Exceptional circumstances--some extraordinary need, wish, passion
or shock--are required to produce what M. Hachet-Souplet calls
"the psychic flash" which suddenly thaws and galvanizes its
brain, placing it for a minute in the waking state in which the
human brain works normally. Nor is this surprising. It does not
need that awakening in order to exist; and we know that nature
never makes great superfluous efforts.. "The intellect," as
Professor Clarapede well says, "appears only as a makeshift, an
instrument which betrays that the organism is not adapted to its
environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of
impotence."
It is probable that our brain at first suffered from the same
lethargy, a condition, for that matter, from which many men have
not yet emerged; and it is even more probable that, compared with
other modes of existence, with other psychic phenomena, on
another plane and in another sphere, the dense sleep in which we
move is similar to that in which the lower animals have their
being. It also is traversed, with increasing frequency, by
psychic flashes of a different order and a different scope.
Seeing, on the one side, the intellectual movement that seems to
be spreading among our lesser brothers and, on the other, the
ever more constantly repeated manifestations of our
subconsciousness, we might even ask ourselves if we have not
here, on two different planes, a tension, a parallel pressure, a
new desire, a new attempt of the mysterious spiritual force which
animates the universe and which seems to be incessantly seeking
fresh outlets and fresh conducting rods.
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