for the time when you will go there once and for all, you may visit
them in thought as easily as if they were still in a region inhabited
by the living. The memory of the dead is even more alive than that of
the living; it is as though they were assisting our memory, as though
they, on their side, were making a mysterious effort to join hands
with us on ours. One feels that they are far more powerful than the
absent who continue to breathe as we do.

3

Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late,
before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come
much closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly,
that they are as real as when they were in the flesh. In putting off
this last, they have but discarded the moments in which they loved us
least or in which we did not love at all. Now they are pure; they are
clothed only in the fairest hours of life; they no longer possess
faults, littlenesses, oddities; they can no longer fall away, or
deceive themselves, or give us pain. They care for nothing now but to
smile upon us, to encompass us with love, to bring us a happiness
drawn without stint from a past which they live again beside us.

* * * * *

THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS

XIX

THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS

At the end of an essay occurring in _The Unknown Guest_ and entitled,
_The Knowledge of the Future_, in which I examined a certain number of
phenomena relating to the anticipatory perception of events, such as
presentiments, premonitions, precognitions, predictions, etc., I
concluded in nearly the following terms:

"To sum up, if it is difficult for us to conceive that the
future preexists, perhaps it is just as difficult for us to
understand that it does not exist; moreover, many facts tend
to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in
time and eternity, the same permanence and the same
vividness as the past. Now, from the moment that it
preexists, it is not surprising that we should be able to
know it; it is even astonishing, granted that it overhangs
us from every side, that we should not discover it oftener
and more easily."

Above all is it astonishing and almost inconceivable that this
universal war, the most stupendous catastrophe that has overwhelmed
humanity since the origin of things, should not, while it was
approaching, bearing in its womb