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

The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

V. THE UNKNOWN GUEST

page 6 of 8 | page 1 | The Unknown Guest - home

M. Ernest Bozzano, one of the most learned, most daring and most subtle exponents of the new science that is in process of formation, in the course of a remarkable essay in the Annales des sciences psychiques,[1] gives it as his opinion that they have remained stationary and unchanged. He considers that they have become in no way diffused, generalized and refined, like so many others that are much less important and useful from the point of view of the struggle for life, such as the musical faculty, for instance. It does not even seem, says M. Bozzano, that it is possible to cultivate or develop them systematically. The Hindu race in particular, who for thousands of years have been devoting themselves to the study of these manifestations, have arrived at nothing but a better knowledge of the empirical methods calculated to produce them in individuals already endowed with these supernormal faculties. I do not know to what extent M. Bozzano's assertions are beyond dispute. They concern historical or remote facts which it is very difficult to verify. In any case, it is something to have perfected , as has been done in India, the empirical methods favourable to the production of supernormal phenomena. One might even say that it is about all that we have the right to expect, seeing that, by the author's own admission, these faculties are latent in every man and that, as has frequently been seen, it needs but an illness, a lesion, or sometimes even the slightest emotion or a mere passing faintness to make them suddenly reveal themselves in an individual who seemed most hopelessly devoid of them. It is therefore quite possible that, by improving the methods, by attacking the mystery from other quarters, we might obtain more decisive results than the Hindus. We must remember that our western science has but lately interested itself in these problems and that it has means of investigating and experimenting which the Asiatics never possessed. It may even be declared that at no time in the existence of our world has the scientific mind been better-equipped, better-suited to cope with every task, or more exact, more skilful and more penetrating than it is today. Because the oriental empirics have failed, there is no reason to believe that it will not succeed in awakening and cultivating in every man those faculties which would often be of greater use to him than those of the intellect itself. It is not overbold to suggest that, from certain points of view, the true history of mankind has hardly begun.

[1] September, 1906.

Nevertheless, in so far as concerns the natural evolution of those faculties, M. Bozzano's assertion seem fairly well- justified. We do not, in fact, observe a startling or even appreciable difference between what they were and what they are. And this anomaly is the more surprising in as much as it is almost universally accepted that a sense or a faculty becomes developed in proportion to its usefulness; and there are few, I think, that would have been not only more useful but even more necessary to man. He has always had a keen and primitive interest in knowing without delay the most secret thoughts of his fellow-man, who is often his adversary and sometimes his mortal enemy. He has always had an interest no less great in immediately transmitting those thoughts through space, in seeing beyond the continents and seas, in going back into the past, in advancing into the future, in being able to find in his memory at will not only all the acquirements of his personal experience but also those of his ancestors, in communicating with the dead and perhaps with the sovereign intelligence diffused over the universe, in discovering hidden springs and treasures, in escaping the harsh and depressing laws of matter and gravity, in relieving pain, in curing the greater number of his disorders and even in restoring his limbs, not to mention many other miracles which he could work if he knew all the mighty forces that doubtless slumber in the dark recesses of his life.