R., that is to say, they have nearly all been very strictly investigated. It is impossible, short of filling these pages with often striking and touching but rather cumbersome anecdotes, to enumerate them here, however briefly. It will be sufficient to note that sometimes the dog begins to howl at the exact moment when his master loses his life, for instance, on a battlefield, hundreds of miles from the place where the dog is. More commonly, the cat, the dog and the horse plainly manifest that they perceive, often before men do, telepathic apparitions, phantasms of the living or the dead. Horses in particular seem very sensitive to places that pass as haunted or uncanny. On the whole, the result of these observations is that we can hardly dispute that these animals communicate as much as we do and perhaps in the same fashion with the mystery that lies around us.
There are moments at which, like man, they see the invisible and perceive events, influences and emotions that are beyond the range of their normal senses. It is, therefore, permissible to believe that their nervous system or some remote or secret part of their being contains the same psychic elements connecting them with an unknown that inspires them with as much terror as it does ourselves. And, let us say in passing, this terror is rather strange; for, after all, what have they to fear from a phantom or an apparition, they who, we are convinced have no after-life and who ought, therefore, to remain perfectly indifferent to the manifestations, of a world in which they will never set foot?
[1] Annales des sciences psychiques, August, 1905, pp 422-469.
I shall perhaps be told that it is not certain that these apparitions are objective, that they correspond with an external reality, but that it is exceedingly possible that they spring solely from the man's or the animal's brain. This is not the moment to discuss this very obscure point, which raises the whole question of the supernatural and all the problems of the hereafter. The only important thing to observe is that at one time it is man who transmits his terror, his perception or his idea of the invisible to the animal and at another the animal which transmits its sensations to man. We have here, therefore, intercommunications which spring from a deeper common source than any that we know and which, to issue from it or go back to it, pass through other channels than those of our customary senses.
Now all this belongs to that unexplained sensibility, to that secret treasure, to that as yet undetermined psychic power which, for lack of a better term, we call subconsciousness or subliminal consciousness. Moreover, it is not surprising that in the animals, these subliminal faculties not only exist, but are perhaps keener and more active than in ourselves, because it is our conscious and abnormally individualized life that atrophies them by relegating them to a state of idleness wherein they have fewer and fewer opportunities of being exercised, whereas in our brothers who are less detached from the universe, consciousness--if we can give that name to a very uncertain and confused notion of the ego--is reduced to a few elementary actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from the whole of the circumambient life and they still possess a number of those more general and indeterminate senses whereof we have been deprived by the gradual encroachment of a narrow and intolerant special faculty, our intelligence. Among these senses which up to the present we have described as instincts, for want--and it is becoming a pressing want--of a more suitable and definite word, need I mention the sense of direction, migration, foreknowledge of the weather, of earthquakes and avalanches and many others which we doubtless do not even suspect? Does all this not belong to a subconsciousness which differs from ours only in being so much richer?
I am fully aware that this explanation by means of the subliminal consciousness will not explain very much and will at most invoke the aid of the unknown to illuminate the incomprehensible. But to explain a phenomenon, a Dr. J. de Modzelwski very truly says, "is to put forward a theory which is more familiar and more easily comprehensible to us than the phenomenon at issue." This is really what we are constantly and almost exclusively doing in physics, chemistry, biology and in every branch of science without exception. To explain a phenomenon is not necessarily to make it as clear and lucid as that two and two are four; and, even so, the fact that two and two are four is not, when we go to the bottom of things, as clear and lucid as it seems. What in this case, as in most others, we wrongfully call explaining is simply confronting the unexpected mystery which these horses offer us with a few phenomena which are themselves unknown, but which have been perceived longer and more frequently. And this same mystery, thus explained, will serve one day to explain others. It is in this way that science goes to work. We must not blame it: it does what it can; and it does not appear that there are other ways.
