Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1868

We have many times been asked what we think about number matching, and if we believe in the value of this science. Our answer is quite simple: until this moment we don't think anything about it because we never dealt with it. We have seen some facts of singular concordances between the dates of certain events, but in very few cases to draw even an approximate conclusion. To tell the truth, we do not see the reason for such a coincidence; but for the fact that we do not understand something, it does not mean that it does not exist; nature has not said its last word, and what is utopia today may be true tomorrow. So, it may be that there is a certain correlation between the facts that we do not suspect, and that could be translated into numbers. In any case, we cannot give the name of science to a calculation as hypothetical as that of numerical ratios, regarding the succession of events. A science is a set of facts sufficiently large in number to deduce rules from them, and susceptible of a demonstration; now, in the current state of our knowledge, it would be quite impossible to give any theory whatsoever to facts of this kind, nor any satisfactory explanation. Therefore, it is not, or if you will, it is not yet a science, which does not imply its denial. There are facts about which we have a personal opinion; in the case in question, we have none, and if we lean to one side, it would be more to the negative, until proven otherwise.



We rely on the fact that time is relative; it can only be appreciated according to the terms of comparison and the points of reference drawn from the revolution of the stars, and these terms vary according to the worlds, because outside the worlds time does not exist: there is no unit to measure infinity. Therefore, it does not appear that there can be a universal law of concordance for the date of events, since the calculation of the duration varies according to the worlds, unless there is, in this respect, a particular law for each world, assigned to its organization, as there is for the duration of the life of its inhabitants.



Undoubtedly, if such a law exists, it will be recognized one day: Spiritism that assimilates all truths, when they are established, will not reject this one; but since until now this law is neither attested by a sufficient number of facts, nor by a categorical demonstration, we should not worry much about it for it only interests us very indirectly. We do not hide from ourselves the seriousness of this law, if it does exist, but as the door of Spiritism will always be open to all progressive ideas, to all acquisitions of intelligence, it handles the necessities of the moment, without fear of being overwhelmed by the conquests of the future.



Having this question been submitted to the Spirits, in a very serious group of the country, and by that reason generally well assisted, it was answered:



“There are, certainly, in all moral phenomena, as in the physical phenomena, relationships based on numbers. The law of the concordance of dates is not a chimera; it is one of those that will be revealed to you later and will give you the key to things that seem anomalies to you; for, believe it, nature has no whims; she always walks accurately and reliably. Besides, this law is not like you suppose; to understand it in its reason for existing, its principle and its usefulness, you must acquire ideas that you do not have yet, and that will come with time. For the moment, this knowledge would be premature, which is why it is not given to you; it would, therefore, be useless to insist. Limit yourself to gathering the facts; observe without concluding anything, for fear of going confused. God knows how to give men the intellectual nourishment as they are able to absorb it. Before anything else, work on your moral advancement, this is the most essential, because it is through that that you will deserve to have new enlightenment."



We are of this opinion; we even think that there would be more disadvantages than advantages to prematurely popularize a belief that, in the hands of ignorance, could degenerate into abuse and superstitious practices, for lack of the counterweight of a rational theory.



The principle of the concordance of dates is therefore entirely hypothetical; but if it is not yet allowed to affirm anything with that respect, experience shows that, in nature, many things are subordinated to numerical laws, susceptible of the most rigorous calculation; this fact, of great importance, may one day shed light on the first question. It is thus, for example, that the likelihoods of chance are subject, as a whole, to a periodicity of astonishing precision; most chemical combinations, for the formation of compounds, take place in definite proportions, that is to say, a definite number of molecules of each of the elementary part is required, and one more or one less molecule completely changes the nature of the compound (see Genesis, chapter X, numbers 7 and following); crystallization takes place at angles of constant aperture; in astronomy, movements and forces follow progressions of mathematical rigor, and celestial mechanics is as exact as terrestrial mechanics; it is the same for the reflection of the rays of light, caloric and sound rays; it is on positive calculations that the chances of life and death are established in the insurances.



Thus, it is certain that numbers are in nature and that numerical laws govern most phenomena of the physical order. Is it the same with moral and metaphysical phenomena? This is what it would be presumptuous to assert without more accurate data than what we have. This question, moreover, raises others that have their significance, and on which we believe to be useful to present some observations from a general point of view.



Considering that a numerical law governs the births and mortality of individuals, couldn’t it be the same, but then on a larger scale, for collective individualities, such as races, peoples, cities, etc.? The phases of their ascending march, of their decadence and of their end, the revolutions that mark the stages of the progress of humanity, wouldn’t they be subjected to a certain periodicity? Regarding the numerical units for the calculation of the periods of the history of humanity, if they are not days, years, or centuries, they could be based on generations, as some facts would tend to suggest.



This is not a system; it is even less a theory, but a simple hypothesis, an idea based on a probability, and that one day may be able to serve as a starting point for more positive ideas.



