Posthumous Humanity: A Study of Phantoms/Chapter 2

The existence of the posthumous personality being demonstrated by some thousands of facts, observed in all ages and among all peoples, it remains to seek out its nature and origin. Evidently it proceeds ​from the living personality, whose continuation it shows itself, with its form, habits, prejudices, &c. Let us, then, inquire if there is not found in man a principle which, detaching itself from the body while the vital forces abandon the latter, continues for some time the action of the human individuality. Numerous facts show that this principle exists, and that it sometimes manifests itself during life, exhibiting, at the same time, the characteristics of the living personality and those of the posthumous personality. I shall now relate some drawn from the best sources, and which seem conclusive. The first was communicated to me on my passage to Rio Janeiro.

It was in 1858; they were still talking, in the French colony of that capital, of a singular apparition which had taken place some years earlier. An Alsatian family, comprising a husband, wife, and little girl of a very tender age, were on a voyage for Rio Janeiro, where they were intending to join some compatriots established in that city. The voyage was long; the wife fell sick, and, no doubt for want of care and proper nourishment, succumbed before reaching port. The day of her death she fell into a syncope, remained a long time in this state, and when she recovered consciousness said to her husband, who was watching by her side:

"I die happy, for now I am relieved of anxiety as to the fate of our child. I have been to Rio ​Janeiro, and found the street and the house of our friend Fritz the carpenter. He was standing in the doorway. I showed him the little one; I am sure that on your arrival he will recognize her and take care of her."

Some moments later she expired. The husband was surprised at this message, yet, however, attached but little importance to it. The same day, and at the same hour, Fritz the carpenter, the Alsatian of whom I have spoken, was in the doorway of the house that he occupied in Rio Janeiro, when he thought he saw passing in the street one of his compatriots, holding in her arms a little girl. She looked at him supplicatingly, and seemed to hold out to him the child which she carried. Her face, which seemed extremely emaciated, nevertheless reminded him of that of Lotta, the wife of his friend and compatriot Schmidt. The expression of her face, the singularity of her gait, which seemed more that of a vision than of something real, made a lively impression upon Fritz. Wishing to satisfy himself that he was not the dupe of an illusion, he called one of his workmen from the shop, also an Alsatian, and from the same locality.

"Look!" said he. "Do you not see a woman passing there, in the street, holding a child in her arms; and would not one say that it is Lotta, the wife of our countryman Schmidt?"

"I cannot say; I don't see it distinctly," answered the workman.

​Fritz said nothing more; but the different circumstances of this real or imaginary apparition deeply impressed themselves on his mind, especially the hour and day. Some time after that he saw his compatriot Schmidt arrive, carrying a little girl in his arms. The visit of Lotta was then immediately recalled to his mind, and before Schmidt could open his mouth he said to him:

My poor friend, I know all! Your wife died on the voyage, and before dying she came to show me her little girl, so that I might take care of it. See here, I have marked the date and hour!"

It was exactly the day and the moment noted by Schmidt on board the ship.

It was from reflecting upon the different circumstances of this story that I first deduced the problem of the doubling of the human personality.^[1] ​But I could not, from a single example, establish a theory which was at every point the antithesis of that which I had been taught as to the nature of man. I had to wait until an accumulation of facts should corroborate the first. My studies upon the posthumous being tended towards this result, I compared the post-sepulchral phantom with the living phantom, and I had not much trouble in convincing myself that it was the same personage. I could not, however, establish such a conclusion save upon the basis of a great number of proofs. I then consulted the works of those writers who, after a more or less direct method, had treated ​this question. I found in the reports of the theologians, magistrates, physicians, magnetizers, &c., a harvest of facts much more abundant than I had dared to hope for. The doubling of the human personality, and, as a consequence, the existence of the posthumous phantom, became for me a matter of certainty. I shall now transcribe some of the examples which have seemed to me the most conclusive and most worthy of credence. The first is taken from the book published, in 1864, by M. Gougenot des Mousseaux, under the title, Les hauts phénomènes de la Magie, précédés du Spiritisme Antique.

An officer of the English army, having taken furlough with the intention of returning from India in the year 1830, had been at sea a fortnight, when meeting the captain, he said to him:

"So you have on board a mysterious passenger whom you are hiding?"

"You're joking."

"No; I have seen him, distinctly seen him but he will not re-appear."

"What do you mean? Explain yourself."

"Very well. I was just about to retire, when I saw a stranger enter the saloon, go all round it from cabin to cabin, opening the doors, and each time, on leaving, shake his head. Having drawn aside the curtain of mine, he looked in, saw me, and as I was not the one whom he sought, he quietly retired and disappeared."

​"Boh! But how was he dressed, and what was the age and appearance of your unknown?"

The officer described him with minuteness and accuracy.

