Belgian essays (French) -- Translations into English; Death
I will not review the various and very often grotesque methods
of interrogating the future that are most frequently practised
to-day: cards, palmistry, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling by means
of coffee-grounds, tea-leaves, magnetic needles and white of egg,
graphology, astrology and the rest. These methods, as I have said before,
are worth exactly what the medium who employs them is worth. They have no
other object than to arouse the medium’s subconsciousness and to bring
it into relation with that of the person questioning him. As a matter of
fact, all these purely empirical processes are but so many, often puerile
forms of self-manifestation adopted by the undeniable gift which is known
as intuition, clairvoyance or, in certain cases, psychometry. I have
written at length, in my volume entitled _The Unknown Guest_, of this
last faculty and need not linger over it now. All that we have still to
do is to consider it for a moment in its relations with the foretelling
of the future.
A large number of investigations, notably those conducted by M. Duchatel
and Dr. Osty, show that, in psychometry, the notion of time, as Dr.
Joseph Maxwell observes, is very loose, that is to say, the past,
present and future nearly always overlap. Most of the clairvoyant or
psychometric subjects, when they are honest, do not know, “do not feel,”
as M. Duchatel very ably remarks, “what the future is. They do not
distinguish it from the other tenses; and consequently they succeed in
being prophets, but unconscious prophets.” In a word—and this is a very
important indication from the point of view of the probable coexistence
of the three tenses—it appears that they see that which is not yet with
the same clearness and on the same plane as that which is no more, but
are incapable of separating the two visions and picking out the future
which alone interests us. For a still stronger reason, it is impossible
for them to state dates with precision. Nevertheless, the fact remains
that, when we take the trouble to sift their evidence and have the
patience to await the realization of certain events which are sometimes
not due for a long time to come, the future is fairly often perceived by
some of these strange soothsayers.
There are psychometers, however, and notably Mme. M⸺, Dr. Osty’s
favourite medium, who never confuse the future and the past. Mme. M⸺
places her visions in time according to the position which they occupy
in space. Thus she sees the future in front of her, the past behind her
and the present beside her. But, notwithstanding these distinctly-graded
visions, she also is incapable of naming her dates exactly; in fact, her
mistakes in this respect are so general that Dr. Osty looks upon it as
a pure chronological coincidence when a prediction is realized at the
moment foretold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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