He never opens the door of that uncertain stable, on
important days, without a sinking at the heart. Let the beard or
the frown of some learned professor fail to please the horses:
they will, forthwith, take an unholy delight in giving the most
irrelevant answer to the most elementary question, for hours and
even days on end.
Other common features are the strongly-marked personality of the
mediumistic "raps" and the communications known as "deferred
telepathic communications," that is to say, those in which the
answer is obtained at the end of a sitting to a question put at
the beginning and forgotten by all those present. What at first
sight seems one of the strongest objections urged against the
mediumism of the horse even tends to confirm it. If the reply
comes from the horse's subconsciousness, it has been asked, how
is it that it should be necessary first to teach him the elements
of language, mathematics and so forth, and that Berto, for
instance, is incapable of solving the same problems as Mohammed?
This objection has been very ably refuted by M. de Vesme, who
writes:
"To produce automatic writing, a medium must have learnt to
write; before Victorien Sardou or Mlle Helene Schmidt could
produce their mediumistic drawings and paintings, they had to
possess an elementary knowledge of drawing and painting; Tartini
would never have composed The Devil's Sonata in a dream, if he
had not known music; and so forth.
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