LIFE AFTER DEATH[1]

Headpiece MaeterlinckLIFE AFTER DEATH[1]BY MAURICE MAETERLINCKAuthor of “The Life of the Bee,” “Pelléas and Mélisande,” etc.

Headpiece Maeterlinck

BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Author of “The Life of the Bee,” “Pelléas and Mélisande,” etc.

THIScalm, judicious review of the results of organized psychical research cannot fail to be immensely valuable in clearing up the mists accumulated in twenty-eight years of earnest investigation into “the debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic.” The accumulations of evidence, and of argument based upon evidence, have been so enormous that few men busy with life have found time more than to dip into the wonderful subject and turn dismayed and reluctant away. Nothing has been so much needed by the Public Concerned with the Greater Things as a careful digestion of this subject to date, and we are fortunate in having so broad, so scientific, so many-sided a mind as Maeterlinck’s perform this service for us.This paper is the first of many in which THECENTURYwill take account of civilization’s accomplishments in many fields for the benefit of busy men and women.—THEEDITOR.

This paper is the first of many in which THECENTURYwill take account of civilization’s accomplishments in many fields for the benefit of busy men and women.—THEEDITOR.

IHAVE recently been studying two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival—solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement of some magnitude in certain countries has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence.

The great argument of its adherents—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument—is only a sentimental one. Their doctrine that the soul in its successive existences is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right, and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric heaven and the monstrous hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are forever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable, or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has only an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.

We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possiblethat we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagined. As Sir William Crookes well puts it in a remarkable passage:

It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays of light but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediæval mystics and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption of fuel.

All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were offered for what they are, very ancient hypotheses that go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but when they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand, that by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms, and so forth. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the “immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating, than ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a multitude of others—phenomena which, although sporadic and open to question, are still admissible?

OUTSIDEtheosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism, or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and as early as 1873 or 1874 he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real beginning of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S. P. R. This society was formed in London twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England, and, as we all know, has made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration. Among the many supernormal manifestations, telepathy, previsions, and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: first, real, objective, and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; second, manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character, or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. Those extraordinary communications have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism. They profoundly impressed and almostconvinced these men, and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.

It appears, therefore, to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflection of life, is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, or surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them.

For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They take place only at the precise moment of death, or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life, differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, although they come from another world, have never brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon they fade away and disappear forever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterward go on living around us, without again succeeding, despite their endeavors, to make themselves known or to give us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavors would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and color? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it is permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, specters, and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind, and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination.

NOW, what are we to think of it all? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson, and many others who have studied this problem at length, conclude in favor of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross? Must we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to hesitate any longer between the telepathic hypothesis and the spiritualistic hypothesis? I do not think so. I have no prejudices,—what were the use of having any in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead; but, before leaving the terrestrial plane, it is wise and necessary to exhaust all the suppositions, all the explanations, there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead: but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we have spoken—transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people series of communications or revelations similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson, and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can be compared with these so far as continuity or lucidity is concerned. But though the quality of the phenomena will not bearcomparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is identical. It is logical to infer from this that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the power of the medium. These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by beings who have crossed to the further side of the mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts.

WELL, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance, and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained. That is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential, and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of the inward essence of which we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending better. Between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, there is, I insist, only a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree, and in no wise a difference in kind.

For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that neither the medium nor the witnesses should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man; in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has ever actually occurred, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be a very difficult experiment to control. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which, as the others were of very much the same nature, I will merely mention one of the most striking. In a course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper, the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits, and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact, and easy. In this extremely favorable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before, and whom he simply called “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now, A “had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”

The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide.

“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions, and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes.”

The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those presentknew of A’s madness; otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man.

OFa truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly everything, bar every road, and all but deny to the spirits any power of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there, then, no other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us; and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal fields in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things, large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a shadow separates us, and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past, that they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which nothing now enthralls some other discourse than that which it avoided when it was still subject to matter.

