Part 9
When all is said, it is perhaps only in the theory which attributes those premonitions to our subconsciousness that we are able to find, if not a justification, at least a sort of explanation of that formidable reticence. They accord fairly well with the strange, inconsistent, whimsical and disconcerting character of the unknown entity within us that seems to live on nothing but nondescript fare borrowed from worlds to which our intelligence as yet has no access. It lives under our reason, in a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual, unknown guest, dropped from another planet, whose interests, ideas, habits, passions have naught in common with ours. If it seems to have notions on the hereafter that are infinitely wider and more precise than those which we possess, it has only very vague notions on the practical needs of our existence. It ignores us for years, absorbed no doubt with the numberless relations which it maintains with all the mysteries of the universe; and, when suddenly it remembers us, thinking apparently to please us, it makes an enormous, miraculous, but at the same time clumsy and superfluous movement, which upsets all that we believed we knew, without teaching us anything. Is it making fun of us, is it jesting, is it amusing itself, is it facetious, teasing, arch, or simply sleepy, bewildered, inconsistent, absent-minded? In any case, it is rather remarkable that it evidently dislikes to make itself useful. It readily performs the most glamorous feats of sleight-of-hand, provided that we can derive no profit from them. It lifts tables, moves the heaviest articles, produces flowers and hair, sets strings vibrating, gives life to inanimate objects and passes through solid matter, conjures up ghosts, subjugates time and space, creates light; but all, it seems, on one condition, that its performances should be without rhyme or reason and keep to the province of supernaturally vain and puerile recreations. The case of the divining-rod is almost the only one in which it lends us any regular assistance, this being a sort of game, of no great importance, in which it appears to take pleasure. Sometimes, to say all that can be said, it consents to cure certain ailments, cleanses an ulcer, closes a wound, heals a lung, strengthens or unstiffens an arm or leg, or even sets bones, but always as it were by accident, without reason, method or object, in a deceitful, illogical and preposterous fashion. One would set it down as a spoilt child that has been allowed to lay hands on the most tremendous secrets of heaven and earth; it has no suspicion of their power, jumbles them all up together and turns them into paltry, inoffensive toys. It knows everything, perhaps, but is ignorant of the uses of its knowledge. It has its arms laden with treasures which it scatters in the wrong manner and at the wrong time, giving bread to the thirsty and water to the hungry, overloading those who refuse and stripping the suppliant bare, pursuing those who flee from it and fleeing from those who pursue it. Lastly, even at its best moments, it behaves as though the fate of the being in whose depths it dwells interested it hardly at all, as though it had but an insignificant share in his misfortunes, feeling assured, one might almost think, of an independent and endless existence.
It is not surprising therefore, when we know its habits, that its communications on the subject of the future should be as fantastic as the other manifestations of its knowledge or its power. Let us add, to be quite fair, that, in those warnings which we would wish to see efficacious, it stumbles against the same difficulties as the spirits or other alien intelligences uselessly foretelling the event which they cannot prevent, or annihilating the event by the very fact of foretelling it.
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And now, to end the question, is this unknown guest of ours alone responsible? Does it explain itself badly or do we not understand it? When we look into the matter closely, there is, under those anomalous and confused manifestations, in spite of efforts which we feel to be enormous and persevering, a sort of incapacity for self-expression and action which is bound to attract our attention. Is our conscious and individual life separated by impenetrable worlds from our subconscious and probably universal life? Does our unknown guest speak an unknown language and do the words which it speaks and which we think that we understand disclose its thought? Is every direct road pitilessly barred and is there nothing left to it but narrow, closed paths, in which the best of what it had to reveal to us is lost? Is this the reason why it seeks those odd, childish, roundabout ways of automatic writing, cross-correspondence, symbolic premonition and all the rest? Yet, in the typical case which we have quoted, it seems to speak quite easily and plainly when it says to the mother:
“Turn the mattress.”
If it can utter this sentence, why should it find it difficult or impossible to add:
“You will there find the matches that will set fire to the curtains.”
What forbids it to do so and closes its mouth at the decisive moment? We relapse into the everlasting question: if it cannot complete the second sentence because it would be destroying in the womb the very event which it is foretelling, why does it utter the first?
