Scanned by Dianne Bean of Phoenix, Arizona.
Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
1
My Essay on Death[1] led me to make a conscientious enquiry intothe present position of the great mystery, an enquiry which Ihave endeavoured to render as complete as possible. I had hopedthat a single volume would be able to contain the result of theseinvestigations, which, I may say at once, will teach nothing tothose who have been over the same ground and which have nothingto recommend them except their sincerity, their impartiality anda certain scrupulous accuracy. But, as I proceeded, I saw thefield widening under my feet, so much so that I have been obligedto divide my work into two almost equal parts. The first is nowpublished and is a brief study of veridical apparitions andhallucinations and haunted houses, or, if you will, the phantasmsof the living and the dead; of those manifestations which havebeen oddly and not very appropriately described as"psychometric"; of the knowledge of the future: presentiments,omens, premonitions, precognitions and the rest; and lastly ofthe Elberfeld horses. In the second, which will be publishedlater, I shall treat of the miracles of Lourdes and other places,the phenomena of so called materialization, of the divining-rodand of fluidic asepsis, not unmindful withal of a diamond dust ofthe miraculous that hangs over the greater marvels in thatstrange atmosphere into which we are about to pass.
[1] Published in English, in an enlarged form, under the title ofOur Eternity (London and New York, 1913)—Translator's Note.
2
When I speak of the present position of the mystery, I of coursedo not mean the mystery of life, its end and its beginnings, noryet the great riddle of the universe which lies about us. In thissense, all is mystery, and, as I have said elsewhere, is likelyalways to remain so; nor is it probable that we shall ever touchany point of even the utmost borders of knowledge or certainty.It is here a question of that which, in the midst of thisrecognized and usual mystery, the familiar mystery of which weare almost oblivious, suddenly disturbs the regular course of ourgeneral ignorance. In themselves, these facts which strike us assupernatural are no more so than the others; possibly they arerarer, or, to be more accurate, less frequently or less easilyobserved. In any case, their deep-seated cause, while beingprobably neither more remote nor more difficult access, seemto lie hidden in an unknown region less often visited by ourscience, which after all is but a reassuring and conciliatoryespression of our ignorance. Today, thanks to the labours of theSociety for Psychical Research and a host of other seekers, weare able to approach these phenomena as a whole with a certainconfidence. Leaving the realm of legend, of after-dinner stories,old wives' tales, illusions and exaggerations, we find ourselvesat last on circumscribed but fairly safe ground. This does notmean that there are no other supernatural phenomena besides thosecollected in the publications of the society in question and in afew of the more weighty reviews which have adopted the samemethods. Notwithstanding all their diligence, which for overthirty years has been ransacking the obscure corners of ourplanet, it is inevitable that a good many things escape theirnotice, besides which the rigour of their investigations makesthem reject three fourths of those which are brought before them.But we may say that the twenty-six volumes of the society isProceedings a