Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

When I told him of that mad escapade at Louisville, while I was visiting Aunt Grace, with Stanley Hughes and the supper party he gave to that French dancing-girl in “The Bird-Flight,” when I got out of the taxi and walked home in my satin slippers in the snow for ten blocks rather than stay and have Stanley take me another block in the state he was in, though I had done nothing to stop his drinking and laughed at him, I heard him catch his breath and shudder.

I never told anybody before that it was a paper-knife in my hands that ripped open Henry Hedrick’s cheek for an inch, down in his library while Mamie was up-stairs putting their six-months’ old baby to bed, and I was a guest in their house. In this case I had suspected how he felt about me before I came, but had contemptuously ignored it because I liked to be with Mamie. I told the last few minutes of that tale with dry sobs breaking my words, and while I shook, he folded my cold hand in both his warm ones, and I heard him mutter between his teeth:

“God love her and keep her!”

Then, after a long stillness, I crept closer to him, so that my head bowed against his arm, and opened the very depths to him.

“I don’t think any woman ought to say this to any man,” I began from very far down in my throat, “but you are a preacher, and that makes a difference, and you won’t mind. I am disrespectful and ungrateful to Aunt Grace about it when she is trying her level best to do it to me, but--but I ought to get married. There are lots of wonderful women all over the world who are doing gloriously without husbands, and living happily forever after; but I’m not one. Some women have such frivolous spirits that nothing but a good, firm husband and an enormous family of children can ever chasten them. I’m one. I’ve always thought that he’d find me some day long before I was ready for him--or them; but now I’m afraid he’ll never come. I know he won’t.” I clung to his strong fingers desperately.

“I think he will,” he answered as he kindly, but firmly, possessed himself of his own hand and coat-sleeve, but in such a way as not to hurt my feelings. “I seem to feel that he is well on the road, though fighting hard,” he added in what sounded like mild exasperation or desperation, I couldn’t tell which.

“No,” I answered, with pitiful sadness and real conviction--“no; I am not worthy of him, and he won’t come. It is too late. God and you have just taught me this dreadful night what a good woman really is, and now I will have to be so busy trying all the rest of my life to be one that I won’t have time to look for--that is, he won’t find me. I don’t want anything but a good one, and if I’m being so good as all that, how’ll I let him know I want him?”

“Maybe he’ll get a revelation,” answered Gabriel in a low and controlled voice that seemed to come from the very fastnesses of something within him.

And as he spoke I felt something warm and sweet and terrible stealing over me; but I plunged forward in my confession, past the episode of the duke, my traitorous flight from home, and up to the arrival at Stivers’s, and the cowardly taking of refuge under the patchwork quilt.

“I misunderstood, and thought from the way the men talked that you were going to kill Bill, and I was too much of a coward to run out and find him in the dark and warn him. You see, I lay still and let Bill be killed, whether you did it or not; and so I murdered him, even if he is alive,” I deduced miserably.

“Dudley was wise to fear the precipitation of the logical part of the solution,” Gabriel remarked so quietly that it seemed as if he preferred that I shouldn’t hear him.

“Yes; and, you see, I am a common murderer as well as all the other dreadful things. And I let that baby die, too, rather than go and help the woman wash it outside and in, as you made me do. That is two murders; and I’m another one for not knowing how to fill it up with hot water and poke my finger down its throat and press the potatoes and water up at the same time. I’m a woman, or I ought to be. It’s my life business to know and perform ably such terrible and simple operations on babies. That makes me three murderers. And how did I know that Bill wouldn’t kill you at the same time you killed him, and Mr. Stivers and--”

“Stop!” Gabriel exclaimed suddenly, and he was shaking so hard with unseemly mirth that he shook me, too; for without being able to help myself, I had been crowding closer and closer to him, until I was burrowing right under his arm in the agonies of confession. “The damages will be endless if you go on at this rate. How many of these murders did you realize you were doing at the time you did ’em?”

“Only Bill,” I answered, after a few minutes of intense mental suffering. “I knew I ought to go and sympathize with the mother of the baby, but I didn’t know about that squeezing a baby’s stomach in the right place; but, as I say, I ought to have known, and--I did throw the quilt back to start to Mrs. Stivers when you came in. Please don’t laugh!”

“Then you stand acquitted of all responsibility of faulty impulse except about the murder of Bill, which didn’t come off,” Gabriel answered in a gentle, serious, and respectful voice that soothed me into a cheerful frame of mind over my crimes even before he had more than half uttered the words. I felt hope for myself rise in my heart.

“And then--then you came to the door and began to sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ so that eyes in my soul opened suddenly, and I saw Him standing and looking pitifully down into my awful black heart, and I felt Him reach out His hand to me in the darkness. I’ve always avoided and been afraid of God before, but now do you think He feels about me as He did the man on the other cross who had done awful things, I forget just what, and as long as Bill and the baby are both alive, and I worked so hard, He will forgive me and love me? And give me more awful work to do? Tell me, and what you say I will believe.” I crouched at his knee as I asked the question breathlessly.

