Belgian essays (French) -- Translations into English; Death
Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we know—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 any series of communications or revelations
similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs.
Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can compare with them
for continuity or lucidity. But, though the quality of the phenomena
will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is
identical. Our logical inference is that the real cause lies not in the
source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the
power of the medium. For the rest, Mr. J. G. Piddington, who devoted an
exceedingly detailed study to Mrs. Thompson, plainly perceived in her,
when she was not “entranced” and when there were no spirits whatever in
question, manifestations inferior, it is true, but absolutely analogous
to those involving the dead.[7] 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 farther 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. In the story of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for instance,
which is one of the most characteristic and one which carries us farther
than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have ceased to
be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by perception of
events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from one subconscious
mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance, with the two
surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and, in the
past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each other,
she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they themselves had
forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust and darkness of
six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of this kind passes
the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse to credit it if,
first of all, the experiment had not been controlled and certified by a
man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge, and if, moreover, it did not
form one of a group of equally significant facts which clearly show that
we are not here concerned with an absolutely unique miracle or with an
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