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But it is well, in spite of everything, to seek an explanation of the inexplicable; it is by attacking it on every side, at all hazards, that we cherish the hope of overcoming it; and we may therefore say to ourselves that our subconsciousness, when it warns us of a calamity that is about to befall us, knowing all the future as it does, necessarily knows that the calamity is already accomplished. As our conscious and unconscious lives blend in it, it distresses itself and flutters around our overconfident ignorance. It tries to inform us, through nervousness, through pity, so as to mitigate the lightning cruelty of the blow. It speaks all the words that can prepare us for its coming, define it and identify it; but it is unable to say those which would prevent it from coming, seeing that it has come, that it is already present and perhaps past, manifest, ineffaceable, on another plane than that on which we live, the only plane which we are capable of perceiving. It finds itself, in a word, in the position of the man who, in the midst of peaceful, happy and unsuspecting folk, alone knows some bad news. He is neither able nor willing to announce it nor yet to hide it completely. He hesitates, delays, makes more or less transparent allusions, but refrains from saying the last word that would, so to speak, let loose the catastrophe in the hearts of the people around him, for to those who do not know of it the catastrophe is still as though it were not there. Our subconsciousness, in that instance, would act towards the future as we act towards the past, the two conditions being identical, so much so that it often confuses them, as we can see more particularly in the celebrated Marmontel case, where it evidently blunders and reports as accomplished an incident that will not take place until several months later. It is of course impossible for us, at the stage which we have reached, to understand this confusion or this coexistence of the past, the present and the future; but that is no reason for denying it; on the contrary, what man understands least is probably that which most nearly approaches the truth.
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Lastly, to complicate the question, it may be very justly objected that, though premonitions in general are useless and appear systematically to withhold the only indispensable and decisive words, there are, nevertheless, some that often seem to save those who obey them. These, it is true, are rarer than the first, but still they include a certain number that are well-authenticated. It remains to be seen how far they imply a knowledge of the future.
Here, for instance, is a traveller who, arriving at night in a small unknown town and walking along the ill-lighted dock in the direction of an hotel of which he roughly knows the position, at a given moment feels an irresistible impulse to turn and go the other way. He instantly obeys, though his reason protests and “berates him for a fool” in taking a roundabout way to his destination. The next day he discovers that, if he had gone a few feet farther, he would certainly have slipped into the river; and, as he was but a feeble swimmer, he would just as certainly, being alone and unaided in the extreme darkness, have been drowned.[21]
But is this a prevision of an event? No, for no event is to take place. There is simply an abnormal perception of the proximity of some unknown water and consequently of an imminent danger, an unexplained but fairly frequent subliminal sensitiveness. In a word, the problem of the future is not raised in this case, nor in any of the numerous cases that resemble it.
Here is another which evidently belongs to the same class, though at first sight it seems to postulate the preexistence of a fatal event and a vision of the future corresponding exactly with a vision of the past. A traveller in South America is descending a river in a canoe; the party are just about to run close to a promontory when a sort of mysterious voice, which he has already heard at different momentous times of his life, imperiously orders him immediately to cross the river and gain the other shore as quickly as possible. This appears so absurd that he is obliged to threaten the Indians with death to force them to take this course. They have scarcely crossed more than half the river when the promontory falls at the very place where they meant to round it.[22]
The perception of imminent danger is here, I admit, even more abnormal than in the previous example, but it comes under the same heading. It is a phenomenon of subliminal hypersensitiveness observed more than once, a sort of premonition induced by subconscious perceptions, which has been christened by the barbarous name of “cryptaesthesia.” But the interval between the moment when the peril is signalled and that at which it is consummated is too short for those questions which relate to a knowledge or a preexistence of the future to arise in this instance.
The case is almost the same with the adventure of an American dentist, very carefully investigated by Dr. Hodgson. The dentist was bending over a bench on which was a little copper in which he was vulcanizing some rubber, when he heard a voice calling, in a quick and imperative manner, these words:
“Run to the window, quick! Run to the window, quick!”
He at once ran to the window and looked out to the street below, when suddenly he heard a tremendous report and, looking round, saw that the copper had exploded, destroying a great part of the workroom.[23]
Here again, a subconscious cautiousness was probably aroused by certain indications imperceptible to our ordinary senses. It is even possible that there exists between things and ourselves a sort of sympathy or subliminal communion which makes us experience the trials and emotions of matter that has reached the limits of its existence, unless, as is more likely, there is merely a simple coincidence between the chance idea of a possible explosion and its realization.
