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I will not review the various and very often grotesque methods of
interrogating the future that are most frequently practised
to-day: cards, palmistry, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling by
means of coffee-grounds, tea-leaves, magnetic needles and white
of egg, graphology, astrology and the rest. These methods, as I
have already said, are worth exactly what the medium who employs
them is worth. They have no other object than to arouse the
medium's subconsciousness and to bring it into relation with that
of the person questioning him. As a matter of fact, all these
purely empirical processes are but so many, often puerile forms
of self-manifestation adopted by the undeniable gift which is
known as intuition, clairvoyance or, in certain cases,
psychometry. I have spoken at sufficient length of this last
faculty not to linger over it now. All that we have still to do
is to consider it for a moment in its relations with the
foretelling of the future. A large number of investigations,
notably those conducted by M. Duchatel and Dr. Osty, show that,
in psychometry, the notion of time, as Dr. Joseph Maxwell
observes, is very loose, that is to say, the past, present and
future nearly always overlap. Most of the clairvoyant or
psychometric subjects, when they are honest, do not know, "do not
feel," as M.
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