“Oh, you wonderful, foolish woman, you! Don’t you know that the good God knows and claims His own?” Gabriel answered, as he bent forward and put his hand on the head that had bowed on his knee. For a heart-still instant we trembled together, then he said quietly and humbly: “I give up. All my life I have prayed that my ‘woman’ would be one who had seen her Master face to face. Stumbling in the darkness, groping, both of us, we found each other and--clung. Are you mine? God, dare I claim a miracle such as You sent to Your servants of old? Have we together met You in the bush, and is it burning? Can we believe that You mean to”--

Then suddenly, in the very midst of his prayer, came a great, white, steady glare, which rent the black clouds above us and revealed us to each other, like the sun at high noon. The very mountains seemed to reel in it, and the forest behind us was stilled from the rack of the winds.

And clasping his knees, I looked and looked into his eyes, down, down until I found a light more blinding than that without, while I could feel his searching mine sternly, solemnly, and with a hope so great that I was tempted to cower, but was prevented by a fierce hunger that rose in me and demanded. I don’t know how long the light lasted, but when it went out, and had left us in the night, the ordeal was over, and I was welded into his arms, and his lips were pouring out love to me in broken words of blessing and demand.

“Are you real?” he whispered, with my cheek pressed hard against his, and his arms terrific with tenderness. “Can I believe it is true? Can I claim a miracle? Can I?”

“Yes,” I answered with triumphant certainty in my mind and voice--“yes. It’s that revelation you said you--that is, the--the man that was coming for me would have. I know it’s a miracle, because I am as afraid of a preacher as of--of that thing rustling out there in the bushes; but if God let me get into your arms this awful way He means for me to stay. And it’s _my_ miracle, not yours. I needed one, and you didn’t. You are it! You don’t think He will take you away from me in the daylight, do you?”

“Never,” he laughed against my lips, with the coax and woo both in his throat, under my hand pressed against it. And that was the taming of the wild me.

A long time after, when I had settled myself comfortably against his shoulder, and gone permanently to housekeeping in the parsonage of his arms, softly the clouds above us drifted apart, and a glorious full moon shone down on us in the warmest congratulatory approval.

“Let me look good at you, love-woman, so I’ll not confuse you with the other flowers when morning comes,” Gabriel fluted from above my head as he attempted to turn me on his arm a fraction of an inch away from him.

“You can use the moon, if you need it for identification purposes, but that lightning was enough for me,” I answered, retiring from his eyes for a hot-cheeked second under the silk handkerchief around his neck. “It may take time and moonlight to teach you me, but I knew you in a flash. I know it’s awful, but most women learn love by lightning, and it’s agony to have to wait while men slowly arrive at it by the light of the sun, moon, and stars. Will nothing ever teach them to hurry?”

“I should say,” answered Gabriel, with a delicious laugh, which I got double benefit of, for I both heard it and felt it, “that I had met you at least half-way.”

“And I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I was reiterating honestly, when an amazed answer arrived from the other side of the rock.

“Well, you don’t look it--perfect strangers!” came in Dudley’s astonished voice, as he rose from beneath the crag and stood beside us. “You old psalm-singer, you, where did you get that girl?” he demanded with a great, but, for the circumstances, very calm, interest.

“Just picked her up in the woods, where she has always been waiting for me, you old log-killer, you. Yes, I guessed the fact that she is your sister, but I dare you to try to take her away from me,” answered Gabriel, as he held me closer, when, with sisterly dignity, I tried to get into a position to squelch Dudley.

“I’ll never try,” answered Dudley, with devout thankfulness sounding in his voice up from his diaphragm. “Maybe you can hold her down, Gates; you seem to have got a good grip for a starter. The family never could.”

Yes, my dear Evelyn, Gabriel turned out to be that wonderful Gates Attwood to whom Chicago has given five million dollars to build his great Temple of Labor down on the South Side. He has been up here visiting Dudley at his camp at Pigeon Creek, hiding for a little rest for three months, and circuit-riding the mountaineers. If I had met him under the shelter of my own roof-tree, I in evening dress, with the lights on, I would have taken one insolent look at him, and then talked to Bobby the rest of the evening, while Aunt Grace raged in pantomime at mother about me. I realized this the instant Dudley called his name, and I turned and hid my eyes against his lips as I trembled at such an escape from losing him.

“I never belonged to anybody but you and--God. That’s what made me bad to the others before I was found and claimed,” I whispered across his cheek, while he nestled me still deeper into his breast, ignoring Dudley, as he deserved.

“God’s good woman, and mine,” was the low answer I felt and heard.