A last and rather more complicated case is that of Jean Dupré, the sculptor, who was driving alone with his wife along a mountain road, skirting a perpendicular cliff. Suddenly they both heard a voice that seemed to come from the mountain crying:
‘Stop!’
They turned round, and saw nobody and continued their road. But the cries were repeated again and again, without anything to reveal the presence of a human being amid the solitude. At last the sculptor alighted and saw that the left wheel of the carriage, which was grazing the edge of the precipice, had lost its linch-pin and was on the point of leaving the axle-tree, which would almost inevitably have hurled the carriage into the abyss.
Need we, even here, relinquish the theory of subconscious perceptions? Do we know and can the author of the anecdote, whose good faith is not in question, tell us that certain unperceived circumstances, such as the grating of the wheel or the swaying of the carriage, did not give him the first alarm? After all, we know how easily stories of this kind involuntarily take a dramatic turn even at the actual moment and especially afterwards.
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These examples—and there are many more of a similar kind—are enough, I think, to illustrate this class of premonitions. The problem in these cases is simpler than when it relates to fruitless warnings; at least it is simpler so long as we do not bring into discussion the question of spirits, of unknown intelligences, or of an actual knowledge of the future; otherwise the same difficulty reappears and the warning, which this time seems efficacious, is in reality just as vain. In fact, the mysterious entity which knows that the traveller will go to the water’s edge, that the wheel will be on the point of leaving the axle, that the copper will explode, or that the promontory will fall at a precise moment, must at the same time know that the traveller will not take the last fatal step, that the carriage will not be overturned, that the copper will not hurt anybody and that the canoe will pull away from the promontory. It is inadmissible that, seeing one thing, it will not see the other, since everything happens at the same point, in the course of the same second. Can we say that, if it had not given warning, the little saving movement would not have been executed? How can we imagine a future which, at one and the same time, has parts that are steadfast and others that are not? If it is foreseen that the promontory will fall and that the traveller will escape, thanks to the supernatural warning, it is necessarily foreseen that the warning will be given; and, if so, what is the point of this futile comedy? I see no reasonable explanation of it in the spiritist or spiritualistic theory, which postulates a complete knowledge of the future, at least at a settled point and moment. On the other hand, if we adhere to the theory of a subliminal consciousness, we find there an explanation which is quite worthy of acceptation. This subliminal consciousness, though, in the majority of cases, it has no clear and comprehensive vision of the immediate future, can nevertheless possess an intuition of imminent danger, thanks to indications that escape our ordinary perception. It can also have a partial, intermittent and so to speak flickering vision of the future event and, if doubtful, can risk giving an incoherent warning, which, for that matter, will change nothing in that which already is.
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In conclusion, let us state once more that fruitful premonitions necessarily annihilate events in the bud and consequently work their own destruction, so that any control becomes impossible. They would have an existence only if they prophesied a general event which the subject would not escape but for the warning. If they had said to any one intending to go to Messina two or three months before the catastrophe, “Don’t go, for the town will be destroyed before the month is out,” we should have an excellent example. But it is a remarkable thing that genuine premonitions of this kind are very rare and nearly always rather indefinite in regard to events of a general order. In M. Bozzano’s excellent collection, which is a sort of compendium of premonitory phenomena, the only pretty clear cases are nos. clv. and clviii., both of which are taken from the _Journal of the S.P.R._ In the first,[24] a mother sent a servant to bring home her little daughter, who had already left the house with the intention of going through the “railway garden,” a strip of ground between the sea-wall and the railway-embankment, in order to sit on the great stones by the seaside and see the trains pass by. A few minutes after the little girl’s departure, the mother had distinctly and repeatedly heard a voice within her say:
“Send for her back, or something dreadful will happen to her.”
Now, soon after, a train ran off the line and the engine and tender fell, breaking through the protecting wall and crashing down on the very stones where the child was accustomed to sit.
In the other case,[25] into which Professor W. F. Barrett made a special enquiry, Captain MacGowan was in Brooklyn with his two boys, then on their holidays. He promised the boys that he would take them to the theatre and booked seats on the previous day; but on the day of the proposed visit he heard a voice within him constantly saying:
“Do not go to the theatre; take the boys back to school.”
