INTRODUCTION

into the depths of being, does it not allow us to hope, provided that this ideal rises back into its intellectual center, still fully imbued with the sufferings glimpsed?

For, if there is one eternal truth, it is that materialism carries within itself the germ of its own downfall.

This is why, at the end of the 19th century, M. Charcot Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology., rediscovering at the Salpêtrière the convulsive phases of the ancient sybil, the witch of the Middle Ages, and the modern convulsionary, is performing magic. Dr. Luys, transplanting at La Charité the diseases of one organism into another organism, is performing magic. MM. Liébault and Bernheim, creating cerebral larvae in Nancy through suggestion, are performing magic. Likewise, Colonel de Rochas, at the École Polytechnique, by making subjects feel at a distance everything that deforms a wax figure, is performing magic in the first degree, just as Professor Richet observes facts of magic, and M. Horace Pelletier, as results from a report by a former student of the École Polytechnique, M. Louis Lemerle, by rediscovering the methods of the Indian fakirs and making inanimate objects move at his Word, just like Orpheus of old, but with less authority, however, is a minor-league magician.

And we shall not speak of these phantoms of the living, of these images of the dying, of these apparitions of the invisible that come to shake the torpor of our lethargic physiologists and pose to the face of materialism, sensualism, naturalism, and atheism the troubling problem of the afterlife, of that order of knowledge that had been classified among the toys of another age: magic, to call it by its true name.

Now, the facts are piling up, sovereignly logical in their brutality. One must come to these studies; but the cowardice