Chapter X: Supernormal Appearances (2)

Taking everything into consideration, I am inclined to believe that Mlle. Smith, in truth, possesses real phenomena of clairvoyance, not, however, passing beyond the possible limits of telepathy; only, in order that they may be produced, it is necessary that Leopold—that is to say, the special psychic state of Hélène which is necessary for the reception and externalization of these telepathic impressions—be aided from the outside by the influence of certain favorable temperaments, more frequently met with among convinced spiritists than among persons who are normal, and that he be not impeded, on the other hand, by the paralyzing presence of hostile temperaments, such as that of a critical observer. It is greatly to be regretted that the naïve believers who inspire and succeed in obtaining magnificent phenomena of lucidity usually care so little for the desiderata of science, and, above all, refuse to submit themselves to an examination which might explain the phenomena in a natural manner; while the investigators in search of “convincing” proofs are not inspiring and obtain almost nothing.

However it may be, I shall give a few examples of Mlle. Smith’s proofs of lucidity, which are not very varied, and can be divided into the three categories of the medical prescriptions and diagnoses, of lost objects found again, and of retrocognitions of events more or less remote.

1. _Medical Consultations._—In promising specimens of extraordinary facts of this kind I have gone too far. Many such have been told me—as, for instance, Leopold dictating an unknown and complicated recipe of a hair tonic for a gentleman living abroad, a single bottle of which was sufficient to bring forth a full growth of hair on a head which had become bald before middle age; or, again, Leopold, being consulted about the health of a lady living at a great distance from Geneva, revealing both the veridical nature of her illness, which was unknown till then to her physicians, and its origin, which was due to certain unsuspected but perfectly true incidents connected with her childhood, and, finally, the treatment, which was crowned with success. But the absence of written testimony and precise information as to the concomitant circumstances of these marvellous cures reduce them to the rank of amusing stories, the value of which cannot positively be estimated. As to better-attested episodes, it is true I have been able to obtain authentic stories, but they are those in which the probability of a supernormal element has been reduced to a minimum—imperceptible to me. I will cite but one case.

M. and Mme. G. having invited Mlle. Smith during the month of August to pass a day with them in the country, a few leagues distant from Geneva, took advantage of the visit to hold a seance in order to consult Leopold on the health of one of their children. I will tell the incident from a written account sent me by Mme. G. soon afterwards:

“Our little girl was suffering from anæmia, and fell frequently into a state of weakness, in spite of intervals of improvement. Dr. d’Espine had been recommended to us for the time of our return to Geneva. The medium [Mlle. Smith] knew nothing of this; we had taken the precaution to keep it from her.” The seance begins with a few kind words from Leopold, whom M. G. then asks whether he would do well in consulting Dr. d’Espine. “_And I_,” replied Leopold, “_can I do nothing for you? Ungrateful people!_” But when he was asked to indicate some treatment, he replied: “_Wait till your return to Geneva._” Then, upon being asked whether an egg mixed with brandy would be good for the child, he replied that the egg would be good, but the brandy was not necessary in her case. Then he recommended that the child be taken for an hour’s walk in the open air every day. As to the prescription relating to her food, he repeated: “_I told you to wait till your return to Geneva._”

On their return to Geneva in the middle of September, M. and Mme. G. held a second seance. This time Leopold was more exact; he advised: “_Not too much milk, but rather a few glasses of good pure wine at each meal._” Then he added: “_Treat the anæmia first and you will triumph over the throat trouble, which would finally weaken her too much. Her blood is so weak that the least cold, the slightest emotion, I will go so far as to say that the expectation of a pleasure even, would be sufficient to bring the angina to a crisis. You ought to have foreseen that._” “Leopold,” M. G. notes here, “has enabled us to put our finger upon such of the details as we did not know how to explain. At each sentence my wife and I looked at each other with stupefaction.” Leopold ordered also many green vegetables, warm salt-water douches of three minutes’ duration in the evening, and: “_The principal thing now is five drops of iron in half a glass of water twice a day before the meal. Do this and you will see the result in a month._” In two weeks’ time the little girl was hardly recognizable.

I have cited this case because it is among those that have most struck M. and Mme. G., and upon which they build their conviction of the independent existence and supernormal knowledge of Leopold, and because it shows how little is needed to kindle the faith among spiritists. I forgot to say that the G. family was well known by Mlle. Smith, and that during the whole winter and the preceding spring she had held weekly seances at their home. There is but one thing that astonishes me, and that is, that Leopold, at the time of the first improvised consultation, should have been taken unawares up to the point of postponing his orders until later, and adhering to such commonplace things as a walk in the open air and the suppression of brandy. In the second seance one sees the effect of a month’s incubation. Leopold has had time to recover in Hélène’s memory the remembrance concerning the little girl who was anæmic and subject to sore throat; also the prescription which, in the given case, surely proved most efficacious, but which hardly denotes a supernormal knowledge. One does not even need here telepathy to explain messages which are amply accounted for by the subconscious functions of Mlle. Smith’s ordinary faculties.