He hesitated, gave up his plan and resumed it again. But the words kept repeating themselves and impressing themselves upon him; and, in the end, he definitely decided not to go, much to the two boys’ disgust. That night, the theatre was destroyed by fire, with a loss of three hundred lives.
We may add to this the prevision of the Battle of Borodino, to which I have already alluded. I will give the story in fuller detail, as told in the journal of Stephen Grellet the Quaker.
About three months before the French army entered Russia, the wife of General Toutschkoff dreamt that she was at an inn in a town unknown to her and that her father came into her room, holding her only son by the hand, and said to her, in a pitiful tone:
“Your happiness is at an end. He”—meaning Countess Toutschkoff’s husband—“has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.”
The dream was repeated a second and a third time. Her anguish of mind was such that she woke her husband and asked him:
“Where is Borodino?”
They looked for the name on the map and did not find it.
Before the French armies reached Moscow, Count Toutschkoff was placed at the head of the army of reserve; and one morning her father, holding her son by the hand, entered her room at the inn where she was staying. In great distress, as she had beheld him in her dream, he cried out:
“He has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.”
Then she saw herself in the very same room and through the windows beheld the very same objects that she had seen in her dreams. Her husband was one of the many who perished in the battle fought near the River Borodino, from which an obscure village takes its name.[26]
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This is evidently a very rare and perhaps solitary example of a long-dated prediction of a great historic event which nobody could foresee. It stirs more deeply than any other the enormous problems of fatality, free-will and responsibility. But has it been attested with sufficient rigour for us to rely upon it? That I cannot say. In any case, it has not been sifted by the S.P.R. Next, from the special point of view that interests us for the moment, we are unable to declare that this premonition had any chance of being of avail and preventing the general from going to Borodino. It is highly probable that he did not know where he was going or where he was; besides, the irresistible machinery of war held him fast and it was not his part to disengage his destiny. The premonition therefore could only have been given because it was certain not to be obeyed.
As for the two previous cases, nos. clv. and clviii., we must here again remark the usual strange reservations and observe how difficult it is to explain these premonitions save by attributing them to our subconsciousness. The main, unavoidable event is not precisely stated; but a subordinate consequence seems to be averted, as though to make us believe in some definite power of free-will. Nevertheless, the mysterious entity that foresaw the catastrophe must also have foreseen that nothing would happen to the person whom it was warning; and this brings us back to the useless farce of which we spoke above. Whereas, with the theory of a subconscious self, the latter may have—as in the case of the traveller, the promontory, the copper or the carriage—not this time by inferences or indications that escape our perception, but by other unknown means, a vague presentiment of an impending peril, or, as I have already said, a partial, intermittent and unsettled vision of the future event, and, in its doubt, may utter its cry of alarm.
Whereupon let us recognize that it is almost forbidden to human reason to stray in these regions; and that the part of a prophet is, next to that of a commentator of prophecies, one of the most difficult and thankless that a man can attempt to sustain on the world’s stage.
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I am not sure if it is really necessary, before closing this chapter, to follow in the wake of many others and broach the problem of the preexistence of the future, which includes those of fatality, of free-will, of time and of space, that is to say, all the points that touch the essential sources of the great mystery of the universe. The theologians and the metaphysicians have tackled these problems from every side without giving us the least hope of solving them. Among those which life sets us, there is none to which our brain seems more definitely and strictly closed; and they remain, if not as unimaginable, at least as incomprehensible as on the day when they were first perceived. What corresponds, outside us, with what we call time and space? We know nothing about it; and Kant, speaking in the name of the “apriorists,” who hold that the idea of time is innate in us, does not teach us much when he tells us that time, like space, is an _a priori_ form of our sensibility, that is to say, an intuition preceding experience, even as Guyau, among the “empiricists,” who consider that this idea is acquired only by experience, does not enlighten us any more by declaring that this same time is the abstract formula of the changes in the universe. Whether space, as Leibnitz maintains, be an order of coexistence and time an order of sequences, whether it be by space that we succeed in representing time or whether time be an essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and to-day—Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf, James Ward, William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillée, Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmès, Dunan and endless others—have been unable to tame it; and that, however much their theories may contradict one another, they are all equally defensible and alike struggle vainly in the darkness against shadows that are not of our world.
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