Besides, as we shall insist later,
the intervention or non-intervention of the spirits is not the
point at issue; and the crux of the mystery does not lie there.
What most interest us is far less the paths or intermediaries by
which prophetic warnings reach us than the actual existence of
the future in the present. It is true--to do complete justice to
neospiritualism--that its position offers certain advantages from
the point of view of the almost inconceivable problem of the
preexistence of the future. It can evade or divert some of the
consequences of that problem. The spirits, it declares, do not
necessarily see the future as a whole, as a total past or
present, motionless and immovable, but they know infinitely
better than we do the numberless causes that determine any agent,
so that, finding themselves at the luminous source of those
causes, they have no difficulty in foreseeing their effects. They
are, with respect to the incidents still in process of formation,
in the position of an astronomer who foretells, within a second,
all the phases of an eclipse in which a savage sees nothing but
an unprecedented catastrophe which he attributes to the anger of
his idols of straw or clay. It is indeed possible that this
acquaintance with a greater number of causes explains certain
predictions; but there are plenty of others which presume a
knowledge of so many causes, causes so remote and so profound,
that this knowledge is hardly to be distinguished from a
knowledge of the future pure and simple.
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