by Frédéric Herrenschneider.
Mr. Herrenschneider is a former Saint-Simonian, and it was there that he drew his keen love for progress. Since then, he has become a Spiritist, and yet we are far from sharing his point of view on all points, and from accepting all the solutions he gives. His work is a work of high philosophy where the Spiritist element holds an important place; we will only examine it from the point of view of the agreement and divergence of his ideas regarding Spiritism. Before moving into the examination of his theory, some preliminary considerations seem essential to us.
Three great doctrines divide the spirits, with the names of different religions and very distinct philosophies; they are materialism, spiritualism, and Spiritism; however, one can be a materialist and believe or not believe in the free will of man; in the second case, one is an atheist or a pantheist; in the first, one is inconsistent, and still takes the name of pantheist or that of naturalist, positivist, etc.
One is spiritualist from the moment that one is not a materialist, that is one admits a spiritual principle, distinct from matter, whatever the idea that one has of its nature and its destiny. Catholics, Greeks, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Deists are all spiritualists, despite the essential differences in dogma that divide them.
The Spiritists have a clearer and more precise idea of the soul; it is not a vague and abstract being, but a defined being that takes some concrete, limited, circumscribed form. Regardless of intelligence, that is its essence, it has special attributes and effects, which are the fundamental principles of their doctrine. They admit: the fluidic body or perispirit; the indefinite progress of the soul; reincarnation or plurality of existences, as a necessity for progress; the plurality of inhabited worlds; the presence in our midst of souls or Spirits who have lived on Earth and the continuation of their care for the living; the perpetuity of affections; the universal solidarity that links the living and the dead, the Spirits of all the worlds, and hence the efficacy of prayer; the possibility of communicating with the Spirits of those who are no more; in man, the spiritual or psychic sight, that is an effect of the soul.
They reject the dogma of eternal, irremediable penalties, as irreconcilable with the justice of God; but they admit that the soul, after death, suffers and endures the consequences of all the evil that she has done during life, all the good that she could have done and that she did not do. One’s sufferings are the natural consequence of one’s actions; they last as long as the perversity or moral inferiority of the Spirit lasts; they diminish as he improves and cease by repairing the evil; this repair takes place in successive bodily existences. The Spirit, always having his freedom of action, is thus the own maker of his happiness and his unhappiness, in this world and in the next. Man is fatally inclined neither to good nor to evil; he accomplishes both by his will and perfects himself by experience. As a consequence to that principle, the Spiritists admit neither the demons, predestined to evil, nor the special creation of angels, predestined to infinite happiness, without having had the trouble of deserving it; demons are still imperfect human Spirits, but who will improve over time; the angels are Spirits that arrived at perfection after having passed, like the others, through all the degrees of inferiority.
Spiritism admits, for each one, only the responsibility for his own acts; the original sin, according to that, is personal; it consists of the imperfections that everyone brings when is reborn, because one has not yet shed them in one’s previous existences, and of which one naturally suffers the consequences in the present life.
Neither does it admit, as a supreme final reward, the useless and blissful contemplation of the elected ones during eternity; but, on the contrary, an incessant activity, from the top to the bottom of the scale of beings, where each one has assignments in proportion to their degree of advancement.
Such is, in a very short summary, the basis of the Spiritist beliefs; one is a Spiritist from the moment that one enters this order of ideas, even when one does not admit all the points of the doctrine in their integrity or all their consequences. Although not a complete Spiritist, one is nonetheless a Spiritist, meaning that one is often a Spiritist without knowing it, sometimes without wishing to admit it to oneself, and that among the followers of the different religions, many are in fact Spiritists, even if not by name.
The common belief to spiritualists is to believe in a creator God, and to admit that the soul, after death, continues to exist, in the form of a pure Spirit, completely detached from all matter, and that she will be able, with or without the resurrection of her material body, to enjoy an eternal happy or unhappy existence.
Materialists believe, on the contrary, that force is inseparable from matter and cannot exist without it; consequently, God is for them only a gratuitous hypothesis, unless he is matter itself; the materialists deny, with all their force, the conception of an essentially spiritual soul and that of a personality surviving death.
Regarding the soul as the spiritualists accept it, their criticism is based on the fact that since force is inseparable from matter, a personal, active and powerful soul cannot exist as a geometric point in space, dimensionless of any kind, neither length, nor width, nor height. What force, what power, what action can such a soul have on the body during life; what progress can it achieve, and in what way does it keep its individuality if it is nothing; how could she be susceptible to happiness or unhappiness after death? They ask the spiritualists.
