Chapter V: Part 5

=A Suffering God.=--The teacher said: "The idea of a suffering God was foolishness to the Greeks, who considered a God as a tyrant gloating over the sufferings of men. But the seeming contradiction is solved if one supposes that a Holy Being deposits itself, so to speak, in humanity, and that humanity then becomes defiled. That is a boundless grief like his who has deposited the best part of his soul and his emotions with a woman. If she then goes and defiles herself, she defiles her husband. Or a father's nature has passed over to his children, and he wishes to see his best impulses continued and multiplied by them, and his likeness ennobled. If the children dishonour themselves, the father suffers; the stem withers when the roots are injured.

"Such I imagine to be the feelings of God the Father when the sinfulness of humanity grows noisome and dishonours Him, and perhaps threatens to affect His own holiness. He will be wroth and lament--perhaps even feel Himself defiled--rather than cut off the cancerous limb of humanity. Christ is no more represented as beautiful, but with features distorted by the sins of others; these he has taken on himself or drawn to himself, for he who approaches pitch is defiled. In order to be free from the impure element he must die by the destruction of the body. Incarnation involved the greatest suffering of all.

"But the death of Christ may also signify that the Father freed himself from the sins of humanity, and broke off connection with the evil race who dishonoured Him. He who will now seek Him must rise to His heights, and gain admission by a pure life. He Himself will descend no more into this valley of filth; the air is too thick, the company too mixed. And that is why things are as they are."

=The Atonement.=--The teacher said: "The work of the Atonement has been very difficult for me to understand. Often I have tried to explain in a way satisfactory to myself, but without success. If God had offered up His Son as an atonement for mankind, there would necessarily have been peace and paradisal quietness on earth, but such is not the case. The period of the Roman emperors before Christ was indeed terrible, but the next thousand years were no better; they rather resembled a deluge in which the old nations were exterminated by barbarians. The second millennium was better, very much better. The third will perhaps close with a complete reconciliation between humanity and God. Everything points to that, though the heathen may reign for a while as instruments of chastisement, and executioners and possessors of wealth. The Egyptian has an important part to play, and slavery is not bad as a school of discipline. In the desert one learns the difficult art of loneliness, and in the strange land of Assyria one feels a wholesome home-sickness. Still, when the Egyptian raises his stick to strike, comfort yourself with Christ's words to Pilate, 'Thou wouldest have no power over Me, if it were not given thee from above.' And when you eat the bread of the heathen, think like the Maccabees, 'I eat thy bread, but I do not sacrifice upon thy altar.' Everything is tolerable so long as we do not let ourselves be beguiled into believing that those who are in power are God's friends and favourites. Our fine gentlemen who imagine that they are forwarding development and are the sole trustees of right, progress, and illumination, are only children of this world. Let that be granted them, and much good may it do them!"

=When Nations Go Mad.=--The teacher said: "Nations are sometimes seized by madness as by other diseases. The Javanese are said to suffer from chronic madness; the men run amuck with a knife in order to slay; the women suffer from a mania for mimicry; if they see anyone throw something into the air, they imitate the gesture; they can even under such circumstances throw their children away. The Japanese again are attacked by megalomania; someone begins to shout, 'We will conquer China!' and his cry is taken up by the whole town and the whole land. The French were raving when, in 1870, they sang 'A Berlin,' and did not even reach the Rhine. Paris was captured. But the French declared it was not captured, but had surrendered. When the enemy had marched in peaceably and spared the town, and after peace was concluded the French set their own town on fire. That was madness. Then they shot down thirty thousand of their own countrymen, while in the war itself only eighty thousand French had fallen."

"But some nations are seized by a mania for suicide. I know a land from which people emigrate at the rate of a hundred a day; in which the only important industry--iron-mining--is hampered by an export duty; that is suicide. In the same land, where the taxes are generally collected by levying distraints, they voted forty million pounds for the army; but when the muster-rolls came to be made up, the men were not to be found. In the same country the State maintains a railway of a hundred miles in length; recently the train came in with one passenger, whose journey had cost the State more than a thousand kronas. That is suicide."

=The Poison of Lies.=--The teacher said: "Let us return to life, and to men whom we think we know better than anything else, although self-knowledge is the hardest of all. A perpetual accusation which people bring against each other is that of lying. All lie more or less--by omitting principal points and emphasising secondary ones, or by colouring matters of fact. Often they do it with an excusable purpose; for instance, when a friend is being spoken about.

"But there are men who seem to be composed of falsehood and deceit. Such are the liars from necessity, who lie in order to obtain something; such, too, are the liars from ostentation, who lie in order to be superior to others, and to keep them down. One may be poisoned in the atmosphere which they spread around them.

"There is a pair of liars whom I have never seen, but often heard spoken about. When I merely hear about them and their falsehoods, I feel my brain affected, and their poison works telepathically on my nerves. The pair are dogged by misfortune, and live alone. They tell each other lies also, and pretend to themselves that they are martyrs, although their misfortunes are solely due to their deceits. They believe that they are persecuted by men, while, on the contrary, men fly from them. Such they have been since childhood, and seem unable to change. Perhaps their mendacity is a form of punishment, for 'they that hate the righteous shall be guilty.'"

