Let us now return to our spontaneous premonitions, in which the future comes to seek us of its own accord and, so to speak, to challenge us at home. I know from personal experience that, when we embark upon these disconcerting matters, the first impression is scarcely favourable. We are very much inclined to laugh, to treat as wearisome tales, as hysterical hallucinations, as ingenious or interested fictions most or those incidents which give too violent a shock to the narrow and limited idea which we have of our human life. To smile, to reject everything beforehand and to pass by with averted head, as was done, I remember, in the time of Galvani, and in the early days of hypnotism, is much more easy and seems more respectable and prudent than to stop, admit and examine. Nevertheless we must not forget that it is to some who did not smile so lightly that we owe the best part of the marvels from whose heights we are preparing to smile in our turn. For the rest, I grant that, thus presented, hastily and summarily, without the details that throw light upon them and the proofs that support them, the incidents in question do not show to advantage and, inasmuch as they are isolated and sparingly chosen, lose all the weight and authority derived from the compact and imposing mass whence they are arbitrarily detached. As I said above, nearly a thousand cases have been collected, representing probably not the tenth part of those which a more active and general search might bring together. The number is evidently of importance and denotes the enormous pressure of the mystery; but, if there were only half a dozen genuine cases—and Dr. Maxwell's, Professor Flournoy's, Mrs. Verrall's, the Marmontel, Jones and Hamilton cases and some others are undoubtedly genuine—they would be enough to show that, under the erroneous idea which we form of the past and the present, a new verity is living and moving, eager to come to light.
The efforts of that verity, I need hardly say, display a very different sort of force after we have actually and attentively read those hundreds of extraordinary stories which, without appearing to do so, strike to the very roots of history. We soon lose all inclination to doubt. We penetrate into another world and come to a stop all out of countenance. We no longer know where we stand; before and after overlap and mingle. We no longer distinguish the insidious and factitious but indispensable line which separates the years that have gone by from the years that are to come. We clutch at the hours and days of the past and present to reassure ourselves, to fasten on to some certainty, to convince ourselves that we are still in our right place in this life where that which is not yet seems as substantial, as real, as positive, as powerful as that which is no more. We discover with uneasiness that time, on which we based our whole existence, itself no longer exists. It is no longer the swiftest of our gods, known to us only by its flight across all things: it alters its position no more than space, of which it is doubtless but the incomprehensible reflex. It reigns in the centre of every event; and every event is fixed in its centre; and all that comes and all that goes passes from end to end of our little life without moving by a hair's breadth around its motionless pivot. It is entitled to but one of the thousand names which we have been wont to lavish upon its power, a power that seemed to us manifold and innumerable: yesterday, recently, formerly, erewhile, after, before, tomorrow, soon, never, later fall like childish masks, whereas to-day and always completely cover with their united shadows the idea which we form in the end of a duration which has no subdivisions, no breaks and no stages, which is pulseless, motionless and boundless.
11
Many are the theories which men have imagined in their attempts to explain the working of the strange phenomenon; and many others might be imagined.
As we have seen, self-suggestion and telepathy explain certain cases which concern events already in existence, but still latent and perceived before the knowledge of them can reach us by the normal process of the senses or the intelligence. But, even by extending these two theories to their uttermost point and positively abusing their accommodating elasticity, we do not succeed in illumining by their aid more than a rather restricted portion of the vast undiscovered land. We must therefore look for something else.
The first theory which suggests itself and which on the surface seems rather attractive is that of spiritualism, which may be extended until it is scarcely distinguishable from the theosophical theory and other religious suppositions. It assumes the revival of spirits, the existence of discarnate or other superior and more mysterious entities which surround us, interest themselves in our fate, guide our thoughts and our actions and, above all, know the future. It is, as we recognized when speaking of ghosts and hanted houses, a very acceptable theory; and any one to whom it appears can adopt it without doing violence to his intelligence. But we must confess that it seems less necessary and perhaps even less clearly proved in this region than in that. It starts by begging the question: without the intervention of discarnate beings, the spiritualists say, it is impossible to explain the majority of the premonitory phenomena; therefore we must admit the existence of these discarnate beings. Let us grant it for the moment, for to beg the question, which is merely an indefensible trick of the superficial logic of our brain, does not necessarily condemn a theory and neither takes away from nor adds to the reality of things. Besides, as we shall insist later, the intervention or non-intervention of the spirits is not the point at issue; and the crux of the mystery does not lie there. What most interest us is far less the paths or intermediaries by which prophetic warnings reach us than the actual existence of the future in the present. It is true—to do complete justice to neospiritualism—that its position offers certain advantages from the point of view of the almost inconceivable problem of the preexistence of the future. It can evade or divert some of the consequences of that problem. The spirits, it declares, do not necessarily see the future as a whole, as a total past or present, motionless and immovable, but they know infinitely better than we do the numberless causes that determine any agent, so that, finding themselves at the luminous source of those causes, they have no difficulty in foreseeing their effects. They are, with respect to the incidents still in process of formation, in the position of an astronomer who foretells, within a second, all the phases of an eclipse in which a savage sees nothing but an unprecedented catastrophe which he attributes to the anger of his idols of straw or clay. It is indeed possible that this acquaintance with a greater number of causes explains certain predictions; but there are plenty of others which presume a knowledge of so many causes, causes so remote and so profound, that this knowledge is hardly to be distinguished from a knowledge of the future pure and simple. In any case, beyond certain limits, the preexistence of causes seems no clearer than that of effects. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the spiritualists gain a slight advantage here.
They believe that they gain another when they say or might say that it is still possible that the spirits stimulate us to realize the events which they foretell without themselves clearly perceiving them in the future. After announcing, for instance, that on a certain day we shall go to a certain place and do a certain thing, they urge us irresistibly to proceed to the spot named and there to perform the act prophesied. But this theory, like those of self-suggestion and telepathy, would explain only a few phenomena and would leave in obscurity all those cases, infinitely more numerous because they make up almost the whole of our future, in which either chance intervenes or some event in no way dependent upon our will or the spirit's, unless indeed we suppose that the latter possesses an omniscience and an omnipotence which take us back to the original mysteries of the problem.
Besides, in the gloomy regions of precognition, it is almost always a matter of anticipating a misfortune and very rarely, if ever, of meeting with a pleasure or a joy. We should therefore have to admit that the spirits which drag me to the fatal place and compel me to do the act that will have tragic consequences are deliberately hostile to me and find diversion only in the spectacle of my suffering. What could those spirits be, from what evil world would they arise and how should we explain why our brothers and friends of yesterday, after passing through the august and peace-bestowing gates of death, suddenly become transformed into crafty and malevolent demons? Can the great spiritual kingdom, in which all passions born of the flesh should be stilled, be but a dismal abode of hatred, spite and envy? It will perhaps be said that they lead us into misfortune in order to purify us; but this brings us to religious theories which it is not our intention to examine.
12
The only attempt at an explanation that can hold its own with spiritualism has recourse once again to the mysterious powers of our subconsciousness. We must needs to recognize that, if the future exists to-day, already such as it will be when it becomes for us the present and the past, the intervention of discarnate minds or of any other spiritual entity adrift from another sphere is of little avail. We can picture an infinite spirit indifferently contemplating the past and future in their coexistence; we can imagine a whole hierarchy of intermediate intelligences taking a more or less extensive part in the contemplation and transmitting it to our subconsciousness. But all this is practically nothing more than inconsistent speculation and ingenious dreaming in the dark; in any case, it is adventitious, secondary and provisional. Let us keep to the facts as we see them: an unknown faculty, buried deep in our being and generally inactive, perceives, on rare occasions, events that have not yet taken place. We possess but one certainty on this subject, namely, that the phenomenon actually occurs within ourselves; it is therefore within ourselves that we must first study it, without burdening ourselves with suppositions which remove it from its centre and simply shift the mystery. The incomprehensible mystery is the preexistence of the future; once we admit this—and it seems very difficult to deny—there is no reason to attribute to imaginary intermediaries rather than to ourselves the faculty of descrying certain fragments of that future. We see, in regard to most of the mediumistic manifestations, that we possess within ourselves all the unusual forces with which the spiritualists endow discarnate spirits; and why should it be otherwise as concerns the powers of divination? The explanation taken from the subconsciousness is the most direct, the simplest, the nearest, whereas the other is endlessly circuitous, complicated and distant. Until the spirits testify to their existence in an unanswerable fashion, there is no advantage in seeking in the grave for the solution of a riddle that appears indeed to lie at the roots of our own life.