This is where things stood when, of late years, the mediums, the spiritualists, or, rather, it appears, the spirits themselves, for one cannot tell exactly with whom we have to do, perhaps dissatisfied at not being more definitely recognized and understood, invented, for a more effectual proof of their existence, what has been called “cross-correspondence.” Here the position is reversed: it is no longer a question of various and more or less numerous spirits revealing themselves through the agency of one and the same medium, but of a single spirit manifesting itself almost simultaneously through several mediums often at great distances from one another and without any preliminary understanding among themselves. Each of these messages, taken alone, is usually unintelligible, and yields a meaning only when laboriously combined with all the others.

As Sir Oliver Lodge says:

The object of this ingenious and complicated effort clearly is to prove that there is some definite intelligence underlying the phenomena, distinct from that of any of the automatists, by sending fragments of a message or literary reference which shall be unintelligible to each separately—so that no effective telepathy is possible between them,—thus eliminating or trying to eliminate what had long been recognized by all members of the Society for Psychical Research as the most troublesome and indestructible of the semi-normal hypotheses. And the further object is evidently to prove as far as possible, by the substance and quality of themessage, that it is characteristic of the one particular personality who is ostensibly communicating, and of no other.[2]

The experiments are still in their early stages, and the most recent volumes of the “Proceedings” are devoted to them. Although the accumulated mass of evidence is already considerable, no conclusion can yet be drawn from it. In any case, whatever the spiritualists may say, the suspicion of telepathy seems to me to be in no way removed. The experiments form a rather fantastic literary exercise, one intellectually much superior to the ordinary manifestations of the mediums; but up to the present there is no reason for placing their mystery in the other world rather than in this. Men have tried to see in them a proof that somewhere in time or space, or else beyond both, there is a sort of immense cosmic reserve of knowledge upon which the spirits go and draw freely. But if the reserve exist, which is very possible, nothing tells us that it is not the living rather than the dead who repair to it. It is very strange that the dead, if they really have access to the immeasurable treasure, should bring back nothing from it but a kind of ingenious child’s puzzle, although it ought to contain myriads of lost or forgotten notions and acquirements, heaped up during thousands and thousands of years in abysses which our mind, weighed down by the body, can no longer penetrate, but which nothing seems to close against the investigations of freer and more subtle activities. They are evidently surrounded by innumerable mysteries, by unsuspected and formidable truths that loom large on every side. The smallest astronomical or biological revelation, the least secret of olden time, such as that of the temper of copper, an archæological detail, a poem, a statue, a recovered remedy, a shred of one of those unknown sciences which flourished in Egypt or Atlantis—any of these would form a much more decisive argument than hundreds of more or less literary reminiscences. Why do they speak to us so seldom of the future? And for what reason, when they do venture upon it, are they mistaken with such disheartening regularity? One would think that, in the sight of a being delivered from the trammels of the body and of time, the years, whether past or future, ought all to lie outspread on one and the same plane.[3]We may therefore say that the ingenuity of the proof turns against it. All things considered, as in other attempts, and notably in those of the famous medium Stainton Moses, there is the same characteristic inability to bring us the veriest particle of truth or knowledge of which no vestige can be found in a living brain or in a book written on this earth. And yet it is inconceivable that there should not somewhere exist a knowledge that is not as ours and truths other than those which we possess here below.

THEcase of Stainton Moses, whose name we have just mentioned, is a very striking one in this respect. This Stainton Moses was a dogmatic, hard-working clergyman, whose learning, Myers tells us, in the normal state did not exceed that of an ordinary schoolmaster. But he was no sooner “entranced” before certain spirits of antiquity or of the Middle Ages who are hardly known save to profound scholars—among others, St. Hippolytus; Plotinus; Athenodorus, the tutor of Augustus; and more particularly Grocyn, the friend of Erasmus—took possession of his person and manifested themselves through his agency. Now, Grocyn, for instance, furnished certain information about Erasmus which was at first thought to have been gathered in the other world, but which was subsequently discovered in forgotten, but nevertheless accessible, books. On the other hand, Stainton Moses’s integrity was never questioned for an instant by those who knew him, and we may therefore take his word for it when he declares that he had not read the books in question. Here again the mystery, inexplicable though it be, seems really to lie hidden in the midst of ourselves. It is unconscious reminiscence, if you will, suggestion at a distance, subliminal reading; but no more than in cross-correspondence is it indispensable to have recourse to the dead and to drag them by main force into the riddle, which, seen from our side of the grave, is dark and impassioned enough as it is. Furthermore, we must not insist unduly on this cross-correspondence. We must remember that the whole thing is in its earliest stages, and that the dead appear to have no small difficulty in grasping the requirements of the living.