But, one will ask, if the events that decide the fate of humanity, of a nation, of a tribe, have deadlines regulated by a numerical law, this is the blessing of fatality, and then what becomes of human free-will? Is Spiritism, therefore, in error when it says that nothing is fatal, and that man is the absolute master of his actions and his fate?



To answer this objection, we must take the question from higher grounds. Let us say, for starters, that Spiritism has never denied the inevitability of certain things, and on the contrary has always recognized it; but it says that fatality does not hinder free-will; this is easy to demonstrate.



All the laws that govern all the phenomena of nature have necessarily fatal consequences, that is, inevitable, and this fatality is essential to the maintenance of the universal harmony. Man, who suffers these consequences, is therefore, in certain ways, subjected to fatality in everything that does not depend on his initiative; thus, for example, he must fatally die: it is the common law from which he cannot escape, and by virtue of this law, he can die at any age, when his hour has come; but if he voluntarily hastens his death by suicide or by its excesses, he acts by virtue of his free will, because no one can force him to do so. He must eat to live, it is inevitable; but if he eats beyond the need, he is making an act of freedom.



The prisoner, in his cell, is free to move at will in the space that is granted to him; but the walls that he cannot cross are for him the fate that restricts his freedom. Discipline is a fatality for the soldier because it obliges him to acts that are independent of his will, but he is nonetheless free for his personal actions, for which he is responsible. So is with man in nature; nature has its fatal laws that oppose a barrier to him, but within which he can move at will. Why hasn’t God given man complete freedom? Because God is like a sensible father, who limits the freedom of his children to the level of their reason, and of the use they can make of it. If men are already using what is given to them so badly, if they do not know how to govern themselves, what if the laws of nature were at their discretion, and if they did not put a healthy brake on them?



Man can therefore be free in his actions despite the inevitability of the whole; he is free to a certain extent, to the extent necessary to leave him responsible for his actions; if, by virtue of this freedom, he disturbs harmony by the evil he does, if he puts a stop to the providential march of things, he is the first to suffer from it, and like the laws of nature are stronger than him, he ends up being dragged into the current; he then feels the need to return to the good, and everything regains its balance; so that the return to the good is still a free act although provoked, but not imposed, by fate. Man can, therefore, be free in his actions, despite the inevitability of the whole; he is free to a certain extent, to the extent necessary to leave him responsible for his actions; if, by virtue of this freedom, he disturbs harmony by evil deeds, if he puts a stop to the providential march of things, he is the first to suffer from it, and since the laws of nature are stronger than him, he ends up being dragged with the current; he then feels the need to return to good, and everything regains its balance, so that the return to good is still a free act, although provoked, but not imposed, by fate. The impetus given by the laws of nature, as well as the limits that they establish, are always good, because nature is the work of the divine wisdom; resistance to these laws is an act of freedom, and this resistance always involves evil; man being free to observe or break these laws, in what affects his person, is therefore free to do good or bad; if he could be fatally inclined to do evil, and this fatality only coming from a power superior to him, God would be the first to break His laws.

Who hasn’t many times thought this: “If I had not acted as I did in such circumstances, I would not be in the position where I am; if I had to start over, would I act differently?” Doesn't that mean recognizing that he was free to do or not to do? That he would be free to do better another time if the occasion presented itself? Now, God, who is wiser than him, foreseeing the errors into which he might fall, the bad use that he might make of his freedom, gives him indefinitely the possibility of beginning again, by the succession of his bodily existences, and he will begin again until, instructed by experience, he no longer takes the wrong path.



Man can, therefore, according to his will, hasten or delay the end of his trials, and this is what freedom consists of. Let us thank God for not having closed the road to happiness forever, by deciding our final fate after a fleeting existence, notoriously insufficient to reach the top of the ladder of progress, and for having given us, by the fate of reincarnation itself, the means to progress incessantly, by renewing the trials in which we have failed.



Fatality is absolute for the laws that govern matter because matter is blind; it does not exist for the Spirit that itself is called to react upon matter, by virtue of its freedom. If the materialist doctrines were true, they would be the most formal consecration of fatality; for, if man is only matter, he cannot have initiative; now, if you grant him the initiative in anything, it is because he is free, and if he is free, it is because there is in him something other than matter. Materialism, being the negation of the spiritual principle, is by that very fact, the negation of freedom; and, weird contradiction, the materialists, the very ones that proclaim the dogma of fatality, are the first to take advantage of that, to embrace their freedom; to claim it as a right in its most absolute plenitude, together with those that restrict it, and that without suspecting that it is claiming the privilege of the Spirit and not of matter.



Here comes another question. Fatality and freedom are two principles that seem to be mutually exclusive; the freedom of individual action is compatible with the inevitability of the laws that govern the whole, and doesn’t this action disturb its harmony? A few examples taken from the most vulgar phenomena of the material order will make the solution of the problem obvious.



