Chapter XVI: When the War Is Over 247 (1)

I

OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH

1

It has been well said:

“Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, where we shall not be. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!”[1]

2

That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it but thrives upon our fears. He who seeks to forget it has his memory filled with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. It clouds everything with its shadow. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head. All the forces which might avail to face death we exhaust in averting our will from it. We deliver it into the groping hands of instinct and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous of ideas—being the most persistent and the most inevitable—remains the flimsiest and the only one that is a laggard? How should we know the one power which we never look in the face? How could it have profited by gleams kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive. We do not begin to think of death until we have no longer the strength, I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us from another century would have difficulty in recognizing, in the depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything has changed around it and when even that which composes it and upon which it depends has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence, grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has not, so to speak, retouched it in any way. Though we may no longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most sceptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life and, if less known, is all the more formidable. And therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to lean give way like rushes beneath the weight of the last minutes. In vain we seek a refuge among reflections which are illusive or are strange to us and which do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.

3

Bossuet, the great poet of the tomb, says:

“It is not worthy of a Christian”—and I would add, of a man—“to postpone his struggle with death until the moment when it arrives to carry him off.”

It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and stand by it. He would say to death:

“I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you were not: that is enough to prevent you from becoming mine.”

He would thus bear, graven on his memory, a tried image against which the last agony would not prevail and from which the phantom-stricken eyes would draw fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his existence, where would be gathered, like angels of peace, the most lucid, the most rarefied thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?

4

“The doctors and the priests,” said Napoleon, “have long been making death grievous.”

And Bacon wrote:

“_Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa._”

Let us, then, learn to look upon death as it is in itself, free from the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it. Thus we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not just. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They form part of life and not of death. We readily forget the most cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts a term to them.

5

In point of fact, whereas sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the last, terrible second of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, naked, disarmed, abandoned by all and stripped of everything, into an unknown that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the soul of man has ever felt.

It is doubly unjust to impute the torments of that second to death. We shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the watchers, at least; for very often the consciousness of him whom death, in Bossuet’s phrase, has “brought to bay” is already greatly dulled and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which it seems to be enduring. All doctors consider it their first duty to prolong to the uttermost even the cruellest pangs of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at the bedside of a dying man, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so great a certainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their revolt and recoil before a law which all recognize and revere as the highest law of man’s conscience.

6

One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarous. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have long since died out in the intelligence of men. That is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that every minute gained amid the most intolerable sufferings is snatched from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and of two evils, to avoid that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the only real one. Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as old Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are but yielding to the unanimous error which makes its enclosing circle more iron-bound every day: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the agony.

7

The doctors, on their side, say or might say that, in the present stage of science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of insupportable torments, might be murder. Doubtless there is not one chance in a hundred thousand that the patient escape. No matter: if that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a few days, or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not be the real life, but much rather, as the Romans called it, “an extended death,” those hundred thousand useless torments will not have been in vain. A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

Here we have, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if we mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which we see with all that remains to us, that is to say, with every imaginable pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts and which is heavy enough to raise by a hair’s-breadth the other scale that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of another world.

8

Swollen by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes such that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors’ reasons. And yet there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree. They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to deaden, at least to dull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them would have dared to do so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate and, like misers, measure out niggardly drops of the clemency and peace which they ought to lavish and which they grudge in their dread of weakening the last resistance, that is to say, the most useless and painful quiverings of reluctant life refusing to give place to on-coming rest.

It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater daring. It is enough to state once more that all this has no concern with death. It happens before it and beneath it. It is not the arrival of death but the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death but life that we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it is life that wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten from every side at the approach of death, but not at its call; and, though they gather round it, they did not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of the fatigue that oppresses you if you do not yield to it? All those strugglings, those waitings, those tossings, those tragic cursings are on the side of the slope to which we cling and not on the other side. They are, indeed, accidental and temporary and emanate only from our ignorance. All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently every evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and the sick man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no physical nor metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be as salutary as that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be nothing else to take into consideration, it will be possible to surround death with profounder ecstasies and fairer dreams. In any case and from this day, with death once acquitted of that which goes before, it will be easier to look upon it without fear and to lighten that which comes after.

