第60章 CHAPTER V(7)

Amidst this antagonism, whose triumph are we to hope for? Is any alliance between the two opposing forces for ever impossible so long as we are in the flesh? What are we to do meanwhile? If a choice be inevitable, which way will our choice incline; and which victim shall we sacrifice? Shall we listen to those who tell us that there is nothing more to be gained or learnt in those inhospitable regions where all our bewildering phenomena have been known since man first was man? Is it true that occultism--as it is very improperly called, for the knowledge which it seeks is no more occult than any other--is it true that occultism is marking time, that it is becoming hopelessly entangled in the same doubtful facts and that it has not taken a single step forward since its renaissance more than fifty years ago? One must be entirely ignorant of the wonderful efforts of those fruitful years to venture upon such an assertion. This is not the place to discuss the question, which would require full and careful treatment; but we may safely say that until now there is no science which in so short a time has brought order out of such a chaos, ascertained, checked and classified such a quantity of facts, or more rapidly awakened, cultivated and trained in man certain faculties which he had never seriously been believed to possess; and furthermore none which has caused to be recognized as incontestable and thus introduced into the circle of the realities whereon we base our lives a number of unlikely phenomena which had hitherto been contemptuously passed over. We are still, it is true, waiting for the domestication of the new force, its practical application to daily use. We are waiting for the all-revealing, decisive manifestation which will remove our last doubts and throw light upon the problem down to its very source. But let us admit that we are likewise waiting for this manifestation in the great majority of sciences. In my case, we are already in the presence of an astonishing mass of well-weighed and verified materials which, until now, had been taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments of wild legends, meaningless and unimportant. For more than three centuries, the science of electricity remained at very much the same point at which our psychical sciences stand to-day. Men were recording, accumulating, trying to interpret a host of odd and futile phenomena, toying with Ramsden's machine, with Leyden jars, with Volta's rough battery. They thought that they had discovered an agreeable pastime, an ingenious plaything for the laboratory or study; and they had not the slightest suspicion that they were touching the sources of an universal, irresistible, inexhaustible power, invisibly present and active in all things, that would soon invade the surface of our globe. Nothing tells us that the psychic forces of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse have not similar surprises in store for us, with this difference, that we are here concerned with energies and mysteries which are loftier, grander and doubtless fraught with graver consequences, since they affect our eternal destinies, traverse alike our life and our death and extend beyond our planet.