Examples of this kind, drawn from Mlle. Smith’s mediumship, might be almost indefinitely multiplied; but _cui bono_? Once more, I do not claim that Leopold has never given any medical consultation surpassing Hélène’s latent knowledge and implying supernormal powers of clairvoyance. I only say that I have not yet succeeded in finding a single case where the proofs reached the height of that conclusion.

2. _Objects Recovered._—I do not know any case in which Mlle. Smith has indicated the situation of an object which had been hidden, and as to the location of which she could have had no information through natural channels. All her discoveries consist, so far as I have been able to judge, in the return, under a spiritistic and with a dramatic aspect, of memories either simply forgotten or properly subliminal, which depended upon the incidents concerned having first belonged to the ordinary consciousness, or their having always escaped it and having been from their origin registered in the subconsciousness.

These are facts of cryptomnesia pure and simple—_i. e._, explicable by a normal psychological process very common in its essence, while the picturesque embellishments added by the mediumistic imagination give to these teleological automatisms a certain mysterious and supernormal appearance which in other surroundings would certainly create for Hélène—or rather for Leopold—a place alongside St. Anthony of Padua. I confine myself to two examples. Mlle. Smith being charged with the duty of making ready the merchandise sent out from her department, was handed a telegram one day from a customer who asked that four yards of No. 13,459 be despatched to him immediately. “This brief order,” said Hélène, “was not calculated to hasten the forwarding of the goods. How could I readily find this No. 13,459, in the midst of six or seven thousand others in the store? Pondering, telegram in hand, I was wondering how I could find it, when a voice outside of but very near me said to me: ‘_Not there, but here_,’ and involuntarily I turned round, without knowing why, and my hand laid itself mechanically on a piece of goods which I drew towards me, and which actually bore the No. 13,459.”

It is not necessary to be a medium to know by experience these happy reminiscences or inspirations which sometimes come to free us from embarrassment by shining forth like a light at an opportune moment; but that which in the case of ordinary persons remains in the feeble condition of an idea or internal image, among mediumistic temperaments assumes readily the fixed and vivid form of an hallucination. Instead of simply “suddenly recollecting” in the case of the No. 13,459, as would have happened to any one else, Hélène hears an exterior voice, and perceives her hand moving involuntarily in a given direction. It is noted that this automatism assumed an auditive and motor form which is the pendant of the vocal and visual automatism which I have referred to on pp. 58-59. It is to this same class of facts, well known and almost common to-day, that the following example likewise belongs, although the subliminal imagination had surrounded it with the form of an intervention on the part of Leopold.

One Sunday evening, on returning home, Mlle. Smith noticed that she had lost a small breastpin which had been fastened to her corsage, and which she greatly valued as a souvenir. The following day she returned to look for it where she had been the evening before, but in vain, and a notice which she caused to be inserted in the “lost” columns of a daily newspaper gave no result. Here I leave the narration of the story to her: “Persuaded that my pin was really lost, I did my best to think no more about it, but this was a difficult matter, since one night I was awakened suddenly by three raps struck against my bed. Somewhat frightened, I looked around, but saw nothing. I tried to go to sleep, but again many raps were struck, this time near my head. I seated myself on my bed (I was agitated), trying to discover what was happening, and hardly had I seated myself when I saw a hand shaking my lost breastpin before my eyes. This vision lasted only a minute, but that was long enough for it to make a deep impression upon me.”

The following Tuesday evening (ten days after the loss of the trinket) Hélène held a seance at the house of M. Cuendet, at which two other persons were also present. She told of the loss of her pin and the curious vision above described; then all seated themselves at the table. After a typtological dictation upon an altogether different subject, the following incident occurred, the account of which I have borrowed from notes taken by M. Cuendet (it was in 1894, and I only knew Mlle. Smith by reputation at the time):

“We notice that from the beginning of the seance Mlle. Smith describes to us our familiar spirit [Leopold] as holding a lantern in his hand. Why? The table is shaken anew, about to tell us something. The following is then dictated to us by it: ‘_Arise. Take a lantern. Extend your walk to the Municipal Building. Take the path which crosses the meadow, and which ends at the Street of the Baths. In the middle of the path, to the left, a few yards distant, a block of white stone will be found. Starting from the block of stone, only one yard away from it, towards the setting sun, the pin so much sought for will be found. Go, I accompany you._’

“I copy _verbatim_ this communication, which was obtained letter by letter. I add nothing, take nothing from it. General stupefaction! We hesitate! Finally, we all four rise, we light a lantern and set out. It was twenty minutes to ten o’clock.

“We walk slowly; we arrive at the Municipal Building, and take the path which leads from it to the Street of the Baths. In the middle, to the left, some yards distant, we, in fact, find the block of stone indicated. We search for a moment without result, and begin to fear we shall find nothing. Finally, towards the setting sun, a yard from the block of stone, I find buried in the grass, covered with sand, and consequently badly soiled, the pin indicated.

“Some one had evidently stepped on it, as it was slightly bent. Mlle. Smith uttered an exclamation of surprise, and we all four returned to the house, to recover from our very natural emotion.”

