even possible that not a single one of the fifty will
listen to the insistent claims of the circumstance that, but for the
disaster ahead, would have rendered their departure imperative, and
that their place will be taken by twenty or thirty others in whom the
voice of Chance does not speak with a similar power. Here we touch the
profoundest depths of the profoundest of human enigmas; and the
hypothesis necessarily falters. But is it not more reasonable, in the
fictitious case before us--wherein we merely thrust into prominence
what is of constant occurrence in the more obscure conjunctures of
daily life--to regard both decision and action as emanating from our
unconsciousness, rather than from doubtful, and distant, gods? Our
unconsciousness is aware of the catastrophe: it must be: our
unconsciousness sees it; for it knows neither time nor space, and the
disaster is therefore happening as actually before its eyes as before
the eyes of the eternal powers. The mode of prescience matters but
little. Out of the fifty travellers who have been warned, two or three
will have had a real presentiment of the danger; these will be the ones
in whom unconsciousness is free and untrammelled, and therefore more
readily able to attain the first, and still obscure, layers of
intellect. The others suspect nothing: they inveigh against the
inexplicable obstacles and delays: they strain every nerve to arrive in
time, but their departure becomes impossible. They fall ill, take a
wrong road, change their plans, meet with some insignificant adventure,
have a quarrel, a love affair, a moment of idleness or forgetfulness,
which detains them in spite of themselves. To the first it will never
have even occurred to sail on the ill-starred boat, although this be
the one that they should logically, inevitably, have been compelled to
choose. But the efforts that their unconsciousness has put forth to
save them have their workings so deep down that most of these men will
have no idea that they owe their life to a fortunate chance; and they
will honestly believe that they never intended to sail by the ship that
the powers of the sea had claimed.

12

As for those who punctually make their appearance at the fatal tryst,
they belong to the tribe of the unlucky. They are the unfortunate race
of our race. When the rest all fly, they alone remain in their places.
When others retreat, they advance boldly. They infallibly travel by
the train