9

Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it. The first has neither face nor form and permeates the whole region of our mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as powerful. The latter strikes all our senses. Let us examine it first.

Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing it the same injustice at its going as at its coming. Is it death that digs our graves and orders us to keep that which is made to disappear? If we cannot think without horror of what befalls the beloved in the grave, is it death or we that placed him there? Because death carries the spirit to some place unknown, shall we reproach it with our bestowal of the body which it leaves with us? Death descends into our midst to change the place of a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone. For it is already far away when we begin the frightful work which we try hard to prolong to the very utmost, as though we were persuaded that it is our only security against forgetfulness. I am well aware that, from any other than the human point of view, this proceeding is very innocent; and that, looked upon from a sufficient height, decomposing flesh is no more repulsive than a fading flower or a crumbling stone. But, when all is said, it offends our senses, shocks our memory, daunts our courage, whereas it would be so easy for us to avoid the foul ordeal. Purified by fire, the remembrance lives enthroned as a beautiful idea; and death is naught but an immortal birth cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and happiest nations in history. What happens in our graves poisons our thoughts together with our bodies. The figure of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial; and the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart but also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the ultimate background of life the great image upon which men’s eyes linger in consolation or despair.

10

There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us lose no time in putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left there. Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they are not proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not one of them brings us a proof before which an honest intelligence can bow. Nor would it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for man lawfully to believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the proof would need to be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best and strongest of them has given us our reason to employ loyally and fully, that is to say, to try to attain, before all and in all things, that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should accept, in spite of it, a belief whose doubtfulness, from the human point of view, is not denied by its wisest and most ardent defenders? He only offers us a very uncertain story, which, even if scientifically substantiated, would be merely a beautiful lesson in morality and which is buttressed by prophecies and miracles no less doubtful. Must we here call to mind that Pascal, to defend that creed which was already tottering at a time when it seemed at its zenith, vainly attempted a demonstration the mere aspect of which would be enough to destroy the last remnant of faith in a wavering mind? Better than any other, he knew the stock proofs of the theologians, for they had been the sole study of the last years of his life. If but one of these proofs could have resisted examination, his genius, one of the three or four most profound and lucid geniuses ever known to mankind, must have given it an irresistible force. But he does not linger over these arguments, whose weakness he feels too well; he pushes them scornfully aside, he glories and, in a manner, rejoices in their futility:

“Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their faith, those who profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in presenting it to the world, that it is a foolishness, _stultitiam_; and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word; it is in being destitute of proofs that they are not destitute of sense.”

His solitary argument, the one to which he clings desperately and devotes all the power of his genius, is the very condition of man in the universe, that incomprehensible medley of greatness and wretchedness, for which there is no accounting save by the mystery of the first fall:

“For man is more incomprehensible without that mystery than the mystery itself is incomprehensible to man.”

He is therefore reduced to establishing the truth of the Scriptures by an argument drawn from the very Scriptures in question; and—what is more serious—to explain a wide and great and indisputable mystery by another, small, narrow and crude mystery that rests only upon the legend which it is his business to prove. And, let us observe in passing, it is a fatal thing to replace one mystery by another and lesser mystery. In the hierarchy of the unknown, mankind always ascends from the smaller to the greater. On the other hand, to descend from the greater to the smaller is to relapse into the condition of primitive man, who carries his barbarism to the point of replacing the infinite by a fetish or an amulet. The measure of man’s greatness is the greatness of the mysteries which he cultivates or on which he dwells.

To return to Pascal, he feels that everything is crumbling around him; and so, in the collapse of human reason, he at last offers us the monstrous wager that is the supreme avowal of the bankruptcy and despair of his faith. God, he says, meaning his God and the Christian religion with all its precepts and all its consequences, exists or does not exist. We are unable, by human arguments, to prove that He exists or that He does not exist.

