It goes without saying that objections are raised from every
side. Among men, arithmetical prodigies are looked upon as
monsters, as a sort of extremely rare teratological phenomenon.
We can count, at most, half-a-dozen in a century, whereas, among
horses, the faculty would appear to be almost general, or at
least quite common. In fact, out of six or seven stallions whom
Krall tried to initiate into the secrets of mathematics, he found
only two that appeared to him too poorly gifted for him to waste
time on their education. These were, I believe, two thoroughbreds
that were presented to him by the Grand-duke of Mecklenburg and
sent back by Krall to their sumptuous stables. In the four or
five others, taken at random as circumstances supplied them, he
met with aptitudes unequal, it is true, but easily developed and
giving the impression that they exist normally, latent and
inactive, at the bottom of every equine soul. From the
mathematical point of view, is the horse's subliminal
consciousness then superior to man's? Why not? His whole
subliminal being is probably superior to one, of greater range,
younger, fresher, more alive and less heavy, since it is not
incessantly attacked, coerced and humiliated by the intelligence
which gnaws at it, stifles it, cloaks it and relegates it to a
dark corner which neither light nor air can penetrate. His
subliminal consciousness is always present, always alert; ours is
never there, is asleep at the bottom of a deserted well and needs
exceptional operations, results and events before it can be drawn
from its slumber and its unremembered deeps. All this seems very
extraordinary; but, in any case, we are here in the midst of the
extraordinary; and this outlet is perhaps the least hazardous. It
is not a question, we must remember, of a cerebral operation, an
intellectual performance, but of a gift of divination closely
allied to other gifts of the same nature and the same origin
which are not the peculiar attribute of man. No observation, no
experiment enables us, up to the present, to establish a
difference between the subliminal of human beings and that of
animals. On the contrary, the as yet restricted number of actual
cases reveals constant and striking analogies between the two. In
most of those arithmetical operations, be it noted, the
subliminal of the horse behaves exactly like that of the medium
in a rate of trance. The horse readily reverses the figures of
the solution; he replies, "37," for instance, instead of "73,"
which is a mediumistic phenomenon so well-known and so frequent
that it has been styled "mirror-writing." He makes mistakes
fairly often in the most elementary additions, and subtractions
and much less frequently in the extraction of the most
complicated roots, which again, in similar cases, such as
"xenoglossy" and psychometry, is one of the eccentricities of
human mediumism and is explained by the same cause, namely, the
inopportune intervention of the ever fallible intelligence,
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