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help. Now, if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my conscience. Your infinity or your God, while even more unintelligible than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is hardly likely that the idea only came to me yesterday. All the chances of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer to these interrogations which spring up everywhence the moment our thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I had rather keep to an infinity whose incomprehensibility has no bounds than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be superior to the silence which they break.

5

It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as this God; but then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds, in a world where seconds no longer count; and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as inexhaustible as the universe itself. The fact none the less remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations; at best, it is but a short space gained; and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to pass over what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now passing over what befalls me in my life. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because, at the moment when they can speak to us, they have nothing yet to tell us, or because, at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us, they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw for ever and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.