"psychometric"; of the knowledge of the future: presentiments,
omens, premonitions, precognitions and the rest; and lastly of
the Elberfeld horses. In the second, which will be published
later, I shall treat of the miracles of Lourdes and other places,
the phenomena of so called materialization, of the divining-rod
and of fluidic asepsis, not unmindful withal of a diamond dust of
the miraculous that hangs over the greater marvels in that
strange atmosphere into which we are about to pass.

[1] Published in English, in an enlarged form, under the title of
Our Eternity (London and New York, 1913)--Translator's Note.


2

When I speak of the present position of the mystery, I of course
do not mean the mystery of life, its end and its beginnings, nor
yet the great riddle of the universe which lies about us. In this
sense, all is mystery, and, as I have said elsewhere, is likely
always to remain so; nor is it probable that we shall ever touch
any point of even the utmost borders of knowledge or certainty.
It is here a question of that which, in the midst of this
recognized and usual mystery, the familiar mystery of which we
are almost oblivious, suddenly disturbs the regular course of our
general ignorance. In themselves, these facts which strike us as
supernatural are no more so than the others; possibly they are
rarer, or, to be more accurate, less frequently or less easily
observed. In any case, their deep-seated cause, while being
probably neither more remote nor more difficult access, seem
to lie hidden in an unknown region less often visited by our