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, because, having neither divisions nor bounds, He has no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is.”

God is or is not.

“But to which side shall we lean? Reason can determine nothing about it. There is an infinite gulf that separates us. A game is played at the uttermost part of this infinite distance, in which heads may turn up or tails. Which will you wager? There is no reason for betting on either one or the other; you cannot reasonably defend either.”

The correct course would be not to wager at all.

“Yes, but you must wager: this is not a matter for your will; you are launched in it.”

Not to wager that God exists means wagering that He does not exist, for which He will punish you eternally. What then do you risk by wagering, at all hazards, that He exists? If He does not, you lose a few small pleasures, a few wretched comforts of this life, because your little sacrifice will not have been rewarded; if He exists, you gain an eternity of unspeakable happiness.

“‘It is true, but, in spite of all, I am so made that I cannot believe.’

“Never mind, follow the way in which they began who believe and who at first did not believe either, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That in itself will make you believe and will reduce you to the level of the beasts.”

“‘But that is just what I am afraid of.’

“Why? What have you to lose?”

Nearly three centuries of apologetics have not added one useful argument to that terrible and despairing page of Pascal. And this is all that human intelligence has found to compel our life. If the God who demands our faith will not have us decide by our reason, by what then must our choice be made? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some æsthetic or sentimental pitch-and-toss? Or has He set within us another higher and surer faculty, before which the understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If this God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which is rejected by that best and most divine part which He has implanted in us, we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a cruel and incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith that injustice may load us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of its Author.

II

ANNIHILATION

1

And now we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was there; we know only what is not there. It is the vaster by all that we have learned to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific certainty to break through its darkness—for man has the right to hope for that which he does not yet conceive—the only point that interests us, because it is situated in the little circle which our actual intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not.

Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day; survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival in the universal consciousness, or with a consciousness different from that which we possess in this world.

2

Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not see. To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it into nothingness, nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exists, under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to analyse it, to define it, or to understand it, thoughts and expressions fail us, or create that which they are struggling to deny. It is as contrary to the nature of our reason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative infinity, a sort of infinity of darkness opposed to that which our intelligence strives to illumine, or rather it is but a child-name or nickname which our mind has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we call nothingness all that escapes our senses or our reason and exists without our knowledge.

3

But, it will perhaps be said, though the annihilation of every world and every thing be impossible, it is not so certain that their death is impossible; and, to us, what is the difference between nothingness and everlasting death? Here again we are led astray by our imagination and by words. We can no more conceive death than we can conceive nothingness. We use the word death to cover those fragments of nothingness which we believe that we understand; but, on closer examination, we are bound to recognize that our idea of death is much too puerile to contain the least truth. It reaches no higher than our own bodies and cannot measure the destinies of the universe. We give the name of death to anything that has a life a little different from ours. Even so do we act towards a world that appears to us motionless and frozen, the moon, for instance, because we are persuaded that any form of existence, animal or vegetable, is extinguished upon it for ever. But it is now some years since we learned that the most inert matter, to outward seeming, is animated by movements so powerful and furious that all animal or vegetable life is no more than sleep and immobility by the side of the swirling eddies and immeasurable energy locked up in a wayside stone.

“There is no room for death!” cried Emily Brontë.

But, even if, in the infinite series of the centuries, all matter should really become inert and motionless, it would none the less persist under one form or another; and persistence, though it were in total immobility, would, after all, be but a form of life stable and silent at last. All that dies falls into life; and all that is born is of the same age as that which dies. If death carried us to nothingness, did birth then draw us out of that same nothingness? Why should the second be more impossible than the first? The higher human thought rises and the wider it expands, the less comprehensible do nothingness and death become. In any case—and this is what matters here—if nothingness were possible, since it could not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.

