And this anomaly is the more surprising in as much as it is almost universally accepted that a sense or a faculty becomes developed in proportion to its usefulness; and there are few, I think, that would have been not only more useful but even more necessary to man. He has always had a keen and primitive interest in knowing without delay the most secret thoughts of his fellow-man, who is often his adversary and sometimes his mortal enemy. He has always had an interest no less great in immediately transmitting those thoughts through space, in seeing beyond the continents and seas, in going back into the past, in advancing into the future, in being able to find in his memory at will not only all the acquirements of his personal experience but also those of his ancestors, in communicating with the dead and perhaps with the sovereign intelligence diffused over the universe, in discovering hidden springs and treasures, in escaping the harsh and depressing laws of matter and gravity, in relieving pain, in curing the greater number of his disorders and even in restoring his limbs, not to mention many other miracles which he could work if he knew all the mighty forces that doubtless slumber in the dark recesses of his life.
Is this once more an unexpected character of the eccentric physiology of our unknown guest? Here are faculties more precious than the most precious faculties that have made us what we are, faculties whose magic buds sprout on every side underneath our intelligence but have never burst into flower, as though a wind from another sphere had killed them with its icy breath. Is it because it occupies itself first and foremost with the species that it thus neglects the individual? But, after all, the species is only an aggregate of successive individuals; and its evolution consequently depends upon their evolution. There would therefore have been an evident advantage to the species in developing faculties that would perhaps have carried it much farther and much higher than has been done by its brain-power, which alone has progressed. If there is no evolution for them here, do they develop elsewhere? What are those powers which exist outside and independent of the laws of this earth? Do they then belong to other worlds? But, if so, what are they doing in ours? One would sometimes think, at the sight of so much neglectfulness, uncertainty and inconsistency, that man's evolution had been intentionally retarded by a superior will, as though that will feared that he was going too fast, that he was anticipating some pre established order and moving prematurely out of his appointed plane.
And the riddles accumulate which we cannot hope to solve. It has been said that these abnormal faculties are communications or infiltrations, themselves abnormal, which have found their way through the partitions that separate our consciousness from our subconsciousness. This is very likely, but it is only a minor side of the question. It would be important before all to know what that subconsciousness represents, whither it tends and with what it itself is communicating. Is the impersonal form of knowledge a necessary or an accidental stage? Is the impersonal form which it takes in the subconsciousness the only true one? Is there really, as everything seems to prove, a hopeless incompatibility between our intellectual faculties and those families of uncertain origin, to such an extent that the latter are unable to manifest themselves except when the former are weakened or temporarily suspended? It has, at any rate, been observed that they are hardly ever exercised simultaneously. Are we to believe that, at a given moment, mankind or the genius that presides over its destinies had to make an exclusive and awful choice between cerebral energy and the mysterious forces of the subconsciousness and that we still find traces of its hesitations in our organism? What would have become of a race of man in which the subconsciousness had triumphed over the brain? Is not this the case with animals; and would not the race have remained purely animal? Or else would not this preponderance of a subconscious more powerful than that of the animals and almost independent of our body have resulted in the disappearance of life as we know it; and should we not even now be trading the life which we shall probably lead when we are dead? Here are a number of questions to which there are no answers and which are nevertheless perhaps not so idle as one might at first believe.
