This brings us back once more to the omniscience and perhaps the
omnipotence of our hidden guest, to the brink of the mysterious
reservoir of every manner of knowledge which we shall meet with
again when we come to speak of the future, of the talking horses,
of the divining-rod, of materializations and miracles, in short,
in every circumstance where we pass beyond the horizon of our
little daily life. As we thus advance, with slow and cautious
footsteps, in them as yet deserted and very nebulous regions of
metapsychics, we are compelled to recognize that there must exist
somewhere, in this world or in others, a spot in which everything
is known, in which everything is possible, to which everything
goes, from which everything comes, which belongs to all, to which
all have access, but of which the long-forgotten roads must be
learnt again by our stumbling feet. We shall often meet those
difficult roads in the course of our present quest and we shall
have more than one occasion to refer again to those depths into
which all the supernatural facts of our existence flow, unless
indeed they take their source there. For the moment, that which
most above all engage our attention in these psychometric
phenomena is their purely and exclusively human character. They
occur between the living and the living, on this solid earth of
ours, in the world that lies before our eyes; and the spirits,
the dead, the gods and the interplanetary intelligences know them
not. Hardly anywhere else, except in the equally perplexing
manifestations of the divining-rod and in certain
materializations, shall we find with the same clearness this same
specific character, if we may call it so. This is a valuable
lesson. It tells us that our every-day life provides phenomena as
disturbing and of exactly the same kind and nature as those
which, in other circumstances, we attribute to other forces than