III

COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD

1

The spiritualists communicate or think that they communicate with the dead by means of what they call automatic speech and writing. These are obtained by the agency of a medium[2] in a state of ecstasy, or rather “trance,” to employ the vocabulary of the new science. This condition is not one of hypnotic sleep, nor does it seem to be an hysterical manifestation; it is often associated, as in the case of the medium Mrs. Piper, with perfect health and complete intellectual and physical balance. It is rather the more or less voluntary emergence of a second or subliminal personality or consciousness of the medium; or, if we admit the spiritualistic hypothesis, his occupation, his “psychic invasion,” as Myers calls it, by forces from another world. In the “entranced” subject, the normal consciousness and personality are entirely done away with; and he replies “automatically,” sometimes by word of mouth, more often in writing, to the questions put to him. It has happened that he speaks and writes simultaneously, his voice being occupied by one spirit and his hand by another, who thus carry on two independent conversations. More rarely, the voice and the two hands are “possessed” at one and the same time; and we receive three different communications. Obviously, manifestations of this sort lend themselves, to frauds and impostures of all kinds; and the distrust aroused is at first invincible. But there are some that make their appearance encompassed with such guarantees of good faith and sincerity, so often, so long and so rigorously checked by scientific men of unimpeachable character and authority and of originally inflexible scepticism, that it becomes difficult to maintain a suspicion at the finish.[3] Unfortunately, I am not able to enter here into the details of some of these purely scientific sittings, those for instance of Mrs. Piper, the famous medium with whom F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Professor Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Oliver Lodge and William James worked during a number of years. On the other hand, it is precisely the accumulation and coincidences of these abnormal details which gradually produce and confirm the conviction that we are in the presence of an entirely new, improbable but genuine phenomenon, which is sometimes difficult of classification among exclusively terrestrial phenomena. I should have to devote to these “communications” a special study which would exceed the limits of this essay; and I will therefore content myself with referring those who care to know more of the subject to Sir Oliver Lodge’s book, _The Survival of Man_; and, above all, to the twenty-five bulky volumes of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R., notably to the report and comments of William James on the Piper-Hodgson sittings in Vol. XXIII. and to Vol. XIII., where Hodgson examines the facts and arguments that may be adduced for or against the agency of the dead; and, lastly, to Myers’ great work, _Human Personality and its Survival after Bodily Death_.

2

The “entranced” mediums are invaded or possessed by different familiar spirits to whom the new science gives the somewhat inappropriate and ambiguous name of “controls.” Thus, Mrs. Piper is visited in succession by Phinuit, George Pelham, or “G.P.,” Imperator, Doctor and Rector. Mrs. Thompson, another very celebrated medium, has Nelly for her usual tenant, while graver and more illustrious personages would take possession of Stainton Moses, a clergyman. Each of these spirits retains a sharply defined character, which is consistent throughout and which, moreover, for the most part bears no relation to that of the medium. Amongst these, Phinuit and Nelly are undoubtedly the most attractive, the most original, the most living, the most active and, above all, the most talkative. They centralize the communications after a fashion; they come and go officiously; and, should any one of those present wish to be brought into touch with the soul of a deceased relative or friend, they fly in search of it, find it amid the invisible throng, usher it in, announce its presence, speak in its name, transmit and, so to speak, translate the questions and replies; for it seems that it is very difficult for the dead to communicate with the living and that they need special aptitudes and a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances. We will not yet examine what they have to reveal to us; but to see them thus fluttering to and fro amid the multitude of their discarnate brothers and sisters gives us a first impression of the next world which is none too reassuring; and we say to ourselves that the dead of to-day are strangely like those whom Ulysses conjured up out of the Cimmerian darkness three thousand years ago: pale and empty shades, bewildered, incoherent, puerile and terror-stricken, like unto dreams, more numerous than the leaves that fall in autumn and, like them, trembling in the unknown winds from the vast plains of the other world. They no longer even have enough life to be unhappy; and they seem to drag out, we know not where, a precarious and idle existence, to wander aimlessly, to hover round us, slumbering, or chattering among one another of the minor matters of this world; and, when a gap is made in their darkness, to hasten from all sides, like flocks of famished birds, hungering for light and the sound of a human voice. And, in spite of ourselves, we think of the _Odyssey_ and the sinister words of the shade of Achilles as it issued from Erebus:

“Do not, O illustrious Ulysses, speak to me of death; I would wish, being on earth, to serve for hire with another man of no estate, who had not much livelihood, rather than rule over all the departed dead.”

