\lElili Ki^Vinil^l: iKltUUpM' ^. .■^ 03 >- SO -< &AiivaanA^ ^t^Aavaaii-^- .?? CO > 33 -^ilIBRARYQ<: ^. ,5.WEUNIVER% cc — ^l. \ >- CO vlOSANCElfx>^ ^JO'^ ^TiiJONYSOl^ "^/sa^AiNnivw CO > -< ^^i i ^OF-CALIF0% ?i:. ' > t- .2^ ,\WEUNIVER% CQ ^lOSANCELfj> ^^AavaaiH'^ '^d^Aavaaii-^^^ ^tjuokvsoi^ ■^/sa3AiN(i]\\v ^!^.V/>, o^- '^HIBRARYQ^ ^^^t■LIBRARYQ^^ ^ ^^ o 55 c: <: so "^/siiaAiNn-j^v^ JAi >- en t- -■iKTFirr. -n ^ oo {^ 55SUlBRARYa<\ ^MIBRARYO^ MWk >i > 'ri iZ? 'f -J^i '''% VQUIl 3 rnrr-. rmv ^ ^., <-vAP.rui' ■ Jx^ )i ^2" u^^ ^, '^/i'(iJAI,i,l iiV> v?, % ,v\T-iiRr ^^ iv.^■■ .\\U IMP N > THE LIGHT BEYOND THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK ESSAYS The Treasure of the Humblk Wisdom and Destiny The Life of the Bee The Buried Temple The Double Garden The Measure of the Hours On Emerson, and Other Essays Our Eternity The Unknown Guest The Wrack of the Storm PLAYS Sisteb Beatrice, and Ardiane and Barbe Bleue jOYZELLE, AND MONNA N'anNA The Blue Bird, A Fairy Play Mary Magdalene PiLLfAs and M£lisande, and Other Plays Princess Maleine The Intruder, and Other Plays Aglavaine and Selysette Poems HOLIDAY EDITIONS Our Friend the Dog The Swarm The Intelligence op the Flowers Death Thoughts from Maeterlinck The Blue Bird The Life of the Bee News of Spring and Other Nature Studies The Light Beyond (y/oauttce (yJoaetetlinck Utanalated by [Lexaader \jeixeiza de cJliDattod Copyright, 1913, By The Century Co. as "Life After Death" Copyright, 1914, By The International Magazine Company Copyright, 1913. 1914, By Dodd, Mead and Company Copyright. 1916, By Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc. « BF I03Z INTRODUCTION I TN the first act of The Blue Bird, the fairy Berylune send INIytyl and Tyltyl in search of happiness. Shepherded and protected by Light, they explore the Past and the Future, the Palace of Night, the Kingdoms of the Dead and of the Unborn. At one moment they find themselves 2 in a graveyard; and JNIytyl grows fearful at her I first contact with the great mystery of Death. Yet the graveyard with its wooden crosses and grass- covered mounds is moonlit and tranquil; and of a sudden, as the revealing diamond is turned in Tyltyl's fingers, even the tombstones and 'all the grand investiture of death' disappear, to be replaced by luxuriant, swaying clusters of Madonna lilies. "Where are the dead?" asks Mytyl, in amaze- ment, searching in the grass for traces of even one tombstone. Her brother also looks: "There are no dead," is his reply. Any one who was present on the first night of the play at the HajTnarket Theatre, in 1909, will -^ -v vi INTRODUCTION not easily forget the audience's little gasp of de- lighted surprise. Yet the two lines of dialogue were more than a stage effect, more than an aspect of mysticism ; almost they may be regarded as the es- sence of Maeterlinck's later work. Since the Life of the Bee, since the earlier essays and such pure drama as Monna Vanna, The Blhid and Pelleas and Melisande, his mind seems to have been brooding more and more on the part which Death, the great twin mystery of the world, plays in the life of man and of the race. In The Death of Tintagiles there is a barred and studded door, through which, for all its studs and bars, there steals a miasma of dread. And, when the door opens, it is to release a spirit of annihilation which the concerted efforts of Tinta- giles' sisters can neither restrain nor force back. In The Blue Bird we are shown that a man can- not die so long as he dwells in the memory of those who loved him. In his latest work Maeterlinck gives to the dead an objective existence. In part each generation survives its own death and transmits to its successors the heritage of aspiration and achievement, of knowledge and passion, which it has received from its predecessors; in greater part the objective existence is founded on new modes of INTRODUCTION vii communication, a new study of psychic relationship and a new belief in a subliminal state. I have collected in the present volume a selec- tion of essays illustrating the later stages of Maeter- linck's quest. Never in history have so many women and men, stricken suddenly and without warning, sought so unanimously and painfully to penetrate the veil wherein the world's oldest mys- tery is shrouded. The finality of death was a chal- lenge flung down and eagerly taken up by all whom the loss of son or brother had taken unawares. To Maeterlinck the war has brought in great part the annihilation of a people, his own people; it has inspired him to a splendour of indignation and pity; but, more gravely and urgently than ever before, it has demanded of him an answer to the question 'of the Sadducees, who "say there is no resurrection." Readers wishing to study the complete series of essays from which the sixteen in this volume are taken will find them in the three books entitled, Our Eternity, The Unknown Guest and The Wrack of the Storm, all of which are issued by the present publishers. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Chelsea, 9 April 1917. CONTENTS CHA.FTEB PA8E INTRODUCTION V • I. OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 3 n. ANNIHILATION 25 III. COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD .... 33 IV. THE FATE OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS .... 65 -V. TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 81 VI. OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES .... 99 VII. CONCLUSIONS 117 'VIII. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE . ... 129 IX. HEROISM 213 X. ON REREADING THUCYDIDES 227 ,-XI. THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 243 XII. IN MEMORIAM 253 XIII. THE LIFE OF THE DEAD 257 XIV. THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 267 XV. THE WILL OF EARTH 281 . XVI. WHEN THE WAR IS OVER 293 OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH IT has been well said: "Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, where we shall not be. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval be- tween death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me — ^to me who am to die outright — of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion ! They call me a mas- ter because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the pres- ence of death !" ^ * Marie Len^ru, hea Afranchis, Act III., sc. iv. 3 4 THE LIGHT BEYOND 2 That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it but thrives upon our fears. He who seeks to forget it has his memory filled with it ; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. It clouds everything with its shadow. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head. All the forces which might avail to face death we exhaust in averting our will from it. We deliver it into the groping hands of instinct and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surpris- ing that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous of ideas — being the most persistent and the most inevitable — remains the flimsiest and the only one that is a laggard? How should we know the one power which we never look in the face? How could it have profited by OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 5 gleams kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive. We do not begin to think of death until we have no longer the strength, I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us from another century would have difficulty in recognis- ing, in the depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of his love or of his universe ; but the figure of death, when everything has changed around it and when even that which com- poses it and upon which it depends has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence, grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has not, so to speak, retouched it in any way. Though we may no longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most sceptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable. And there- fore, when the impending hour strikes to which we 6 THE LIGHT BEYOND dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas M hereon, without examining them, we had meant to lean give way like rushes beneath the weight of the last minutes. In vain we seek a refuge among re- flexions which are illusive or are strange to us and which do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror. 3 Bossuet, the great poet of the tomb, says : "It is not worthy of a Christian" — and I would add, of a man — "to postpone his struggle with death until the moment when it arrives to carry him off." It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and stand by it. He would say to death: "I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you were not: that is enough to prevent you from becoming mine." He would thus bear, graven on his memory, a OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 7 tried image against which the last agony would not prevail and from which the phantom-stricken eyes would draw fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his existence, where would be gathered, like angels of peace, the most lucid, the most rare- fied thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown? 4 "The doctors and the priests," said Napoleon, "have long been making death grievous." And Bacon wrote: "Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa." Let us, then, learn to look upon death as it is in itself, free from the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it. Thus we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not just. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They form part of life and not of death. We readily forget 8 THE LIGHT BEYOND the most cruel sufferings that restore us to health ; and the first sun of convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before it. Not a tear but is remem- bered and used as a reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts a term to them. In point of fact, whereas sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the last, terrible second of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, naked, disarmed, abandoned by all and stripped of every- thing, into an unknown that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the soul of man has ever felt. OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 9 It is doubly unjust to impute the tomients of that second to death. We shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himsejf the unknown into which death flings us. Let us con- fine ourselves here to the last struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the watchers, at least ; for very often the consciousness of him whom death has brought to bay is already greatly dulled and per- ceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which it seems to be enduring. All doc- tors consider it their first duty to prolong to the uttermost even the cruellest pangs of the most hope- less agony. Who has not, at the bedside of a dying man, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so great a cer- tainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their revolt and recoil before a law which all recognise and revere as the highest law of man's conscience. 10 THE LIGHT BEYOND 6 One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbar- ous. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have long since died out in the intelligence of men. That is why the doctors act as though convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that every minute gained amid the most intoler- able sufferings is snatched from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and of two evils, to avoid that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the only real one. Besides, in thus post- poning the end of a torture, which, as old Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are but yielding to the unanimous error which makes its enclosing circle more iron-bound every day: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the agony. 7 The doctors, on their side, say or might say that. OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 11 in the present stage of science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of insupportable torments, might be murder. Doubt- less there is not one chance in a hundred thousand that the patient escape. No matter : if that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a few days, or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not be the real life, but much rather, as the Romans called it, "an extended death," those hundred thousand useless torments will not have been in vain. A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures. Here we have, face to face, two values that can- not be compared ; and, if we mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which we see with all that remains to us, that is to say, with every imaginable pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts and which is heavy enough to raise by a hair's-breadth the other scale that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of another world. 8 Swollen by so many adventitious horrors, the 12 THE LIGHT BEYOND horror of death becomes such that, without reason- ing, we accept the doctor's reasons. And yet there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree. They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to deaden, at least to dull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them would have dared to do so ; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate and, like misers, measure out nig- gardly drops of the clemency and peace which they ought to lavish and which they grudge in their dread of weakening the last resistance, that is to say, the most useless and painful quiverings of reluctant life refusing to give place to on-coming rest. It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater daring. It is enough to state once more that all this has no concern with death. It happens before it and beneath it. It is not the arrival of death but the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death but life that we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it is life that wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten from every side at the approach of death, but not at its call; and, though they gather round it, they did not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of the fatigue that oppresses you if you do not yield to it? OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 13 All those strugglings, those waitings, those tossings, those tragic cursings are on the side of the slope to which we cling and not on the other side. They are, indeed, accidental and temporary and emanate only from our ignorance. All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesi- tate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty ; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently every evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and the sick man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no physical nor meta- physical reason why the advent of death should not be as salutary as that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be nothing else to take into considera- tion, it will be possible to surround death with pro- founder ecstasies and fairer dreams. In any case and from this day, with death once acquitted of that which goes before, it will be easier to look upon it without fear and to lighten that which comes after. 14 THE LIGHT BEYOND 9 Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it. The first has neither face nor form and permeates the whole region of our mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as powerful. The latter strikes all our senses. Let us examine it first. Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add to the dread which it in- spires all that happens beyond it, thus doing it the same injustice at its going as at its coming. Is it death that digs our graves and orders us to keep that which is made to disappear? If we cannot think without horror of what befalls the beloved in the grave, is it death or we that placed him there? Because death carries the spirit to some place un- known, shall we reproach it with our bestowal of the body which it leaves with us ? Death descends into our midst to change the place of a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone. For it is already far away when we begin the frightful work which we try hard to prolong to the very utmost, as though we were persuaded that it is our only security against forgetfulness. I am well OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 15 aware that, from any other than the human point of view, this proceeding is very innocent; and that, looked upon from a sufficient height, decomposing flesh is no more repulsive than a fading flower or a crumbling stone. But, when all is said, it offends our senses, shocks our memory, daunts our courage, whereas it would be so easy for us to avoid the foul ordeal. Purified by fire, the remembrance lives en- throned as a beautiful idea ; and death is naught but an immortal birth cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and happiest na- tions in history. .What happens in our graves pois- ons our thoughts together with our bodies. The figure of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial ; and the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart but also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the ultimate background of life the great image upon which men's eyes linger in consolation or despair. 