Is it possible to consider this extraordinary faculty as a ‘disaggregation’? Is it possible to class phenomena of this kind with the commonplace phenomena of somnambulism and ‘incarnation,’ the only ones Janet has observed? It suffices to put the question to receive the answer immediately. The psychological mechanism of these facts, so unlike one to the other, is probably the same, but the cause of the apparent automatism, motor or sensory, is certainly not the same. The sensitive, of whom I spoke, who sees in the mirror twenty-four hours beforehand, the very scenes she actually sees the next day, presents to us a phenomenon of considerable importance. It intimates that time and space are forms of the personal thought and consciousness, but that probably they have not the same signification for the impersonal consciousness. It is a phenomenon which, if it be true, demonstrates experimentally that Kant’s theory upon the contingency of these ‘categories’ necessary to all conscious and personal perception is exact. I am quite aware of the nature of the reply I shall meet with: my observations have been defective; and all those who before me affirmed the existence of the same facts were also deceived. This simplifies the discussion. The history of science offers us many an example of the manner in which facts are received, when they contradict current ideas. Kant said more than a hundred years ago, in his _Traüme eines Geistersehers_, 1, i.: ‘Das methodische Geschwätz der hohen Schulen ist oftmals nur ein Einverständniss durch veränderliche Wortbedeutungen eine schwer zu lösenden Frage auszuweichen, weil das bequeme und mehrentheils vernünftige, “Ich weiss nicht,” auf Akademien nicht leichtlich gehört wird.’[14] [14] The methodical idle prattle of the high schools is often only an understanding to elude, by words of variable acceptation, a question difficult of solution, for we do not often hear in academies such convenient and ordinarily intelligent words as ‘I do not know.’ The discussion on Janet recalled to my mind these words of Kant’s. His expression, _misère psychologique_ is one of those words of double meaning, true, if we consider only a part of the facts and one aspect only of the phenomenon, that which concerns the personal consciousness; inexact, if we study the facts in their totality and the phenomenon they reveal in its generality. The being who would be capable of perceiving at a distance, by looking into space and into time, would have faculties superior to the normal; he would not be the inferior being imagined by Janet. An attentive and patient observation will show him, I am sure, the reality of the facts which I point out; may he not deny this possibility without putting himself under the requisite conditions for observing these facts. It belongs to the future to decide the question, and I have no doubt whatever upon the nature of the verdict.[15] [15] See Appendix A.