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CHAPTER IV. THE ELBERFELD HORSES 1 I
will first sum up as briefly as possible, for who so may still be ignorant of
them, the facts which it is necessary to know if one would fully understand the
marvelous story of the Elberfeld horses. For a detailed account, I can refer
him to Herr Karl Krall's remarkable work, Denkende Tiere (Leipsig,
1912), which is the first and principal source of information amid a
bibliography that is already assuming considerable dimensions. Some
twenty years ago there lived in Berlin an old misanthrope named Wilhelm von
Osten. He was a man with a small private income, a little eccentric in his ways
and obsessed by one idea, the intelligence of animals. He began by undertaking
the education of a horse that gave him no very definite results. But, in 1900,
he became the owner of a Russian stallion who, under the name of Hans,
to which was soon added the Homeric and well-earned prefix of Kluge, or
Clever, was destined to upset all our notions of animal psychology and to raise
questions that rank among the most unexpected and the most absorbing problems
which man has yet encountered. Thanks
to Von Osten, whose patience, contrary to what one might think, was in no wise
angelic but resembled rather a frenzied obstinacy, the horse made rapid and
extraordinary progress. This progress is very aptly described by Professor E.
Clarapede, of the university of Geneva, who says, in his excellent monograph on
the Elberfeld horses: "After
making him familiar with various common ideas, such as right, left, top, bottom
and so on, his master began to teach him arithmetic by the intuitive method.
Hans was brought to a table on which were placed first one, then two, then
several small skittles. Von Osten, kneeling beside Hans, uttered the
corresponding numbers, at the same time making him strike as many blows with
his hoof as there were skittles on the table. Before long, the skittles were
replaced by figures written on a blackboard. The results were astonishing. The
horse was capable not only of counting (that is to say, of striking as many blows
as he was asked), but also of himself making real calculations, of solving
little problems.... "But
Hans could do more than mere sums: he knew how to read; he was a musician,
distinguishing between harmonious and dissonant chords. He also had an extraordinary
memory: he could tell the date of each day of the current week. In short, he
got through all the tasks which an intelligent schoolboy of fourteen is able to
perform." The
rumour of these curious experiments soon spread; and visitors flocked to the
little stable-yard in which Von Osten kept his singular pupil at work. The
newspapers took the matter up; and a fierce controversy broke forth between
those who believed in the genuineness of the phenomenon and those who saw no
more in it than a barefaced fraud. A scientific committee was appointed in
1904, consisting of professors of psychology and physiology, of the director of
a zoological garden, of a circus manager and of veterinary surgeons and
cavalry-officers. The committee discovered nothing suspicious, but ventured
upon no explanation. A second committee was then appointed, numbering among its
members Herr Oskar Pfungst, of the Berlin psychological laboratory. Herr
Pfungst, after a long series of experiments, drew up a voluminous and crushing
report, in which he maintained that the horse was gifted with no intelligence,
that it did not recognize either letters or figures, that it really knew
neither how to calculate nor how to count, but merely obeyed the imperceptible,
infinitesimal and unconscious signs which escaped from its master. Public
opinion veered round suddenly and completely. People felt a sort of
half-cowardly relief at beholding the prompt collapse of a miracle which was
threatening to throw confusion into the self satisfied little fold of
established truths. Poor Von Osten protested in vain: no one listened to him;
the verdict was given. He never recovered from this official blow; he became
the laughing-stock of all those whom he had at first astounded; and he died,
lonely and embittered, on the 29th of June, 1909, at the age of seventy-one. But
he left a disciple whose faith had not been shaken by the general defection. A
well-to-do Elberfeld manufacturer, Herr Krall, had taken a great interest in
Von Osten's labours and, during the latter years of the old man's life, had
eagerly followed and even on occasion directed the education of the wonderful
stallion. Von Osten left Kluge Hans to him by will; on his own side, Krall had
bought two Arab stallions, Mohamed and Zarif whose prowess soon
surpassed that of the pioneer. The whole question was reopened, events took a
vigorous and decisive turn and, instead of a weary, eccentric old man,
discouraged almost to sullenness and with no weapons for the struggle, the
critics of the miracle found themselves faced by a new adversary, young and
high-spirited, endowed with remarkable scientific instinct, quick-witted,
scholarly and well able to defend himself. His
educational methods also differ materially from Von Osten's. It was a strange
thing, but deep down in the rather queer, cross-grained soul of the old enthusiast
there had grown up gradually a sort of hatred for his four-legged pupil. He
felt the stallion's proud and nervous will resisting his with an obstinacy
which he qualified as diabolical. They stood up to each other like two enemies:
and the lessons almost assumed the form of a tragic and secret struggle in
which the animal's soul rebelled against man's domination. Krall,
on the other hand, adores his pupils; and this atmosphere of affection has in a
manner of speaking humanized them. There are no longer those sudden movements
of wild panic which reveal the ancestral dread of man in the quietest and
best-trained horse. He talks to them long and tenderly, as a father might talk
to his children; and we have the strange feeling that they listen to all that he
says and understand it. If they appear not to grasp an explanation or a
demonstration, he will begin it all over again, analyze it, paraphrase it ten
times in succession, with the patience of a mother. And so their progress has
been incomparably swifter and more astounding than that of old Hans. Within a
fortnight of the first lesson Mohamed did simple little addition and
subtraction sums quite correctly. He had learnt to distinguish the tens from
the units, striking the latter with his right foot and the former with his
left. He knew the meaning of the symbols plus and minus. Four days later, he
was beginning multiplication and division. In four months' time, he knew how to
extract square and cubic roots; and, soon after, he learnt to spell and read by
means of the conventional alphabet devised by Krall. This
alphabet, at the first glance, seems rather complicated. For that matter, it is
only a makeshift; but how could one find anything better? The unfortunate
horse, who is almost voiceless, has only one way in which to express himself: a
clumsy hoof, which was not created to put thought into words. It became
necessary, therefore, to contrive, as in table-turning, a special alphabet, in
which each letter is designated by a certain number of blows struck by the
right foot and the left. Here is the copy handed to visitors at Elberfeld to
enable them to follow the horse's operations: To
mark the letter E, for instance, the stallion will strike one blow with his
left foot and one with his right; for the letter L, two blows with his left
foot and three with his right; and so on. The horses have this alphabet so
deeply imprinted in their memory that, practically speaking, they never make a
mistake; and they strike their hoofs so quickly, one after the other, that at
first one has some difficulty in following them. Mohamed
and Zarif for Zarif's progress was almost equal to that of his fellow-pupil,
though he seems a little less gifted from the standpoint of higher mathematics-Mohamed
and Zarif in this way reproduce the words spoken in their presence, spell the
names of their visitors, reply to questions put to them and sometimes make
little observations, little personal and spontaneous reflections to which we
shall return presently. They have created for their own use an inconceivably
fantastic and phonetic system of spelling which they stubbornly refuse to
relinquish and which often makes their writing rather difficult to read.
Deeming most of the vowels useless, they keep almost exclusively to the
consonants; thus Zucker, for instance, becomes Z K R; Pferd, P F
R T, or F R T, and so on. I
will not set forth in detail the many different proofs of intelligence lavished
by the singular inhabitants of this strange stable. They are not only
first-class calculators, for whom the most repellent fractions and roots
possess hardly any secrets: they distinguish sounds, colours, and scents, read
the time on the face of a watch, recognize certain geometrical figures,
likenesses and photographs. Following
on these more and more conclusive experiments and especially after the
publication of Krall's great work, Denkende Tiere, a model of precision
and arrangement, men's minds were faced with clear and definite problem which,
this time, could not be challenged. Scientific committees followed one another
at Elberfeld; and their reports became legion. Learned men of every country including
Dr. Edinger, the eminent Frankfort neurologist; Professors Dr. H. Kraemer and
H. E. Ziegler, of Stuttgart; Dr. Paul Saresin, of Bale; Professor Ostwald, of
Berlin; Professor A. Beredka, of the Pasteur Institute; Dr. E. Clarapede, of
the university of Geneva; Professor Schoeller and Professor Gehrke, the natural
philosopher, of Berlin; Professor Goldstein, of Darmstadt; Professor von
Buttel-Reepen, of Oldenburg; Professor William Mackenzie, of Genoa; Professor
R. Assagioli, of Florence; Dr. Hartkopf, of Cologne; Dr. Freudenberg, of
Brussels; Dr. Ferrari, of Bologna, etc., etc., for the list is lengthening
daily came to study on the spot the inexplicable phenomenon which Dr.
Clarapede proclaims to be "the most sensational event that has ever
happened in the psychological world." With
the exception of two or three sceptics or convinced misoneists and of those who
made too short a stay at Elberfeld, all were unanimous in recognizing that the
facts were as stated and that the experiments were conducted with absolute
fairness. Disagreement begins only when it becomes a matter of commenting on
them, interpreting them and explaining them. To
complete this short preamble, it is right to add that, for some time past, the
case of the Elberfeld horses no longer stands quite alone. There exists at
Mannheim a dog of a rather doubtful breed who performs almost the same feats as
his equine rivals. He is less advanced than they in arithmetic, but does little
additions, subtractions and multiplications of one or two figures correctly. He
reads and writes by tapping with his paw, in accordance with an alphabet which,
it appears, he has thought out for himself; and his spelling also is simplified
and phoneticized to the utmost. He distinguishes the colour in a bunch of
flowers, counts the money in a purse and separates the marks from the pfennigs.
He knows how to seek and find words to define the object or the picture placed
before him. You show him, for instance, a bouquet in a vase and ask him what it
is. "A
glass with little flowers," he replies. And
his answers are often curiously spontaneous and original. In the course of a
reading-exercise in which the word Herbst, autumn, chanced to attract
attention, Professor William Mackenzie asked him if he could explain what
autumn was. "It
is the time when there are apples," Rolf replied. On
the same occasion, the same professor, without knowing what it represented,
held out to him a card marked with red and blue squares: "What's
this?" "Blue,
red, lots of cubes," replied the dog. Sometimes
his repartees are not lacking in humour. "Is
there anything you would like me to do for you?" a lady of his
acquaintance asked, one day. And
Master Rolf gravely answered: "Wedelen,"
which means, "Wag your tail!" Rolf,
whose fame is comparatively young, has not yet, like his illustrious rivals of the
Rhine Province, been the object of minute enquiries and copious and innumerable
reports. But the incidents which I have just mentioned and which are vouched
for by such men as Professor Mackenzie and M. Duchatel, the learned and
clear-sighted vice-president of the Societe Universelle d'Etudes Psychiques,1
who went to Mannheim for the express purpose of studying them, appear to be no
more controvertible than the Elbenfeld occurrences, of which they are a sort of
replica or echo. It is not unusual to find these coincidences amongst abnormal
phenomena. They spring up simultaneously in different quarters of the globe,
correspond with one another and multiply as though in obedience to a word of
command. It is probable therefore that we shall see still more manifestations
of the same class. One might almost say that a new spirit is passing over the
world and, after awakening in man forces whereof he was not aware, is now
reaching other creatures who with us inhabit this mysterious earth, on which
they live, suffer and die, as we do, without knowing why. I
have not been to Mannheim, but I made my pilgrimage to Elberfeld and stayed
long enough in the town to carry away with me the conviction shared by all
those who have undertaken the journey. A few
months ago, Herr Krall, whom I had promised the year before that I would come
and see his wonderful horses, was kind enough to repeat his invitation in a
more pressing fashion, adding that his stable would perhaps be broken up after
the 15th of September and that, in any case, be would be obliged, by his
doctor's orders, to interrupt for an indefinite period a course of training
which he found exceedingly fatiguing. I at
once left for Elberfeld, which, as everybody knows, is an important
manufacturing-town in Rhenish Prussia and is, in fact, more quaint, pleasing
and picturesque than one might expect. I had long since read everything that
had been published on the question; and I was wholly persuaded of the
genuineness of the incidents. Indeed it would be difficult to have any doubts
after the repeated and unremitting supervision and verification to which the experiments
are subjected, a supervision which is of the most rigorous type, often hostile
and almost ill-mannered. As for their interpretation, I was convinced that
telepathy, that is to say, the transmission of thought from one
subconsciousness to another, remained, however strange it might be in this new
region, the only acceptable theory; and this in spite of certain circumstances
that seemed plainly to exclude it. In default of telepathy proper, I inclined
toward the mediumistic or subliminal theory, which was very ably outlined by M.
de Vesmes in a remarkable lecture delivered, on the 22nd of December, 1912,
before the Soci้t้ Universelle d'ษtudes Psychiques. It is true that telepathy,
especially when carried to its extreme limits, appeals above all to the
subliminal forces, so that the two theories overlap at more than one point and
it is often difficult to make out where the first ends and the second begins.
