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 1st, 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 24th and 25th, 1868, with the title Paris somnambulist; Spiritism is clearly defined there.
