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Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1868 > February
February
Extracted from the manuscripts of a young Breton mediumThe hallucinated, the inspired, the fluidics and the somnambulists
Our readers remember reading the Novel of the Future, in June last year, that Mr. Bonnemère had taken from the manuscripts of a young Breton medium, that had given him his work. It was still in that large heritage of manuscripts that the author found these pages, written by inspiration, that comes to the appreciation of the readers of the Spiritist Review. It goes without saying that we leave it to the medium, or rather to the Spirit that inspires him, the responsibility for the opinions that are issued, preserving our rights to analyze them later. As with the Novel of the Future, it is a curious specimen of unconscious mediumship.
I
The Hallucinated
We have little to say about hallucination, a state provoked by a psychological cause that influences the physical, and to which nervous natures are more prone, always more impressionable. Women, for their intimate organization, are more particularly driven to exaltation, and the fever in them occurs more frequently, followed by a delirium that takes the appearance of a momentary madness. We must recognize that hallucination slightly touches madness, as well as cerebral overexcitations, while delirium is mostly exhaled through incoherent words, more particularly representing the action, the staging. They are, sometimes, wrongly confused.
In the grip of a sort of internal fever, that does not manifest itself on the outside, by any apparent disruption of the organs, the hallucinated person lives in the midst of an imaginary world, created by his troubled imagination; everything is in disorder in him, as around him; he takes everything to the extreme: sometimes cheerfulness, almost always sadness, and tears roll from the eyes while the lips grin a sickly smile.
These fantastic visions exist for him; he sees them, touches them, is frightened by them. He preserves, however, the domain of his will; he talks with his interlocutors and hides from them the object of his fears or his dark concerns.
We knew one who, for about six months, attended the burial of his own body every morning, fully aware that his soul was surviving. Nothing seemed to have changed in the habits of his life, and yet that incessant thought, that same sight followed him everywhere. The word death echoed continually in his ear. When the sun shone, dispelled the night, or pierced the clouds, the dreadful sight gradually faded away, and finally disappeared. At night he fell asleep sad and desperate, for he knew what a horrible awakening awaited him the next day.
Sometimes, when the excess of physical suffering silenced his will, and deprived it of the power of dissimulation that he usually had, he suddenly cried out: - Ah! Here they are! … I see them! … And then he described to those more closely around him the details of the dismal ceremony, he recounted the sinister scenes that unfolded before his eyes, where circles of fantastic characters paraded in front of him.
The hallucinated will tell you the crazy perceptions of his sick brain, but he has nothing to repeat to you about what others would come and tell him; for to be inspired, peace and harmony must reign in your soul, and you must be free from all material or petty thoughts; sometimes the sickly disposition provokes inspiration, it is then like a help that the friends, who left first, bring to relieve you.
This madman, who yesterday enjoyed the fullness of his reason, does not present any external disorders, perceptible to the eye of the observer; however, there are many, they exist and are real. Evil is often in the soul, yanked from itself by the excess of work, joy, pain; the physical man is no longer in equilibrium with the psychological man; the psychological shock has been more violent than the physical can bear: hence the cataclysm.
The hallucinated also suffers the consequences of a serious disturbance in his nervous system. But – something that rarely takes place in madness - in him these disorders are intermittent and more easily curable, because his life is doubled in a way, since he thinks of real life and dreams of a fantastic life.
The latter is often the awakening of his sick soul, and if we listen to him with intelligence, we can discover the cause of the illness, that he often wants to hide. Among the flow of incoherent words that a delirious person throws out, and that seem to have nothing to do with the probable causes of his illness, there will be one that will keep coming back, and as if in spite of himself, that he would like to retain, and that escapes nonetheless. That is the real cause and that must be fought.
But the task is long and difficult, for the hallucinated is a skillful actor, and if he notices that he is being observed, his mind throws itself into strange cracks, taking the appearance of madness to escape this unwelcome pressure that one seems determined to exert on him. It is, therefore, necessary to study it with extreme discretion, without ever contradicting or trying to correct the errors of his delirious brain.
These are various phases of cerebral excitations, or rather of excitations of the whole being, because it is not necessary to locate the seat of the intelligence. The human soul, that gives it, hovers everywhere; it is the breath from above that makes the whole machine vibrate and act.
The hallucinated can, in good faith, believe himself to be inspired, and prophesize, either because he is aware of what he is saying, or only those around him can, without his knowledge, collect his words. But to accredit the indications of a hallucinated would be to prepare for strange disappointments, and that is how too often we have attributed to inspiration the errors that were only the product of hallucination.
The physical is material, sensitive, exposed to broad daylight, that everyone can see, admire, criticize, heal, or try to correct. But who can know the psychological man? When we ignore ourselves, how would others judge us? If we reveal some of our thoughts to them, it is still in greater quantity those that we hide from their eyes, and that we would like to hide from ourselves.
This cover-up is almost a social crime. Created for progress, our soul, our heart, our intelligence are made to spread over all brothers of the large family, to lavish on them all that is in us, as to enrich ourselves, at the same time, with all that they can communicate to us.
Reciprocal expansion is, therefore, the great humanitarian law, and concentration, in other words, the concealment of our actions, our thoughts, our aspirations is a kind of theft that we commit to the detriment of everyone. Which progress will be made if we keep to ourselves all that nature and education give us, and if everyone acts in the same way towards us?
Voluntary exiles, and keeping ourselves apart from the exchanges with our brothers, we concentrate on a fixed idea; the obsessed imagination tries to escape it by pursuing all kinds of senseless thoughts, and one can thus reach the point of madness, fair punishment that is inflicted on us for not having wanted to walk on our natural pathways.
So, let us live in others, and them in us, so that we all become one. Great joys, like great sorrows, break us when not confided in a friend. All loneliness is bad and doomed, and anything contrary to the designs of nature has, by inevitable consequences, immense internal disturbances.
II
The inspired
Inspiration is rarer than hallucination, because it does not depend only on the physical state, but also, and more importantly, on the mental situation of the individual predisposed to receive it.
Every man has only a certain share of intelligence that he is given to develop through his work. Arriving at the culminating point where it is granted to him to reach, he stops for a moment, then he returns to the primitive state, to childhood, without this very intelligence that grows every day, diminishes at an old age, dies out and disappears. So, having given everything, and no longer able to add anything to the baggage of his century, he leaves, but to go elsewhere, to continue the work that had been interrupted down here; he leaves, but leaving the place invigorated to another who, arriving at the adult age, will in turn have the power to accomplish a greater and more useful mission.
What we call death is just dedication to progress and humanity. But nothing dies, everything survives and is found again, through the transmission of the thought of the beings who left earlier, who still hold to the homeland they left, but did not forget, through the most ethereal part of themselves, that they continue to love, since it is inhabited by the followers of their life, by the heirs of their ideas, to whom they like to instill, at times, those that they did not have time to sow around them, or that they could not see the expected progress.
Having no more organs at the service of their intelligence, they come to ask the men of good will that they appreciate, to give way to them for a moment. Sublime hidden benefactors, they imbue their brothers with the quintessence of their thought, so that their sketched work continues and ends, by passing through the brains of those who can make its way in the world.
Between the missing friends and us, love continues, and love is life. They speak to us with the voice of our awakened conscience. Purified and better, they bring us only pure things, free that they are from any material part, as from all the triviality of our poor existence. They inspire us in the feeling they had in this world, but in this feeling free from any stain.
They still have a part of themselves to give; they bring it to us, letting us believe that we have obtained it through our own personal work. From there come these unexpected revelations that confuse science. The spirit of God blows where it wants ... Strangers make great discoveries, and the official world of academies is there to hinder their passage.
We do not claim that, in order to be inspired, it is essential to keep incessantly in the narrow paths of good and virtue; but they are usually moral beings to whom one comes, often as compensation for the evils from which they suffer for the actions of others, to grant manifestations that allow them to take revenge in their own way, by bringing the tribute of some benefits to humanity that disregards them, mocks and slanders them.
There are as many categories of inspirations, and therefore inspired, as there are faculties in the human brain for assimilating different knowledge.
The struggle startles the purified Spirits that have left for more advanced worlds, and they want to be listened to with meekness. Also the inspired are generally pure beings, naive and simple, serious and reflective, steeped in abnegation and devotion, without any marked personality, with deep and lasting impressions, accessible to external influences, without preconceived ideas about what they ignore, intelligent enough to assimilate the thoughts of others, but not strong enough morally to discuss them.
If the inspired holds to his own convictions, he takes, in good faith, their echo for the warning of the voices that speak in him, and that also deceives, in good faith, instead of enlightening. Kindness presides over these revelations, that never take place except for a useful, and at the same time, moral purpose.
When one of these sympathetic organizations suffers from a cruel disappointment or a physical ailment, a friend takes an interest in him and comes, giving another nourishment to his thought, to bring him relief, and particularly to those who are dear to him.
It is not uncommon for the inspired one to begin as a hallucinated. It is like a novitiate, a preparation of his brain to concentrate his mind and to be able to accept what will be said to him.
Because an inspired one cannot formulate anything conclusive at a certain moment, this does not mean that he will not be able to do it in other times. The manifestations remain free, spontaneous; they come when needed. Thus, those who are inspired, even the best ones, are not inspired on a fixed day and time, and sessions announced in advance often lead to inevitable disappointments.
In making too frequent evocations, we run the risk of ending up only in a state of overexcitation, more akin to hallucination than to inspiration. So, it is only about games of our delirious imagination, instead of those lights from another world, intended of illuminating the steps of humanity, in its providential path.
This explains these errors turned into a weapon by skepticism, denying in absolute terms the intervention of the superior Spirits. The inspired are by all those who left before their time and have something to teach us.
It may happen that the simpler, the less educated woman has medical revelations. We have seen one who, without even knowing how to read or write, found within herself different names of plants that could heal. Popular credulity had almost forced her to exploit that faculty. She also was not always enlightened, even by feeling the pulse of the sick person she was in contact with, for she was also one of those fluidics of which we will speak later. Although weak and delicate, she could, by her touch, restore balance to the one who lacked it and put the arrested vital principles back into circulation. Without realizing it, she often did by this simple touch, on certain people whose fluid was identical to hers, more good than by the remedies that she prescribed, sometimes only out of habit, and with insignificant variations, whatever the illness she was consulted for.
Providence has placed a remedy for each disease with each man. Only there are as many different organisms as there are individuals. The remedies also act differently on each organism, that influences the characters of the disease; and this is what makes it almost impossible for the doctor to prescribe the effective remedy. He knows its general effects, but he has no idea in what direction it will act on any patient that is presented to him.
It is here that the superiority of the fluidics and somnambulists shines, since when they find themselves in certain conditions of sympathy with those who come to consult them, the superior beings guide them with almost certain infallibility.
Often this inspiration is unconscious; often a doctor, but only with certain patients, suddenly finds the remedy that can cure them. It wasn't science that guided him, it was inspiration. Science put at his disposal several modes of treatment, but an inner voice shouted a name to him; he was forced to say it, and that name was that of the remedy that was to act, to the exclusion of all others.
What we say about medicine exists in the same way in all other branches of human labor. At certain times, the fire of inspiration devours us, we must give in; and if we pretend to concentrate in ourselves what must come out of it, real suffering becomes the punishment for our revolt.
All those to whom God has granted the sublime gift of creation, poets, scientists, artists, inventors, all have these unexpected illuminations, sometimes in fields very different from their ordinary studies, if one has claimed to violate their vocation. But the Spirits know what we must and can do, and they constantly come to awaken our muffled attractions.
We know how Molière explained these inequalities that distort Corneille's most beautiful pieces: "This devil of a man," he said, "has a familiar genius that at times comes to whisper sublime things in his ear; then suddenly he plants it there, saying: Get out of there as best you can! And then he doesn't do anything worthwhile anymore.” Molière was right. The proud genius of Corneille did not have the docile passivity necessary to always endure the inspiration from above. The Spirits would abandon him, and then he would fall asleep, as Homer himself sometimes did.
There are some - Socrates and Joan of Arc were among them - who hear interior voices speaking within them. Others hear nothing but are forced to obey a victorious force that dominates them.
At other times, a name strikes the ear of the inspired: it is that of a friend, of an individual whom he does not even know, of whom he has hardly heard. The personality of this unknown friend penetrates him, pervades him; strange thoughts gradually replace his own. He has the spirit of that one for a moment; he obeys, he writes, unwittingly and despite himself, if necessary, things that he does not know. And since that passive obedience, to which he is condemned, is bitter for him to endure in the waking state, he avoids these things written under an oppressive inspiration, and does not want to read them.