But this discussion will be more appropriate a little later. I
found Herr Krall in his goldsmith's shop, a sort of palace of Golconda,
streaming and glittering with the most precious pearls and stones on earth.
Herr Krall, it is well to remember, in order to dispel any suspicion of
pecuniary interest, is a rich manufacturer whose family for three generations,
from father to son, have conducted one of the most important jewelry businesses
in Germany. His researches, so far from bringing him the least profit, cost him
a great deal of money, take up all his leisure and some part of the time which
he would otherwise devote to his business and, as usually happens, procure him
from his fellow citizens and from not a few scientific men more annoyance,
unfair criticism and sarcasm than consideration or gratitude. His work is
preeminently the disinterested and thankless task of the apostle and pioneer. For
the rest, Herr Kraft, though his faith is active, zealous and infectious, has
nothing in common with the visionaries or illuminati. He is a man of about
fifty, vigorous, alert and enthusiastic, but at the same time well-balanced; accessible
to every idea and even to every dream, yet practical and methodical, with a
ballast of the most invincible common-sense. He inspires from the outset that
fine confidence, frank and unrestrained, which instantly disperses the
instinctive doubt, the strange uneasiness and the veiled suspicion that
generally separate two people who meet for the first time; and one welcomes in
him, from the very depths of one's being, the honest man, the staunch friend
whom one can trust and whom one is sorry not to have known earlier in life. We go
together through the streets and along the bustling quays of Elberfeld to the
stable, situated at a few hundred steps from the shop. The horses are taking
the air outside the doors of their boxes, in the yard shaded by a lime-tree.
There are four of them: Mohamed, the most intelligent, the most gifted of them
all, the great mathematician of the party; his double, Zarif, a little less
advanced, less tractable, craftier, but at the same time more fanciful, more
spontaneous and capable of occasional disconcerting sallies; next, Hไnschen, a
little Shetland pony, hardly bigger than a Newfoundland dog, the street-urchin
of the band, always quivering with excitement, roguish, flighty, uncertain and
passionate, but ready in a moment to work you out the most difficult addition
and multiplication sums with a furious scrape of the hoof; and lastly the latest
arrival, the plump and placid Berto, an imposing black stallion, quite blind
and lacking the sense of smell. He has been only a few months at school and is
still, so to speak, in the preparatory class, but already does a little more
clumsily, but more good humouredly and conscientiously small addition and
subtraction sums quite as well as many a child of the same age. In a
corner, Kama, a young elephant two or three years old, about the size of
an outrageously "blown" donkey, rolls his mischievous and almost
knavish eye, under the shelter of his wide ears, each resembling a great
rhubarb-leaf, and with his stealthy, insinuating trunk carefully picks up
whatever he considers fit to eat, that is to say, pretty well everything that
lies about on the stones. Great things were hoped of him, but hitherto he has
disappointed all expectations: he is the dunce of the establishment. Perhaps he
is too young still: his little elephant-soul no doubt resembles that of a
sucking-babe which, in the place of its feet and hands, plays with the
stupendous nose that must first explore and question the universe. It is
impossible to grip his attention; and, when they set out before him his
alphabet of movable letters, instead of naming those which are pointed out to
him he applies himself to pulling them off their stems, in order to swallow
them surreptitiously. He has disheartened his kind master, who, pending the
coming of the reason and wisdom promised by the proboscidian legends, leaves
him in a contented state of ignorance made more blissful by an almost
insatiable appetite. But I
ask to see the great pioneer, Kluge Hans, Clever Hans. He is still alive. He is
old: he must be sixteen or seventeen; but his old age, alas, is not exempt from
the baneful troubles from which men themselves suffer in their decline! Hans
has turned out badly, it appears, and is never mentioned save in ambiguous
terms. An imprudent or vindictive groom, I forget which, having introduced a
mare into the yard, Hans the Pure, who till then had led an austere and monkish
existence, vowed to celibacy, science and the chaste delights of figures, Hans
the Irreproachable incontinently lost his head and cut himself open on the
hanging-rail of his stall. They had to force back his intestines and sew up his
belly. He is now rusticating miserably in a meadow outside the town. So true it
is that a life cannot be judged except at its close and that we are sure of
nothing until we are dead. Before
the sitting begins, while the master is making his morning inspection, I go up
to Muhamed, speak to him and pat him, looking straight into his eyes meanwhile
in order to catch a sign of his genius. The handsome creature, well-bred and in
hard condition, is as calm and trusting as a dog; he shows himself excessively
gracious and friendly and tries to give me some huge licks and mighty kisses
which I do my best to avoid because they are a little unexpected and over-demonstrative.
The expression of his limpid antelope-eyes is deep, serious and remote, but it
differs in no wise from that of his brothers who, for thousands of years, have
seen nothing but brutality and ingratitude in man. If we were able to read
anything there, it would not be that insufficient and vain little effort which
we call thought, but rather an indefinable, vast anxiety, a tear-dimmed regret
for the boundless, stream-crossed plains where his sires sported at will before
they knew man's yoke. In any case, to see him thus fastened by a halter to the
stable-door, beating off the flies and absently pawing the cobbles, Muhamed is
nothing more than a well-trained horse who seems to be waiting for his saddle
or harness and who hide, his new secret as profoundly as all the others which
nature has buried in him. But
they are summoning me to take my place in the stable where the lessons are
given. It is a small room, empty and bare, with peat-moss litter bedding and
white-washed walls. The horse is separated from the people present by
breast-high wooden partitions. Opposite the four-legged scholar is a
black-board, nailed to the wall; and on one side a corn-bin which forms a seat
for the spectators. Muhamed is led in. Krall, who is a little nervous, makes no
secret of his uneasiness. His horses are fickle animals, uncertain, capricious
and extremely sensitive. A trifle disturbs them, confuses them, puts them off.
At such times, threats, prayers and even the irresistible charm of carrots and
good rye-bread are useless. They obstinately refuse to do any work and they
answer at random. Everything depends on a whim, the state of the weather, the
morning meal or the impression which the visitor makes upon them. Still, Krall
seems to know, by certain imperceptible signs, that this is not going to be a
bad day. Muhamed quivered with excitement, snorts loudly through his nostrils,
utters a series of indistinct little whinnyings: excellent symptoms, it
appears. I take my seat on the corn-bin. The master, standing beside the
black-board, chalk in hand, introduces me to Muhamed in due form, as to a human
being: "Muhamed,
attention! This is your uncle" pointing to me "who has come all
the way to honour you with a visit. Mind you don't disappoint him. His name is
Maeterlinck." Krall pronounced the first syllable German-fashion: Mah.
"You understand: Maeterlinck. Now show him that you know your letters and
that you can spell a name correctly, like a clever boy. Go ahead, we're listening."
Muhamed gives a short neigh and, on the small, movable board at his feet,
strikes first with his right hoof and then with his left the number of blows
which correspond with the letter M in the conventional alphabet used by the
horses. Then, one after the other, without stopping or hesitating, he marks the
letters A D R L I N S H, representing the unexpected aspect which my humble name
assumes in the equine mind and phonetics. His attention is called to the fact
that there is a mistake. He readily agrees and replaces the S H by a G and then
the G by a K. They insist that he must put a T instead of the D; but Muhamed,
content with his work, shakes his head to say no and refuses to make any
further corrections. I
assure you that the first shock is rather disturbing, however much one expected
it. I am quite aware that, when one describes these things, one is taken for a
dupe too readily dazzled by the doubtless childish illusion of an ingeniously-contrived
scene. But what contrivances, what illusions have we here? Do they lie in the
spoken word? Why, to admit that the horse understands and translates his
master's words is just to accept the most extraordinary part of the phenomenon!
Is it a case of surreptitious touches or conventional signs? However simple-minded
one may be, one would nevertheless notice them more easily than a horse, even a
horse of genius. Krall never lays a hand on the animal; he moves all round the
little table, which contains no appliances of any sort; for the most part, he
stands behind the horse which is unable to see him, or comes and sits beside
his guest on the innocuous corn-bin, busying himself, while lecturing his
pupil, in writing up the minutes of the lesson. He also welcomes with the most
serene readiness any restrictions or tests which you propose. I assure you that
the thing itself is much simple, and clearer than the suspicions of the
arm-chair critics and that the most distrustful mind world not entertain the
faintest idea of fraud in the frank, wholesome atmosphere of the old stable. "But,"
some one might have said, "Krall, who knew that you were coming to
Elberfeld, had of course thoroughly rehearsed his little exercise in spelling,
which apparently is only an exercise in memory." For
conscience' sake, though I did not look upon the objection as serious, I
submitted it to Krall, who at once said: "Try it for yourself. Dictate to
the horse any German word of two or three syllables, emphasizing it strongly.
I'll go out of the stable and leave you alone with him." Behold
Muhamed and me by ourselves. I confess that I am a little frightened. I have
many a time felt less uncomfortable in the presence of the great ones or the
kings of the earth. Whom am I dealing with exactly? However, I summon my
courage and speak aloud the first word that occurs to me, the name of the hotel
at which I am staying: Weidenhof. At first, Muhamed, who seems a little puzzled
by his master's absence, appears not to hear me and does not even deign to
notice that I am there. But I repeat eagerly, in varying tones of voice, by
turns insinuating, threatening, beseeching and commanding: "Weidenhof!
Weidenhof! Weidenhof!" At
last, my mysterious companion suddenly makes up his mind to lend me his ears
and straightway blithely raps out the following letters, which I write down on
the black-board as they come: WEIDNHOZ. It is
a magnificent specimen of equine spelling! Triumphant and bewildered, I call in
friend Krall, who, accustomed as he is to the prodigy, thinks it quite natural,
but knits his brows: "What's
this, Muhamed? You've made a mistake again. It's an F you want at the end of
the word, not a Z. Just correct it at once, please." And
the docile Muhamed, recognizing his blunder, gives the three blows with his
right hoof, followed by the four blows with his left, which represent the most
unexceptionable F that one could ask for. Observe,
by the way, the logic of his phonetic writing: contrary to his habit, he
strikes the mute E after the W, because it is indispensable; but, finding it
included in the D, he considers it superfluous and suppresses it with a high
hand. You
rub your eyes, question yourself, ask yourself in the presence of what
humanized phenomenon, of what unknown force, of what new creature you stand.
