Spiritism leads precisely to the goal that all men of progress propose; it is therefore impossible that, even without knowing each other, they do think in the same about certain points, and that, when they do get to know each other, they do not join hands to march together against their common enemies: the social prejudices, routine, fanaticism, intolerance, and ignorance.
La Solidarité is a journal whose editors take their title seriously; and what a vaster and more fruitful field for the moralist philosopher than this word that contains the whole program of the future of humanity! Thus, this periodical that has always been noted for the elevated reach of its views, if it does not have the popularity of light papers, it has acquired more solid credit among serious thinkers.
[1] Although, to this day, it has not shown itself to be very sympathetic to our doctrines, we didn’t do less justice to the sincerity of its points of views and the undeniable talent of its writings. It is therefore with great satisfaction that today we see it doing justice to the principles of Spiritism. Its editors will also give us the credit for recognizing that we have taken no steps to bring them to us; their opinion, therefore, is not the result of any personal deference.
With the title
Bulletin of the Philosophical and Religious Movement, the May 1
st issue contains a remarkable article from which we extract the following passages:
“
The mess is constantly increasing. Where will it stop? It is not only in politics that we no longer get along; it is no longer only in social economy, but it is also in morality and religion, so that the disorder extends to all spheres of human activity, that it has invaded the whole domain of consciousness, and that civilization itself is involved. Not that the material order is in danger. Today there are too many acquired elements in society and too many interests to maintain for the material order to be seriously disturbed. But the material order proves nothing. It can persist for a long time when the very principle of social life is reached, and corruption slowly dissolves the organism. Order reigned in Rome under the Caesars, while Roman civilization was crumbling every day, not by the efforts of the barbarians, but by the weight of its own vices. Will our society succeed in eliminating from its midst the morbid elements that threaten to become its seeds of dissolution and death? We hope so, but it requires the fulcrum of the eternal principles, the assistance of a truly positive science, and the prospect of a new ideal. These are the conditions of social salvation because these are the means of a true rebirth for individuals. A society can only be the product of the social beings that constitute it, and as the result of their physical, intellectual, and moral state. If you want social transformation, make the new man first.[2] Although the circle of readers of philosophical publications has grown a lot in recent years, how many people still ignore the existence of these journals, or neglect reading them! It is a mistake. Without them, it is impossible to realize the state of the souls. The organizations of contemporary philosophy have yet another reach: they prepare the questions that the events will soon raise, and that will be urgent to solve. Certainly, there is great confusion in the philosophical press; it is a bit like the Tower of Babel: everyone speaks their own language and is much more concerned with covering the neighbor's voice than listening to their reasons. Each system aspires to be unique and excludes all others. But we must be careful not to take them literally in their exclusivity. And there is possibly no one of them that does not represent some legitimate point of view. They will all pass, for truth alone is eternal; but none of them, perhaps, will have been completely sterile; not one will have disappeared without adding something to the intellectual capital of humanity. Materialism, religious and philosophical positivism, “independentism” (forgive me for this barbarism, it is not mine), criticism, idealism, spiritualism, spiritism - because it is necessary to count on this newcomer that has more supporters than all the others together; and on the other hand, liberal Protestantism, liberal idealism, and even liberal Catholicism: such are the names of the main banners that, in various capacities and with unequal strengths, are represented in the philosophical arena. No doubt, there is no army here since there is no obedience to a leader, no hierarchy, no discipline, but these groups, today divided and independent, can be united by a common danger. The philosophical movement that we are witnessing shortly precedes the great religious movement that is being prepared. Soon religious questions will fascinate people's minds, as social questions once did, and even more strongly. That the order must be founded by a simple evolution of the Christian idea brought back to its primitive purity, as some think, or by a kind of fusion of beliefs on the wasteland of a Judeo-Christian deism, as hoped by other men of good will, or what seems to us much more probable, by the intervention of a larger and more comprehensible idea, that gives human life its true goal, the first need for the time we are in is freedom: freedom to think and publish one's thoughts, freedom of conscience and worship, freedom of propaganda and preaching! Of course, amid so many current systems, it is impossible not to see the opening of a phase of ardent, passionate, apparently disordered discussions, but this preparatory phase is necessary just as chaotic agitation is necessary for creation. Like lightning and bolts in the earth's atmosphere, the amalgamation of ideas stirs the moral atmosphere to purify it. Who can fear the storm, knowing that it must restore the disturbed balance and renew the sources of life?” The same issue contains the following appreciation of our work about the Genesis. We only reproduced it because it is linked to the general interests of the Doctrine:
