The Unknown Guest | Page 8

and did not
retire until itself apparently frightened by the exclamations of surprise
drawn from a group of scientists who, after all, were prepared for
anything; and Professor Bottazzi confesses that it was then that, to
quote his own words--measured words, as beseems a votary of science,
but expressive--he felt "a shiver all through his body."
[1] On the same grounds, we will also leave on one side the
theosophical hypothesis, which, like the others, begins by calling for an
act of adherence, of blind faith. Its explanations, though often
ingenious, are no more than forcible but gratuitous asservations and, as
I said in Our Eternity, do not give us the shadow of the commencement
of a proof.
[2] Annales des Sciences Psychiques: April November 1907.
It was one of those moments in which a doubt which one had thought
for ever abolished grips the most unbelieving. For the first time,
perhaps, he looked around him with uncertainty and wondered in what
world he was. As for the faithful adherents of the unknown, who had
long understood that we must resign ourselves to understanding
nothing and he prepared for every sort of surprise there was here, all
the same, even for them, a mystery of another character, a bewildering
mystery, the only really strange mystery, more torturing than all the
others together, because it verges upon ancestral fears and touches the
most sensitive point of our destiny.
4
The spiritualistic argument most worthy of attention is that supplied by
the apparitions of the dead and by haunted houses. We will take no
account of the phantasms that precede, accompany or follow hard upon

death: they are explained by the transmission of a violent motion from
one subconsciousness to another; and, even when they are not
manifested until several days after death, it may still he contended that
they are delayed telepathic communications. But what are we to say of
the ghosts that spring up more than a year, nay, more than ten years
after the disappearance of the corpse? They are very rare, I know, but
after all there are some that are extremely difficult to deny, for the
accounts of their actions are attested and corroborated by numerous and
trustworthy witnesses. It is true that here again, where it is in most
cases a question of apparitions to relations or friends, we may be told
that we are in the presence of telepathic incidents or of hallucinations
of the memory. We thus deprive the spiritualists of a new and
considerable province of their realm. Nevertheless, they retain certain
private desmesnes into which our telepathic explanations do not
penetrate so easily. There have in fact been ghosts that showed
themselves to people who had never known or seen them in the flesh.
They are more or less closely connected with the ghosts in haunted
houses, to which we must revert for a moment.
As I said above, it is almost impossible honestly to deny the existence
of these houses. Here again the telepathic interpretation enforces itself
in the majority of cases. We may even allow it a strange but justifiable
extension, for its limits are scarcely known. It has happened fairly often,
for instance, that ghosts come to disturb a dwelling whose occupiers
find, in response to their indications, bones hidden in the walls or under
the floors. It is even possible, as in the case of William Moir,[1] which
was as strictly conducted and supervised as a judicial enquiry, that the
skeleton is buried at some distance from the house and dates more than
forty years back. When the remains are removed and decently interred,
the apparitions cease.
[1] Proceedings, vol. vi., pp. 35-41.
But even in the case of William Moir there is no sufficient reason for
abandoning the telepathic theory. The medium, the "sensitive," as the
English say, feels the presence or the proximity of the bones; some
relation established between them and him--a relation which certainly
is profoundly mysterious--makes him experience the last emotion of
the deceased and sometimes allows him to conjure up the picture and
the circumstances of the suicide or murder, even as, in telepathy

between living persons, the contact of an inanimate object is able to
bring him into direct relation with the subconsciousness of its owner.
The slender chain connecting life and death is not yet entirely broken;
and we might even go so far as to say that everything is still happening
within our world.
But are there cases in which every link, however thin, however subtle
we may deem it, is definitely shattered? Who would venture to
maintain this? We are only beginning to suspect the elasticity, the
flexibility, the complexity of those invisible threads which bind
together objects, thoughts, lives, emotions, all that is on this earth and
even that