Was all this what they hid in their eyes, those silent brothers of ours? You
blush at arm's long injustice. You look around you for some sort of trace,
obvious or subtle, of the mystery. You feel yourself attacked in your innermost
citadel, where you held yourself most certain and most impregnable. You have
felt a breath from the abyss upon your face. You would not be more astonished
if you suddenly heard the voice of the dead. But the most astonishing thing is
that you are not astonished for long. We all, unknown to ourselves, live in the
expectation of the extraordinary; and, when it comes, it moves us much less
than did the expectation. It is as though a sort of higher instinct, which
knows everything and is not ignorant of the miracles that hang over our heads,
were reassuring us in advance and helping us to make an easy entrance into the
regions of the supernatural. There is nothing to which we grow accustomed more
readily than to the marvellous; and it is only afterwards, upon reflection,
that our intelligence, which knows hardly anything, appreciates the magnitude
of certain phenomena. But
Muhamed gives unmistakable signs of impatience to show that he has had enough
of spelling. Thereupon, as a diversion and a reward, his kind master suggests
the extraction of a few square and cubic roots. Muhamed appears delighted:
these are his favourite problems: for he takes less interest than formerly in
the most difficult multiplications and divisions. He doubtless thinks them
beneath him. Krall
therefore writes on the blackboard various numbers of which I did not take
note. Moreover, as nobody now contests the fact that the horse works them with
ease, it would hardly be interesting to reproduce here several rather grim
problems of which numerous variants will be found in the accounts and reports of
experiments signed by Drs. Mackenzie and Hartkopff, by Overbeck, Clarapede and
many others. What strikes one particularly is the facility, the quickness, I
was almost saying the joyous carelessness with which the strange mathematician
gives the answers. The last figure is hardly chalked upon the board before the
right hoof is striking off the units, followed immediately by the left hoof
marking the tens. There is not a sign of attention or reflection; one is not
even aware of the exact moment at which the horse looks at the problem: and the
answer seems to spring automatically from an invisible intelligence. Mistakes
are rare or frequent according as it happens to be a good or bad day with the
horse; but, when he is told of them, he nearly always corrects them. Not
unseldom, the number is reversed: 47, for instance, becomes 74; but he puts it
right without demur when asked. I am
manifestly dumbfounded; but perhaps these problems are prepared beforehand? If
they were, it would be very extraordinary, but yet less surprising than their
actual solution. Krall does not read this suspicion in my eyes, because they do
not show it; nevertheless, to remove the least shade of it, he asks me to write
a number of my own on the black-board for the horse to find the root. I
must here confess the humiliating ignorance that is the disgrace of my life. I
have not the faintest idea of the mysteries concealed within these recondite
and complicated operations. I did my humanities like everybody else; but, after
crossing the useful and familiar frontiers of multiplication and division I
found it impossible to advance any farther into the desolate regions, bristling
with figures, where the square and cubic roots hold sway, together with all
sorts of other monstrous powers, without shapes or faces, which inspired me
with invincible terror. All the persecutions of my excellent instructors wore
themselves out against a dead wall of stolidity. Successively disheartened,
they left me to my dismal ignorance, prophesying a most dreary future for me,
haunted with bitter regrets. I must say that, until now, I had scarcely
experienced the effects of these gloomy predictions; but the hour has come for
me to expiate the sins of my youth. Nevertheless, I put a good face upon it:
and, taking at random the first figures that suggest themselves to my mind, I
boldly write on the black-board an enormous and most daring number. Muhamed
remains motionless. Krall speaks to him sharply, telling him to hurry up.
Muhamed lifts his right hoof, but does not let it fall. Krall loses patience,
lavishes prayers, promises and threats; the hoof remains poised, as though to
bear witness to good intentions that cannot be carried out. Then my host turns
round, looks at the problem and asks me: "Does
it give an exact root?" Exact?
What does he mean? Are there roots which. . .? But I dare not go on: my
shameful ignorance suddenly flashes before my eyes. Krall smiles indulgently
and, without making any attempt to supplement an education which is too much in
arrears to allow of the slightest hope, laboriously works out the problem and
declares that the horse was right in refusing to give an impossible solution. Muhamed
receives our thanks in the form of a lordly portion of carrots; and a pupil is
introduced whose attainments do not tower so high above mine: Hanschen, the
little pony, quick and lively as a big rat. Like me, he has never gone beyond
elementary arithmetic: and so we shall understand each other better and meet on
equal terms. Krall
asks me for two numbers to multiply. I give him 63 X 7. He does the sum and
writes the product on the board, followed by the sign of division: 441 / 7.
Instantly Hanschen, with a celerity difficult to follow, gives three blows, or
rather three violent scrapes with his right hoof and six with his left, which
makes 63, for we must not forget that in German they say not sixty-three, but
three-and-sixty. We congratulate him; and, to evince his satisfaction, he
nimbly reverses the number by marking 36 and then puts it right again by scraping
63. He is evidently enjoying himself and juggling with the figures. And
additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions follow one after the
other, with figures supplied by myself, so as to remove any idea of collusion.
Hanschen seldom blunders; and, when he does, we receive a very clear impression
that his mistake is voluntary: he is like a mischievous schoolboy playing a
practical joke upon his master. The solutions fall thick as hail upon the
little spring-board; the correct answer is released by the question as though
you were pressing the button of an electric push. The pony's flippancy is as
surprising as his skill. But in this unruly flippancy, in this hastiness which
seems inattentive there is nevertheless a fixed and permanent idea. Hanschen
paws the ground, kicks, prances, tosses his head, looks as if he cannot keep
still, but never leaves his spring-board. Is he interested in the problems,
does he enjoy them? It is impossible to say; but he certainly has the
appearance of one accomplishing a duty or a piece of work which we do not
discuss, which is important, necessary and inevitable. But
the lesson suddenly ends with a joke carried rather too far by the pupil, who
catches his good master by the seat of his trousers, into which he plants disrespectful
teeth. He is severely reprimanded, deprived of his carrots and sent back in
disgrace to his private apartments. Next
comes Bette, who is like a big, sleek Norman horse. He makes the calm,
dignified, peaceful entrance of a blind giant. His large, dark, brilliant eyes
are quite dead, deprived of any reflex power. He feels about with his hoof for
the board on which he is to rap his answers. He has not yet gone beyond the
rudiments of mathematics; and the early part of his education was particularly
difficult. They managed to make him understand the value and meaning of the
numbers and of the addition- and multiplication-signs by means of little taps
on his sides. Krall speaks to him as a father might speak to the youngest of
his sons. He explains to him fondly the easy sums which I suggest his doing:
two plus three, eight minus four, four times three; he says: "Mind!
It's not plus three or minus three this time, but four multiplied by
three!" Berto
hardly ever makes a mistake. When he does not understand the question, he waits
for it to be written with the finger on his side; and the careful way in which
he works it out like some backward and afflicted child is an infinitely
pathetic sight. He is much more zealous and conscientious than his fellow-pupils;
and we feel that, in the darkness wherein he dwells, this work is, next to his
meals, the only spark of light and interest in his existence. He will certainly
never rival Muhamed, for instance, who is the arithmetical prodigy, the Inaudi,
of horses; but he is a valuable and living proof that the theory of unconscious
and imperceptible signs, the only one which the German theorists have hitherto
seriously considered, is now clearly untenable. I
have not yet spoken of Zarif. He is not in the best of tempers; and besides, in
arithmetic, he is only a less learned and more capricious Muhamed. He answers
most of the questions at random, stubbornly raising his foot and declining to
lower it, so as clearly to mark his disapproval; but he solves the last problem
correctly when he is promised a panful of carrots and no more lessons for that
morning. The groom enters to lead him away and makes some movement or other at
which the horse starts, rears and shies. "That's
his bad conscience," says Krall, gravely. And
the expression assumes a singular meaning and importance in this hybrid
atmosphere, steeped in an indefinable something from another world. But
it is half-past one, the sacred German dinner-hour. The horses are taken back
to their racks and the men separate, wishing one another the inevitable Mahlzeit. As he
walks with me along the quays of the black and muddy "It
is a pity that you did not see Zarif in one of his better moods. He is
sometimes more startling than Muhamed and has given me two or three surprises
that seem incredible. One morning, for instance, I came to the stable and was
preparing to give him his lesson in arithmetic. He was no sooner in front of
the spring-board than he began to stamp with his foot. I left him alone and was
astounded to hear a whole sentence, an absolutely human sentence, come letter
by letter from his hoof: 'Albert has beaten Hanschen,' was what he said to me
that day. Another time, I wrote down from his dictation, 'Hanschen has bitten
Kama.' Like a child seeing its father after an absence, he felt the need to
inform me of the little doings of the stable; he provided me with the artless
chronicle of a humble and uneventful life." Krall,
for that matter, living in the midst of his miracle, seems to think this quite
natural and almost inevitable. I, who have been immersed in it for only a few
hours, accept it almost as calmly as he does. I believe without hesitation what
he tells me; and, in the presence of this phenomenon which, for the first time
in man's existence, gives us a sentence that has not sprung from a human brain,
I ask myself whither we are tending, where we stand and what lies ahead of us..
. . After
dinner, the experiments begin again, for my host is untiring. First of all,
pointing to me, he asks Muhamed if he remembers what his uncle's name is. The
horse raps out an H. Krall is astonished and utters fatherly reprimands: "Come,
take care! You know it's not an H." The
horse raps out an E. Krall becomes a little impatient: he threatens, he
implores, he promises in turn, carrots and the direst punishments, such as
sending for Albert, the groom, who, on special occasions, recalls idle and
inattentive pupils to a sense of duty and decorum, for Krall himself never
chastises his horses, lest he should lose their friendship or their confidence.
So he continues his reproaches: "Come
now, are you going to be more careful and not rap out your letters
anyhow?" Muhamed
obstinately goes his own way and strikes an R. Then "He's
right," he says. "You understand: H E R, standing for Herr. He
wanted to give you the title to which every man wearing a top hat or a bowler
has the right. He does it only very rarely and I had forgotten all about it. He
probably heard me call you Herr Maeterlinck and wanted to get it perfectly.
This special politeness and this excess of zeal augur a particularly good
lesson. You've done very well, Mohamed, my child; you've done very well and I
beg your pardon. Now kiss me and go on." But Mohamed,
after giving his master a hearty kiss, still seems to be hesitating. Then
Krall, to put him on the right track observes that the first letter of my name
is the same as the first letter of his own. Mohamed strikes a K, evidently
thinking of his master's name. At last, Krall draws a big M on the black-board,
whereupon the horse, like one suddenly remembering a word which he could not
think of, raps out, one after the other and without stopping, the letters M A Z
R L K, which, stripped of useless vowels, represent the curious corruption
which my name has undergone, since the morning, in a brain that is not a human
brain. He is told that this is not correct. He seems to agree, gropes about a
little and writes, M A R Z L E G K. Krall repeats my name and asks which is the
first letter to be altered. The stallion marks an R. "Good,
but what letter will you put instead?" Mohamed
strikes an N. "No,
do be careful!" He
strikes a T. "Very
good, but in what place will the T come?" "In
the third," replies the horse; and the corrections continue until my
patronomic comes out of its strange adventure almost unscathed. And
the spelling, the questioning, the sums, the problems are resumed and follow
upon one another, as wonderful, as bewildering as before, but already a little
dimmed by familiarity, like any other prolonged miracle. It is important,
besides, to notice that the instances which I have given are not to be classed
among the most remarkable feats of our magic horses. Today's is a good ordinary
lesson, a respectable lesson, not illumined by flashes of genius. But in the
presence of other witnesses the horses performed more startling exploits which
broke down even more decisively the barrier, which is undoubtedly an imaginary
one, between animal and human nature. One day, for instance, Zarif; the scamp
of the party, suddenly stopped in the middle of his lesson. They asked him the
reason. "Because
I am tired." Another
time, he answered: "Pain
in my leg." They
recognize and identify pictures shown to them, distinguish colours and scents.