We must not hide it from ourselves, this argument is specious, but it is without value against the doctrine of the Spiritists; they admit the soul distinct from the body, like the spiritualists, with an eternal life and an indestructible personality, but they consider this soul as indissolubly united to matter; not the matter of the body itself, but another more ethereal, fluidic and incorruptible that they call perispirit, a fortunate word expressing well the thought that is the origin and the very basis of Spiritism.
If we summarize the three doctrines, we will say that, for materialists, the soul does not exist; or if it exists, it merges with matter without any distinct personality apart from present life, where this personality is even more apparent than real.
For the spiritualists, the soul exists in the state of Spirit, independent of God and of all matter.
For the Spiritists, the soul is distinct from God who created it, inseparable from a fluidic and incorruptible matter that we can call the perispirit.
This preliminary explanation will make it possible to understand that there are Spiritists without knowing it.
Indeed, from the moment when one is neither a materialist nor a spiritualist, one can only be a Spiritist, despite the disgust that some seem to feel for this qualification.
Here we are a far away from the fanciful appreciations of those who imagine that Spiritism rests only on the evocation of the Spirits; there are, however, some Spiritists who have never made a single evocation; others who have never seen it and do not even want to see it, their belief not needing this resource; and for relying only on reason and study, this belief is nonetheless complete and serious.
We even think that it is in its philosophical and moral form that Spiritism meets the most firm and convinced supporters; the communications are only means of conviction, of demonstration and above all of consolation; we should only resort to it with caution, and when we already know what we want to obtain.
It is not that the communications are the exclusive sharing of the Spirits; they often take place spontaneously and, sometimes even, in environments hostile to Spiritism, from which they are independent; they are, in fact, only the result of laws and natural actions that Spirits or men can use, one or the other, either independently or in agreement between them.
But just as it is wise to put instruments of physics, chemistry, and astronomy only in the hands of those who know how to use them, so it is advisable to initiate communications only when they can have a real utility, and not with the aim of satisfying a foolish curiosity.
Having said that, we can examine the remarkable work of Mr. Herrenschneider; it is the work of a deep thinker and a convinced, if not complete Spiritist, but we do not agree with all the conclusions he reaches.
Mr. Herrenschneider admits the existence of a Creator God, present in creation everywhere, penetrating all bodies with his fluidic substance and being in us as we are in him; this is the remarkable solution that Mr. Allan Kardec presented in his Genesis as a hypothesis.
But, according to the author, God filled all the space in the beginning; he would have created each being by withdrawing from the place that he conceded, allowing his free development under his unstoppable protection; this progressive development takes place, first of all, under the necessary effect of the laws of nature, and by the coercion of evil; then, when the Spirit has already progressed sufficiently, it can combine its own action with the fatal action of natural laws to activate its progress.
Throughout this phase of the existence of beings that begins by the molecule of the mineral, continues in the plant, develops in the animal, and is determined in man, the Spirit collects and preserves knowledge through its perispirit; it thus acquires a certain experience. The accomplished progress is very slow, and the slower it is, the more the incarnations are multiplied.
As we can see, the author adopts the scientific principles of the progress of beings, issued by Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Darwin, with the difference that the moderating action of the animal forms and organs is no longer only the result of selection and vital competition, but it is also, and primarily, the effect of the intelligent action of the animal Spirit, incessantly modifying forms and matter that it takes on to achieve an appropriation more in accordance with the acquired experience.
It is in this order of ideas that we would like to have seen the author insisting on the beneficent and kind action of the superior beings, contributing to the advancement of the weakest, guiding, and protecting them by a feeling of sympathy and solidarity, the development of which is fortunately presented in the book of
Genesis and in all the works of Mr. Allan Kardec.
Mr. Herrenschneider does not speak of the reciprocal action of beings on each other, except from the sad point of view of the bad action and the necessary progress that results from the evil in nature. About this point, he understood well that evil is only relative, and that it is one of the conditions of progress; this part of his work is well developed.
“Created,” he said, “in extreme weakness, in extreme laziness and having to be the means of our own end, we are obliged to arrive at perfection and power, happiness and freedom by our own efforts; our destiny is to be the children of our works in everything and everywhere, to create for us our unity, our personality, our originality as well as our happiness.” “These, in my opinion, are the designs of God for us; but to succeed, the creator obviously cannot abandon us to ourselves, since being created in this tiny and molecular state, we are naturally plunged into a deep numbness; we would have even remained there in perpetuity, and we would never have taken a step forward if, in order to awaken us, to make our inert substance sensitive and to activate our force deprived of initiative, God had not subjected us to a system of coercion, that takes us from our origin, never leaves us, and forces us to deploy our efforts to satisfy the needs and the moral, intellectual and material instincts, to which he has made us slaves, as a result of the system of incarnation that he has arranged for this purpose." Going further than the Stoics who claimed that pain did not exist and was only a word, we see that the Spiritists manage to pronounce this strange formula that evil itself is good, in the sense that it inevitably and necessarily leads to that.
