various characters that figure in his existence.
If by means of your questions you direct her towards the past, she
traces the whole course of the subject's history. If you turn her
towards the future, she seems often to discover it as clearly as the
past.

But here we must make certain reservations. We are entering upon
forbidden tracts; errors are almost the rule and proper supervision is
all but impossible. It is better therefore not to venture into those
dangerous regions. Pending fuller investigation of the question, we
may say that the foretelling of the future, when it claims to cover a
definite space of time, is nearly always illusory. There is scarcely
any accuracy of vision, except when the events concerned are very near
at hand, already developing or actually being consummated; and it then
becomes difficult to distinguish it from presentiments, which in their
turn are rarely true except where the immediate future is concerned.
To sum up, in the present state of our experience, we observe that
what the psychometers and clairvoyants foretell us possesses a certain
value and some chance of proving correct only in so far as they put
into words our own forebodings, forebodings which again may be quite
unknown to us and which they discover deep down in our subconsciousness.
They confine themselves--I speak of the genuine mediums--to bringing
to light and revealing to us our unconscious and personal intuition
of an event that is hanging over us. But, when they venture to predict
a general event, such as the result of a war, an epidemic, an
earthquake, which does not interest ourselves exclusively or which is
too remote to come within the somewhat limited scope of our intuition,
they almost invariably deceive themselves and us.

It is very difficult to fathom the nature of this intuition. Does it
relate to events partly or wholly realized, but still in a latent
state and perceived before the knowledge of them reaches us through
the normal channels of the mind or brain? Does our ever-watchful
instinct of self-preservation notice causes or traces which escape our
ever-inattentive and slumbering reason? Are we to believe in a sort of
autosuggestion that induces us to realize things which we have been
foretold or of which we have had presentiments? This is not the place
to examine so complex a problem, which brings us into contact with
all the mysteries of subconsciousness and the preexistence of the
future.

There r