This case has remained in the eyes of Mlle. Smith and her spiritistic friends as one of the most striking and irrefragible proofs of the objective and independent reality of Leopold. For the psychologist it constitutes a very beautiful and interesting example of cryptomnesia, well worthy to figure among the very instructive cases collected by Mr. Myers, in which the memory of a subliminal perception (_i. e._, registered immediately without striking the normal personality) appears as a revelation in a dream of ordinary sleep, or under some other equivalent form of automatism. Here is “Leopold”—the subconsciousness of Hélène—who, having felt the pin fall and noticed where it rolled, first manifested himself in a passing nocturnal vision, and then took advantage of the next spiritistic gathering to restore completely her latent memories. It is not necessary to see anything intentional in this restitution, the simple play of association of ideas sufficing to explain that the memory of the situation of the pin stored up in a subliminal stratum and stimulated by a desire to recover the lost object might have mechanically reappeared at the moment of the seance, thanks to mediumistic autohypnotization, and gushed forth under the dramatic form, naturally appropriate to the environment, of an apparently supernormal piece of information furnished by Leopold.

3. _Retrocognitions._—The apparently supernormal revelations in regard to the past, furnished at the seances of Mlle. Smith, can be divided into two groups—namely, whether they concern universal history, or deal with private interests relative to the families of the sitters.

First: The messages of the first group abound, under the form of visions accompanied by typtological explanations, in Hélène’s seances of 1894, but have almost wholly come to an end since I made her acquaintance, and I have never been witness of any. According to the reports which I have seen, all these retrocognitions have reference to the history of Protestantism, or that of the French Revolution—_i. e._, to two classes of facts which are among the best known in France to-day.

It goes without saying that the firmly convinced spiritistic group in which these messages were received have never had a doubt that the apparitions which Hélène perceived were the veritable personages they asserted themselves to be, habited as they were in the costume of the period to which they belonged, communicating by means of the table, and speaking in the first person (except when Leopold acted as showman and dictated in his own name the explanations asked for).

But as the content of these messages is always the _verbatim_ reproduction or almost exact equivalent of information which is to be found in historical and biographical dictionaries, I cannot avoid being inclined to the impression that we here are concerned with common facts of cryptomnesia.

If the intervention of the supernormal be absolutely insisted upon in this case, it can only be manifested under the form of a telepathic transmission from the sitters to the medium. In favor of that supposition two facts may be urged: first, that Mlle. Smith passed in that group as devoid of all historical knowledge, and was very much surprised at these revelations of facts totally unknown to her; secondly, that there were regularly in attendance at these seances one or more members of the teaching body, who by their general education possessed, without any doubt whatever, either consciously or in a latent manner, all the historical knowledge, which, after all, was not very great, displayed by Leopold.

But these arguments are not of much weight in my opinion. To begin with the second: as the sitters had their hands on the table at the same time with the medium, according to the spiritistic custom, they could themselves, without any telepathy, properly speaking, and simply by their slight, unconscious muscular contractions, have directed, unknown to themselves, the movements of that piece of furniture, Mlle. Smith only augmenting these shocks proceeding from her neighbors.

As to the supposed ignorance of Mlle. Smith, it is not at all so great as has been imagined, and the historical revelations obtained at her seances do not in any degree surpass the level of that which she could have absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, at school and in her surroundings.

Moreover, the hypothesis which appears to me the most probable, and on which I rest, is that the messages come essentially from Hélène herself—I ought rather to say from her subliminal memory; that, however, does not exclude a certain amount of co-operation on the part of the sitters, whose conversation, on the one hand, and their unconscious muscular action upon the table, on the other, have often maintained and directed the course of the subconscious ideas of the medium and the automatic unfolding of her latent memories.

Secondly: Retrocognition of family events, which are exhibited in Mlle. Smith’s seances, have generally the savor of the unknown for the sitters, from the fact that they concern incidents of the past which have never been printed save in the memories of certain aged persons or of a few lovers of local anecdotes.

I do not hesitate to see in these stories of other days, gushing forth in visions and in dictations by the table in the course of Hélène’s hemisomnambulisms, narratives heard in her childhood and long since forgotten by her ordinary personality, but which reappear by the aid of mediumistic autohypnotization, bringing the deepest strata to the surface; the simple play of association, in an entirely natural manner, then causes the memories relative to the families of the persons present at the seance to be poured forth. There is nothing whatever of the supernormal in all this, in spite of the dramatic form, the piquant and unexpected art, the amusing embellishments, of which the subliminal imagination bethinks itself—or I should rather say Leopold, in his rôle of historiographer and scene-shifter of the past.

The judgment which I have pronounced is the result of a course of inductive reasoning based on the retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith concerning my own family. I trust it may be allowable for me to enter upon some details designed to justify my opinion.

I note first that all these retrocognitions with which Leopold honored me took place in the first six seances which I had with Hélène, after which there has not been a single one in the whole five years which have since elapsed. This argues in favor of a limited group of latent memories, which my introduction to the seances set free, a sort of subliminal sac or pocket which was emptied once for all on the first occasions of my presence.

