How explain this tangle of contradictions? I was so chafed and fretted by these incoherent results that I had for a long time abandoned the study of psychic forces, when your alluring researches came to wake in me my old self.
If the unconscious doubling of the personality of the individual (his externalization) can, in an extreme case, be sometimes admitted, it seems to me that there are cases in which this explanation becomes possible.
But I will explain. If, as respects the facts which happened to me personally, and the authenticity of which I affirm to you upon my honor, there are some in which this externalization could have been possible, there are others in which it seems to me impossible.
Yes, strictly speaking, I might have been able, without suspecting it, to externalize myself, or, rather, unknown to myself, to be influenced by my friend Dolard when, in my own presence, he mentally asked me what had become of the soul of a deceased sister of whose name and very existence I was ignorant; yes, the same thing may, strictly speaking, explain the responses I made to the lady who questioned me on the subject of a marriage and her father, although it would in that case be necessary to suppose that she dictated to me the words that I was writing; yes, my friend Boucaud, who was hunting letters, might, at the moment when he was asking me about them, have thought of that oven, of the existence of which I was ignorant; yes, all of that is (in the last analysis) possible, although it would need a large amount of good will to admit it.
Yes, once more I say—and always with much good will—a table may be under the unconscious domination of a musician present and dictate a musical phrase. But, as it stands, it is difficult to admit the same phenomenon in the case of Victor Hugo, whose curious séances you have just described to the public. Why, just look at this great poet who, when he is asked by the table to put one or more questions in verse, and, not feeling that he is man enough, in spite of his genius, to improvise something passable, asks for a breathing spell to prepare his questions, and brings them in next day!—and yet you would wish that, on this same next day, a part of himself should perform its functions, unknown to himself, and compose illico, without any preparation, verses at least as fine as those which he took an entire day to create!—verses of a pitiless logic and more profound than his own!
Yet let us admit even that. You see, dear sir, that I have all the good will possible, and that I have the most profound respect for the scientific method. But can you explain by externalization the case of finding a lost object when one is even ignorant of the way in which the apartment is arranged where it has been lost? or the ability to know, two days in advance, of the death of a person about whom one was not thinking at all? A possible coincidence, you will tell me, but at least very strange.
And those inverted dictations? and those in which we are obliged to skip every other letter?
No, I believe that we need not give ourselves so much trouble and rack our brains, for it seems to me that it is like looking for mid-day at two o'clock in the afternoon. It would require the labor of all the devils to explain how this phenomenon can take place in our nature without the knowledge of the proprietor. I do not like to see a part of my personality scampering away, and then housing itself again without my knowing anything about it.
As to what concerns the production of this externalization in a way which I may call voluntary—when a person who feels himself dying thinks intensely about those whom he loves and whose absence he deplores, yes, it may be that his will, even unknown to himself, suggesting the absent person produces the phenomena of telepathy; but, in the phenomena of which we are speaking, that explanation seems to me more than doubtful.