These thoughts can be in formal disagreement with his beliefs, with his feelings, or rather with those that education has imposed on him, because for certain Spirits to come to him, there must be some relationship between them. They give him the thought, leaving it up to him to find the form; they must then know that his intelligence can understand them, and momentarily assimilate their ideas to translate them.
It is rare that the circumstances have allowed us to develop in the direction of our native aptitudes. More advanced Spirits know which string to pull for it to vibrate. It had remained silent because others had been attacked by neglecting this one. They bring it back to life for a while. It is a long-stifled germ that they fertilize. The inspired then returning to his usual state, no longer remembers, for he lives a double existence, each of which is independent of the other.
It also happens, however, that he retains a greater easiness of understanding, and conquers a greater intellectual development. It is the reward for the effort he has made to give a graspable form to the thoughts that others have revealed to him.
Do not believe that all the inspired can know everything. Each, according to his natural predispositions, but often kept unknown to himself as to others, is inspired for such and such a thing, but is not equally so for all. There are indeed natures so unfriendly to certain knowledge, that the Spirits will never come knocking on a door that they know they cannot open.
The future is only known to the inspired to a certain extent. So, it is not true to say that an inspired predicted in what world such a person will go after his death, and what judgment God will pass on him. This is a game of the hallucinated imagination. Man, however high he has climbed the ladder of the worlds, does not know what his brother's destiny will be. This is the part reserved for God: the creature will never be able to infringe such rights.
Yes, there are manifestations, but they are not continuous, and our impatience with them is often to blame. Yes, everything is held together, and nothing is broken in the immense universe. Yes, there exists between this existence and the others a sympathetic and indissoluble bond that links and unites all the members of the human family to one another, and that allows the best ones to come and give us the knowledge of what we do not know. It is through this labor that progress is accomplished. Whether it is called the work of intelligence or inspiration, it is the same thing. Inspiration is superior progress, it is the substance; personal work gives the form, while still adding the quintessence of previously acquired knowledge.
Not a single invention belongs to us, for others have sown before us the seed we harvest. We apply to the work that we want to pursue the forces and the work of nature, that belongs to all, and without the help of which nothing is done, and then the forces and the work accumulated by others who have prepared for us the means of success.
In a way, everything is common and collective work, to further confirm this great principle of solidarity and association, that is the basis of societies and the whole law of creation.
Man’s work will never be made useless by inspiration. The Spirit who comes to bring it to us will always respect the part reserved to the individual; he will respect it as a noble and holy thing, since work puts man in possession of the faculties that God has deposited in his soul, so that the goal of his life is to fertilize them. It was through their development that he got to know himself, and that he deserves to be closer to God.
Inspiration comes either during the day, at night, waking or sleeping. It only requires recollection. It must find minds that can be abstracted from all concerns of the real world, providing free space to the being who will come to embrace him entirely, and infuse his thoughts into him.
In the hours of inspiration, man becomes much more accessible to all the outside noise, and everything that comes from the real world troubles him. He is no longer in this world, he is in a transitory environment between this one and the other, since he is in a way embedded in the moral and intellectual person of a being from another sphere, and whose body, however, clings to this one.
Although it is addressed to everyone, the inspiration will descend more generally on the unhealthy natures or worn out by a succession of sufferings, material or psychological. Since it is a blessing, is it not right that those who suffer are more easily able to receive it?
Hallucination is an unhealthy condition that magnetism can modify in a beneficial way. Inspiration is a psychological assimilation that we must be careful not to provoke by magnetic passes. The hallucinated readily indulges in outbursts, in ridiculous contortions. The inspired one is calm.
The inspired are melancholic. They need to be thoughtful; to be joyful, you don't need to think much; one must enjoy, in good health, a balance that the inspired ones do not always possess. But let's not think that they are difficult and fanciful. On the contrary, they are gentle and easy going with those they love.
There are inspired of several degrees. Some come to tell you tangible things, facts of second sight, so that one can see the reality of the initiation. The others, more clairvoyant and little concerned with the material processes of which they are not called to divulge the secrets, repeat as they come to them, the thoughts brought by the Spirits of progress. The first heal the body, the second are the doctors of the soul.
The mission of the most modest is limited to revealing how these things come to them. It is an established fact that advanced powers, by many degrees above us, come to dominate and inspire us. What is the point of repeating it? Believe it if they will. But the findings being well established, we should only consider inspiration from the useful and serious side. It doesn't matter, if the ideas are good, from what sources they come.
E. Bonnemère
Our readers remember reading the Novel of the Future, in June last year, that Mr. Bonnemère had taken from the manuscripts of a young Breton medium, that had given him his work. It was still in that large heritage of manuscripts that the author found these pages, written by inspiration, that comes to the appreciation of the readers of the Spiritist Review. It goes without saying that we leave it to the medium, or rather to the Spirit that inspires him, the responsibility for the opinions that are issued, preserving our rights to analyze them later. As with the Novel of the Future, it is a curious specimen of unconscious mediumship.
I
The Hallucinated
We have little to say about hallucination, a state provoked by a psychological cause that influences the physical, and to which nervous natures are more prone, always more impressionable. Women, for their intimate organization, are more particularly driven to exaltation, and the fever in them occurs more frequently, followed by a delirium that takes the appearance of a momentary madness. We must recognize that hallucination slightly touches madness, as well as cerebral overexcitations, while delirium is mostly exhaled through incoherent words, more particularly representing the action, the staging. They are, sometimes, wrongly confused.
In the grip of a sort of internal fever, that does not manifest itself on the outside, by any apparent disruption of the organs, the hallucinated person lives in the midst of an imaginary world, created by his troubled imagination; everything is in disorder in him, as around him; he takes everything to the extreme: sometimes cheerfulness, almost always sadness, and tears roll from the eyes while the lips grin a sickly smile.
These fantastic visions exist for him; he sees them, touches them, is frightened by them. He preserves, however, the domain of his will; he talks with his interlocutors and hides from them the object of his fears or his dark concerns.
We knew one who, for about six months, attended the burial of his own body every morning, fully aware that his soul was surviving. Nothing seemed to have changed in the habits of his life, and yet that incessant thought, that same sight followed him everywhere. The word death echoed continually in his ear. When the sun shone, dispelled the night, or pierced the clouds, the dreadful sight gradually faded away, and finally disappeared. At night he fell asleep sad and desperate, for he knew what a horrible awakening awaited him the next day.
Sometimes, when the excess of physical suffering silenced his will, and deprived it of the power of dissimulation that he usually had, he suddenly cried out: - Ah! Here they are! … I see them! … And then he described to those more closely around him the details of the dismal ceremony, he recounted the sinister scenes that unfolded before his eyes, where circles of fantastic characters paraded in front of him.
The hallucinated will tell you the crazy perceptions of his sick brain, but he has nothing to repeat to you about what others would come and tell him; for to be inspired, peace and harmony must reign in your soul, and you must be free from all material or petty thoughts; sometimes the sickly disposition provokes inspiration, it is then like a help that the friends, who left first, bring to relieve you.
This madman, who yesterday enjoyed the fullness of his reason, does not present any external disorders, perceptible to the eye of the observer; however, there are many, they exist and are real. Evil is often in the soul, yanked from itself by the excess of work, joy, pain; the physical man is no longer in equilibrium with the psychological man; the psychological shock has been more violent than the physical can bear: hence the cataclysm.
The hallucinated also suffers the consequences of a serious disturbance in his nervous system. But – something that rarely takes place in madness - in him these disorders are intermittent and more easily curable, because his life is doubled in a way, since he thinks of real life and dreams of a fantastic life.
The latter is often the awakening of his sick soul, and if we listen to him with intelligence, we can discover the cause of the illness, that he often wants to hide. Among the flow of incoherent words that a delirious person throws out, and that seem to have nothing to do with the probable causes of his illness, there will be one that will keep coming back, and as if in spite of himself, that he would like to retain, and that escapes nonetheless. That is the real cause and that must be fought.
But the task is long and difficult, for the hallucinated is a skillful actor, and if he notices that he is being observed, his mind throws itself into strange cracks, taking the appearance of madness to escape this unwelcome pressure that one seems determined to exert on him. It is, therefore, necessary to study it with extreme discretion, without ever contradicting or trying to correct the errors of his delirious brain.
These are various phases of cerebral excitations, or rather of excitations of the whole being, because it is not necessary to locate the seat of the intelligence. The human soul, that gives it, hovers everywhere; it is the breath from above that makes the whole machine vibrate and act.
The hallucinated can, in good faith, believe himself to be inspired, and prophesize, either because he is aware of what he is saying, or only those around him can, without his knowledge, collect his words. But to accredit the indications of a hallucinated would be to prepare for strange disappointments, and that is how too often we have attributed to inspiration the errors that were only the product of hallucination.
The physical is material, sensitive, exposed to broad daylight, that everyone can see, admire, criticize, heal, or try to correct. But who can know the psychological man? When we ignore ourselves, how would others judge us? If we reveal some of our thoughts to them, it is still in greater quantity those that we hide from their eyes, and that we would like to hide from ourselves.
This cover-up is almost a social crime. Created for progress, our soul, our heart, our intelligence are made to spread over all brothers of the large family, to lavish on them all that is in us, as to enrich ourselves, at the same time, with all that they can communicate to us.
Reciprocal expansion is, therefore, the great humanitarian law, and concentration, in other words, the concealment of our actions, our thoughts, our aspirations is a kind of theft that we commit to the detriment of everyone. Which progress will be made if we keep to ourselves all that nature and education give us, and if everyone acts in the same way towards us?
Voluntary exiles, and keeping ourselves apart from the exchanges with our brothers, we concentrate on a fixed idea; the obsessed imagination tries to escape it by pursuing all kinds of senseless thoughts, and one can thus reach the point of madness, fair punishment that is inflicted on us for not having wanted to walk on our natural pathways.
So, let us live in others, and them in us, so that we all become one. Great joys, like great sorrows, break us when not confided in a friend. All loneliness is bad and doomed, and anything contrary to the designs of nature has, by inevitable consequences, immense internal disturbances.
II
The inspired
Inspiration is rarer than hallucination, because it does not depend only on the physical state, but also, and more importantly, on the mental situation of the individual predisposed to receive it.
Every man has only a certain share of intelligence that he is given to develop through his work. Arriving at the culminating point where it is granted to him to reach, he stops for a moment, then he returns to the primitive state, to childhood, without this very intelligence that grows every day, diminishes at an old age, dies out and disappears. So, having given everything, and no longer able to add anything to the baggage of his century, he leaves, but to go elsewhere, to continue the work that had been interrupted down here; he leaves, but leaving the place invigorated to another who, arriving at the adult age, will in turn have the power to accomplish a greater and more useful mission.
What we call death is just dedication to progress and humanity. But nothing dies, everything survives and is found again, through the transmission of the thought of the beings who left earlier, who still hold to the homeland they left, but did not forget, through the most ethereal part of themselves, that they continue to love, since it is inhabited by the followers of their life, by the heirs of their ideas, to whom they like to instill, at times, those that they did not have time to sow around them, or that they could not see the expected progress.
Having no more organs at the service of their intelligence, they come to ask the men of good will that they appreciate, to give way to them for a moment. Sublime hidden benefactors, they imbue their brothers with the quintessence of their thought, so that their sketched work continues and ends, by passing through the brains of those who can make its way in the world.
Between the missing friends and us, love continues, and love is life. They speak to us with the voice of our awakened conscience. Purified and better, they bring us only pure things, free that they are from any material part, as from all the triviality of our poor existence. They inspire us in the feeling they had in this world, but in this feeling free from any stain.
They still have a part of themselves to give; they bring it to us, letting us believe that we have obtained it through our own personal work. From there come these unexpected revelations that confuse science. The spirit of God blows where it wants ... Strangers make great discoveries, and the official world of academies is there to hinder their passage.
We do not claim that, in order to be inspired, it is essential to keep incessantly in the narrow paths of good and virtue; but they are usually moral beings to whom one comes, often as compensation for the evils from which they suffer for the actions of others, to grant manifestations that allow them to take revenge in their own way, by bringing the tribute of some benefits to humanity that disregards them, mocks and slanders them.
There are as many categories of inspirations, and therefore inspired, as there are faculties in the human brain for assimilating different knowledge.
The struggle startles the purified Spirits that have left for more advanced worlds, and they want to be listened to with meekness. Also the inspired are generally pure beings, naive and simple, serious and reflective, steeped in abnegation and devotion, without any marked personality, with deep and lasting impressions, accessible to external influences, without preconceived ideas about what they ignore, intelligent enough to assimilate the thoughts of others, but not strong enough morally to discuss them.
If the inspired holds to his own convictions, he takes, in good faith, their echo for the warning of the voices that speak in him, and that also deceives, in good faith, instead of enlightening. Kindness presides over these revelations, that never take place except for a useful, and at the same time, moral purpose.