I have made a point of stating only what I saw with my own eyes and heard with
my own ears; and I declare that I have done so with the same scrupulous
accuracy as though I were reporting a criminal trial in which a man's life
depended on my evidence. But I
was practically convinced of the truth of the incidents before going to
Elberfeld; and it was not to check them that I made the journey. I was anxious
to make certain if the telepathic theory, which was the only one that I
considered admissible, would withstand the tests which I intended to apply to
it. I opened my mind on the subject to Krall, who at first did not quite grasp
what I was asking. Like most men who have not made a special study of the
questions, he imagined that telepathy meant above all a deliberate and
conscious transmission of thought; and he assured me that he never made any
effort to transmit his and that, for the most part, the horses gave a reply
which was the exact opposite of what he was expecting. I did not doubt this for
a moment; in fact, direct and deliberate transmission of thought is, even among
men, a very rare, difficult and uncertain, phenomenon, whereas involuntary,
unpremeditated and unsuspected communications between one subconsciousness and
another can no longer be denied except by those who of set purpose ignore
studies and experiments that are within the reach of any one who will take the
trouble to engage in them. I was persuaded therefore that the horses acted
exactly like the "tipping-tables" which simply translate the
subliminal ideas of one or another of those present by the aid of conventional
little taps. When all is said, it is much less surprising to see a horse than a
table lift its foot and much more natural that the living substance of an
animal rather than the inert matter of a thing should be sensitive and
susceptible to the mysterious influence of a medium. I knew quite well that
experiments had been made in order to eliminate this theory. People, for
instance, prepared a certain number of questions and put them in sealed
envelopes. Then, on entering the presence of the horse, they would take one of
the envelopes at random, open it and write down the problem on the black-board;
and Mohamed or Zarif would answer with the same facility and the same readiness
as though the solution had been known to all the onlookers. But was it really
unknown to their subconsciousness? Who could say for certain? Tests of this
kind require extraordinary precautions and a special dexterity; for the action
of the subconsciousness is so subtle, takes such unexpected turns, delves in
the museum of so many forgotten treasures and operates at such distances that
one is never sure of escaping it. Were those precautions taken? I was not
convinced that they were; and, without pretending to decide the question, I
said to myself that my blissful ignorance of mathematics might perhaps be of
service in shedding light upon some part of it. For
this ignorance, however deplorable from other points of view, gave me a rare
advantage in this case. It was in fact extremely unlikely that my subliminal
consciousness, which had never known what a cubic root was or the root of any
other power, could help the horse. I therefore took from a table a list
containing several problems, all different and all equally unpleasant looking,
covered up the solutions, asked Krall to leave the stable and, when alone with
Zarif, copied out one of them on the black-board. In order not to overload
these pages with details which would only be a repetition of one another, I
will at once say that none of the antitelepathic tests succeeded that day. It
was the end of the lesson and late in the afternoon; the horses were tired and
irritable; and, whether Krall was there or not, whether the problem was
elementary or difficult, they gave only absurd replies, wilfully "putting
their foot in it," as one might say with very good reason. But, next
morning, on resuming their task, when I proceeded as described above, Mohamed
and Zarif, doubtless in a better temper and already more accustomed to their
new examiner, gave in rapid succession correct answers to nearly every problem
set them. I am bound in fairness to say that there was no appreciable
difference between these results and those which are obtained in the presence of
Krall or other onlookers who, consciously or unconsciously, are already aware
of the answer required. I
next thought of another and much simpler test, but one which, by virtue of its
very simplicity, could not be exposed to any elaborate and farfetched suspicions.
I saw on one of the shelves in the stable a panel of cards, about the size of
an octavo volume, each bearing an arabic numeral on one of its sides. I once
more asked my good friend Krall, whose courtesy is inexhaustible, to leave me
alone with his pupil. I then shuffled the cards and put three of them in a row
on the spring-board in front of the horse, without looking at them myself.
There was therefore, at that moment, not a human soul on earth who knew the
figures spread at the feet of my companion, this creature so full of mystery
that already I no longer dare call him an animal. Without hesitation and
unasked, he rapped out correctly the number formed by the cards. The experiment
succeeded, as often as I cared to try it, with Hanschen, Mohamed and Zarif
alike. Mohamed did even more: as each figure was of a different colour, I asked
him to tell me the colour of which I myself was absolutely ignorant of the
first letter on the right. With the aid of the conventional alphabet, he
replied that it was blue, which proved to be the case. Of course, I ought to
have multiplied these experiments and made them more exhaustive and complicated
by combining, with the aid of the cards and under the same conditions,
exercises in multiplication, division and the extracting of roots. I had not
the time; but, a few days after I left, the subject was resumed and completed
by Dr. H. Hamel. I will sum up his report of the experiments: the doctor, alone
in the stable with the home (Krall was away, travelling), puts down on the
black-board the sign + and then places before and after this sign, without
looking at either of them, a card marked with a figure which he does not know.
He next asks Mohamed to add up the two numbers. Mohamed at first gives a few
heedless taps with his hoof. He is called to order and requested to be serious
and to attend. He then gives fifteen distinct taps. The doctor next replaces
the sign + by X and, again without looking at them, places two cards on the
blackboard and asks the horse not to add up the two figures this time, but to
multiply them. Mohamed taps out, "27," which is right, for the
black-board says, "9 X 3." The same success follows with other
multiplication sums: 9 X 2, 8 X 6. Then the doctor takes from an envelope a
problem of which he does not know the solution: fourth root of 7890481. Mohamed
replies, "53." The doctor looks at the back of the paper: once more,
the answer is perfectly correct.
Does
this mean that every risk of telepathy is done away with? It would perhaps be
rash to make a categorical assertion. The power and extent of telepathy are as
yet, we cannot too often repeat, indefinite, indiscernible, untraceable and
unlimited. We have but quite lately discovered it, we know only that its
existence can no longer be denied; but, as for all the rest, we are at much the
same stage as that whereat Galvani was when he gave life to the muscles of his
dead frogs with two little plates of metal which roused the jeers of the
scientists of his time, but contained the germ of all the wonders, of
electricity. Nevertheless,
as regards telepathy in the sense in which we understand and know it to-day, my
mind is made up. I am persuaded that it is not in this direction that we must
seek for an explanation of the phenomenon; or, if we are determined to find it
there, the explanation becomes complicated with so many subsidiary mysteries
that it is better to accept the prodigy as it stands, in its original obscurity
and simplicity. When, for instance, I was copying out one of the grisly
problems which I have mentioned, it is quite certain that my conscious
intelligence could make neither head nor tail of it. I did not so much as know
what it meant or whether the exponent 3 ท 4 ท 5 called for a multiplication, a
division or some other mathematical operation which I did not even try to
imagine; and, rack my memory as I may, I cannot remember any moment in my life
when I knew more about it than I do now. We should therefore have to admit that
MY subliminal self is a born mathematician, quick, infallible and endowed with
boundless learning. It is possible and I feel a certain pride at the thought.
But the theory simply shifts the miracle by making it pass from the horse's
soul to mine; and the miracle becomes no clearer by the transfer, which, for
that matter, does not sound probable. I need hardly add that, a fortiori,
Dr. Hamel's experiments and many others which I have not here the space to
describe finally dispose of the theory. Let
us see how those who have interested themselves in these extraordinary manifestations
have attempted to explain them. As we
go along, we will just shear through the feeble undergrowth of childish
theories. I shall not, therefore, linger over the suggestions of cheating, of
manifest signs addressed to the eye or ear, of electrical installations that
are supposed to control the answers, nor other idle tales of an excessively
clumsy character. To realize their inexcusable inanity we have but to spend a
few minutes in the honest Elberfeld stable. At
the beginning of this essay, I mentioned the attack made by Herr Pfungst. Herr
Pfungst, the reader will remember, claims to prove that all the horse's replies
are determined by imperceptible and probably unconscious movement on the part
of the person putting the questions. This interpretation, which falls to the
ground, like all the others, in the face of the actual facts, would not deserve
serious discussion, were it not that the Berlin psychologist's report created
an immense sensation some years ago and has succeeded in intimidating the
greater part of the official German scientific world to this day. It is true
that the report in question is a monument of useless pedantry, but we are none
the less bound to admit that, such as it was, it annihilated poor Von Oaten,
who, being no controversialist and not knowing how to proclaim the truth which
was struggling for utterance, died in gloom and solitude. To
make an end of this cumbrous and puerile theory, is it necessary to emphasize
again that experiments in which the animal does not see the questioner are as
regularly successful as the others? Krall, if you ask him, will stand behind
the horse, will speak from the end of the room, will leave the stable
altogether; and the results are just the same. They are the same again when the
tests are made in the dark or when the animal's head is covered with a
close-fitting hood. They do not vary either in the case of Berto, who is
stone-blind, or when any other person whatever sets the problem in Krall's
absence. Will it be maintained that this outsider or that stranger is
acquainted beforehand with the imperceptible signs that are to dictate the
solution which he himself often does not know? But
what is the use of prolonging this fight against a cloud of smoke? None of it
can bear examination; and it calls for a genuine effort of the will to set
one's self seriously to refute such pitiful objections. On
the ground thus cleared and at the portal of this unlooked-for riddle, which
comes to disturb our peace in a region which we thought to be finally explored
and conquered, there are only two ways, if not of explaining, at least of
contemplating the phenomenon: to admit purely and simply the almost human
intelligence of the horse, or to have recourse to an as yet very vague and
indefinite theory which, for lack of a better designation, we will call the
mediumistic or subliminal theory and of which we will strive presently and no
doubt vainly to dispel the grosser darkness. But, whatever interpretation we
adopt, we are bound to recognize that it plunges us into a mystery which is
equally profound and equally astonishing on either side, one directly related
to the greatest mysteries that overwhelm us; and it is open to us to accept it
with resignation or rejoicing, according as we prefer to live in a world
wherein everything is within the reach of our intelligence or a world wherein
everything is incomprehensible. As
for Krall, he does not doubt for an instant that his horses solve for
themselves, without any assistance, without any outside influence, simply by
their own mental powers, the most arduous problems set them. He is persuaded
that they understand what is said to them and what they say, in short, that
their brain and their will perform exactly the same functions as a human brain
and will. It is certain that the facts seem to prove him right and that his
opinion carries way great weight, for, after all, he knows his horses better
than any one does; he has beheld the birth or rather the awakening of that
dormant intelligence, even as a mother beholds the birth or the awakening of
intelligence in her child; he has perceived its first gropings, known its first
resistance and its first triumphs; he has watched it taking shape, breaking
away and gradually rising to the point at which it stands to-day; in a word, he
is the father and the principal and sole perpetual witness of the miracle. Yes,
but the miracle comes as such a surprise that, the moment we set foot in it, a
sort of instinctive aberration seizes us, refusing to accept the evidence and compelling
us to search in every direction to see if there is not another outlet. Even in
the presence of those astounding horses and while they are working before our
eyes, we do not yet sincerely believe that which fills and subdues our gaze. We
accept the facts, because there is no means of escaping them; but we accept
them only provisionally and with all reserve, putting off till later the
comfortable explanation which will give us back our familiar, shallow
certainties. But the explanation does not come; there is none in the homely and
not very lofty regions wherein we hoped to find one; there is neither fault nor
flaw in the mighty evidence; and nothing delivers us from the mystery. It
must be confessed that this mystery, springing from a point where we least
expected to come upon the unknown, bears enough within itself to scatter all
our convictions. Remember that, since man appeared upon this earth, he has
lived among creatures which, from immemorial experience, he thought that he knew
as perfectly as he knows an object fashioned by his hands. Out of these
creatures he chose the most docile and, as he called them, the most
intelligent, attaching in this case to the word intelligence a sense so narrow
as to be almost ridiculous. He observed them, scrutinized them, tried them,
analyzed them and dissected them in every imaginable way; and whole lives were
devoted to nothing but the study of their habits, their faculties, their
nervous system, their pathology, their psychology, their instincts. All this
led to certainties which, among those supported by our unexplained little
existence on an inexplicable planet, would seem to be the least doubtful, the
least subject to revision. There is no disputing, for instance, that the horse
is gifted with an extraordinary memory, that he possesses the sense of
direction, that he understands a few signs and even a few words and that he
obeys them. It is equally undeniable that the anthropoid apes are capable of
imitating a great number of our actions and of our attitudes: but it is also
manifest that their bewildered and feverish imagination perceives neither their
object nor their scope. As for the dog, the one of all these privileged animals
who lives closest to us, who for thousands and thousands of years has eaten at our
table and worked with us and been our friend, it is manifest that, now and
then, we catch a rather uncanny gleam in his deep, watchful eyes. It is certain
that he sometimes wanders in a curious fashion along the mysterious border that
separates our own intelligence from that which we grant to the other creatures
inhabiting this earth with us. But it is no less certain that he has never
definitely passed it. We know exactly how far he can go; and we have invariably
found that our efforts, our patience, our encouragement, our passionate
appeals, have hitherto failed to draw him out of the somewhat narrow, darkly
enchanted circle wherein nature seems to have imprisoned him once and for all.