"Ah! God forbid!" cried the captain. "If what you say were not absurd, that would be my father. It could be no one else!"

The voyage finally terminated. Then the captain returned to England, where he learned that his father had ceased to live, and that the date of his death was posterior to the date of the apparition; but that, on that very day, and at the hour of the apparition, being ill, he became delirious. The members of the family, who had watched by him, added, in speaking of this crisis, that in his delirium be had cried out:

"Whence, think you, I have come? Well, I have crossed the sea. I have visited the vessel of my son. I have made the round of the cabins. I opened them all, and I did not see him in any of them."

Des Mousseaux tells us that he had this story from an old captain of Sepoys of the British army in India, and that the latter had learned it from the family of the captain of the ship.

That which first strikes one in this story is the instantaneousness of the passage of the fluidic man. The living phantom moves with a rapidity not less marvellous than the posthumous phantom. The father of the ship's captain goes to find the vessel ​of his son on the Indian route, examines attentively the cabins in turn, and comes back almost in the same instant. All that lasts only the time of one crisis. We have seen the same fact repeated in the aërial journey of the Alsatian woman to Rio Janeiro. This is a characteristic peculiar to every fluidic form, whether living or posthumous. I have given, in the preceding chapter, the reason of this phenomenon, which seems inexplicable at first sight. Another fact to notice is that, according to the story of the persons of the family who witnessed his sickness, the father of the ship's captain, the moribund, bad fallen into delirium some moments before he went to search after his son, and the delirium continued until his return. Perhaps the expression, delirium, is badly chosen, and it is a question of syncope that we are dealing with. The state of syncope would seem to be the most. favourable for the flight of the living phantom;^[2] we have seen it occur in the case of the Alsatian woman. I shall have occasion to cite other examples. With certain persons, sleep is quite enough to permit of the projection of the Double. ​Here is an instance which I borrow from the same author:

Mr. Robert Bruce, a connection of the eminent Scotch family of that name, was first mate of a vessel. One day he was sailing near the banks of Newfoundland, and making the usual calculations for longitude and latitude, when he thought he saw the captain seated at his desk; but he looked closer and saw that it was a stranger, whose fixed gaze filled him with astonishment. Hurrying on deck to the captain, who perceived his agitation, he asked him:

"Who is that at your desk?"

"Nobody," answered the captain.

"Yes, there is some one. Is it a stranger; and how could that be?"

"You dream, or you're joking."

"Not at all. Kindly come down to the cabin and see."

They went down, and found no one seated at the desk. The ship was searched throughout, but no stranger was found.

"Nevertheless, the man I saw writing at your slate must have left his writing there," said the mate to the captain.

They examined the slate; it bore these words: "Steer to the Nor-West."

"But this writing is yours, or some one's on board?"

"No."

​Each member of the ship's company was made to write the same sentence, but not one of the writings resembled that on the slate.

"Well, let us obey this order. Put the ship to the Nor'-West; the wind is fair, and we may easily make the experiment."

Three hours later, the look-out reported an iceberg, and a vessel from Quebec, bound for Liverpool, frozen to it. She was dismantled, and crowded with people. The passengers were all taken off by the boats of Bruce's ship. At the moment when one of these men passed the gangway of the rescuing vessel, Bruce shuddered, and started back much moved.

It was the stranger whom he had seen writing the words on the slate. He communicated the fact to the captain.

"Kindly write 'Steer to the Nor-West' on this slate," said the captain to the new-comer, holding out to him the side on which was no writing. The stranger wrote the sentence.

"Well, you acknowledge that to be your usual hand?" said the captain, who was struck with the identity of the writings.

"But you saw me write it. How can you doubt it?"

The captain's only reply was to turn up the other side of the slate, and the stranger was confounded on seeing on both sides his own handwriting.

"Do you think you dreamed that you wrote on ​this slate?" asked the captain of the wrecked vessel of him who had just written.

"No; at least, I have no recollection of it."

"But what was this passenger doing at noon?" asked the rescuing captain of his colleague.

"Being much fatigued, he fell into a profound sleep, and, as near as I can remember, it must have been shortly before noon. An hour or more after he awoke and said to me, 'Captain, we shall be saved to-day. I have dreamed that I was on board a vessel, and that it would come to our rescue.' He described the barque and her rig; and great was our surprise, when you bore down towards us, to recognize the accuracy of his description. Finally, the passenger said, in his turn: 'What seems to me strange is that everything here seems familiar to me, and yet I have never been here before!'"^[3]

I will make one remark upon this strange adventure.