When one of these sympathetic organizations suffers from a cruel disappointment or a physical ailment, a friend takes an interest in him and comes, giving another nourishment to his thought, to bring him relief, and particularly to those who are dear to him.
It is not uncommon for the inspired one to begin as a hallucinated. It is like a novitiate, a preparation of his brain to concentrate his mind and to be able to accept what will be said to him.
Because an inspired one cannot formulate anything conclusive at a certain moment, this does not mean that he will not be able to do it in other times. The manifestations remain free, spontaneous; they come when needed. Thus, those who are inspired, even the best ones, are not inspired on a fixed day and time, and sessions announced in advance often lead to inevitable disappointments.
In making too frequent evocations, we run the risk of ending up only in a state of overexcitation, more akin to hallucination than to inspiration. So, it is only about games of our delirious imagination, instead of those lights from another world, intended of illuminating the steps of humanity, in its providential path.
This explains these errors turned into a weapon by skepticism, denying in absolute terms the intervention of the superior Spirits. The inspired are by all those who left before their time and have something to teach us.
It may happen that the simpler, the less educated woman has medical revelations. We have seen one who, without even knowing how to read or write, found within herself different names of plants that could heal. Popular credulity had almost forced her to exploit that faculty. She also was not always enlightened, even by feeling the pulse of the sick person she was in contact with, for she was also one of those fluidics of which we will speak later. Although weak and delicate, she could, by her touch, restore balance to the one who lacked it and put the arrested vital principles back into circulation. Without realizing it, she often did by this simple touch, on certain people whose fluid was identical to hers, more good than by the remedies that she prescribed, sometimes only out of habit, and with insignificant variations, whatever the illness she was consulted for.
Providence has placed a remedy for each disease with each man. Only there are as many different organisms as there are individuals. The remedies also act differently on each organism, that influences the characters of the disease; and this is what makes it almost impossible for the doctor to prescribe the effective remedy. He knows its general effects, but he has no idea in what direction it will act on any patient that is presented to him.
It is here that the superiority of the fluidics and somnambulists shines, since when they find themselves in certain conditions of sympathy with those who come to consult them, the superior beings guide them with almost certain infallibility.
Often this inspiration is unconscious; often a doctor, but only with certain patients, suddenly finds the remedy that can cure them. It wasn't science that guided him, it was inspiration. Science put at his disposal several modes of treatment, but an inner voice shouted a name to him; he was forced to say it, and that name was that of the remedy that was to act, to the exclusion of all others.
What we say about medicine exists in the same way in all other branches of human labor. At certain times, the fire of inspiration devours us, we must give in; and if we pretend to concentrate in ourselves what must come out of it, real suffering becomes the punishment for our revolt.
All those to whom God has granted the sublime gift of creation, poets, scientists, artists, inventors, all have these unexpected illuminations, sometimes in fields very different from their ordinary studies, if one has claimed to violate their vocation. But the Spirits know what we must and can do, and they constantly come to awaken our muffled attractions.
We know how Molière explained these inequalities that distort Corneille's most beautiful pieces: "This devil of a man," he said, "has a familiar genius that at times comes to whisper sublime things in his ear; then suddenly he plants it there, saying: Get out of there as best you can! And then he doesn't do anything worthwhile anymore.” Molière was right. The proud genius of Corneille did not have the docile passivity necessary to always endure the inspiration from above. The Spirits would abandon him, and then he would fall asleep, as Homer himself sometimes did.
There are some - Socrates and Joan of Arc were among them - who hear interior voices speaking within them. Others hear nothing but are forced to obey a victorious force that dominates them.
At other times, a name strikes the ear of the inspired: it is that of a friend, of an individual whom he does not even know, of whom he has hardly heard. The personality of this unknown friend penetrates him, pervades him; strange thoughts gradually replace his own. He has the spirit of that one for a moment; he obeys, he writes, unwittingly and despite himself, if necessary, things that he does not know. And since that passive obedience, to which he is condemned, is bitter for him to endure in the waking state, he avoids these things written under an oppressive inspiration, and does not want to read them.
These thoughts can be in formal disagreement with his beliefs, with his feelings, or rather with those that education has imposed on him, because for certain Spirits to come to him, there must be some relationship between them. They give him the thought, leaving it up to him to find the form; they must then know that his intelligence can understand them, and momentarily assimilate their ideas to translate them.
It is rare that the circumstances have allowed us to develop in the direction of our native aptitudes. More advanced Spirits know which string to pull for it to vibrate. It had remained silent because others had been attacked by neglecting this one. They bring it back to life for a while. It is a long-stifled germ that they fertilize. The inspired then returning to his usual state, no longer remembers, for he lives a double existence, each of which is independent of the other.
It also happens, however, that he retains a greater easiness of understanding, and conquers a greater intellectual development. It is the reward for the effort he has made to give a graspable form to the thoughts that others have revealed to him.
Do not believe that all the inspired can know everything. Each, according to his natural predispositions, but often kept unknown to himself as to others, is inspired for such and such a thing, but is not equally so for all. There are indeed natures so unfriendly to certain knowledge, that the Spirits will never come knocking on a door that they know they cannot open.
The future is only known to the inspired to a certain extent. So, it is not true to say that an inspired predicted in what world such a person will go after his death, and what judgment God will pass on him. This is a game of the hallucinated imagination. Man, however high he has climbed the ladder of the worlds, does not know what his brother's destiny will be. This is the part reserved for God: the creature will never be able to infringe such rights.
Yes, there are manifestations, but they are not continuous, and our impatience with them is often to blame. Yes, everything is held together, and nothing is broken in the immense universe. Yes, there exists between this existence and the others a sympathetic and indissoluble bond that links and unites all the members of the human family to one another, and that allows the best ones to come and give us the knowledge of what we do not know. It is through this labor that progress is accomplished. Whether it is called the work of intelligence or inspiration, it is the same thing. Inspiration is superior progress, it is the substance; personal work gives the form, while still adding the quintessence of previously acquired knowledge.
Not a single invention belongs to us, for others have sown before us the seed we harvest. We apply to the work that we want to pursue the forces and the work of nature, that belongs to all, and without the help of which nothing is done, and then the forces and the work accumulated by others who have prepared for us the means of success.
In a way, everything is common and collective work, to further confirm this great principle of solidarity and association, that is the basis of societies and the whole law of creation.
Man’s work will never be made useless by inspiration. The Spirit who comes to bring it to us will always respect the part reserved to the individual; he will respect it as a noble and holy thing, since work puts man in possession of the faculties that God has deposited in his soul, so that the goal of his life is to fertilize them. It was through their development that he got to know himself, and that he deserves to be closer to God.
Inspiration comes either during the day, at night, waking or sleeping. It only requires recollection. It must find minds that can be abstracted from all concerns of the real world, providing free space to the being who will come to embrace him entirely, and infuse his thoughts into him.
In the hours of inspiration, man becomes much more accessible to all the outside noise, and everything that comes from the real world troubles him. He is no longer in this world, he is in a transitory environment between this one and the other, since he is in a way embedded in the moral and intellectual person of a being from another sphere, and whose body, however, clings to this one.
Although it is addressed to everyone, the inspiration will descend more generally on the unhealthy natures or worn out by a succession of sufferings, material or psychological. Since it is a blessing, is it not right that those who suffer are more easily able to receive it?
Hallucination is an unhealthy condition that magnetism can modify in a beneficial way. Inspiration is a psychological assimilation that we must be careful not to provoke by magnetic passes. The hallucinated readily indulges in outbursts, in ridiculous contortions. The inspired one is calm.
The inspired are melancholic. They need to be thoughtful; to be joyful, you don't need to think much; one must enjoy, in good health, a balance that the inspired ones do not always possess. But let's not think that they are difficult and fanciful. On the contrary, they are gentle and easy going with those they love.
There are inspired of several degrees. Some come to tell you tangible things, facts of second sight, so that one can see the reality of the initiation. The others, more clairvoyant and little concerned with the material processes of which they are not called to divulge the secrets, repeat as they come to them, the thoughts brought by the Spirits of progress. The first heal the body, the second are the doctors of the soul.
The mission of the most modest is limited to revealing how these things come to them. It is an established fact that advanced powers, by many degrees above us, come to dominate and inspire us. What is the point of repeating it? Believe it if they will. But the findings being well established, we should only consider inspiration from the useful and serious side. It doesn't matter, if the ideas are good, from what sources they come.
E. Bonnemère
New Year’s Greetings from a Spiritist from Leipzig
A Spiritist from Leipzig had the following card printed in German, whose translation we provide below with pleasure.
“My good wishes for the New Year, to all Spiritists and Spiritualists of Leipzig.
To you too who call yourselves materialists, because you only want to know matter, I would be tempted to send you my wishes of happiness, but I am afraid you would consider this as a boldness of a stranger who does not have the right to be counted among you.
It is different with the Spiritualists, who are on the same ground as the Spiritists, concerning the belief in the immortality of the soul, in its individuality and in its happy or unhappy state after death. Spiritualists and Spiritists recognize in each man a sister soul, and by that gives me the right to send them my good wishes. All of them thank the Lord for the year that has just passed, and they hope that, supported by his grace, they will have the courage to endure the trials of unhappy days, the strength to work for their betterment by taming their passions.
To you, dear Spiritists, known and unknown brothers and sisters, I particularly wish you a Happy New Year, because you have received from God, for your earthly pilgrimage, a great support in Spiritism. Religion has come to bring faith to all and blessed are those who have kept it. Unfortunately, it is extinct in many; that is why God is sending a new weapon to fight skepticism, pride and selfishness that are assuming greater and greater proportions. This new weapon is the communication with the Spirits; through that we have faith, because it gives us the certainty of the life of the soul, and allows us to glance into the other life; we thus recognize the vanity of earthly happiness, and we have the solution of the difficulties that made us doubt everything, even the existence of God.
Jesus said to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you could not bear it yet.” Today, having progressed, humanity can understand them; that is why God gave us the science of Spiritism, and the proof that humanity is ripe for this science is that this science exists. It is useless to deny and to mock, as in the past it was useless to deny and mock the facts sustained by Copernicus and Galileo. These facts were as little recognized then as they are now in the world of the Spirits. As in the past, the first opponents are the scholars, until the day when, seeing themselves isolated, they will humbly recognize that new discoveries, such as steam, electricity and magnetism, that were unknown once, are not the last word of the laws of nature. They will be responsible before future generations for not having welcomed the new science, like the sister of the others, and for having rejected it like a madness.
It is true that she does not teach anything new by proclaiming the life of the soul, since Christ spoke of it; but Spiritism removes all doubts and sheds new light on this question. Let us beware, however, of considering the teachings of Christianity as useless, and of believing them to be replaced by Spiritism; let us strengthen ourselves, on the contrary, at the source of the Christian truths, for which Spiritism is only a new torch, so that our intelligence and our pride do not lead us astray. Spiritism teaches us, before anything, that “without love and charity, there is no happiness”, that is to say that one must love one's neighbor as oneself; by basing oneself on this Christian truth, it opens the way for the fulfillment of these words of Christ: “One flock and one shepherd."
Therefore, dear Spiritist brothers and sisters, allow me to add this prayer, to my good wishes for the New Year: that you will never misuse the power to communicate with the spiritual world. Let us not forget that, according to the law on which our relationships with the Spirits are based, the evil ones are not excluded from the communications. While it is difficult to ascertain the identity of a Spirit that is unknown to us, it is easy to distinguish the good from the bad. These can hide under the mask of hypocrisy, but a good Spiritist always recognizes them; this is why one should not deal with these things lightheartedly, because one can become the plaything of evil Spirits, although intelligent, as one sometimes finds in the world of the incarnate. If we compare our communications with those obtained in the meetings of earnest and sincere Spiritists, we will soon be able to recognize if we are on the right track. Elevated Spirits are recognized by their language that is the same everywhere, always in accordance with the Gospel and human reason.
The way to protect oneself from evil Spirits is first to make a sincere prayer to God; second, to never use Spiritism for material things. Evil Spirits are always ready to satisfy any request, and if sometimes they say right things, more often they deceive out of intention or ignorance, because inferior Spirits know no more than during their earthly life. The good Spirits, on the contrary, help us in our efforts to improve ourselves, and make us know the spiritual life, so that we can assimilate it to ours. This is the goal towards which all sincere Spiritists must strive.
Adolf, Count of Poninski.
Leipzig, January 1st, 1868.”
“My good wishes for the New Year, to all Spiritists and Spiritualists of Leipzig.
To you too who call yourselves materialists, because you only want to know matter, I would be tempted to send you my wishes of happiness, but I am afraid you would consider this as a boldness of a stranger who does not have the right to be counted among you.
