It would therefore in the very first days of its activity have
encountered all these strange problems: telepathy,
materializations, clairvoyance, miraculous cures, knowledge of
the future, the possibility of survival, interplanetary
intelligence and many others, which it has neglected hitherto and
which, thanks to its neglect, are still in their infancy. But, as
the human mind is not able to follow two diametrically opposite
directions at the same time, it would necessarily have rejected
the mathematical sciences. A steamship coming from another
hemisphere, one in which men's minds had taken, unknown to
ourselves, the road which our own has actually taken, would have
seemed to us as wonderful, as incredible as the phenomena of our
subconsciousness seem to us to-day. We should have gone very
far in what at present we call the unknown or the occult; but we
should have known hardly anything of physics, chemistry or
mechanics, unless, which is very probable, we had come upon them
by another road as we travelled round the occult. It is true that
certain nations, the Hindus particularly, the Egyptians and
perhaps the Incas, as well as others, in all probability, who
have not left sufficient traces, thus went to work the other way
and obtained nothing decisive. Is this again a consequence of the
hopeless incompatibility between the faculties of the brain and
those of the subconsciousness? Possibly; but we must not forget
that we are speaking of nations which never possessed our
intellectual habits, our passion for precision, for verification,
for experimental certainty; indeed, this passion has only been
fully developed in ourselves within the last two or three
centuries. It is to be presumed therefore that the European would
have gone much farther in the other direction than the Oriental.
Where would he have arrived? Endowed with a different brain,
naturally clearer, more exacting, more logical, less credulous,
more practical, closer to realities, more attentive to details,
but with the scientific side of his intelligence uncultivated,
would he have gone astray or would he have met the truths which
we are still seeking and which may well be more important than
all our material conquests. Ill-prepared, ill-equipped,
ill-balanced, lacking the necessary ballast of experiments and
proofs, would he have been exposed to the dangers familiar to all
the too-mystical nations? It is very difficult to imagine so. But
the hour has now perhaps come to try without risk what he could
not have done without grave peril. While abandoning no whit of
his understanding, which is small compared with the boundless
scope of the subconsciousness, but which is sure, tried and
docile, he can now embark upon the great adventure and try to do
that which has not been done before. It is a matter of
discovering the connecting link between the two forces. We are
still ignorant of the means of aiding, encouraging, developing
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