815. The case, assuredly, is a marked one; but it may be thought to be too exceptional for the purpose of my argument. Socrates, it may be said, was too strangely above ordinary men to allow us to draw wider inferences from this unique example. It might be well if we could add a case not complicated by such towering genius; - a case where some one with no previously manifested gifts of nature, with no incomprehensible workings of the soul, had, nevertheless, by monitory voices been taught wisdom and raised to honour, - and who, if so it might be, had testified to the reality of the inward message by some witness which the world could not gainsay. And such a case there is; there is a figure in history unique and marvellous, but marvellous in this point alone. One there has been who was born with no opportunities of education, and in no high or powerful place, but to whom voices came from childhood onwards, and brought at length a strange command; - one who by mere obedience to that monitory call rose to be the saviour of a great nation; - one to whose lot it fell to push that obedience to its limit, and to pledge life for truth; to perish at the stake rather than disown those voices or disobey that inward law.

I speak, of course, of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, the national heroine of France; whose name crowns the poet's list of those famous women of old time who have vanished like "the snows of yester-year".

"La royne blanche comme ung lys Qui chantoit a voix de sereine, Berthe au grant pied, Bietris, Allys, Haremboures qui tint le Mayne, Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine Qu' Anglois bruslerent a Rouen, Ou sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine? Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

I must be excused for dwelling on this signal example; for I believe that only now, with the comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an impulse from the mind's deeper strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself, - only now, I repeat, can we understand aright that familiar story. I shall not repeat its incidents in detail; but shall draw my citations from the most trustworthy source, namely, Joan's evidence, given in 1431, before Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and the other ecclesiastics who ultimately condemned her to be burnt alive.1 The condemnation was based on her own admissions; and the Latin proces-verbal still exists, and was published from the MS. by M. Quicherat, 1841-9, for the French Historical Society. Joan, like Socrates, was condemned mainly on the ground, or at least on the pretext, of her monitory voices: and her Apology remarkably resembles his, in its resolute insistence on the truth of the very phenomena which were being used to destroy her. Her answers are clear and self-consistent, and seem to have been little, if at all, distorted by the recorder.

Few pieces of history so remote as this can be so accurately known.

On the other hand, the Proces de Rehabilitation, held some twenty years after Joan's death, when memories had weakened and legend had begun to grow, is of little value as evidence. Joan's credit must rest entirely on that testimony on the strength of which she was condemned to death.

Fortunately for our purpose, her inquisitors asked her many questions as to her voices and visions; and her answers enable us to give a pretty full analysis of the phenomena which concern us viz., that the siege of Orleans would be raised; that Charles VII. would be crowned at Rheims; that she herself would be wounded; but the prediction that there would be a great victory over the English within seven years was not fulfilled in any exact way, although the English continued to lose ground. In short, about so much was fulfilled as an ardent self-devoted mind might have anticipated; much indeed that might have seemed irrational to ordinary observers, but nothing which actually needed a definite prophetic power. Here, again, we are reminded of the general character of the monitions of Socrates. And yet in Joan's case, more probably than in the case of Socrates, there may have been one singular exception to this general rule. She knew by monition that there was a sword "retro altare" - somewhere behind the altar - in the Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois. "Scivit ipsum ibi esse per voces":- she sent for it, nothing doubting, and it was found and given to her. This was an unique incident in her career.

Her judges asked whether she had not once found a cup, and a missing priest, by help of similar monitions, but this she denied; and it is remarkable that no serious attempt was made either to show that she had claimed this clairvoyant power habitually, or, on the other hand, to invalidate the one instance of it which she did in effect claim. It would be absurd to cite the alleged discovery of the sword as in itself affording a proof of clairvoyance, any more than Socrates' alleged intimation of the approaching herd of swine. But when we are considering monitions given in more recent times it will be well to remember that it is in this direction that some supernormal extension of knowledge seems possibly traceable.

I. The voices do not begin with the summons to fight for France. Joan heard them first at thirteen years of age, - as with Socrates also the voice began in childhood. The first command consisted of nothing more surprising than that "she was to be a good girl, and go often to church." After this the voice - as in the case of Socrates - intervened frequently, and on trivial occasions.

II. The voice was accompanied at first by a light, and sometimes afterwards by figures of saints, who appeared to speak, and whom Joan appears to have both seen and felt as clearly as though they had been living persons. But here there is some obscurity; and Michelet thinks that on one occasion the Maid was tricked by the courtiers for political ends. For she asserted (apparently without contradiction) that several persons, including the Archbishop of Rheims, as well as herself, had seen an angel bringing to the King a material crown.3

III. The voices came mainly when she was awake, but also sometimes roused her from sleep; a phenomenon often observed in our cases of "veridical hallucination." "Ipsa dormiebat, et vox excitabat eam." (Quicherat, i., p. 62).

IV. The voice was not always fully intelligible (especially if she was half awake); - in this respect again resembling some of our recorded cases, both visual and auditory, where, on the view taken in Phantasms of the Living, the externalisation has been incomplete. "Vox dixit aliqua, sed non omnia intellexit." (Quicherat, i., p. 62).

V. The predictions of the voice, so far as stated, were mainly fulfilled;

1 For other authorities see Mr. Andrew Lang's paper in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 198-212, from which I quote in 815 A.

2 On this point, see Mr. Lang in 815 A.

And, lastly, it must be observed that among all the messages thus given to Joan of Arc, there does not seem to have been one which fell short of the purest heroism. They were such commands as were best suited to draw forth from her who heard them the extreme of force, intelligence, virtue, of which she had the potency at her birth. What better can we desire as the guide of life?

We need not assume that the voices which she heard were the offspring of any mind but her own, any more than we need assume that the figures in which her brave and pious impulses sometimes took external form were veritable saints, - the crowned St. Margaret and the crowned St. Catherine and Michael in the armoury of Heaven.

Yet, on the other hand, we have no right to class Joan's monitions, any more than those of Socrates, as an incipient madness. To be sane, after all, is to be adjusted to our environment, to be capable of coping with the facts around us. Tried by this test, it is Socrates and Joan who should be our types of sanity; their difference from ourselves lying rather in the fact that they were better able to employ their own whole being, and received a clearer inspiration from the monitory soul within.

I have dwelt at some length on these two cases, far more remote in date than those to which it is our custom to appeal. But this has been because I held it essential to make my reader understand that the grotesque and trivial messages or monitions, with which in this inquiry we habitually deal, are not to be taken as covering the whole field of automatic action. Before we proceed to consider the question as to the action of minds external to the automatist's own, we ought at any rate to recognise that words given in these strange ways may in themselves be worth hearing, - that not the mechanism only but the content of automatic messages may sometimes deserve our close and serious attention.