Let us keep to the
facts as we see them: an unknown faculty, buried deep in our
being and generally inactive, perceives, on rare occasions,
events that have not yet taken place. We possess but one
certainty on this subject, namely, that the phenomenon
actually occurs within ourselves; it is therefore within
ourselves that we must first study it, without burdening
ourselves with suppositions which remove it from its centre and
simply shift the mystery. The incomprehensible mystery is the
preexistence of the future; once we admit this--and it seems very
difficult to deny--there is no reason to attribute to imaginary
intermediaries rather than to ourselves the faculty of descrying
certain fragments of that future. We see, in regard to most of
the mediumistic manifestations, that we possess within ourselves
all the unusual forces with which the spiritualists endow
discarnate spirits; and why should it be otherwise as concerns
the powers of divination? The explanation taken from the
subconsciousness is the most direct, the simplest, the nearest,
whereas the other is endlessly circuitous, complicated and
distant. Until the spirits testify to their existence in an
unanswerable fashion, there is no advantage in seeking in the
grave for the solution of a riddle that appears indeed to lie at
the roots of our own life.
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