Nevertheless, there is some interest in knowing whether we have to do with a general faculty latent in all men or an inexplicable privilege reserved to rare individuals. The exceptional should always be eliminated, if possible, and not left to hang over the abyss like an unfinished bridge leading to nothing. I am well aware that the compulsory intervention of the medium implies that, in spite of all, we recognize his possession of abnormal faculties; but at any rate we reduce their power and their extent appreciably and we return sooner and more easily to the ordinary laws of the great human mystery. And it is of importance that we should be ever coming back to that mystery and ever bringing all things back to it. But, unfortunately, actual experience does not admit of this generalization. It is clearly a case of a special faculty, one peculiar to the medium, one which is wholly unknown to our latent intuition. We can easily assure ourselves of this by causing the medium to receive through a third party and enclosed in a series of three envelopes, as in the experiment described above, a letter of which we know the writer, but of which both the source and the contents are absolutely unknown to the messenger. These unusual circumstances, in which all subconscious communications between consultant and consulted are strictly cut off, will in no way hamper the medium's clairvoyance; and we may fairly conclude that it is actually the medium himself who discovers directly, without any intermediary, without "relays," to use M. Duchatel's expression, all that the object holds concealed. It, therefore, seems certain that there is, at least in psychometry, something more than the mere mirror of which Dr. Osty speaks.
I consider it necessary to declare for the last time that these psychometric phenomena, astonishing though they appear at first, are known, proved and certain and are no longer denied or doubted by any of those who have studied them seriously. I could have given full particulars of a large number of conclusive experiments; but this seemed to me as superfluous and tedious as would be, for instance, a string of names of the recognized chemical reactions that can be obtained in a laboratory. Any one who pleases is at liberty to convince himself of the reality of the facts, provided that he applies to genuine mediums and keeps aloof from the inferior "seers" and especially the shams and imposters who swarm in this region more than in any other. Even with the best of them, he will have to be careful of the involuntary, unconscious and almost inevitable interference of telepathy, which is also very interesting, though it is a phenomenon of a different class, much less surprising and debatable than pure psychometry. He must also learn the art of interrogating the medium and refrain from asking incoherent and random questions about casual or future events. He will not forget that "clairvoyance is strictly limited to the perception of human personality," according to the role so well formulated by Dr. Osty. Experiments have been made in which a psychometer, on touching the tooth of a prehistoric animal, saw the landscapes and the cataclysms of the earth's earliest ages displayed before his eyes; in which another medium, on handling a jewel, conjured up, it would seem with marvellous exactness, the games and processions of ancient Greece, as though the objects permanently retained the recollection or rediscovered the "astral negatives" of all the events which they once witnessed. But it will be understood that, in such cases, any effective control is, so to speak, impossible and that the part played by telepathy cannot be decided. It is important, therefore, to keep strictly to that which can be verified.
Even when thus limiting his scope, the experimenter will meet with many surprises. For instance, though the revelations of two psychometers to whom the same letter is handed in succession most often agree remarkably in their main outlines, it can also happen that one of them perceives only what concerns the writer of the letter, whereas the other will be interested only in the person to whom the letter was addressed or to a third person who was in the room where the letter was written. It is well to be forearmed against these first mistakes, which, for that matter, in the frequent cases where strict control is possible, but confirm the existence and the independence of the astounding faculty.
As for the theories that attempt to explain it, I am quite willing to grant that they are still somewhat confused. The important thing for the moment is the accumulation of claims and experiments that go feeling their way farther and farther along all the paths of the unknown. Meanwhile, that one unexpected door which sheds at the back of our old convictions more than one unexpected door, which sheds upon the life and habits of our secret being sufficient light to puzzle us for many a long day.
This brings us back once more to the omniscience and perhaps the omnipotence of our hidden guest, to the brink of the mysterious reservoir of every manner of knowledge which we shall meet with again when we come to speak of the future, of the talking horses, of the divining-rod, of materializations and miracles, in short, in every circumstance where we pass beyond the horizon of our little daily life. As we thus advance, with slow and cautious footsteps, in them as yet deserted and very nebulous regions of metapsychics, we are compelled to recognize that there must exist somewhere, in this world or in others, a spot in which everything is known, in which everything is possible, to which everything goes, from which everything comes, which belongs to all, to which all have access, but of which the long-forgotten roads must be learnt again by our stumbling feet. We shall often meet those difficult roads in the course of our present quest and we shall have more than one occasion to refer again to those depths into which all the supernatural facts of our existence flow, unless indeed they take their source there. For the moment, that which most above all engage our attention in these psychometric phenomena is their purely and exclusively human character. They occur between the living and the living, on this solid earth of ours, in the world that lies before our eyes; and the spirits, the dead, the gods and the interplanetary intelligences know them not. Hardly anywhere else, except in the equally perplexing manifestations of the divining-rod and in certain materializations, shall we find with the same clearness this same specific character, if we may call it so. This is a valuable lesson. It tells us that our every-day life provides phenomena as disturbing and of exactly the same kind and nature as those which, in other circumstances, we attribute to other forces than ours. It teaches us also that we must first direct and exhaust our enquiries here below, among ourselves, before passing to the other side; for our first care should be to simplify the interpretations and explanations and not to seek elsewhere, in opposition, what probably lies hidden within us in reality.
Afterwards, if the unknown overwhelm us utterly, if the darkness engulf us beyond all hope, there will still be time to go, none can tell where, to question the deities or the dead.