There
remains, it is true, the insect-world, in which marvellous things happen. It
includes architects, geometricians, mechanicians, engineers, weavers,
physicists, chemists and surgeons who have forestalled most of our human
inventions. I need not here remind the reader of the wasps' and bees' genius
for building, the social and economic organization of the hive and the
ant-hill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' nest and hanging egg, the odynerus'
cell with its neat stacks of game, the sacred beetle's filthy but ingenious
ball, the leafcutter's faultless disks, the brick-laying of the mason-bee, the
three dagger-thrusts which the aphex administers to the three nerve-centres of
the cricket, the lancet of the cerceris, who paralyses her victims without
killing them and preserves them for an indefinite period as fresh meat, nor a
thousand other features which it would be impossible to enumerate without
recapitulating the whole of Henri Fabre's work and completely altering the
proportions of the present essay. But here such silence and such darkness reign
that we have nothing to hope for. There exists, so to speak, no bench-mark, no
means of communication between the world of insects and our own; and we are
perhaps less far from grasping and fathoming what takes place in Saturn or
Jupiter than what is enacted in the ant-hill or the hive. We know absolutely
nothing of the quality, the number, the extent or even the nature of their
senses. Many of the great laws on which our life is based do not exist for
them: those, for instance, which govern fluids are completely reversed. They
seem to inhabit our planet, but in reality move in an entirely different world.
Understanding nothing of their intelligence pierced with disconcerting gaps, in
which the blindest stupidity suddenly comes and destroys the ablest and most
inspired schemes, we have given the name of instinct to that which we could not
apprehend, postponing our interpretation of a word that touches upon life's
most insoluble riddles. There is, therefore, from the point of view of the
intellectual faculties, nothing to be gathered from those extraordinary
creatures who are not, like the other animals, our "lesser brothers,"
but strangers, aliens from we know not where, survivors or precursors of
another world. We
were at this stage, slumbering peacefully in our long-established convictions,
when a man entered upon the scene and suddenly showed us that we were wrong and
that, for long centuries, we had over looked a truth which was scarcely even
covered with a very thin veil. And the strangest thing is that this astonishing
discovery, is in no wise the natural consequence of a new invention, of
processes or methods hitherto unknown. It owes nothing to the latest
acquirements of our knowledge. It springs from the humblest idea which the most
primitive man might have conceived in the first days of the earth's existence.
It is simply a matter of having a little more patience, confidence and respect
for all that which shares our lot in a world whereof we know none of the
purposes. It is simply a matter of having a little less pride and of looking a
little more fraternally upon existences that are much more fraternal than we
believed. There is no secret about the almost puerile ingenuousness of Von
Osten's methods and Krall's. They start with the principle that the horse is an
ignorant but intelligent child; and they treat him as such. They speak,
explain, demonstrate, argue and mete out rewards or punishments like a
schoolmaster addressing little boys of five or six. They begin by placing a few
skittle-pins in front of their strange pupil. They count them and make him
count them by alternately lifting and lowering the horse's hoof. He thus
obtains his first notion of numbers. They next add one or two more skittles and
say, for instance: "Three
skittles and two skittles are five skittles." In
this way, they explain and teach addition; next, by the reverse process,
subtraction, which is followed by multiplication, division and all the rest. At
the beginning, the lessons are extremely laborious and demand an untiring and
loving patience, which is the whole secret of the miracle. But; as soon as the
first barrier of darkness is passed, the progress becomes bewilderingly rapid. All
this is incontestable; and the facts are there, before which we must need bow.
But what upsets all our convictions or, more correctly, all the prejudices
which thousands of years have made as invincible as axioms, what we do not
succeed in understanding is that the horse at once understands what we want of
him; it is that first step, the first tremor of an unexpected intelligence,
which suddenly reveals itself as human. At what precise second did the light
appear and was the veil rent under? It is impossible to say; but it is certain
that, at a given moment, without any visible sign to reveal the prodigious
inner transformation, the horse acts and replies as though he suddenly
understood the speech of man. What is it that sets the miracle working? We know
that, after a time, the horse associates certain words with certain objects
that interest him or with three or four events whose infinite repetition forms
the humble tissue of his daily life. This is only a sort of mechanical memory
which has nothing in common with the most elementary intelligence. But behold,
one fine day, without any perceptible transition, he seems to know the meaning
of a host of words which possess no interest for him; which represent to him no
picture, no memory; which he has never had occasion to connect with any
sensation, agreeable or disagreeable. He handles figures, which even to man are
nothing but obscure and abstract ideas. He solves problems that cannot possibly
be made objective or concrete. He reproduces letters which, from his point of
view, correspond with nothing actual. He fixes his attention and makes observations
on things or circumstances which in no way affect him, which remain and always
will remain alien and indifferent to him. In a word, he steps out of the narrow
ring in which he was made to turn by hunger and fear which have been
described as the two great moving powers of all that is not human to enter
the immense circle in which sensations go on being shed till ideas come into
view. Is it
possible to believe that the horses really do what they appear to do? Is there
no precedent for the marvel? Is there no transition between the Elberfeld
stallions and the horses which we have known until this day? It is not easy to
answer these questions, for it is only since yesterday that the intellectual
powers of our defenseless brothers have been subjected to strictly scientific
experiments. We have, it is true more than one collection of anecdotes in which
the intelligence of animals is lauded to the skies; but we cannot rely upon
these ill-authenticated stories. To find genuine and incontestable instances we
must have recourse to the works, rare as yet, of scientific men who have made a
special study of the subject. M. Hachet-Souplet, for example, the director of
the Institut de Psychologie Zoologique, mentions the case of a dog who learnt
to acquire an abstract idea of weight. You put in front of him eight rounded
and polished stones, all of exactly the same size and shape, but of different
weights. You tell him to fetch the heaviest or the lightest; he judges their
weight by lifting them and, without mistake, picks out the one required. The
same writer also tells the story of a parrot to whom he had taught the word
"cupboard" by showing him a little box that could be hung up on the
wall at different heights and in which his daily allowance of food was always
ostentatiously put away: "I
next taught him the names of a number of objects," says M. Hachet-Souplet,
"by holding them out to him. Among them was a ladder; and I prevailed upon
the bird to say, 'Climb,' each time that he saw me mount the steps. One morning,
when the parrot's cage was brought into the laboratory, the cupboard was
hanging near the ceiling, while the little ladder was stowed away in a corner
among other objects familiar to the bird. Now the parrot, every day, when I
opened the cupboard, used to scream, 'Cupboard! Cupboard! Cupboard!' with all
his might. My problem was, therefore, this: seeing that the cupboard was out of
my reach and that, therefore, I could not take his food out of it; knowing, on
the other hand, that I was able to raise myself above the level of the floor by
climbing the ladder; and having the words 'climb' and 'ladder' at his disposal:
would he employ them to suggest to me the idea of using them in order to reach
the cupboard? Greatly excited, the parrot flapped his wings, bit the bars of
his cage, and screamed: "'Cupboard!
Cupboard! Cupboard!'" "And
I got no more out of him that day. The next day, the bird, having received
nothing but millet, for which he did not much care, instead of the hemp-seed
contained in the cupboard, was in paroxysms of anger; and, after he had made
numberless attempts to force open his bars, his attention was at last caught by
the ladder and he said: "'Ladder,
climb, cupboard!'" We
have here, as the author remarks, a marvellous intellectual effort. There is an
evident association of ideas; cause is linked with effect; and examples such as
this lesson appreciably the distance separating our learned horses from their
less celebrated brethren. We must admit, however, that this intellectual
effort, if we observe, animals a little carefully, is much less uncommon than
we think. It surprises us in this case because a special and, when all is said,
purely mechanical arrangement of the parrot's organ gives him a human voice. At
every moment, I find in my own dog associations of ideas no less evident and
often more complex. For instance, if he is thirsty, he seeks my eyes and next
looks at the tap in the dressing-room, thus showing that he very plainly
connects the notions of thirst, running water and human intervention. When I
dress to go out, he evidently watches all my movements. While I am lacing my
boots, he conscientiously licks my hands, in order that my divinity may be good
to him and especially to congratulate me on my capital idea of going out for a
constitutional. It is a sort of general and as yet vague approval. Boots
promise an excursion out of doors, that is to say, space, fragrant roads, long
grass full of surprises, corners scented with offal, friendly or tragic
encounters and the pursuit of wholly illusory, game. But the fair vision is
still in anxious suspense. He does not yet know if he is going with me. His
fate is now being decided; and his eyes, melting with anguish, devour my mind.
If I buckle on my leather gaiters, it means the sudden and utter extinction, of
all that constitutes the joy of life. They leave not a ray of hope. They herald
the hateful, lonely motorcycle, which he cannot keep up with; and he stretches
himself sadly in a dark corner, where he goes back to the gloomy dreams of an
unoccupied, forsaken dog. But, when I slip my arms into the sleeves of my heavy
great-coat, one would think that they were opening the gates of the most
dazzling paradise. For this implies the car, the obvious, indubitable
motor-car, in other words, the radiant summit of the most superlative delight.
And delirious barks, inordinate bounds, riotous, embarrassing demonstrations of
affection greet a happiness which, for all that, is but an immaterial idea,
built up of artless memories and ingenuous hopes. I
mention these matters only because they are quite ordinary and because there is
nobody who has not made a thousand similar observations. As a rule, we do not
notice that these humble manifestations represent sentiments, associations of
ideas, inferences, deductions, an absolute and altogether human mental effort.
