FOURTEENTH LECTURE
The third category of human foreknowledge to be discussed deals with foretellings which concern individual actions and events.
Simply to deny such facts, as they are reported either by metapsychists or by folklorists, would seem a manner of escaping from the difficulty. Therefore, even knowing how uncertain this material is, we must assume by hypothesis the reality of some of these facts and argue as if, generally speaking, they were well established. On the other hand, psychology is yet ignorant of the factors, both physical and psychic, involved in phenomena of premonition, clairvoyance, etc. What must be supposed, in any case, is a physical communication relating distant things, or mental activity of another person, to the unconsciousness of certain subjects. In order to carry on our discussion, we shall design the ensemble of those unknown factors by any name whatsoever, for instance, "intersympathetic sensibility."
In some cases, it is the foreknowing or foretelling that produces the foretold event. Then there is no real foreknowledge.
But what of the cases of real foreknowledge? Beginning with statistical considerations, we can first observe that in every human group there are, as in a theater play, many predefined situations or parts, which are waiting, so to say, for their players, in order to be taken. Before coming into contact with such or such a group, we know beforehand that these situations exist within it and that somebody occupies them.
Secondly there exists a conformity or convention between these diverse moral situations, with their characteristic events, and the dispositions rooted in the individuality of everyone. Things happen as if the situation should attract the individual fitted to it, by means of certain slopes in the moral universe. What I call slope results from the constellation of causes involved in the individuality and in the environment; this notion of slope is a concrete substitute for the notion of converging causes, so numerous and so complicated that abstract knowledge cannot exhaust them.
We can admit that the specially endowed or educated subjects, brought by any means whatsoever in psycho-physical relationship with an individual, perceive unconsciously his slopes, thanks to their inter-sympathetic sensibility, and that this unconscious internal connivance expresses itself externally in a sign (an image in their imagination, or an uttered word, or an automatic gesture), designating the situation or the event corresponding to the slopes in question, as a poet expresses his creative intuition by images which gush forth from his spiritual unconscious activity.
Thus a future situation or event can be "seen" or forecast. That is a kind of foreknowledge by causes, and a foreknowledge simply probable. Such a foreknowledge can be found exact in many cases, because in the greatest number of cases men follow the inclinations rooted in their individuality, that is to say, their predefined slopes. But this fact does not imply that they have not free will, for most often it is freely that man consents to his inclinations. And it is always possible that freedom act against the slope of inclinations, and that foreknowledge or foretelling be consequently deceptive.
Finally, another way of explanation was also indicated by the ancients for certain cases of natural foreknowledge. Thomas Aquinas teaches that pure forms or pure intellects have an only probable knowledge of future contingent events, but much more perfect than the human one, and that they can, on the other hand, act on human imaginations. He also teaches that their successive acts of thinking are produced in a discontinuous time, each instant of which is a lasting instant, and coincides with some part of our continuous time. There is therefore no contradiction to imagine that at an instant of our time they see -- in their time -- another instant which is future for us and in our time. Here we have a sort of dislocation of times, which is comparable to that which certain contemporary philosophers admit, but which concerns mental activity of supra-human intellects.