In the apparitions which occurred at Rio Janeiro, and on board the returning Indiaman, the Alsatian woman, as well as the father of the ship's captain, recollected perfectly, on coming out of their lethargy, the journey which they had made, and related its different particulars to the persons about them. Here we see the passenger announcing to the captain of the wreck that another vessel is coming to their ​rescue, but he has not the least remembrance of that which he had written upon the slate of the ship which was to save them. When he came aboard her it seemed as though he could remember her, and yet he declared that he had never been there before. He had only fragmentary, confused reminiscences of what had occurred to him while out in the Double. One would say that we have here solutions of continuity in his dream. That is not surprising. The phenomena of "doubling" present, as we shall see in the course of this book, all the shades of difference, from the complete and living apparition of the human form to the simplest dreams. These different manifestations evidently depend upon the degree of moral energy in the individual, the tension of his mind toward a determined result, his physical constitution, his age, and probably other causes as well, of which we are ignorant.^[4] The same applies to the memory of what passes during the "doubling." Certain persons recollect most accurately all that they have done, seen, or heard. Others only catch vague and broken reminiscences alternated with perfect blanks; others have no remembrance of the part which they have played during their lethargic sleep. Such is the case of some somnambules, about whom I shall soon have occasion to remark.

Now let us open the book of a man whose name ​carries weight in everything pertaining to the rational use of magnetism, Du Potet.^[5] We read the following on page 549 of his book:

"The following fact is well attested, and may be grouped with the phenomena of the order of spiritism which are the most difficult to explain. It was published in a manual, The Pocket Book of the Friends of Religion, for 1811, by Jung Stilling, to whom it was related as a personal experience by Baron de Salza, chamberlain of the king of Sweden. The baron says that, having been to pay a visit to a neighbour, he returned to his house about mid-night, an hour at which, in summer, there is light enough in Sweden for one to read the finest print.

"As I arrived," said he, "in my domain, my father came to meet me before the park gate. He was dressed as usual, and held in his hand a cane that my brother had carved. I saluted him, and we had a long conversation together. We arrived thus at the house, and at the door of his room. Upon entering, I saw my father undressed, lying in his bed in a deep sleep; at the same instant the apparition vanished. Presently my father awoke, and looked at me with an inquiring expression.

"'My dear Edward,' said he, 'God be praised that I see you again safe and sound, for I have been extremely worried on your account in my ​dream. It seemed to me that you had fallen into the water, and were in danger of being drowned.'

"Now that very day," added the baron, "I had gone with one of my friends to the river to fish for crabs, and I just escaped being carried away by the current. I related to my father that I had seen his apparition at the park gate, and that we had a long talk together. He replied that such things often happened to him."

One of the most striking and at the same time improbable facts is here presented. The human phantom speaks and sustains a conversation of some length. In the preceding examples the apparitions are mute. Nothing is more natural. There is needed a special organ for producing speech, and an interior force which puts this apparatus in motion. Admitting that the phantom duplicates the interior, as well as the exterior, of the human mechanism, whence does it draw the breath which puts in play the phonetic machine? If the passenger on the wrecked ship above mentioned could have spoken, it is probable that, instead of writing on the slate the instructions which were to save him and his companions, he would have transmitted them directly in an audible voice to the mate, Mr. Bruce, who stood before him in the captain's room. Should we, then, regard as absurd and completely impossible the ad-venture attributed to the father of the chamberlain of the king of Sweden? By no means, for it is confirmed by a crowd of analogous histories, of which ​I shall cite some. Let us simply say, to explain the contradiction which exists between the two apparitions of which I have spoken, that the human phantom never loses its relation with the body which it has quitted, by a sort of fluidic communication which unites the one with the other. It is in the latter that the living force is acting which is necessary for its different evolutions. Useless to add that this force has its maximum at the emerging point, that it weakens with distance, and attains nullity when this distance exceeds certain limits. The phantom of the chamberlain's father, not having gone beyond the inclosure of the park, was consequently at but a short distance from the château where lay the body from which he drew his active power, and could therefore manifest itself by speech, whilst the case was quite different with the phantom of the passenger, which had had to travel a distance of some leagues to reach the room of the captain.^[6] ​Let us quote another fact of a speaking-apparition from the same author.

Stilling gives some interesting details about a man who lived in 1740, who passed a retired life, had strange habits, and resided in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia, U.S.A. This man had the reputation of possessing extraordinary secrets, and of being able to discover the most hidden things. Amongst the most remarkable proofs that he gave of his power, the following was regarded by Stilling as well authenticated:

