Other common features are the strongly-marked personality of the mediumistic "raps" and the communications known as "deferred telepathic communications," that is to say, those in which the answer is obtained at the end of a sitting to a question put at the beginning and forgotten by all those present. What at first sight seems one of the strongest objections urged against the mediumism of the horse even tends to confirm it. If the reply comes from the horse's subconsciousness, it has been asked, how is it that it should be necessary first to teach him the elements of language, mathematics and so forth, and that Berto, for instance, is incapable of solving the same problems as Mohammed?
This objection has been very ably refuted by M. de Vesme, who writes:
"To produce automatic writing, a medium must have learnt to write; before Victorien Sardou or Mlle Helene Schmidt could produce their mediumistic drawings and paintings, they had to possess an elementary knowledge of drawing and painting; Tartini would never have composed The Devil's Sonata in a dream, if he had not known music; and so forth. Unconscious cerebration, however wonderful, can only take effect upon elements already acquired in some way or another. The subconscious cerebration of a man blind from birth will not make him see colours."
Here, then, in this comparison which might easily be extended, are several fairly well- defined features of resemblance. We receive a vivid impression of the same habits, the same contradictions, and the same eccentricities; and we once more recognize the strange and majestic shadow of our unknown guest.
One great objection remains, based upon the very nature of the phenomenon, upon the really inseparable distance that separates the whole life of the horse from the abstract and impenetrable life of numbers. How can his subliminal consciousness interest itself for a moment in signs that represent nothing to him, have no relation to his organism and will never touch his existence?
But in the first place, it is just the same with the child or the illiterate calculator. He is not interested either in the figures which he lets loose. He is completely ignorant of the consequences of the problems which he solves. He juggles with digits which have hardly any more meaning to him than to the horse. He is incapable of accounting for what he does; and his subconsciousness also acts in a sort of indifferent and remote dream. It is true that, in his case, we can appeal to heredity and to memory; but is this difference enough to settle the difficulty and definitely to separate the two phenomena? To appeal to heredity is still to appeal to the subliminal; and it is not at all certain that the latter is limited by the interest of the organism sheltering it. It appears, on the contrary, in many circumstances, to spread and extend far beyond that organism in which it is domiciled, one would say, accidentally and provisionally. It likes to show, apparently, that it is in relation with all that exists. It declares itself, as often as possible, universal and impersonal. It has but a very indifferent care, as we have seen in the matter of apparitions and premonitions, for the happiness and even the safety of its host and protector. It prophesies to its companion of a lifetime events which he cannot avoid or which do not concern him. It makes him see beforehand, for instance, all the circumstances of the death of a stranger whom he will only hear of after the event, when this event is irrevocable. It brings a crowd of barren presentiments and conjures up veridical hallucinations that are wholly alien and idle. With psychometric, typtological or materializing mediums, it practises art for art's sake, mocks at space and time, passes through personalities, sees through solid bodies, brings into communication thoughts and motions worlds apart, reads souls and lives by the light of a flower, a rag of a scrap of paper; and all this for nothing, to amuse itself, to astonish us, because it adores the superfluous, the incoherent, the unexpected, the improbable, the bewildering, or rather, perhaps, because it is a huge, rough, undisciplined force still struggling in the darkness and coming to the surface only by wild fits and starts, because it is an enormous expansion of a spirit striving to collect itself, to achieve consciousness, to make itself of service and to obtain a hearing. In any case, for the time being, it appeals just what we have described, and would be unlike itself if it behaved any otherwise in the case that puzzles us.
Lastly, to close this chapter, let us remark that it is nearly certain that the solution given by calculating children and horses is not of a mathematical nature at all. They do not in any way consider the problem or the sum to be worked. They simply find the answer straight away to a riddle, the guessing of which is made easy by the actual nature of figures which keep their secrets badly. To any one in the requisite state of mind, it becomes a question of a sort of elementary charade, which hides its answer only from those who speak another language. It is evident that every problem, however complex it may appear, carries within its very enunciation its one, invariable solution, scarce veiled by the indiscreet signs that contain or cover it.