On everything that precedes, we criticize the author for having forgotten that the closest solidarity binds all beings, and that the best of all are those who, having best understood this principle, constantly put it into action, so that all beings in nature contribute to the general goal and to the progress of one another: some without knowing it and motivated by their spiritual guides; others by understanding their duty to elevate and educate those around them, or who depend on them and by helping themselves with the support of the more advanced ones. Everyone understands today that parents owe their children a proper education, and that those who are happy, educated, and advanced must help the poor, the sufferers and the ignorant.
Consequently, we must understand the usefulness of prayer that puts us in relation with the Spirits that can guide us. Don’t we, sometimes, pray to those who live like us; who are our superiors or our equals, and can our life pass without this perpetual appeal that we make to the assistance of others? It is, therefore, not surprising that, hearing us, those who are no longer, are likewise sensitive to our prayers to the extent of what they can do, as in fact they would have done during their lifetime; sometimes we give to those who have not asked, but we give especially to those who ask; knock and it will be opened to you; pray, and if possible, you will be heard.
Do not think that everything is due to you and that you have to wait for the benefits without asking for them or deserving them; do not believe that everything happens inevitably and necessarily, but think, on the contrary, that you are in the midst of free and voluntary beings, as many as the sand of the sea, and that their action can join yours, at your request and following their sympathy that you have to know how to deserve.
Praying is a way of acting on others and on oneself, but this is not the time to develop this important subject; let us say only that prayer is only valid when it follows effort or work, and can do nothing without it, while work and generous efforts can very well substitute prayer; it is especially among the Spiritists that we admit this old saying: “
To work is to pray.”
The most interesting part of Mr. Herrenschneider's book is that in which he does what one might call the psychology of the soul, conceived as such that the Spiritists understand it, and from this point of view his work is new and most curious.
The author clearly determines the phenomena that depend on the perispirit, and how he keeps at the disposal of the mind, the entire sum of his previous progress, while keeping track of the efforts and new progress attempted and realized by the being, at any given time.
According to these data, the nature of the soul or perispirit is to be considered as an acquired treasure, preserved in us, and containing all that concerns our being in the moral, intellectual, and practical order.
We will avoid using the terms adopted by the author who, to express that the soul can act, either by the effect of its acquired treasure or its intimate nature (perispirit), or by a new effort or voluntary action, uses the expression
duality of the soul, although pointing out that the soul is one; this is an unfortunate expression that does not express the true thought of the author and that could be confusing to a careless mind.
Mr. Herrenschneider believes in the unity of the soul, like the Spiritists; like them, he admits the existence of the perispirit, which allows him to make a very fine critique of the psychology of the spiritualists, that he studies more specifically from the works of Mr. Cousin.
Starting from the same point as Socrates and Descartes: knowledge of oneself, the author establishes the primordial fact from which all our knowledge results, that is to say, the affirmation of ourselves made each time we use the words: I or me; the affirmation of the ego is therefore the true basis of psychology; now, there are several manifestations of this self that are presented to our observation, without one having any priority over the others and without their being reciprocally generated: I feel, - I know myself, - I am conscious of my individuality - I want to be satisfied. These last two facts of consciousness are self-evident and clear; they constitute the principle of unity of the being and that of our final cause or destiny, namely: to be happy.
In order to feel and to know oneself, it should be noted that one is perfectly aware of feeling without needing to make any effort; on the contrary, the perception of feeling is an act that results from an effort of the same order as attention; as soon as I stop trying, I no longer think or pay attention, and then I feel all the external things that make an impression on me, until one of them hits me hard enough that I examine it with my attention; so I can think or feel, be impressed or perceive, and judge my impression when I want to.
There are two different, heterogeneous psychological orders here, one of which is passive and is characterized by sensitivity and permanence: it is the feeling; and the other is active and is distinguished by the effort of attention, and by its intermittence: it is the voluntary thought.
It is from this observation that the author concludes on the existence of the perispirit, by a series of very interesting deductions, but too long to report here.
For Mr. Herrenschneider, the perispirit, or substance of the soul, is a simple, incorruptible, inert, extended, solid and sensitive matter; it is the potential principle that, by its subtlety, receives all impressions, assimilates them, preserves them, and is transformed, under this incessant action, to contain all our moral, intellectual, and practical nature.
