The Double Garden

by Maurice Maeterlinck

VIII

Could this be the case with all predictions? Were the prophecies of the great prophets, the oracles of the sibyls, witches, pythonesses content thus to reflect, translate, raise to the level of the intelligible world the instinctive clairvoyance of the individuals or peoples that listened to them? Let each accept the reply or the hypothesis which his own experience suggests to him. I have given mine with the simplicity and sincerity which a question of this nature demands.[2]

To resume my inquiry. In so far, then, as concerns that formidable unknown which stretches before us, I found nothing conclusive, nothing decisive; and yet, I repeat, it is almost incredible that we should not know the Future. I can imagine that we stand opposite to it as though opposite to a forgotten past. We might try to remember it. It would be a question of inventing or re-discovering the road taken by that memory which precedes us.

I can conceive that we are not qualified to know beforehand the disturbances of the elements, the destiny of the planets of the earth, of empires, peoples and races. All this does not touch us directly, and we know it in the past thanks only to the artifices of history. But that which regards us, that which is within our reach, that which is to unfold itself within the little sphere of years, a secretion of our spiritual organism, that envelops us in Time, even as the shell or the cocoon envelops the mollusc or the insect in Space; that, together with all the external events relating to it, is probably recorded in that sphere. In any case, it would be much more natural that it were so recorded than comprehensible that it were not. There we have realities struggling with an illusion; and there is nothing to prevent us from believing that, here as elsewhere, realities will end by overcoming illusion. Realities are what will happen to us, having already happened in the history that overhangs our own, the motionless and superhuman history of the universe. Illusion is the opaque veil woven with the ephemeral threads called Yesterday, To-day and To-Morrow, which we embroider on those realities. But it is not indispensable that our existence should continue the eternal dupe of that illusion. We may even ask ourselves whether our extraordinary unfitness for knowing a thing so simple, so incontestable, so perfect and so unnecessary as the Future, would not form one of the greatest subjects for astonishment to an inhabitant of another star who should visit us.

To-day, all this appears to us so profoundly impossible that we find it difficult to imagine how the certain reality of the Future would refute the objections which we make to it in the name of the organic illusion of our minds. We say to it, for instance: If, at the moment of undertaking an affair, we could know that its outcome would be unfortunate, we should not undertake it; and, since it must be written somewhere, in Time, before our question has been put, that the affair will not take place, seeing that we abandon it, we could not, therefore, foresee the outcome of that which will have no beginning.

So as not to lose ourselves in this road, which would lead us whither nothing calls us, it will be enough for us to say that the Future, like all that exists, is probably more coherent and more logical than the logic of our imagination and that all our hesitations and uncertainties are included in its provisions.

Moreover, we must not believe that the march of events would be completely upset if we knew it beforehand. First, only they would know the Future, or a part of the Future, who would take the trouble to learn it; even as only they know the Past, or a part of their own Present, who have the courage and the intelligence to examine it. We should quickly accommodate ourselves to the lessons of this new science, even as we have accommodated ourselves to those of history. We should soon make allowance for the evils which we could not escape and for inevitable evils. The wiser among us, for themselves, would lessen the sum total of the latter; and the others would meet them half-way, even as now they go to meet many certain disasters which are easily foretold. The amount of our vexations would be somewhat decreased, but less than we hope; for already our reason is able to foresee a portion of our Future, if not with the material evidence that we dream of, at least with a moral certainty that is often satisfying: yet we observe that the majority of men derive hardly any profit from this easy foreknowledge. Such men would neglect the counsels of the Future, even as they hear, without following it, the advice of the Past.