It is not surprising, therefore, when we know its habits, that
its communications on the subject of the future should be as
fantastic as the other manifestations of its knowledge or its
power. Let us add, to be quite fair, that, in those warnings
which we would wish to see efficacious, it stumbles against the
same difficulties as the spirits or other alien intelligences
uselessly foretelling the event which they cannot prevent, or
annihilating the event by the very fact of foretelling it.
18
And now, to end the question, is our unknown guest alone
responsible? Does it explain itself badly or do we not understand
it? When we look into the matter closely, there is, under those
anomalous and confused manifestations, in spite of efforts which
we feel to be enormous and persevering, a sort of incapacity for
self expression and action which is bound to attract our
attention. Is our conscious and individual life separated by
impenetrable worlds from our subconscious and probably universal
life? Does our unknown guest speak an unknown language and do the
words which it speaks and which we think that we understand
disclose its thought? Is every direct road pitilessly barred and
is there nothing left to it but narrow, dosed paths in which the
best of what it had to reveal to us is lost? Is this the reason
why it seeks those odd, childish, roundabout ways of automatic
writing, cross-correspondence, symbolic premonition and all the
rest? Yet, in the typical case which we have quoted, it seems to
speak quite easily and plainly when it says to the mother:
"Turn the mattress.
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