Everywhere energy, everywhere the invisible element. It is this same dynamism that produces the phenomena we have been studying. The question at present resolves itself into this: Does this dynamism belong wholly to the experimenters? We have so little real knowledge of our mental nature that it is impossible for us to know what this nature is capable of producing, even in certain states of unconsciousness—in fact especially in these. The directing intelligence is not always the personal, normal, intelligence of the experimenters or of any one whatever among them. We ask the entity what its name is, and it gives us a name which is not ours; it replies to our questions, and usually claims to be a discarnate soul, the spirit of a deceased person. But if we drive the question home, this entity finally steals away without having given us sufficient proofs of its identity. There results from this the impression that the "medium," or principal subject of the experiment, has responded for himself, has reflected himself, without knowing it.
Moreover, this entity, this personality, this spirit, has his individual will, his caprices, his cantankerousness, and sometimes acts in opposition to our own thoughts. He tells us absurd, foolish, brutal, insane things, and amuses himself with fantastic combinations of letters, real head-splitting puzzles. It astonishes and stupefies us.
What is this being?
Two inescapable hypotheses present themselves. Either it is we who produce these phenomena or it is spirits. But mark this well: these spirits are not necessarily the souls of the dead; for other kinds of spiritual beings may exist, and space may be full of them without our ever knowing anything about it, except under unusual circumstances. Do we not find in the different ancient literatures, demons, angels, gnomes, goblins, sprites, spectres, elementals, etc? Perhaps these legends are not without some foundation in fact. Then we cannot but remark that, in our mediumistic studies and experiments, in order to succeed we always address an invisible being who is supposed to hear us. If this is an illusion, it dates from the very origin of Spiritualism, from the raps produced unconsciously by the Fox sisters in their chambers at Hydesville and at Rochester in 1848. But once more, this personification may pertain to our own being or it may represent a mind external to ourselves.
In order to admit the first hypothesis we must admit at the same time that our mental nature is not simple, that there are in us several psychic elements, and that one at least of these elements may act unknown to ourselves, make raps in a table, move any piece of furniture, lift a weight, touch us with a hand that seems real, play an instrument, create a spectral figure, read hidden words, answer questions, act with a personal will—and all this, I repeat, without our own knowledge.
This is tolerably complicated; but it is not impossible.
That there are in us psychic elements, obscure, unconscious, capable of acting outside of the sphere of our normal consciousness, this is something we can notice every night in our dreams; that is to say, during a quarter, or a third part of our life. Scarcely has sleep closed our eyes, our ears, all our senses, than our thoughts begin to work just the same as during the day, though without rational direction, without logic, under the most incoherent forms, freed from our customary conceptions of space and time, in a world entirely different from the normal world. The physiologists and psychologists have for centuries been trying to determine the mechanism of the dream without having yet obtained any satisfactory solution of the problem. But the proved fact that we see sometimes, in our dreams, occurrences which take place at a distance, proves that we have in us unknown powers.
Again, it is not rare for each of us to experience, sometimes (all our faculties being on the alert), the play of an interior power, distinct from our dominant reason. We are on the point of pronouncing words that are not a part of our habitual vocabulary, and ideas suddenly traverse and arrest the course of our thoughts. During the reading of a book which seemed interesting to us, our soul spreads her wings and flies to other realms, while our eyes continue in vain the mechanical act of reading. We are discussing certain projects in our mind, as if we were so many judges; and then, one would like to know in all simplicity, whence comes this distraction?
In his tireless researches, the great investigator of psychic phenomena, Myers, to whom we owe synthetic studies upon the subliminal consciousness, reached the conviction, with Ribot, that "the me is a co-ordination."
These supernormal phenomena (writes this competent and learned inquirer) are due not to the action of the spirits of deceased persons, as Wallace believes, but, for the most part, to the action of an incarnate spirit, either that of the subject himself or of some agent or other.[87]