It is different with the Spiritualists, who are on the same ground as the Spiritists, concerning the belief in the immortality of the soul, in its individuality and in its happy or unhappy state after death. Spiritualists and Spiritists recognize in each man a sister soul, and by that gives me the right to send them my good wishes. All of them thank the Lord for the year that has just passed, and they hope that, supported by his grace, they will have the courage to endure the trials of unhappy days, the strength to work for their betterment by taming their passions.
To you, dear Spiritists, known and unknown brothers and sisters, I particularly wish you a Happy New Year, because you have received from God, for your earthly pilgrimage, a great support in Spiritism. Religion has come to bring faith to all and blessed are those who have kept it. Unfortunately, it is extinct in many; that is why God is sending a new weapon to fight skepticism, pride and selfishness that are assuming greater and greater proportions. This new weapon is the communication with the Spirits; through that we have faith, because it gives us the certainty of the life of the soul, and allows us to glance into the other life; we thus recognize the vanity of earthly happiness, and we have the solution of the difficulties that made us doubt everything, even the existence of God.
Jesus said to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you could not bear it yet.” Today, having progressed, humanity can understand them; that is why God gave us the science of Spiritism, and the proof that humanity is ripe for this science is that this science exists. It is useless to deny and to mock, as in the past it was useless to deny and mock the facts sustained by Copernicus and Galileo. These facts were as little recognized then as they are now in the world of the Spirits. As in the past, the first opponents are the scholars, until the day when, seeing themselves isolated, they will humbly recognize that new discoveries, such as steam, electricity and magnetism, that were unknown once, are not the last word of the laws of nature. They will be responsible before future generations for not having welcomed the new science, like the sister of the others, and for having rejected it like a madness.
It is true that she does not teach anything new by proclaiming the life of the soul, since Christ spoke of it; but Spiritism removes all doubts and sheds new light on this question. Let us beware, however, of considering the teachings of Christianity as useless, and of believing them to be replaced by Spiritism; let us strengthen ourselves, on the contrary, at the source of the Christian truths, for which Spiritism is only a new torch, so that our intelligence and our pride do not lead us astray. Spiritism teaches us, before anything, that “without love and charity, there is no happiness”, that is to say that one must love one's neighbor as oneself; by basing oneself on this Christian truth, it opens the way for the fulfillment of these words of Christ: “One flock and one shepherd."
Therefore, dear Spiritist brothers and sisters, allow me to add this prayer, to my good wishes for the New Year: that you will never misuse the power to communicate with the spiritual world. Let us not forget that, according to the law on which our relationships with the Spirits are based, the evil ones are not excluded from the communications. While it is difficult to ascertain the identity of a Spirit that is unknown to us, it is easy to distinguish the good from the bad. These can hide under the mask of hypocrisy, but a good Spiritist always recognizes them; this is why one should not deal with these things lightheartedly, because one can become the plaything of evil Spirits, although intelligent, as one sometimes finds in the world of the incarnate. If we compare our communications with those obtained in the meetings of earnest and sincere Spiritists, we will soon be able to recognize if we are on the right track. Elevated Spirits are recognized by their language that is the same everywhere, always in accordance with the Gospel and human reason.
The way to protect oneself from evil Spirits is first to make a sincere prayer to God; second, to never use Spiritism for material things. Evil Spirits are always ready to satisfy any request, and if sometimes they say right things, more often they deceive out of intention or ignorance, because inferior Spirits know no more than during their earthly life. The good Spirits, on the contrary, help us in our efforts to improve ourselves, and make us know the spiritual life, so that we can assimilate it to ours. This is the goal towards which all sincere Spiritists must strive.
Adolf, Count of Poninski.
Leipzig, January 1st, 1868.”
Instructions of the Spirits
The Messiahs of Spiritism
1. - You have been told that one day all religions will merge into the same belief; well, this is how it will happen. God will give a body to a few superior Spirits, and they will preach the pure gospel. A new Christ will come; he will put an end to all the abuses that have been going on for so long, and he will unite men under one flag.
He's born, the new Messiah, and he'll restore the gospel of Jesus Christ. Glory to his power!
It is not allowed to reveal the place where he was born; and if someone comes to tell you, "He is in such and such a place," do not believe it, for no one will know until he is able to reveal himself, and by then great things must happen to smooth out the ways.
If God lets you live long enough, you will see the true gospel of Jesus Christ preached by the new Missionary of God, and a great change will be made by the preaching of this blessed Child; at his powerful word, men of different faiths will join hands.
Glory to this divine envoy, who will reestablish the misunderstood and badly practiced laws of Christ! Glory to the Spiritism that precedes him and that comes to shed light on all these things!
Believe, my brothers, that it is not only you who will receive such communications; but keep this secret until further notice.
Saint Joseph, Sétif, Algeria, 1861.
Observation: This revelation is one of the first of its kind that has been transmitted to us; but others had already preceded it. Since then, a large number of communications on the same subject have been given spontaneously in different Spiritist centers, in France and abroad, all of which agree on the basis of the thought; and as the need not to divulge them was understood everywhere, and since none has been published, they could not be the reflection of each other. This is one of the most remarkable examples of the simultaneity and concordance of the teaching of the Spirits, when the time for a revelation has come.[1]
2. - It is incontestably admitted that your time is a time of transition and general fermentation; but it has not yet reached that degree of maturity that marks the life of nations. It is to the twentieth century that the reorganization of humanity is reserved; all the things that are going to be accomplished by then are only the preliminaries of the great renovation. The man called to achieve it is not yet ripe to accomplish his mission; but he has already been born, and his star appeared in France marked with a halo, and was shown to you in Africa, not long ago. His route is marked in advance; the corruption of morals, the misfortunes that will be the result of the unleashing of passions, the decline of religious faith, will be the precursor signs of his advent.
Corruption within religions is the symptom of their decadence, as it is that of decadence of peoples and political regimes, because it is an indication of lack of true faith; corrupt men drag humanity down a fatal slope, from which it can only escape through a violent crisis. It is the same with religions that substitute worship of the Divinity with the worship of money and honors, and that show themselves greedier for the material goods of Earth than the spiritual goods of heaven. (Fénelon, Constantine, December 1861.)
3. - When a transformation of humanity must take place, God sends on a mission a Spirit capable, by his thoughts and by a superior intelligence, of dominating his contemporaries, and of imparting to future generations the ideas necessary for a civilizing moral revolution.
From time to time, we thus see beings rising above the common man, like beacons, guiding them in the path of progress, and making them cross the stages of several centuries in a few years. The role of a few is limited to a country or a race; they are like subordinate officers, each leading a division of the army; but there are others whose mission is to act on the whole of humanity, and which only appear in the rarer periods which mark the era of general transformations.
The role of some is limited to a country or a race; they are like subordinate officers, each leading a division of the army; but there are others whose mission is to act on the entire humanity, and that only appear in the rarer periods that mark the era of general transformations.
Jesus Christ was one of these exceptional envoys; in the same way you will have, when the time is come, a superior Spirit that will direct the whole movement, and will give a powerful cohesion to the scattered forces of Spiritism. God knows how to modify our laws and our habits, and when a new fact presents itself, hope and pray, for the Lord does nothing that is not according to the laws of divine justice that govern the universe. For you who have faith, and who have devoted your life to the propaganda of the regenerative idea, it must be simple and just; but God alone knows the one that is promised; I limit myself to saying to you: Hope and pray, for the time has come, and the new Messiah will not fail you: God will know how to designate him in time; and moreover, it is through his works that he will assert himself. You can expect many things, you who see so many strange things compared to the ideas accepted by modern civilization.
Baluze, Paris, 1862.
4. - Here is a question that is repeated everywhere: is the announced Messiah the very person of Christ? There are many Spirits with God who have reached the top of the ladder of pure Spirits, who have deserved to be initiated into his designs, to direct their execution. God chooses among them his superior envoys assigned to special missions. You can call them Christs: it's the same school; they are the same ideas modified according to the times.
Therefore do not be surprised with all the communications that announce to you the coming of a mighty Spirit under the name of Christ; it is the thought of God revealed at a certain time, and that is transmitted by the group of superior Spirits that are close to God, who receive from him the emanations to preside over the future of the worlds gravitating in space.
He who died on the cross had a mission to fulfill, and this mission is renewed today by other Spirits of this divine group, who come, I repeat to you, to preside over the destinies of your world.
If the Messiah of whom these communications speak is not the personality of Jesus, it is the same thought. It is the one that Jesus announced when he said: "I will send you the Spirit of Truth who must restore all things,” that is to say, bring men back to the sound interpretation of his teachings, for he foresaw that men would deviate from the path he had marked out for them.
It was necessary, moreover, to complete what he had not been able to tell them then, because it would not have been understood. This is why a multitude of Spirits of all kinds, under the direction of the Spirit of Truth, came to all parts of the world and to all peoples, to reveal the laws of the spiritual world of which Jesus had postponed the teaching, and to lay, by Spiritism, the foundations of the new social order. When all the foundations have been laid, then the Messiah will come who must crown the edifice and preside over the reorganization with the help of the elements that will have been prepared.
But don't think that this Messiah is alone; there will be several who will embrace, by the position that each will occupy in the world, the great parts of the social order: politics, religion, legislation, in order to bring them together towards the same goal.
Besides the principal Messiahs, superior Spirits will arise in all parts, and like lieutenants of the same faith and the same desire, will act in common accord under the impulse of the higher thought.
That is how the harmony of the whole will gradually be established; but certain events must take place first.
Lacordaire, Paris, 1862.
[1] Communications of this kind are innumerable; we only report a few here, and if we are publishing them today, it is because the time has come to bring the fact to the knowledge of all, and that it is useful, for the spiritualists, to know in which direction the majority of Spirits stand.
1. - You have been told that one day all religions will merge into the same belief; well, this is how it will happen. God will give a body to a few superior Spirits, and they will preach the pure gospel. A new Christ will come; he will put an end to all the abuses that have been going on for so long, and he will unite men under one flag.
He's born, the new Messiah, and he'll restore the gospel of Jesus Christ. Glory to his power!
It is not allowed to reveal the place where he was born; and if someone comes to tell you, "He is in such and such a place," do not believe it, for no one will know until he is able to reveal himself, and by then great things must happen to smooth out the ways.
If God lets you live long enough, you will see the true gospel of Jesus Christ preached by the new Missionary of God, and a great change will be made by the preaching of this blessed Child; at his powerful word, men of different faiths will join hands.
Glory to this divine envoy, who will reestablish the misunderstood and badly practiced laws of Christ! Glory to the Spiritism that precedes him and that comes to shed light on all these things!
Believe, my brothers, that it is not only you who will receive such communications; but keep this secret until further notice.
Saint Joseph, Sétif, Algeria, 1861.
Observation: This revelation is one of the first of its kind that has been transmitted to us; but others had already preceded it. Since then, a large number of communications on the same subject have been given spontaneously in different Spiritist centers, in France and abroad, all of which agree on the basis of the thought; and as the need not to divulge them was understood everywhere, and since none has been published, they could not be the reflection of each other. This is one of the most remarkable examples of the simultaneity and concordance of the teaching of the Spirits, when the time for a revelation has come.[1]
2. - It is incontestably admitted that your time is a time of transition and general fermentation; but it has not yet reached that degree of maturity that marks the life of nations. It is to the twentieth century that the reorganization of humanity is reserved; all the things that are going to be accomplished by then are only the preliminaries of the great renovation. The man called to achieve it is not yet ripe to accomplish his mission; but he has already been born, and his star appeared in France marked with a halo, and was shown to you in Africa, not long ago. His route is marked in advance; the corruption of morals, the misfortunes that will be the result of the unleashing of passions, the decline of religious faith, will be the precursor signs of his advent.
Corruption within religions is the symptom of their decadence, as it is that of decadence of peoples and political regimes, because it is an indication of lack of true faith; corrupt men drag humanity down a fatal slope, from which it can only escape through a violent crisis. It is the same with religions that substitute worship of the Divinity with the worship of money and honors, and that show themselves greedier for the material goods of Earth than the spiritual goods of heaven. (Fénelon, Constantine, December 1861.)
3. - When a transformation of humanity must take place, God sends on a mission a Spirit capable, by his thoughts and by a superior intelligence, of dominating his contemporaries, and of imparting to future generations the ideas necessary for a civilizing moral revolution.
From time to time, we thus see beings rising above the common man, like beacons, guiding them in the path of progress, and making them cross the stages of several centuries in a few years. The role of a few is limited to a country or a race; they are like subordinate officers, each leading a division of the army; but there are others whose mission is to act on the whole of humanity, and which only appear in the rarer periods which mark the era of general transformations.
