I believe that it is now possible to give a truer explanation; to place these old records in juxtaposition with more instructive parallels; and to show that the messages which Socrates received were only advanced examples of a process which, if supernormal, is not abnormal, and which characterises that form of intelligence which we describe as genius.
The story of Socrates I take as a signal example of wise automatism; of the possibility that the messages which are conveyed to the supraliminal mind from subliminal strata of the personality,—whether as sounds, as sights, or as movements,—may sometimes come from far beneath the realm of dream and confusion,—from some self whose monitions convey to us a wisdom profounder than we know.
Similarly in the case of Joan of Arc, I believe that only now, with the comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an impulse from the mind's deeper strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself,—only now, I repeat, can we understand aright that familiar story.
Joan's condemnation was based on her own admissions; and the Latin procès-verbal still exists, and was published from the MS. by M. Quicherat, 1841-9, for the French Historical Society.[169] Joan, like Socrates, was condemned mainly on the ground, or at least on the pretext of her monitory voices: and her Apology remarkably resembles his, in its resolute insistence on the truth of the very phenomena which were being used to destroy her. Her answers are clear and self-consistent, and seem to have been little, if at all, distorted by the recorder. Few pieces of history so remote as this can be so accurately known.
Fortunately for our purpose, her inquisitors asked her many questions as to her voices and visions; and her answers enable us to give a pretty full analysis of the phenomena which concern us.
I. The voices do not begin with the summons to fight for France. Joan heard them first at thirteen years of age,—as with Socrates also the voice began in childhood. The first command consisted of nothing more surprising than that "she was to be a good girl, and go often to church." After this the voice—as in the case of Socrates—intervened frequently, and on trivial occasions.
II. The voice was accompanied at first by a light, and sometimes afterwards by figures of saints, who appeared to speak, and whom Joan appears to have both seen and felt as dearly as though they had been living persons. But here there is some obscurity; and Michelet thinks that on one occasion the Maid was tricked by the courtiers for political ends. For she asserted (apparently without contradiction) that several persons, including the Archbishop of Rheims, as well as herself, had seen an angel bringing to the King a material crown.[170]
III. The voices came mainly when she was awake, but also sometimes roused her from sleep; a phenomenon often observed in our cases of "veridical hallucination." "Ipsa dormiebat, et vox excitabat eam." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)
IV. The voice was not always fully intelligible (especially if she was half awake);—in this respect again resembling some of our recorded cases, both visual and auditory, where, on the view taken in Phantasms of the Living, the externalisation has been incomplete. "Vox dixit aliqua, sed non omnia intellexit." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)
V. The predictions of the voice, so far as stated, were mainly fulfilled; viz., that the siege of Orleans would be raised; that Charles VII. would be crowned at Rheims; that she herself would be wounded; but the prediction that there would be a great victory over the English within seven years was not fulfilled in any exact way, although the English continued to lose ground. In short, about so much was fulfilled as an ardent self-devoted mind might have anticipated; much indeed that might have seemed irrational to ordinary observers, but nothing which actually needed a definite prophetic power. Here, again, we are reminded of the general character of the monitions of Socrates. And yet in Joan's case, more probably than in the case of Socrates, there may have been one singular exception to this general rule. She knew by monition that there was a sword "retro altare"—somewhere behind the altar—in the Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois. "Scivit ipsum ibi esse per voces":—she sent for it, nothing doubting, and it was found and given to her. This was a unique incident in her career. Her judges asked whether she had not once found a cup, and a missing priest, by help of similar monitions, but this she denied; and it is remarkable that no serious attempt was made either to show that she had claimed this clairvoyant power habitually, or, on the other hand, to invalidate the one instance of it which she did in effect claim. It would be absurd to cite the alleged discovery of the sword as in itself affording a proof of clairvoyance, any more than Socrates' alleged intimation of the approaching herd of swine.[171] But when we are considering monitions given in more recent times it will be well to remember that it is in this direction that some supernormal extension of knowledge seems possibly traceable.