L'hôte inconnu by Maurice Maeterlinck
"L'hôte inconnu" by Maurice Maeterlinck is a reflective treatise on psychical research written in the early 20th century. It probes apparitions, haunted houses, telepathy, psychometry, and premonitions through documented cases and measured skepticism, testing spiritist claims against mediumistic and psychological explanations. The guiding question is whether an “unknown guest”—perhaps our subliminal mind or a force outside us—accounts for these verified anomalies. The opening of the book sets a wartime preface and a
clear plan: a first part on apparitions and veridical hallucinations, haunted houses, psychometry, foreknowledge, and the Elberfeld horses, with a second part (promised later) on miracles, materializations, the dowsing rod, and related phenomena. Maeterlinck distinguishes these specific anomalies from the grand “mystery of life,” cites the Society for Psychical Research, and catalogs phenomena from table-turning to levitation, noting both fraud risks and hard-to-dismiss cases. He then surveys phantasms of the living and the dead and “haunted” dwellings—typically modest, recurrent scenes—juxtaposing spiritist and telepathic explanations while urging we exhaust terrestrial causes first. Moving to psychometry, he defines how an object can trigger precise insights about a distant or unknown person, illustrates it with practical examples and controlled tests, and recounts a striking case where a medium’s descriptions led to a missing man’s body in a forest. Throughout, the emphasis is on careful controls, repeatable “laboratory” conditions, and the likelihood that lucidity is tied to human personality rather than automatic recourse to the dead. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77908.html.images | 426 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77908.epub3.images | 364 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77908.epub.images | 365 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77908.epub.noimages | 285 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77908.kf8.images | 610 kB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77908.kindle.images | 580 kB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77908.txt.utf-8 | 382 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77908/pg77908-h.zip | 316 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Maeterlinck, Maurice, 1862-1949 |
|---|---|
| Title | L'hôte inconnu |
| Original Publication | Paris: Eugène Fasquelle, 1917. |
| Contents | Phantasmes des vivants et des morts -- La psychométrie -- La connaissance de l'avenir -- Les chevaux d'Elberfeld -- L'hôte inconnu. |
| Credits | Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | BF: Philosophy, Psychology, Religion: Psychology, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis |
| Subject | Parapsychology |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77908 |
| Release Date | Feb 10, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 210 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |