ETERNAL PROGRESS.

Days, weeks, months, seasons, years, pa.s.s quickly on this planet,--and doubtless also on the others. The Earth has already run its yearly course around the Sun twenty times since destiny so tragically closed the book that my young friends had been reading for less than a year.

Their happiness was short-lived; their morning faded away like the dawn.

I had forgotten,[1] or at least lost sight of them, when quite recently, at a hypnotic seance in Nancy, where I had stopped for a few days on my way to the Vosges, I was induced to question a "subject" by whose a.s.sistance the experimental savants of the Academie Stanislas had obtained some of those really startling results with which the scientific Press has surprised us for a few years past. I do not remember how, but it happened that my conversation with him turned on the planet Mars. After describing to me a country situated on the sh.o.r.es of a sea known to astronomers under the name of Kepler"s Ocean, and a solitary island lying in the bosom of this sea; after telling me about the picturesque landscapes and reddish vegetation which adorned the sh.o.r.es, the wave-washed cliffs, and the sandy beaches where the billows break and die away,--the subject, who was very sensitive, suddenly grew pale, and raised his hand to his head; his eyes closed, his eyebrows contracted; he seemed desirous of grasping some fugitive idea which obstinately eluded him. "_See!_" said Dr. B., standing before him with irresistible command; "see! I wish it."

"You have friends there," he said to me.

"I am not surprised at that," I said, laughing; "I have done enough to deserve them."

"Two friends," he went on, "who are talking about you now, this very minute."

"Ah, ha! Persons who know me?"

"Yes."

"How is that?"

"They have known you here."

"Here?"

"Here,--on the earth!"

"How long ago was it?"

"I do not know."

"Have they lived on Mars long?"

"I do not know."

"Are they young?"

"Yes; they are lovers, who adore each other."

Then the loved image of my lamented friends rose distinctly in my mind; but I had no sooner seen them than the subject exclaimed,--

"Yes! it is they!"

"How do you know?"

"I see,--they are the same souls, same colors."

"What do you mean by the "same colors"?"

"Yes, the souls are suffused with light."

A few instants afterwards he added, "And yet there is a difference."

Then he was silent, his forehead frowning in his effort to find out. But his face regained all its calmness and serenity as he added,--

"He has become she, the woman; she is now the man,--and they love each other more than ever."

As if he did not quite understand what he had said himself, he seemed to be seeking for some explanation,--made painful efforts, judging from the contraction of the muscles in his face, and fell into a sort of cataleptic fit, from which Dr. B. speedily relieved him; but the lucid interval had fled, not to return.

In ending, I leave this last fact with the reader just as it happened, without comment. Had the subject, according to the hypothesis now admitted by many hypnotists, been under the influence of my own thought when the professor ordered him to answer me? Or, being independent, had he really "freed" himself, and had he _seen_ beyond our sphere? I cannot undertake to decide. Perhaps it will appear in the course of this story.

And yet I will acknowledge in all sincerity that the resurrection of my friend and his adored companion on the world of Mars,--a neighboring abode to ours, and so remarkably like this one we inhabit, only older, doubtless more advanced on the road of progress,--may appear to a thinker"s eyes the logical and natural continuation of their earthly existence, so quickly broken off.

Doubtless Spero was right in declaring that matter is not what it seems to be, and that appearances are deceitful; that the real is the invisible; that animate force is indestructible; that in the absolute, the infinitely great is identical with the infinitely small; that celestial s.p.a.ce is not impa.s.sable; and that souls are the seeds of planetary humanities. Who knows but that the philosophy of dynamism may one day reveal the religion of the future to the apostles of astronomy?

Does not Urania bear the torch without which every problem is insoluble, without which all Nature would remain to us in impenetrable obscurity?

Heaven must explain the earth, the infinite must explain the soul and its immaterial faculties.

The unknown of to-day is the truth of to-morrow.

The following pages will perhaps enable us to form something of an idea of the mysterious link which binds the transitory to the eternal, the visible to the invisible, earth to heaven.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Part Third.

HEAVEN AND EARTH.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

I.

TELEPATHY.

The magnetic seance at Nancy had left a strong impression on my mind. I often thought of my departed friend and his investigations in the unexplored domains of nature and life, of his sincere and original a.n.a.lytical researches on the mysterious problem of immortality; but I could not think of him now without a.s.sociating him with the idea of a possible reincarnation in the planet Mars.

This idea seemed to me to be bold, rash, purely imaginary if you like, but not absurd. The distance from here to Mars is equal to zero for the transmission of attraction; it is almost insignificant for that of light, since a few minutes are enough for a luminous undulation to travel millions of leagues. I thought of the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph; of the influence a hypnotizer"s will has on his subject many kilometres distant; and I wondered if some marvellous advance in science might not suddenly throw a celestial bridge between our world and others of its kind in infinity.

For several evenings I could not observe Mars through the telescope without my attention being diverted by many strange fancies. Still, the planet was very beautiful, as it was during all the spring of 1888.

Extensive inundations had taken place upon one of its continents, upon Libye, as astronomers had observed before in 1882, and under various circ.u.mstances. It was discovered that its meteorology and climatology are not the same as ours, and that the waters which cover about half of the planet"s surface are subject to strange displacements and periodical variations, of which terrestrial geography can give no idea.

The snow at the boreal pole had greatly diminished,--which proves that the summer on that hemisphere had been quite hot, although less elevated than that of the southern hemisphere. Besides, there had been very few clouds over Mars during the whole series of our observations. But it will be hardly credible that it was not these astronomical facts, however important they might be, and the base of all our conjectures, which most interested me,--it was what the hypnotized man had told me of George and Iclea; the fantastic ideas flitting through my brain prevented me from making a truly scientific observation. I persistently wondered if communication could not exist between two beings very far removed from each other, and even between the living and the dead; and each time I told myself that such a question was of itself unscientific, and showed a positive spirit.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Yet, after all, what is what we call "science"? What is not "scientific"