INTRODUCTION
1
My Essay on Death[1] led me to make a conscientious enquiry into the
present position of the great mystery, an enquiry which I have
endeavoured to render as complete as possible. I had hoped that a single
volume would be able to contain the result of these investigations, which, I
may say at once, will teach nothing to those who have been over the same
ground and which have nothing to recommend them except their sincerity,
their impartiality and a certain scrupulous accuracy. But, as I proceeded, I
saw the field widening under my feet, so much so that I have been obliged
to divide my work into two almost equal parts. The first is now published
and is a brief study of veridical apparitions and hallucinations and haunted
houses, or, if you will, the phantasms of the living and the dead; of those
manifestations which have been oddly and not very appropriately
described as "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.