=Murderous Lies.=--The teacher continued: "When one lives on intimate terms with liars, one runs a risk of becoming a liar oneself. One believes what they say, bases his views on their falsehoods, spreads their false reports in good faith, defends their sophistries, and is entangled in their deceits. Moreover, one's whole view of life is distorted, one loses contact with reality, lives in a fictitious world of feeling, regards friends as foes and foes as friends, thinks one is loved while one is hated, and vice versa.

"On one occasion a liar with whom I lived on intimate terms made me think that my last book had been a failure. For five years I believed it, suffered under the belief, and lost my courage. On my return to Sweden I found that the book had had a great success. Five years had been struck out of my life; I was nearly losing self-respect and the courage to support existence. That is equivalent to murder. And this behaviour on the part of my only friend, for whom I had worked and made sacrifices, gave me such a shock that all my ideas were confused. It took me years to rearrange them and bring them into proper order. True and false were mingled together: lies became reality, and my whole life seemed as unsubstantial as smoke. I was not far from ruin and the loss of reason."

=Innocent Guilt.=--The teacher continued: "During the five years in which I believed myself unjustly treated, I also incurred guilt. I had cursed those who had been just towards me, wished evil to my benefactors, repelled my admirers, avoided my adherents. And when I should now have felt remorse for it, I could not do so sincerely. On the one hand I felt myself innocent, and almost the victim of another's falsehood. But the evil which I had done was there, and must be atoned for. Such tangles are not easy to undo. Yet it is not good in life to show mistrust towards men; one must take things easily, without criticism and too careful reckoning. The deceiver says, to be sure, 'He who does not keep a sharp look-out, has himself to blame if he is cheated.' But if one does look out, and will not let oneself be cheated, one is credited with a morbid mistrustfulness. It is not easy to live, and among lawless men it is better to be cheated than to cheat. The Talmud says: 'Be rather among those who are cursed than those who curse; rather among the persecuted than the persecutors: read in the Scripture, No bird is more persecuted than the dove; yet God has chosen it for a sacrifice on His altar.'"

=The Charm of Old Age.=--The teacher said: "The charms of old age are many. The greatest is the consciousness that it is not long till evening when one can undress and lie down, without the necessity of rising up and dressing again. The diminution of the body's strength lessens its resistance to the free motions of the soul. One's interest in merely temporal matters decreases, and one begins to take a bird's-eye view of things. Seemingly important trifles shrink to insignificance. Old estimates of the values of things are changed. All that one has experienced lies like a litter of straw under one's feet; one stands in it and grows in the midst of one's past. We have found a constant amid all variables, that is, the instability of life, the transitoriness and mutability of all things. Everything is repeated; there are scarcely any surprises. We know everything beforehand, expect no improvement, are no more deceived by false hopes, demand nothing more of men, neither gratitude, nor faithfulness, nor love, only some companionship in solitude. If we are deceived, we think it is part of the play, and even find a sort of consolation in it, because it confirms our views, which we do not like to see refuted. We become, finally, cheerful pessimists. When, on the discovery of a new cheat, we can say, 'What did I tell you?' we feel almost a sense of pleasure."

=The Ring-System.=--The teacher said: "In our old schools, the pupils were arranged not in classes, but in rings, and the forms were not placed in rows, but in circles. When I read of the circles of Dante's hell, I thought of my old school. But outside in life, I found this ring-system also. Men seemed linked together in concentric circles, each of which formed a little system of views. Each circle spoke its own language, expressed its meaning in old formulas, revered its gods, created its great men, often out of nothing. In each circle they had found the truth, and worked for development, but in a different way to the others. The first circle was really the lowest, but it considered itself the most important, because it was the first. When I read a paper or a book which comes from other circles than mine, I only see so much--that they are mad or stand on their heads. It stifles me, and has a hostile effect. I surmise that the five great races of the earth feel that, when they meet one another. In their minds they are as foreign to each other as though they came from the five great planets, although they have many human characteristics in common."

=Lust, Hate, and Fear, or the Religion of the Heathen.=--The teacher said: "You know one of my tasks in life has been to unmask gyneolatry, the worship of women in history and life. I have called it 'the superstition of the heathen,' because there is something exclusively heathenish about it. Woman-worship is the religion of the heathen, but it is a religion of fear, which has nothing to do with love. Lust, hate, and fear--those are the component parts of it. As soon as a heathen comes in the proximity of a woman, he becomes tame and cowardly; faithless towards his friends, his convictions, and himself. He immediately desires that others should venerate his idol whom he hates and fears. That is a side of his animal self-love.

"Gyneolatry is not Christian in its origin, but heathenish. All animals and savage races fear their women. When heathenism in the Græco-Roman and Moorish colonies of southern France and Italy got the upper hand, then began gyneolatry, the worship of mistresses. This worship was dishonestly confounded with chivalrous reverence for the Madonna, which was quite another thing. This religion of the heathen is the religion of fear and concealed hatred. Therefore all tyrants have been punished by having a woman oppress and torment them. Swedenborg explains the reason."

="Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy."=--The teacher continued: "A man's goodwill and generosity towards his wife stands in direct relation to her behaviour. When therefore a woman is ill-treated by her husband, we know of what sort she is. The apparently subordinate position which the woman occupies is the direct result of the position which nature has assigned to this immature transition-form between child and man. The child has also a subordinate position; that is quite natural, and no reasonable man has objected to it. Woman is the earth-spirit who effectuates a certain harmony with the earth-life. To this earth-life we must bring our sacrifice; therefore it is that a man feels at home in his house, and therefore wife and child comfort and protect us against the cold abstraction, life.

"Marriage is the hardest school in which renunciation and self-conquest is learned; it is also a forcing-house for wickedness of all kinds, especially the hellish sin of imperiousness. How low the sons of the Lord of Dung stand on the ladder of development may be seen from their conviction that they are only equal to the woman or subordinate to her. Blinded by this penal hallucination, they work for their own destruction when they battle for the emancipation of women, for the gods wish to destroy them.

=The Slavery of the Prophet.=--"Stuart Mill, who became the prophet of the woman's cause, had formed an attachment for another man's wife.[1] As a punishment he had to live in the hallucination that he derived all his thoughts from her. She was indeed his medium, and as such she repeated his thoughts as though they came from her, and he believed she was his superior. When somebody asked if he had received his 'Logic,' which he wrote before he knew her, also from her, he answered, 'Yes.' This sober Positivist, who only believed in tables of statistics, was obsessed by the powerful delusion that the simple-minded woman was his Genius. He could not rise to a higher idea of God. One thing I am sure of: as soon as a man deserts God, he becomes the thrall of a female devil. All tyrants, above and below, are caught in these chains, out of which only God in heaven can help a man. But He can certainly. One sees it in those who have come alive out of this hell. I know one...."

"I know two!" the pupil interrupted.

[Footnote 1: Mrs. Taylor.]

=Absurd Problems.=--The teacher continued: "There are several reasons why woman is depicted as a sphinx by men. She is incomprehensible because her soul is rudimentary, and she thinks with her body. Her judgments are dictated by interests and passions, she draws conclusions according to the state of the weather and the phases of the moon. She will sell her best friend for a theatre-ticket, or leave her sick child to see a balloon ascend. She murders her husband in order to be able to go to a bathing-resort, and forswears her religion for a diamond ring. At the same time she can appear to be a charming woman, tender towards her children, amiable, and before all things polite and affable. She may also appear a good household manager, or at any rate enjoy the reputation of being one. She can produce the illusion that she is quick at apprehension, although she does not really understand a word. She can exhibit sacrifices which are only ostentation, and give away only in order to receive back. Why cannot one guess the riddle of this sphinx? Because there is no riddle there! Why is woman incomprehensible? Because the problem is absurd. She is an irrational function because she operates with variable quantities under the radical signs.

"Nevertheless we take her as a charming actuality, a delightful child who may pull three hairs out of our beard; but if it pulls the fourth, there is an end to the enchantment."

=The Crooked Rib.=--The teacher said: "Goethe says in his _Divan_,[1] 'Woman is fashioned out of a crooked rib; if one tries to bend her, she breaks; if one lets her alone, she becomes still more crooked.' Thus there is nothing to be done. The only tactics one can adopt, as Napoleon did, are flight, or at any rate to break off contact and intimacy. This never fails; if one deprives a woman of the victim of her hatred, she pines away.

"Man loves and woman hates; man gives and woman takes; man sacrifices and woman devours. When the woman wishes to show her superiority in intellect, she commits a rascality. Her utmost endeavour is to deceive her husband. If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy. When woman gets her milk-teeth, she does not learn to speak but to lie, for speech and falsehood are synonymous for her. Every married man knows all that. But politeness and his own vanity keep him silent. Often he is silent because of his children; often because he is ashamed in the name of humanity. He thinks how often one has drunk the toasts of mother, wife, sister, daughter--these fictions in a world of deceit, where all is vanity of vanities. But many men are silent because they are afraid of being called 'woman-haters.' They are afraid!"

[Footnote 1: The saying is originally Muhammed's.]

=White Slavery.=--The teacher said: "In the whole of the upper and middle classes and a good way below them the following is the case with regard to marriage: When a man marries, his work, which he can devolve on no one else, increases. His wife, on the other hand, at once gets a servant to do her work; if she has children, then she gets a nurse besides. But she herself sits there without occupation, and tries to kill time with useless trivialities. In this way she can neither get an appetite for dinner, nor sleep at night. In the evening her husband comes home, and wants to enjoy the domestic hearth; but his wife wants to go to the theatre and restaurant. She is not tired, but bored by want of occupation, and therefore wants amusement. Women, in fact, seem not to be born for domestic life, but for the theatre, the restaurant, and the street. Therefore women complain that they must sit at home. Although they have slaves to serve them, they call themselves 'slaves' and hold meetings to their own emancipation, but not that of their servants. Their animalised husbands support them without observing that they themselves are slaves; for he who works for the idle is a slave. But it is written, 'Ye are bought with a price; be slaves to no man.'"

