theosophical hypothesis, which, like the others, begins by
calling for an act of adherence, of blind faith. Its
explanations, though often ingenious, are no more than forcible
but gratuitous asservations and, as I said in Our Eternity, do
not give us the shadow of the commencement of a proof.

[2] Annales des Sciences Psychiques: April November 1907.


It was one of those moments in which a doubt which one had
thought for ever abolished grips the most unbelieving. For the
first time, perhaps, he looked around him with uncertainty and
wondered in what world he was. As for the faithful adherents of
the unknown, who had long understood that we must resign
ourselves to understanding nothing and he prepared for every sort
of surprise there was here, all the same, even for them, a
mystery of another character, a bewildering mystery, the only
really strange mystery, more torturing than all the others
together, because it verges upon ancestral fears and touches the
most sensitive point of our destiny.

4

The spiritualistic argument most worthy of attention is that
supplied by the apparitions of the dead and by haunted houses. We
will take no account of the phantasms that precede, accompany or
follow hard upon death: they are explained by the transmission of
a violent motion from one subconsciousness to another; and, even
when they are not manifested until several days after death, it
may still he contended that they are delayed telepathic