Alexandre Dumas – Monte-Cristo
“Listen, Valentin, have you ever felt for someone, one of those irresistible sympathies that when you see a person for the first time, you believe you have known him for a long time, and you wonder where and when you saw him? And unable to remember either the place or the time, you come to believe that it is in a world prior to ours, and that this sympathy is only a memory that awakens?” (Monte-Cristo, part 3, chapter XVIII, The Alfalfa Enclosure).
“You have never dared to rise with a flick of your wing into the higher spheres that God has populated with invisible and exceptional beings. - And do you admit, sir, that these spheres exist; that exceptional and invisible beings mingle with us? - Why not? Do you see the air you breathe, and without which you could not live? - So, we do not see these beings that you speak of. - you see them when God allows them to materialize…” (Monte-Cristo, part 3, chapter IX, Ideology).
And I, Monsieur (Villefort), I tell you that it is not so as you believe. Last night I slept a terrible sleep, because in a way I could see myself sleeping, as if my soul had already hovered above my body; my eyes, that I tried to open, closed unwillingly; and yet ... with my eyes closed, I saw, in the very place where you are, a white shape entering silently. (Monte-Cristo, part 4, chap. XIII, Madame Mairan).
One hour before he died, he said to me: Father, no man's faith can be stronger than mine, for I saw and heard a soul separate from her body. (François Picaut, continuation of Monte-Cristo).”
There is, in these thoughts, only one very small criticism to be made, it is the qualification of exceptional given to the invisible beings that surround us; there is nothing exceptional about these beings since they are the souls of men, and all men, without exception, must go through this state. Apart from that, wouldn't we say that these ideas were textually drawn from the Doctrine?