The role of some is limited to a country or a race; they are like subordinate officers, each leading a division of the army; but there are others whose mission is to act on the entire humanity, and that only appear in the rarer periods that mark the era of general transformations.
Jesus Christ was one of these exceptional envoys; in the same way you will have, when the time is come, a superior Spirit that will direct the whole movement, and will give a powerful cohesion to the scattered forces of Spiritism. God knows how to modify our laws and our habits, and when a new fact presents itself, hope and pray, for the Lord does nothing that is not according to the laws of divine justice that govern the universe. For you who have faith, and who have devoted your life to the propaganda of the regenerative idea, it must be simple and just; but God alone knows the one that is promised; I limit myself to saying to you: Hope and pray, for the time has come, and the new Messiah will not fail you: God will know how to designate him in time; and moreover, it is through his works that he will assert himself. You can expect many things, you who see so many strange things compared to the ideas accepted by modern civilization.
Baluze, Paris, 1862.
4. - Here is a question that is repeated everywhere: is the announced Messiah the very person of Christ? There are many Spirits with God who have reached the top of the ladder of pure Spirits, who have deserved to be initiated into his designs, to direct their execution. God chooses among them his superior envoys assigned to special missions. You can call them Christs: it's the same school; they are the same ideas modified according to the times.
Therefore do not be surprised with all the communications that announce to you the coming of a mighty Spirit under the name of Christ; it is the thought of God revealed at a certain time, and that is transmitted by the group of superior Spirits that are close to God, who receive from him the emanations to preside over the future of the worlds gravitating in space.
He who died on the cross had a mission to fulfill, and this mission is renewed today by other Spirits of this divine group, who come, I repeat to you, to preside over the destinies of your world.
If the Messiah of whom these communications speak is not the personality of Jesus, it is the same thought. It is the one that Jesus announced when he said: "I will send you the Spirit of Truth who must restore all things,” that is to say, bring men back to the sound interpretation of his teachings, for he foresaw that men would deviate from the path he had marked out for them.
It was necessary, moreover, to complete what he had not been able to tell them then, because it would not have been understood. This is why a multitude of Spirits of all kinds, under the direction of the Spirit of Truth, came to all parts of the world and to all peoples, to reveal the laws of the spiritual world of which Jesus had postponed the teaching, and to lay, by Spiritism, the foundations of the new social order. When all the foundations have been laid, then the Messiah will come who must crown the edifice and preside over the reorganization with the help of the elements that will have been prepared.
But don't think that this Messiah is alone; there will be several who will embrace, by the position that each will occupy in the world, the great parts of the social order: politics, religion, legislation, in order to bring them together towards the same goal.
Besides the principal Messiahs, superior Spirits will arise in all parts, and like lieutenants of the same faith and the same desire, will act in common accord under the impulse of the higher thought.
That is how the harmony of the whole will gradually be established; but certain events must take place first.
Lacordaire, Paris, 1862.
[1] Communications of this kind are innumerable; we only report a few here, and if we are publishing them today, it is because the time has come to bring the fact to the knowledge of all, and that it is useful, for the spiritualists, to know in which direction the majority of Spirits stand.
Marked Spirits
5. - There are many superior Spirits who will contribute mightily to the reorganizing work, but not all are Messiahs. They must be distinguished as:
1st – Superior Spirits that act freely and out of their own will;
2nd – Marked Spirits, that is, designated for an important mission. They have a luminous radiance that is the characteristic sign of their superiority. They are chosen from among the Spirits capable of fulfilling it; however, since they have their free will, they can fail for lack of courage, perseverance or faith, and they are not immune to accidents that can shorten their days. But as the designs of God are not at the mercy of one man, what one does not do, another is called to do. That is why there are many called, and few chosen. Blessed is he who accomplishes his mission according to the views of God and without failing!
3rd – The Messiahs, superior beings who have reached the highest degree of the celestial hierarchy, after having reached a perfection that henceforth makes them infallible and above human weaknesses, even in the incarnation. Admitted to the counsels of the Highest, they directly receive his word, that they responsible for transmitting and having fulfilled. True representatives of the Divinity, of which they have the mind, it is among them that God chooses his special envoys, or his Messiahs, for the great general missions, whose details of execution are entrusted to other incarnate or discarnate Spirits, acting on their orders and under their inspiration.
Spirits of these three categories must contribute to the great regenerative movement that is taking place. (Somnambulistic ecstasy, Paris, 1866.)
6. - I come, my friends, to confirm the hope of the high destinies that await Spiritism. This glorious future that we announce to you will be accomplished by the arrival of a superior Spirit who will summarize, in the essence of his perfection, all the old and new doctrines and who will, by the authority of his word, rally men to the new beliefs. Like the rising sun, he will dispel all the obscurities piled up on the eternal truth by fanaticism and non-observance of the precepts of Christ.
The star of the new belief, the future Messiah, grows in the shadows; but already his enemies are trembling, and the virtues of heavens are shaken.
You ask if this new Messiah is the very person of Jesus of Nazareth? What does it matter to you if it's the same thought that drives them both! It is imperfections that divide the Spirits; but when the perfections are equal, nothing distinguishes them; they form collective units without losing their individuality.
The beginning of all things is obscure and vulgar; what is small grows; our manifestations, greeted at first by disdain, violence or the banal indifference of idle curiosity, will spread waves of light on the blind and will regenerate them.
All great events have had their prophets, both praised and unrecognized. As Moses led the Hebrews, we will lead you to the promised land of intelligence.
Striking similarity! The same phenomena are produced, no longer in the material sense, intended to strike childish men, but in its spiritual sense. The children have become adults; as the goal raises, the examples no longer appeal to the eyes; Aaron's rod is broken, and the only transformation we make is that of your hearts being attentive to the cry of love that, from heaven, echoes on Earth.
Spiritists! Understand the seriousness of your mission; tremble of joy, for the hour is not far off when the divine envoy will rejoice the world. Hardworking Spiritists, be blessed in your efforts, and be forgiven in your mistakes. Ignorance and turmoil still steal from you a part of the truth that only the heavenly Messenger can fully reveal. (Saint Louis, Paris, 1862).
7. - The coming of Christ has brought your Earth back to feelings that have, for a moment, subjected it to the will of God; but men, blinded by their passions, could not keep in their hearts the love of neighbor, the love of the Master of heaven. The envoy of the Almighty opened to humanity the road that leads to the blessed dwelling; but humanity has retreated from the immense step that Christ had made it take; it has fallen back into the rut of selfishness, and pride has made it forget its Creator.
God allows his word to be preached once again on earth, and you will have to glorify him, for he has been good enough to call you as the first ones to believe in what will be taught later. Rejoice, for the times are near when this word will be heard. Improve yourself by taking advantage of the teachings that he allows us to give you.
May the tree of faith, that is taking such long-lasting roots at this time, bear its fruit; may these fruits ripen as the faith that animates some of you today will ripen!
Yes, my children, the people will follow in the footsteps of the new messenger announced by Christ himself, and all will come to listen to this divine word, for they will recognize in it the language of truth and the way of salvation. God, who has allowed us to enlighten you, to support your walk to this day, will still allow us to give you the instructions you need.
But you, the first favored by the belief, you also have your mission to accomplish; you will have to bring those of you who still doubt these God allowed manifestations; you will have to shine onto their eyes the benefits of what has consoled you so much; for in your days of sadness and dejection, hasn’t your belief sustained you; hasn’t that given birth to that hope in your heart without which you would be left discouraged?
This is what must be shared with those that do not believe yet, not by untimely haste, but with caution and without clashing head-on with prejudices that have long rooted in them. You don't pull up an old tree all at once, like a shoot of grass, but gradually.
Sow now what you want to harvest later; sow the grain that will come to bear fruit on the ground that you will have prepared and from which you will collect the fruits, for God will take into account what you have done for your brothers. (Lamennais, Le Havre, 1862).
Future of Spiritism
8. - After its first stages, Spiritism seasoned and freeing itself more and more from the obscurities that served it as swaddling clothes, will soon make its appearance on the great stage of the world.
Events move with such a speed that one cannot ignore the powerful intervention of the Spirits who preside over the destinies of Earth. There is something like an intimate thrill in the flanks of your globe, in childbirth; new races from the higher spheres are swirling around you, awaiting the hour of their messianic incarnation, and preparing themselves for it by studying the vast questions that are stirring the Earth today.
We see on all sides signs of decrepitude on uses and legislation that are no longer in line with modern ideas. The old beliefs that have been dormant for centuries seem to be awakening from their secular inertia and are astonished to see themselves grappling with new beliefs, emanating from the philosophers and thinkers of this as well as the past century. The degraded system of a world that was only a simulacrum collapses before the dawn of the real world, of the new world.
The law of solidarity, of the family, passed to the inhabitants of the States and then conquered the whole earth; but this law, so wise, so progressive, in a word, this divine law, was not limited to this unique result; infiltrating the hearts of great men, she taught them that, not only was it necessary for the great improvement of your world, but that it extended to all the worlds of your solar system, to extend from there to all the worlds of the immensity! This law of universal solidarity is beautiful, because this sublime maxim is in that law: all for one, one for all.
Here, my children, is the true law of Spiritism, the true conquest of a near future. So, walk on your path composedly, without worrying about the mockery of some and the crushed self-love of others. We are and will remain with you, under the aegis of the Spirit of Truth, my master and yours. (Erastus, Paris, 1863).
9. – Every day Spiritism extends the circle of its moralizing teaching. Its great voice echoed from one end to the other of Earth. The Society was moved by it, followers and adversaries came out of it. Keen followers, skillful adversaries, but whose very skill and fame served the cause they wanted to fight, calling the gaze of the masses on the new doctrine, and inviting them to know the regenerative teachings advocated by its followers, and that they derided and ridiculed.
Contemplate the work accomplished and enjoy the result! But what unspeakable effervescence will occur among the peoples, when the names of their most beloved writers will join the most obscure or less known names of those who huddle around the flag of truth!
See what the work of a few isolated groups has produced, most of them hampered by intrigue and unwillingness, and imagine the revolution that will take place when all the members of the great Spiritist family will hold hands, and will declare, with their heads up and proud hearts, the sincerity of their faith and belief in the reality of the teaching of the Spirits.
The masses love progress, they seek it, but they fear it. The unknown inspires a secret fear in the ignorant children of a society lulled by prejudices, that tries its first steps in the path of reality and moral progress. The great words of liberty, progress, love, and charity strike the people without moving them; they often prefer their present and mediocre state to a better, but unknown future.
The reason for this dread of the future lies in the ignorance of moral sentiment in many, and intelligent sentiment in others. But it is not true, as several renowned philosophers have said, that a false conception of the origin of things has caused people to err, as I have said myself - why would I blush to say it; couldn’t I have been wrong? - it is not true, I used to say, that humanity is inherently bad; no, by perfecting its intelligence, it will not give a more extensive development to its evil dualities. Get rid of these hopeless thoughts that are based on a false knowledge of the human mind.
Humanity is not bad by nature; but it is ignorant, and therefore, more apt to allow itself to be ruled by its passions. It is progressive and must progress to reach its destinies; enlighten it; show its hidden enemies in the shadows; develop its moral essence, which is innate, and only dozes off under the influence of bad instincts, and you will rekindle the spark of eternal truth, of the eternal prescience of the infinite, of the beautiful and of the good that forever resides in the heart of man, even in the most perverse one.
You the children of a new doctrine, unite your forces; may the divine breath and the help of the good Spirits sustain you, and you will do great things. You will have the glory of having laid the foundations of imperishable principles from which your descendants will reap the fruits. (Montaigne, Paris, 1865).
8. - After its first stages, Spiritism seasoned and freeing itself more and more from the obscurities that served it as swaddling clothes, will soon make its appearance on the great stage of the world.
Events move with such a speed that one cannot ignore the powerful intervention of the Spirits who preside over the destinies of Earth. There is something like an intimate thrill in the flanks of your globe, in childbirth; new races from the higher spheres are swirling around you, awaiting the hour of their messianic incarnation, and preparing themselves for it by studying the vast questions that are stirring the Earth today.
We see on all sides signs of decrepitude on uses and legislation that are no longer in line with modern ideas. The old beliefs that have been dormant for centuries seem to be awakening from their secular inertia and are astonished to see themselves grappling with new beliefs, emanating from the philosophers and thinkers of this as well as the past century. The degraded system of a world that was only a simulacrum collapses before the dawn of the real world, of the new world.
The law of solidarity, of the family, passed to the inhabitants of the States and then conquered the whole earth; but this law, so wise, so progressive, in a word, this divine law, was not limited to this unique result; infiltrating the hearts of great men, she taught them that, not only was it necessary for the great improvement of your world, but that it extended to all the worlds of your solar system, to extend from there to all the worlds of the immensity! This law of universal solidarity is beautiful, because this sublime maxim is in that law: all for one, one for all.