A ship's captain had gone for a long voyage to Europe and Africa; his wife, who had received no news of him for a long time, was advised to apply to this expert; he begged her to excuse him while he went in search of the particulars which she desired. He passed into the adjoining room, and she took a seat to wait. As his absence was prolonged, she grew impatient, and thought that he had forgotten her; she softly approached the door, looked through a blind, and was astonished to see him lying on a sofa motionless as if he were dead. She did not think it right to disturb him, but awaited his return. He told her that her husband had been prevented from writing by such and such reasons, that he was at that moment in a café in London, and that he would soon return home. The return of the husband occurred, agreeably with what had been thus announced; and the wife, having asked of him the motives of his long silence, he alleged the very ​reasons which the adept had given her. The wife had a great desire to verify the remainder of these particulars. She was fully satisfied in this respect, for her husband had no sooner set his eyes on the magician than he remembered having seen him on a certain day in a London coffee-house, where this man had told him that his wife was very uneasy about him; to which the captain had replied by explaining why he had been prevented from writing, and had added that he was on the eve of embarking for America. The captain had afterwards lost sight of this stranger, and had heard nothing more of him.

Here, again, is a speaking phantom, and this time at several hundreds of leagues away from the starting point; for he had to cross the Atlantic to go from the suburbs of Philadelphia to the coffee-house in London. The explanation that we have given of this phenomenon on the preceding page does not apply here. It is, in fact, difficult to believe that the Double of the adept exerted the force that was necessary for these phonetic manifestations in the physical body. The distance which separates the phantom from its centre of action seems too great. A new explanation becomes necessary. We find it in an experimental fact well known to all those who are occupied in any way with the study of man considered from the point of view of these fluidic manifestations. It is, that every phantom exerts its force, not only ​in the body whence it proceeds, but also in that of persons whose physical or moral constitution resembles its own, or which by their nature pre-sent a marked tendency towards what is commonly called the phenomena of spiritism. The Seeress of Prevorst, about whom I shall have frequent occasion to speak, possessed this faculty in the highest degree. She felt that she was nourished by the emanations of those who came to see her. The members of her family were those who gave her the most strength, by reason of the conformity of their constitution to this sort of vampirism, and they felt themselves weakened after they had spent some minutes near her. It was, then, in the body of the ship's captain, or in that of one of the persons in the same room with him, that the phantom of the expert fed himself with vital force, and thus supplied the deficiency of the current which reached him from Philadelphia.^[7] ​It is not, however, the dialogue of the phantom that must be considered the most curious trait of this narrative. What strikes one, in my opinion, the most is the facility with which the expert falls into lethargy to undertake his voyage of exploration. Until now, we have seen apparitions produce themselves in a more or less unconscious manner, following after a sleep more or less lethargic, yet natural. In the case we are now considering, the patient knows that he is about to project the Double, and, to accomplish his object, he shuts himself in his room, lies upon a sofa, and sleeps, or rather falls into syncope, for it is not a question here of an ordinary sleep. Certain privileged beings, that is to say, who present, in certain physiological aspects, an organization of extreme delicacy, produce surprising effects, which seem so many inexplicable phenomena, but which are in reality but the exaggerated development of a principle inherent in our nature and common to all men. These personalities are rare; one sees them arise only at certain epochs.^[8] In antiquity it was Moses, ​Appolonius of Tyana, Simon Magus; then it was Merlin the Enchanter and the thaumaturgists of the first centuries of the Christian era. In our times we have had Swedenborg, Cagliostro, and the Seeress of Prevorst. The adept of Philadelphia belongs to this galaxy.

If it is surprising to see a vocal organ in the human phantom, it is still more so to learn that the latter also possesses a digestive apparatus. A glass of water, for example, can be swallowed by the fluidic image of a person and instantaneously pass into that person's body. I might quote several examples of this kind, taken from different authors; but intending to devote a special chapter to the ogreish, propensities of the posthumous man, I will not enter here into any of the details of the subject. I will but add that this apparatus can only be the gaziform replica of that which exists in the body, and that it is united to the latter by a plexus of invisible capillaries.^[9] This supposition is, no doubt, contrary to all the laws of physics. One ​cannot explain how an aëriform recipient can receive, without disintegrating itself, a liquid so heavy as water; and a thing still more extraordinary, how this liquid passes into another receptacle placed at a distance, and having with the first no apparent communication. It must be distinctly affirmed, and I shall have several occasions to re-peat it, that the fluidic world obeys, in certain of its manifestations, laws as yet unfathomed, and which seem to connect themselves, at least in part, to the very obscure problem of the rarification of matter. It would not be impossible, however, to find analogies in the physical world.^[10] Let us ​only bear in mind this principle of natural philosophy, so familiar to all who devote themselves to the study of science: there is no solution of continuity in nature. The child who comes out of the body of its mother is attached to her by a vascular system which brought it strength and life. It is the same in this doubling; the human phantom is constantly in immediate relation with the body whence it has wandered for some moments. Invisible bonds, and of a vascular nature, so intimately connect the two extremities of the chain, that any accident happening to one of the two poles reacts (se répercute) instantaneously upon the other. My meaning will be better understood from the examples I am about to relate. The first was extracted by Des Mousseaux from the judicial archives of England:

"A young son of Henry Jones, the little Richard, was one day touched by a woman named Jane Brooks. Passing her fingers downward along one of the child's sides, Jane, after having in a friendly way pressed his hand, made him a present of an apple.^[11] He lost no time in cooking and eating it. ​A moment later he fell sick, and the illness became serious. Now, one Sunday, when the child, tormented with the curious sickness which had seized upon his body, was watched by his father and a witness named Gilson, he suddenly cried out, at about noon:

"'Look, there is Jane Brooks!'