10 There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us lose no time in putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left there. 16 THE LIGHT BEYOND Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they are not proved, but for them to estabhsh that they are true. Now not one of them brings us a proof before which an honest intelligence can bow. Now would it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for man lawfully to believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the proof would need to be ir- resistible. The God offered to us by the best and strongest of them has given us our reason to employ loyally and fully, that is to say, to try to attain, be- fore all and in all things, that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should accept, in spite of it, a belief whose doubtfulness, from the human point of view, is not denied by its wisest and most ardent defenders? He only offers us a very uncertain story, which, even if scientifically sub- stantiated, would be merely a beautiful lesson in morality and which is buttressed by prophecies and miracles no less doubtful. Must we here call to mind that Pascal, to defend that creed which was already tottering at a time when it seemed at its zenith, vainly attempted a demonstration the mere aspect of which would be enough to destroy the last remnant of faith in a wavering mind? Better than any other, he knew the stock proofs of the theolo- OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 17 gians, for they had been the sole study of the last years of his life. If but one of these proofs could have resisted examination, his genius, one of the three or four most profound and lucid geniuses ever known to mankind, must have given it an irresistible force. But he does not linger over these arguments, whose weakness he feels too well; he pushes them scornfully aside, he glories and, in a manner, re- joices in their futility: "Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their faith, those who profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in presenting it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitimn; and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word; it is in being destitute of proofs that they are not destitute of sense." His sohtary argument, the one to which he clings desperately and devotes all the power of his genius, is the very condition of man in the universe, that incomprehensible medley of greatness and wretch- edness, for which there is no accounting save by the mystery of the first fall : "For man is more incomprehensible without that 18 THE LIGHT BEYOND mystery than the mystery itself is incomprehensible to man." He is therefore reduced to establishing the truth of the Scriptures by an argument drawn from the very Scriptures in question; and — what is more serious — to explain a wide and great and indis- putable mystery by another, small, narrow and crude mystery that rests only upon the legend which it is his business to prove. And, let us observe in passing, it is a fatal thing to replace one mystery by another and lesser mystery. In the hierarchy of the unknown, mankind always ascends from the smaller to the greater. On the other hand, to descend from the greater to the smaller is to relapse into the condition of primitive man, who carries his barbarism to the point of replacing the infinite by a fetish or an amulet. The measure of man's greatness is the greatness of the mysteries which he cultivates or on which he dwells. To return to Pascal, he feels that everything is crmnbling around him; and so, in the collapse of human reason, he at last offers us the monstrous wager that is the supreme avowal of the bankruptcy and despair of his faith. God, he says, meaning his OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 19 God and the Christian religion with all its precepts and all its consequences, exists or does not exist. We are unable, by human arguments, to prove that He exists or that He does not exist. "If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehen- sible, because, having neither divisions nor bounds, He has no relation to us. We are therefore in- capable of knowing either what He is or if He is." God is or is not. "But to which side shall we lean? Reason can determine nothing about it. There is an infinite gulf that separates us. A game is played at the uttermost part of this infinite distance, in which heads may turn up or tails. Which will you wager? There is no reason for betting on either one or the other; you cannot reasonably defend either." The correct course would be not to wager at all. "Yes, but you must wager: this is not a matter for your will; you are launched in it." Not to wager that God exists means wagering that He does not exist, for which He will punish you eternally. What then do you risk by wagering, at all hazards, that He exists? If He does not, you lose a few small pleasures, a few wretched com- forts of this life, because your little sacrifice will 20 THE LIGHT BEYOND not have been rewarded; if He exists, you gain an eternity of unspeakable happiness. " 'It is ti-ue, but, in spite of all, I am so made that I cannot believe.' "Never mind, follow the way in which they be- gan who believe and who at first did not believe either, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That in itself will make you believe and will reduce you to the level of the beasts." " 'But that is just what I am afraid of.' "Why? What have you to lose?" Nearly three centuries of apologetics have not added one useful argument to that terrible and despairing page of Pascal. And this is all that human intelligence has found to compel our life. If the God who demands our faith will not have us decide by our reason, by what then must our choice be made? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some sesthetic or sentimental pitch- and-toss? Or has He set within us another higher and surer faculty, before which the understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If this God punishes us for not having blindly fol- lowed a faith that does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He gave us; if He OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 21 chastises us for not having made, in the presence of the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which is rejected by that best and most divine part which He has implanted in us, we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a cruel and incom- prehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith that injustice may load us, they ^ill be less intolerable than the eternal presence of its Author. II ANNIHILATION II ANNIHILATION 1 AND now we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was there; we know only what is not there. It is the vaster by all that we have learned to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific certainty to break through its darkness — for man has the right to hope for that which he does not yet conceive — the only point that interests us, because it is situated in the little circle which our actual intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not. Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day; survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival in the 25 26 THE LIGHT BEYOND universal consciousness, or with a consciousness dif- ferent from that which we possess in this world. Total annihilation is impossible. /We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not see. To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it into nothingness, nothing- ness would have to exist; and, if it exists, under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to analyse it, to define it, or to understand it, thought and expressions fail us, or create that which they are struggling to deny. It is as con- trary to the nature of our reason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to ANNIHILATION 27 conceive limits to infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative infinity, a sort of infinity of dark- ness opposed to that which our inteUigence strives to illumine, or rather it is but a child-name or nick- name which our mind has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we call nothingness all that escapes our senses or our reason and exists without our knowledge. 3 But, it will perhaps be said, though the anniliila- tion of every world and every thing be impossible, it is not so certain that their death is impossible; and, to us, what is the difference between nothing- ness and everlasting death ? Here again we are led astray by our imagination and by words. We can no more conceive death than we can conceive nothingness. We use the word death to cover those fragments of nothingness which we believe that we understand; but, on closer examination, we are bound to recognise that our idea of death is much too puerile to contain the least truth. It reaches no higher than our own bodies and cannot measure the destinies of the universe. We give the name of death to anything that has a life a little different 28 THE LIGHT BEYOND from ours. Even so do we act towards a world that appears to us motionless and frozen, the moon, for instance, because we are persuaded that any form of existence, animal or vegetable, is extinguished upon it for ever. But it is now some years since we learned that the most inert matter, to outward seem- ing, is animated by movements so powerful and furious that all animal or vegetable life is no more than sleep and immobility by the side of the swirling eddies and immeasurable energy locked up in a wayside stone. "There is no room for death!" cried Emily Bronte. But, even if, in the infinite series of the centuries, all matter should really become inert and motion- less, it would none the less persist under one form or another; and persistence, though it were in total immobility, would, after all, be but a form of life stable and silent at last. All that dies falls into life; and all that is born is of the same age as that which dies. If death carried us to nothingness, did birth then draw us out of that same nothingness? Why should the second be more impossible than the first? The higher human thought rises and the wider it expands, the less comprehensible do noth- ANNIHILATION 29 ingness and death become. In any case — and this is what matters here— if nothingness were possible, since it could not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful. Ill COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD Ill COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD THE spiritualists communicate or think that they communicate with the dead by means of what they call automatic speech and writing. These are obtained by the agency of a medium ^ in a state of ecstasy, or rather "trance," * Those who take up the study of these supernormal manifestations usually ask themselves: "Why mediums? Why make use of these often questionable and always inadequate intermediaries?" The reason is that, hitherto, no way has been discovered of doing without them. If we admit the spiritualistic theory, the discarnate spirits which surround us on every side and which are separated from us by the impenetrable and mysterious wall of death seek, in order to communicate with us, the line of least resistance between the two worlds and find it in the medium, without our knowing why, even as we do not know why an electric current passes along copper wire and is stopped by glass or porcelain. If, on the other hand, we admit the telepathic hypothesis, which is the more probable, we observe that the thoughts, intentions or suggestions transmitted are, in the majority of cases, not conveyed from one subconscious intelli- gence to another. There is need of an organism that is, at the same time, a receiver and a transmitter; and this organism is found in the medium. Why? Once more, we know absolutely nothing about 33 34 THE LIGHT BEYOND to employ the vocabulary of the new science. This condition is not one of hypnotic sleep, nor does it seem to be an hysterical manifestation; it is often associated, as in the case of the medium Mrs. Piper, with perfect health and complete intellectual and physical balance. It is rather the more or less vol- untary emergence of a second or subliminal per- sonality or consciousness of the medium; or, if we admit the spiritualistic hypothesis, his occupation, his "psychic invasion," as Myers calls it, by forces from another world. In the "entranced" subject, the normal consciousness and personality are en- tirely done away with; and he replies "automati- cally," sometimes by word of mouth, more often in writing, to the questions put to him. It has hap- pened that he speaks and writes simultaneously, his voice being occupied by one spirit and his hand by another, who thus carry on two independent con- versations. More rarely, the voice and the two it, even as we do not know why one body or combination of bodies is sensitive to concentric waves in wireless telegraphy, while another is not affected by it. We are here groping, as indeed we grope almost everywhere, in the obscure domain of undisputed but inexplicable facts. Those who care to possess more precise notions on the theory of mediumism will do well to read the admirable address delivered by Sir William Crookes, as president of the S.P.R., on the 29th of January 1897. COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 35 hands are "possessed" at one and the same time; and we receive three different communications. Obviously, manifestations of this sort lend them- selves to frauds and impostures of all kinds ; and the distrust aroused is at first invincible. But there are some that make their appearance encompassed with such guarantees of good faith and sincerity, so often, so long and so rigorously checked by scien- tific men of unimpeachable character and authority and of originally inflexible scepticism, that it be- comes difficult to maintain a suspicion at the finish.^ ^The questions of fraud and imposture are naturally the first that suggest themselves when we begin to study these phenomena. But the slightest acquaintance with the life, habits and proceedings of the three or four leading mediums is enough to remove even the faintest shadow of suspicion. Of all the explanations conceivable, that one which attributes everything to imposture and trickery is unquestionably the most extraordinary and the least probable. More- o%'er, by reading Richard Hodgson's report entitled, Observations of certain Phenomena of Trance (Proceedings, Vols. VIII. and XIII.) and also J. H. Hyslop's report {Proceedings, Vol. XVI.), we can observe the precautions taken, even to the extent of employing special detectives, to make certain that Mrs. Piper, for instance, was unable, normally and humanly speaking, to have any knowledge of the facts which she revealed. I repeat, from the moment that one enters upon this study, all suspicions are dispelled without leaving a trace behind them; and we are soon convinced that the key to the riddle must not be sought in imposture. All the manifestations of the dumb, mysterious and oppressed personality that lies concealed in every one of us have to undergo the same ordeal in their turn; and those which relate to the divining-rod, to name no others, are at this mo- ment passing through the same crisis of incredulity. Less than fifty years ago, most of the hypnotic phenomena which are now scientifi- 36 THE LIGHT BEYOND Unfortunately, I am not able to enter here into the details of some of these purely scientific sittings, those for instance of Mrs. Piper, the famous me- dium with whom F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodg- son, Professor Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Oliver Lodge and William James worked during a number of years. On the other hand, it is precisely the accumulation and coincidences of these abnormal details which gradu- ally produce and confirm the conviction that we are in the presence of an entirely new, improbable but genuine phenomenon, which is sometimes difficult of classification among exclusively terrestrial phe- nomena. I should have to devote to these "com- munications" a special study which would exceed the limits of this essay ; and I will therefore content myself with referring those who care to know more of the subject to Sir Oliver Lodge's book. The Sur- vival of Man; and, above all, to the twenty-five bulky volumes of the Proceedings of the S.P.R., notably to the report and comments of William James on the Piper-Hodgson sittings in Vol. XXIII. and to Vol. XIII. , where Hodgson ex- cally classified were likewise looked upon as fraudulent. It seems that man is loth to admit that there lie within him many more things than he imagined. COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 37 amines the facts and arguments that may be ad- duced for or against the agency of the dead; and, lastly, to Myers' great work, Human Personality and its Survival after Bodily Death. The "entranced" mediums are invaded or pos- sessed by different familiar spirits to whom the new science gives the somewhat inappropriate and ambiguous name of "controls." Thus, Mrs. Piper is visited in succession by Phinuit, George Pelham, or "G.P.," Imperator, Doctor and Rector. Mrs. Thompson, another very celebrated medium, has Nelly for her usual tenant, while graver and more illustrious personages would take possession of Stainton JNIoses, a clergyman. Each of these spirits retains a sharply defined character, which is con- sistent throughout and which, moreover, for the most part bears no relation to that of the medium. Amongst these, Phinuit and Nelly are undoubtedly the most attractive, the most original, the most living, the most active and, above all, the most talkative. They centralise the communications after a fashion; they come and go officiously; and, should any one of those present wish to be brought oVsLi^^ 38 THE LIGHT BEYOND into touch with the soul of a deceased relative or friend, they fly in search of it, find it amid the invisible throng, usher it in, announce its presence, speak in its name, transmit and, so to speak, trans- late the questions and replies ; for it seems that it is very difficult for the dead to communicate with the living and that they need special aptitudes and a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances. We will not yet examine what they have to reveal to us ; but to see them tlius fluttering to and fro amid the multitude of their discarnate brothers and sisters gives us a first impression of the next world which is none too reassuring; and we say to ourselves that the dead of to-day are strangely like those whom Ulysses conjured up out of the Cimmerian darkness three thousand years ago: pale and empty shades, bewildered, incoherent, puerile and terror-stricken, like unto dreams, more numerous than the leaves that fall in autumn and, like them, trembling in the unknown winds from the vast plains of the other world. They no longer even have enough life to be unhappy ; and they seem to drag out, we know not where, a precarious and idle existence, to wander aimlessly, to hover round us, slumbering, or chat- tering among one another of the minor matters of COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 39 this world ; and, when a gap is made in their dark- ness, to hasten from all sides, like flocks of famished birds, hungering for light and the sound of a human voice. And, in spite of ourselves, we think of the Odyssey and the sinister words of the shade of Achilles as it issued from Erebus: "Do not, O illustrious Ulysses, speak to me of death; I would wish, being on earth, to serve for hire with another man of no estate, who had not much livelihood, rather than rule over all the de- parted dead." 3 What have these latterday dead to tell us? To begin with, it is a remarkable thing that they appear to be much more interested in events here below than in those of the world wherein they move. They seem, above all, jealous to establish their identity, to prove that they still exist, that they recognise us, that they know everything; and, to convince us of this, they enter into the most minute and forgotten details with extraordinary precision, perspicacity and prolixity. They are also extremely clever at unravelling the intricate family connec- tions of the person actually questioning them, of 40 THE LIGHT BEYOND any of the sitters, or even of a stranger entering the room. They recall this one's little infirmities, that one's maladies, the eccentricities or personal tenden- cies of a third. They have cognisance of events taking place at a distance: they see, for instance, and describe to their hearers in London an insignifi- cant episode in Canada. In a word, they say and do almost all the disconcerting and inexplicable things that are sometimes obtained from a first-rate medimn; perhaps they even go a little further; but there comes from it all no breath, no glimmer of the hereafter, not even the something vaguely promised and vaguely w^aited for. We shall be told that the mediums are visited only by inferior spirits, incapable of tearing them- selves from earthly cares and soaring towards greater and loftier ideas. It is possible; and no doubt we are wrong to believe that a spirit stripped of its body can suddenly be transformed and reach, in a moment, the level of our imaginings ; but could they not at least inform us where they are, what they feel and what they do ? 4 And now it seems that death itself has elected to COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 41 answer these objections. Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson and WilHam James, who so often, for long and ardent hours, questioned Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson and obhged the departed to speak by their mouths, are now themselves among the shades, on the other side of the curtain of darkness. They at least knew exactly what to do in order to reach us, what to reveal in order to allay the uneasy curiosity of men. Myers in particular, the most ardent, the most convinced, the most impatient of the veil that parted him from the eternal realities, formally promised those who were continuing his work that he would make every imaginable effort out yonder, in the unknown, to come to their aid in a decisive fashion. He kept his word. A month after his death, when Sir Oliver Lodge was ques- tioning Mrs. Thompson in her trance, Nelly, the medium's familiar spirit, suddenly declared that she had seen Myers, that he was not yet fully awake, but that he hoped to come, at nine o'clock in the evening, and "communicate" with his old friend of the Psychical Society. The sitting was suspended and resumed at half past eight; and Myers' "communication" was at last obtained. He was recognised by the first few 42 THE LIGHT BEYOND words he spoke; it was really he; he had not changed. Faithful to his idiosyncrasy when on earth, he at once insisted on the necessity for taking notes. But he seemed dazed. They spoke to him of the Society for Psychical Research, the sole in- terest of his life. He had lost all recollection of it. Then memory gradually revived; and there followed a quantity of post-mortem gossip on the subject of the society's next president, the obituary article in the Times, the letters that should be pub- lished and so on. He complained that people would not let him rest, that there was not a place in England where they did not ask for him: "Call Myers ! Bring Myers !" He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the mediums: "they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines of Virgil." ^ As for his present condition, "he groped his way as if through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his way in a strange town . . . and, even when he saw ^ In this and other "communications," I have quoted the actual English words employed, whenever I have been able to discover them. — Translator. COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 43 people that he knew were dead, he thought they were only visions." This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about all that we obtained from Myers' "control" or "impersonation," of which better things had been expected. The "communi- cation" and many others which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers' habits, character and ways of thinking and speaking would possess some value if none of those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand, they are most probably but reminis- cences of a secondary personality of the medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters. 5 A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the names connected with it, is that which is known as "]Mrs. Piper's Hodg- son-Control." Professor William James devotes an account of over a hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the Proceedings. Dr. Hodg- son, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American 44 THE LIGHT BEYOND branch of the S.P.R., of which Wilham James was vice-president. For many years, he devoted him- self to Mrs. Piper the medium, working with her twice a week and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject of posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death; and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape and that "he would make it hot for them." He did come back, a week after his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs. Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during several sittings at which William James was pres- ent. I should like to give an idea of these manifes- tations. But, as the celebrated Harvard professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sit- ting of this kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain for the emotion experi- enced on thus finding yourself in the presence of an invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but anticipates your thoughts, un- COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 45 derstands before you have finished speaking, grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or smiling. The life of the dead man, which, dur- ing a strange hour, had, so to speak, surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for the second time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt supplies the best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion ; but it is not certain that here, as in many other cases where the unknown predominates, logic is the only road that leads to the truth. "When I first undertook," says William James, "to collate this series of sittings and make the pres- ent report, I supposed that my verdict would be determined by pure logic. Certain minute inci- dents, I thought, ought to make for spirit-return or against it in a 'crucial' way. But watching my mind work as it goes over the data, convinces me that exact logic plays only a preparatory part in shaping our conclusions here ; and that the decisive vote, if there be one, has to be cast by what I may call one's general sense of dramatic probability, which sense ebbs and flows from one hypothesis to another — it does so in the present writer at least — in a rather illogical manner. If one sticks to the 46 THE LIGHT BEYOND detail, one may draw an anti-spiritist conclusion; if one thinks more of what the whole mass may signify, one may well incline to spiritist interpre- tations." ^ And, at the end of his article, he sums up in the following words : "Z myself feel as if an external will to communi- cate were probably there, that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper's dream-life, even equipped with 'telepathic' powers, accounts for all the results found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be Hodgson's, or be some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I re- main uncertain and await more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty or a hundred years." ^ As we see, William James is inclined to waver; and at certain points in his account he appears to waver still more and indeed to say deliberately that the spirits "have a finger in the pie." These hesi- tations on the part of a man who has revolutionised our psychological ideas and who possessed a brain ^Proceedings, Vol. XXIII., p. 33. ''Ibid, p. 120. COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 47 as wonderfully organised and well-balanced as that or our own Taine, for instance, are very significant. As a doctor of medicine and a professor of philoso- phy, sceptical by nature and scrupulously faithful to experimental methods, he was thrice qualified to conduct investigations of this kind to a successful conclusion. It is not a question of allowing our- selves, in our turn, to be unduly influenced by those hesitations; but, in any case, they show that the problem is a serious one, the gravest, perhaps, if the facts were beyond dispute, which we have had to solve since the coming of Christ; and that we must not expect to dismiss it with a shrug or a laugh. 6 I am obliged, for lack of space, to refer those who wish to form an opinion of their own on the "Piper- Hodgson" case to the text of the Proceedings. The case, at the same time, is far from being one of the most striking; it should rather be classed, were it not for the importance of the sitters concerned, among the minor successes of the Piper series. Hodgson, according to the invariable custom of the spirits, is, first of all, bent on making himself recog- 48 THE LIGHT BEYOND nised; and the inevitable, tedious string of trifling reminiscences begins twenty times over again and fills page after page. As usual in such instances, the recollections common to both the questioner and the spirit who is supposed to be replying are brought out in their most circumstantial, their most insignificant and also their most private details with astonishing eagerness, precision and vivacity. And observe that, for all these details, which he discloses with such extraordinary facility, the dead man answering seeks by preference, one would say, the most hidden and forgotten treasures of the living listener's memory. He spares him nothing; he harps on everything with childish satisfaction and apprehensive solicitude, not so much to persuade others as to prove to himself that he still exists. And the obstinacy of this poor invisible being, in striving to manifest himself through the hitherto uncrannied doors that separate us from our eternal destinies, is at once ridiculous and tragic: "Do you remember, William, when we were in the country at So-and-so's, that game we played with the children; do you remember my saying such-and-such a thing when I was in that room where there was such-and-such a chair or table?" COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 49 "Why, yes, Hodgson, I do remember now." "A good test, that?" "First-rate, Hodgson!" And so on, indefinitely. Sometimes, there is a more significant incident that seems to surpass the mere transmission of subliminal thought. They are talking, for instance, of a frustrated marriage which was always surrounded with great mystery, even to Hodgson's most intimate friends : "Do you remember a lady-doctor in New York, a member of our society?" "No, but what about her?" "Her husband's name was Blair ... I think." "Do you mean Dr. Blair Thaw?" "Oh, yes. Ask Mrs. Thaw if I did not at a din- ner-party mention something about the lady. I may have done so." James writes to Mrs. Thaw, who declares that, as a matter of fact, fifteen years before, Hodgson had said to her that he had just proposed to a girl and been refused. Mrs. Thaw and Dr. Newbold were the only people in the world who knew the par- ticulars. But to come to the further sittings. Among other points discussed is the financial position of the 50 THE LIGHT BEYOND American branch of the S.P.R., a position which, at the death of the secretary, or rather factotum, Hodgson, was anything but briUiant. And be- hold the somewhat strange spectacle of different members of the society debating its affairs with their defunct secretary. Shall they dissolve? Shall they amalgamate? Shall they send the materials collected, most of which are Hodgson's, to Eng- land? They consult the dead man; he replies, gives good advice, seems fully aware of all the com- plications, all the difficulties. One day, in Hodg- son's lifetime, when the society was found to be short of funds, an anonymous donor had sent the sum necessary to relieve it from embarrassment. Hodgson alive did not know who the donor was; Hodgson dead picks him out among those present, addresses him by name and thanks him publicly. On another occasion, Hodgson, like all the spirits, complains of the extreme difficulty which he finds in conveying his thought through the alien organ- ism of the medium: "I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat," he says. But, when, after so much idle chatter, William James at last puts the essential questions that burn COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 51 our lips — "Hodgson, what have you to tell us about the other life?" — the dead man becomes shifty and does nothing but seek evasions : "It is not a vague fantasy but a reality," he replies. "But," Mrs. William James insists, "do you live as we do, as men do?" "What does she say?" asks the spirit, pre- tending not to understand. "Do you live as men do?" repeats William James. "Do you wear clothing and live in houses?" adds his wife. "Oh yes, houses, but not clothing. No, that is absurd. Just wait a moment, I am going to get out." "You will come back again?" "Yes." "He has got to go out and get his breath," re- marks another spirit, named Rector, suddenly in- tervening. It has not been waste of time, perhaps, to repro- duce the general features of one of these sittings which may be regarded as typical. I will add, in order to give an idea of the farthest point which it is 52 THE LIGHT BEYOND possible to attain, the following instance of an experiment made by Sir Oliver Lodge and related by him. He handed Mrs. Piper, in her "trance," a gold watch which had just been sent him by one of his uncles and which belonged to that uncle's twin brother, who had died twenty years before. When the watch was in her possession, Mrs. Piper, or rather Phinuit, one of her familiar spirits, began to relate a host of details concerning the childhood of this twin brother, facts dating back for more than sixty-six years and of course unknown to Sir Oliver Lodge. Soon after, the surviving uncle, who lived in another town, wrote and confirmed the accuracy of most of these details, which he had quite forgot- ten and of which he was only now reminded by the medium's revelations; while those which he could not recollect at all were subsequently declared to be in accordance with fact by a third uncle, an old sea-captain, who lived in Cornwall and who had not the least notion why such strange questions were put to him. I quote this instance not because it has any ex- ceptional or decisive value, but simply, I repeat, by way of an example; for, like the case connected with Mrs. Thaw, mentioned above, it marks pretty COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 53 accurately the extreme points to which people have up to now, thanks to spirit agency, penetrated the mysteries of the unknown. It is well to add that cases in which the suj^posed limits of the most far- reaching telepathy are so manifestly exceeded are fairly uncommon. 