The Unknown Guest | Page 7

to them, see it as the others do and ask, innocently: "Who is the
lady in mourning whom I met in the dining-room?"
[1] Proceedings, vol. i., pp. 101-115; vol. ii., pp. 137-151; vol. viii., pp.
311, 332, etc.
If it is a case of collective suggestion, we should have to admit that it is
a subconscious suggestion emitted without the knowledge of the
participants, which indeed is quite possible.
Though they belong to the same order, I will not here mention the
exploits of what the Germans call the Poltergeist, which take the form
of flinging stones, ringing bells, turning mattresses, upsetting furniture
and so forth. These matters are always open to suspicion and really
appear to be nothing but quaint frolics of hysterical subjects or of
mediums indulging their sense of humour. The manifestations of the
Poltergeist are fairly numerous and the reader will find several
instances in the Proceedings and especially in the Journal of the S. P. R.
As for communications with the dead, I devoted a whole chapter to
these in my own essay entitled Our Eternity and will not return to them
now. It will be enough to recall and recapitulate my general impression,
that probably the dead did not enter into any of these conversations. We
are here concerned with purely mediumistic phenomena, more curious
and mere subtle than those of table-rapping, but of the same character;
and these manifestations, however astonishing they may be, do not
pierce the terrestrial sphere wherein we are imprisoned.
3
Setting aside the religious hypotheses, which we are not examining
here, for they belong to a different order of ideas,[1] we find, as an
explanation of the Majority of these phenomena, or at least as a means

of avoiding an absolute and depressing silence in regard to them, two
hypotheses which reach the unknown by more or less divergent paths,
to wit, the spiritualistic hypothesis and the mediumistic hypothesis. The
spiritualists, or rather the neospiritualists or scientific spiritualists, who
must not be confused with the somewhat over-credulous disciples of
Allan Kardec, maintain that the dead do not die entirely, that their
spiritual or animistic entity neither departs nor disperses into space
after the dissolution of the body, but continues an active though
invisible existence around us. The neospiritualistic theory, however,
professes only very vague notions as to the life led by these discarnate
spirits. Are they more intelligent than they were when they inhabited
their flesh? Do they possess a wider understanding and mightier
faculties than ours? Up to the present, we have not the unimpeachable
facts that would permit us to say so. It would seem, on the contrary, if
the discarnate spirits really continue to exist, that their life is
circumscribed, frail, precarious, incoherent and, above all, not very
long. To this the objection is raised that it only appears so to our feeble
eyes. The dead among whom we move without knowing it struggle to
make themselves understood, to manifest themselves, but dash
themselves against the inpenetrable wall of our senses, which, created
solely to perceive matter, remain hopelessly ignorant of all the rest,
though this is doubtless the essential part of the universe. That which
will survive in us, imprisoned in our body, is absolutely inaccessible to
that which survives in them. The utmost that they can do is
occasionally to cause a few glimmers of their existence to penetrate the
fissures of those singular organisms known as mediums. But these
vagrant, fleeting, venturous, stifled, deformed glimmers can but give us
a ludicrous idea of a life which has no longer anything in common with
the life--purely animal for the most part- which we lead on this earth. It
is possible; and there is something to be said for the theory. It is at any
rate remarkable that certain communications, certain manifestations
have shaken the scepticism of the coldest and most dispassionate men
of science, men utterly hostile to supernatural influences. In order to
some extent to understand their uneasiness and their astonishment, we
need only read--to quote but one instance among a thousand--a
disquieting but unassailable article, entitled, Dans les regions
inexplorees de la biologic humaine. Observations et experiences sur

Eusapia Paladino, by Professor Bottazzi, Director of the Physiological
Institute of the University of Naples.[2] Seldom have experiments in
the domain of mediums or spirits been conducted with more distrustful
suspicion or with more implacable scientific strictness. Nevertheless,
scattered limbs, pale, diaphanous but capable hands, suddenly appeared
in the little physiological laboratory of Naples University, with its
doors heavily padlocked and sealed, as it were, mathematically
excluding any possibility of fraud; these same hands worked apparatus
specially intended to register their touches; lastly, the outline of
something black, of a head, uprose between the curtains of the
mediumistic cabinet, remained visible for several seconds