=Noodles.=--The pupil asked: "What is a woman-hater?"

The teacher answered: "I do not know. But the expression is used as a term of reproach by noodles, for those who say what all think. Noodles are those men who cannot come near a woman without losing their heads and becoming faithless. They purchase the woman's favour by delivering up the heads of their friends on silver chargers; and they absorb so much femininity, that they see with feminine eyes and feel with feminine feelings. There are things which one does not say every day, and one does not tell one's wife what her sex is composed of. But one has the right to put it on paper sometimes. Schopenhauer has done it the best, Nietzsche not badly, Peladan is the master. Thackeray wrote _Men's Wives_ but the book was ignored. Balzac has unmasked Caroline in the _Petites Misères de la vie Conjugale_. Otto Weininger discovered the deceit at the age of twenty; he did not wait for the consequent vengeance, but went his own way, _i.e._ died. I have said that the child is a little criminal, incapable of self-guidance, but I love children all the same. I have said that a woman is--what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been a father. Whoever therefore calls me a woman-hater is a blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together."

=Inextricable Confusion.=--The teacher continued: "If on the other side of the grave there were a Judge Rhadamanthus appointed to arrange the disputes of men, he would never come to an end. Life is such a tissue of lies, errors, misunderstandings, of debts and demands, that a balancing of the books is impossible. I know men who have been lied about their whole lives through. I know of one who was branded through his whole life with the stigma of a seducer, although he has never seduced, but was seduced himself. I know of an uncommonly truthful man who had the reputation of being a liar. I know an honourable man who passed for a thief. I know a man who was three times married, and had children in all three marriages, but was said to be no man, because he, as a man, would not be the slave of his wife. I know many who are sincerely religious and yet are called hypocrites, although the chief point in religion is sincerity. But, on the other hand, I know heathen who professed to be atheists, although in their bedchambers they sang penitential psalms when they were nervous in the dark and feared the consequences of their misdeeds. They were so cowardly that they dared not fall under the suspicion of being religious, but bragged of their courage and strength of character. They would not abandon the Black Flag; they would not be untrue to the ideal of their youth--godlessness. Rascally right and good-hearted stupidity form a problem too complicated for Rhadamanthus himself to solve. Only the Crucified could do it with the single saying which He addressed to the penitent thief, 'To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.'"

=Phantoms.=--The teacher said: "When intelligence and the power of reflection are matured, and one thinks about men, their outlines begin to dissolve, and they turn into phantoms. Indeed, one never really knows a man; one knows only his own, or others' ideas of him, but when these ideas change, the image of him becomes indistinct and is obscured with a veil. We form our conception of a person whom we have never seen according to others' ideas of him. Thus, for example, the personality of a famous painter was described to me by an author. After two years the author had formed another idea of him, and imparted that to me, and I had to alter my view of him. Then there came another describer, and gave me quite a different idea of the painter. He was followed by a third and a fourth. After this I saw the painter's pictures, and could not understand how he could paint in the way he did. But the painter himself I never saw. He has become for me a phantom without clear outlines, composed of different-coloured pieces of glass, which do not harmonise, and alter according to my moods. I expect that when I meet him he will not resemble my idea of him at all, but have the effect of quite another independent phantom."

=Mirage Pictures.=--The teacher said: "When I have lived for some time in solitude my acquaintances begin to appear like mirage-pictures before me. Some gain by distance, occasion only friendly feelings, and are surrounded by an atmosphere of light and peace. Others whom I really like very well when they are near, lose by absence, and appear to be hostile. Thus I may hate a friend in his absence, look upon him as unpleasant and inimical, but as soon as he comes, enter into friendly contact with him. There is a woman whose proximity I cannot bear, but whom I love at a distance. We write letters to each full of regard and friendliness. When we have longed for each other for a time and must meet, we immediately begin to quarrel, become vulgar and unsympathetic, and part in anger. We love each other on a higher plane, but cannot live in the same room. We dream of meeting again, spiritualised, on some green island, where only we two can live, or, at any rate, only our child with us. I remember a half-hour which we three actually spent hand in hand on a green island by the sea-coast. It seemed to me like heaven. Then the clocks struck the hour of noon, and we were back again on earth, and soon after that, in hell."

=Trifle not with Love.=--The pupil said: "When a man and a woman are united in love, a single being is the result, whose existence is a positive pleasure, as long as harmony reigns. But this being is an extremely sensitive receptive instrument, and is exposed to disturbances from outer currents which act from all distances, an inconvenience which it shares with wireless telegraphy. Therefore a disturbance of the relationship between a married pair is the greatest pain which exists. Unfaithfulness is a cosmic crime which brings the one or the other member of the married pair into perverse relations with their own sex. If the husband loves another woman, his wife is exposed to terrible alternate currents; by turns she loves and hates the woman who is her rival. Often she can be the friend of her husband's paramour, but more often her enemy. Whoever comes between a pair who love, does not so with impunity. The hate which he arouses is so terrible, that he can be lamed by the discharge, lose all energy and pleasure in life. Therefore it is rightly said, 'Trifle not with love.'"

