For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They only take place at the precise moment of death or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, have never, although they come from another world, brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon, they fade away and disappear for ever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterwards go on living around us, without again succeeding, in spite of their endeavours, in making themselves known or giving us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavours would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and colour? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it be permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. They would really assume importance only if it were possible to verify or to induce apparitions of beings whose death dated back a certain number of years. We should then at last have the positive proof, which has always escaped us hitherto, that the spirit is independent of the body, that it is cause, not effect, that it can thrive, find sustenance and perform its functions without organs. The greatest question that humanity has ever set itself would thus be, if not solved, at least rid of some of its obscurity; and, forthwith, personal survival, while continuing to be wrapped in the mysteries of the beginning and the end, would become defensible. But we have not yet reached that stage. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, spectres and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination. CHAPTER VI COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD 1