978. In the course of this book I have several times touched on the difficult questions raised by the incidents which have been classed as retrocognitive and precognitive,1 and which seem to suggest a power yet more remote than telepathy or teleaesthesia from our ordinary methods of acquiring knowledge. The consideration of the problems involved was, however, postponed to this chapter, and must now be dealt with here.

In a universe where instantaneous gravitation operates unexplained - where a world of ether coexists with a world of matter - men's minds must needs have a certain openness to other mysterious transmissions; must be ready to conceive other invisible evironments or co-existences, and in a sense to sit loose to the conception of Space, regarded as an obstacle to communication or cognition. A similar emancipation from the limitations of Time is more difficult. We can, of course, imagine increased powers of remembering the Past, of inferring the future. But we can hardly conceive the Past revived, save in some mind which has directly observed it. And to imagine the Future as known, except by inference and contingently, to any mind whatever is to induce at once that iron collision between Free Will and "Fixed Fate, Foreknowledge absolute," from which no sparks of light have ever yet been struck. Still more unwelcome is the further view that the so-called Future actually already exists; and that apparent time-progression is a subjective human sensation, and not inherent in the universe as that exists in an Infinite Mind.

Nor shall we in fact find it necessary to insist upon any very revolutionary line of explanation. There is one analogy which will meet most of our evidence (though not all), and to which we must repeatedly recur as our simplest guide. As is the memory and the foresight of a child to that of a man, even such, I suggest, is the memory and the foresight of the man's supraliminal self as compared to the retro-cognition and the precognition exercised by an intelligence unrestrained by sensory limits; - whether that intelligence belong to the man's own subliminal self, or to an unembodied human spirit, or possibly to spirits higher than human. I maintain that in this thesis there is nothing incredible; - nay, that it is the necessary corollary of belief in the existence anywhere of any extension of the powers which we habitually exercise.

1 A more complete discussion of these phenomena, with numerous cases illustrating apparent stages in their evolution, and a description of the faculties they seem to indicate, summarised in a diagrammatic scheme, are given in my article on "Retro-cognition and Precognition" in the Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 334-593.

For references to retrocognitive cases, see sections 572, 663, 733, 859-863, 963, also 572 A, 572 B. See also the accounts of retrocognitive scenes quoted in the record of Miss A.'s crystal visions in 625 C. For cases bearing on precognition see the case of Anna Winsor (237 A), where there were predictions concerning the course of her disease; refer to 541 F and 564 A, where the difficulty of excluding the agency of self-suggestion is considered; compare also the cases given in 541 H and 573 F - where prognoses concerning other persons were made correctly by hypnotised subjects - and the prediction of his aunt's death given in Mr. W.'s automatic writing, in 873. See section 425 and the Appendices to that section, also 663 A, the cases in section 717 and 717 B, cases 6,7, II, and 12 in the experiences of Lady Mabel Howard, 851 A; also 852 A, 874 A, 927 B, and section 963 with its Appendices. There may have been something of prevision also in Professor Thoulet's case, in 930.

If there is a transcendental world at all, there is a transcendental view of Past and Future fuller and further-reaching than the empirical; and in that view we may ourselves to some extent participate, either directly, as being ourselves denizens all along of the transcendental world, or indirectly, as receiving intimations from spirits from whom the shadow in which our own spirits are "half lost" has melted away.

This I believe to be the central reflection to which the study of supernormal knowledge of Past and Future at present points us; and I shall be well satisfied if the evidence should persuade the reader that in some undefined fashion we share at moments in this transcendental purview. As to the precise manner in which we share it, the difficulties are just those which meet us when, in any other group of our phenomena, we try to distinguish between the activity of the automatist's own spirit, and of other spirits, embodied or unembodied, and perhaps also of a World-Soul or of Intelligences finite, but above anthropomorphic personification.

979. The general characteristic of these occurrences is to show us fragments of knowledge coming to us in obscure and often symbolical ways, and extending over a wider tract of time than any faculty known to us can be stretched to cover. On the one side there is retrocognition, or knowledge of the past, extending back beyond the reach of our ordinary memory; on the other side there is precognition, or knowledge of the future, extending onwards beyond the scope of our ordinary inference.

In each direction, indeed, there are certain landmarks; the regression and the progression alike seem to develop gradually, and to follow lines which we can learn to recognise. In the direction of the Past we begin with hypermnesia; - our first step lies in the conception that what has once been presented to our sensory field, although never gathered into what we deem our conscious perception, may nevertheless have been perceived and retained by the subliminal self. It is partly through dream and partly by automatic artifices that this fact is realised; and those same dreams, those same artifices of script or vision, presently carry us a step further, and reveal a knowledge which must have come from the memories of other living persons, or (as I hold) of departed spirits. Then in another direction a less direct source of knowledge opens out; living organisms, our own or others', disclose (in ways unknown to biology) the history implicate in their structure; objects which have been in contact with organisms preserve their trace; and it sometimes seems as though even inorganic nature could still be made, so to say, luminescent with the agelong story of its past.

Or it may even be that some retrocognitive picture is presented which we may discover to be veracious, but with which we can discern no spiritual or material link; as though a page of the cosmic record had been opened to us at random, and had closed again without sign or clue.