3

What have these latterday dead to tell us? To begin with, it is a remarkable thing that they appear to be much more interested in events here below than in those of the world wherein they move. They seem, above all, jealous to establish their identity, to prove that they still exist, that they recognize us, that they know everything; and, to convince us of this, they enter into the most minute and forgotten details with extraordinary precision, perspicacity and prolixity. They are also extremely clever at unravelling the intricate family connections of the person actually questioning them, of any of the sitters, or even of a stranger entering the room. They recall this one’s little infirmities, that one’s maladies, the eccentricities or personal tendencies of a third. They have cognizance of events taking place at a distance: they see, for instance, and describe to their hearers in London an insignificant episode in Canada. In a word, they say and do almost all the disconcerting and inexplicable things that are sometimes obtained from a first-rate medium; perhaps they even go a little further; but there comes from it all no breath, no glimmer of the hereafter, not even the something vaguely promised and vaguely waited for.

We shall be told that the mediums are visited only by inferior spirits, incapable of tearing themselves from earthly cares and soaring towards greater and loftier ideas. It is possible; and no doubt we are wrong to believe that a spirit stripped of its body can suddenly be transformed and reach, in a moment, the level of our imaginings; but could they not at least inform us where they are, what they feel and what they do?

4

And now it seems that death itself has elected to answer these objections. Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson and William James, who so often, for long and ardent hours, questioned Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson and obliged the departed to speak by their mouths, are now themselves among the shades, on the other side of the curtain of darkness. They at least knew exactly what to do in order to reach us, what to reveal in order to allay the uneasy curiosity of men. Myers in particular, the most ardent, the most convinced, the most impatient of the veil that parted him from the eternal realities, formally promised those who were continuing his work that he would make every imaginable effort out yonder, in the unknown, to come to their aid in a decisive fashion. He kept his word. A month after his death, when Sir Oliver Lodge was questioning Mrs. Thompson in her trance, Nelly, the medium’s familiar spirit, suddenly declared that she had seen Myers, that he was not yet fully awake, but that he hoped to come, at nine o’clock in the evening, and “communicate” with his old friend of the Psychical Society.

The sitting was suspended and resumed at half past eight; and Myers’ “communication” was at last obtained. He was recognized by the first few words he spoke; it was really he; he had not changed, Faithful to his idiosyncracy when on earth, he at once insisted on the necessity for taking notes. But he seemed dazed. They spoke to him of the Society for Psychical Research, the sole interest of his life. He had lost all recollection of it. Then memory gradually revived; and there followed a quantity of post-mortem gossip on the subject of the society’s next president, the obituary article in the _Times_, the letters that should be published and so on. He complained that people would not let him rest, that there was not a place in England where they did not ask for him:

“Call Myers! Bring Myers!”

He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the mediums: “they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines of Virgil.”[4] As for his present condition, “he groped his way as if through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his way in a strange town ... and, even when he saw people that he knew were dead, he thought they were only visions.”

This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about all that we obtained from Myers’ “control” or “impersonation,” of which better things had been expected. The “communication” and many others which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers’ habits, character and ways of thinking and speaking would possess some value if none of those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand, they are most probably but reminiscences of a secondary personality of the medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters.

