It is not true therefore that the psychical sciences have said their last word and that we have nothing more to expect from them. They have but just awakened or reawakened; and, to postdate Guyau's prediction by a hundred years, we might say, with them in our minds, that the twentieth century "will end with discoveries as ill-formulated but perhaps as important in the moral world as those of Newton and Laplace in the astronomical world." But, though we have much to hope from them, that is no reason why we should look to them for everything and abandon in their favour that which has brought us where we are. The choice of which we spoke, between the brain and the subconsciousness, has been made long ago; and it is not our part to make it over again. We are carried along by a force acquired in the course of two or three thousand years; and our methods, like our intellectual habits, have of themselves become transformed into sort of minor subconsciousness superposed upon the major subconsciousness and sometimes mingling with it. Henri Bergson, in his very fine presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research on the 28th of May, 1913, said that he had sometimes wondered what would have happened if modern science, instead of setting out from mathematics, instead of bringing all its forces to converge on the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of mind; if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for instance, had been psychologists:
"We should certainly," said he, "have had a psychology of which to-day we can form no idea, any more than before Galileo we could have imagined what our physics would be; a psychology that probably would have been to our present psychology what our physics is to Aristotle's. Foreign to every mechanistic idea, not even conceiving the possibility of an explanation, science would have enquired into, instead of dismissing a priori facts, such as those which you study; perhaps 'psychical research' would have stood out as its principal preoccupation. The most general laws of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental laws of mechanics were discovered), we should have passed from mind, properly so-called, to life; biology would have been constituted, but a vitalist biology, quite different from ours, which would have sought behind the sensible forms of living beings the inward, invisible force of which the sensible forms are the manifestations."
It would therefore in the very first days of its activity have encountered all these strange problems: telepathy, materializations, clairvoyance, miraculous cures, knowledge of the future, the possibility of survival, interplanetary intelligence and many others, which it has neglected hitherto and which, thanks to its neglect, are still in their infancy. But, as the human mind is not able to follow two diametrically opposite directions at the same time, it would necessarily have rejected the mathematical sciences. A steamship coming from another hemisphere, one in which men's minds had taken, unknown to ourselves, the road which our own has actually taken, would have seemed to us as wonderful, as incredible as the phenomena of our subconsciousness seem to us to-day. We should have gone very far in what at present we call the unknown or the occult; but we should have known hardly anything of physics, chemistry or mechanics, unless, which is very probable, we had come upon them by another road as we travelled round the occult. It is true that certain nations, the Hindus particularly, the Egyptians and perhaps the Incas, as well as others, in all probability, who have not left sufficient traces, thus went to work the other way and obtained nothing decisive. Is this again a consequence of the hopeless incompatibility between the faculties of the brain and those of the subconsciousness? Possibly; but we must not forget that we are speaking of nations which never possessed our intellectual habits, our passion for precision, for verification, for experimental certainty; indeed, this passion has only been fully developed in ourselves within the last two or three centuries. It is to be presumed therefore that the European would have gone much farther in the other direction than the Oriental.
Where would he have arrived? Endowed with a different brain, naturally clearer, more exacting, more logical, less credulous, more practical, closer to realities, more attentive to details, but with the scientific side of his intelligence uncultivated, would he have gone astray or would he have met the truths which we are still seeking and which may well be more important than all our material conquests. Ill-prepared, ill-equipped, ill-balanced, lacking the necessary ballast of experiments and proofs, would he have been exposed to the dangers familiar to all the too-mystical nations? It is very difficult to imagine so. But the hour has now perhaps come to try without risk what he could not have done without grave peril. While abandoning no whit of his understanding, which is small compared with the boundless scope of the subconsciousness, but which is sure, tried and docile, he can now embark upon the great adventure and try to do that which has not been done before. It is a matter of discovering the connecting link between the two forces. We are still ignorant of the means of aiding, encouraging, developing and taming the greater of the two and of bringing it closer to us; the quest will be the most difficult, the most mysterious and, in certain respects, the most dangerous that mankind has ever undertaken. But we can say to ourselves, without fear of being very far wrong, that it is the best task at the moment. In any case, this is the first time since man has existed that he will be fronting the unknown with such good weapons, even as it is also the first time since its awakening that his intelligence, which has reached a summit from which it can understand almost everything, will at last receive help from outside and hear a voice that is something more than the echo of its own.