7 Now what are we to think of all this ? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson and many others, who studied this problem at length, conclude in favour of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross. ^lust we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impos- sible for us to hesitate any longer between the tele- pathic theory and the spiritualistic theory? I do not think so. I have no prejudices — what were the use of having any, in these mysteries? — no reluct- ance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead ; but it is wise and necessary, before leav- ing the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the supposi- tions, all the explanations there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifes- tations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, 54 THE LIGHT BEYOND whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, there- fore, that we should stay in our own world, as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not piti- lessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to at- tribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead ; but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists. Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we know^ — transmission of thought from one subcon- scious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance — occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people any series of communications or revelations similar to COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 55 those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can compare with them for continuity or lucidity. But, though the quality of the phe- nomena will not bear comparison, it cannot be de- nied that their inner nature is identical. Our logical inference is that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensi- tiveness, the power of the medium. For the rest, Mr. J. G. Piddington, who devoted an exceedingly detailed study to Mrs. Thompson, plainly perceived in her, when she was not "entranced" and when there were no spirits whatever in question, mani- festations inferior, it is true, but absolutely analo- gous to those involving the dead.^ These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably uncon- sciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by beings who have crossed to the farther side of the mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither * For a discussion of these cases, which would take us too far from our subject, see Mr. J. G. Piddington's paper. Phenomena in Mrs. Thompson's Trance (Proceedings, Vol. XVIII., pp. 180 et seq.) ; also Professor A. C. Pigou's article in Vol. XXIII. (Proceedings, pp. 286 et seq.). 56 THE LIGHT BEYOND lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts. Well, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. In the story of Sir Oliver Lodge's watch, for instance, which is one of the most charac- teristic and one which carries us farther than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have ceased to be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by perception of events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoy- ance, with the two surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch ; and, in the past sub- consciousness of those two brothers, distant from each other, she had to rediscover a host of circum- stances which they themselves had forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust and darkness of six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of this kind passes the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse to credit COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 57 it if, first of all, the experiment had not been con- trolled and certified by a man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge and if, moreover, it did not form one of a group of equally significant facts which clearly show that we are not here concerned with an absolutely unique miracle or with an unlioped-for and unprecedented concourse of coincidences. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoj^ance and telepathy raised to the highest power ; and these three manifestations of the unex- plored depths of man are to-day recognised and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained : that is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential and resist- ance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward essence we are utterly ignorant ; and we must needs be content with these, pending any better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difFerence of extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind. 58 THE LIGHT BEYOND 8 For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that no one, neither the medium nor the witnesses, should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man, in other words, that every living link should be elimin- ated. I do not believe that this has actually oc- curred up to the present, nor even that it is possible ; in any case, it would be very difficult to control such an experiment. Be this as it may. Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which — as the others were of very much the same nature — I will merely mention one of the most striking.^ In the course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood ; and the revelations were plentiful, exact and easy. In this extremely favourable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his ^Proceedings, Vol. XIII., pp. 349-350 and 375. COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 59 best friends, who had died a year before and whom he simply calls "A." This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity be- yond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now A "had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasional mental ex- haustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance." The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide. "If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one," says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), "if it is claimed that all the com- munications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintel- ligible that, after having obtained satisfactory re- sults from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had conse- quently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but in- coherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence. 60 THE LIGHT BEYOND that it is in the presence of a real, hving personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains indepen- dent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes." The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A's madness ; other- wise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man. 9 Of a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly every- thing, bar every road and all but deny to the spirits any power of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus re- strict themselves? Why do they jealously hug the COMMUNICATIONS WITH DEAD 61 narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there then no other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry around us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words ? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us; and the evidence of the darkness will at least pos- sess a grandeur that is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it to die, if all life's trivialities continue? Is it really worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal fields, in order to remem- ber that we had a great-uncle called Peter and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august and frozen 62 THE LIGHT BEYOND solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult for them, as they complain, to make them- selves understood through a strange and sleep- bound organism, they tell us enough categorical de- tails about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our body alone prevents us from approach- ing. There are a thousand things, large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a shadow separates us and not in foolish title-tattle of the past that they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to seek with such enthusiasm. Without de- manding a great miracle, one would nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which nothing now enthrals some other discourse than that which it avoided when it was still subject to matter. IV OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS IV OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS SURVIVAL with our present consciousness is nearly as impossible and nearly as incom- prehensible as total annihilation. More- over, even if it were admissible, it could not be dreadful. This is certain that, when the body dis- appears, all physical sufferings will disappear at the same time ; for we cannot imagine a spirit suffering in a body which it no longer possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all that we call mental or moral sufferings, seeing that all of them, if we examine them well, spring from the ties and habits of our senses. Our spirit feels the reaction of the sufferings of our body or of the bodies that sur- round it; it cannot suffer in itself or through itself. Slighted affection, shattered love, disappointments, failures, despair, betrayal, personal hmniliations, as well as the sorrows and the loss of those whom it loves, acquire their potent sting only by passing through the body which it animates. Outside its 65 66 THE LIGHT BEYOND own pain, which is the pain of not knowing, the spirit, once deHvered from its flesh, could suffer only in the recollection of the flesh. It is possible that it still grieves over the troubles of those whom it has left behind on earth. But to its eyes, since it no longer reckons the days, these troubles will seem so brief that it will not grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and knowing whither they lead, it will not behold their severity. The spu-it is insensible to all that is not happi- ness. It is made only for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It can grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those limits, when there are no more bonds to space and time, is already to transcend them. 2 It becomes a question of knowing whether that spirit, sheltered from all sorrow, will remain itself, will perceive and recognise itself in the bosom of in- finity and up to what point it is important that it should recognise itself. This brings us to the pro- blems of survival without consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of to-day Survival without consciousness seems at first ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 67 sight the more probable. From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the other side of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful, therefore, for those who prefer the easiest solution and the most consistent with the present state of human thought to limit their anxiety to that. They have nothing to dread; for, on close inspection, every fear, if any remained, should deck itself with hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer suffer; the mind, separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is extinguished, scattered and and lost in a boundless darkness ; and what comes is the great peace so often prayed for, the sleep with- out measure, without dreams and without awaken- ing. But this is only a solution that fosters indolence. If we press those who speak of survival without consciousness, we perceive that they mean only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and we have just seen that it is almost im- possible for that manner of consciousness to persist in infinity. Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that cosmic consciousness into which their own will fall. But this were to solve 68 THE LIGHT BEYOND very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the night, the greatest and most mysteri- ous question that can arise in a man's brain. 3 It is evident that, in the depths of our thought limited on every side, we shall never be able to form the least idea of an infinite consciousness. There is even an essential antinomy between the words con- sciousness and infinity. To speak of consciousness is to mean the most definite thing conceivable in the finite ; consciousness, properly speaking, is the finite self -concentrated in order to discover and feel its closest limits, to the end that it may enjoy them as closely as possibly. On the other hand, it is impos- sible for us to separate the idea of intelligence from the idea of consciousness. Any intelligence that does not seem capable of transforming itself into consciousness becomes for us a mysterious phenom- enon to which we give names more mysterious still, lest we should have to admit that we under- stand nothing of it at all. Now, on this little earth of ours, which is but a dot in space, we see expended in every scale of life, as for instance, in the wonder- ful combinations and organisms of the insect world, ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 69 a mass of intelligence so vast that our human in- telligence cannot even dream of assessing it. Everj'thing that exists — and man first of all — is in- cessantly drawing upon that inexhaustible reserve. .We are therefore irresistibly driven to ask ourselves if that cosmic intelligence is not the emanation of an infinite consciousness, or if it must not, sooner or later, elaborate one. And this sets us tossing be- tween two irreducible impossibilities. What is most probable is that here again we are judging every- thing from the lowlands of our anthropomorphism. At the sunmiit of our infinitesimal life, we see only intelligence and consciousness, the extreme point of thought; and from this we infer that, at the sum- mits of all lives, there could be naught but intelli- gence and consciousness, whereas these perhaps oc- cupy only an inferior place in the hierarchy of spiritual or other possibilities. 