In regard to this subject, as to the others, the spiritualists are fond of saying:

“If you refuse to admit the agency of spirits, the majority of these phenomena are absolutely inexplicable.”

Agreed; nor do we pretend to explain them, for hardly anything is to be explained upon this earth. We are content simply to ascribe them to the incomprehensible power of the mediums, which is no more improbable than the survival of the dead, and has the advantage of not going outside the sphere which we occupy and of bearing relation to a large number of similar facts that occur among living people. Those singular faculties are baffling only because they are still sporadic, and because only a very short time has elapsed since they received scientific recognition. Properly speaking, they are no more marvelous than those which we use daily without marveling at them; as our memory, for instance, our understanding, our imagination, and so forth. They form part of the great miracle that we are; and, having once admitted the miracle, we should be surprised not so much at its extent as at its limits.

Nevertheless, I am not at all of opinion that we must definitely reject the spiritualistic theory; that would be both unjust and premature. Hitherto everything remains in suspense. We may say that things are still very little removed from the point marked by Sir William Crookes, in 1874, in an article which he contributed to the “Quarterly Journal of Science.” He there wrote:

The difference between the advocates of Psychic Force and the Spiritualists consists in this—that we contend that there is as yet insufficient proof of any other directing agent than the Intelligence of the Medium, and no proof whatever of the agency of Spirits of the Dead; while the Spiritualists hold it as a faith, not demanding further proof, that Spirits of the Dead are the sole agents in the production of all the phenomena. Thus the controversy resolves itself into a pure question offact, only to be determined by a laborious and long-continued series of experiments and an extensive collection of psychologicalfacts, which should be the first duty of the Psychological Society, the formation of which is now in progress.

MEANWHILE, it is saying a good deal that rigorous scientific investigations have not utterly shattered a theory which radically confounds the idea which we were wont to form of death. We shall see presently why, in considering our destinies beyond the grave, we need have no reason to linger too long over these apparitions or these revelations, even though they should really be incontestable and to the point. They would seem, all told, to be only the incoherent and precarious manifestations of a transitory state. They would at best prove, if we were bound to admit them, that a reflection of ourselves, an after-vibration of the nerves, a bundle of emotions, a spiritual silhouette, a grotesque and forlorn image, or, more correctly, a sort of truncated and uprooted memory, can, after our death, linger and float in a space where nothing remains to feed it, where it gradually becomes wan and lifeless, but where a special fluid, emanating from an exceptional medium, succeeds at moments in galvanizing it. Perhaps it exists objectively, perhaps it subsists and revives only in the recollection of certain sympathies. After all, it would be not unlikely that the memory which represents us during our life should continue to do so for a few weeks or even a few years after our decease. This would explain the evasive and deceptive character of those spirits which, possessing only a mnemonic existence, are naturally able to interest themselves only in matters within their reach. Hence their irritating and maniacal energy in clinging to the slightest facts, their sleepy dullness, their incomprehensible indifference and ignorance, and all the wretched absurdities which we have noticed more than once.

But, I repeat, it is much simpler to attribute these absurdities to the special character and the as yet imperfectly recognized difficulties of telepathic communication. The unconscious suggestions of the most intelligent among those who take part in the experiment are impaired, disjointed, and stripped of their main virtues in passing through the obscure intermediary of the medium. It may be that they go astray and make their way into certain forgotten corners which the intelligence no longer visits, and thence bring back more or less surprising discoveries; but the intellectual quality of the aggregate will always be inferior to that which a conscious mind would yield. Besides, once more, it is not yet time to draw conclusions. We must not lose sight of the fact that we have to do with a science which was born but yesterday, and which is groping for its implements, its paths, its methods, and its aim in a darkness denser than the earth’s. The boldest bridge that men have yet undertaken to throw across the river of death is not to be built in thirty years. Most sciences have centuries of thankless efforts and barren uncertainties behind them; and there are, I imagine, few among the younger of them that can show from the earliest hour, as this one does, promises of a harvest which may not be the harvest of their conscious sowing, but which already bids fair to yield such unknown and wondrous fruit.[4]

SOmuch for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go further, and attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to rely upon them with safety. Nor do I purpose to pay attention to the proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant prodigies—aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which, nevertheless, may be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’s experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.

