But how shall we explain the incredible contrast between the immeasurable grandeur of our unknown guest, the assurance, the calmness, the gravity of the inner life which it leads in us and the puerile and sometimes grotesque incongruities of what one might call its public existence? Inside us, it is the sovereign judge, the supreme arbiter, the prophet, almost the god omnipotent; outside us, from the moment that it quits its shelter and manifests itself in external actions, it is nothing more than a fortune-teller, a bone-setter, a sort of facetious conjuror or telephone-operator, I was on the verge of saying a mountebank or clown. At what particular instant is it really itself? Is it seized with giddiness when it leaves its lair? Is it we who no longer hear it, who no longer understand it, as soon as it ceases to speak in a whisper and to act in the dark recesses of our life? Are we in regard to it the terrified hive invaded by a huge and inexplicable hand, the maddened ant-hill trampled by a colossal and incomprehensible foot? Let us not venture yet to solve the strange riddle with the aid of the little that we know.
Let us confine ourselves, for the moment, to noting on the way some other, rather easier questions which we can at least try to answer.
First of all, are the facts at issue really new? Was it only yesterday that the existence of our unknown guest and its external manifestations were revealed to us? Is it our attention that makes them appear more numerous, or is it the increase in their number that at last attracts out attention?
It does indeed seem that, however far we go back in history, we everywhere find the same extraordinary phenomena, under other names and often in a more glamorous setting. Oracles, prophecies, incantations, haruspication, "possession," evocation of the dead, apparitions, ghosts, miraculous cures, levitation, transmission of thought, apparent resurrections and the rest are the exact equivalent, though magnified by the aid of plentiful and obvious frauds of our latter-day supernaturalism. Turning in another direction, we are able to see that psychical phenomena are very evenly distributed over the whole surface of the globe. At all events, there does not appear to be any race that is absolutely or peculiarly refractory to them. One would be inclined to say, however, that they manifest themselves by preference among the most civilized nations--perhaps because that is where they are most carefully sought after--and among the most primitive. In short, it cannot be denied that we are in the presence of faculties or senses, more or less latent but at the same time universally distributed, which form part of the general and unvarying inheritance of mankind. But have these faculties or senses undergone evolution, like most of the others? And, if they have not done so on our earth, do they show traces of an extraplanetary evolution? Is there progress or reaction? Are they withered and useless branches, or buds swollen with sap and promise? Are they retreating before the march of intelligence or invading its domain?
M. Ernest Bozzano, one of the most learned, most daring and most subtle exponents of the new science that is in process of formation, in the course of a remarkable essay in the Annales des sciences psychiques,[1] gives it as his opinion that they have remained stationary and unchanged. He considers that they have become in no way diffused, generalized and refined, like so many others that are much less important and useful from the point of view of the struggle for life, such as the musical faculty, for instance. It does not even seem, says M. Bozzano, that it is possible to cultivate or develop them systematically. The Hindu race in particular, who for thousands of years have been devoting themselves to the study of these manifestations, have arrived at nothing but a better knowledge of the empirical methods calculated to produce them in individuals already endowed with these supernormal faculties. I do not know to what extent M.
Bozzano's assertions are beyond dispute. They concern historical or remote facts which it is very difficult to verify. In any case, it is something to have perfected , as has been done in India, the empirical methods favourable to the production of supernormal phenomena. One might even say that it is about all that we have the right to expect, seeing that, by the author's own admission, these faculties are latent in every man and that, as has frequently been seen, it needs but an illness, a lesion, or sometimes even the slightest emotion or a mere passing faintness to make them suddenly reveal themselves in an individual who seemed most hopelessly devoid of them. It is therefore quite possible that, by improving the methods, by attacking the mystery from other quarters, we might obtain more decisive results than the Hindus. We must remember that our western science has but lately interested itself in these problems and that it has means of investigating and experimenting which the Asiatics never possessed. It may even be declared that at no time in the existence of our world has the scientific mind been better-equipped, better-suited to cope with every task, or more exact, more skilful and more penetrating than it is today.
Because the oriental empirics have failed, there is no reason to believe that it will not succeed in awakening and cultivating in every man those faculties which would often be of greater use to him than those of the intellect itself. It is not overbold to suggest that, from certain points of view, the true history of mankind has hardly begun.
[1] September, 1906.
Nevertheless, in so far as concerns the natural evolution of those faculties, M. Bozzano's assertion seem fairly well- justified. We do not, in fact, observe a startling or even appreciable difference between what they were and what they are.
