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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

III. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE

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We now come to an infinitely more significant and less questionable case related by Dr. Joseph Maxwell, the learned and very scrupulous author of Les Phenomenes Psychiques, 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 crystal 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 announced the accident to the Deutschland, whose boiler had burst, obliging the steamboat to stand to.

The evidence of a man like Dr. Maxwell, especially when we have to do with a so-to-speak personal incident, possesses an importance on which it is needless to insist. We have here, therefore, several days beforehand, the very clear prevision of an event which, moreover, in no way concerns the percipient: a curious detail, but one which is not uncommon in these cases. The mistake in reading Leutschland for Deutschland, which would have been quite natural in real life, adds a note of probability and authenticity to the phenomenon. As for the final act, the foundering of the vessel in the place of a simple heaving to, we must see in this, as Dr. J. W. Pickering and W. A. Sadgrove suggest, "the subconscious dramatization of a subliminal inference of the percipient." Such dramatization, moreover, are instinctive and almost general in this class of visions.

If this were an isolated case, it would certainly not be right to attach decisive importance to it; "but," Dr. Maxwell observes, "the same sensitive has given me other curious instances; and these cases, compared with others which I myself have observed or with those of which I have received first-hand accounts, render the hypothesis of coincidence very improbable, though they do not absolutely exclude it."[1]

[1] Maxwell: Metapsychical Phenomena, p. 202.

Another and perhaps more convincing case, more strictly investigated and established, a case which clearly does not admit of explanation, by the theory of coincidence, worthy of all respect though this theory be, is that related by M. Theodore Flournoy, science professor at the university of Geneva, in his remarkable work, Esprits et Mediums. Professor Flournoy is known to be one of the most learned and most critical exponents of the new science of metapsychics. He even carries his fondness for natural explanations and his repugnance to admit the intervention of superhuman powers to a point where it is often difficult to follow him. I will give the narrative as briefly as possible. It will be found in full on pp. 348 to 362 of his masterly book.

In August, 1883, a certain Mme. Buscarlet, whom he knew personally, returned to Geneva after spending three years with the Moratief family at Kazan as governess to two girls. She continued to correspond with the family and also with a Mme. Nitchinof, who kept a school at Kazan to which Mlles. Moratief, Mme. Buscarlet's former pupils, went after her departure.

On the night of the 9th of December (O. S.) of the same year, Mme. Buscarlet had a dream which she described the following morning in a letter to Mme. Moratief, dated 10 December. She wrote, to quote her own words:

"You and I were on a country-road when a carriage passed in front of us and a voice from inside called to us. When we came up to the carriage, we saw Mlle. Olga Popoi lying across it, clothed in white, wearing a bonnet trimmed with yellow ribbons. She said to you:

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