Eight days afterwards, the newspapers announced the accident to
the Deutschland, whose boiler had burst, obliging the steamboat
to stand to.
The evidence of a man like Dr. Maxwell, especially when we have
to do with a so-to-speak personal incident, possesses an
importance on which it is needless to insist. We have here,
therefore, several days beforehand, the very clear prevision of
an event which, moreover, in no way concerns the percipient: a
curious detail, but one which is not uncommon in these cases. The
mistake in reading Leutschland for Deutschland, which would have
been quite natural in real life, adds a note of probability and
authenticity to the phenomenon. As for the final act, the
foundering of the vessel in the place of a simple heaving to, we
must see in this, as Dr. J. W. Pickering and W. A. Sadgrove
suggest, "the subconscious dramatization of a subliminal
inference of the percipient." Such dramatization, moreover, are
instinctive and almost general in this class of visions.
If this were an isolated case, it would certainly not be right to
attach decisive importance to it; "but," Dr. Maxwell observes,
"the same sensitive has given me other curious instances; and
these cases, compared with others which I myself have observed or
with those of which I have received first-hand accounts, render
the hypothesis of coincidence very improbable, though they do not
absolutely exclude it."[1]
[1] Maxwell: Metapsychical Phenomena, p. 202.
4
Another and perhaps more convincing case, more strictly
investigated and established, a case which clearly does not admit
of explanation, by the theory of coincidence, worthy of all
respect though this theory be, is that related by M. Theodore
Flournoy, science professor at the university of Geneva, in his
remarkable work, Esprits et Mediums. Professor Flournoy is known
to be one of the most learned and most critical exponents of the
new science of metapsychics. He even carries his fondness for
natural explanations and his repugnance to admit the intervention
of superhuman powers to a point where it is often difficult to
follow him. I will give the narrative as briefly as possible. It
will be found in full on pp. 348 to 362 of his masterly book.
In August, 1883, a certain Mme. Buscarlet, whom he knew
personally, returned to Geneva after spending three years with
the Moratief family at Kazan as governess to two girls. She
continued to correspond with the family and also with a Mme.
Nitchinof, who kept a school at Kazan to which Mlles. Moratief,
Mme. Buscarlet's former pupils, went after her departure.
On the night of the 9th of December (O. S.) of the same year,
Mme. Buscarlet had a dream which she described the following
morning in a letter to Mme. Moratief, dated 10 December. She
wrote, to quote her own words:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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