This Classic work is now copyright expired and therefore in the public domain.

The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

I. PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

page 6 of 6 | page 1 | The Unknown Guest - home

Let us observe that this survival of the dead, as the neospiritualists conceive it, seems much less improbable since we have been studying more closely the manifestations of the extraordinary and incontestable spiritual force that lies hidden within ourselves. It is not dependent in our thought, nor on our consciousness, nor on our will; and very possibly it is not dependent either on our life. While we are still breathing on this earth it is already surmounting most of the great obstacles that limit and paralyse our existence. It acts at a distance and so to speak without organs. It passes through matter, disaggregates it and reconstitutes it. It seems to possess, the gift of ubiquity. It is not subject to the laws of gravity and lifts weights out of all proportion with the real and measurable strength of the body whence it is believed to emanate. It releases and removes itself from that body; it comes and goes freely and takes to itself substances and shapes which it borrows all around it; and therefore it is no longer so strange to see it surviving for a time that body to which it does not appear to be as indissolubly bound as is our conscious existence. Is it necessary to add that this survival of a part of ourselves which we hardly know and which besides seems incomplete, incoherent and ephemeral is wholly without prejudice to nor fate in the eternity of the worlds? But this is a question which we are not called upon to study here.

I shall perhaps be asked:

"If it is becoming increasingly difficult for all these facts--and there are more of them accumulating every day--to be embraced in the telepathic or psychometric theory, why not frankly accept the spiritualistic explanation, which is the simplest, which has an answer for everything and which is gradually encroaching on all the others?"

That is true: it is the simplest theory, perhaps too simple; and, like the religious theory, it dispenses as from all effort or seeking. We have nothing to set against it but the mediumistic theory, which doubtless does not account exactly for a good many things, but which at least is on the same side of the hill of life as ourselves and remains among us, upon our earth, within reach of our eyes, our hands, our thoughts and our researches. There was a time when lightning, epidemics and earthquakes were attributed without distinction to the wrath of Heaven. Nowadays, when we are more or less familiar with the source of the great infectious diseases, the hand of Providence knows them no more; and, though we are still ignorant of the nature of electricity and the laws that regulate seismic shocks, we no longer dream, while waiting to learn more about them, of looking for their causes in the judgment or anger of an imaginary Being. Let us act likewise in the present case. It behooves us above all to avoid those rash explanations which, in their haste, leave by the roadside a host of things that appear to be unknown or unknowable only because the necessary effort has not yet been made to know them. After all, while we must not eliminate the spiritualistic theory, neither must we content ourselves with it. It is even preferable not to linger over it until it has supplied us with decisive arguments, for it is the duty of this theory which sweeps us roughly out of our sphere to furnish us with such arguments. For the present, it simply relegates to posthumous regions, phenomena that appear to occur within ourselves; it adds superfluous mystery and needless difficulty to the mediumistic mystery whence it springs. If we were concerned with facts that had no footing in this world, we should certainly have to turn our eyes in another direction; but we see a large number of actions performed which are of the same nature as those attributed to the spirits and equally inexplicable, actions with which, however, we know that they have nothing to do. When it is proved that the dead exercise some intervention, we will bow before the fact as willingly as we bow before the mediumistic mysteries: it is a question of order, of internal policy and of scientific method much more than of probability, preference or fear. The hour has not yet come to abandon the principle which I have formulated elsewhere with respect to our communications with the dead, namely, that it is natural that we should remain at home, in our own world, as long as we can, as long as we are not violently driven from it by a series of irresistible and incontrovertible proofs coming from the neighbouring abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead. But the existence of mediums is beyond dispute, whereas that of spirits is not; and it is therefore for the spirits or for those who make use of their name to begin by proving that they must. Before turning towards the mystery beyond the grave, let us first exhaust the possibilities of the mystery here on earth.

Next