IV. Somnambulists as Teachers

IV. Somnambulists as Teachers.IV. Die Somnambulen als Lehrer.

The telescope has widened our sense of sight, and this mere artificial heightening of a sense already present has created a science that takes the first rank with regard to the certainty of its results and its importance for our consciousness of the world: astronomy. What would happen if a wholly new sense were given us? A wholly new science would arise, whose extent and importance we cannot even guess. Let us suppose we had only four senses, and the sense of smell were lacking to us; if there were now a man among us endowed with an extraordinarily fine sense of smell, he would show us quite incomprehensible capacities. Led blindfold into a garden, he could name the flowers; he could state musk as the contents of a closed box, and he could follow the track of a missing person with the certainty of a hound. The scholars would say that such performances contradict the laws of physiology, and that that man is therefore a swindler; but the unlearned would take him for a sorcerer.

In this way somnambulists too were judged when their remarkable capacities became known. In antiquity they were held to be divinely inspired, the Church in the Middle Ages ascribed demonic promptings to them, and the scholars of modern times call them swindlers outright. In truth, however, the capacities of somnambulists can be explained scientifically if we grant them a sixth sense, that for od. But somnambulists are not even exceptional beings, for similar capacities show themselves not only in various instincts of animals but also in man, even in waking, where they make themselves felt as idiosyncrasies, as sympathies and antipathies. In the normal state this sense remains latent; the somnambulist, then, does not acquire a wholly new possession, but differs from us only in this, that in him the odic sense is raised above the threshold of sensation, and so gives occasion to abnormal knowledge. But this is the foundation of a wholly new science, which the next century will take in hand, but with regard to which much has long since been stated by somnambulists as teachers that will find its use.