“Well, I’d better go scare Mr. and Mrs. Possum and the Coon Sisters off your trunks over at Crow Point,” remarked Dudley, with more than brotherly consideration. “Something familiar about that collection of baggage yanked me off the down train. I’ll fix you up at Stivers’s when you want to come in, Nell. Here’s to her permanent change of heart, Parson!” And he lighted his pipe as he strolled away through the woods.

And as he left, an awful shyness came pressing in between me and the great man who sat on an Old Harpeth crag and held me so mercifully in his arms.

“Isn’t there a mistake somewhere?” I asked in fear and trembling. “Or did I really get born again, with you to help me?”

“Yes, love,” he answered softly. “This is the right way of things. I needed you; you, me. We were ready, and He let us touch hands in the storm, to be new created. Don’t you feel--kind of weak and young?”

“No,” I whispered just as softly. “Dreadfully strong. I know now how Eve felt when she put her hand to Adam’s side, where there wasn’t even a scar, and didn’t have to ask where she really came from.”

THE LETTER THAT REALLY WAS SENT

Hillsboro, Tennessee, May 30.

My dear Evelyn:

Yes, I know it sounds dreadful for him, that I’m going to marry Gates Attwood next month; but I am going to be better than you can believe I will. I tried to write you all about it, but I couldn’t. No, that isn’t exactly true. I did, but Gates is wearing the letter in his left breast pocket, and won’t give it up. Everybody will just have to trust him with me because he does; and he must know what’s best, because God trusts him. Please come home in time for the wedding. I need you, but I haven’t made any plans. I can’t think or plan. I’m feeling. Were you ever born again? If you have been, you will know what I’m talking about when I tell you; and if you haven’t, you will think I am crazy.

Lovingly,

~Helen~.

LES DEUX AVOCATS (THE TWO LAWYERS)

FROM THE HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PAINTING BY HONORÉ DAUMIER

NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF ALEXANDER W. DRAKE]

LIFE AFTER DEATH[1]

BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Author of “The Life of the Bee,” “Pelléas and Mélisande,” etc.

This calm, judicious review of the results of organized psychical research cannot fail to be immensely valuable in clearing up the mists accumulated in twenty-eight years of earnest investigation into “the debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic.” The accumulations of evidence, and of argument based upon evidence, have been so enormous that few men busy with life have found time more than to dip into the wonderful subject and turn dismayed and reluctant away. Nothing has been so much needed by the Public Concerned with the Greater Things as a careful digestion of this subject to date, and we are fortunate in having so broad, so scientific, so many-sided a mind as Maeterlinck’s perform this service for us.

This paper is the first of many in which ~The Century~ will take account of civilization’s accomplishments in many fields for the benefit of busy men and women.--~The Editor.~

THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS

I have recently been studying two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival--solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement of some magnitude in certain countries has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence.

The great argument of its adherents--the chief and, when all is said, the only argument--is only a sentimental one. Their doctrine that the soul in its successive existences is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right, and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric heaven and the monstrous hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are forever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable, or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has only an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.

We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possible that we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagined. As Sir William Crookes well puts it in a remarkable passage:

It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of
sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our
eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations
to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living in
a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea
we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes
not sensitive to the ordinary rays of light but sensitive to the
vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and
crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be
more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air
would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious
solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration,
whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediæval
mystics and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of
energy or consumption of fuel.

All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were offered for what they are, very ancient hypotheses that go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but when they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand, that by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms, and so forth. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the “immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating, than ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a multitude of others--phenomena which, although sporadic and open to question, are still admissible?

THE NEOSPIRITUALISTIC HYPOTHESIS

Outside theosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism, or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and as early as 1873 or 1874 he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real beginning of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S. P. R. This society was formed in London twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England, and, as we all know, has made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration. Among the many supernormal manifestations, telepathy, previsions, and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: first, real, objective, and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; second, manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character, or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. Those extraordinary communications have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism. They profoundly impressed and almost convinced these men, and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.

It appears, therefore, to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflection of life, is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, or surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them.

For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They take place only at the precise moment of death, or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life, differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, although they come from another world, have never brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon they fade away and disappear forever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterward go on living around us, without again succeeding, despite their endeavors, to make themselves known or to give us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavors would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and color? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it is permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, specters, and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind, and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination.

THE DILEMMA OF THE TRUTH-SEEKER

Now, what are we to think of it all? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson, and many others who have studied this problem at length, conclude in favor 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 hypothesis and the spiritualistic hypothesis? 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, before leaving the terrestrial plane, it is wise and necessary 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.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we have spoken--transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance--occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people series of communications or revelations similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson, and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can be compared with these so far as continuity or lucidity is concerned. But though the quality of the phenomena will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is identical. It is logical to infer from this that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the power of the medium. These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by beings who have crossed to the further side of the mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts.

THE BORDER-LAND OF LIFE AND DEATH

Well, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance, and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained. That is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential, and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of the inward essence of which we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending better. Between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, there is, I insist, only a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree, and in no wise a difference in kind.

For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that neither the medium nor the witnesses should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man; in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has ever actually occurred, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be a very difficult experiment to control. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which, as the others were of very much the same nature, I will merely mention one of the most striking. In a course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper, the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits, and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact, and easy. In this extremely favorable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before, and whom he simply called “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now, A “had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”

The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide.

“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions, and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes.”

The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness; otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man.

IS THE FUTURE LIFE DIM AND SHADOWY?

Of a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly everything, bar every road, and all but deny to the spirits any power of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there, then, no other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us; and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal fields in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things, large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a shadow separates us, and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past, that they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which nothing now enthralls some other discourse than that which it avoided when it was still subject to matter.

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

As Sir Oliver Lodge says:

The object of this ingenious and complicated effort clearly is
to prove that there is some definite intelligence underlying
the phenomena, distinct from that of any of the automatists, by
sending fragments of a message or literary reference which shall be
unintelligible to each separately--so that no effective telepathy
is possible between them,--thus eliminating or trying to eliminate
what had long been recognized by all members of the Society for
Psychical Research as the most troublesome and indestructible of
the semi-normal hypotheses. And the further object is evidently
to prove as far as possible, by the substance and quality of
the message, that it is characteristic of the one particular
personality who is ostensibly communicating, and of no other.[2]

The experiments are still in their early stages, and the most recent volumes of the “Proceedings” are devoted to them. Although the accumulated mass of evidence is already considerable, no conclusion can yet be drawn from it. In any case, whatever the spiritualists may say, the suspicion of telepathy seems to me to be in no way removed. The experiments form a rather fantastic literary exercise, one intellectually much superior to the ordinary manifestations of the mediums; but up to the present there is no reason for placing their mystery in the other world rather than in this. Men have tried to see in them a proof that somewhere in time or space, or else beyond both, there is a sort of immense cosmic reserve of knowledge upon which the spirits go and draw freely. But if the reserve exist, which is very possible, nothing tells us that it is not the living rather than the dead who repair to it. It is very strange that the dead, if they really have access to the immeasurable treasure, should bring back nothing from it but a kind of ingenious child’s puzzle, although it ought to contain myriads of lost or forgotten notions and acquirements, heaped up during thousands and thousands of years in abysses which our mind, weighed down by the body, can no longer penetrate, but which nothing seems to close against the investigations of freer and more subtle activities. They are evidently surrounded by innumerable mysteries, by unsuspected and formidable truths that loom large on every side. The smallest astronomical or biological revelation, the least secret of olden time, such as that of the temper of copper, an archæological detail, a poem, a statue, a recovered remedy, a shred of one of those unknown sciences which flourished in Egypt or Atlantis--any of these would form a much more decisive argument than hundreds of more or less literary reminiscences. Why do they speak to us so seldom of the future? And for what reason, when they do venture upon it, are they mistaken with such disheartening regularity? One would think that, in the sight of a being delivered from the trammels of the body and of time, the years, whether past or future, ought all to lie outspread on one and the same plane.[3] We may therefore say that the ingenuity of the proof turns against it. All things considered, as in other attempts, and notably in those of the famous medium Stainton Moses, there is the same characteristic inability to bring us the veriest particle of truth or knowledge of which no vestige can be found in a living brain or in a book written on this earth. And yet it is inconceivable that there should not somewhere exist a knowledge that is not as ours and truths other than those which we possess here below.

A LACK OF VITAL COMMUNICATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAS THE SPIRIT ONLY AN INCOHERENT MEMORY OF LIFE?

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

But, I repeat, it is much simpler to attribute these absurdities to the special character and the as yet imperfectly recognized difficulties of telepathic communication. The unconscious suggestions of the most intelligent among those who take part in the experiment are impaired, disjointed, and stripped of their main virtues in passing through the obscure intermediary of the medium. It may be that they go astray and make their way into certain forgotten corners which the intelligence no longer visits, and thence bring back more or less surprising discoveries; but the intellectual quality of the aggregate will always be inferior to that which a conscious mind would yield. Besides, once more, it is not yet time to draw conclusions. We must not lose sight of the fact that we have to do with a science which was born but yesterday, and which is groping for its implements, its paths, its methods, and its aim in a darkness denser than the earth’s. The boldest bridge that men have yet undertaken to throw across the river of death is not to be built in thirty years. Most sciences have centuries of thankless efforts and barren uncertainties behind them; and there are, I imagine, few among the younger of them that can show from the earliest hour, as this one does, promises of a harvest which may not be the harvest of their conscious sowing, but which already bids fair to yield such unknown and wondrous fruit.[4]

TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will now quote Colonel de Rochas:

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

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