4 Survival absolutely denuded of consciousness would, therefore, be possible only if we deny the existence of a cosmic consciousness. When once we admit this consciousness, under whatsoever form, we are bound to share in it; and, up to a cer- 70 THE LIGHT BEYOND tain point, the question is indistinguishable from that of the continuance of a more or less modi- fied consciousness. There is, for the moment, no hope of solving it; but we are free to grope in its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at all points. Here begins the open sea. Here begins the splendid adventure, the only one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a form of life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth ; and soon our mind will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad expectation that greets a birth. Suppose that a child in its mother's womb were endowed with a certain consciousness; that unborn twins, for instance, could, in some obscure fashion, exchange their impressions and communicate their hopes and fears to each other. Having known naught but the warm maternal shades, they would not feel straitened nor unhappy there. They would probably have no other idea than to prolong as long as possible that life of abundance free from cares and of sleep free from alarms. But, if, even ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 71 as we are aware that we must die, they too knew that they must be born, that is to say, that they must suddenly leave the shelter of that gentle dark- ness and bandon for ever that captive but peaceful existence, to be precipitated into an absolutely different, unimaginable and boundless world, how great w^ould be their anxieties and their fears ! And yet there is no reason why our own anxieties and fears should be more justified or less ridiculous. The character, the spirit, the intentions, the benevo- lence or the indifference of the unknown to which we are subject do not alter between our birth and our death. We remain always in the same infinity, in the same universe. It is perfectly reasonable and legitimate to persuade ourselves that the tomb is no more dreadful than the cradle. It would even be legitimate and reasonable to accept the cradle only on account of the tomb. If, before being born, we were permitted to choose between the great peace of non-existence and a life that should not be completed by the glorious hour of death, which of us, knowing what he ought to know, would accept the disquieting problem of an exist- ence that would not lead to the reassuring mystery of its end? Which of us would wish to come into 72 THE LIGHT BEYOND a world where we can learn so little, if he did not know that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more? The best thing about life is that it pre- pares this hour for us, that it is the one and only road leading to the magic gateway and into that in- comparable mj^stery where misfortunes and suffer- ings will no longer be possible, because we shall have lost the body that produced them ; where the worst that can befall us is the dreamless sleep which we number among the greatest boons on earth ; where, lastly, it is almost unimaginable that a thought should not survive to mingle with the substance of the universe, that is to say, with infinity, which, if it be not a waste of indifference can be nothing but a sea of joy. Before fathoming that sea, let us remark to those who aspire to maintain their ego that they are call- ing for the sufferings which they dread. The ego implies limits. The ego cannot subsist except in so far as it is separated from that which surrounds it. The stronger the ego, the narrower its limits and the clearer the separation. The more painful too; for the mind, if it remain as we know it — and ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 73 we are not able to imagine it different — will no sooner have seen its limits than it will wish to over- step them; and, the more separated it feels, the greater will be its longing to unite with that which lies outside. There will therefore be an eternal struggle between its being and its aspirations. And really it would have served no object to be born and die only to arrive at these interminable contests. Have we not here yet one more proof that our ego, as we conceive it, could never subsist in the infinity where it must needs go, since it cannot go elsewhere? It behoves us therefore to clear away conceptions that emanate only from our body, even as the mists that veil the daylight from our sight emanate only from the lowlands. Pascal has said, once and for all: "The narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view." 6 On the other hand — for we must keep nothing back, nor turn from the adverse darkness should it seem nearest to the truth, nor show any bias — on the other hand, we can grant to those who yearn to remain as they are that the survivial of an atom of 74 THE LIGHT BEYOND themselves would suffice for a new entrance into an infinity from which their body no longer separates them. If it seems impossible that anything — a move- ment, a vibration, a radiation — should stop or dis- appear, why then should thought be lost? There will, no doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to allure the new ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that it will find in that bound- less environment, just as the other ego, on this earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since we have been able to acquire our pres- ent consciousness, why should it be impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear to us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day ; it is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much more chance than purpose has entered into it; and much more alien substance than any inborn substance which it con- tained. It is but a long series of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not become aware until the awakening of our memory; and its kernel, of which we do not know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less concrete than a thought. If the new environment which we enter on leaving ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 75 our mother's womb transforms us to such a point that there is, so to speak, no connection between the embryo that we w^ere and the man that we have become, is it not right to think that the far newer, stranger, wider and richer environment which we enter on quitting hfe will transform us even more? We can see in what happens to us here a figure of what awaits us elsewhere and can readily admit that our spiritual being, liberated from its body, if it does not mingle at the first onset with the infinite, will develop itself there gradually, will choose itself a substance and, no longer trammelled by space and time, will go on for ever growing. It is very possi- ble that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become the law of our future development. It is very possible that our best thoughts will welcome us on the far- ther shore and that the quality of our intellect will determine that of the infinite which crystallises around it. Every hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be addressed to happi- ness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us. It finds no place in the human imagination that methodically explores the future^ And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides over our existence in the other world, this existence, to pre- 76 THE LIGHT BEYOND sume the worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in this world the only narrow, grudging, obscure and sorrowful moment of our destiny. 7 We have said that the peculiar sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of not knowing or not understanding, which includes the sorrow of being powerless; for he who knows the supreme causes, being no longer paralysed by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them: and he who understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a mistake, which is not possible, an infinite mistake being in- conceivable. I do not believe that another sorrow of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only one sorrow which, at first thought, might seem admis- sible — and which, in any case, could be but ephem- eral — would arise from the sight of the pain and misery remaining on the earth which we have left. But this sorrow, after all, would be but one aspect and an insignificant phase of the sorrow of being powerless and of not understanding. As for the ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 77 latter, though it is not only beyond the domain of our intelligence, but even at an insuperable dis- tance from our imagination, we may say that it would be intolerable only if it were without hope. But, for that, the universe would have to abandon any attempt to understand itself, or else admit within itself an object that remained for ever for- eign to it. Either the mind will not perceive its limits and, consequently, will not suffer from them, or else it will overstep them as it perceives them; for how could the universe have parts eternally condemned to form no part of itself and of its knowledge ? Hence we cannot understand that the torture of not understanding, supposing it to exist for a moment, should not end by absorption in the state of infinity, which, if it be not happiness as we comprehend it, could be naught but an indiffer- ence higher and purer than joy. V THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY LET us turn our thoughts towards it. The problem goes beyond humanity and em- braces all things. It is possible, I think, to view infinity under two distinct aspects. Let us contemplate the first of them. We are plunged in a universe that has no limits in space or time. It can neither go forward nor go back. It has no origin. It never began, nor will it ever end. The myriads of years behind it are even as the myriads which it has yet to unroll. From all time it has been at the boundless centre of the days. It could have no aim, for, if it had one, it would have attained it in the infinity of the years that lie behind us; besides, that aim would lie outside itself and, if anything lay outside it, infinity would be bounded by that thing and would cease to be infinity. It is not making for anywhere, for it would have ar- 81 82 THE LIGHT BEYOND rived there ; consequently, all that the worlds within its pale, all that we ourselves do can have no in- fluence upon it. All that it will do it has done. All that it has not done remains undone because it can never do it. If it have no mind, it will never have one. If it have one, that mind has been at its cli- max from all time and will remain there, change- less and immovable. It is as young as it has ever been and as old as it will ever be. It has made in the past all the efforts and all the trials which it will make in the future ; and, as all the possible com- binations have been exhausted since what we can- not even call the beginning, it does not seem as if that which has not taken place in the eternity that stretches before our birth can happen in the eternity that will follow our death. If it have not become conscious, it will never become conscious ; if it know not what it wishes, it will continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or knowing nothing and remaining as near its end as its beginning. This is the gloomiest thought to which man can attain. So far, I do not think that its depths have been sufficiently sounded. If it were really irrefu- table — and some may contend that it is — if it actu- ally contained the last word of the great riddle, it TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 83 would be almost impossible to live in its shadow. Naught save the certainty that our conceptions of time and space are illusive and absurd can lighten the abyss wherein our last hope would perish. 2 The universe thus conceived would be, if not in- telligible, at least admissible by our reason; but in that universe float billions of worlds limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are born again. They form part of the whole ; and we see, therefore, that parts of that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and end. We, in fact, know only those parts ; and they are of a number so infinite that in our eyes they fill all infinity. That which is going nowhere teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That which has always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems to be eternally experimenting with more or less ill-success. At what goal is it aiming, since it is already there? Everything that we discover in that which could not possibly have an object looks as though it were pursuing one with inconceivable ardour; and the mind that animates what we see, in that which should know everything 84 THE LIGHT BEYOND and possess itself, seems to know nothing and to seek itself without intermission. Thus all that is apparent to our senses in infinity gainsays that which our reason is compelled to ascribe to it. Ac- cording as we fathom it, we come to understand how deep is our want of understanding; and, the more we strive to penetrate the two incomprehensible problems that stand face to face, the more they con- tradict each other. 3 What will become of us amid all this confusion? Shall we leave the finite wherein we dwell to be swallowed up- in this or the other infinite ? In other words, shall we end by absorption in the infinite which our reason conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which our eyes behold, that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral worlds ? Shall we never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and to be reborn eternally, to enter at last into that which, from all eternity, can neither have been born nor have died and which exists with- out either future ar past ? Shall we one day escape, with all that surrounds us, from this unhappy spec- ulation, to find our way at last into peace, wisdom, changeless and boundless consciousness, or into TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 85 hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our senses foretell, or that which our intelli- gence demands? Or are both senses and intelli- gence only illusions, puny implements, vain wea- pons of an hour, which were never intended to ex- amine or defy the universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it and deem im- possible that which we do not understand, seeing that we understand almost nothing? Is truth not at an immeasurable distance from these inconsistencies which appear to us enormous and irreducible and which, doubtless, are of no more importance than the rain that falls upon the sea? 4 But, even to our poor understanding of to-day, the discrepancy between the infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses is perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe that has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible combination has been made ; when we declare that there is no chance that what has not taken place in the immeasurable past can take place in the immeasurable future, our imagination perhaps attributes to the infinity of 86 THE LIGHT BEYOND time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth, all that infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its disposal ; and the chances, encounters and combinations that lie therein have not been ex- hausted in the eternity that has gone before us any more than they could be in the eternity that will come after us. The infinity of time is no vaster than the infinity of the substance of the universe. Events, forces, chances, causes, effects, phenomena, fusions, combinations, coincidences, harmonies, unions, possibilities, lives are represented in it by countless numbers that entirely fill a bottomless and vergeless abyss where they have been shaken together from what we call the beginning of the world that had no beginning and where they will be stirred up until the end of a world that will have no end. There is, therefore, no climax, no changeless- ness, no immovability. It is probable that the uni- verse is seeking and finding itself every day, that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what it wants. It is possible that its ideal is still veiled by the shadow of its imniensity; it is also possible that experiments and chances are fol- lowing one upon the other in unimaginable worlds, compared wherewith all those which we see on starry TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 87 nights are no more than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean depths. Lastly, if either be true, it is also true that we ourselves, or what remains of us — it matters not — will profit one day by those experi- ments and those chances. That which has not yet happened may suddenly supervene; and the next state, with the supreme wisdom which will recognise and be able to establish that state, is perhaps ready to arise from the clash of circumstances. It would not be at all astonishing if the consciousness of the universe, in the endeavour to form itself, had not yet encountered the combination of necessary chances and if human thought were actually sup- porting one of those decisive chances. Here there is a hope. Small as man and his brain may appear, they have exactly the value of the most enormous forces that they are able to conceive, since there is neither great nor small in the immensurable ; and, if our body equalled the dimensions of all the worlds which our eyes can see, it would have exactly the same weight and the same importance, as compared with the universe, that it has to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in infinity a space which com- parisons do not reduce to nothing. 