The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories [70]
Father Ayroles continually quarrels with Quicherat, as a Freethinker. He certainly was a free thinker in the sense that he was the first historian who did not accept the theory of direct inspiration by saints (still less by fiends), and yet took liberty to admit that the Maid possessed knowledge not normally acquired. Other 'freethinking' sympathisers with the heroine have shuffled, have skated adroitly past and round the facts, as Father Ayroles amusingly demonstrates in his many passages of arms with Michelet, Simeon Luce, Henri Martin, Fabre, and his other opponents. M. Quicherat merely says that, if we are not to accept the marvels as genuine, we must abandon the whole of the rest of the evidence as to Jeanne d'Arc, and there he leaves the matter.
*Quicherat's five volumes of documents, the Proces, is now accessible, as far as records of the two trials go, in the English version edited by Mr. Douglas Murray.
Can we not carry the question further? Has the psychological research of the last half-century added nothing to our means of dealing with the problem? Negatively, at least, something is gained. Science no longer avers, with M. Lelut in his book on the Daemon of Socrates, that every one who has experience of hallucinations, of impressions of the senses not produced by objective causes, is mad. It is admitted that sane and healthy persons may have hallucinations of lights, of voices, of visual appearances. The researches of Mr. Galton, of M. Richet, of Brierre du Boismont, of Mr. Gurney, and an army of other psychologists, have secured this position.
Maniacs have hallucinations, especially of voices, but all who have hallucinations are not maniacs. Jeanne d'Arc, so subject to 'airy tongues,' was beyond all doubt a girl of extraordinary physical strength and endurance, of the highest natural lucidity and common- sense, and of health which neither wounds, nor fatigue, nor cruel treatment, could seriously impair. Wounded again and again, she continued to animate the troops by her voice, and was in arms undaunted next day. Her leap of sixty feet from the battlements of Beaurevoir stunned but did not long incapacitate her. Hunger, bonds, and the protracted weariness of months of cross-examination produced an illness but left her intellect as keen, her courage as unabated, her humour as vivacious, her memory as minutely accurate as ever. There never was a more sane and healthy human being. We never hear that, in the moments of her strange experiences, she was 'entranced,' or even dissociated from the actual occurrences of the hour. She heard her voices, though not distinctly, in the uproar of the brawling court which tried her at Rouen; she saw her visions in the imminent deadly breach, when she rallied her men to victory. In this alertness she is a contrast to a modern seeress, subject, like her, to monitions of an hallucinatory kind, but subject during intervals of somnambulisme. To her case, which has been carefully, humorously, and sceptically studied, we shall return.
Meantime let us take voices and visions on the lowest, most prevalent, and least startling level. A large proportion of people, including the writer, are familiar with the momentary visions beheld with shut eyes between waking and sleeping (illusions hypnagogiques). The waking self is alert enough to contemplate these processions of figures and faces, these landscapes too, which (in my own case) it is incapable of purposefully calling up.
Thus, in a form of experience which is almost as common as ordinary dreaming, we see that the semi-somnolent self possesses a faculty not always given to the waking self. Compared with my own waking self, for instance, my half-asleep self is almost a personality of genius. He can create visions that the waking self can remember, but cannot originate, and cannot trace to any memory of waking impressions. These apparently trivial things thus point to the existence of almost wholly submerged potentialities in a mind so everyday, commonplace, and, so to speak, superficial as mine. This
*Quicherat's five volumes of documents, the Proces, is now accessible, as far as records of the two trials go, in the English version edited by Mr. Douglas Murray.
Can we not carry the question further? Has the psychological research of the last half-century added nothing to our means of dealing with the problem? Negatively, at least, something is gained. Science no longer avers, with M. Lelut in his book on the Daemon of Socrates, that every one who has experience of hallucinations, of impressions of the senses not produced by objective causes, is mad. It is admitted that sane and healthy persons may have hallucinations of lights, of voices, of visual appearances. The researches of Mr. Galton, of M. Richet, of Brierre du Boismont, of Mr. Gurney, and an army of other psychologists, have secured this position.
Maniacs have hallucinations, especially of voices, but all who have hallucinations are not maniacs. Jeanne d'Arc, so subject to 'airy tongues,' was beyond all doubt a girl of extraordinary physical strength and endurance, of the highest natural lucidity and common- sense, and of health which neither wounds, nor fatigue, nor cruel treatment, could seriously impair. Wounded again and again, she continued to animate the troops by her voice, and was in arms undaunted next day. Her leap of sixty feet from the battlements of Beaurevoir stunned but did not long incapacitate her. Hunger, bonds, and the protracted weariness of months of cross-examination produced an illness but left her intellect as keen, her courage as unabated, her humour as vivacious, her memory as minutely accurate as ever. There never was a more sane and healthy human being. We never hear that, in the moments of her strange experiences, she was 'entranced,' or even dissociated from the actual occurrences of the hour. She heard her voices, though not distinctly, in the uproar of the brawling court which tried her at Rouen; she saw her visions in the imminent deadly breach, when she rallied her men to victory. In this alertness she is a contrast to a modern seeress, subject, like her, to monitions of an hallucinatory kind, but subject during intervals of somnambulisme. To her case, which has been carefully, humorously, and sceptically studied, we shall return.
Meantime let us take voices and visions on the lowest, most prevalent, and least startling level. A large proportion of people, including the writer, are familiar with the momentary visions beheld with shut eyes between waking and sleeping (illusions hypnagogiques). The waking self is alert enough to contemplate these processions of figures and faces, these landscapes too, which (in my own case) it is incapable of purposefully calling up.
Thus, in a form of experience which is almost as common as ordinary dreaming, we see that the semi-somnolent self possesses a faculty not always given to the waking self. Compared with my own waking self, for instance, my half-asleep self is almost a personality of genius. He can create visions that the waking self can remember, but cannot originate, and cannot trace to any memory of waking impressions. These apparently trivial things thus point to the existence of almost wholly submerged potentialities in a mind so everyday, commonplace, and, so to speak, superficial as mine. This