We take our ideas to be realities. This is a mistake. For example, to our senses the air is not a solid body; we pa.s.s through it without effort, while we cannot pa.s.s through an iron door. The converse is true of electricity: it pa.s.ses through iron, and finds the air to be a solid impa.s.sible body. To the electrician, a wire is a ca.n.a.l leading electricity across the solid rock of the air. Gla.s.s is opaque to electricity and transparent to magnetism. The flesh is transparent to the X-rays, while gla.s.s is opaque, etc.
We feel the need of explaining everything, and we are driven to admit only the phenomena of which we have had an explanation; but that does not prove that our explanations are valid. Thus for example, if some one had affirmed the possibility of instantaneous communication between Paris and London, before the invention of the telegraph, people would have regarded the a.s.sertion as utopian. Later it would not have been admitted, except on condition of the existence of a wire between the two stations, and any communication without the medium of an electric wire would have been declared impossible. Now that we have wireless telegraphy we can apply this discovery to the explanation of the phenomena of telepathy. But it is not yet proved that this explanation is the true one.
Why do we wish to explain these phenomena at all hazards? Because we navely imagine that we are able to do so in the present state of our knowledge.
The physiologists who claim to see daylight in this matter are like Ptolemy persisting in accounting for the movements of the heavenly bodies by holding to the idea of the immobility of the earth; or Galileo explaining the attraction of amber by the rarefaction of the surrounding air; or Lavoisier seeking (with the common people) the origin of aerolites in thunder storms or denying their existence; or Galvani, who saw in his frogs a _special_ organic electricity. I put my physiologists in good company, surely, and they have nothing of which to complain. But who does not feel that this natural propensity to explain everything is not justified, that science progresses from age to age, that what is not known to-day will be known later, and that we ought sometimes to know how to wait?
The phenomena of which we are speaking are manifestations of the universal dynamism, with which our five senses put us very imperfectly in relation.
We live in the midst of an unexplored world, in which the psychical forces play a role still very insufficiently investigated.
These forces are of a cla.s.s superior to the forces usually a.n.a.lyzed in mechanics, in physics, in chemistry: they are of the psychical order, have in them something vital and a kind of mentality. They confirm what we know from other sources,--that the purely mechanical explanation of nature is insufficient and that there is in the universe something else than so-called matter. It is not matter that rules the world: it is a dynamic and psychic element.
What light will the study of these still unexplained forces shed upon the origin of the soul and upon the conditions of its survival? That is something that the future has to teach us.
The truth that the soul is a spiritual ent.i.ty distinct from the body is proved by other arguments. These arguments are not made for the purpose of injuring this doctrine; but while confirming it and while putting in clear light the application of psychic forces, they still do not solve the great problem by the material proofs that we should like to have.
However, if the study of these phenomena has not yet yielded all that is claimed for it, nor all that it will in the future yield, we still cannot help recognizing that it has considerably enlarged the sphere of psychology, and that the knowledge of the nature of the soul and of its faculties has been once for all expanded under grander and deeper skies and wider horizons.
There is in nature, especially in the domain of life, in the manifestation of instinct in vegetables and animals, in the general soul of things, in humanity, in the cosmic universe, a psychic element which appears more and more in modern studies, especially in researches in telepathy, and in the observation of the unexplained phenomena which we have been studying in this book. This element, this principle, is still unknown to contemporary science. But, as in so many other cases, it was divined by the ancients.
Besides the four elements fire, water, air and earth, the ancients admitted a fifth, belonging to the material order, which they named _animus_, the soul of the world, the animating principle, ether.
"Aristotle" (writes Cicero, _Tuscul. Quaest._ I. 22), "after having mentioned the four kinds of material elements, believes that we ought to admit a fifth kind from which the soul proceeds; for, since the soul and the intellectual faculties cannot reside in any of the material elements, we must admit a fifth kind, which had not yet received a name and which he styles _entelechy_; that is to say, eternal and continued movement." The four material elements of the ancients have been dissected by modern a.n.a.lysis. The fifth is perhaps more fundamental.
Citing the philosopher Zeno, the same orator adds that this wise man did not admit this fifth principle, which might be compared to fire. But, from all the evidence, fire and thought are two distinct things.
Virgil has written in the _aeneid_ (Book VI) these admirable verses which are known to everybody:
Principio coelum ac terras camposque liquentes Lucentemque glob.u.m Lunae t.i.taniaque astra Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus MENS AGITAT MOLEM, _et magno se corpore miscet_.
Martia.n.u.s Capella, like all the authors of the first centuries of Christianity, mentions this directive force, also calling it the fifth element, and furthermore describes it under the name "ether."
A Roman emperor, well known to the Parisians, since it was in their city (in the palace built by his grandfather near the present _Thermes_, or old Roman baths) that he was proclaimed emperor in the year 360 (I mean Julian, called the Apostate), celebrates this fifth principle in his discourse in honor of the "The Sun, the Monarch,"[96] styling it sometimes the solar principle, sometimes the soul of the world, or intellectual principle, sometimes ether, or the soul of the physical world.
This psychical element is not confounded by the philosophers with G.o.d and Providence. In their eyes, it is something which forms part of nature.
One more word before closing. Human nature is endowed with faculties as yet little explored, that the observations made with mediums, or dynamogens, bring to light--such as human magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and premonition. These unknown psychic forces are worthy of being embraced within the scope of scientific a.n.a.lysis. At present they have been almost as little studied as in the time of Ptolemy, and have not yet found their Kepler, and their Newton, yet fairly obtrude themselves upon our notice, and cry out to be examined.
Many another unknown force will be revealed. The earth and the planets were circling about the sun in their harmonious...o...b..ts while astronomical theories saw in them only a complicated whirl of seventy-nine crystalline sh.e.l.ls. Magnetism was encircling the earth with its currents long before the invention of the mariner"s compa.s.s which reveals them to us. The waves of wireless telegraphy existed long before they were arrested in their flight. The sea was moaning along its sh.o.r.es ages before the ear of any being had come to hear it. The stars were darting their rays through the ether before any human eye had been raised to them.
The observations set forth in this work prove that the conscious will, or desire, on the one hand, and the subliminal consciousness on the other hand, exert an influence, or perform work, beyond the limits of our body.
The nature of the human soul is still a deep mystery to science and to philosophy.
It seems rather remarkable that the conclusions drawn from my labors here are the same as those of my work _The Unknown_, which were founded upon the examination of the phenomena of telepathy, apparitions of the dying, communications at a distance, premonitory dreams, etc. Indeed, the following deductions were drawn at the close of that volume:
1. _The soul exists as a real ent.i.ty independent of the body._
2. _It is endowed with faculties still unknown to science._
3. _It is able to act at a distance, without the intervention of the senses._
The conclusions of the present work concord with those of the former, and yet the subjects studied in this are entirely different from the subject-matter of that.
I may sum up the whole matter with the single statement that there exists in nature, in myriad activity, a _psychic element_ the essential nature of which is still hidden from us. I shall be happy for my part, if I have helped to establish by these two works the above important principle, exclusively based upon the scientific verification of certain phenomena studied by the experimental method.