88 THE LIGHT BEYOND 5 For the rest, if everything must be said, at the cost of constantly and shamelessly contradicting one's self in the dark, and to return to the first sup- position, the idea of possible progress, it is extreme- ly probable that this again is one of those childish disorders of our brain which prevent us from see- ing the thing that is. It is quite as probable, as we have seen above, that there never was, that there never will be any progress, because there could not be a goal. At most there may occur a few ephemeral combinations which, to our poor eyes, will seem happier or more beautiful than the others. Even so we think gold more beautiful than the mud in the street, or the flower in a splendid garden hap- pier than the stone at the bottom of a drain ; but all this, obviously, is of no importance, has no corre- sponding reality and proves nothing in particular. The more we reflect upon it, the more pronounced is the infirmity of our intelligence which cannot suc- ceed in reconciling the idea of progress and even the idea of experiment with the supreme idea of in- finity. Although nature has been incessantly and indefatigably repeating herself before our eyes for thousands of years, reproducing the same trees and TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 89 the same animals, we camiot contrive to understand why the universe indefinitely recommences experi- ments that have been made billions of times. It is inevitable that, in the innumerable combinations that have been and are being made in termless tune and boundless space, there have been and still are millions of planets and consequently millions of human races exactly similar to our own, side by side with myriads of others more or less different from it. Let us not say to ourselves that it would require an unimaginable concourse of circumstances to re- produce a globe like unto our earth in every respect. We must remember that we are in the infinite and that this unimaginable concourse must necessarily take place in the innumerousness which we are un- able to imagine. Though it need billions and bil- lions of cases for two features to coincide, those bil- lions and billions will encumber infinity no more than would a single case. Place an infinite number of worlds in an infinite number of infinitely diverse circumstances : there will always be an infinite num- ber for which those circumstances will be alike; if not, we should be setting bounds to our idea of the universe, which would forthwith become more in- comprehensible still. From the moment that we 90 THE LIGHT BEYOND insist sufficiently upon that thought, we necessarily arrive at these conclusions. If they have not struck us hitherto, it is because we never go to the farthest point of our imagination. Now the farthest point of our imagination is but the begiiining of reality and gives us only a small, purely human universe, which, vast as it may seem, dances in the real uni- verse like an apple on the sea. I repeat, if we do not admit that thousands of worlds, similar in all points to our own, in spite of the billions of adverse chances, have always existed and still exist to-day, we are sapping the foundations of the only possible conception of the universe or of infinity. 6 Now how is it that those millions of exactly simi- lar human races, which from all time suffer what we have suffered and are still suffering, profit us nothing, that all their experiences and all their schools have had no influence upon our first efforts and that everything has to be done again and begun again incessantly? As we see, the two theories balance each other. It is well to acquire by degrees the habit of under- standing nothing. There remains to us the faculty TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 91 of choosing the less gloomy of the two or persuad- ing ourselves that the mists of the other exist only in our brain. As that strange visionary, William Blake, said: "Nor is it possible to thought A greater than itself to know." Let us add that it is not possible for it to know an}i;hing other than itself. What we do not know would be enough to create the world afresh; and what we do know cannot add one moment to the life of a fly. Who can tell but that our chief mistake lies in believing that an intelligence, were it an in- telligence thousands of times as great as ours, di- rects the universe? It may be a force of quite an- other nature, a force that differs as widely from that on which our brain prides itself as electricity, for instance, differs from the wind that blows. That is why it is fairly probable that our mind, however powerful it become, will always grope in mystery. If it be certain that everj^thing in us must also be in nature, because everything comes to us from her, if the mind and all the logic which it has placed at the culminating point of our being direct or seem to direct all the actions of our life, it by no means fol- 92 THE LIGHT BEYOND lows that there is not in the universe a force greatly superior to thought, a force having no imaginable relation to the mind, a force which animates and governs all things according to other laws and of which nothing is found in us but almost imper- ceptible traces, even as almost imperceptible traces of thought are all that can be found in plants and minerals. In any case, there is nothing here to make us rose courage. It is necessarily the human illusion of evil, ugliness, uselessness and impossibility that is to blame. We must wait not for the universe to be transformed, but for our intelligence to expand or to take part in the other force ; and we must main- tain our confidence in a world which knows nothing of our conceptions of purpose and progress, because it doubtless has ideas whereof we have no idea, a world, moreover, which could scarcely wish itself harm. 7 "These are but vain speculations," it will be said. "What matters, after all, the idea which we form of those things which belong to the unknowable, see- ing that the unknowable, were we a thousand times as intelligent as we are, is closed to us for ever and TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 93 that the idea which we form of it will never have any value?" That is true; but there are degrees in our igno- rance of the unknowable ; and each of these degrees marks a triumph of the intelligence. To estimate more and more completely the extent of what it does not know is all that man's knowledge can hope for. Our idea of the unknowable was and always will be valueless, I admit; but it nevertheless is and will remain the most important idea of mankind. All our morality, all that is in the highest degree noble and profound in our existence has always been based on this idea devoid of real value. To-day, as yesterday, even though it be possible to recognise more clearly that it is too incomplete and relative ever to have any actual value, it is necessary to carry it as high and as far as we can. It alone creates the only atmosphere wherein the best part of ourselves can live. Yes, it is the unknowable into which we shall not enter; but that is no reason for saying to ourselves : "I am closing all the doors and all the windows; henceforth, I shall interest myself only in things which my everyday intelligence can compass. Those 94 THE LIGITT BEYOND things alone have the right to influence my actions and my thoughts." Where should we arrive at that rate? What things can my intelligence compass? Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from the inconceivable? Since there is no means of elimi- nating that inconceivable, it is reasonable and salu- tary to make the best of it and therefore to imagine it as stupendously vast as we are able. The gravest reproach that can be brought against the positive religions and notably against Christianity is that they have too often, if not in theory, at least in practice, encouraged such a narrowing of the mys- tery of the universe. By broadening it, we broaden the space wherein our mind will move. It is for us what we make it : let us then form it of all that we can reach on the horizon of ourselves. As for the mysteiy itself, we shall, of course, never reach it; but we have a much greater chance of approaching it by facing it and going whither it draws us than by turning our backs upon it and returning to that place where we well know that it no longer is. Not by diminishing our thoughts shall we diminish the distance that separates us from the ultimate truths ; but by enlarging them as much as possible we are TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 95 sure of deceiving ourselves as little as possible. And the loftier our idea of the infinite, the more buoyant and the purer becomes the spiritual at- mosphere wherein we live and the wider and deeper the horizon against which our thoughts and feelings stand out, the horizon which is all their life and which they inspire. "Perpetually to construct ideas requiring the ut- most stretch of our faculties," wrote Herbert Spen- cer, "and perpetually to find that such ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realise to us more fully than any other course the greatness of that which we vainly strive to grasp. . . . By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the im- possibility of knowing, we may keep alive the con- sciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the Unknowable." 8 Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract, absolute and perfect infinity — the changeless, immovable infinity which has at- tained perfection and which knows everything, to 96 THE LIGHT BEYOND which our reason tends — or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence, undeniable here be- low, of our senses — the infinity which seeks itself, which is still evolving and not yet established — it behoves us above all to foresee in it our fate, which, for that matter, must, in either case, end by absorp- tion in that very infinity. VI OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES VI OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES THE first infinity, the ideal infinity, corre- sponds most nearly with the requii'ements of our reason, which does not justify us in giving it the preference. It is impossible for us to foresee what we shall become in it, because it seems to exclude any becoming. It therefore but remains for us to address ourselves to the second, to that which we see and imagine in time and space. Furthermore, it is possible that it may precede the other. However absolute our conception of the uni- verse, we have seen that we can always admit that what has not taken place in the eternity before us will happen in the eternity after us and that there is nothing save an untold number of chances to pre- vent the universe from acquiring in the end that perfect consciousness which will establish it at its zenith. 98 100 THE LIGHT BEYOND 2 Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar infinity, the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other things from our eyes, but which cannot be a total illusion. It seems to us to be peopled only with objects — planets, suns, stars, nebulae, atoms, imponderous fluids — which move, unite and separate, repel and attract one another, which shrink and expand, are for ever shifting and never arrive, which measure space in that which has no confines and number the hours in that which has no term. In a word, we are in an infinity that seems to have almost the same character and the same habits as that power in the midst of which we breathe and which, upon oui' earth, we call nature or life. What will be our fate in that infinity? We are asking ourselves no idle question, even if we should unite with it after losing all consciousness, all notion of the ego, even if we should exist there as no more than a little nameless substance — soul or matter, we cannot tell — suspended in the equally nameless abyss that replaces time and space. It is not an idle question, for it concerns the history of the worlds or of the universe ; and this history, far more OUR FATE IN INFINITIES 101 than that of our petty existence, is our own great historj^ in which perhaps something of ourselves or something incomparably better and vaster will end by meeting us again some day. Shall we be unhappy there ? It is hardly reassur- ing when we consider the ways of nature and re- member that we form part of a universe that has not yet gathered its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that good and bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and that, when we have lost the organ of suffering, we shall not meet any of the earthly sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind, lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to world, unknown to itself in an unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly, will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have already spoken and which is doubtless the last that imagina- tion can touch with its wing? Finally, if there were nothing left of our body and our mind, there would still remain the matter and the spirit (or, at least, the obviously single force to which we give that dou- ble name) which composed them and whose fate 102 THE LIGHT BEYOND must be no more indifferent to us than our own fate ; for, let us repeat, from our death onwards, the ad- venture of the universe becomes our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to ourselves: "What can it matter? We shall not be there." We shall be there always, because everything will be there. 4 And will this everything wherein we shall be in- cluded, in a world ever seeking itself, continue a prey to new and perpetual and perhaps painful ex- periences? Since the part that we were was un- happy, why should the part that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that yonder the unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful, more stupid and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of others which ought to have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity? It is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our sorrows are but illusions and appearances : it is none the less true that they make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more complete conscious- OUR FATE IN INFINITIES 103 ness, a more just and serene understanding than on this earth and in the worlds which we discern? And, if it be true that it has somewhere attained that better understanding, why does the mind that presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by- it? Is no communication possible between worlds which must have been born of the same idea and which lie in its depths ? What would be the mystery of that isolation? Are we to believe that the earth marks the farthest stage and the most successful experiment ? What, then, can the mind of the uni- verse have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come only to this? But, on the other hand, that darkness and those barriers which can have come only from itself, since they could have arisen no elsewhere, have they the power to stay its progress ? Who then could have set those insoluble problems to infinity and from what more remote and profound region than itself could they have issued? Some one, after all, must know the answer; and, as behind infinity there can oe none" that is not infinity itself, it is impossible to imagine a malignant will in a will that leaves no point around it which is not wholly covered. Or are the experi- ments begun in the stars continued mechanically. 