They lack only speech; but speech is merely a mechanical accident which reveals
the operations of thought more clearly to us. We are amazed that Mohamed or
Zarif should recognize the picture of a horse, a donkey, a hat, or a man on
horseback, or that they should spontaneously report to their master the little
events that happen in the stable; but it is certain that our own dog is
incessantly performing a similar work and that his eyes, if we could read them,
would tell us a great deal more. The primary miracle of Elberfeld is that the
stallions should have been given the means of expressing what they think and
feel. It is momentous; but, when closely looked into, it is not
incomprehensible. Between the talking horses and my silent dog there is an
enormous distance, but not an abyss. I am saying this not to detract from the
nature or extent of the prodigy, but to call attention to the fact that the theory
of animal intelligence is more justifiable and less fanciful than one is at
first inclined to think. But
the second and greater miracle is that man should have been able to rouse the
horse from his immemorial sleep, to fix and direct his attention and to
interest him in matters that are more foreign and indifferent to him than the
variations of temperature in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It really seems,
when we consider our preconceived ideas, that there is not in the animal an
organic and insurmountable inability to do what man's brain does, a total and
irremediable absence of intellectual faculties, but rather a profound lethargy
and torpor of those faculties. It lives in a sort of undisturbed stolidity, of
nebulous slumber. As Dr. Ochorowicz very justly remarks, "its waking state
is very near akin to the state of a man walking in his sleep." Having no
notion of space or time, it spends its life, one may say, in a perpetual dream.
It does what is strictly necessary to keep itself alive; and all the rest
passes over it and does not penetrate at all into its hermetically closed
imaginings. Exceptional circumstances some extraordinary need, wish, passion
or shock are required to produce what M. Hachet-Souplet calls "the
psychic flash" which suddenly thaws and galvanizes its brain, placing it
for a minute in the waking state in which the human brain works normally. Nor
is this surprising. It does not need that awakening in order to exist; and we
know that nature never makes great superfluous efforts.. "The
intellect," as Professor Clarapede well says, "appears only as a
makeshift, an instrument which betrays that the organism is not adapted to its
environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of impotence." It is
probable that our brain at first suffered from the same lethargy, a condition,
for that matter, from which many men have not yet emerged; and it is even more
probable that, compared with other modes of existence, with other psychic
phenomena, on another plane and in another sphere, the dense sleep in which we
move is similar to that in which the lower animals have their being. It also is
traversed, with increasing frequency, by psychic flashes of a different order
and a different scope. Seeing, on the one side, the intellectual movement that
seems to be spreading among our lesser brothers and, on the other, the ever
more constantly repeated manifestations of our subconsciousness, we might even
ask ourselves if we have not here, on two different planes, a tension, a
parallel pressure, a new desire, a new attempt of the mysterious spiritual
force which animates the universe and which seems to be incessantly seeking
fresh outlets and fresh conducting rods. Be this as it may, when the flash has
passed, we behave very much as the animals do: we promptly lapse into the
indifferent sleep which suffices also for our miserable ways. We ask no more of
it, we do not follow the luminous trail that summons us to an unknown world, we
go on turning in our dismal circle, like contented sleep-walkers, while Isis'
sistrum rattles without respite to rouse the faithful. I
repeat, the great miracle of Elberfeld is that of having been able to prolong
and reproduce at will those isolated "psychic flashes." The horses,
in comparison with the other animals, are here in the state of a man whose subliminal
consciousness had gained the upper hand. That man would lead a higher
existence, in an almost immaterial atmosphere, of which the phenomena of
metaphysics, sparks falling from a region which we shall perhaps one day reach,
sometimes give us an uncertain and fleeting glimpse. Our intelligence, which is
really lethargy and which keeps us imprisoned in a little hollow of space and
time, would there be replaced by intuition, or rather by a sort of imminent
knowledge which would forthwith make us sharers in all that is known to a
universe which perhaps knows all things. Unfortunately, we have not, or at
least, unlike the horses, we are not acquainted with a superior being who
interests himself in us and helps us to throw off our torpor. We have to become
our own god, to rise above ourselves and to keep ourselves raised by our
unaided strength. It is almost certain that the horse would never have come out
of his nebulous sphere without man's assistance; but it is not forbidden to
hope that man, with no other help than his own courage and high purpose, may
yet succeed in breaking through the sleep that cramps him and blinds him. To
come back then to our horses and to the main point, which is the isolated "psychic
flash," it is admitted that they know the values of figures, that they can
distinguish and identify smells, colours, forms, objects and even graphic
reproductions of those objects. They also understand a large number of words,
including some of which they were, never taught the meaning, but which they
picked up as they went along by hearing them spoken around them. They have
learnt, with the assistance of an exceedingly complicated alphabet, to
reproduce the words, thanks to which they manage to convey impressions,
sensations, wishes, associations of ideas, observations and even spontaneous
reflections. It has been held that all this implies real acts of intelligence.
It is, in fact, often very difficult to decide exactly how far it is
intelligence and how far memory, instinct, imitative genius, obedience or
mechanical impulse, the effects of training, or happy coincidences. There
are cases, however, which admit of little or no hesitation. I give a few. One
day Krall and his collaborator, Dr. Scholler, thought that they would try and
teach Mohamed to express himself in speech. The horse, a docile and eager
pupil, made touching and fruitless efforts to reproduce human sounds. Suddenly,
he stopped and, in his strange phonetic spelling, declared, by striking his
foot on the spring-board: "Ig
hb kein gud Sdim. I have not a good voice." Observing
that he did not open his mouth, they strove to make him understand, by the
example of a dog, with pictures, and so on, that, in order to speak, it is necessary
to separate the jaws. They next asked him: "What
must you do to speak?" He
replied, by striking with his foot: "Open
mouth." "Why
don't you open yours?" "Weil
kan nigd: because I can't." A few
days after, Zarif was asked how he talks to Mohamed. "Mit
Munt: with mouth." "Why
don't you tell me that with your mouth?" "Weil
ig kein Stim hbe: because I have no voice." Does not this answer, as
Krall remarks, allow us to suppose that he has other means than speech of
conversing with his stable-companion? In
the course of another lesson, Mohamed was shown the portrait of a young girl
whom he did not know. "What's
that?" asked his master. "Metgen:
a girl?" On
the black-board: "Why
is it a girl?" "Weil
lang Hr hd: because she has long hair." "And
what has she not?" "Moustache." They
next produced the likeness of man with no moustache. "What's
this?" "Man." "Why
is it a man?" "Weil
kurz Hr hd: because he has short hair." I
could multiply these examples indefinitely by drawing on the voluminous
Elberfeld minutes, which, I may say in passing, have the convincing force of
photographic records. All this, it must be agreed, is unexpected and
disconcerting, had never been foreseen or suspected and may be regarded as one
of the strangest prodigies, one of the most stupefying revelations that have
taken place since man has dwelt in this world of riddles, Nevertheless, by
reflecting, by comparing, by investigating, by regarding certain forgotten or
neglected landmarks and starting-points, by taking into consideration the
thousand imperceptible gradations between the greatest and the least, the
highest and the lowest, it is still possible to explain, admit and understand.
We can, if it comes to that, imagine that, in his secret self, in his tragic
silence, our dog also makes similar remarks and reflections. Once again, the
miraculous bridge which, in this instance, spans the gulf between the animal
and man is much more the expression of thought than thought itself. We may go
further and grant that certain elementary calculations, such as little
additions, little subtractions of one or two figures, are, after all,
conceivable; and I, for my part, am inclined to believe that the horse really
executes them. But where we get out of our depth, where we enter into the realm
of pure enchantment is when it becomes a matter of mathematical operations on a
large scale, notably of the finding of roots. We know, for instance, that the
extraction of the fourth root of a number of six figures calls for eighteen
multiplications, ten subtractions and three divisions and that the horse does
thirty-one sums in five or six seconds, that is to say, during the brief,
careless glance which he gives at the black-board on which the problem is
inscribed, as though the answer came to him intuitively and instantaneously. Still,
if we admit the theory of intelligence, we must also admit that the horse knows
what he is doing, since it is not until after learning what a squared number or
a square root means that he appears to understand or that, at any rate, he
gradually works out correctly the ever more complicated calculations required
of him. It is not possible to give here the details of this instruction, which
was astonishingly rapid. The reader will find them on pages 117 et seq.
of Krall's book, Denkende Tiere. Krall begins by explaining to Mohamed
that 2 squared is equal to 2 X 2 = 4; that 2 cubed is equal to 2 X 2 X 2 = 6;
that 2 is the square root of 4; and so on. In short, the explanations and
demonstrations are absolutely similar to those which one would give to an
extremely intelligent child, with this difference, that the horse is much more
attentive than the child and that, thanks to his extraordinary memory, he never
forgets what he appears to have understood. Let us add, to complete the magical
and incredible character of the phenomenon that, according to Krall's own
statement, the horse was not taught beyond the point of extracting the square
root of the number 144 and that he spontaneously invented the manner of
extracting all the others. Must
we once more repeat, in connection with these startling performances, that
those who speak of audible or visible signals, of telegraphy and wireless
telegraphy, of expedients, trickery or deceit, are speaking of what they do not
know and of what they have not seen? There is but one reply to be made to any
one who honestly refuses to believe: "Go
to Elberfeld -the problem is sufficiently important, sufficiently big with
consequences to make the journey worth while and, behind closed doors, alone
with the horse, in the absolute solitude and silence of the stable, set Mohamed
to extract half-a dozen roots which, like that which I have mentioned, require
thirty-one operations. You must yourself be ignorant of the solutions, so as to
do away with any transmission of unconscious thought. If he then gives you, one
after the other, five or six correct solutions, as he did to me and many
others, you will not go away with the conviction that the animal is able by its
intelligence to extract those roots, because that conviction would upset too
thoroughly the greater part of the certainties on which your life is based; but
you will, at any rate, be persuaded that you have been for a few minutes in the
presence of one of the greatest and strangest riddles that can disturb the mind
of man; and it is always a good and salutary thing to come into contact with
emotions of this order." Truth
to say, the theory of intelligence in the animal would be so extraordinary as
to be almost untenable. If we are determined, at whatever cost, to pin our
faith to it, we are bound to call in the aid of other ideas, to appeal, for
instance, to the extremely mysterious and essentially uncomprehended and
incomprehensible nature of numbers. It is almost certain that the science of
mathematics lies outside the intelligence. It forms a mechanical and abstract
whole, more spiritual than material and more material than spiritual, visible
only through its shadow and yet constituting the most immovable of the
realities that govern the universe. From first to last it declares itself a
very strange force and, as it were, the sovereign of another element than that
which nourishes our brain. Secret, indifferent, imperious and implacable, it
subjugates and oppresses us from a great height or a great depth, in any case,
from very far, without telling us why. One might say that figures place those
who handle them in a special condition. They draw the cabalistic circle around
their victim. Henceforth, he is no longer his own master, he renounces his
liberty, he is literally "possessed" by the powers which he invokes.
He is dragged he knows not whither, into a formless, boundless immensity,
subject to laws that have nothing human about them, in which each of those
lively and tyrannical little signs which move and dance in their thousands
under the pen represents nameless, but eternal, invincible and inevitable
verities. We think that we are directing them and they enslave us. We become
weary and breathless following them into their uninhabitable spaces. When we
touch them, we let loose a force which we are no longer able to control. They
do with us what they will and always end by hurling us, blinded and benumbed,
into blank infinity or upon a wall of ice against which every effort of our
mind and will is shattered. It is
possible, therefore, in the last resort, to explain the Elberfeld mystery by
the no less obscure mystery that surrounds numbers. This really only means
moving to another spot in the gloom; but it is often just by that moving to
another spot that we end by discovering the little gleam of light which shows
us a thoroughfare. In any case, and to return to more precise ideas, more than
one instance has been cited to prove that the gift of handling great groups of
figures is almost independent of the intelligence proper. One of the most
curious is that of an Italian shepherd boy, Vito Mangiamele, who was brought
before the Paris Academy of Science in 1837 and who, at the age of ten, though
devoid of the most rudimentary education, was able in half a minute to extract
the cubic root of a number of seven figures. Another, more striking still, also
mentioned by Dr. Clarapede in his paper on the learned horses, is that of a man
blind from birth, an inmate of the lunatic-asylum, at Armentieres. This blind
man, whose name is Fleury, a degenerate and nearly an idiot, can calculate in
one minute and fifteen seconds the number of seconds in thirty-nine years,
three months and twelve days, not forgetting the leap-years. They explain to
him what a square root is, without telling him the conventional method of
finding it; and soon he extracts almost as rapidly as Inaudi himself, without a
blunder, the square roots of numbers of four figures, giving the remainder. On
the other hand, we know that a mathematical genius like Henri Pomcare confessed
himself incapable of adding up a column of figures without a mistake. From
the maybe enchanted atmosphere that surrounds numbers we shall pass more easily
to the even more magic mists of the final theory, the only one remaining to us
for the moment: the mediumistic or subliminal theory. This, we must remember,
is not the telepathic theory proper which decisive experiments have made us
reject. Let us have the courage to venture upon it. When one can no longer
interpret a phenomenon by the known, we must needs try to do so by the unknown.