“There is something of capital importance happening in our time, and people pretend not to see it. There are, however, phenomena to be observed that are of interest to science, notably physics and human physiology; but, even when the phenomena of what is called Spiritism exist only in the imagination of its followers, the belief in Spiritism, so rapidly spread everywhere, is a considerable phenomenon and well worthy of occupying the meditations of the philosopher. It is difficult, even impossible to assess the number of people who believe in Spiritism, but we can say that this belief is general in the United States, and that it is spreading more and more in Europe. In France, there is a whole Spiritist literature. Paris has two or three journals that represent it. Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille each have their own. Mr. Allan Kardec is in France the most eminent representative of Spiritism. Fortunately to this belief it found a leader who knew how to keep it within the limits of rationalism. It would have been so easy, with all this mixture of real phenomena and purely ideal and subjective creations that constitutes the marvelousness of what is called Spiritism, to indulge in the attraction of the miracle, and the resurrection of old superstitions! Spiritism could have lent the enemies of reason a powerful support if it had turned to demonology, and there exists within the Catholic world a party that still makes all its efforts there. There is also a whole deplorable literature there, unhealthy, but fortunately without influence. Spiritism, on the contrary, in France as in the United States, resisted the spirit of the Middle Ages. The demon plays no part in it, and the miracle never comes to introduce its silly explanations. Apart from the hypothesis that forms the basis of Spiritism and that consists in believing that the Spirits of dead people talk to the living by means of certain processes of correspondence, very simple and accessible to everyone; apart from the hypothesis of this starting point, we were saying, we find ourselves in the presence of a general doctrine that is perfectly in keeping with the state of science in our time, and that perfectly meets the needs and modern aspirations. And what is remarkable is that the Spiritist doctrine is almost the same everywhere. If we study it only in France, we can believe that the works of Mr. Allan Kardec, which are like the encyclopedia of Spiritism, have a lot to do with it. But this parity of doctrine extends to other countries; for example, Davis' teachings in the United States do not differ essentially from those of Mr. Allan Kardec. It is true that, in the ideas emitted by Spiritism, one finds nothing that could not have been found by the human mind, given over to the sole resources of imagination and of positive science; but considering that the syntheses proposed by the Spiritist writers are scientific and rational, they deserve to be examined without prejudice, without bias, by philosophical criticism. The new book by Mr. Allan Kardec addresses the issues that are the subject of our studies. We cannot present the report today. We will come back to this in a future issue, and we will say at the same time what we think of the so-called Spiritist phenomena, and the explanations that can be given to them in the current state of science." Note: This same number contains a remarkable article by Mr. Raisant, entitled: My religious ideal, that the Spiritists would not disavow.
[1] La Solidarité, a monthly journal of 16 in-4 pages, published on the 1
st of each month. Price: Paris, 5 francs per year; departments, 6 francs; foreigner, 7 francs. Price of an issue, 25 cents; by mail, 30 cents. - Office: rue des Saints-Pères, 13, at the Library of Social Sciences.
[2] We wrote in 1862: “Before making institutions for men, we must form men for institutions."(Spiritist Journey). Conferences In a series of conferences given last April by Mr. Chavée, at the Free Institute of Boulevard des Capucines, # 39, the speaker made, with as much talent as he did with real science, an analytical and philosophical study of the Indian Vedas and the laws of Manu, compared to the book of Job and the Psalms. This subject led him to considerations of great importance that directly touch on the fundamental principles of Spiritism. Here are some notes collected by a listener in these conferences; these are only thoughts seized on the fly, that necessarily misses out by being detached from the whole and deprived of their developments, but that suffice to show the order of ideas followed by the author:
“
What is the point of throwing a veil over what is?" What is the use of not saying out loud what one is thinking in a whisper? One must have the courage to say it; as for me, I will have this courage. In the Indian Vedas it says, “We have our peers up there”, and I agree with that. “With the eyes of the flesh one cannot see everything." “Man has an indefinite existence, and the progress of the soul is indefinite. Whatever the sum of her lights, she always must learn, for she has infinity in front of her, and although she cannot reach it, her goal will always be to get closer and closer to that." “Individual man cannot exist without an organism that limits him within creation. If the soul exists after death, then it has a body, an organism that I call the superior organism, as opposed to the carnal body that is the inferior organism. During vigil these two organisms are, so to speak, confused; during sleep, somnambulism and ecstasy the soul makes use only of its ethereal body or the superior organism; she is freer in this state; her manifestations are more elevated, because she acts on this more perfect organism that offers her less resistance; she embraces a whole and relationships that are admired, something that cannot be done with her inferior organism that limits her clairvoyance and the field of her observations." The soul is without extension; it