The Unknown Guest [64]
of figures is almost independent of the intelligence proper. One of the most curious is that of an Italian shepherd boy, Vito Mangiamele, who was brought before the Paris Academy of Science in 1837 and who, at the age of ten, though devoid of the most rudimentary education, was able in half a minute to extract the cubic root of a number of seven figures. Another, more striking still, also mentioned by Dr. Clarapede in his paper on the learned horses, is that of a man blind from birth, an inmate of the lunatic-asylum, at Armentieres. This blind man, whose name is Fleury, a degenerate and nearly an idiot, can calculate in one minute and fifteen seconds the number of seconds in thirty-nine years, three months and twelve days, not forgetting the leap-years. They explain to him what a square root is, without telling him the conventional method of finding it; and soon he extracts almost as rapidly as Inaudi himself, without a blunder, the square roots of numbers of four figures, giving the remainder. On the other hand, we know that a mathematical genius like Henri Pomcare confessed himself incapable of adding up a column of figures without a mistake.
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>From the maybe enchanted atmosphere that surrounds numbers we shall pass more easily to the even more magic mists of the final theory, the only one remaining to us for the moment: the mediumistic or subliminal theory. This, we must remember, is not the telepathic theory proper which decisive experiments have made us reject. Let us have the courage to venture upon it. When one can no longer interpret a phenomenon by the known, we must needs try to do so by the unknown. We, therefore, now enter a new province of a great unexplored kingdom, in which we shall find ourselves without a guide.
Mediumistic phenomena, manifestations of the secondary or the subliminal consciousness, between man and man, are, as we have more than once had occasion to assure ourselves, capricious, undisciplined, evasive and uncertain, but more frequent than one thought and, to one who examines, them seriously and honestly, often undeniable. Have similar manifestations been discovered between man and the animals? The study of these manifestations, which is very difficult even in the case of man, becomes still more so when we question witnesses doomed to silence. There are, however, some animals which are looked upon as "psychic," which, in other words, seem indisputably to be sensitive to certain subliminal influences. One usually classes the cat, the dog and the horse in this somewhat ill-defined category. To these superstitious animals one might perhaps add certain birds, more or less birds of omen, and even a few insects, notably the bees. Other animals, such as, for instance, the elephant and the monkey, appear to be proof against mystery. Be this as it may, M. Ernest Bozzano, in an excellent article on Les Perceptions psychiques des animaux,[1] collected in 1905 sixty-nine cases of telepathy, presentiments and hallucinations of sight or hearing in which the principal actors are cats, dogs and horses. There are, even among them, ghosts or phantoms of dogs which, after their death, return to haunt the homes in which they were happy. Most of these cases are taken from the Proceedings of the S. P. 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
29
>From the maybe enchanted atmosphere that surrounds numbers we shall pass more easily to the even more magic mists of the final theory, the only one remaining to us for the moment: the mediumistic or subliminal theory. This, we must remember, is not the telepathic theory proper which decisive experiments have made us reject. Let us have the courage to venture upon it. When one can no longer interpret a phenomenon by the known, we must needs try to do so by the unknown. We, therefore, now enter a new province of a great unexplored kingdom, in which we shall find ourselves without a guide.
Mediumistic phenomena, manifestations of the secondary or the subliminal consciousness, between man and man, are, as we have more than once had occasion to assure ourselves, capricious, undisciplined, evasive and uncertain, but more frequent than one thought and, to one who examines, them seriously and honestly, often undeniable. Have similar manifestations been discovered between man and the animals? The study of these manifestations, which is very difficult even in the case of man, becomes still more so when we question witnesses doomed to silence. There are, however, some animals which are looked upon as "psychic," which, in other words, seem indisputably to be sensitive to certain subliminal influences. One usually classes the cat, the dog and the horse in this somewhat ill-defined category. To these superstitious animals one might perhaps add certain birds, more or less birds of omen, and even a few insects, notably the bees. Other animals, such as, for instance, the elephant and the monkey, appear to be proof against mystery. Be this as it may, M. Ernest Bozzano, in an excellent article on Les Perceptions psychiques des animaux,[1] collected in 1905 sixty-nine cases of telepathy, presentiments and hallucinations of sight or hearing in which the principal actors are cats, dogs and horses. There are, even among them, ghosts or phantoms of dogs which, after their death, return to haunt the homes in which they were happy. Most of these cases are taken from the Proceedings of the S. P. 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