5

A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the names connected with it, is that which is known as “Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control.” Professor William James devotes an account of over a hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the _Proceedings_. Dr. Hodgson, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American branch of the S.P.R., of which William James was vice-president. For many years, he devoted himself to Mrs. Piper the medium, working with her twice a week and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject of posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death; and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape and that “he would make it hot for them.” He did come back, a week after his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs. Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during several sittings at which William James was present. I should like to give an idea of these manifestations. But, as the celebrated Harvard professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sitting of this kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain for the emotion experienced on thus finding yourself in the presence of an invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but anticipates your thoughts, understands before you have finished speaking, grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or smiling. The life of the dead man, which, during a strange hour, had, so to speak, surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for the second time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt supplies the best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion; but it is not certain that here, as in many other cases where the unknown predominates, logic is the only road that leads to the truth.

“When I first undertook,” says William James, “to collate this series of sittings and make the present report, I supposed that my verdict would be determined by pure logic. Certain minute incidents, I thought, ought to make for spirit-return or against it in a ‘crucial’ way. But watching my mind work as it goes over the data, convinces me that exact logic plays only a preparatory part in shaping our conclusions here; and that the decisive vote, if there be one, has to be cast by what I may call one’s general sense of dramatic probability, which sense ebbs and flows from one hypothesis to another—it does so in the present writer at least—in a rather illogical manner. If one sticks to the detail, one may draw an anti-spiritist conclusion; if one thinks more of what the whole mass may signify, one may well incline to spiritist interpretations.”[5]

And, at the end of his article, he sums up in the following words:

“_I myself feel as if an external will to communicate were probably there_, that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper’s dream-life, even equipped with ‘telepathic’ powers, accounts for all the results found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be Hodgson’s, or be some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty or a hundred years.”[6]

As we see, William James is inclined to waver; and at certain points in his account he appears to waver still more and indeed to say deliberately that the spirits “have a finger in the pie.” These hesitations on the part of a man who has revolutionized our psychological ideas and who possessed a brain as wonderfully organized and well-balanced as that of our own Taine, for instance, are very significant. As a doctor of medicine and a professor of philosophy, sceptical by nature and scrupulously faithful to experimental methods, he was thrice qualified to conduct investigations of this kind to a successful conclusion. It is not a question of allowing ourselves, in our turn, to be unduly influenced by those hesitations; but, in any case, they show that the problem is a serious one, the gravest, perhaps, if the facts were beyond dispute, which we have had to solve since the coming of Christ; and that we must not expect to dismiss it with a shrug or a laugh.

6

I am obliged, for lack of space, to refer those who wish to form an opinion of their own on the “Piper-Hodgson” case to the text of the _Proceedings_. The case, at the same time, is far from being one of the most striking; it should rather be classed, were it not for the importance of the sitters concerned, among the minor successes of the Piper series. Hodgson, according to the invariable custom of the spirits, is, first of all, bent on making himself recognized; and the inevitable, tedious string of trifling reminiscences begins twenty times over again and fills page after page. As usual in such instances, the recollections common to both the questioner and the spirit who is supposed to be replying are brought out in their most circumstantial, their most insignificant and also their most private details with astonishing eagerness, precision and vivacity. And observe that, for all these details, which he discloses with such extraordinary facility, the dead man answering seeks by preference, one would say, the most hidden and forgotten treasures of the living listener’s memory. He spares him nothing; he harps on everything with childish satisfaction and apprehensive solicitude, not so much to persuade others as to prove to himself that he still exists. And the obstinacy of this poor invisible being, in striving to manifest himself through the hitherto uncrannied doors that separate us from our eternal destinies, is at once ridiculous and tragic:

“Do you remember, William, when we were in the country at So-and-so’s, that game we played with the children; do you remember my saying such-and-such a thing when I was in that room where there was such-and-such a chair or table?”

“Why, yes, Hodgson, I do remember now.”

“A good test, that?”

“First-rate, Hodgson!”

And so on, indefinitely. Sometimes, there is a more significant incident that seems to surpass the mere transmission of subliminal thought. They are talking, for instance, of a frustrated marriage which was always surrounded with great mystery, even to Hodgson’s most intimate friends:

“Do you remember a lady-doctor in New York, a member of our society?”