In the second place, this knowledge only concerns outside details, susceptible of striking the attention of the gallery and of being carried from mouth to mouth. Since family histories have no great interest for the ordinary reader, I will confine myself to citing, by way of example, the vision which so astonished me at my first meeting with Hélène (p. 2), and which has already been published by M. Lemaître. I reproduce his narrative, giving real names:

“The medium [Mlle. Smith] perceives a long trail of smoke, which envelopes M. Flournoy. ‘A woman!’ cries the medium, and, a moment after, ‘Two women ... quite pretty, brunettes ... both are in bridal toilet!... This concerns you, M. Flournoy!’ [The table approves by a rap.] They remain motionless; they have white flowers in their hair and resemble each other a little; their eyes, like their hair, are black, or, at all events, very dark. The one in the corner appears under two different aspects; under both forms she is young—perhaps twenty-five years old; on the one hand she remains with the appearance already described (bridal toilet), and on the other she appears very luminous in a great space, a little more slender of visage, and surrounded by a number of pretty children, in the midst of whom she appears very happy; her happiness manifests itself by her expression, but still more in her surroundings. Both women seem ready to be married. The medium then hears a name, which at first escapes her, then returns little by little. ‘=An!... An!... Dan ... Ran ... Dandi ... Dandiran!=’

“‘To which of these two women does this name belong?’ demands M. Flournoy—‘to the one you see under two aspects, or to the other?’ Answer: ‘To the one who is presented under two forms.’ The medium does not see the other woman as distinctly as the first, but all at once distinguishes a tall man by her side, who only passes by, when the table dictates: ‘I am his sister; we will return!’ after which the scene changes and we pass to another subject.”

This vision revolves altogether around the facts that my mother and her sister were married on the same day; that they were brunettes, quite pretty, and looked alike; that my father was tall; that my aunt married M. Dandiran and died while still young, without children; all matters which should have been of public notoriety in a small city like Geneva. But the same is true of all the other retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith; their content is always veridical, but at the same time is also such as could not fail to be known to a host of people. This causes me to doubt whether there is at the base of these phenomena a really supernormal faculty of retrocognition.

A third striking feature is, that all Hélène’s retrocognitions concerning me are relative to the family of my mother, and are connected with two quite precise and brief periods, the first of which is many years previous to Mlle. Smith’s birth. This limitation as to times and persons seems to me significant.

To clear up the matter, if possible, I addressed myself to the last representative of the present generation of my family, Professor Dandiran, of Lausanne, and laid the case before him. He did not immediately remember whether my grandparents Claparède had any communication, nearly half a century before, with the Smith family, but on the following day he wrote me that he distinctly recalled a young woman of that name in whom his mother and aunt had been greatly interested, and who had been employed by them as a dressmaker previous to her marriage to a Hungarian.

One understands that I had a reason for not addressing myself first to Mme. Smith herself; but I must do her the justice to state that when I questioned her in turn, she very obligingly gave me all the information I desired, and which was in perfect accord with the statements of M. Dandiran.

Without entering into details wearisome to the reader, it will be sufficient for me to state that all the retrocognitions in which I was involved were connected with two periods in which Mme. Smith had relations with my mother’s family, periods separated by an interval during which these relations were suspended by the fact of M. and Mme. Smith making a sojourn of several years in a foreign country. It would have been possible for Hélène to know directly the facts of the second period, at which time she was about five or six years of age. As to the first period, which was many years prior to her birth (the time of the double marriage of my mother and her sister in 1853), it is evident that Mme. Smith has had many opportunities at a later date to narrate these facts to her daughter; and it would have been altogether natural for her to have done so.

_Ab uno disce omnes._ Although I am less familiar with the retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith concerning other families, everything contributes to prove to me that they are explicable in the same manner. In two cases, at least, proof has been obtained that the mother of Mlle. Smith was found to have been in direct and personal communication with the families concerned, exactly as was the case with my grandparents, and this circumstance is sufficient to account for the knowledge, very astonishing at first sight, contained in the revelations of Leopold.

To sum up—pure cryptomnesia seems to me to furnish a sufficient and adequate explanation for Hélène’s retrocognitions, both as to family events as well as historic facts.

And no more in this domain of knowledge of the past than in those of recovered objects and medical consultations have I thus far succeeded in discovering in her the least serious indication of supernormal faculties.

V. INCARNATIONS AND SPIRIT MESSAGES

The time having arrived to speak of spiritism, I feel ill at ease and embarrassed by my surroundings, for divers reasons, some of which I will set forth, without, however, endeavoring to explain them at length, since my aim is simply, as has been seen above (p. 373), to indicate my subjective ideas as to the standing of that doctrine, in order that the reader may share, if he pleases, in my appreciation of the phenomena of this class presented by Mlle. Smith. 1 confess, in the first place, that spiritism is a subject which has the faculty of arousing my mirth, and develops a spirit of playfulness. I really do not know why this should be the case, since that which concerns the dead and the great beyond ought not to be a matter for joking. Perhaps the cause is to be found in the nature of the intermediaries, and the character of the messages with which the spirits are accustomed to favor us. However it may be, I have ordinarily much difficulty in preserving a serious countenance in the presence of manifestations of “disincarnates.”