Here, my children, is the true law of Spiritism, the true conquest of a near future. So, walk on your path composedly, without worrying about the mockery of some and the crushed self-love of others. We are and will remain with you, under the aegis of the Spirit of Truth, my master and yours. (Erastus, Paris, 1863).
9. – Every day Spiritism extends the circle of its moralizing teaching. Its great voice echoed from one end to the other of Earth. The Society was moved by it, followers and adversaries came out of it. Keen followers, skillful adversaries, but whose very skill and fame served the cause they wanted to fight, calling the gaze of the masses on the new doctrine, and inviting them to know the regenerative teachings advocated by its followers, and that they derided and ridiculed.
Contemplate the work accomplished and enjoy the result! But what unspeakable effervescence will occur among the peoples, when the names of their most beloved writers will join the most obscure or less known names of those who huddle around the flag of truth!
See what the work of a few isolated groups has produced, most of them hampered by intrigue and unwillingness, and imagine the revolution that will take place when all the members of the great Spiritist family will hold hands, and will declare, with their heads up and proud hearts, the sincerity of their faith and belief in the reality of the teaching of the Spirits.
The masses love progress, they seek it, but they fear it. The unknown inspires a secret fear in the ignorant children of a society lulled by prejudices, that tries its first steps in the path of reality and moral progress. The great words of liberty, progress, love, and charity strike the people without moving them; they often prefer their present and mediocre state to a better, but unknown future.
The reason for this dread of the future lies in the ignorance of moral sentiment in many, and intelligent sentiment in others. But it is not true, as several renowned philosophers have said, that a false conception of the origin of things has caused people to err, as I have said myself - why would I blush to say it; couldn’t I have been wrong? - it is not true, I used to say, that humanity is inherently bad; no, by perfecting its intelligence, it will not give a more extensive development to its evil dualities. Get rid of these hopeless thoughts that are based on a false knowledge of the human mind.
Humanity is not bad by nature; but it is ignorant, and therefore, more apt to allow itself to be ruled by its passions. It is progressive and must progress to reach its destinies; enlighten it; show its hidden enemies in the shadows; develop its moral essence, which is innate, and only dozes off under the influence of bad instincts, and you will rekindle the spark of eternal truth, of the eternal prescience of the infinite, of the beautiful and of the good that forever resides in the heart of man, even in the most perverse one.
You the children of a new doctrine, unite your forces; may the divine breath and the help of the good Spirits sustain you, and you will do great things. You will have the glory of having laid the foundations of imperishable principles from which your descendants will reap the fruits. (Montaigne, Paris, 1865).
Stars will fall from the skyes
10. - Oh! how beautiful is the light of the Lord! What a prodigious brilliance its rays spread! Holy Sion![1] Blessed are those who sit in the shade of your tabernacles! Oh! What harmony is comparable to the spheres of the Lord! Incomprehensible beauty to mortal eyes, unable to see anything that does not belong to the domain of the senses!
A splendid dawn of a new day, Spiritism comes to enlighten men. Already stronger lights appear on the horizon; already the Spirits of darkness, seeing that their empire is going to crumble, are in the grip of powerless rages, and throw their last strengths into infernal plots. Already the radiant angel of progress is spreading its white variegated wings; already the virtues of heavens are shaken, and the stars fall from their dome, but transformed into pure Spirits, who come, as the Scriptures announces in figurative language, to proclaim the advent of the Son of the Man in the ruins of the old world.
Blessed are those whose hearts are prepared to receive the divine seed that the Spirits of the Lord throw to all winds of heaven! Blessed are those who cultivate, in the sanctuary of their soul, the virtues that Christ came to teach them, and that he still teaches by the voice of the mediums, that is, the instruments that repeat the words of the Spirits! Blessed are the righteous, for the kingdom of heaven will be theirs!
O my friends! continue to walk in the path that has been laid out for you; do not be obstacles to the truth that wishes to enlighten the world; no, be zealous and tireless propagators, like the first apostles, who had no roof to shelter their heads, but who marched to the conquest that Jesus had begun; who walked without ulterior motive, without hesitation; who sacrificed everything, to the last drop of their blood, for Christianity to be established.
You, my friends, do not need such great sacrifices; no, God is not asking you for your life, but your heart, your good will. Therefore, be zealous, and walk united and confident, repeating the divine word: “My Father, your will be done and not mine!” (Dupuch, Bishop of Algiers, Bordeaux, 1863.)
[1] Nicholas of Sion was a 6th-century Christian saint from Pharroa, in Lycia (Wikipedia, T.N.)
A splendid dawn of a new day, Spiritism comes to enlighten men. Already stronger lights appear on the horizon; already the Spirits of darkness, seeing that their empire is going to crumble, are in the grip of powerless rages, and throw their last strengths into infernal plots. Already the radiant angel of progress is spreading its white variegated wings; already the virtues of heavens are shaken, and the stars fall from their dome, but transformed into pure Spirits, who come, as the Scriptures announces in figurative language, to proclaim the advent of the Son of the Man in the ruins of the old world.
Blessed are those whose hearts are prepared to receive the divine seed that the Spirits of the Lord throw to all winds of heaven! Blessed are those who cultivate, in the sanctuary of their soul, the virtues that Christ came to teach them, and that he still teaches by the voice of the mediums, that is, the instruments that repeat the words of the Spirits! Blessed are the righteous, for the kingdom of heaven will be theirs!
O my friends! continue to walk in the path that has been laid out for you; do not be obstacles to the truth that wishes to enlighten the world; no, be zealous and tireless propagators, like the first apostles, who had no roof to shelter their heads, but who marched to the conquest that Jesus had begun; who walked without ulterior motive, without hesitation; who sacrificed everything, to the last drop of their blood, for Christianity to be established.
You, my friends, do not need such great sacrifices; no, God is not asking you for your life, but your heart, your good will. Therefore, be zealous, and walk united and confident, repeating the divine word: “My Father, your will be done and not mine!” (Dupuch, Bishop of Algiers, Bordeaux, 1863.)
[1] Nicholas of Sion was a 6th-century Christian saint from Pharroa, in Lycia (Wikipedia, T.N.)
The dead will come out of their graves
11. - Peoples, listen! … A great voice is heard from one end of the world to the other; it is that of the precursor, announcing the coming of the Spirit of Truth who comes to straighten the tortuous ways where the human spirit strayed in false sophisms. It is the angel's trumpet coming to wake up the dead to come out of their graves.
You have often read the revelation of John, and you have asked yourself: But what does he mean? How then will these amazing things be accomplished? And your reason, mixed up, sank into a dark maze from which it could not come out, because you wanted to take literally what was rendered in a figurative style.
Now that the time has come for some of those predictions to be fulfilled, you will gradually learn to read in this book where the beloved disciple recorded the things he was given to see. However, bad translations and misinterpretations will still bother you a bit, but with perseverance you will come to understand what, until now, had been closed to you.
Understand only that, if God allows the veils to be lifted earlier for some, it is not so that this knowledge remains sterile in their hands, but so that, tireless pioneers, they clear the wasteland; it is so that they may fertilize, with the sweet dew of charity, hearts dried up by pride and hindered by worldly embarrassments, where the good seed of the word of life has not yet been able to sprout.
Alas! How many see human life as having to be a perpetual party, where distractions and pleasures follow one another without interruption! They invent a thousand things to charm their leisure time; they cultivate their mind, because it is one of the brilliant facets used to bring out their personality; they are like those ephemeral bubbles reflecting the colors of the prism, and swaying in space: they attract attention for a time, then you look for them… they have disappeared without a trace. In the same way these worldly souls shone with a borrowed brilliance, during their short earthly passage, from which nothing useful was taken, neither for their fellows nor for themselves.
You who know the value of time, you to whom the laws of the eternal wisdom are gradually revealed, be docile instruments in the hands of the Almighty, serving to bring light and fruitfulness to these souls of whom it is said : "They have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear," because having turned away from the torch of truth, and having listened to the voice of the passions, their light is only darkness in which the Spirit cannot recognize the road that leads him towards God.
Spiritism is that powerful voice that is already echoing to the ends of Earth; all will hear it. Happy are those who, not voluntarily covering their ears, will come out of their selfishness, as the dead would do from their tombs, and henceforth accomplish the acts of true life, that of the Spirit freeing himself from the shackles of matter, as did Lazarus from his shroud, to the voice of the Savior.
Spiritism sets the solemn hour of the awakening of the intelligences, who used their free will to linger around in the muddy paths whose deleterious miasmas have infected the soul with a slow poison that gives it the appearance of death. The Heavenly Father has pity on these prodigal children, fallen so low that they do not even think of the paternal home, and it is for them that he allows these brilliant manifestations, intended to convince that beyond this world of perishable forms, the soul retains the memory, the power and the immortality.
May these poor slaves of matter, shake off the torpor that has prevented them from seeing and understanding until this day; may they study with sincerity, so that the divine light, penetrating their soul, cast out doubt and skepticism. (John, the Evangelist, Paris, 1866).
You have often read the revelation of John, and you have asked yourself: But what does he mean? How then will these amazing things be accomplished? And your reason, mixed up, sank into a dark maze from which it could not come out, because you wanted to take literally what was rendered in a figurative style.
Now that the time has come for some of those predictions to be fulfilled, you will gradually learn to read in this book where the beloved disciple recorded the things he was given to see. However, bad translations and misinterpretations will still bother you a bit, but with perseverance you will come to understand what, until now, had been closed to you.
Understand only that, if God allows the veils to be lifted earlier for some, it is not so that this knowledge remains sterile in their hands, but so that, tireless pioneers, they clear the wasteland; it is so that they may fertilize, with the sweet dew of charity, hearts dried up by pride and hindered by worldly embarrassments, where the good seed of the word of life has not yet been able to sprout.
Alas! How many see human life as having to be a perpetual party, where distractions and pleasures follow one another without interruption! They invent a thousand things to charm their leisure time; they cultivate their mind, because it is one of the brilliant facets used to bring out their personality; they are like those ephemeral bubbles reflecting the colors of the prism, and swaying in space: they attract attention for a time, then you look for them… they have disappeared without a trace. In the same way these worldly souls shone with a borrowed brilliance, during their short earthly passage, from which nothing useful was taken, neither for their fellows nor for themselves.
You who know the value of time, you to whom the laws of the eternal wisdom are gradually revealed, be docile instruments in the hands of the Almighty, serving to bring light and fruitfulness to these souls of whom it is said : "They have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear," because having turned away from the torch of truth, and having listened to the voice of the passions, their light is only darkness in which the Spirit cannot recognize the road that leads him towards God.
Spiritism is that powerful voice that is already echoing to the ends of Earth; all will hear it. Happy are those who, not voluntarily covering their ears, will come out of their selfishness, as the dead would do from their tombs, and henceforth accomplish the acts of true life, that of the Spirit freeing himself from the shackles of matter, as did Lazarus from his shroud, to the voice of the Savior.
Spiritism sets the solemn hour of the awakening of the intelligences, who used their free will to linger around in the muddy paths whose deleterious miasmas have infected the soul with a slow poison that gives it the appearance of death. The Heavenly Father has pity on these prodigal children, fallen so low that they do not even think of the paternal home, and it is for them that he allows these brilliant manifestations, intended to convince that beyond this world of perishable forms, the soul retains the memory, the power and the immortality.
May these poor slaves of matter, shake off the torpor that has prevented them from seeing and understanding until this day; may they study with sincerity, so that the divine light, penetrating their soul, cast out doubt and skepticism. (John, the Evangelist, Paris, 1866).
The final judgement
12. - Jesus will come in the clouds to judge the living and the dead.
Yes, God will send him, as he sends him every day, to render this sovereign justice in the immense plains of the ether. Ah! When Saint James was cast down from the top of the tower of the temple of Jerusalem, by the pontiffs and the Pharisees, for having announced to the assembled people this truth taught by Christ and his apostles, remember that at this word of the just, the multitude bowed down, crying: Glory to Jesus, son of God, in the highest heaven!
He will come in the clouds to hold his formidable foundations: isn’t this telling you, O Spiritists, that he is perpetually coming to receive the souls of those who return to erraticity? Go to my right, said the shepherd to his sheep, you who have done well according to my Father's views, go to my right and go up to him; as for you, who have let yourselves be dominated by the passions of Earth, go to my left, you are doomed.
Yes, you are condemned to begin the journey again, in a new earthly existence, until you are done with matters and iniquities, and you have finally driven out the impurity that dominates you. Yes, you are doomed; therefore, go and return to the hell of human life, while your brothers on my right will rush towards the higher spheres, from which the passions of Earth are excluded, until the day when they enter the kingdom of my Father by a greater purification.
