What in
this case, as in most others, we wrongfully call explaining is
simply confronting the unexpected mystery which these horses
offer us with a few phenomena which are themselves unknown, but
which have been perceived longer and more frequently. And this
same mystery, thus explained, will serve one day to explain
others. It is in this way that science goes to work. We must not
blame it: it does what it can; and it does not appear that there
are other ways.
31
If we assent to this explanation by means of the subliminal
consciousness, which is a sort of mysterious participation in all
that happens in this world and the others, many obstacles
disappear and we enter into a new region in which we draw
strangely nearer to the animals and really become their brothers
by closer links, perhaps the only essential links in life. They
take part from that moment in the great human problems, in the
extraordinary actions of our unknown guest; and, if, since we
have been observing the indwelling force more attentively,
nothing any longer surprises us of that which it realizes in us,
no more should anything surprise us of that which it realizes in
them. We are on the same plane with them, in some as yet
undetermined element, when it is no longer the intelligence that
reigns alone, but another spiritual power, which pays no heed to
the brain, which passes by other roads and which might rather be
the psychic substance of the universe itself, no longer set in
grooves, isolated and specialized by man, but diffused, multiform
and perhaps, if we could trace it, equal in everything that
exists.
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