Mediumistic phenomena, manifestations of the secondary or the
subliminal consciousness, between man and man, are, as we have
more than once had occasion to assure ourselves, capricious,
undisciplined, evasive and uncertain, but more frequent than one
thought and, to one who examines, them seriously and honestly,
often undeniable. Have similar manifestations been discovered
between man and the animals? The study of these manifestations,
which is very difficult even in the case of man, becomes still
more so when we question witnesses doomed to silence. There are,
however, some animals which are looked upon as "psychic," which,
in other words, seem indisputably to be sensitive to certain
subliminal influences. One usually classes the cat, the dog and
the horse in this somewhat ill-defined category. To these
superstitious animals one might perhaps add certain birds, more
or less birds of omen, and even a few insects, notably the bees.
Other animals, such as, for instance, the elephant and the
monkey, appear to be proof against mystery. Be this as it may, M.
Ernest Bozzano, in an excellent article on Les Perceptions
psychiques des animaux,[1] collected in 1905 sixty-nine cases of
telepathy, presentiments and hallucinations of sight or hearing
in which the principal actors are cats, dogs and horses. There
are, even among them, ghosts or phantoms of dogs which, after
their death, return to haunt the homes in which they were happy.
Most of these cases are taken from the Proceedings of the S. P.
R., that is to say, they have nearly all been very strictly
investigated. It is impossible, short of filling these pages with
often striking and touching but rather cumbersome anecdotes, to
enumerate them here, however briefly. It will be sufficient to
note that sometimes the dog begins to howl at the exact moment
when his master loses his life, for instance, on a battlefield,
hundreds of miles from the place where the dog is. More commonly,
the cat, the dog and the horse plainly manifest that they
perceive, often before men do, telepathic apparitions, phantasms
of the living or the dead. Horses in particular seem very
sensitive to places that pass as haunted or uncanny. On the
whole, the result of these observations is that we can hardly
dispute that these animals communicate as much as we do and
perhaps in the same fashion with the mystery that lies around us.
There are moments at which, like man, they see the invisible and
perceive events, influences and emotions that are beyond the
range of their normal senses. It is, therefore, permissible to
believe that their nervous system or some remote or secret part
of their being contains the same psychic elements connecting them
with an unknown that inspires them with as much terror as it does
ourselves. And, let us say in passing, this terror is rather
strange; for, after all, what have they to fear from a phantom or
an apparition, they who, we are convinced have no after-life and
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