104 THE LIGHT BEYOND by virtue of the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and their pitiful consequences, ac- cording to the custom of nature, who knows noth- ing of our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as she does the seed on earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again, is the whole ques- tion of our peace and happiness, like that of the fate of the worlds, reduced to knowing whether or not the infinity of endeavours and combinations be equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly, to come to what is most likely, is it we who deceive ourselves, who know nothing, who see nothing and who consider imper- fect that which is perhaps faultless, we who are but an infinitesimal fragment of the intelligence which we judge by the aid of the little shreds of under- standing which it has vouchsafed to lend us? 5 How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the infinite and the invisible, we who do not understand nor even see the thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In fact, as has been very justly ob- served, man does not see light itself. He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds OUR FATE IN INFINITIES 105 which he knows by the name of matter, touched by Hght. He does not perceive the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment when they stopped by an object akin to those with which his eye is familiar upon this earth: were it otherwise, the whole space filled with innumerable suns and boundless forces, instead of being an abyss of abso- lute darkness, absorbing and extinguishing shafts of light that shoot across it from every side, would be but a monstrous and unbearable ocean of flashes. And, if we do not see the light, at least we think we know a few of its rays or its reflexions ; but we are absolutely ignorant of that which is unquestion- ably the essential law of the universe, namely, gravi- tation. What is that force, the most powerful of all and the least visible, imperceptible to our senses, without form, without colour, without temperature, without substance, without savour and without voice, but so awful that it suspends and moves in space all the worlds which we see and all those which we shall never know? More rapid, more subtle, more incorporeal than thought, it wields such sway over everything that exists, from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, that there is not a grain of sand upon our earth nor a drop of blood in our 106 THE LIGHT BEYOND veins but are penetrated, wrought upon and quick- ened by it until they act at every moment upon the farthest planet of the last solar system that we struggle to imagine beyond the bounds of our imag- ination. Shakspeare's famous lines, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer more things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine : there is none but things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the un- imaginable; and, if we do not even see the light, which is the one thing that we believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing all around us but the invisible. We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching, seeing or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it is, just as they would prevent us from un- derstanding it if an intelligence of a different order were to bethink itself of revealing or explaining it OUR FATE IN INFINITIES 107 to us. The number and volume of those mysteries is as boundless as the universe itself. If mankind were one day to draw near to those which to-day it deems the greatest and the most inaccessible, such as the origin and the aim of life, it would at once behold rising up behind them, like eternal moun- tains, others quite as great and quite as unfathom- able; and so on, without end. In relation to that which it would have to know in order to hold the key to the riddle of this world, it would always find itself at the same point of central ignorance. It would be just the same if we possessed an intelli- gence several million times greater and more pene- trating than ours. All that its miraculously in- creased power could discover would encounter limits no less impassable than at present. All is bound- less in that w'hich has no bounds. We shall be the eternal prisoners of the universe. It is therefore impossible for us to appreciate in any degree what- soever, in the smallest conceivable respect, the pres- ent state of the universe and to say, as long as we are men, whether it follows a straight line or de- scribes an immense circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps 108 THE LIGHT BEYOND towards that which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny confines is tc struggle to- wards that which appears to us the best and to re- main heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those confines can ever be wholly lost. 6 But let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From the point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way necessary that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the universe have already found its consciousness, whether it find it one day or seek it everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of being unhappj^ and of suffering, either in its entirety, or in any one of its parts; and it matters little if the latter be in- visible or incommensurable, considering that the smallest is as great as the greatest in what has neither limit nor measure. To torture a point is the same thing as to torture the worlds; and, if it torture the worlds, it is its own substance that it tortures. Its very fate, wherein we have our part, protects us; for we are simply morsels of infinity. It is inseparable from us as we are inseparable from it. Its breath is our breath, its aim is our aim and OUR FATE IN INFINITIES 109 we bear within us all its mysteries. We participate in it everywhere. There is naught in us that es- capes it ; there is naught in it but belongs to us. It extends us, fills us, traverses us on every side. In space and time and in that which, beyond space and time, has as yet no name, we represent it and sum- marise it completely, with all its properties and all its future; and, if its immensity terrifies us, we are as terrifying as itself. If, therefore, we had to suffer in it, our suff*erings could be but ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible, although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go astray; but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting and necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and its sole master: if not, the law or the master whom it must obey would be the universe alone ; and the centre of a word which we pronounce without being able to grasp its scope would be simply shifted. If it be unhappy, that means that it wills its own unhappiness; if it will its unhappiness, it is mad ; and, if it appear to us mad, that means that our reason works contrary to everything and to the 110 THE LIGHT BEYOND only laws possible, seeing that they are eternal, or, to speak more humbly, that it judges what it wholly fails to understand. 7 Everything, therefore, must end, or perhaps al- ready be, if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all suffering, all anxiety, all last- ing unhappiness ; and what, after all, is our happi- ness upon this earth, if it be not the absence of sor- row, anxiety and unhappiness? But it is childish to talk of happiness and un- happiness where infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we take it out of its little sphere. It proceeds en- tirely from a few contingencies of our nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have felt everything the oppo- site way and taken pleasure in that which is now pain. I do not know if my readers remember the strik- ingpassage in which Sir William Crookes shows how well-nigh all that we consider as essential laws of nature would be falsified in the eyes of a microscopic OUR FATE IN INFINITIES 111 man, while forces of which we are ahnost wholly ignorant, such as surface-tension, capillarity or the Brownian movements, would preponderate. Walk- ing on a cabbage-leaf, for instance, after the dew had fallen, and seeing it studded with huge crystal globes, he would infer that water was a solid body which assumes spherical form and rises in the air. At no great distance, he might come to a pond, when he would observe that this same matter, in- stead of rising upwards, now seems to slope down- wards in a vast curv^e from the brink. If he man- aged, with the aid of his friends, to throw into the water one of those enormous steel bars which we call needles, he would see that it made a sort of con- cave trough on the surface and floated tranquilly. From these experiments and a thousand others which he might make, he would naturally deduce theories diametrically oj^posed to those upon which our entire existence is based. It would be the same if the changes were made in the direction of time, to take an hypothesis imagined by the philosopher .William James: "Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note distinctly ten thousand events in- stead of barely ten, as now; if our life were then 112 THE LIGHT BEYOND destined to hold the same number of impressions it might be a thousand times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be in- ferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis, and suppose a being to get only one thousandth part of the sen- sations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live a thousand times as long. Winters and sum- mers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mush- rooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous crea- tions ; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water-springs ; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the move- ments of bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, &c. That such imaginary cases (barring the super-human longevity) may be real- ised somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny." OUR FATE IN INFINITIES 113 8 We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great inter- planetary spaces, with their intense cold and their awful and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the worlds that revolve through space are as un- happy as ourselves because they freeze, or disaggre- gate, or clash together, or are consumed in unutter- able flames. We infer from this that the genius of the universe is an abominable tyrant, seized with a monstrous madness, delighting only in the torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulae whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our language is able to express, we at- tribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephe- meral play of our nerves ; and we are convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold. It were much Mqser to say to ourselves that it would need but a trifle, a few papillae more or less to our skin, the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature of space, its silence and its dark- 114 THE LIGHT BEYOND ness into a delicious springtime, an incomparable music, a divine light. "Nothing is too wonderful to be true," said Faraday. It were much more reasonable to persuade our- selves that the catastrophes which our imagination sees there are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverised means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an unex- pected happiness drawn direct from the inexhausti- ble unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens ; for all is but birth and rebirth, a de- parture into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some ineffa- ble event. VII CONCLUSIONS VII CONCLUSIONS 1 IN order to retain a livelier image of all this and a more exact memory, let us give a last glance at the road which we have travelled. We have put aside, for reasons which we have stated, the religious solutions and total annihilation. Anni- hilation is physically impossible ; the religious solu- tions occupy a citadel without doors or windows into which human reason does not penetrate. Next comes the theory of the surv^ival of our ego, released from its body, but retaining a full and unimpaired consciousness of its identity. We have seen that this theory, strictly defined, has very little likelihood and is not greatly to be desired, although, with the surrender of the body, the source of all our ills, it seems less to be feared than our actual existence. On the other hand, as soon as we try to extend or to exalt it, so that it may appear less barbarous or 117 118 THE LIGHT BEYOND less crude, we come back to the theory of a cosmic consciousness or of a modified consciousness, which, together with that of survival without any sort of consciousness, closes the field to every supposition and exhausts every forecast of the imagination. Survival without any sort of consciousness would be tantamount for us to annihilation pure and sim- ple and consequently would be no more dreadful than the latter, that is to say, than a sleep with no dreams and with no awakening. The theory is unquestionably more acceptable than that of anni- hilation; but it prejudges very rashly the questions of a cosmic consciousness and of a modified con- sciousness. 2 Before replying to these, we must choose our uni- verse, for we have the choice. It is a matter of knowing how we propose to look at infinity. Is it the moveless, immovable infinity, from all eternity perfect and at its zenith, and the purposeless uni- verse that our reason will conceive at the farthest point of our thoughts? Do we believe that, at our death, the illusion of movement and progress which we see from the depths of this life will suddenly fade away? If so, it is inevitable that, at our last breath. CONCLUSIONS 119 we shall be absorbed in what, for lack of a better term, we call the cosmic consciousness. Are we, on the other hand, persuaded that death will reveal to us that the illusion lies not in our senses but in our reason and that, in a world incontestably alive, de- spite the eternity preceding our birth, all the experi- ments have not been made, that is to say that move- ment and evolution continue and will never and no- where stop? In that case, we must at once accept the theory of a modified or progressive conscious- ness. The two aspects, after all, are equally unin- telligible but defensible ; and, although really irrec- oncilable, they agree on one point, namely, that unending pain and unredeemed misery are alike ex- cluded from them both for ever. 3 The theory of a modified consciousness does not necessitate the loss of the tiny consciousness ac- :juired in our body ; but it makes it almost negligible, flings, drowns and dissolves it in infinity. It is of course impossible to support this theory with satis- factory proofs; but it is not easy to shatter it like the others. Were it permissible to speak of likeness to truth in this connection, when our only truth is 120 THE LIGHT BEYOND that we do not see the truth, it is the most likely of the interim theories and gives a magnificent opening for the most plausible, varied and alluring dreams. Will our ego, our soul, our spirit, or whatever we call that which will survive us in order to continue us as we are, will it find again, on leaving the body, the innumerable lives which it must have lived since the thousands of years that had no beginning? .Will it continue to increase by assimilating all that it meets in infinity during the thousands of years that will have no end ? Will it linger for a time around our earth, leading, in regions invisible to our eyes, an ever higher and happier existence, as the theoso- phists and spiritualists contend? Will it move to- wards other planetary systems, will it emigrate to other worlds, whose existence is not even suspected by our senses? Everything seems permissible in this great dream, save that which might arrest its flight. Nevertheless, so soon as it ventures too far in the ultramondane spaces, it crashes into strange obsta- cles and breaks its wings against them. If we ad- mit that our ego does not remain eternally what it was at the moment of our death, we can no longer imagine that, at a given second, it stops, ceases to CONCLUSIONS 121 expand and rise, attains its perfection and its ful- ness, to become no more than a sort of motionless wreck suspended in eternity and a finished thing in the midst of that which will never finish. That A\'ould indeed be the only real death and the more fearful inasmuch as it would set a limit to an un- paralleled life and intelligence, beside which those which we possess here below would not even weigh what a drop of water weighs when compared with the ocean, or a grain of sand when placed in the scales with a mountain-chain. In a word, either we believe that our evolution will one day stop, im- plying thereby an incomprehensible end and a sort of inconceivable death; or we admit that it has no limit, whereupon, being infinite, it assumes all the properties of infinity and must needs be lost in in- finity and united with it. This, withal, is the latter end of theosophy, spiritualism and all the religions in which man, in his ultimate happiness, is absorbed by God. And this again is an incomprehensible end, but at least it is life. And then, taking one in- comprehensibility with another, after doing all that is humanly possible to understand one or the other riddle, let us by preference leap into the greatest and therefore the most probable, the one which con- 122 THE LIGHT BEYOND tains all the others and after which nothing more remains. If not, the questions reappear at every stage and the answers are always conflicting. And questions and answers lead us to the same inevitable abyss. As we shall have to face it sooner or later, why not make for it straightway? All that hap- pens to us in the interval interests us beyond a doubt, but does not detain us, because it is not eter- nal. 4 Behold us then before the mystery of the cosmic consciousness. Although we are incapable of un- derstanding the act of an infinity that would have to fold itself up in order to feel itself and conse- quently to define itself and separate itself from other things, this is not an adequate reason for de- claring it impossible; for, if we were to reject all the realities and impossibilities that we do not under- stand, there would be nothing left for us to live upon. If this consciousness exist under the form which we have conceived, it is evident that we shall be there and take part in it. If there be a con- sciousness somewhere, or some thing that takes the place of consciousness, we shall be in that conscious- ness or that thing, because we cannot be elsewhere. CONCLUSIONS 123 And as this consciousness or this thing cannot be unhappy, because it is impossible that infinity should exist for its own unhappiness, neither shall we be unhappy wlien we are in it. Lastly, if the infinity into which we shall be projected have no sort of consciousness nor anything that stands for it, the reason will be that consciousness, or anything that might replace it, is not indispensable to eternal hap- piness. 