It has, when it is pleased to
communicate with us or when we are allowed to penetrate into it,
an answer for every question, and perhaps a remedy for every
ill. We will not enumerate its virtues again. It will be enough
for us to recall with what ease it mocks at space, time and all
the obstacles that beset our poor human knowledge and
understanding. We believed it, like all that seems to us superior
and marvellous, the intangible, inalienable and incommunicable
attribute of man, with even better reason than his intelligence.
And now an accident, strangely belated, it is true, tells us
that, at one precise point, the strangest and least foreseen of
all, the horse and the dog draw more easily and perhaps more
directly than ourselves upon its mighty reservoirs. By the most
inexplicable of anomalies, though one that is fairly consistent
with the fantastic character of the subliminal, they appear to
have access to it only at the spot that is most remote from their
habits and most unknown to their propensities, for there is
nothing in the world about which animals trouble less than
figures. But is this not, perhaps because we do not see what goes
on elsewhere? It so happens that the infinite mystery of numbers
can sometimes be expressed by a very few simple movements which
are natural to most animals; but there is nothing to tell us
that, if we could teach the horse and the dog to attach to these
same movements the expression of other mysteries, they would not
draw upon them with equal facility.
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