We, therefore, now enter a new province of a great unexplored kingdom, in which
we shall find ourselves without a guide. Mediumistic
phenomena, manifestations of the secondary or the subliminal consciousness,
between man and man, are, as we have more than once had occasion to assure
ourselves, capricious, undisciplined, evasive and uncertain, but more frequent
than one thought and, to one who examines, them seriously and honestly, often
undeniable. Have similar manifestations been discovered between man and the
animals? The study of these manifestations, which is very difficult even in the
case of man, becomes still more so when we question witnesses doomed to
silence. There are, however, some animals which are looked upon as
"psychic," which, in other words, seem indisputably to be sensitive
to certain subliminal influences. One usually classes the cat, the dog and the
horse in this somewhat ill-defined category. To these superstitious animals one
might perhaps add certain birds, more or less birds of omen, and even a few
insects, notably the bees. Other animals, such as, for instance, the elephant
and the monkey, appear to be proof against mystery. Be this as it may, M.
Ernest Bozzano, in an excellent article on Les Perceptions psychiques des
animaux,2 collected in 1905 sixty-nine cases of telepathy,
presentiments and hallucinations of sight or hearing in which the principal
actors are cats, dogs and horses. There are, even among them, ghosts or
phantoms of dogs which, after their death, return to haunt the homes in which
they were happy. Most of these cases are taken from the Proceedings of the S. P. R., that is to say, they have
nearly all been very strictly investigated. It is impossible, short of filling
these pages with often striking and touching but rather cumbersome anecdotes,
to enumerate them here, however briefly. It will be sufficient to note that
sometimes the dog begins to howl at the exact moment when his master loses his
life, for instance, on a battlefield, hundreds of miles from the place where
the dog is. More commonly, the cat, the dog and the horse plainly manifest that
they perceive, often before men do, telepathic apparitions, phantasms of the
living or the dead. Horses in particular seem very sensitive to places that
pass as haunted or uncanny. On the whole, the result of these observations is
that we can hardly dispute that these animals communicate as much as we do and
perhaps in the same fashion with the mystery that lies around us. There are
moments at which, like man, they see the invisible and perceive events,
influences and emotions that are beyond the range of their normal senses. It
is, therefore, permissible to believe that their nervous system or some remote
or secret part of their being contains the same psychic elements connecting
them with an unknown that inspires them with as much terror as it does ourselves.
And, let us say in passing, this terror is rather strange; for, after all, what
have they to fear from a phantom or an apparition, they who, we are convinced
have no after-life and who ought, therefore, to remain perfectly indifferent to
the manifestations, of a world in which they will never set foot? I
shall perhaps be told that it is not certain that these apparitions are
objective, that they correspond with an external reality, but that it is
exceedingly possible that they spring solely from the man's or the animal's
brain. This is not the moment to discuss this very obscure point, which raises
the whole question of the supernatural and all the problems of the hereafter.
The only important thing to observe is that at one time it is man who transmits
his terror, his perception or his idea of the invisible to the animal and at
another the animal which transmits its sensations to man. We have here,
therefore, intercommunications which spring from a deeper common source than
any that we know and which, to issue from it or go back to it, pass through
other channels than those of our customary senses. Now all this belongs to that
unexplained sensibility, to that secret treasure, to that as yet undetermined
psychic power which, for lack of a better term, we call subconsciousness or
subliminal consciousness. Moreover, it is not surprising that in the animals,
these subliminal faculties not only exist, but are perhaps keener and more
active than in ourselves, because it is our conscious and abnormally individualized
life that atrophies them by relegating them to a state of idleness wherein they
have fewer and fewer opportunities of being exercised, whereas in our brothers
who are less detached from the universe, consciousness if we can give that
name to a very uncertain and confused notion of the ego is reduced to a few
elementary actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from the whole
of the circumambient life and they still possess a number of those more general
and indeterminate senses whereof we have been deprived by the gradual
encroachment of a narrow and intolerant special faculty, our intelligence.
Among these senses which up to the present we have described as instincts, for
want and it is becoming a pressing want of a more suitable and definite
word, need I mention the sense of direction, migration, foreknowledge of the
weather, of earthquakes and avalanches and many others which we doubtless do
not even suspect? Does all this not belong to a subconsciousness which differs
from ours only in being so much richer? I am
fully aware that this explanation by means of the subliminal consciousness will
not explain very much and will at most invoke the aid of the unknown to
illuminate the incomprehensible. But to explain a phenomenon, a Dr. J. de
Modzelwski very truly says, "is to put forward a theory which is more
familiar and more easily comprehensible to us than the phenomenon at
issue." This is really what we are constantly and almost exclusively doing
in physics, chemistry, biology and in every branch of science without
exception. To explain a phenomenon is not necessarily to make it as clear and
lucid as that two and two are four; and, even so, the fact that two and two are
four is not, when we go to the bottom of things, as clear and lucid as it
seems. What in this case, as in most others, we wrongfully call explaining is
simply confronting the unexpected mystery which these horses offer us with a few
phenomena which are themselves unknown, but which have been perceived longer
and more frequently. And this same mystery, thus explained, will serve one day
to explain others. It is in this way that science goes to work. We must not
blame it: it does what it can; and it does not appear that there are other
ways. If we
assent to this explanation by means of the subliminal consciousness, which is a
sort of mysterious participation in all that happens in this world and the
others, many obstacles disappear and we enter into a new region in which we
draw strangely nearer to the animals and really become their brothers by closer
links, perhaps the only essential links in life. They take part from that
moment in the great human problems, in the extraordinary actions of our unknown
guest; and, if, since we have been observing the indwelling force more
attentively, nothing any longer surprises us of that which it realizes in us,
no more should anything surprise us of that which it realizes in them. We are
on the same plane with them, in some as yet undetermined element, when it is no
longer the intelligence that reigns alone, but another spiritual power, which
pays no heed to the brain, which passes by other roads and which might rather
be the psychic substance of the universe itself, no longer set in grooves,
isolated and specialized by man, but diffused, multiform and perhaps, if we
could trace it, equal in everything that exists. There
is, henceforth, no reason why the horses should not participate in most of the
mediumistic, phenomena which we find existing between man and man; and their
mystery ceases to be distinct from those of human metaphysics. If their
subliminal is akin to ours, we can begin by extending to its utmost limits the
telepathic theory, which has, so to speak, no limits, for, in the matter of
telepathy, as Myers has said, all that we are permitted to declare is that
"life has the power of manifesting itself to life." We may ask
ourselves, therefore, if the problem which I set to the horse, without knowing
the terms of it, is not communicated to my subliminal, which is ignorant of it,
by that of the horse, who has read it. It is practically certain that this is
possible between human subliminals. Is it I who see the solution and transmit
it to the horse, who only repeats it to me? But, suppose that it is a problem
which I myself am incapable of solving? Whence does the solution come, then? I
do not know if the experiment has been attempted, under the same conditions,
with a human medium. For that matter, if it succeeded, it would be very much
the same as the no less subliminal phenomenon of the arithmetical prodigies, or
lightning calculators, with which, in this rather superhuman atmosphere, we are
almost forced to compare the riddle of the mathematical horses. Of all the
interpretations, it is the one which, for the moment, appears to me the least
eccentric and the most natural. We
have seen that the gift of handling colossal figures is almost foreign to the
intelligence proper; one can, even declare that, in certain cases, it is
evidently and completely independent of such intelligence. In these cases, the
gift is manifested prior to any education and from the earliest years of
childhood. If we refer to the list of arithmetical prodigies given by Dr.
Scripure,3 we see that the faculty made its appearance in Ampere at
the age of three, in Colburn at six, in Gauss at three, in Mangiamele at ten,
in Safford at six, in Whateley at three, and so on. Generally, it lasts for
only a few years, becoming rapidly enfeebled with age and usually vanishing
suddenly at the moment when its possessor begins to go to school. When
you ask those children and even most of the lightning calculators who have come
to man's estate how they go to work to solve the huge and complicated problems
set them, they reply that they know nothing about it. Bidder, for instance,
declares that it is impossible for him to say how he can instinctively tell the
logarithm of a number consisting of seven or eight figures. It is the same with
Safford, who, at the age of ten, used to do in his head, without ever making a
mistake, multiplication-sums the result of which ran into thirty-six figures.
The solution presents itself authoritatively and spontaneously; it is a vision,
an impression, an inspiration, an intuition coming one knows not whence,
suddenly and indubitably. As a role, they do not even try to calculate.
Contrary to the general belief, they have no peculiar methods; or, if method
there be, it is more a practical way of subdividing the intuition. One would
think that the solution springs suddenly from the very enunciation of the
problem, in the same way as a veridical hallucination. It appears to rise, infallible
and ready-done, from a sort of eternal and cosmic reservoir wherein the answers
to every question lie dormant. It must, therefore, be admitted that we have
here a phenomenon that occurs above or below the brain, by the side of the
consciousness and the mind, outside all the intellectual methods and habits;
and it is precisely for phenomena of this kind that Myers invented the word
"subliminal."4
32 Does
not all this bring us a little nearer to our calculating horses? From the
moment that it is demonstrated that the solution of a mathematical problem no
longer depends exclusively on the brain, but on another faculty, another
spiritual power whose presence under various forms has been ascertained beyond
a doubt in certain animals, it ceases to be wholly rash or extravagant to
suggest that perhaps, in the horse, the same phenomenon is reproduced and
developed in the same unknown, wherein moreover the mysteries of numbers and
those of subconsciousness mingle in a like darkness. I am well aware that an
explanation laden to such an extent with mysteries explains but very little
more than silence does; nevertheless, it is at least a silence traversed by
restless murmurs, and sedulous whispers that are better than the gloomy and
hopeless ignorance to which we would have perforce to resign ourselves if we
did not, in spite of all, to perform the great duty of man, which is to
discover a spark in the darkness. It
goes without saying that objections are raised from every side. Among men,
arithmetical prodigies are looked upon as monsters, as a sort of extremely rare
teratological phenomenon. We can count, at most, half-a-dozen in a century,
whereas, among horses, the faculty would appear to be almost general, or at
least quite common. In fact, out of six or seven stallions whom Krall tried to
initiate into the secrets of mathematics, he found only two that appeared to
him too poorly gifted for him to waste time on their education. These were, I
believe, two thoroughbreds that were presented to him by the Grand-duke of
Mecklenburg and sent back by Krall to their sumptuous stables. In the four or
five others, taken at random as circumstances supplied them, he met with
aptitudes unequal, it is true, but easily developed and giving the impression
that they exist normally, latent and inactive, at the bottom of every equine
soul. From the mathematical point of view, is the horse's subliminal
consciousness then superior to man's? Why not? His whole subliminal being is
probably superior to one, of greater range, younger, fresher, more alive and
less heavy, since it is not incessantly attacked, coerced and humiliated by the
intelligence which gnaws at it, stifles it, cloaks it and relegates it to a
dark corner which neither light nor air can penetrate. His subliminal consciousness
is always present, always alert; ours is never there, is asleep at the bottom
of a deserted well and needs exceptional operations, results and events before
it can be drawn from its slumber and its unremembered deeps. All this seems
very extraordinary; but, in any case, we are here in the midst of the
extraordinary; and this outlet is perhaps the least hazardous. It is not a
question, we must remember, of a cerebral operation, an intellectual
performance, but of a gift of divination closely allied to other gifts of the
same nature and the same origin which are not the peculiar attribute of man. No
observation, no experiment enables us, up to the present, to establish a
difference between the subliminal of human beings and that of animals. On the
contrary, the as yet restricted number of actual cases reveals constant and
striking analogies between the two. In most of those arithmetical operations,
be it noted, the subliminal of the horse behaves exactly like that of the
medium in a rate of trance. The horse readily reverses the figures of the
solution; he replies, "37," for instance, instead of "73,"
which is a mediumistic phenomenon so well-known and so frequent that it has
been styled "mirror-writing." He makes mistakes fairly often in the
most elementary additions, and subtractions and much less frequently in the
extraction of the most complicated roots, which again, in similar cases, such
as "xenoglossy" and psychometry, is one of the eccentricities of
human mediumism and is explained by the same cause, namely, the inopportune
intervention of the ever fallible intelligence, which, by meddling in the
matter, alters the certainties of a subliminal which, when left to itself,
never makes a mistake. It is, in fact, quite probable that the horse, being really
able to do the small sums, no longer relies solely on his intuition and, from
that moment, gropes and flounders about. The solution hovers between the
intelligence and the subliminal and, passing from the one, which is not quite
sure of it, to the other, which is not urgently appealed to, comes out of the
conflict as best it may. The case is the same with the psychometric or
spiritualistic medium who seeks to profit by what he knows in the ordinary way,
so as to complete the visions or revelations of his subconscious sensibility.