"'Where, where?'

"'There, on the wall. There, don't you see her, at the end of my finger?'

"For this sorceress, as well as the one who will appear in the next anecdote, seemed to enter the room, as she also left it, by passing through the wall!^[12] Nobody, it should be remarked, distinguished her except little Richard. Was he then feverish? did he dream? Gilson, however, springing to the place pointed out by the child, slashed at it with a knife.

"'Oh, father! Gilson has made a cut on Jane's hand; she is all over blood.'

"What was to be believed or done? As quick as ​thought, Richard's father and Gilson ran to the house of the constable. The constable was one of those quite rare individuals, of a class that our academies would find the greatest profit to draw their recruits from, who know how to listen to people of sound judgment, however strange and singular their speech may seem to be. He gave them then quite a magisterial attention, that is to say that he put no obstacles in their way, but at once accompanied them to the house of the accused. They entered unceremoniously. Jane, seated upon her stool, held one of her hands with the other.

"'How do you get on, mother?' said the constable.

"'Not so very well, sir.'

"'But why are you covering up one of your hands with the other?'

"'Oh, that is only my way.'

"'Is that hand paining you, then, perhaps?'

"'No, not at all.'

"'But you must have something the matter with it; let me look.'

"And as the old woman refused, the constable, quickly grasping her, uncovered her hand all over blood. It was exactly as the child described it.

"'It was a large pin that terribly tore me,' cried out the old woman.

"But it was averred furthermore that a host of similar wicked acts committed by this wretch had ​come to the knowledge of many witnesses. Jane, arraigned at the assizes, was condemned on the 16th of March, 1658, and that also marked the time when the sufferings of the boy Richard ceased.

"Messrs. Robert Hunt and John Carey, justices of the peace, before whom Jane was tried, affirmed that they had seen with their own eyes a part of the phenomena on which the accusation was based. And every one knows the high position which these magistrates hold in England. Needless to say that all the witnesses deposed upon oath, which is important."

One cannot misunderstand the cause of the wound which the sorceress tried to conceal. This wound had been perceived upon the phantom's hand by the boy Richard at the moment when the slashing stroke of the knife was made, and it was found almost immediately afterwards by the constable on the hand of Jane, in the latter's dwelling. The child had seen not only the wound, but also the blood which spurted from it. The direct communication between the body and its phantom is here established in an official and undeniable manner. It implies in the phantom the existence of an arterial and venous system a system which is in reality but the fluidic replica of that which is in the body. It may be asked if the blood which the boy Richard saw coming from the wound of the phantom was really arterial blood, or only its appearance. The following story affords the answer. I take it ​from the same author, who has exhumed it, like the preceding one, from English judicial records:

"Another woman, named Juliana Cox, had attained her seventieth year; and as she knocked one day, while begging, at the door of a house, a servant-maid who opened it gave her a rough welcome. Very well, my child; very well! Before this evening you shall repent of this! and that very night the maid was writhing in the most frightful convulsions.

"As soon as she felt better, she cried loudly for help, earnestly begging the people of the house to come. 'See, see, this miserable beggar-woman is pursuing me;' and, pointing with her finger, the poor girl pretended to show the infamous old woman, whom no other eye than hers could discover! 'She must be hallucinated, maniacal, hysterical; what could be clearer? Let her leave us in peace.' These were the expressions uttered about her in the kitchen by the philosophers in petticoats who surrounded her, and the molestations took their course. But one fine morning the servant-girl, perfectly certain that she should see her tormentor coming again, conceived the happy thought of arming herself with a cutlass. The phantom of Juliana Cox did in fact soon renew her visit; when, seizing her cutlass, the girl dealt a blow at her in-visible enemy, and before all the witnesses who saw the flash of the blade her bed became instantly sprinkled with blood. It was the leg of the phantom, she said, that had received the blow. 'Let us go ​and see, she cried; and immediately she went, well accompanied, to the house of Juliana. Their purpose was to verify the wound. On arriving, they knocked at the door, but they might have knocked a long time if they had not burst it open; then they rushed into Juliana's room. Quick, quick, what says the leg? The leg, newly wounded, had been dressed not more than a few minutes before. And the lips of a wound have sometimes an indiscreet and terrible language. They then compared it with the servant's cutlass. What then? The blade exactly fitted the wound. The blow aimed at the spectre of the beggar-woman, in a house where there were so many good eyes which ought to have been able to see her, but did not, thus took effect on this same woman in a place other than that of the apparition. However, it so happened that the wound, which seems to have re-bounded from the phantom to the person, was visible and palpable to everybody. Nevertheless, the obsessions of which the poor servant was the victim did not cease until the day Juliana Fox was arrested. She was judged and condemned."