=A "Taking" Religion.=--The pupil said: "When Buddhism, mixed with Vedantism, became fashionable in 1890, all the renegades from Christianity flocked to it and tried to fill the vacuum in their religious lives. Six thousand new gods were received with applause forthwith; the new trinity--Brahma, Vishnu, Siva--encountered no objections; spirits, ghosts, genies, fairies were thought quite natural; Gautama's heaven and hell were thrown into the bargain, accompanied by a slight flavour of asceticism. Those who denied the Resurrection found reincarnation quite a simple affair. But the favourite was Krishna. He was the incarnation of the god Vishnu, who descended to earth in order to be born of earthly parents and to save fallen humanity. His coming was prophesied, and so dreaded that a massacre of new-born infants like that at Bethlehem was plotted, but unsuccessfully. Krishna fulfilled his mission, conquered the evil powers, and finally endured a voluntary death. That 'took'! The trinity Brahma, Vishnu, Siva 'took,' but Father, Son, Holy Spirit did not 'take.' Krishna 'took,' but not Christ. It was strange!"

=The Sixth Sense.=--The pupil continued: "The outer eye can reflect images, the inner eye can conceive them. There are therefore two kinds of sight, an outer and an inner. Of the senses, that of smell is the most immediate when it has to do with the conveyance of impressions. But there seem also to be two kinds of faculties of smell. Swedenborg says that a false man smells of sour gastric juice, but only for the person to whom he has been false. In this case the smell-perception is only subjective, but it is of great objective value in judging men. In this case the organ of smell seems to operate with æther-waves. According to Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences, good men exhale sweet perfume, and bad men a stench like that of corpses. He says that misers smell like rats, and so on. Legends of the saints relate that the corpses of those who have kept their souls and bodies pure, when they dissolve, exhale a flower-like perfume. In short, every soul has its scent, which varies according to its characteristics.

"This sixth sense the clothes-hygienist Jäger believed he had discovered after he had begun to observe and train his outer and inner man. I will speak now of my own experiences in the matter. They did not begin till I had passed through the great purgatorial fire which burnt up the rubbish of my soul, and after I had scrambled out of the worst of the mire by self-discipline and asceticism. They are accustomed to boil off the gum from raw silk before it is spun, and so my nerve-fibres seemed to have been 'scoured' by the sufferings of life, and gone through a process like the 'fining' of silk."

=Exteriorisation of Sensibility.=--The pupil continued: "I happened once, when watching a spider in a web, to see her 'exteriorise her sensibility,' or in other words reel out a nerve-substance for herself with which she remains in touch, and by means of which she becomes aware when flies come and when the weather changes. Raspail, who in his masterly works has cast many a far-reaching glance behind the curtains of nature, has in one place philosophised over the spider's web. In other works dealing with transcendent natural sciences, one finds the doubt expressed whether the object of the spider's web is only to be a fly-trap. I myself have counted four and twenty radii in the web of the garden-spider resembling an hour-circle, and have asked myself whether, besides being a barometer and trap, the web is also a kind of clock.

"Now it seems as though I had myself in a similar manner exteriorised my sensibility. I feel at a distance when anyone interferes with my destiny, when enemies threaten my personal existence, and also when people speak well of me or wish me well. I feel in the street whether those I meet are friends or foes; I have felt the pain of an operation undergone by a man to whom I was fairly indifferent; twice I have shared the death-agonies of others with the accompanying corporeal and psychical sufferings. The last time I went through three illnesses in six hours, and when the absent person with whom I suffered was liberated by death, I rose up well. This makes life painful, but rich and interesting."

=Telepathic Perception.=--The pupil said: "While I lived in the most intimate relations with a woman, I arrived, like Gustav Jäger, at 'the discovery of the soul.' I was always in communication with her, often through obscure sensations, but very often through the sense of smell; these were subjective however, as other people were not aware of them. When she was travelling I knew whether she was in a steamer or on a train; I could distinguish the revolutions of the screw from the vibration of the railway carriage and the puffing of the engine. She used to make her presence felt by me at a certain hour of the day, _i.e._ five o'clock in the morning. Once, when she was in Paris, this time changed to four o'clock. When I consulted the table of time variations, I found that it was four o'clock in Paris when it was five o'clock with me. Another time she was in St. Petersburg, then our meeting took place an hour later; that also agreed with the time-table. When she hated me, I was conscious of a smell and taste like that of mortalin; this happened one night so distinctly that I had to rise and open the window. When she thought kindly of me, I perceived a smell of incense and often of jasmine, but these scents sometimes changed into sensations of taste. When she was in society without me I felt that she was away, and when the conversation turned on me I was aware whether they were speaking good or ill about me."