First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth, and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep, and by means of downward passes makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence, and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character, and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence, and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again suffers the pains of childbirth. Carried back to an age when she was learning to write, she writes like a child, and her writings can be placed side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.

This in itself is very extraordinary, but, as Colonel de Rochas says:

Up to the present, we have walked on firm ground; we have been observing a physiological phenomenon which is difficult of explanation, but which numerous experiments and verifications allow us to look upon as certain.

We now enter a region where still more surprising enigmas await us. Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of the Isère. By means of downward passes, she is brought back to the condition of a baby at her mother’s breast. The passes continue, and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphine no longer answers except by signs;she is not yet born, “she is floating in darkness.” They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being—a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful, and discontented old man. They question him. At first he refuses to answer, saying that “of course he’s there, as he’s speaking”; that “he sees nothing”; and that “he’s in the dark.” They increase the number of passes, and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean-Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen, and served his time in the army with the Seventh Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes the gesture of twirling an imaginary mustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.

We now hear the dead man speak, and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He “feels himself growing out of his body,” but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to him to reincarnate himself, and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is to say, the mother of Joséphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child’s body. Until about the seventh year this body was surrounded by a sort of floating mist in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.

The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean-Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood, to a fresh silence, a new limbo; and then suddenly another voice and an unexpected person. This time it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment. She is dead at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backward and of course begin at the end. She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of caviling at every moment, as Jean-Claude did. Her name is Philomène Carteron.

I will now quote Colonel de Rochas:

By intensifying the sleep, I induce the manifestations of a living Philomène. She no longer suffers, seems very calm, and always answers very coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, but no one is a penny the worse, and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philomène Charpigny; her grandfather on the mother’s side was called Pierre Machon and lived at Ozan. In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carteron, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.Before her incarnation, Philomène had been a little girl who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who had committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured much suffering in the darkness, even after her life as a little girl, when she had had no time to do wrong. I did not think it necessary to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch.But, on the other hand, I noticed one thing which would tend to show that the revelations of these mediums rest on an objective reality. At Voiron, one of the regular attendants at my demonstrations is a young girl, Louise——. She possesses avery sedate and thoughtful cast of mind, not at all open to hypnotic suggestion; and she has in a very high degree the capacity, which is comparatively common in a lesser degree, of perceiving the magnetic effluvia of human beings and, consequently, the fluidic body. When Joséphine revives the memory of her past, a luminous aura is observed around her, and is perceived by Louise. Now, to the eyes of Louise, this aura becomes dark when Joséphine is in the phase separating two existences. In every instance there is a strong reaction in Joséphine when I touch points where Louise tells me that she perceives the aura, whether it be dark or light.

Before her incarnation, Philomène had been a little girl who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who had committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured much suffering in the darkness, even after her life as a little girl, when she had had no time to do wrong. I did not think it necessary to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch.

But, on the other hand, I noticed one thing which would tend to show that the revelations of these mediums rest on an objective reality. At Voiron, one of the regular attendants at my demonstrations is a young girl, Louise——. She possesses avery sedate and thoughtful cast of mind, not at all open to hypnotic suggestion; and she has in a very high degree the capacity, which is comparatively common in a lesser degree, of perceiving the magnetic effluvia of human beings and, consequently, the fluidic body. When Joséphine revives the memory of her past, a luminous aura is observed around her, and is perceived by Louise. Now, to the eyes of Louise, this aura becomes dark when Joséphine is in the phase separating two existences. In every instance there is a strong reaction in Joséphine when I touch points where Louise tells me that she perceives the aura, whether it be dark or light.

I thought it well to give the report of one of these experiments almost in extenso, because those who maintain the palingenesic theory find in these the only appreciable argument which they possess. Colonel de Rochas renewed them more than once with different subjects. Among these, I will mention only one, a girl called Marie Mayo, whose history is more complicated than Joséphine’s, and whose successive reincarnations take us back to the seventeenth century and carry us suddenly to Versailles, among the historical personages moving about Louis XIV.