Here we not only see the wound made by the cutlass on the phantom's leg, but the bed on which the scene took place is sprinkled with blood at the same instant. Several persons were witnesses of this marvel. There may have been some exaggeration in the description, and the blood sprinkled on the bed may be reducible to a few drops; but the quantity of liquid spilled matters little; it was seen ​to flow at the instant the blow was struck. This fact suffices. Doubt is no longer possible; the phantom possesses a circulatory apparatus as well as the body of which it is the double. Invisible capillaries unite the one to the other, and the whole forms a system so homogeneous, so closely connected, that the slightest prick received by the phantom at once reacts (se répercute) on all the vascular apparatus up to the extremity of the chain, and blood flows immediately. This explains the instinctive aversion shown by phantoms to fire-arms, swords, and cutting instruments of all kinds. It is the most certain way of putting them to flight, unless, however, feeling themselves the stronger, they try to disarm their adversaries. I shall return to this subject further on, and cite some examples. This fact was known in antiquity, and all the authors who have treated of spiritism or demonology—a designation which, according to us, is only applicable to phantoms of the living or the dead—are unanimous in testifying to it.^[13] ​We have seen that the human phantom is able to speak, when not too far distant from its starting point. At other times its lips are seen to move without any sounds being heard.^[14] Such is the case in the following instance reported by Gærres:

"Mary, wife of Joseph Goffe, of Rochester, was attacked by a wasting disease and taken to West Malling, nine miles from her home, to the house of her father, where she died on June 4, 1691. On the eve of her death, she feels a great desire to see her two children, whom she has left at home in the care of a nurse. She begs her husband to hire a horse, that she may go to Rochester and die near her children. She is told that she is not in a fit state to leave her bed and ride on horseback. She persists, and says that, at any rate, she wants to try.

"'If I cannot sit up, she said, 'I will lie at full length on the horse, for I want to see my dear little ones.'

"A clergyman came to see her at about two o'clock in the afternoon. She appeared quite resigned to die, and full of confidence in divine mercy.

"'All my trouble,' she said, 'is that I cannot see my children again.'

"Between one and two o'clock in the morning ​she fell into a sort of ecstasy. According to the report of the widow Turner, who watched by her through the night, her eyes were fixed and her mouth shut. Her nurse placed her hand over her mouth and nostrils, and did not feel any breath; so she thought that the patient had fainted, and could not tell whether she was dead or alive. When she came to herself, she told her mother that she had been to Rochester and seen her children.

"'It is impossible,' said the mother; 'you have not left your bed.'

"'Well,' said the other, 'anyhow, I went to see my children to-night while I was asleep.'

"The widow Alexander, the children's nurse, affirmed, on her side, that the same morning, a little before two o'clock, she had seen Mary Goffe come out of the room next her own, where one of the children was sleeping alone, the door being open, and come into her room; that she had stopped about a quarter of an hour by the bed where she was lying with the younger child. Her eyes moved, and her lips seemed to speak, but she said nothing audibly. The nurse willingly agreed to confirm by oath, before the authorities, all that she had said, and afterwards to receive the sacraments. She added that she was perfectly awake, and the day was breaking, for it was one of the longest in the year. She was sitting up in bed, had regarded the apparition with close attention, and had heard the clock on the bridge strike two. But after a few. ​instants she had said, 'In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who are you?' With these words the phantom had vanished.

"The nurse quickly put on some clothes to follow the phantom, but could not discover what had become of it. She then began to feel somewhat alarmed. She went out of the house, which was situated on the Quay, and walked about for some hours, going to look at the children occasionally. About five o'clock in the morning she knocked at the door of the adjoining house; but it was not opened until an hour later, and then she related what had happened. They told her she had been dreaming, but she answered, I saw her to-night as plain as ever I saw her in my life. Mary de J. Liveet, one of the persons who heard her talk thus, heard in the morning that Mrs. Goffe was in the last extremity, and wanted to speak to her. She, therefore, went to Malling the same day, and found her dying. The mother of the sick woman told her, among other things, that her daughter had greatly desired to see her children, and, indeed, said she had seen them.

