“Of course they have,” replied the physician. “Of course! We really know so little of the things we do and even less why we do them. Our emotions, our feelings, are really only the resultants of numerous components; they are only tensions giving shadowy testimony of ripening forces. We think we are directing these forces, but we are being driven by them; we think we make our decisions, but we only accept the decisions of ‘the other fellow’ in us. Professor Freud has assured himself a place amongst the immortals with his psychological theory concerning so-called ‘symptomatic acts.’ He has substituted a ‘secret inner will’ for ‘blind chance.’”
“And what about looking into the future?” inquired the journalist.
“Why, that’s only looking backward. We can easily predict for ourselves anything we long for, and can easily have presentiments about what we do not wish to avert. The facts which permit us to glimpse the future are gleaned from our yesterdays. Our childhood wishes determine our subsequent history. All of us could readily read our future could we call into new life our childhood emotions. What we dreamed of in childhood we wish to experience as adults. And if we cannot experience it we are drawn back into the realm of eternal dreams. This is as true of humanity as a whole as of man individually. Only when we study our past can we see the future of our present, then can we predict that our modern, ultra-modern time with its innumerable stupidities, with its conflicts and ideals, with its strivings and discoveries, will be as far outstripped as we imagine ourselves to have outstripped our ancestors. Science and art, politics and public life—all a perpetual circle tending towards an unknown future....”
“So then, to return to my glimpse of the future,” the journalist interrupted, “that I shall be crushed by runaway horses?”
The physician smiled superiorly. “Just try to think back and see whether your presentiment has not its roots in the past!”
“Something now occurs to me,” exclaimed the mystic; “my mother used to prophesy that I would not die a natural death. I was a very wild youth, and managed to spend a lot of time with the horses in our stable. In great anger my dear little mother would then launch all sorts of gloomy predictions concerning my destiny.”
His mysterious look into the future was now explained. The doctor ventured to remark that this “case” also illustrated how intimately superstition and a consciousness of guilt are linked together. The imaginary glimpse into the future was in his friend’s case also only a glimmer out of the past. He referred to the remarkable fact that our earliest recollections represent a reflection of our future....
“There are facts”—he said slowly, hesitatingly, as if the words had to be forced out of his interior—“which one can hardly explain. I once loved a woman with such an intense love as I have not felt for any woman since. We spent a wonderful day together. Then we bade each other good-night. I remained standing, looking after her. She was walking through the high reeds in a meadow. Her graceful figure was getting smaller and smaller. With a slight turn in the road she disappeared from my view but soon reappeared. Then for a while I saw her shadowy outline until a clump of trees again hid her from my view. Then I saw her again, but very small. I saw something white—her handkerchief. At this moment a shiver went through me, and I thought: that’s how you will lose her; gradually you will cease to see her; twice she will re-appear, and then she will be gone for ever!—Nonsense, said I to myself, and spun bold plans for the future.... But the future proved that my presentiment had been true. Everything happened as I had felt it that evening. A glimpse into the future! And yet! Sometimes I think to myself that I had only realised the impossibility of a union between us. What I felt as a presentiment may have been only clearer inner comprehension.”
The waiter yawned loud. This time we took the hint and paid. We went home, and something oppressive, unspoken, weighed us all down. As if we were not quite satisfied with the solution of the mystery—as if the shuddering sweetness of a superstitious belief in supernatural powers, a belief in a something above and beyond us would be more to our liking. Silently we took our way through the quiet streets. We felt, for all the world, like children who had been told by their mother that the beautiful story was only a story—that the prince and the princess had never really lived.