=Morse Telepathy.=--The pupil continued: "I was spending one evening at home alone; I did not know where she was, but had the feeling that she was lost to me. At 10.40 p.m. I was aware of a passing breath of perfume. Then I said to myself, 'She has been in the theatre! But in which?' I took the daily paper, read the theatre advertisements, and found that one theatre closed at 10.40. Further inquiry proved that my surmise was right.

"On another occasion when in company I broke off a lively conversation with a smile. 'What are you smiling at?' 'Just now the train from the south entered the terminus.' Another time under similar circumstances I said: 'Now the curtain falls on the last act in _Helsingfors_!' and I heard the applause which greeted the prima donna who had played in my piece. The conversation of the people in the restaurant after the conclusion of the piece sounded like ringing in my ears. I can hear that as far as from Germany when a prima donna is acting in one of my pieces there, although I do not know beforehand that it is going to be played. One evening I had gone to bed about half-past nine, and was awoken about half-past eleven by a smell of punch and tobacco and in the impression that two of my acquaintances in a café were talking about me. I had every reason to believe that I had been present there in some way or another, but I was so accustomed to this phenomenon that this time I did not test it. Flammarion gives a hundred such cases in his book _The Unknown_."

=Nisus Formativus, or Unconscious Sculpture.=--The pupil continued: "Once I signed a contract with a merchant. After sleeping the night over it, I noticed that he had cheated me. With angry thoughts I went out for my morning stroll. When I came back I wished to change my clothes, and threw my handkerchief on the table. After I had undressed myself I noticed that the handkerchief had been crumpled together by my nervous clutch, and now, where it lay, formed a cast of the merchant's head, like a plaster-of-Paris bust. The question arises: Had my hand unconsciously formed an image of my thoughts? Linen is a very plastic material, and one often finds excellent pieces of 'sculpture' in handkerchiefs, sheets, and cushions. When a married man comes home with his wife from a ball, he should look at the handkerchief chief which she has held the whole evening in her hand, and then perhaps he might see with whom she preferred most to dance.

"In India a Buddhist priest is said to represent the 208 incarnations of Vishnu by putting his hand in a linen bag, and moulding rapidly from within the linen of the bag into the shapes of an elephant, tortoise, etc. When St. Veronica's napkin retained the impress of Christ's face, that is not more improbable than that my pillow in the morning should show the impress of faces which are not like mine. I have read of Indian vases which are so modelled that at first one only sees a chaos resembling clouds, twisted entrails, or the convolutions of the brain. After the eye has become accustomed to this the confusion begins to be disentangled; all kinds of objects such as plants and animals emerge in clear outline. Whether all observers see the same I know not. But I believe that the moulder of the vase has worked unintentionally and unconsciously."

=Projections.=--The pupil continued: "But there are also projections which I cannot explain. It is possible that only poets and artists possess the power so to project their inward images in every life that they become half real. It is quite a usual occurrence that the dying show themselves to their absent friends. Living persons can also appear at a distance, but only to those who keep them in their thoughts. I used to show my initiated friends the following phenomenon: I observed a stranger who resembled an absent acquaintance. As soon as my eye completed the image, whatever unlikeness remained was erased. 'See, there goes X.,' I said. My friends saw the resemblance, understood that it was not X., comprehended my meaning, and agreed with me without further thought. If we shortly afterwards met X. we were astonished, and attempted to find no explanation in face of the inexplicable latter part of the phenomenon.

"But one day I went down a street and 'saw' my friend Dr. Y. who lived fifty miles away. It was he, and yet it was not he. It was the same little figure although somewhat wavering and uncertain. The grey-yellow face was also the same although almost ghost-like, with deep furrows which followed the oval lines of the face, and with the forced laugh of suffering. When I came home I read in the paper that the man was dead."

=Apparitions.=--The pupil continued: "One evening I passed a well-known theatre while a performance was going on inside. There was no one outside. Suddenly on the pavement I saw an actor who had died thirty years previously, after he had first gone crazy with vexation because he had failed as an actor in this very theatre. His face, like that of my deceased friend the doctor's, was lined with those parallel furrows which run from the forehead to the jaw. 'Was it he, or not?' I asked myself, and left the question open. On another occasion I was travelling by rail in a foreign country. The train halted at a station for three minutes. On the platform in broad daylight a man was going up and down with a paint-box in his hand. He looked nervous and suffering and was badly dressed. 'That is he!' I thought. 'How has he got here? Why has he come down in the world?' During this three minutes I suffered all the tortures of uncertainty and of a bad conscience, for I was partly to blame for his misfortune and his poverty. The train went on, and I have never discovered whether it were really he. It was certainly improbable.

"Yet another time I was travelling by rail. At a remote station a man came into my compartment and sat opposite me. I thought he was an acquaintance, but he looked at me unrecognisingly. Then I let my eyes fall. Immediately he regarded me with an ironical smile which I again recognised. 'It is he,' I thought, 'but he will not greet me.' So I suffered for some hours. My conscience endured all that I owed him. Whether it really was he I know not, but the effect was the same."