But I reproach myself bitterly with this facetious humor when I reflect that it is indulged in at the expense of conceptions and beliefs which supported the first steps of our race on its painful ascent, the survival or atavic reapparition of which is yet, even to-day, a source of moral strength, of happy certitude, of supreme consolation for a host of my contemporaries, many of whom I have learned to know, and who, moreover, inspire me with respect as well as admiration by their uprightness of life, their nobility of character, the purity and elevation of their sentiments.

In the second place, I have often had the deceptive experience that, when it comes to a discussion of it, spiritism possesses a great advantage for its defenders, but which is most inconvenient for those who would investigate it closely—of being fugitive and incapable of being grasped on account of the fact of its double nature—a science and religion at the same time—which never permits it to be wholly and entirely the one or the other.

When we come to analyze and criticise, according to strict scientific methods, the positive facts upon which it pretends to base its fundamental argument —the reality of communication with the spirits of the departed, through the intervention of mediums—as soon as the adepts begin to unpack for you their stock of theories (I was about to say their stock theories!) they are astonished at the lack of ideal on the part of these terrible materialist-scientists, who are intent upon searching for the “hidden rat” in the demonstrations of spiritism, instead of falling on their knees before the splendor of its revelations.

A third cause of my uneasiness whenever obliged to approach this subject is the fear of being misunderstood or misinterpreted, thanks to the naïve and simple classification which prevails in the environments which the “disincarnates” frequent.

Spiritism or materialism—these are the brutal alternatives to which one finds himself driven in spite of himself. If you do not admit that the spirits of the dead reveal themselves by raps on the table or visions of the mediums, you are, therefore, a materialist! If you do not believe that the destiny of the human personality is terminated at the grave, you are a spiritist! This mode of nomenclature and labelling is surely puerile. Moreover, no one willingly consents to be thrust into the company of those with whom, no matter how honorable they may be, he is not in sympathy.

I also wish to state that I absolutely repudiate the above alternative. There is greater variety of choice in the cabinet of human thought. In the last century, for example, outside the spiritism of Swedenborg and the materialism of Baron d’Holbach, there was yet the criticism of one named Kant, who made some noise in the world and whose vogue is even now not absolutely extinct. I should not fear to range myself among his followers. And in our own times, if it was necessary for me to choose between Büchner and Allan Kardec, as the spiritist seems sometimes to believe, I would not hesitate to choose—in favor of M. Renouvier, or my deceased compatriot Charles Secrétan.

I hold to no other philosophy, and it suffices me, in order to repulse the whole of materialism and spiritism, to be the disciple—unworthy, but convinced—of the Nazarene, who replied to the materialists of his time, not by spiritistic evocations, but by the simple words, “God is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live unto Him.” I am not sure whether this argument convinced the Sadducees, but it pleases me by its simplicity, and I have no desire for any other.

If God exists—I should say, if the supreme reality is not the unconscious and blind force-substance of conventional monism, but that sovereign personality (or _supra_ personality) which in the clear consciousness of Christ made its paternal presence to be continually felt—if God exists, it is not, apparently, in order to play the rôle of a perpetual undertaker of funereal pomp that he consents to exist, or to allow to fall forever into nothingness the poor creatures who wait upon Him.

They may disappear from before our eyes, but they do not disappear from before His; for they are dead to us, but for Him, and, consequently, in actual reality, they are living. Otherwise He would not be God. This is all I need. I see nothing clearly, it is true, as to the concrete conditions of that other existence, of which the manner even, if it were revealed to me, would probably remain a sealed book to my intelligence, hampered by the bonds of space and time. But of what importance is it? That which I am ignorant of, God knows; and while waiting for Him to call me to rejoin those who have preceded me, He is great enough for me to leave to Him the mysterious fate of our personalities. “Since all live unto Him,” I ask no more than that, and as for the pretended demonstrations of spiritism, true or false, I do not care a farthing.

Or I would prefer them to be false. And if they are true, if it is actually a law of nature that during long years to come, after this terrestrial existence, we must drag ourselves miserably from table to table and medium to medium, the best of us (not to speak of the others) displaying without shame the proofs of our mental decrepitude in pitiable nonsense and wretched verses—oh, so much the worse!

It is one misery and shame the more added to all those of which this satanic world is made up, a new calamity coming to crown the physical and moral ills of a world against which the Christian continually protests as he repeats “_Thy kingdom come_,” an additional scandal condemned to disappear when “His kingdom shall have come.”

There is nothing in common between the empirical, spatial, and temporal survivals which spiritism pretends to establish and that “eternal life” proclaimed by the Prophet of Nazareth. These things, said Pascal, are not of the same order. That is why I am not a spiritist.

