Memories and Adventures

by Arthur Conan Doyle

“It is not in print. It is in manuscript. Each manuscript is carefully numbered and trusted to the honour of a passed initiate. We have never had a case of one going wrong.”

“Well,” said I, “it is very interesting and you can go ahead with the next step, whatever it may be.”

Some little time later—it may have been a week—I awoke in the very early morning with a most extraordinary sensation. It was not a nightmare or any prank of a dream. It was quite different from that, for it persisted after I was wide awake. I can only describe it by saying that I was tingling all over. It was not painful, but it was queer and disagreeable, as a mild electric shock would be. I thought at once of the little doctor.

In a few days I had a visit from him. “You have been examined and you have passed,” said he with a smile. “Now you must say definitely whether you will go on with it. You can’t take it up and drop it. It is serious, and you must leave it alone or go forward with a whole heart.”

It began to dawn upon me that it really was serious, so serious that there seemed no possible space for it in my very crowded and pre-occupied life. I said as much, and he took it in very good part. “Very well,” said he, “we won’t talk of it any more unless you change your mind.”

There was a sequel to the story. A month or two later, on a pouring wet day, the little doctor called, bringing with him another medical man whose name was familiar to me in connection with exploration and tropical service. They sat together beside my study fire and talked. One could not but observe that the famous and much-travelled man was very deferential to the little country surgeon, who was the younger of the two.

“He is one of my initiates,” said the latter to me. “You know,” he continued, turning to his companion, “Doyle nearly joined us once.” The other looked at me with great interest and then at once plunged into a conversation with his mentor as to the wonders he had seen and, as I understood, actually done. I listened amazed. It sounded like the talk of two lunatics. One phrase stuck in my memory.

“When first you took me up with you,” said he, “and we were hovering over the town I used to live in, in Central Africa, I was able for the first time to see the islands out in the lake. I always knew they were there, but they were too far off to be seen from the shore. Was it not extraordinary that I should first see them when I was living in England?”

“Yes,” said Brown, smoking his pipe and staring into the fire. “We had some fun in those days. Do you remember how you laughed when we made the little steamboat and it ran along the upper edge of the clouds?”

There were other remarks as wild. “A conspiracy to impress a simpleton,” says the sceptic. Well, we can leave it at that if the sceptic so wills, but I remain under the impression that I brushed against something strange, and something which I am not sorry that I avoided. It was not Spiritualism and it was not Theosophy, but rather the acquisition of powers latent in the human organization, after the alleged fashion of the old gnostics or of some modern fakirs in India, though some doubtless would spell fakirs with an “e.” One thing I am very sure of, and that is that morals and ethics have to keep pace with knowledge, or all is lost. The Maori cannibals had psychic knowledge and power, but were man-eaters none the less. Christian ethics can never lose its place whatever expansion our psychic faculties may enjoy. But Christian theology can and will.