=The Reactionary Type.=--The teacher said: "Men seem to react against themselves and their own bad qualities when they demand from others what they cannot themselves do. A man who is full of hate demands to be loved. A faithless deceiver came lately to me and finished his wily talk by saying, 'All I ask is that you trust me!' He only asked that in order that he might be able to deceive me. But perhaps he trusted me more than himself; he did not know himself, but had an inkling of what he was. Perhaps he felt that my belief in him would strengthen and elevate him, and might possibly neutralise his untrustworthiness. It sounded at any rate very naïve, and I felt myself honoured by the compliment.

"Again, a spendthrift who had no means of his own always cautioned me to be frugal. He gave brilliant parties, but when he came to me he only got potatoes and herrings, and yet he thought that was beyond my means. On one occasion I had bought 200 grammes of nickel-sulphate for my chemical experiments. They cost fifty-two pence. The spendthrift came to visit me, looked at the sulphate, and exclaimed, 'Can you afford it? Nickel-sulphate which is so dear.' Fifty-two pence! Then he invited me to a drive in a carriage, and a meal which cost fifty-two kronas for an altogether unproductive purpose. When he had to pay the reckoning he suffered torments. Perhaps he was by nature a skinflint, who had yielded to a mania for extravagance and reacted against it. I tried to explain this once to him, as on principle I wished to think well of the man."

=The Hate of Parasites.=--The teacher continued: "There are men who are spiritually so empty that they only live on others. I have an acquaintance (when one is over fifty one does not ask for friends any more) who constantly visits me but never says anything. Our social intercourse consists in my speaking alone. When he leaves me after several hours, I feel as if I had been undergoing blood-letting. It is certainly good to be able to talk oneself out often, but one would often like to have an answer to one's questions; but I never get an answer, not even to a question in his own special line. I can only remember one expression which this man used, and that was extraordinarily stupid. Somebody had slandered me, and my 'acquaintance' had believed every word and painted my figure in false colours. Finally one evening I defended myself, and proved that my slanderer was not in his right senses. He rejected my explanation, exclaiming 'Fie! how cynical you are!'

"What did this answer mean? First, that I must not wash myself clean, for he wanted to have me dirty; secondly, that he gave me the lie; thirdly, that his sympathies were on the side of the slanderer. I draw the inference that this man hated me, and therefore visited me. If he could not have intercourse with me, he could not abuse my confidence and gratify his hate. His tactics were--to live my life, to devour my soul, to gnaw my bones. The attraction he felt to me he called sympathy, though it was antipathy. There are many kinds of hate, and a wife's 'love' to her husband is a variety of hate. She desires his virile power in order to become a husband and make him into a passive-wife."

=A Letter from the Dead.=--The teacher said: "It seems as though one could live the life of another parallel with one's own, or as though one might be in touch with a stranger on another continent. One morning I received a letter of twenty-quarto pages from America. Long letters make me nervous; they always begin with flattery and end with scolding. I read, as I usually do, the signature first, which was unknown to me. Then I dipped into the letter here and there, and saw that the writer wished to influence me. One word pricked me like a needle, and I tore the letter into small pieces which I threw in the paper-basket. In the night I dreamt that the remarkable man,[1] who seemed still to guide my steps after his death, showed me an old manuscript which I had not found worth reading. The old servant held the manuscript against the light, and then I saw like a water-mark another writing between the lines. Immediately afterwards I saw in my dream a broken-off leaden wire, but closer inspection showed its surface to be gold. When I awoke in the morning I understood the dream in its perfectly clear symbolism. I went to the paper-basket, collected the fragments of the stranger's letter, and spent six hours in piecing them together. Then I began to read. I should premise that the handwriting was so like that of my deceased and honoured teacher, that I believed I was reading a letter from the dead."

[Footnote 1: He refers probably to the Chief Librarian in the Royal Stockholm Library, where he had been an assistant in his youth.]

=A Letter from Hell.=--"The letter pricked me like a packet of needles. But it was so interesting that I was continually lured onward to read to the end. The writer began by saying that he had received his first intellectual awakening through my books. Since then his course for twenty years had been very irregular; led astray by the prevailing ape-morality, he had gone in evil ways. In the midst of his wandering, it happened to him as to Dante and others--he came into hell, but found a Virgil who led him out and saved him. Then his own real life began. He passed all the sciences from philosophy to chemistry under critical review, and found them consisting of mere conventional lies. He drifted about helplessly till he found an anchorage-ground in faith in Christ, the Exorciser of demons, the highest Wisdom, the Redeemer who saves from doubt, despair, and madness.

"During the perusal I felt sometimes as though I were reading my own life or a satire on it. Annoyed by what seemed a tactless encroachment, I often wished to throw the letter away but could not; the dream always recurred to me, and the letter contained new and bold ideas sparkling in a chaos of contradictions and paradoxes. In short, it proved a turning-point in my life. It exposed my faults, but showed me at the same time that I had held the right course, in spite of the deflections and cross-currents to which I had been exposed."