Here rises a last point, which worries me when I ought to speak my mind in regard to spiritism in the presence of spiritists. “You do not personally hold,” it has been often objected to me, “to these communications of the living with those who have gone before us into the great unknown, and you cry out against spiritistic demonstrations. It is all very well for you, who are a mystic, and to whom the existence of God in Jesus Christ seems a sufficient guarantee of the destinies of human personality and its ultimate palingenesis. But every one has not the same temperament, and does not take so blithely his ignorance of the kind of life which awaits him beyond the tomb. To believe in God, and to abandon to Him with closed eyes the fate of those who leave us, carrying away with them the best portions of our being, is all very well, but it is very difficult. The times of the psalmist who could say ‘_Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him_’ are no more; and as for Christ, He was certainly a very remarkable medium, but His simple affirmation would scarcely be taken to-day for gospel words. The solid and the palpable are necessary to the ‘fools’ of our epoch. They are not capable of admitting a higher world than that of sense, unless they are enabled to touch it with their finger by means of messages and the return of the dead themselves. Whence it results that every attack, every hostile attitude towards spiritism tends directly to break down the only rampart which might henceforth be efficacious against materialism and its disastrous consequences —infidelity, egotism, vice, despair, suicide, and, finally, the destruction and annihilation of the entire social organism. On the other hand, when science at length shall recognize and consecrate spiritism officially, thereupon, simultaneously with the tangible certainty of another life, courage and strength will return to the hearts of individuals, devotion and all virtues will begin to flourish once again, and an elevated humanity will soon see heaven descend upon the earth, thanks to the connection established and daily practised between the living and the spirits of the dead.”

My embarrassment is easily seen. On the one hand, I do not in any way admit the foregoing objection. I do not think that the gospel has had its day or is above the reach of “fools,” since it was for them that its author designed it. I believe, on the contrary, that the Christian faith, the faith of Christ or faith in Christ, is, in its inmost essence, a psychological reality, a personal experience accessible to the most humble, a fact of consciousness which will survive when all theological systems shall have been forgotten and all the clergy shall have been abolished. That vital and regenerating power will save our civilization (if anything can save it) by means of the individuals whom it shall have regenerated, without owing anything to spiritistic theories or practices. Inversely, I do not share the optimism of those who would make of spiritism a social panacea, and who imagine that when the moral consciousness on the one side and the religious consciousness on the other have ceased to make themselves heard, the messages of the “disincarnates” will have better success. (“If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”)

But, on the other hand, there are individual cases which are interesting and which certainly merit consideration. And for millions, and by a hundred different titles—religious belief, moral consolation, solemn and mysterious rites, old habit, etc.—spiritism is to-day the pivot around which existence turns, and also its only support; would not the destruction of it, then, be productive of more harm than good, and would it not be better to let matters take their course? Why prevent man from delighting in dreams, if he so pleases?

_All things are possible_, and was it not of the revenants that Hamlet was thinking in his celebrated apostrophe, from which I have taken this principle?

These are the things which perplex me: while waiting to find a way out of them, and by way of summing up, it seems to me indispensable to separate distinctly spiritism-religion, which is an assemblage of beliefs and practices dear to many, from spiritism-science, a simple hypothesis designed to explain certain phenomena arising from observation. The first tells me nothing, or rather it amuses me or repels me according to circumstances; but the more elevated sentiments, and those worthy of all respect, which it inspires in its adepts, impose upon me the duty of passing it by and ignoring it here. The second, on the contrary, does not fail to interest me, as it does all who are curious in regard to natural phenomena.

For the question, Do human or animal individualities continue to intervene in an effective manner in the physical, physiological, or psychological phenomena of this universe after the loss of their corporeal and visible organism? is not an ordinary one. If there are facts which peremptorily establish an affirmative answer, what problems will arise, what an unexpected field of investigation will it not open up to our experimental sciences! And even if the hypothesis is false, how captivating the study of the singular phenomena which have been able to give it birth, which simulate the return of the dead to our observable world! It is understood, therefore, that, even despoiled of all the emotional accessories in which it so easily wraps itself in the heart and imagination of men, the empirical question of immortality and spiritistic interventions, apparent or real, preserves its scientific importance, and merits being discussed with the calm serenity, independence, and strictness of analysis which belong to the experimental method.

It goes without saying that, _à priori_, the hypothesis of _spirits_ to explain the phenomena of mediums has in it nothing of the impossible or the absurd. It does not even necessarily contradict, as is sometimes imagined, the directing principle of physiological psychology—the psychological parallelism—which demands that every mental phenomenon shall have a physical correlative. For, in spite of our habit of considering the molecular or atomic phenomena of the brain, the katabolism of the nerves, as the true concomitant of conscious processes, it may well be—it is even very probable—that these molecular movements do not constitute the ultimate physical term immediately paralleling the mental world, but that the real physical correlatives (spatial) of the (non-spatial) psychological phenomena should be sought for in the vibrations of imponderable matter, the ether, in which the ponderable atoms and molecules are plunged somewhat like grains of dust in the atmosphere, in order to make a sensible though somewhat inaccurate comparison.

The ethereal body, perispiritistic, astral, fluid, etc., of the occultists, and of many thinkers who are not believers in occultism, is only a notion scientifically absurd when it is made to be an equivocal and cloudy intermediary between the soul and the body, an unassignable _tertium quid_, a plastic mediator of which nothing is known as to its being material or spiritual or something else. But conceived as a system of movements of the ether, it contains nothing absolutely anti-or extra-scientific in its nature; the connection between the subjective facts of consciousness and the objective, material facts, remains essentially the same whether one considers the material world under the imponderable form of ether or under the ponderable form of chemical atoms, of physical molecules, and of anatomical elements. Nothing, then, would be radically opposed, from the point of view of the natural sciences, to the existence of disincarnate spirits wandering through space.

