838. "This fact of the primitive nature of M1Ie Smith's various hypnoidal elucubrations, and the different ages of her life to which they belong, seems to me (says Professor Flournoy, p. 415) to constitute one of the most interesting psychological points in her mediumship. It tends to show that her secondary personalities are probably in their origin, as has sometimes been suggested, phenomena partly of reversion to the ordinary personality - survivals or momentary returns of inferior phases, overpassed for a longer or shorter time, and which should normally have been absorbed in the development of the individual instead of appearing externally in strange proliferations. Just as teratology illustrates embryology, which in return explains teratology, and as both of these unite in throwing light on anatomy, - similarly one may hope that the study of the facts of mediumship may some day help to furnish us with some just and fruitful view of normal psychogenesis, - which in return will enable us better to comprehend the appearance of these singular phenomena; so that psychology in general may thence acquire a better and exacter conception of human personality".

The faculty here touched upon - the strong reviviscence of long-past emotional states - seems to me eminently characteristic, at any rate, of artistic and poetical genius.

The artist must needs desire to have his whole life to draw upon. He must often wish to live in the past more vividly than in the present, and to feel again what he has felt, even more than to see again what he has seen. Visual and auditory memories, pushed to absolute vividness, become hallucinations of vision or audition; and this point of absolute hallucination few artists are able or even desire to reach. But emotional or affective memory may for some gifted natures be pushed on into all its old actual vividness with pure gain to art; nay, if the man himself has grown more capable of feeling, then the revived emotion (like certain optical memory-images) may even go beyond the original.

Thus Sully Prudhomme says, in speaking of a hidden insurgent memory of this type: "C'est meme cette reviviscence qui seule me per-mettrait de retoucher les vers que cette petite aventure, si ancienne, m'a fait commettre, et de faire beneficier de l'experience que j'ai acquise dans mon art l'expression de mes sentiments d'autrefois." And he asks whether every memory of feeling does not assume a certain character of hallucination. Wordsworth (as Aubrey de Vere has told us, and as the sonnet "surprised by joy," shows) had very much the same experience. And Littre (Revue Positive, 1877, p. 660) describes what he calls the "affective automnesia" - or spontaneously arising flow of emotion - with which quite suddenly, and late in life, he remembered losing a young sister when he was ten years old: "Ce meme evenement s'est reproduit avec une peine non moindre, certes, que celle que j'eprouvais au moment meme, et qui alla jusqu'a mouiller mes yeux de larmes."1

This train of reflections, I think, well illustrates that kinship between the working of what is admitted as genius and the dreamlike subliminal mentation with which we are here dealing, of which I have often spoken, and to which I must again presently recur.

Turning now to the Hindoo pre-incarnation, we observe that it offers a linguistic problem of a rather different kind. Certain Sanscrit letters are written, and certain Sanscrit words are uttered - mixed, it is true, with much quasi-Sanscrit gibberish, and not exceeding what a quick eye and memory might pick up in a few hours from a Sanscrit grammar. Helene, however - whose complete good faith is vouched for on all sides and who herself undoubtedly believes with her whole heart in the spirit-hypothesis - denies that she ever consulted or even to her knowledge saw, a Sanscrit grammar. Again, M. Flournoy's careful researches have shown that incidents of the Indian history, or pseudo-history, on which the narrative of this incarnation turns, are undoubtedly derived from a particular passage in a rare and antiquated history of India by de Maries - which Mlle Smith asserts that she never saw, and which it seems very improbable that she should have seen.2 This knowledge is worked up in a way indicating considerable familiarity with the East, and quasi-Indian tunes and gestures are employed with great verisimilitude.

I need not here go into the details of the more modern and accessible characterisation of Marie Antoinette.