“No, but what about her?”

“Her husband’s name was Blair ... I think.”

“Do you mean Dr. Blair Thaw?”

“Oh, yes. Ask Mrs. Thaw if I did not at a dinner-party mention something about the lady. I may have done so.”

James writes to Mrs. Thaw, who declares that, as a matter of fact, fifteen years before, Hodgson had said to her that he had just proposed to a girl and been refused. Mrs. Thaw and Dr. Newbold were the only people in the world who knew the particulars.

But to come to the further sittings. Among other points discussed is the financial position of the American branch of the S.P.R., a position which, at the death of the secretary, or rather factotum, Hodgson, was anything but brilliant. And behold the somewhat strange spectacle of different members of the society debating its affairs with their defunct secretary. Shall they dissolve? Shall they amalgamate? Shall they send the materials collected, most of which are Hodgson’s, to England? They consult the dead man; he replies, gives good advice, seems fully aware of all the complications, all the difficulties. One day, in Hodgson’s lifetime, when the society was found to be short of funds, an anonymous donor had sent the sum necessary to relieve it from embarrassment. Hodgson alive did not know who the donor was; Hodgson dead picks him out among those present, addresses him by name and thanks him publicly. On another occasion, Hodgson, like all the spirits, complains of the extreme difficulty which he finds in conveying his thought through the alien organism of the medium:

“I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat,” he says.

But, when, after so much idle chatter, William James at last puts the essential questions that burn our lips—“Hodgson, what have you to tell us about the other life?”—the dead man becomes shifty and does nothing but seek evasions:

“It is not a vague fantasy but a reality,” he replies.

“But,” Mrs. William James insists, “do you live as we do, as men do?”

“What does she say?” asks the spirit, pretending not to understand.

“Do you live as men do?” repeats William James.

“Do you wear clothing and live in houses?” adds his wife.

“Oh yes, houses, but not clothing. No, that is absurd. Just wait a moment, I am going to get out.”

“You will come back again?”

“Yes.”

“He has got to go out and get his breath,” remarks another spirit, named Rector, suddenly intervening.

It has not been waste of time, perhaps, to reproduce the general features of one of these sittings which may be regarded as typical. I will add, in order to give an idea of the farthest point which it is possible to attain, the following instance of an experiment made by Sir Oliver Lodge and related by him. He handed Mrs. Piper, in her “trance,” a gold watch which had just been sent him by one of his uncles and which belonged to that uncle’s twin brother, who had died twenty years before. When the watch was in her possession, Mrs. Piper, or rather Phinuit, one of her familiar spirits, began to relate a host of details concerning the childhood of this twin brother, facts dating back for more than sixty-six years and of course unknown to Sir Oliver Lodge. Soon after, the surviving uncle, who lived in another town, wrote and confirmed the accuracy of most of these details, which he had quite forgotten and of which he was only now reminded by the medium’s revelations; while those which he could not recollect at all were subsequently declared to be in accordance with fact by a third uncle, an old sea-captain, who lived in Cornwall and who had not the least notion why such strange questions were put to him.

I quote this instance not because it has any exceptional or decisive value, but simply, I repeat, by way of an example; for, like the case connected with Mrs. Thaw, mentioned above, it marks pretty accurately the extreme points to which people have up to now, thanks to spirit agency, penetrated the mysteries of the unknown. It is well to add that cases in which the supposed limits of the most far-reaching telepathy are so manifestly exceeded are fairly uncommon.

7

Now what are we to think of all this? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson and many others, who studied this problem at length, conclude in favour of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross. Must we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to hesitate any longer between the telepathic theory and the spiritualistic theory? I do not think so. I have no prejudices—what were the use of having any, in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead; but it is wise and necessary, before leaving the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the suppositions, all the explanations there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world, as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead; but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.