Yes, Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead; the living: the righteous, those on his right hand side; the dead: the unclean, those on his left side; and when the wings sprout from the righteous, matter will take hold of the unclean again; and this, until they emerge victorious from the fights against impurity, and finally, forever strip themselves of their human chrysalises.
O Spiritists! You see that your doctrine is the only one that consoles, the only one that gives hope, by not condemning to eternal disgrace those unfortunate ones who have behaved badly for a few minutes of eternity; the only one, finally, that predicts the true end of Earth by the gradual elevation of the Spirits.
So, progress by stripping the old man, to enter the region of the beloved Spirits of God. (Erastus, Paris, 1861).
13. - Society in general, or to put it better, the reunion of beings, both incarnate and discarnate, who make up the floating population of a world, in a word, a humanity, is no other than a great collective child who, like any being endowed with life, goes through all the successive phases that takes place in each one, from birth to the most advanced age; and just as the development of the individual is accompanied by certain physical and intellectual disturbances that are more particularly incumbent on certain periods of life, humanity has its diseases of growth, its moral and intellectual upheavals. It is one of those great eras that end one period and begin another that you are given to witness. Participating at the same time in the things of the past and those of the future, in the systems that crumble and in the truths that are founded, be careful, my friends, to put yourselves on the side of solidity, of progress and logic, if you don't want to be pushed astray, abandoning the sumptuous palace in appearance, but vacillating in its foundation, and that will soon bury under their ruins the unfortunate ones, foolish enough not to want to leave them, in spite of the warnings of all kinds lavished upon them.
All fronts darken, and the apparent calm you enjoy only serves to accumulate more destructive elements. Sometimes the storm that destroys the fruit of a year's sweats is preceded by precursors that allow the necessary precautions to be taken to avoid devastation, as much as possible. This time it will not be so. The darkened sky will seem to brighten; the clouds will flee; then, suddenly, all the long-suppressed fury will be unleashed with unheard-of violence.
Woe to those who will not have prepared a shelter! Woe to the swaggers who will face danger unarmed and their breasts uncovered! Woe to those who will face the peril with a cup in hand! What a terrible disappointment awaits them! They will be struck before the cup they hold reaches their lips!
So, get to work, Spiritists, and don't forget that you must be all prudence and all foresight. You have a shield, know how to use it; an anchor of salvation, do not neglect it. (Clélie Duplantie, Paris, 1867).
Yes, God will send him, as he sends him every day, to render this sovereign justice in the immense plains of the ether. Ah! When Saint James was cast down from the top of the tower of the temple of Jerusalem, by the pontiffs and the Pharisees, for having announced to the assembled people this truth taught by Christ and his apostles, remember that at this word of the just, the multitude bowed down, crying: Glory to Jesus, son of God, in the highest heaven!
He will come in the clouds to hold his formidable foundations: isn’t this telling you, O Spiritists, that he is perpetually coming to receive the souls of those who return to erraticity? Go to my right, said the shepherd to his sheep, you who have done well according to my Father's views, go to my right and go up to him; as for you, who have let yourselves be dominated by the passions of Earth, go to my left, you are doomed.
Yes, you are condemned to begin the journey again, in a new earthly existence, until you are done with matters and iniquities, and you have finally driven out the impurity that dominates you. Yes, you are doomed; therefore, go and return to the hell of human life, while your brothers on my right will rush towards the higher spheres, from which the passions of Earth are excluded, until the day when they enter the kingdom of my Father by a greater purification.
Yes, Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead; the living: the righteous, those on his right hand side; the dead: the unclean, those on his left side; and when the wings sprout from the righteous, matter will take hold of the unclean again; and this, until they emerge victorious from the fights against impurity, and finally, forever strip themselves of their human chrysalises.
O Spiritists! You see that your doctrine is the only one that consoles, the only one that gives hope, by not condemning to eternal disgrace those unfortunate ones who have behaved badly for a few minutes of eternity; the only one, finally, that predicts the true end of Earth by the gradual elevation of the Spirits.
So, progress by stripping the old man, to enter the region of the beloved Spirits of God. (Erastus, Paris, 1861).
13. - Society in general, or to put it better, the reunion of beings, both incarnate and discarnate, who make up the floating population of a world, in a word, a humanity, is no other than a great collective child who, like any being endowed with life, goes through all the successive phases that takes place in each one, from birth to the most advanced age; and just as the development of the individual is accompanied by certain physical and intellectual disturbances that are more particularly incumbent on certain periods of life, humanity has its diseases of growth, its moral and intellectual upheavals. It is one of those great eras that end one period and begin another that you are given to witness. Participating at the same time in the things of the past and those of the future, in the systems that crumble and in the truths that are founded, be careful, my friends, to put yourselves on the side of solidity, of progress and logic, if you don't want to be pushed astray, abandoning the sumptuous palace in appearance, but vacillating in its foundation, and that will soon bury under their ruins the unfortunate ones, foolish enough not to want to leave them, in spite of the warnings of all kinds lavished upon them.
All fronts darken, and the apparent calm you enjoy only serves to accumulate more destructive elements. Sometimes the storm that destroys the fruit of a year's sweats is preceded by precursors that allow the necessary precautions to be taken to avoid devastation, as much as possible. This time it will not be so. The darkened sky will seem to brighten; the clouds will flee; then, suddenly, all the long-suppressed fury will be unleashed with unheard-of violence.
Woe to those who will not have prepared a shelter! Woe to the swaggers who will face danger unarmed and their breasts uncovered! Woe to those who will face the peril with a cup in hand! What a terrible disappointment awaits them! They will be struck before the cup they hold reaches their lips!
So, get to work, Spiritists, and don't forget that you must be all prudence and all foresight. You have a shield, know how to use it; an anchor of salvation, do not neglect it. (Clélie Duplantie, Paris, 1867).
Appreciation of the book Genesis
Paris, December 18th, 1867 – medium Mr. Desliens
This work is timely, in the sense that the doctrine is well posed today in the moral and religious relation. Whichever direction it takes now, it has precedents too ingrained in the hearts of its followers, for nobody to fear that it is deviating from its route.
What was most important to satisfy were the aspirations of the soul; it was to make up for the void left in souls by doubt, vacillating in their faith. This first mission is now accomplished. Spiritism is currently entering a new phase; to the attribute of consoler, it adds that of instructor and director of the mind, in science and philosophy as well as in morality. Charity, its unshakeable foundation, has made it the bond of tender souls; science, solidarity, progress, the liberal spirit will make it the link between strong souls. It conquered the friendly hearts with the weapons of meekness; virile today, it is to virile intelligences that it addresses himself. Materialists, positivists, all those who, for any reason whatsoever, have strayed from a spirituality whose imperfections their intelligence showed them, will find new food for their insatiability there. Science is their matron, but one discovery calls for another, and man ceaselessly advances with it, from desire to desire, never finding complete satisfaction. It is because the Spirit also has its needs; it is because the most atheistic soul has secret, unconfessed aspirations, and these aspirations claim their food.
Religion, antagonist of science, answered through mystery to all the questions of skeptical philosophy. It violated the laws of nature and tortured them at her whim, to extract a lame explanation of its teachings. You, on the contrary, you sacrifice to science; you accept all its teachings without exception, and you open horizons for science that it supposed to be impenetrable. Such will be the effect of this new work; it can only reassure the foundations of the Spiritist belief in the hearts that already possess it and will take a step forward towards unity with all dissidents, except, however, with those who are so by interest or self-esteem; these see it with spite, on its more and more unshakeable bases, that leaves them behind and pushes them back into the shadows. There was little or no common ground where one could meet them; today, materialism elbows you everywhere, because being on its ground, you will not be less at home, and materialism will not be able to help it but get to know the guests that the Spiritist philosophy brings to it. It is an instrument with a double effect: a shovel, a mine that still overturns some of the ruins of the past, and a trowel that builds for the future. The question of origin that relates to Genesis is a burning question for all; a book written on this subject must, therefore, interest all serious minds. With this book, as I said, Spiritism enters a new phase and this will prepare the way for the phase that will open later, because everything must come in its time. Anticipating the right moment is as bad as letting it slip away.
St. Louis
This work is timely, in the sense that the doctrine is well posed today in the moral and religious relation. Whichever direction it takes now, it has precedents too ingrained in the hearts of its followers, for nobody to fear that it is deviating from its route.
What was most important to satisfy were the aspirations of the soul; it was to make up for the void left in souls by doubt, vacillating in their faith. This first mission is now accomplished. Spiritism is currently entering a new phase; to the attribute of consoler, it adds that of instructor and director of the mind, in science and philosophy as well as in morality. Charity, its unshakeable foundation, has made it the bond of tender souls; science, solidarity, progress, the liberal spirit will make it the link between strong souls. It conquered the friendly hearts with the weapons of meekness; virile today, it is to virile intelligences that it addresses himself. Materialists, positivists, all those who, for any reason whatsoever, have strayed from a spirituality whose imperfections their intelligence showed them, will find new food for their insatiability there. Science is their matron, but one discovery calls for another, and man ceaselessly advances with it, from desire to desire, never finding complete satisfaction. It is because the Spirit also has its needs; it is because the most atheistic soul has secret, unconfessed aspirations, and these aspirations claim their food.
Religion, antagonist of science, answered through mystery to all the questions of skeptical philosophy. It violated the laws of nature and tortured them at her whim, to extract a lame explanation of its teachings. You, on the contrary, you sacrifice to science; you accept all its teachings without exception, and you open horizons for science that it supposed to be impenetrable. Such will be the effect of this new work; it can only reassure the foundations of the Spiritist belief in the hearts that already possess it and will take a step forward towards unity with all dissidents, except, however, with those who are so by interest or self-esteem; these see it with spite, on its more and more unshakeable bases, that leaves them behind and pushes them back into the shadows. There was little or no common ground where one could meet them; today, materialism elbows you everywhere, because being on its ground, you will not be less at home, and materialism will not be able to help it but get to know the guests that the Spiritist philosophy brings to it. It is an instrument with a double effect: a shovel, a mine that still overturns some of the ruins of the past, and a trowel that builds for the future. The question of origin that relates to Genesis is a burning question for all; a book written on this subject must, therefore, interest all serious minds. With this book, as I said, Spiritism enters a new phase and this will prepare the way for the phase that will open later, because everything must come in its time. Anticipating the right moment is as bad as letting it slip away.
St. Louis
Bibliography
Summary of the Spiritist doctrine, by Florent Loth, d’Amiens[1]This book, that we were only able to announce in our last number, is a summary of the most essential principles of the Spiritist doctrine; it consists mainly of textual quotations borrowed from fundamental works, and of examples taken from Heaven and Hell, capable of giving a more just, more rational, more striking idea, about the consequences of the way in which one uses life, and above all more in conformity with the justice of God than the doctrine of the eternal flames. The author does not make his book a matter of self-esteem or interest; a fervent and devoted Spiritist, he published it with a view to mostly propagate the doctrine in the countryside of his department; the modesty of his views does not prevent this little book from being very useful elsewhere.
Here is the report that the Journal d'Amiens gave of this pamphlet on December 29th, 1867. This is followed by a letter about this review, from Mr. Loth to the author of the article, that the same newspaper published in its January 17th issue.
Here is the report that the Journal d'Amiens gave of this pamphlet on December 29th, 1867. This is followed by a letter about this review, from Mr. Loth to the author of the article, that the same newspaper published in its January 17th issue.
[1] 150-page small in-8 ° brochure, price 1.25 francs - By post, 1.50 francs - Amiens, at the main booksellers. It can also be obtained at the office of the Spiritist Review.
“Summary of the Spiritist Doctrine
Here is a rather curious little book, written by a villager from Saint-Sauflieu. It is true that the author lived in Paris for a long time, and that it was in that city that he was able to get in touch with the apostles of Spiritism. Since we are interested in all the publications in our country, we wanted to get acquainted with this work. We were told that the work by Mr. Florent Loth was blacklisted in the neighboring municipalities of his village; this news piqued our curiosity, and we decided to read the Abrégé de la Doctrine Spirite. We love the forbidden fruit so much.
As for ourselves, who have no interest in blaming or in approving the work of the author, we will say frankly, to put ourselves at ease, that we do not believe in Spiritism, that we do not give any credit to the turning or talking tables, because our reason is unwilling to admit that material objects can be endowed with the slightest intelligence. We do not believe either in the gift of second sight, or to put it better, in the ability to see through thick walls, or to distinguish at great distances what is happening far away, that is, at several hundred leagues. Finally, to continue our preliminary confessions, we declare that we have no faith in the Spirits of the ghosts, and that man, somewhat inspired, does not have the power to evoke and specially to make the souls of the dead speak.