Let us add that Colonel de Rochas is not the only mesmerizer who has obtained revelations of this kind, which may henceforth be classed among the incontestable facts of hypnotism. I have mentioned his alone because they offer the most substantial guaranties from every point of view.

WHATdo they prove? We must begin, as in all questions of this kind, by entertaining a certain distrust of the medium. It goes without saying that all mediums, by the very nature of their faculties, are inclined to imposture, to trickery. I know that Colonel de Rochas, like Dr. Richet and like Professor Lombroso, was occasionally hoaxed. That is the inherent defect of the machinery which we must perforce employ; and experiments of this sort will never possess the scientific value of those made in a physical or chemical laboratory. But this is not an a priori reason for denying them any sort of interest. As a question of fact, are imposture and trickery possible here? Obviously, even though the experiments be conducted under the strictest supervision. However complicated it may be, the subject can have learned his lesson, and can cleverly avoid the traps laid for him. The best guaranty, when all is said, lies in his good faith and his moral sense, which the experimenters alone are in a position to test and to know; and for that we must trust to them. Besides, they neglect no precaution necessary to make imposture extremely difficult. After taking the subject, by means of transverse passes, up the stream of his life, they make him come down the same stream; and the same events pass in the reverse order. Repeated tests and countertests always yield identical results; and the medium never hesitates or goes astray in the labyrinth of names, dates, and incidents.[5]

Moreover, it would be requisite for these mediums, who are generally people of merely average intelligence, suddenly to become great poets in order thus to create, down to every detail, a series of characters differing entirely one from the other, in which everything—gestures, voice, temper, mind, thoughts, feeling—is in keeping, and ever ready to reply, in harmony with their inmost nature, to the most unexpected questions. It has been said that every man is a Shakspere in his dreams; but have we not here to do with dreams which, in their uniformity, bear a singular resemblance to fact?

I think, therefore, that, until we receive evidence to the contrary, we may be allowed to leave fraud out of the question. Another objection that might be raised, as was done with respect to the Myers phantom, is the insignificance of their revelations from beyond the grave. I would rather look on this as an argument in behalf of their good faith. Those whose imagination is rich enough to create the wonderful persons whom we see living in their sleep would doubtless find no greatdifficulty in inventing a few fantastic but plausible details on the subject of the next world. Not one of them thinks of it. They are Christians, and therefore carry deep down in themselves the traditional terror of hell, the fear of purgatory, and the vision of a paradise full of angels and palms. They never refer to any of it. Although they are most often ignorant of all the theories of reincarnation, they conform strictly to the theosophical or neospiritualistic hypothesis, and are unconsciously faithful to it in their very indefiniteness: they speak vaguely of “the dark” in which they find themselves. They tell nothing because they know nothing. It is apparently impossible for them to give any account of a state that is still illumined. In fact, it is very likely, if we admit the hypothesis of reincarnation and of evolution after death, that nature, here as elsewhere, does not proceed by bounds. There is no special reason why she should take a prodigious and inconceivable leap between life and death.

We do not find the dramatic change which at first thought we are rather inclined to expect. The spirit is first of all confused at losing its body and every one of its familiar ways; it recovers itself only by degrees. It resumes consciousness slowly. This consciousness is subsequently purified, exalted, and extended, gradually and indefinitely, until, reaching other spheres, the principle of life that animates it ceases to reincarnate itself, and loses all contact with us. This would explain why we never have any but minor and elementary revelations.

All that concerns this first phase of the survival is fairly probable, even to those who do not admit the theory of reincarnation. For the rest, we shall see presently that the solutions which man’s imagination finds there merely change the question and are inadequate and provisional.

WEnow come to the most serious objection, that of suggestion. Colonel de Rochas declares that he and all the other experimenters who have given themselves up to this study “have not only avoided everything that could put the subject on a definite tack, but have often tried in vain to lead him astray by different suggestions.” I am convinced of it: there can be no question of voluntary suggestion.

But do we not know that in these regions unconscious and involuntary suggestion is often more powerful and effective than the other? In the hackneyed and rather childish experiment of table-turning, for instance, which, after all, is only a crude and elementary form of telepathy, the replies are nearly always dictated by the unconscious suggestion of a participant or a mere onlooker.[6]We should therefore first of all have to make sure that neither the hypnotizer nor an onlooker, nor yet the subject himself, has ever heard of the reincarnated persons. It will be enough, I shall be told, to employ for the countertests another operator and different onlookers who are ignorant of the previous revelations. Yes, but the subject is not ignorant of them; and it is possible that the first suggestion has been so profound that it will remain forever stamped upon the unconsciousness, and that it will reproduce the same incarnations indefinitely in the same order.

