It is not difficult for us to conceive that one can thus go back and see again the astral negative of an event that is no more; and retrospective clairvoyance appears to us a wonderful but not an impossible thing. It astonishes but does not stagger our reason. But, when it becomes a question of discovering the same picture in the future, the boldest imagination flounders at the first step. How are we to admit that there exists somewhere a representation or reproduction of that which has not yet existed? Nevertheless, some of the incidents which we have just been considering seem to prove in an almost conclusive manner not only that such representations are possible, but that we may arrive at them more frequently, not to say more conveniently, than at those of the past. Now, once this representation preexists, as we are obliged to admit in the case of a certain number of premonitions, the riddle remains the same whether the preexistence be one of a few hours, a few years or several centuries. It is therefore possible—for, in these matters, we must go straight to extremes or else leave them alone—it is therefore possible that a seer mightier than any of to-day, some god, demigod or demon, some unknown, universal or vagrant intelligence, saw that procession a million years ago, at a time when nothing existed of that which composes and surrounds it and when the very earth on which it moves had not yet risen from the ocean depths. And other seers, as mighty as the first, who from age to age contemplated the same spot and the same moment, would always have perceived, through the vicissitudes and upheavals of seas, shores and forests, the same procession going round the same little church that still lay slumbering in the oceanic ooze and made up of the same persons sprung from a race that was perhaps not yet represented on the earth. 27