Having said that, to clear the field of anything that is not within our scope, we recognize that Mr. Florent Loth's book is not a bad book. The moral is pure, love of neighbor is recommended, tolerance for the beliefs of others is defended, and that explains the sale of this work.
But to say that convinced believers of the Spiritist doctrine will be formed, because of the reading of the work of our compatriot, with all its parts admitted, would be to sustain a fact that will not be realized. In what seems reasonable to us, and let's slap the word, to have common sense, in the best meaning of those terms, there are some excellent things there. Thus, certain abuses are rejected with clear, spotless, and precise reasons, and if the author tries to convince, it is always by gentleness and persuasion.
So, leaving aside all that relates to the material practices of Spiritism, practices in which we do not believe in any way, we will be able to derive from reading the book in question very good notions of morality, tolerance, and love for the neighbor. From these points of view, we fully approve of Mr. Florent Loth, and we do not understand the ban launched against his pamphlet.
So, leaving aside all that relates to the material practices of Spiritism, practices in which we do not believe in any way, we will be able to derive, by reading the book in question, very good notions of morality, tolerance, and love for the neighbor. From these points of view, we fully approve of Mr. Florent Loth, and we do not understand the ban launched against his pamphlet.
Will the Summary of the Spiritist Doctrine one day be defended by the congregation of the Index, whose headquarters are in Rome? This is an unresolved question, because this little book is not intended to cross our Picardy borders. If, however, this fact happened, Mr. Florent Loth would gain a notoriety he had never dreamed of for his book.
As for the physical experiences of Spiritism, we believe we should let Mr. Georges Sauton, one of our colleagues, speak here, who in La Liberté, on Wednesday, September 11th, 1867, said about a Spiritist session that had taken place in Paris, at the house of a doctor in medicine:
Doctor F… had amassed some fortune. He spends it by giving Spiritism sessions that cost him dearly in candles and mediums.
Yesterday evening, he invited the press to his monthly meeting. Those Spirits were to be questioned on the account of the Zouave Jacob and give their views on this interesting soldier. Mr. Babinet, from the Institute, - excuse me for so little! - had promised to honor the meeting with his presence; at least the host had hinted at that on the invitation letters.
Albert Brun, Victor Noir, and I went to the doctor's house. Not a word from Mr. Babinet.
Ten people around a table were spinning this piece of furniture, that turned around badly; thirty others, many of whom were decorative, looked on.
The Spirits, undoubtedly ill-disposed, had their ears pulled to speak. They scarcely deigned to imitate the cry of the saw, of the cooper and blacksmith's hammers striking the barrels or the anvil. They were asked to sing The Bearded Woman and I Have Good Tobacco, and they did not sing. They were ordered to make a pear jump in the air, and the pear did not jump.
We will add nothing to this small and witty story.
Let us end with an extract from the author's preface in which the moral part of his ideas is exposed:
Spiritism does not pretend to impose its belief; it is by persuasion alone that it hopes to arrive at its goal, that is the good of mankind. Freedom of conscience: thus, I firmly believe in the existence of the soul and its immortality; I believe in future sorrows and rewards; I believe in the manifestations of the Spirits, that is to say in the souls of those who have lived on this earth or in other worlds; I believe in it by virtue of the right that my neighbor has not to believe in it; but it is as easy for me to prove my affirmation to him, as it is impossible for him to prove his negation to me, for the negation of unbelievers is not a proof. The fact, they say, is against the known laws. Well! it is because it is based on an unknown law: we cannot know all the laws of nature, for God is great and he can do everything! ...
Malicious people spread the rumor that Spiritism was an obstacle to the progress of religion; these people, more ignorant than truly pious, not knowing the doctrine at all, can neither appreciate nor judge it.
We say, and moreover we prove, that the teaching of the Spirits is very Christian, that it is based on the immortality of the soul, the future penalties and the rewards, the justice of God and the morals of Christ.
The citation of this profession of faith by the author will be sufficient to make his point of view known. It is up to the reader to appreciate the work we are talking about.
In writing this report, we only wanted to note one fact, which is that in our province of Picardy, Spiritism had met a fervent and convinced defender.
We do not accept all the ideas of the author. We hope that, by virtue of his gentleness, he will not be angry at our honesty. As long as public peace is not disturbed by impious doctrines, as long as the social order is not shaken by subversive maxims, our fraternal tolerance will make us say what we say here of the book by Mr. Florent Loth: Peace to conscience! Respect for the beliefs of the neighbor!
Mr. A. Gabriel Rembault.”
Mr. Director,
I would be grateful if you would insert in your journal my response to Mr. Gabriel Rembault's criticism of my Summary of the Spiritist Doctrine, an article that appeared on December 29th.
I don't want to raise a controversy between Mr. Gabriel Rembault and I; I am not up to his talent as a writer, undeniable talent and that everyone recognizes in him; but allow me to demonstrate to him the reasons that made me write my book.
Before anything else, I must admit that Mr. Gabriel Rembault's criticism is courteous and polite; it emanates from a man who is convinced, but not irritated. Alas! I cannot say the same of other critics who anathematize the Spiritists with insults and disrespectful words! I do not understand this display of hatred and insults, those uncalled-for words of madmen and bastards that are thrown in our face and that only inspire a deep disgust in honest people. These intolerant men know, however, that, according to the principles of our modern society, all consciences are free and have the right to inviolable respect.
Forgive me for this digression, Mr. Director, as I forgive these deriders; I forgive them with all my heart, and I pray to God that he deigns to enlighten them on charity. They should better practice this virtue of the Gospel, towards their neighbor.
Coming back to my subject:
It is by study, meditation and specially by practice that I have acquired the proof of certain physical facts that have thus far been regarded as supernatural; it is by the universal fluid that we can explain the phenomena of magnetism. These phenomena can no longer be seriously contested today; it is thanks to the same fluid that the Spirit crosses the space, that it possesses the double sight, that it is endowed with ethereal perception, to which the opacity of bodies cannot be opposed. These phenomena are no more than momentary liberation of the Spirit. Incredulity, it is true, does not want to admit these phenomena, but authentic and numerous observations no longer allow them to be called into question.
Thus, all the wonders of which magnetism and Spiritism are accused are simply effects, whose cause lies in the laws of nature.
And since Mr. Gabriel Rembault quoted an article from the newspaper La Liberté, I in turn will allow myself to quote an extract from a brand-new book (Reason for Spiritism), the fruit of long studies by an honorable magistrate; he says on page 216:
Has God ever departed from the laws He instituted to bring His work to good ends? He who has foreseen everything, hasn’t he provided for everything? How could you pretend to claim that mediumship, the communication of Spirits, does not conform to the laws of nature of man? And if revelation is the necessary consequence of mediumship, why would you say that it is a derogation of the law of God, when it ostensibly falls within the views of Providence and of human economy?"
I stop after this quote; it is an argument in a direction opposed to the ideas of M. Gabriel Rembault, and that I submit to the appreciation of your readers.
In short, I agree with him when he says: “Peace to conscience! respect for the beliefs of the neighbor!”
"Receive, Mr. Director, my kind regards.
Florent Loth
Saint-Sauflieu, January 16th, 1868
It appears from the above account that the author of the article did not know the first word of the doctrine; he judged it, like so many others, on hearsay, without having taken the trouble to get to the bottom of the question, and to lift the cloak of ridicule with which a malicious critic, or more or less interested, took pleasure in adorning it. He acted like the monkey in the fable who rejected the nut, because he had only bitten the green shell. If he had known the first elements of it, he would not have supposed the Spiritists simple enough to believe in the intelligence of a table, any more than he himself believes in the intelligence of the pen that, in his hands, transmits the thoughts of his own mind; the Spiritists do not admit that material objects can be endowed with the least intelligence any more than he does; but like him, no doubt, they admit that these same objects can be instruments at the service of an intelligence. Mr. Lot's book did not convince him, but it showed him the seriousness and the moral tendencies of the doctrine, and that was enough to make him understand that the thing was good and deserved at least the respect due to the beliefs of the neighbor. He showed commendable impartiality by immediately inserting the correction addressed to him by the author.
What touched him were not the facts of the manifestations, of which, moreover, there isn’t much in this book, it was the liberal and anti-retrograde tendencies, the spirit of tolerance and conciliation of the doctrine; such is, in fact, the impression that it will produce on all those who take the trouble of studying it. Without accepting the experimental part that, for the Spiritists, is the material proof of the truth of their principles, they will see in it a powerful aid to the reform of the abuses against which they rise every day. Instead of fanatics of a new kind, they will see in all the Spiritists, whose number is constantly increasing, an army that fights for the same goal, with other weapons, it is true; but what do they care about the means, if the result is the same?
Their ignorance of the tendencies of Spiritism is such that they do not even know that it is a liberal doctrine, emancipating intelligence, enemy of blind faith, that proclaims freedom of conscience and free examination as an essential basis of any serious belief. They do not even know that it was the first to inscribed on its flag this immortal maxim: there is no salvation but through charity, principle of universal union and fraternity, the only one that can put an end to the antagonisms of peoples and beliefs; while they believe it to be childishly absorbed by a spinning table, they have no idea that the child has left the toy for the armor, that he has grown up and that he now embraces all the questions that concern the progress of humanity. All that is lacking in its impartial and in good faith adversaries is to get to know it, to judge it otherwise than they do. If they reflected on the speed of its propagation, that nothing could hinder, they would say to themselves that it cannot be the effect of a completely empty idea, and that if it contained only one truth, if this truth is capable of moving so many consciences, it deserves to be taken into consideration; that if it causes so much fear in certain people, it is because it is not considered there as a hopeless smoke.
The article reported above further notes an important fact, that is the ban launched against this little book, by the clergy of the countryside, served to propagate it, what could not be different, so powerful the attraction of the forbidden fruit is. The author of the article rightly thinks that, if he were condemned by the congregation of the Index that sits in Rome, he would acquire a notoriety that Mr. Lot should not have claimed. He ignores that the fundamental works of the doctrine had this privilege, and that it is through the wrath launched against the doctrine, in the name of this Index, that these books must have been sought in circles where they were unknown. People did this quite natural reflection: the louder they thunder, the more important the thing should be. They first read them out of curiosity, then, since they found good things in them, they accepted them. That is history.
Characters of the Spiritist Revelation
by Allan Kardec
Many people have considered the article published with this title in September 1867, and that once completed, forms the first chapter of Genesis, as proper to propagate the true character of the Spiritist doctrine, and at the same time, as a refutation to certain critics. They, therefore, thought that it would be useful for the propagation of the idea to spread this article. To comply with their wishes, we did a separate print of the first chapter of Genesis, in a brochure that will be delivered in the same conditions as the Simple Expression, or at 15 cents, by mail, 20 cents. Ten copies altogether, 2 francs, or 10 cents per copy; by post, 2.60 cents.
The printing of this brochure, having been delayed, is now finished.
by Allan Kardec
Many people have considered the article published with this title in September 1867, and that once completed, forms the first chapter of Genesis, as proper to propagate the true character of the Spiritist doctrine, and at the same time, as a refutation to certain critics. They, therefore, thought that it would be useful for the propagation of the idea to spread this article. To comply with their wishes, we did a separate print of the first chapter of Genesis, in a brochure that will be delivered in the same conditions as the Simple Expression, or at 15 cents, by mail, 20 cents. Ten copies altogether, 2 francs, or 10 cents per copy; by post, 2.60 cents.
The printing of this brochure, having been delayed, is now finished.
Second Edition of Genesis
The first edition of Genesis being almost sold out, the second edition is currently being printed, to which no changes have been made.
Note. - At the rate indicated in the January issue, page 31, for the postage costs of this work abroad, those of Switzerland were erroneously increased to 1 franc, according to an old rate. They are now only 60 cents.
The Thoughts of Zouave Jacob
1 volume in-12, 220 pages. Price: 2.50 francs; by post, 2.75 francs. At the publisher's, 70, rue Bonaparte, in Paris.
This number was in the printing when the book by Mr. Jacob reached us, so that we will refer the report to the next issue.
This number was in the printing when the book by Mr. Jacob reached us, so that we will refer the report to the next issue.
Psiche
Giornale di Studii Psicologici
This journal will appear on the 1st and 15th of each month, from March 1st, at Naples, 49, Cagliardi alle Pigna 2e P. Price: 6 francs per year, 3 francs for six months.
We will give more details in the next issue.
This journal will appear on the 1st and 15th of each month, from March 1st, at Naples, 49, Cagliardi alle Pigna 2e P. Price: 6 francs per year, 3 francs for six months.
We will give more details in the next issue.