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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

II. PSYCHOMETRY

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On inquiry, all the details were found to be astonishingly accurate; but, as usual, there was a mistake in the time, that is to say, the girl and her dog were not in the garden at the instant when the medium saw them there. Here again an habitual action had obscured a casual movement; for, as I have already said, the vision very rarely corresponds with the momentary reality.

There is nothing exceptional in the above example; I selected it from among many others because it is simple and clear. Besides, this kind of experience is already, so to speak, classical, or at least should be so, were it not that everything relating to the manifestations of our subconsciousness is always received with extraordinary suspicion. In any case, I cannot too often repeat that the experiment is within everybody's reach; and it rarely fails to achieve absolute success with capable psychometers, who are pretty well known and whom it is open to any one to consult.

Let us add that it can be extended much further. If, for instance, I had acted as I did in similar cases and asked the medium questions about the young girl's home-circle, about the character of her father, the health of her mother, the tastes and habits of her brothers and sisters, she would have answered with the same certainty, the same precision as one might do who was not only a close acquaintance of the girl's, but endowed with much more penetrating faculties of intuition than a normal observer. In short, she would have felt and expressed all that this girl's subconsciousness would have felt with regard to the persons mentioned. But it must be admitted that, as we are here no longer speaking of facts that are easily verified, confirmation becomes infinitely more difficult.

There could be no question, in the circumstances, of transmission of thought, since both the medium and I were ignorant of everything. Besides, other experiments, easily devised and repeated and more rigourously controlled, do away with that theory entirely. For instance, I took three letters written by intimate friends, put each of them in a double envelope and gave them to a messenger unacquainted with the contents of the envelopes and also with the persons in question to take to Mme. M--. On arriving at the house, the messenger handed the clairvoyant one of the letters, selected at random, and did nothing further beyond putting the indispensable questions, likewise at random, and taking down the medium's replies in shorthand. Mme. M-- began by giving a very striking physical portrait of the lady who had written the letter; followed this up with an absolutely faithful description of her character, her habits, her tastes, her intellectual and moral qualities; and ended by adding a few details concerning her private life, of which I myself was entirely unaware and of which I obtained the confirmation shortly afterwards. The experiment yielded just as remarkable results when continued with the two other letters.

In the face of this mystery, two explanations may be offered, both equally perplexing. On the one hand, we shall have to admit that the sheet of paper handed to the psychometer and impregnated with human "fluid" contains, after the manner of some prodigiously compressed gas, all the incessantly renewed, incessantly recurring images that surround a person, all his past and perhaps his future, his psychology, his state of health, his wishes, his intentions, often unknown to himself, his most secret instincts, his likes and dislikes, all that is bathed in light and all that is plunged in darkness, his whole life, in short, and more than his personal and conscious life, besides all the lives and all the influences, good or bad, latent or manifest, of all who approach him. We should have here a mystery as unfathomable and at least as vast as that of generation, which transmits, in an infinitesimal particle, the mind and matter, with all the qualities and all the faults, all the acquirements and all the history, of a series of lives of which none can tell the number.