He
understands none of it, he has no need to understand, he is but
the unconscious medium who lends his voice or his limbs to the
mind that inspires him. There is here but a bare and simple
answer, bearing no precise significance, seized in an alien
existence. There is here but a mechanical revelation, so to
speak, a sort of special reflex which we can only record and
which, for the rest, is as inexplicable as any other phenomenon
of consciousness or instinct. After all, when we think of it, it
is just as, astonishing that we should not perceive the solution
as it is that we should discover it. However, I grant that all
this is but a venturesome interpretation to be taken for what it
is worth, an experimental or interim theory with which we must
needs content ourselves since all the others have hitherto been
controverted by the facts.
35
Let us now briefly sum up what the Elberfeld experiments have
yielded us. Having put aside telepathy in the narrow sense--which
perhaps enters into more than one phenomenon but is not
indispensable to it, for we see these same phenomena repeated
when telepathy is practically impossible--we cannot help
observing that, if we deny the existence or the influence of the
subliminal, it is all the more difficult to contest the existence
and the intervention of the intelligence, at any rate up to the
extracting of roots, after which there is a steep precipice which
ends in darkness.
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