The Unknown Guest | Page 4

with a certain
confidence. Leaving the realm of legend, of after-dinner stories, old
wives' tales, illusions and exaggerations, we find ourselves at last on
circumscribed but fairly safe ground. This does not mean that there are
no other supernatural phenomena besides those collected in the
publications of the society in question and in a few of the more weighty
reviews which have adopted the same methods. Notwithstanding all
their diligence, which for over thirty years has been ransacking the
obscure corners of our planet, it is inevitable that a good many things
escape their notice, besides which the rigour of their investigations
makes them reject three fourths of those which are brought before them.
But we may say that the twenty-six volumes of the society is
Proceedings and the fifteen or sixteen volumes of its Journal, together
with the twenty-three annuals of the Annales des Sciences Psychiques,
to mention only this one periodical of signal excellence, embrace for
the moment the whole field of the extraordinary and offer some
instances of all the abnormal manifestations of the inexplicable. We are
henceforth able to classify them, to divide and subdivide them into
general, species and varieties. This is not much, you may say; but it is
thus that every science begins and furthermore that many a one ends.
We have therefore sufficient evidence, facts that can scarcely be
disputed, to enable us to consult them profitably, to recognize whither
they lead, to form some idea of their general character and perhaps to
trace their sole source by gradually removing the weeds and rubbish
which for so many hundreds and thousands of years have hidden it

from our eyes.
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Truth to tell, these supernatural manifestations seem less marvelous and
less fantastic than they did some centuries ago; and we are at first a
little disappointed. One would think that even the mysterious has its
ups and downs and remains subject to the caprices of some strange
extra mundane fashion; or perhaps, to be more exact, it is evident that
the majority of those legendary miracles could not withstand the
rigorous scrutiny of our day. Those which emerge triumphant from the
test and defy our less credulous and more penetrating vision are all the
more worthy of holding our attention. They are not the last survivals of
the riddle, for this continues to exist in its entirety and grows greater in
proportion as we throw light upon it; but we can perhaps see in them
the supreme or else the first efforts of a force which does not appear to
reside wholly in our sphere. They suggest blows struck from without by
an Unknown even more unknown than that which we think we know,
an Unknown which is not that of the universe, not that which we have
gradually made into an inoffensive and amiable Unknown, even as we
have made the universe a son of province of the earth, but a stranger
arriving from another world, an unexpected visitor who comes in a
rather sinister way to trouble the comfortable quiet in which we were
slumbering, rocked by the firm and watchful hand of orthodox science.
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Let us first be content to enumerate them. We shall find that we have
table-turning, with its raps; the movements and transportations of
inanimate objects without contact; luminous phenomena; lucidite, or
clairvoyance; veridical apparitions or hallucinations; haunted houses;
bilocations and so forth; communications with the dead; the
divining-rod; the miraculous cures of Lourdes and elsewhere; fluidic
asepsis; and lastly the famous thinking animals of Elberfeld and
Mannheim. These, if I be not mistaken, after eliminating all that is in,
sufficiently attested, constitute the residue or caput mortuum of this
latter-day miracle.
Everybody has heard of table-turning, which may be called the A B C
of occult science. It is so common and so easily produced that the
Society for Psychical Research has not thought it necessary to devote
special attention to the subject. I need hardly add that we must take

count only of movements or "raps" obtained without the hands
touching the table, so as to remove every possibility of fraud or
unconscious complicity. To obtain these movements it is enough, but it
is also indispensable that those who form the "chain" should include a
person endowed with mediumistic faculties. I repeat, the experiment is
within the reach of any one who cares to try it under the requisite
conditions; and it is as incontestable as the polarization of light or as
crystallization by means of electric currents.
In the same group may be placed the movement and transportation of
objects without contact, the touches of spirit hands, the luminous
phenomena and materialization. Like table-turning, they demand the
presence of a medium. I need not observe that we here find ourselves in
the happy hunting-ground