It is very nearly all that we can do for the
moment; but this first effort is not wholly to be despised.
2
It has seemed to us then that it was our unknown guest that
expressed itself in the name of the dead in table-turning and in
automatic writing and speaking. This unknown guest has appeared
to us to take within us the place of those who are no more, to
unite itself perhaps with forces that do not die, to visit the
grave with the object of bringing thence inexplicable phantoms
which rise up in front of us fruitlessly or haunt our houses
without telling us why. We have seen it, in experiments in
clairvoyance and intuition, suppressing all the obstacles that
banish or conceal thought and, through bodies that have become
transparent, reading in our very souls forgotten secrets of the
past, sentiments that have not yet taken shape, intentions as yet
unborn. We have discovered that some object once handled by a
person now far away is enough to make it take part in the
innermost life of that person, to go deeper and rise higher than
he does, to see what he sees and even what he does not see: the
landscape that surrounds him, the house which he inhabits and
also the dangers that threaten him and the secret passions by
which he is stirred. We have surprised it wandering hither and
thither, at haphazard, in the future, confounding it with the
present and the past, not conscious of where it is but seeing far
and wide, knowing perhaps everything but unaware of the
importance of what it knows, or as yet incapable of turning it to
account or of making itself understood, at once neglectful and
overscrupulous, prolix and reticent, useless and indispensable.
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