The foregoing will doubtless please my spiritistic friends. Here are two facts which will please them less. First: I separate myself from them when they pass prematurely from mere abstract possibilities to the affirmation of actualities. Perhaps the outcome will prove them right some day; perhaps in the near future, but we have not yet reached that point. I freely admit that never have circumstances been so favorable for the spiritistic doctrines as at present. The authentic return of George Pelham and other deceased persons, through Mrs. Piper entranced, as intermediary, seems to be admitted by so many acute observers, the phenomena observed for fifteen years past in the case of this incomparable medium are at times so marvellous and surrounded with such solid scientific guarantees—the case is, in a word, so unheard of and astounding in all respects, that those who are only acquainted with it from a distance, by printed reports and oral narratives of immediate witnesses, feel themselves in a poor position for formulating their doubts and reservations upon this subject.

I fear, in the second place, for mediums and practical spiritists, that when their hypothesis shall have been scientifically demonstrated the result may be very different from that which they now imagine it will be.

It might well happen that the cult of the table, mechanical writing, seances, and all other mediumistic exercises, may receive their death-blow from the official recognition of spirits by science. Suppose, in fact, that contemporaneous researches should at last have proved clearly that messages actually come from the disincarnate; it has already followed from the same researches that in the most favorable cases the veritable messages are very difficult to distinguish from those which are not authentic. When people come to understand that this sorting of messages is almost always beyond their power, they will, perhaps, be put out of conceit with experiments in which they have ninety-nine chances against one of being dupes of themselves or others, and in which—a still more vexatious matter—if they should even be so fortunate as to light upon the hundredth chance, they would have no certain means of knowing it.

This subject, decidedly, is fatal to me. I lose myself in digressions when discussing it—very useless they are, too, since the verdict which the future will pronounce upon the theory of spirits, with or without an ethereal body, matters little as far as the actual examination of the messages furnished by Mlle. Smith is concerned. Even having become scientifically verified, spiritism will never absolve us from bringing to the analysis of the pretended communications less care and rigor than while it was only an undemonstrated hypothesis; each particular case will always demand to be scrutinized by itself, in order to make the distinction between that which in all probability only arises from many non-spiritistic causes, and the residue eventually proceeding from the disincarnate.

I ought to state at the outset that, as far as Hélène’s mediumistic phenomena are concerned, their careful analysis has not revealed to me in them any evident vestige of the other world, not even of traces of a telepathic transmission on the part of the living. I have only succeeded in perceiving in them very beautiful and instructive examples of the well-known tendency of the subliminal imagination to reconstruct the deceased and to feign their presence, especially when the favorable suggestions of the surrounding environment incites them to do so. Not being infallible, and bearing in mind Hamlet’s principle, I will guard myself well from affirming that these subliminal imitations and simulacra are absolutely free from any spirit collaboration; I content myself with repeating that I have not discovered any, and that it seems to me in the highest degree improbable, and with leaving it to others to demonstrate its reality, if they think they are able to do so. Some examples taken from the principal incarnations of Mlle. Smith will enable me to show after a more concrete fashion my manner of regarding them.

1. _Case of Mlle. Vignier._—This case has no evidential value whatever, since (as has been seen, p. 411), there were formerly relations between the Vignier family and Mme. Smith which suffice to explain the veridical knowledge manifested by Hélène in this incarnation.

I give an abridged recital of it, nevertheless, for the sake of certain points of psychological interest. None of the spectators had any suspicion of these relations at the time of this scene, which was absolutely enigmatical to all of them.

In a seance at my house (on March 3, 1895, after a Hindoo vision, described p. 280), Mlle. Smith saw an unknown lady appear, of whom she gave the following description: “A nose bent and hooked like the beak of an eagle; small gray eyes, very close together; a mouth with three teeth only; a wicked smile, mocking expression; simple dress; a collar not of the fashion of to-day; she draws near to this portrait,[30] and gazes at it not ill-naturedly.”

The name of this person is asked, and the table (Leopold) commences to spell: “_Mademoiselle_”—but refuses to go further, while Hélène sees the apparition laughing, “with a sly air”; as the name is insisted on, the table dictates: “_That does not concern you_,” then she begins to jump and skip as though glad of an opportunity to mock us.

Presently Hélène falls asleep and enters into somnambulism; she leaves the table and moves towards the portrait in question, before which she remains fixed, completely incarnating the unknown lady of her vision. I take down the portrait and place it in its frame upon an easy-chair; immediately she kneels before it and contemplates it with affection; then, taking the frame in her right hand, while the left, very much agitated, plays with the cord, she ends, after many vain attempts, by saying with a great stammering, “_J—j—je l’aimais b—b—beaucoup: je n’aime pas l’autre—j—j—je ne l’ai jamais aimée l’autre—j’amais bien mon neveu—adieu!—je le vois._” “I liked it very much: I do not like the other one: I never liked the other one. I was very fond of my nephew. Adieu! I see him.”

