Tyranny of the Dark

"That's the way with you scientists. You'll pursue the tail of a comet--or a germ--till you're black in the face, but when something really important to the human race comes under your nose you can't see it."

"You're forceful but not elegant, sis."

"I'm out of all patience with you."

He laughed. "Good-night."

"I hope that girl's face will haunt you," she replied.

It did. From the moment he turned off his light his mind leaped into the most restless activity. Taking up the scroll of the night's events, he read and reread it with minutest care. A voice seemed to present the girl's case, arguing that she had no conscious part in the manifestations. "It is possible for one in deep trance to rise and manipulate horns, bells, and guitars at the suggestion of another precisely as a somnambulist walks without intention of wrong-doing, without conscious knowledge of what is being done. She might have had a veritable hand in to-night's drama and still be innocent. Hypnotism is now pretty thoroughly proven--and to Clarke you must look for the real offender.

"The human brain, which is marvellous enough when in health and singing merrily forward like a cunningly constructed and jewelled time-piece, becomes, in disease, as baffling, as hopeless of solution as the laws of the unfathomable sky. Beyond the utmost sweep of the imagined lies the marvel of fact. The beliefs, the vagaries, the hallucinations of the insane have never been co-ordinated, perhaps they never will be. It is possible that this girl, so normal in appearance, has a rotten strand in her--some weakness inherited from her father. This is the only way in which to account for her glowing physical health and her manifest mental disorder. She has her father's mind in a body drawn from her mother. One-half of her is pure and sweet and girlish, the other is old, decayed, lying, and irresponsible. Can she be reclaimed?

"It is now known that the conscious mind is but a pin's-point of the mind's activity, the conscious state being but one of an infinite number of possible states--that the submerged, unconscious self is a million times more complex than the chain of those conscious states which makes up the normal or orderly life of an individual. May it not be that this girl, by reason of her long practice of submission--induced by others--has dethroned her conscious, higher self, making of her subliminal self a tyrant? This submerged self, holding, as it does, all the experiences of the dark past, all the lusts, deceits, and subterfuges, all the cruelties and shameless potentialities of her animal and semicivilized forebears, and being but a mass of discordant impulses--states almost entirely disassociated from her conscious life--has all but taken possession of her higher self. The restraint of the later-developed, governing, moral self being weakened, the witches and wolves are leaping forth to vex and destroy. Over this fortuitous subversion of her soul's kingdom Clarke now rules like a demon councillor.