"Mary remembered the words of the nurse, for till then she had said nothing about them, believing there had been some illusion. Tilson, the vicar of Aylesworth-Maidstone, who has published this fact, heard all the details on the day of the burial, from J. Carpenter, father of Mrs. Goffe. On the 2nd of July, he made a very exact inquiry ​of the nurse and the two neighbours she had visited in the morning. The next day the account was confirmed by the mother of Mrs. Goffe, by the clergyman who had come to see her in the evening, and by the person who had watched by her through the night. All were unanimous in their testimony; all were calm, intelligent persons, incapable of deception, and who, besides, had no interest in giving false evidence. This fact, therefore, unites all the conditions which make it incontestible."

According to the testimony of the nurse who saw the phantom of Mary Goffe, her lips moved as well as her eyes, and seemed to speak, but uttered no sound. It is permissible to conjecture that this mutism was due to a certain physical weakness; but to what cause shall we ascribe it? The distance which separated the invalid from the place of the apparition being but a few miles, the theory of distance can hardly be urged. On one side, the movements of the eyes and lips implied on the mother's part an evident desire to bid a last farewell to the dear ones whom she was about to leave for ever. Moreover, the phantom had exerted all the vital force which still animated the dying woman. The sick-nurse, who was on watch, attests this very precisely when she tells us that, at the moment of the vision, Mary Goffe was as though in ecstasis, her eyes fixed, mouth closed, and without any trace of breathing, so much so that she asked herself if she had not before her a lifeless corpse. ​It is presumable that the phonetic powerlessness of the image reflected the exhaustion of the dying woman.^[15]

The facts which I have just cited and analyzed are, I think, sufficiently numerous and conclusive to prove the existence of the human phantom, and edify us with respect to its intimate constitution. I could multiply citations, but it seems useless. However, I will again borrow from Des Mousseaux the following narrative, which, in certain respects, finishes and sums up what I have said upon this subject:

"Mr. Robert Dale Owen was ambassador from the American Republic at the Court of Naples. In 1845, this diplomatist tells us, there existed in Livonia the boarding-school of Neuwelke, about twelve leagues from Riga and half a league from Wolmar. The school contained forty-two boarders, mostly of noble families, and among the assistant-mistresses was one Emilie Sagée, of French origin, aged about thirty-two, in good health, but nervous and of unexceptionable deportment. A few weeks after her arrival it was noticed that when one boarder said ​that she had seen her in a certain place, often another one affirmed that she was in a different place. Upon a certain day, the young ladies, saw suddenly two Emilie Sagées, exactly alike, and making the same gestures. The one, however, held in her hand a chalk pencil, and the other nothing. Soon afterwards Antoinette de Wrangel was dressing, while Emilie was hooking her dress behind; the young girl saw in a mirror, upon turning around, two Emilies hooking her dress, and fainted from fright. Sometimes at meals the double form appeared standing behind the chair of the assistant-mistress, and imitating the movements that she made in eating; but the hands held neither knife nor fork. However, the doubled form seemed only by accident to be imitating the real person, and sometimes when Emilie rose from her chair, the Double seemed to be sitting there. Once, Emilie being sick in bed, Mdlle. de Wrangel was reading to her. Suddenly the assistant-mistress became, stiff, pale, and seemed ready to faint. The young pupil asked if she felt herself worse; she replied in the negative, but in a feeble voice.^[16] Some seconds ​later, Mdlle. de Wrangel saw distinctly Emilie's Double walking up and down in the room."

Here is the most remarkable example of bi-corporeality that was observed in this marvellous assistant-mistress:

"One day, the forty-two boarders were embroidering in the same apartment on the ground floor, and four glazed doors of this room opened upon the garden. They saw in this garden Emilie gathering flowers, while at the same moment she seemed in-stalled in the arm-chair which had been vacated. The boarders immediately looked in the garden, where they still saw Emilie; but they observed the feebleness of her locomotion and her air of suffering; she was as though dull and exhausted. Two of the boldest approached the Double and tried to touch it. They felt a slight resistance, which they compared to that of some texture in muslin or crêpe. One of them passed through a portion of the figure; and, after the boarder had passed, the appearance remained the same for some moments and then gradually disappeared. This phenomenon was repeated in different ways as long as Emilie remained in her situation, i.e., in 1845–46, during a year and a half; but there were intermissions of from one to several weeks. It was further remarked that the more distinct the Double, and more material in ​appearance, the really material person was proportionately wearied, suffering, and languid; when, on the contrary, the appearance of the Double weakened, the patient was seen to recover her strength. Emilie, finally, had no consciousness of this doubling, but learned it only by hearsay. She never saw the Double, nor ever suspected the state into which she was plunged. This phenomenon having alarmed the relatives, they took away their children, and the institution failed."

