PSYCHOMETRY
Now that we have eliminated the gods and the dead, what have we left? Ourselves and all the life around us; and that is perhaps enough. It is, at any rate, much more than we are able to grasp.
Let us now study certain manifestations that are absolutely similar to those which we attribute to the spirits and quite as surprising. As for these manifestations, there is not the least doubt of their origin. They do not come from the other world; they are born and die upon this earth; and they arise solely and incontestably from our own actual living mystery. They are, moreover, of all psychic manifestations, those which are easiest to examine and verify, seeing that they can be repeated almost indefinitely and that a number of excellent and well-known mediums are always ready to reproduce them in the presence of any one interested in the question. It is no longer a case of uncertain and casual observation, but of scientific experiment.
The manifestations in question are so many phenomena of intuition, of clairvoyance or clairaudience, of seeing at a distance and even of seeing the future. These phenomena may either be due to pure, spontaneous intuition on the part of the medium, in an hypnotic or waking state, or else produced or facilitated by one of the various empirical methods which apparently see only to arouse the medium's subconscious faculties and to release in some way his subliminal clairvoyance. Among such methods, those most often employed are, as we all know, cards, coffee-grounds, pins, the lines of the hand, crystal globes, astrology, and so on. They possess no importance in themselves, no intrinsic virtue, and are worth exactly what the medium who uses them is worth. As M. Duchatel well says:
"In reality, there is only one solitary MANCY. The faculty of seeing in TIME, like the faculty of seeing in SPACE, is ONE, whatever its outward form or the process employed."
We will not linger now over those manifestations which, under appearances that are sometimes childish and vulgar, often conceal surprising and incontestable truths, but will devote the present chapter exclusively to a series of phenomena which includes almost all the others and which has been classed under the generic and rather ill-chosen and ill-constructed title of "psychometry." Psychometry, to borrow Dr. Maxwell's excellent definition, is "the faculty possessed by certain persons of placing themselves in relation, either spontaneously or, for the most part, through the intermediary of some object, with unknown and often very distant things and people."
The existence of this faculty is no longer seriously denied; and it is easy for any one who cares to do so to verify it for himself; for the mediums who possess it are not extremely rare, nor are they inaccessible. It has formed the subject of a number of experiments (see, among others, M. Warcollier's report in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques of July, 1911) and of a few treatises, in the front rank of which I would mention M.
Duchatel's Enquete sur des Cas de Psychometrie and Dr. Otty's recently published book, Lucidite et Intuition, which is the fullest, most profound and most conscientious work that we possess on the matter up to the present. Nevertheless it may be said that these regions quite lately annexed by metaphysical science are as yet hardly explored and that fruitful surprises are doubtless awaiting earnest seekers.
The faculty in question is one of the strangest faculties of our subconsciousness and beyond a doubt contains the key to most of the manifestations that seem to proceed from another world. Let us begin by seeing, with the aid of a living and typical example, how it is exercised.
Mme. M--, one of the best mediums mentioned by Dr. Osty, is given an object which belonged to or which has been touched and handled by a person about whom it is proposed to question her. Mme. M-- operates in a state of trance; but there are other noted psychometers, such as Mme. F-- and M. Ph. M. de F--, who retain all their normal consciousness, so that hypnotism or the somnambulistic state is in no way indispensable to the awakening of this extraordinary faculty of clairvoyance.
When the object, which is usually a letter, has been handed to Mme. M--, she is asked to place herself in communication with the writer of the letter or the owner of the object. Forthwith, Mme.
M-- not only sees the person in question, his physical appearance, his character, his habits, his interests, his state of health, but also, in a series of rapid and changing visions that follow upon one another like cinematograph pictures, perceives and describes exactly his immediate surroundings, the scenery outside his window, the rooms in which he lives, the people who live with him and who wish him well or ill, the psychology and the most secret and unexpected intentions of all those who figure in his existence. If, by means of your questions, you direct her towards the past, she traces the whole course of the subject's history. If you turn her towards the future, she seems often to discover it as clearly as the past.
But we will for the moment reserve this latter point, to which we shall return later in a chapter devoted to the knowledge of the future.