It was impossible to obtain any explanation of this incomprehensible scene, until, having slipped a pencil and a writing-tablet into Hélène’s hand, she scribbled feverishly, in a hand not her own, these two words “_Mademoiselle Vignier_”; then she fell into a cataleptic phase, from which she awakened without memory at the end of half an hour.

This name of Vignier evoked in me far-off memories and vaguely recalled to my mind the fact that Professor Dandiran (who had married, as we have seen, my mother’s sister) had an ancestress of that name; was it she who returned to express to me by means of Mlle. Smith her affection for my mother, whose portrait she had so attentively regarded, and her regrets, perhaps, that her nephew had not been preferred to my aunt?

On the other hand, M. Cuendet recollected a Mlle. Vignier who had been a friend of his family, but who did not correspond at all with the description of Hélène’s visions; he promised to obtain information, and, in fact, wrote me on the following day: “Dear Sir,—Here is some information on the subject of our seance of yesterday. This morning I asked my mother: ‘Did you ever know another Mlle. Vignier than the one who was your friend?’ After an instant of reflection: ‘Yes,’ replied she; ‘I did know another. She was M. Dandiran’s aunt, of Lausanne, his mother’s sister. She stammered, and was not always very good-natured; she had three large teeth which projected, and a hooked nose.’ It is useless to state to you that this was the first time I had heard her spoken of.”

This information, coinciding with my remembrances and Hélène’s vision, was later confirmed by M. Dandiran, who gave me the following information: “Your aunt, Mlle. Vignier, who died about thirty-five or forty years ago, loved her nephew very much; but she was made very angry by his marriage, and the sentence uttered before my mother’s portrait could not have referred to a difference of sentiment in regard to the two sisters, for whom she always had an equal affection. This sentence, on the contrary, is wonderfully well explained by the following facts: My mother and her sister having become betrothed at the same time, oil-paintings of both, of natural size, were made by the same painter. These portraits were not of equal merit, and Mlle. Vignier, who was herself something of an artist, always considered that of my mother excellent, while the other, that of my aunt, she did not like at all. Mlle. Vignier was very lively, and M. Dandiran finds that the epithet ‘sly’ and the table dictating ‘_That does not concern you_,’ very well express her character; she was, however, not at all malicious or mocking at heart, but it is true that persons who knew her slightly could easily have gained that impression of her. She had three or four prominent teeth and stammered badly. In her photograph she wears a white collar, has a nose long and arched, but the eyes are rather large and wide apart. She always wore gold eye-glasses, of which the medium did not speak.”

If the reader has had patience to read these details, he will have remarked that the distinctive traits of Mlle. Vignier in the vision and her incarnation by Hélène (the stammering, the teeth, the shape of the nose, the ill-natured air) coincide with those spontaneously indicated by M. Cuendet, who had known her slightly; and that while M. Dandiran, better posted as to his aunt’s character, finds the note of maliciousness or want of good-nature false, he acknowledges that people outside of her family could have been deceived concerning it. That is to say, has not the imagination of Mlle. Smith produced the exterior memory, the description according to public notoriety, as it were, which Mlle. Vignier left behind her? And if it be recalled that at the period at which the two _fiancées_ were painted, Mme. Smith was in communication with my maternal grandparents through the only sister of Mlle. Vignier, there would be a probability amounting almost to a certainty that these are contemporary remembrances, narrated some time or other to Hélène by her mother, and which furnished the material for this somnambulic personification.

In this example, to which I might add several analogous ones, the apparent _spirit control_ is reduced to latent memories of recitals formerly heard by Hélène.

In other cases, in which, for lack of information, it has hitherto been impossible to discover this wholly natural filiation of facts, simple analysis of the circumstances and of the content of the communications indicates that, in all probability, they proceed from reminiscences and impressions appertaining to living individuals much rather than from disincarnates. In other words, these messages and personifications too evidently reflect the point of view of the medium or other living persons for it to be permissible to regard them as due to the intervention of deceased persons, whose attitude towards them would, in all probability, be wholly different.

2. _Case of Jean the Quarryman._—We have here to deal with a very curious spirit message concerning Mme. Mirbel, in which I cannot fail to see actual memories of the latter—transmitted I know not how (but not necessarily in a supernormal manner) to Mlle. Smith—rather than an authentic communication from a pretended disincarnate.

In a seance at which Mme. Mirbel was not present, Hélène had the hallucination of a very strong odor of sulphur; then the vision of a quarryman from the foot of Salève, in which she perceived and described in detail an unknown man, who, by the dictations of the table, was declared to be _Jean the Quarryman_, and charged the sitters with an affectionate message for Mme. Mirbel. The latter, interrogated on the following day, recognized in the very circumstantial description of this man, and under all the features of Hélène’s vision, perfectly correct facts connected with her childhood, and which had passed away from the habitual circle of her ideas for more than twenty years. It concerned a workman employed in her father’s quarries, and who, when she was a little girl, had always evinced a special affection for her.