5 That, I think, is about as much as we may be permitted to declare, for the moment, to the spirit anxiously facing the unfathomable space wherein death will shortly hurl it. It can still hope to find there the fulfilment of its dreams; it will perhaps find less to dread than it had feared. If it prefer to remain expectant and to accept none of the theo- ries which I have expounded to the best of my power and without prejudice, it nevertheless seems difficult not to welcome, at least, this great assurance which we find at the bottom of every one of them, namely, that infinity could not be malevolent, seeing that, if it eternally tortured the least among us, it would be torturing something which it cannot tear out of 124 THE LIGHT BEYOND itself and that it would therefore be torturing its very self. I have added nothing to what was already known. I have simply tried to separate what may be true from that which is assuredly not true ; for, if we do not know where truth is, we nevertheless learn to know where it is not. And perhaps, in seeking for that undiscoverable truth, we shall have accustomed our eyes to pierce the terror of the last hour by look- ing it full in the face. Many things, beyond a doubt, remain to be said which others will say with greater force and brilliancy. But we need have no hope that any one will utter on this earth the word that shall put an end to our uncertainties. It is very probable, on the contrary, that no one in this world, nor perhaps in the next, will discover the great secret of the universe. And, if we reflect upon this even for a moment, it is most fortunate that it should be so. We have not only to resign ourselves to living in the incomprehensible, but to rejoice that we cannot go out of it. If there were no more in- soluble questions nor impenetrable riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and then we should have for ever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists CONCLUSIONS 125 would be but a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and the unknowable are necessary and will perhaps always be necessary to our happiness. In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thou- sandfold loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the least tittle. VIII THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE VIII THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE WHAT is known as premonition or pre- cognition leads us to mysterious re- gions, where stands, half-emerging from an intolerable darkness, the gravest problem that can thrill mankind, the knowledge of the fu- ture. The latest, the best and the most complete study devoted to it is, I believe, that published by M. Ernest Bozzano under the title Des Phenome- nes premonitoires. Availing himself of excellent earlier work, notably that of INIrs. Sidgwick and Myers,* and adding the result of his own researches, the author collects some thousand cases of precog- nition, of which he discusses one hundred and sixty, leaving the great majority of the others on one side, not because they are negligible, but because he does ^Proceedings, Vols. V. and XI. 129 130 THE LIGHT BEYOND not wish to exceed too flagrantly the normal limits of a monograph. He begins by carefully eliminating all the epi- sodes which, though apparently premonitory, may be explained by self-suggestion (as in the case, for instance, where some one smitten with a disease still latent seems to foresee this disease and the death which will be its conclusion), by telepathy (when a sensitive is aware before hand of the arrival of a person or a letter), or lastly by clairvoyance (when a man dreams of the spot where he will find some- thing which he has mislaid, or an uncommon plant, or an insect sought for in vain, or the unknown place which he will visit at some later date). In all these cases, we have not, properly speaking, to do with a pure future, but rather with a present that is not yet known. Thus reduced and stripped of all foreign influences and intrusions, the number of instances wherein there is a really clear and in- contestable perception of a fragment of the future remains large enough, contrary to what is gener- ally believed, to make it impossible for us to speak of extraordinary accidents or wonderful coinci- dences. There must be a limit to everything, even to distrust, even to the most extensive incredulity. KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 131 otherwise all historical research and a good deal of scientific research would become decidedly imprac- ticable. And this remark applies as much to the nature of the incidents related as to the actual au- thenticity of the narratives. We can contest or suspect any story whatever, any written proof, any evidence; but thenceforward we must abandon all certainty or knowledge that is not acquired by means of mathematical operations or laboratory ex- periments, that is to say, three-fourths of the human phenomena that chiefly interest us. Observe that the records collected by the investigators of the S. P. R., like those discussed by M. Bozzano, are all told at first hand and that those stories of which the narrators were not the protagonists or the direct witnesses have been ruthlessly rejected. Further- more, some of these narratives are necessarily of the nature of medical observations ; as for the others, if we attentively examine the character of those who have related them and the circumstances which cor- roborate them, we shall agree that it is more just and more reasonable to believe in them than to look upon every man who has an extraordinary experi- ence as being a priori a liar, the victim of an hallu- cination, or a wag. 132 THE LIGHT BEYOND 2 There could be no question of giving here even a brief analysis of the most striking cases. It would require a hundred pages and would alter the whole nature of this essay, which, to keep within its proper dimensions, must take it for granted that most of the materials which it examines are familiar. I therefore refer the reader who may wish to form an opinion for himself to the easily-accessible sources which I have mentioned above. It will suffice to give an accurate idea of the gravity of the problem to any one who has not time or opportunity to con- sult the original documents if I sum up in a few words some of these pioneer adventures, selected among those which seem least open to dispute; for it goes without saying that all have not the same value, otherwise the question would be settled. There are some which, while exceedingly striking at first sight and offering every guarantee that could be desired as to authenticity, nevertheless do not imply a real knowledge of the future and can be interpreted in another manner. I give one, to serve as an instance ; it is reported by Dr. Alphonse Teste in his Manuel pratique du magnetisme animal. KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 133 On the 8th of May, Dr. Teste magnetises JNIme. Hortense in the presence of her husband. She is no sooner asleep than she announces that she has been pregnant for a fortnight, that she will not go her full time, that "she will take fright at some- thing," that she w^ill have a fall and that the result will be a miscarriage. She adds that, on the 12th of May, after having had a fright, she will have a fainting-fit w^hich will last for eight minutes; and she then describes, hour by hour, the course of her malady, which will end in three days' loss of rea- son, from w^hich she will recover. On awaking, she retains no recollection of any- thing that has passed ; it is kept from her ; and Dr. Teste communicates his notes to Dr. Amedee Latour. On the 12th of May, he calls on JNI. and Mme. , finds them at table and puts ]Mme. to sleep again, whereupon she repeats word for word what she told him four days before. They wake her up. The dangerous hour is drawing near. They take every imaginable precaution and even close the shutters. JNIme. , made uneasy by these extraordinary measures which she is quite un- able to understand, asks what they are going to do to her. Half -past three o'clock strikes. Mme. 134 THE LIGHT BEYOND rises from the sofa on which they have made her sit and wants to leave the room. The doctor and her husband try to prevent her. "But what is the matter with you?" she asks. "I simply must go out." "No, madame, you shall not: I speak in the in- terest of your health." "Well, then, doctor," she replies, with a smile, "if it is in the interest of my health, that is all the more reason why you should let me go out." The excuse is a plausible one and even irresistible; but the husband, wishing to carry the struggle against destiny to the last, declares that he will accompany his wife. The doctor remains alone, feeling somewhat anxious, in spite of the rather farcical turn which the incident has taken. Sud- denly, a piercing shriek is heard and the noise of a body falling. He runs out and finds Mme. wild with fright and apparently dying in her hus- band's arms. At the moment when, leaving him for an instant, she opened the door of the place where she was going, a rat, the first seen there for twenty years, rushed at her and gave her so great a start that she fell flat on her back. And all the rest KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 135 of the prediction was fulfilled to the letter, hour by hour and detail by detail. To make it quite clear in what spirit I am under- taking this study and to remove at the beginning any suspicion of blind or systematic credulity, I am anxious, before going any further, to say that I fully realise that cases of this kind by no means carry conviction. It is quite possible that every- thing happened in the subconscious imagination of the subject and that she herself created, by self- suggestion her illness, her fright, her fall and her miscarriage and adapted herself to most of the cir- cumstances which she had foretold in her secondary state. The appearance of the rat at the fatal mo- ment is the only thing that would suggest a pre- cise and disquieting vision of an inevitable future event. Unfortunately, we are not told that the rat was perceived by other witnesses than the patient, so that there is nothing to prove that it also was not imaginary. I have therefore quoted this inadequate instance only because it represents fairly well the general aspect and the indecisive value of many similar cases and enables us to note once and for all 136 THE LIGHT BEYOND the objections which can be raised and the precau- tions which we should take before entering these suspicious and obscure regions. .We now come to an infinitely more significant and less questionable case related by Dr Joseph JMaxwell, the learned and very scrupulous author of Les Phenonienes psyckiques, a work which has been translated into English under the title of Metapsychical Phenomena. It concerns a vision which was described to him eight days before the event and which he told to many people before it was accomplished. A sensitive perceived in a crys- tal the following scene: a large steamer, flying a flag of three horizontal bars, black, white and red, and bearing the name Leutschland, was sailing in mid-ocean; the boat was suddenly enveloped in smoke; a great number of sailors, passengers and men in uniform rushed to the upper deck; and the boat went down. Eight days afterwards, the newspapers an- nounced the accident to the Deutschland, whose boiler had burst, obliging the steamboat to stand to. The evidence of a man like Dr. Maxwell, especi- KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 137 ally 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 per- cipient: a curious detail, but one which is not un- common in these cases. "The mistake in reading Leutschland for DeutscJiland, which would have been quite natural in real life, adds a note of prob- ability 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 sug- gest, "the subconscious dramatisation of a sublim- inal inference of the percipient." Such dramatisa- tions, 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 138 THE LIGHT BEYOND very improbable, though they do not absolutely ex- clude it." 1 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, professor of science at the university of Geneva, in his remarkable work, Esprits et mediums. Profes- sor Flournoy is known to be one of the most learned and critical exponents of the new science of meta- psychics. He even carries his fondness for natural explanations and his repugnance to admit the in- tervention of superhuman powers to a point whither 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 * Maxwell, Metapsychical Phenomena, p. 202. KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 139 Miles. Moratief, JNIme. 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. JNIoratief, dated 10 December. She wrote, to quote her own words : "You and I were on a country-road when a car- riage passed in front of us and a voice from inside called to us. When we came up to the carriage, we saw Mile. Olga Popoi lying across it, clothed in white, wearing a bonnet trimmed with yellow rib- bons. She said to you: *' 'I called you to tell you that Mme. Xitchinof will leave the school on the 17th.' "The carriage then drove on." A week later and three days before the letter reached Kazan, the event foreseen in the dream was fulfilled in a tragic fashion. Mme. Nitchinof died on the 16th of an infectious disease; and on the 17th her body was carried out of the school for fear of infection. It is well to add that both Mme. Buscharlet's let- ter and the replies which came from Russia were 140 THE LIGHT BEYOND communicated to Professor Flournoy and bear the postmark dates. Such premonitory dreams are frequent; but it does not often happen that circumstances and espe- cially the existence of a document dated previous to their fulfilment give them such incontestable authen- ticity. We may remark in passing the odd character of this premonition. The date is fixed precisely; but only a veiled and mysterious allusion (the woman lying across the carriage and cloaked in white) is made to the essential part of the prediction, the ill- ness and death. Was there a coincidence, a vision of the future pure and simple, or a vision of the fu- ture suggested by telepathic influence ? The theory of coincidence can be defended, if need be, here as every elsewhere, but would be very extraordinary in this case. As for telepathic influence, we should have to suppose that, on the 9th of December, a week before her death, Mme. Nitchinof had in her subconsciousness a presentiment of her end and that she transmitted this presentment across some thou- sands of miles, from Kazan to Geneva, to a person with whom she had never been intimate. It is very complex but possible, for telepathy often has these KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 141 disconcerting ways. If this were so, the case would be one of latent illness or even of self-suggestion; and the pre-existence of the future, without being entirely disproved, would be less clearly established. Let us pass to other examples. I quote from an excellent article on the importance of precognitions, by Messrs. Pickering and Sadgrove, which ap- peared in the Annales des sciences psycliiques for 1 February 1908, the summary of an experiment by Mrs. A. W. Verrall told in full detail in Vol. XX. of the Proceedings. Mrs. Verrall is a celebrated "automatist ;" and her "cross-correspondences" oc- cupy a whole volume of the Proceedings. Her good faith, her sincerity, her fairness and her scientific precision are above suspicion ; and she is one of the most active and respected members of the Society for Psychical Research. On the 11th of May 1901, at 11.10 p.m., Mrs. Verrall wrote as follows : "Do not hurry date this hoc est quod volui tandem. StKaLoavi^T] Kal X^^PO- crvfi