is only extended by its ethereal body and circumscribed by the limits of this body that Saint Paul calls a luminous organism. An organism, ethereal in its constituent elements, but invisible and reachable only by scientific induction, does not, in any way, contradict the known laws of physics and chemistry. There are facts that experimentation can always reproduce, noting the existence, in man, of a superior internal organism that must succeed the usual opaque organism at the time of the destruction of the latter. After death separates the soul from its carnal organism, it continues life in space, with its ethereal body, thus retaining its individuality. Among the men of whom we have spoken and who have died according to the flesh, there are certainly some here among us who participate, invisible, at our talks; they are by our side, and hover above our heads; they see us and hear us. Yes, they are there, I assure you. The scale of beings is continuous; before being what we are, we have passed through all the steps of this ladder that are below us, and we will continue to climb those that are above. Before our brain was a reptile, it was a fish, and it was a fish before it was a mammal. Materialists deny these truths; they are honest people; they are in good faith, but they are wrong! I challenge a materialist to come here to this podium and prove that he is right and that I am wrong. Come and prove materialism! No, they will not prove it; they will only put forward ideas based on a void; they will only oppose denials, while I am going to demonstrate by facts the truth of my thesis. Are there pathological phenomena that prove the existence of the soul after death? Yes, there are, and I'll mention one. I see medical doctors here who claim that there aren’t. I will only answer this: If you haven't seen any, it's because you looked badly. Observe, seek, study, and you will find some as I have found myself. It is to somnambulism and ecstasy that I am going to ask for the proofs that I have promised you. Somnambulism? I will be asked; but the Academy of Medicine has not yet recognized it. - What does that matter to me? I don't care about the Academy of Medicine, and I will do without it. - But Mr. Dubois, of Amiens, wrote a big book against this doctrine. - It doesn't matter to me either; these are opinions without proof, that disappear before the facts. People will say to me still: "It is no longer in fashion to defend somnambulism. I will answer that I do not want to be fashionable, and that, if so, few men dare to profess truths that still attract ridicule, I am one of those whom ridicule cannot reach, and who willingly face it in good will, courageously saying what they believe to be the truth. If each of us acted like that, skepticism would soon lose all the ground that it has gained for some time and be replaced by faith; not the faith that is the daughter of revelation, but a more solid faith, the daughter of science, observation, and reason.” The speaker cites numerous examples of somnambulism and ecstasy, that gave him proof, in some way material, of the existence of the soul, of its action isolated from the carnal body, of its individuality after death, and, finally, of his ethereal body, that is no other but the fluidic envelope or perispirit.
The existence of the perispirit, suspected by elites of intelligences since the highest antiquity, but ignored by the masses, demonstrated, and popularized in recent times by Spiritism, is a whole revolution in psychological ideas, and consequently in philosophy. Having this starting point admitted, we inevitably arrive, from deduction to deduction, to the individuality of the soul, to the plurality of existences, to indefinite progress, to the presence of Spirits among us, in a word, to all the consequences of Spiritism, up to the fact of the manifestations that can be explained in a very natural way.
On the other hand, we have demonstrated in time that by speaking of the principle of the plurality of existences, accepted today by several serious thinkers, even outside Spiritism, we arrive precisely at the same consequences.
If, therefore, men whose knowledge is authoritative, openly profess, verbally or by their writings, even without speaking of Spiritism, some of the doctrine of the perispirit, by any given name, others to the plurality of existences, it is professing Spiritism, since these are two roads that inevitably lead to it. If they drew these ideas from themselves and from their own observations, it only proves that those are part of nature and how irresistible their power is. Thus, perispirit and reincarnation are now two open doors for Spiritism, in the field of philosophy and popular beliefs.
Mr. Chavée's conferences are therefore true Spiritist lectures, minus the word; and in this last aspect, we will say that they are, for the moment, more beneficial to the doctrine than if they openly raised the flag. They popularize its fundamental ideas, without offending those who by ignorance of the matter, would have prejudices against the name. A clear proof of the sympathy that these ideas meet in public opinion is the enthusiastic reception given to the doctrines professed by Mr. Chavée, by the large public that flock to his conferences.
We are convinced that more than one writer, who makes fun of the Spiritists, applauds Mr. Chavée and his doctrines, finding it perfectly rational, without suspecting that they are nothing other than the purest Spiritism.
The journal
La Solidarité, in the issue of May 1
st, that we cited above, gives a report of these conferences, to which we draw the attention of our readers, in that it completes the information given above from other points of view.
Note: The abundance of material obliges us to hand over to the next issue the review of two very interesting feuilletons by Mr. Bonnemère, the author of the
Novel of the future, published in the Siècle of April 24
th and 25
th, 1868, with the title
Paris somnambulist; Spiritism is clearly defined there.
