I will adduce one more fact, which was observed very long ago, in 1784, by my great-grandfather, on my mother’s side.
It occurred in Illand, a little village in the county of Bar, which to-day belongs to the Department of Haute-Marne, not far from the native place of both my maternal grandfather and myself. In childhood I spent all my vacations there among the vine-planted hills, face to face with gracious landscapes, amid forests alive with bird songs. The house yet stands in which the incident happened. It is at the entrance of the village, on the right, and is called the Chateau. One evening my great-grandmother, on returning from her work in the fields, perceived, by the huge chimney-corner (which can still be seen), her brother, who had been dead several months. He was seated, and seemed to be warming himself. “My God!” she exclaimed in affright, “it’s our dead Rolet!” and then she ran away. Her husband, entering in his turn, also saw his brother-in-law sitting by the fireplace. At that critical moment one of the farm hands uttered an oath, and the apparition vanished.
I give this narrative as it was related to me. No misgivings as to the reality of the vision existed in the minds of the personages in my grandmother’s household.
Allow me to mention another illustration. In February, 1889, I received from H. Van der Kerkhare the following communication, relating to an article I had published about this class of phenomena.
While in Texas, on August 25, 1874, towards sunset, I was smoking my after-dinner pipe in a room on the ground floor of the house I occupied. I was facing the wall, with a door on my right opening towards the northwest. Here is a diagram of the scene.
Suddenly I saw my old grandfather in the doorway. I was in that semi-conscious state of well-being and quietude natural to a man with a good appetite who has dined satisfactorily. I was not at all astonished to see my grandfather there. In fact, I was vegetating just then, thinking of nothing in particular. Nevertheless, I said to myself:—“It is droll that the rays of the setting sun should pour gold and purple through the least folds of my grandfather’s garments and face.” In fact, the setting sun was red, and threw its last horizontal rays diagonally athwart the doorway. Grandfather had a beneficent countenance. He smiled and seemed happy. All at once he disappeared along with the vanishing sun, and I roused myself as from a dream, but with the conviction that I had seen an apparition. Six weeks afterwards I was apprised by letter that my grandfather had died on the night of August 25 and 26 between one and two o’clock. Well, there is a difference of five and one-half hours between the longitude of Belgium, where my grandfather died, and the longitude of Texas where I was, and where the sun set at about seven o’clock.
It would be easy to cite a large number of similar cases. Let me end this section with the following conclusion of Ch. Richet, the learned editor of the Revue Scientifique:—
Unless we discredit the value of all human testimony, these stories are veritable and accurate. Whenever kindred incidents are reproduced by experiment, telepathy will no longer be disputed, but admitted as a natural phenomenon, as well proven as the rotation of the earth, or as the contagion of tuberculosis. To-day’s audacious theories will, in a few years, seem almost like infantile truisms.
We have now come to the closing section of this already long essay,—namely, to the explanation of such phenomena as table-tipping, spirit rapping and dictation, and distant transmission of thought. Let us confess that it is much easier to unfold and discuss such facts, than to determine their modus operandi. I will add that, even if in the present state of our knowledge, it is impossible to explain these facts, there is no shadow of a reason for rejecting them.