All this does not mean that the phenomena of suggestion are not themselves ladenwith mysteries; but that is another question. For the moment, as we see, the problem is almost insoluble, and control is impracticable. Meanwhile, since we have to choose between reincarnation and suggestion, it is right that we should confine ourselves in the first instance to the latter, in accordance with the principles which we have observed in the case of automatic speech and writing. Between two unknowns, common sense and prudence decree that we should turn first to the one on whose frontiers lie certain facts more frequently recorded, the one which shows a few familiar glimmers. Let us exhaust the mystery of our life before forsaking it for the mystery of our death. Throughout this vast expanse of treacherous ground, it is important that, until fresh evidence arrives, we should keep to one inflexible rule, namely, that thought transference exists as long as it is not absolutely and physically impossible for the subject or some person in the room to have cognizance of the incident in question, whether the cognizance be conscious or not, forgotten or actual. Even this guaranty is not sufficient, for it is still possible for some one taking no part in the sitting, and even very far away from it, to be placed in communication with the medium by some unknown means, and to influence the medium at a distance and unwittingly. Lastly, to provide for every contingency before letting death come upon the boards, it would be necessary to make certain that atavistic memory does not play an unforeseen part. Cannot a man, for instance, carry hidden in the depths of his being the recollection of events connected with the childhood of an ancestor whom he has never seen, and communicate it to the medium by unconscious suggestion? It is not impossible. We carry in ourselves all the past, all the experience, of our ancestors. If by some magic we could illumine the prodigious treasures of the subconscious memory, why should we not there discover the events and facts that form the sources of that experience? Before turning toward yonder unknown, we must utterly exhaust the possibilities of this terrestrial unknown. It is moreover remarkable, but undeniable, that, despite the strictness of a law which seems to shut out every other explanation, despite the almost unlimited and probably excessive scope allotted to the domain of suggestion, there nevertheless remain some facts which perhaps call for another interpretation.

BUTlet us return to reincarnation, and recognize, in passing, that it is very regrettable that the arguments of the theosophists and neospiritualists are not compelling; for there never was a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful, and consoling, or, to a certain point, a more probable creed than theirs. But the quality of a creed is no evidence of its truth. Even though it is the religion of six hundred millions of mankind, the nearest to the mysterious origins, the only one that is not odious, and the least absurd of all, it will have to do what the others have not done—bring unimpeachable testimony; and what it has given us hitherto is only the first shadow of a proof begun.

Indeed, even that would not put an end to the riddle. In principle, reincarnation sooner or later is inevitable, since nothing can be lost or remain stationary. What has not been demonstrated in any way, and will perhaps remain indemonstrable, is the reincarnation of the whole, identical person, notwithstanding the abolition of memory. But what matters that reincarnation to him, if he be unaware that he is still himself? All the problems of the conscious survival of man start up anew, and we have to begin all over again. Even if scientifically established, the doctrine of reincarnation, just like that of a survival, would not set a term to our questions. It replies to neither the first nor the last, those of the beginning and the end, the only ones that are essential. It simply shifts them, pushes them a few hundreds, a few thousands, of years back, in the hope, perhaps, of losing or forgetting them in silence and space. But they have come from the depths of the most prodigious infinities, and are not content with a tardy solution. I am most certainly interested in learning what is in store for me, what will happen to me immediately after my death. You tell me:

“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering, will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”

I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old religions; I am willing to believe it; but even then? What matters to me is not what will be for some time, but for always; and your divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help. Now, even if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my conscience. Your infinity or our God, without being even more unintelligible than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is hardly likely that the idea came to me only yesterday. All the chances of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer to these interrogations, which spring up everywhence the moment our thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I had rather keep to an infinity the incomprehensibility of which has no bounds than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be superior to the silence which they break.

It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as this God; but, then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as inexhaustible as the universe itself. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations. At best, it is only a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life here. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because at the moment when they can speak to us they have nothing to tell us, or because at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever, and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.

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