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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

II. PSYCHOMETRY

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In this particular case, considering that all relations with the living were definitely and undeniably severed, I can see no other explanations beyond these two. They are both equally astounding and land us suddenly in a world of fable and enchantment which we thought that we had left for good and all. If we do not adopt the theory of the tell-tale scarf, we must accept that of the spiritualists, who maintain that the spirits communicate with us freely. It is possible that they may find a serious argument in this case. But a solitary fact is not enough to support a theory, all the more so as the one in question will never be absolutely safe from the objection that could be raised if the case were one of murder, which is possible, after all, and cannot be actually disproved. We must, therefore, while awaiting other similar and more decisive facts, if any such are conceivable, return to those which are, so to speak, laboratory facts, facts which are only denied by those who will not take the trouble to verify them; and to interpret these facts there are only the two theories which we mentioned above, before this digression; for, in these cases, which are unlike those of automatic speech or writing, we have not as a rule to consider the possibility of any intervention of the dead. As a matter of fact, the best-known psychometers are very rarely spiritualists and claim no connection with the spirits. They care but little, as a rule, about the source of their intuitions and seem very little interested in their exact working and origin. Now it would be exceedingly surprising if, acting and speaking in the name of the departed, they should be so consistently ignorant of the existence of those who inspire them; and more surprising still if the dead, whom in other circumstances we see so jealously vindicating their identity, should not here, when the occasion is so propitious, seek to declare themselves, to manifest themselves and to make themselves known.

Dismissing for the time being the intervention of the dead, I believe then that, in most of the cases which I will call laboratory cases, because they can be reproduced at will, we are not necessarily reduced to the theory of the vitalized object representing wholly, indefinitely and inexhaustibly, through all the vicissitudes of time and spice, every one of those who have held it in their hands for a little while. For we must not forget that, according to this theory, the object in question will conceal and, through the intermediary of the medium, will reveal as many distinct and complete personalities as it has undergone contacts. It will never confuse or mix those different personalities. They will remain there in definite strata, distinct one from another; and, as Dr. Osty puts it, "the medium can interpret each of them from beginning to end, as though he were in communication with the far-off entity."

All this makes the theory somewhat incredible, even though it be not much more so than the many other phenomena in which the shock of the miraculous has been softened by familiarity. We can find more or less everywhere in nature that prodigious faculty of storing away inexhaustible energies and ineffaceable tram, memories and impressions in space. There is not a thing in this world that is lost, that disappears, that ceases to be, to retain and to propagate life. Need we recall, in this connection, the incessant mission of pictures perceived by the sensitized plate, the vibrations of sound that accumulate in the disks of the gramophone, the Hertzian waves that lose none of their strength in space, the mysteries of reproduction and, in a word, the incomprehensibility of everything around us?