I shall now analyze, as I have in the previous examples, the different peculiarities of this story. The facts speak for themselves; all commentary would be superfluous. However, I will note two or three points which especially deserve our attention, and which enlighten us upon the nature of the fluidic being which seems to constitute in us a second personality.

In nearly all the narratives of phantasmal doubling that we have seen unfold themselves up to this point, the person who was the subject of it has been in bed, motionless, and plunged either in sleep or lethargy. The same rule holds with the greater part of analogous facts, which I either pass without remark or which I shall have occasion to cite in the following chapters. Hence follows this natural conclusion, that a lethargic sleep is the first necessary condition for producing the phenomenon of the Double. With the assistant-mistress of Riga, we see this doubling occur at all hours of the day, ​without apparent cause and under the most diverse circumstances. This remarkable fact must be attributed to the lady's nature, who, we are told, was of an extremely nervous organization. However, this exception is not solitary; we shall meet others in the course of the book.

The resistance which the image of the assistant-mistress offered to the boarders, who tried to touch it, is another important fact to notice. This resistance was compared to that which one feels in pressing a gauzy fabric. Such an indication confirms that which has been revealed to us by the analysis of the human phantom from the aspect of its physical constitution. It is not purely an optical image of our exterior form; it is a complete replica of all the constituent parts of our organism, and this copy, far from being an ideal thing, is composed of material molecules. I have designated the phantom thus produced by the word fluid, to imply that the atoms which constitute it are borrowed from the most tenuous molecules of the human body. But how reconcile the resistance offered by these material molecules with the extreme tenuity that must be attributed to the phantom to allow it to penetrate walls and closed doors, for we have seen it enter the most securely closed rooms?

The phenomenon explains itself. We know that hydrogen, the lightest of the gases, passes through certain metals. We also recall the celebrated ​experiment of the Academicians of Florence, who, having filled a golden globe with water, saw some liquid drops appear upon the surface after they had submitted it to a certain pressure. Whatever the thickness of a wall, it can be easily traversed by gaseous atoms, by reason of the numerous pores which in all bodies separate the molecules of even the densest matter.

Nevertheless, the manner in which the phantom of the assistant-mistress of Riga appeared and disappeared gives us the solution of the problem; her image formed itself not suddenly, but by imperceptible degrees. Appearing very mist-like at first, it was only after some moments that it showed its full consistence. The same occurred when she fainted. It is thus that the phantom proceeds who passes through a wall or partition. So to speak, he causes the molecules to pass singly, which becomes very easy, thanks to the elastic nature of the gaseous elements which constitute it.^[17]

Another fact to mark is the change which was observed in the attitude, gestures, and physiognomy of the assistant-mistress each time that her ​duplication occurred. The boarders saw her lose colour, relax her movements, and lose her strength, in proportion as her image developed. When the latter had attained its complete development, Emilie seemed exhausted and in a state of complete prostration. This torpor reminds us of the heavy and profound sleep which almost always seems the enforced prelude of phantasmal duplication. For naturalists, nothing is simpler than the explanation of this phenomenon. It is the application of a great principle of animal and vegetable physiology, daily noticed in living nature, and known under the name of the law of organic compensation. Invariably, when an organ grows abnormally, it is at the expense of those near it; the latter diminish in ratio as the other develops: the phantom of Emilie developed at the expense of her body, by drawing to itself, by a sort of aspiration, its constituent elements. Thus is confirmed the existence of a plexus of fluidiform capillaries connecting the phantom with the body from which it emanates. The extreme tenuity of this plexus makes it invisible, as is the phantom itself at the moment when it is about to manifest itself; for we have just read that it only becomes visible cumulatively in proportion as its constituent molecules reach it through the conducting threads.

Let us summarize this chapter. Innumerable facts, observed from antiquity to our own day, demonstrate in our being the existence of an ​internal reality—the internal man. Analysis of these different manifestations has permitted us to penetrate its nature. Externally it is the exact image of the person of whom it is the complement. Internally, it reproduces the mould of all the organs which constitute the framework of the human body. We see it, in short, move, speak, take nourishment; perform, in a word, all the great functions of animal life. The extreme tenuity of these constituent molecules, which represent the last term of organic matter, allow it to pass through the walls and partitions of apartments. Hence the name of phantom, by which it is generally designated. Nevertheless, as it is united with the body from which it emanates by an invisible vascular plexus, it can, at will, draw to itself by a sort of aspiration the greater part of the living forces which animate the latter. One sees, then, by a singular inversion, life withdraw from the body, which theu exhibits a cadaverous rigidity, and transfer itself entirely to the phantom, which acquires consistency, sometimes even to the point of struggling with persons before whom it materializes. It is but exceptionally that it shows itself in connexion with a living person. But as soon as death has snapped the bonds which attach it to our organism, it definitely separates itself from the human body and constitutes the posthumous phantom.