All that concerns this first phase of the survival is fairly probable, even to those who do not admit the theory of reincarnation. For the rest, we shall see presently that the solutions which man’s imagination finds there merely change the question and are inadequate and provisional.
In order to hide nothing and to bring all the documents into court, we may point out that Colonel de Rochas ascertained upon enquiry that the subjects’ revelations concerning their former existences were inaccurate in several particulars:
“Their narratives were also full of anachronisms which disclosed the presence of normal recollections among the suggestions that came from an unknown source. Nevertheless, one perfectly indubitable fact remains, which is that of the existence of certain visions recurring with the same characteristics in the case of a considerable number of persons unknown to one another.”
We now come to the most serious objection, that of suggestion. Colonel de Rochas declares that he and all the other experimenters who have given themselves up to this study “have not only avoided everything that could put the subject on a definite tack, but have often tried in vain to lead him astray by different suggestions.” I am convinced of it: there can be no question of voluntary suggestion. But do we not know that, in these regions, unconscious and involuntary suggestion is often more powerful and effective than the other? In the hackneyed and rather childish experiment of table-turning, for instance, which, after all, is only a crude and elementary form of telepathy, the replies are nearly always dictated by the unconscious suggestion of a participant or a mere on-looker.[17] We should therefore first of all have to make sure that neither the hypnotizer nor the onlookers, nor yet the subject himself, have ever heard of the reincarnated persons. It will be enough, I shall be told, to employ for the counter-tests another operator and different onlookers who are ignorant of the previous revelations. Yes, but the subject is not ignorant of them; and it is possible that the first suggestion has been so profound that it will remain for ever stamped upon the unconsciousness and that it will reproduce the same incarnations indefinitely, in the same order.