We have seen it, lastly, although we had hitherto looked upon it
as indissolubly and unchangeably human, suddenly emerge from
other creatures and there reveal faculties akin to ours, which
commune with them deep down in the deepest mysteries and which
equal them and sometimes surpass them in a region that wrongly
appeared to us the only really unassailable province of mankind,
I mean the obscure and abstruse province of numbers.
It has many other no less strange and perhaps more important
manifestations, which we propose to examine in a later volume,
notably its surprising therapeutic virtues and its phenomena of
materialization. But, without expressing a premature judgment on
what we do not yet know, perhaps we have sketched it with
sufficient clearness in the foregoing pages to enable us
henceforward to disentangle certain general and characteristic
features from a confusion of often contradictory lines.
3
But, in the first place, does it really exist, this tragic and
comical, evasive and unavoidable figure which we make no claim to
portray, but at most to divest of some of its shadows? It were
rash to affirm it too loudly; but meanwhile, in the realms where
we suppose it to reign, everything happens as though it did
exist. Do away with it and you are obliged to people the world
and burden your life with a host of hypothetical and imaginary
beings: gods, demigods, angels, demons, saints, spirits, shells,
elementals, etherial entities, interplanetary intelligences and
so on; except it and all those phantoms, without disappearing,
for they may very well continue to live in its shadow, become
superfluous or accessory.
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