=An Unconscious Medium.=--"Now let me say a few words about my deceased mentor, who already in his lifetime exercised a great influence on my development, though without knowing or wishing it. I was young, precocious, dull, and untrustworthy, mostly because I wished to preserve my personal independence, but also because I was godless, and consequently immoral without any other principle except that of getting on. He, my chief, attracted me, in spite of the fact that I was antipathetic to him in most things. My position required that I should serve him devotedly, but I wished also to serve my own interests. He was a spiritist and Swedenborgian, but I was a materialist. This he was aware of, because I was brutally truthful. But struggle as I might, I came under his influence and became his medium. There were days on which he was so blind that he could not read the old manuscripts which he was editing. One day he gave me a mediæval codex in a difficult character, and half in joke told me to read it. I read it at once, without having learnt the character. Then he had discovered me. But I worked alone, although unconsciously. One day I stumbled on a pile of old documents, and found a date which he had been hunting for for twenty years. Another time I found an historic detail of great importance which altered our ideas of our early history. One day our paths diverged.

=The Revenant.=--"Years passed. I lived abroad, but my thoughts often reverted to the savant who had had a great influence on my life. Often, without any special reason, I spoke of him for hours at a time--not always with the respect which I owed him. I was, it must be remembered, a pioneer, to whom nothing was sacred, neither parents nor teacher. One day I heard that the old man was dead. Eight days later there appeared in the paper this mysterious announcement. An intimate friend of the deceased received, eight days after his death, through the post, a letter from him. The paper considered it a jocose mystification on the part of the deceased, who loved jokes. I guessed who might have been entrusted with the letter, but felt astonished that a dying man could take such pleasure in jesting, especially about things which he had taken so seriously. When, two years later, began the experiences described in my book _Inferno_, I felt that I was in touch with my departed teacher. There were certain roguish traits in the phenomena which reminded me of him. I remember one night addressing the question to the darkness, 'Is it you?' The whole affair was in his style, teasing in form, but well-meaning in purpose. I received no answer, but the impression remained--a mixture of terrible grim earnest and behind it a friendly smile, comforting, pardoning, protecting, just as in his lifetime, when he practised patience with my ill manners."

=The Meeting in the Convent.=--The teacher continued: "During my wanderings I happened once to visit a convent with a travelling companion in a corner of Europe. What interested me specially was the library, for I had long been trying to trace Anschar's[1] journal. After I had slept the night in a cell which bore the inscription 'B. Victor III. P.P.,' in memory of Pope Victor III 'who punished the heretics who denied the divinity of Christ,' I was taken into the library. The first thing shown me was a collection of Latin hymns of the Middle Ages which had been edited by my deceased teacher. The inner side of the title-page contained some handwriting by the editor, which was so peculiar that it could hardly be imitated. I asked the Benedictine monk who accompanied me, whose signature it was. He answered, 'The convent librarian's.' 'Are you certain?' I asked. 'Yes, quite certain.' This discovery of his handwriting, which I had never seen elsewhere, after so many years made a deep impression on me. I asked myself whether the monk, acting as a medium, could have imitated the handwriting of the deceased editor. After an afternoon's search I found the valuable explanation that Anschar's journal had been taken by Abbot Thymo from Corvey to Rome in A.D. 1261. It was known that it had since disappeared, but now I had found a trace of it. I felt as though my deceased friend had brought me here into the convent in order to discuss Anschar's journal, concerning the fate of which we had often made guesses and searches."

[Footnote 1: A famous French missionary in Sweden, a.d. 801-865.]

=Correspondences.=--The teacher said: "It seems to me as though Swedenborg's correspondences or correlatives were to be found again in all departments, as though natural laws on a higher plane can be applied to the spiritual life of man. If an object comes too close to the magnifying glass, it becomes indistinct. Similarly one cannot see the object of one's affections if she comes too close. She becomes small and indistinct, loses outline and colour; but remove her to the proper focus, and she becomes magnified and clear. Thus it is with princes and their valets de chambre.

"But there are also exceptions to the rule. Many friends gain by proximity; one must see them often, otherwise they change their shape and become ghostly and alarming. Others again seem better at a distance; whenever we meet them we lose an illusion. The attraction between lovers can increase in proportion to the square of the distance between them, and also in reverse proportion; the greater the distance, the greater the pain of separation. It seems also possible to apply the facts of electricity in the psychical sphere. Pellets of elder-pith attract one another so long as they are of opposite polarity, but when they are saturated or over-saturated they repel one another. But the mutual repulsion also takes place when a foreign body is interposed between them, for then an influence is produced which operates laterally."

=Portents.=--The teacher continued: "As soon as I believe in an Almighty God, who can suspend the few natural laws which we know, and bring into operation the countless host of laws which we do not know, I must believe in miracles. Swedenborg does not deal so hardly with anyone (at the same time that he commiserates them) as the asses who revere the creation and the laws of nature, without believing in the Creator and Law-giver. They go with their noses on the ground, and if anything unusual happens 'in the air,' as they say, they call it 'a meteorological phenomenon,' and attribute it to such and such natural causes. They register the phenomenon in their records without dreaming of anything behind it, and forthwith forget the matter.

"We, on the other hand, will mention some events of recent years and connect them with certain natural phenomena which may possibly denote the presence of warning and chastising powers.