rediction in both is timid and
laconic; but, in those regions where the least gleam of light assumes
extraordinary importance, it is not to be neglected. I admit, for the
rest, that there has so far been no time to carry out a serious
enquiry on this point, but I should be greatly surprised if any such
enquiry gave positive results and if it did not allowed us to state
that the gigantic event, as a whole, as a general event, was neither
foreseen nor divined. On the other hand, we shall probably learn, when
the enquiry is completed, that hundreds of deaths, accidents, wounds
and cases of individual ruin and misfortune, included in the great
disaster, were predicted by clairvoyants, by mediums, by dreams and by
every other manner of premonition with a definiteness sufficient to
eliminate any kind of doubt. I have said elsewhere what I think of
individual predictions of this kind, which seem to be no more than the
reading of the presentiments which we carry within us, presentiments
which themselves, in the majority of cases, are but the perception, by
the as yet imperfectly known senses of our subconsciousness, of
events, in course of formation or in process of realization, which
escape the attention of our understanding. However, it would still
remain to be explained how a wholly accidental death or wound could be
perceived by these subliminal senses as an event in course of
formation. In any case, it would once more be confirmed, after this
great test, that the knowledge of the future, so soon as it ceases to
refer to a strictly personal fact and one, moreover, not at all
remote, is always illusory, or rather impossible.

Apart then from these strictly personal cases, which for the moment we
will agree to set aside, it appears more than ever certain that there
is no communication between ourselves and the vast store of events
which have not yet occurred and which nevertheless seem already to
exist at some place where they await the hour to advance upon us, or
rather the moment when we shall pass before them. As for the
exceptional and precarious infiltrations which belong not merely to
the present that is still unknown, veiled or disguised, but really to
the future, apart from the two which we have just examined, which are
inconclusive, I for my part know of but four or five that appear to be
rigorously verified; and these I have discussed in the essay already
mentioned. For that matter, they have no bearing upon the pre