The strength of the soul is of virtual, spiritual, active, voluntary, and reflective order; this is the principle of our activity. Wherever our perispirit is, our strength is also found. Our sensitivity, our sensations, our feelings, our memory, our imagination, our ideas, our common sense, our spontaneity, our moral nature, and our principles of honor, as well as dreams, passions, and madness itself, depend on the perispirit or the acquired treasure of our nature.
Attention, perception, reason, memory, fantasy, humor, thought, judgment, reflection, will, virtue, conscience, and vigilance, as well as somnambulism, elation, and monomania derive from our strength, as virtual qualities.
Considering that these qualities can be substituted by one another, without being mutually exclusive, and because the same organs must be used both by the perception and by the sensation that are equivalent, by the feeling as much as by reason, etc., it follows that each Spirit seldom uses both orders of its faculties with the same facility. From this observation, it follows for the author that the individuals who function more easily by virtue of the so-called potential faculties will have them more developed than the others, and will use them more willingly, and vice versa.
From this point of view and from an observation regarding the greater or lesser virtual power of certain clusters of individuals, generally grouped under the same race identification, the author concludes that there are Spirits that can be called French, English, Italian, Chinese or Black Spirits, etc.
Despite the explanatory difficulties that would result from such an idea, it must be admitted that the very careful studies made by Mr. Herrenschneider, on the different peoples, are very remarkable and in any case very interesting; but we would have liked the author to have indicated more clearly his thought that is obviously the following: Spirits are grouped in general according to their affinities; this is what causes Spirits of the same order and of the same degree of elevation to tend to incarnate on the same point of the globe, and from there results this national character, a phenomenon so singular in appearance. We will, therefore, say that there are no French or English Spirits, but that there are Spirits whose state, their habits, their traditions lead them to incarnate, some in France, others in England, like we see them during their life grouping themselves according to their sympathies, their moral value, and their characters. As for the individual progress, it always depends on the will, and not on the already acquired value of the perispirit that only serves, so to speak, as a starting point, intended to allow a new elevation of the Spirit, new conquests, and new progress.
We will leave aside the part of the book that deals with social order and the need for an imposed religion, because the author, still imbued with the principles of authority that he drew from Saint-Simonism, he departs too much, at this point, from the principles of absolute tolerance that Spiritism prides itself of professing. We think it is fair to teach, but we would be afraid of an imposed and necessary doctrine, because even if it were excellent for the present generation, it would inevitably become a hindrance for the following generations when they would have progressed.
Mr. Herrenschneider does not understand that morality can be independent of religion; in our opinion, the question is badly put, and each one discusses it precisely from the point of view where he is right. Independent moralists are right in saying that morality is independent of religious dogmas, in the sense that, without believing in any of the existing dogmas, many of the ancients were moral, and among the moderns there are many who have the right to boast about it. But what is true is that morality, and above all its practical application, is always dependent on our individual beliefs, whatever they may be; now, even if it is most philosophical, a belief constitutes the religion of the one who possesses it.
This is easily demonstrated by the daily facts of existence, and moralists, who claim to be independent, believe that one must respect oneself and respect others, by developing as much as possible, in oneself and in others, the elements of progress. Their morality will, therefore, depend on their belief; their actions will necessarily be affected, and this morality will be independent only of religions, beliefs, and dogmas in which they have no faith, that we find very fair and very rational, but also very elementary.
What we can say is that, in the present state of our society, there are moral principles that agree with all individual beliefs, whatever they may be, because individuals have modified their religious beliefs on certain points by virtue of scientific and moral progress, fortunately conquered by our ancestors.
We will end by saying that the author is, on many points, the disciple of Jean Reynaud. His book is the summary of studies and serious thoughts expressed clearly and powerfully; it is done with a care that must be praised, and this care goes even to the minutia in the material details of printing, that is of great importance for the clarity of such a serious book.
Despite the deep disagreement that separates us from Mr. Herrenschneider, both about his way of seeing to impose religion, as on his ideas regarding authority and family, that he has forgotten, as well as prayer, the benevolent solidarity of Spirits that he did not know how to appreciate, etc., ideas that Jean Reynaud himself had already disapproved of, it is impossible not to be touched by the merit of the book, and the value of the man who knew how to find strong thoughts, often right and always clearly expressed.
Spiritism is squarely affirmed there, at least in its fundamental principles, and considered in the elements of the philosophical science; there is this difference, however, in the point of departure, that the author arrives at the result by induction, while Spiritism, proceeding by experimentation, has based its theory on the observation of the facts. He is a very serious writer, that gives him the right of citizenship.
Emile Barrault, engineer.
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