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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

V. THE UNKNOWN GUEST

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Is this once more an unexpected character of the eccentric physiology of our unknown guest? Here are faculties more precious than the most precious faculties that have made us what we are, faculties whose magic buds sprout on every side underneath our intelligence but have never burst into flower, as though a wind from another sphere had killed them with its icy breath. Is it because it occupies itself first and foremost with the species that it thus neglects the individual? But, after all, the species is only an aggregate of successive individuals; and its evolution consequently depends upon their evolution. There would therefore have been an evident advantage to the species in developing faculties that would perhaps have carried it much farther and much higher than has been done by its brain-power, which alone has progressed. If there is no evolution for them here, do they develop elsewhere? What are those powers which exist outside and independent of the laws of this earth? Do they then belong to other worlds? But, if so, what are they doing in ours? One would sometimes think, at the sight of so much neglectfulness, uncertainty and inconsistency, that man's evolution had been intentionally retarded by a superior will, as though that will feared that he was going too fast, that he was anticipating some pre established order and moving prematurely out of his appointed plane.

And the riddles accumulate which we cannot hope to solve. It has been said that these abnormal faculties are communications or infiltrations, themselves abnormal, which have found their way through the partitions that separate our consciousness from our subconsciousness. This is very likely, but it is only a minor side of the question. It would be important before all to know what that subconsciousness represents, whither it tends and with what it itself is communicating. Is the impersonal form of knowledge a necessary or an accidental stage? Is the impersonal form which it takes in the subconsciousness the only true one? Is there really, as everything seems to prove, a hopeless incompatibility between our intellectual faculties and those families of uncertain origin, to such an extent that the latter are unable to manifest themselves except when the former are weakened or temporarily suspended? It has, at any rate, been observed that they are hardly ever exercised simultaneously. Are we to believe that, at a given moment, mankind or the genius that presides over its destinies had to make an exclusive and awful choice between cerebral energy and the mysterious forces of the subconsciousness and that we still find traces of its hesitations in our organism? What would have become of a race of man in which the subconsciousness had triumphed over the brain? Is not this the case with animals; and would not the race have remained purely animal? Or else would not this preponderance of a subconscious more powerful than that of the animals and almost independent of our body have resulted in the disappearance of life as we know it; and should we not even now be trading the life which we shall probably lead when we are dead? Here are a number of questions to which there are no answers and which are nevertheless perhaps not so idle as one might at first believe.

Amidst this antagonism, whose triumph are we to hope for? Is any alliance between the two opposing forces for ever impossible so long as we are in the flesh? What are we to do meanwhile? If a choice be inevitable, which way will our choice incline; and which victim shall we sacrifice? Shall we listen to those who tell us that there is nothing more to be gained or learnt in those inhospitable regions where all our bewildering phenomena have been known since man first was man? Is it true that occultism--as it is very improperly called, for the knowledge which it seeks is no more occult than any other--is it true that occultism is marking time, that it is becoming hopelessly entangled in the same doubtful facts and that it has not taken a single step forward since its renaissance more than fifty years ago? One must be entirely ignorant of the wonderful efforts of those fruitful years to venture upon such an assertion. This is not the place to discuss the question, which would require full and careful treatment; but we may safely say that until now there is no science which in so short a time has brought order out of such a chaos, ascertained, checked and classified such a quantity of facts, or more rapidly awakened, cultivated and trained in man certain faculties which he had never seriously been believed to possess; and furthermore none which has caused to be recognized as incontestable and thus introduced into the circle of the realities whereon we base our lives a number of unlikely phenomena which had hitherto been contemptuously passed over. We are still, it is true, waiting for the domestication of the new force, its practical application to daily use. We are waiting for the all-revealing, decisive manifestation which will remove our last doubts and throw light upon the problem down to its very source. But let us admit that we are likewise waiting for this manifestation in the great majority of sciences. In my case, we are already in the presence of an astonishing mass of well-weighed and verified materials which, until now, had been taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments of wild legends, meaningless and unimportant. For more than three centuries, the science of electricity remained at very much the same point at which our psychical sciences stand to-day. Men were recording, accumulating, trying to interpret a host of odd and futile phenomena, toying with Ramsden's machine, with Leyden jars, with Volta's rough battery. They thought that they had discovered an agreeable pastime, an ingenious plaything for the laboratory or study; and they had not the slightest suspicion that they were touching the sources of an universal, irresistible, inexhaustible power, invisibly present and active in all things, that would soon invade the surface of our globe. Nothing tells us that the psychic forces of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse have not similar surprises in store for us, with this difference, that we are here concerned with energies and mysteries which are loftier, grander and doubtless fraught with graver consequences, since they affect our eternal destinies, traverse alike our life and our death and extend beyond our planet.

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