He, too, in this instance, is nearly always guilty of flagrant and inexplicable
blunders. Many
other similarities will be found to exist, notably the way in which the lessons
vary. Nothing is more uncertain and capricious than manifestations of human
mediumism. Whether it be a question of automatic writing, psychometry,
materializations or anything else, we meet with series of sittings that yield
none but absurd results. Then, suddenly, for reasons as yet obscure the state
of the weather, the presence of this or that witness, or I know not what the
most undeniable and bewildering manifestations occur one after the other. The
case is precisely the same with the horses: their queer fancies, their
unaccountable and disconcerting freaks drive poor Krall to despair. He never
opens the door of that uncertain stable, on important days, without a sinking
at the heart. Let the beard or the frown of some learned professor fail to
please the horses: they will, forthwith, take an unholy delight in giving the
most irrelevant answer to the most elementary question, for hours and even days
on end. 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 Mohamed? 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. It is there,
under the numbers that have no other object than to give it life, coming,
stirring and ceaselessly proclaiming itself a necessity. It is not surprising
therefore that eyes sharper than ours and ears open to other vibrations should
see and hear it without knowing what it represents, what it implies or from
what prodigious mass of figures and operations it merges. The problem itself
speaks; and the horse but repeats the sign which he hears whispered in the
mysterious life of numbers or deep down in, the abyss where the eternal
verities hold sway. He understands none of it, he has no need to understand, he
is but the unconscious medium who lends his voice or his limbs to the mind that
inspires him. There is here but a bare and simple answer, bearing no precise
significance, seized in an alien existence. There is here but a mechanical
revelation, so to speak, a sort of special reflex which we can only record and
which, for the rest, is as inexplicable as any other phenomenon of
consciousness or instinct. After all, when we think of it, it is just as,
astonishing that we should not perceive the solution as it is that we should
discover it. However, I grant that all this is but a venturesome interpretation
to be taken for what it is worth, an experimental or interim theory with which
we must needs content ourselves since all the others have hitherto been
controverted by the facts. Let
us now briefly sum up what the Elberfeld experiments have yielded us. Having
put aside telepathy in the narrow sense which perhaps enters into more than
one phenomenon but is not indispensable to it, for we see these same phenomena
repeated when telepathy is practically impossible we cannot help observing
that, if we deny the existence or the influence of the subliminal, it is all
the more difficult to contest the existence and the intervention of the
intelligence, at any rate up to the extracting of roots, after which there is a
steep precipice which ends in darkness. But, even if we stop at the roots, the
sudden discovery of an intellectual force so similar to our own, where we were
accustomed to see but an irremediable impotency, is no doubt one of the most
unexpected revelations that we have received since the invisible and the
unknown began to press upon us with a persistence and an impatience which they
had not displayed heretofore. It is not easy to foresee as yet the consequences
and the promises of this new aspect which the great riddle of the intelligence
is suddenly adopting. But I believe that we shall soon have to revise some of
the essential ideas which are the foundations of our life and that some rather
strange horizons are appearing out of the mists in the history of psychology,
of morality, of human destiny and of many other things. So
much for the intelligence. On the other hand, what we deny to the intelligence
we are constrained to grant to the subliminal; and the revelation is even more disconcerting.
We should then have to admit that them is in the horse and hence most
probably in everything that lives on this earth a psychic power similar to
that which is hidden beneath the veil of our reason and which, as we learn to
know it, astonishes, surpasses and dominates our reason more and more. This
psychic power, in which no doubt we shall one day be forced to recognize the
genius of the universe itself, appears, as we have often observed, to be
all-wise, all-seeing and all-powerful. It has, when it is pleased to
communicate with us or when we are allowed to penetrate into it, an answer for
every question, and perhaps a remedy for every ill. We will not enumerate its
virtues again. It will be enough for us to recall with what ease it mocks at
space, time and all the obstacles that beset our poor human knowledge and
understanding. We believed it, like all that seems to us superior and
marvellous, the intangible, inalienable and incommunicable attribute of man,
with even better reason than his intelligence. And now an accident, strangely
belated, it is true, tells us that, at one precise point, the strangest and
least foreseen of all, the horse and the dog draw more easily and perhaps more
directly than ourselves upon its mighty reservoirs. By the most inexplicable of
anomalies, though one that is fairly consistent with the fantastic character of
the subliminal, they appear to have access to it only at the spot that is most
remote from their habits and most unknown to their propensities, for there is
nothing in the world about which animals trouble less than figures. But is this
not, perhaps because we do not see what goes on elsewhere? It so happens that
the infinite mystery of numbers can sometimes be expressed by a very few simple
movements which are natural to most animals; but there is nothing to tell us
that, if we could teach the horse and the dog to attach to these same movements
the expression of other mysteries, they would not draw upon them with equal
facility. It has been successfully attempted to give them a more or less clear
idea of the value of a few figures and perhaps of the course and nature of
certain elementary operations; and this appears to have been enough to open up
to them the most secret regions of mathematics in which every question is
answered beforehand. It is not wholly illusive to suppose that, if we could
impart to them, for instance, a similar notion of the future, together with a
manner of conveying to us what they see there, they might also have access to
strange visions of another class, which are jealously kept from us by the
too-watchful guardians of our intelligence. There is an opportunity here for
experiments which will doubtless prove exceedingly arduous, for the future is
not so easily seen and above all not so easily interpreted and expressed as a
number. It is possible, moreover, that, when we know how to set about it, we
shall obtain most of the human mediumistic phenomena; rapping, the moving of
objects, materialization even and Heaven knows what other surprises held in
store for us by that astounding subliminal to whose fancy there appears to be
no bounds. In any case, if we accept the divining of numbers, as we are almost
forced to do, it is almost certain that the divining of other matters must
follow. An unexpected breach is made in the wall behind which lie heaped the
great secrets that seem to us, as our knowledge and our civilization increase,
to become stronger and more inaccessible. True, it is a narrow breach; but it
is the first that has been opened in that part of the hitherto uncrannied wall
which is not turned towards mankind. What will issue through it? No one can
foretell what we may hope. What
astonishes us most is that this revelation has been so long delayed. How are we
to explain that man has lived to this day with his domestic animals never
suspecting that they harboured mediumistic or subliminal faculties as
extraordinary as those which he vaguely felt himself to possess. One would have
in this connection to study the mysterious practices of ancient India and of
Egypt; the numerous and persistent legends of animals talking, guiding their
masters and foretelling the future; and, nearer to ourselves, in history
proper, all that science of augury and soothsaying which derived its omens from
the flight of birds, the inspection of entrails, the appetite or attitude of
the sacred or prophetic animals, among which horses were often numbered. We
here find one of those innumerous instances of a lost or anticipated power
which make us suspect that mankind has forestalled or forgotten all that we
believe ourselves to be discovering. Remember that there is almost always some
distorted, misapprehended or dimly seen truth at the bottom of the most
eccentric and wildest creeds, superstitions and legends. All this new science
of metaphysics or of the investigation of our subconsciousness and of unknown
powers, which has scarcely begun to unveil its first mysteries, thus finds
landmarks and defaced but recognizable traces in the old religions, the most inexplicable
traditions and the most ancient history. Besides, the probability of a thing
does not depend upon undeniably established precedents. While it is almost
certain that there is nothing new under the sun or in the eternity preceding
the suns, it is quite possible that the same forces do not always act with the
same energy. As I observed, nearly twenty years ago, in The Treasure of the
Humble, at a time when I hardly knew at all what I know so imperfectly
to-day: "A
spiritual" I should have said, a psychic "epoch is perhaps upon
us, an epoch to which a certain number of analogies are found in history. For there
are periods recorded when the soul, in obedience to unknown laws, seemed to
rise to the very surface of humanity, whence it gave clearest evidence of its
existence and of its power
. It would seem, at moments such as these, as though
humanity," and, I would add
to-day, all that lives with it on this earth "were on the point of
struggling from beneath the crushing burden of matter that weighs it
down." One
might in fact believe that a shudder which we have not yet experienced is
passing over everything that breathes; that a new activity, a new restlessness
is permeating the spiritual atmosphere which surrounds our globe; and that the
very animals have felt its thrill. One might say that, by the side of the
niggardly private spring which would only supply our intelligence, other
streams are spreading and rising to the same level in every form of existence.
A sort of word of command is being passed from rank to rank; and the same
phenomena are bursting forth in every quarter of the globe in order to attract
our attention, as though the obstinately dumb genius that lay hidden in the
pregnant silence of the universe, from that of the stones, the flowers and the
insects to the mighty silence of the stars, were at last trying to tell us some
secret whereby it would be better known to us or to itself. It is possible that
this is but an illusion. Perhaps we are simply more attentive and better
informed than of old. We learn at the very instant what happens in every part
of our earth and we have acquired the habit of more minutely observing and
examining the things that happen. But the illusion would in this case have all
the force, all the value and all the meaning of the reality and would enjoin
the same hopes and the same obligation.
1 See the interesting lecture by M. Edmond Duchatel,
published in the Annales des Sciences
Psychiques, October 1913. 2 Annales des Sciences
Psychiques, August, 1905, pp 422-469. 3 American Journal of Psychology, 1 April 1891. 4 I have no need
to recall the derivation of the term subliminal: beneath (sub) the
threshold (limen) of consciousness. Let us add, as M. de Vesme very
rightly remarks, that the subliminal is not exactly what classical psychology
calls the subconsciousness, which latter records only notions that are normally
perceived and possesses only normal faculties, that is to say, faculties
recognized to-day by orthodox science. |