We have said that the likelihoods of chance are balanced with a surprising regularity; in fact, it is a well-known result in the game of red and black that, despite the irregularity of their exit at each stroke, the colors are in equal number after a certain number of strokes; it means that out of a hundred strokes, there will be fifty reds and fifty blacks; on a thousand strokes, five hundred from one and five hundred from the other, within a few units. It is the same with even and odd numbers, and all the so-called double chances. If, instead of two colors, there are three, there will be a third of each; if there are four, a quarter, etc. Often the same color comes out in series of two, three, four, five, six straight hits; in a certain number of moves, there will be as many series of two reds as two black notes, as many three reds as three black notes, and so on; but the hits of two will be 50% less frequent as those of one; those of three, a third of those of one; those of four, a quarter, etc. With dice, since each die has six faces, if it is thrown sixty times, it will give ten times one point, ten times two points, ten times three points and so forth.



In the old lottery of France, there were ninety numbers placed in a wheel; five were drawn each time; records of several years have shown that each number came out in the proportion of one ninetieth and each decade in the proportion of one ninth.

The greater the number of draws, the more accurate the proportion; over ten or twenty draws, for example, it can be very uneven, but the equilibrium is established as the number of draws increases, and that with mathematical regularity. This being a constant fact, it is obvious that a numerical law presides over this distribution, when it is left to itself, and that nothing forces or precludes it. What is called chance is, therefore, subjected to a mathematical law, or to put it better, there is no chance. The capricious irregularity that occurs at each draw, or in a small number of draws, does not prevent the law from taking its course, hence one can say that there is, in this distribution, a real fatality; but this fatality that presides over the whole is null, or at least inappreciable, for each isolated draw.



We elaborated a bit on the example of games because it is one of the most striking and the easiest to verify, by the possibility of multiplying the events at will, in a short stretch of time; and as the law emerges from all the events, it is this multiplicity that made it possible to recognize it, otherwise it is likely that it would still be ignored.



The same law has been observed with precision in the chances of mortality; death, that seems to strike indiscriminately and blindly, nevertheless follows a regular and constant course, according to the age. We know very well that out of a thousand individuals of all ages in a year, so many will die from one to ten years, so many from ten to twenty, so many from twenty to thirty and so on; or else, that after a period of ten years, the number of survivors will be as many from one to ten, as many from ten to twenty, etc. Accidental causes of mortality may momentarily disturb this order, as in a game a long streak of the same color upsets the balance; but if instead of a period of ten years and a thousand individuals, we extend the observation over fifty years and a hundred thousand individuals, we will find the equilibrium restored.



From this one can suppose that all the eventualities that seem to be the effect of chance, in individual life, as in that of peoples and humanity, are governed by numerical laws, and that what is lacking to recognize them is to be able to embrace a rather considerable mass of events and a sufficient length of time, at a glance.



For the same reason, there would be nothing impossible if all the facts of a moral and metaphysical order were also subordinated to a numerical law, whose elements and bases are, until now, totally unknown to us. In any case, we see from the preceding that this law, or if you want, this fatality of the whole, would in no way eliminate free will; this is what we set out to demonstrate. Free will, being exercised only on isolated points of detail, it would not hinder the fulfillment of the general law any more than the irregularity of the output of each number would hinder the proportional distribution of these same numbers, on a given sequence of draws. Man exercises his free will in the small sphere of his individual action; this little sphere can be misaligned, without preventing it from gravitating with the whole, according to the common law, as the small swirls caused in the waters of a river, by the agitating fish, do not prevent the mass of water from following the forced course imprinted on them by the law of gravitation.



Since man has his free-will, fatality has nothing to do with his individual actions; as for the events of his private life that sometimes seem to inevitably affect him, they have two very distinct sources: some are the direct consequence of his conduct, in present life; many people are unhappy, sick, disabled by their own fault; many accidents are the result of carelessness; he can therefore only blame himself and not fate, or as they say, his bad star. The others are completely independent of the present life, and seem, by that very fact, imprinted with a certain fatality; but here again Spiritism shows us that this fatality is only apparent, and that certain painful positions in life have their reason for happening in the plurality of existences. The Spirit voluntarily chose them in erraticity, before his incarnation, as trials for his advancement; they are, therefore, the product of free-will and not of fatality. If sometimes they are imposed as atonement, by a superior will, it is still the result of bad actions, voluntarily committed by man in a previous existence, and not because of a fatal law, since he could have avoided them by acting otherwise.



Fatality is the brake imposed on man, by a will superior to him, and wiser than him, in everything that is not left to his initiative; but it is never a hindrance in the exercise of his free-will, regarding his personal actions. Fatality can neither impose evil nor good on him; to excuse any bad action by fate, or as it is often said, by destiny, would be to abdicate the judgment that God has given him to weigh the pros and cons, the expediency or the inconvenience, the advantages, or the disadvantages of everything. If an event is in the destiny of a man, it will take place despite his will, and it will always be for his own good; but the circumstances of the accomplishment depend on the use that he makes of his free-will, and he can often reverse into detriment what should be a good, if he acts with improvidence, and if he allows himself to be driven by his passions. He is even more mistaken if he takes his desire or the deviations of his imagination for his destiny. (See the Gospel according to Spiritism, chapter V, numbers 1 to 11).