The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1863

Allan Kardec

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Extracted from the journey to the East by Mr. Lamartine



Oh, for that matter I tell you there is another question. Nobody suffers and bears the burden of nature, people and society more than I do. Nobody speaks so loudly of the social, political and religious abuse. Nobody expects a reparation to all these intolerable evils of humanity more than I do. Nobody is better convinced that such a repairer cannot be but divine! If you expect a messiah, I expect, like you, to do more than you as I wait for his appearance; like you, and more than you, I see in the shaken beliefs of mankind, in the turmoil of ideas, in the emptiness of hearts, in the depravation of the social fabric, in the repeated commotion of the political institutions, all the symptoms of disorder and consequently of a nearing and imminent renovation. I believe that God is always present at the precise moment when everything that is human is insufficient confessing humans’ inability of doing anything on their own. That is where the world is. I thus believe in a messiah; I don’t see Christ who cannot give us more wisdom, virtue and truth; I see the one that one announced by Christ that would come after him: this always an active saint Spirit, always supporting mankind, always revealing, according to the times and needs, what they need to know and do. May such a divine Spirit incarnate in a man or in a doctrine, in a fact or in an idea, it does not matter: it is always him, man or doctrine, fact or idea. I believe in him, I wait for him and more than you, madam, I invoke him! As you see we can understand one another and that your stars are no so much diverging as this conversation made us to think.” (vol. 1, page 176)

Human imagination is truer than thought. It does not always build with the dreams but proceeds by instinctive assimilations of things and images that give safer and more positive results than science and logic. With the exception of the valleys of Lebanon, the ruins of Baalbek, the waterways of the Bosphorus, Constantinople and the first signs of Damascus, from the top of the Anti-Lebanon, I have never found a place, something that at first sight was not a memory to me! Have we already lived twice or a thousand times? Isn’t our memory a foggy glass that is cleaned by the breath of God? Or do we have in our imagination the power of presenting and seeing before we do actually see? Insoluble questions!” (vol. 1, page 327).

OBSERVATION: In our preceding article about the precursors of Spiritism, we said that there are, in many authors, sparse elements of this doctrine. The fragments above are very clear without the need for us to point out their purpose. For that fact that Mr. Lamartine and others issue Spiritist ideas in their texts does it follow that they frankly adopt Spiritism? No. In most cases they did not study it or, if they did, they don’t dare to associate their already well-known names to a new flag. Their conviction, incidentally, is only partial and to them the idea is just a flash that starts from a vague intuition, not formulated and not matured in their minds; they can thus back up before a whole body from which certain parts may obfuscate them, even horrify them. To us it does not represent less an indication of a presentiment of the general idea that germinates in bright minds, what is sufficient to demonstrate to certain adversaries that these ideas do lack so much sense as they pretend to be as long as they are shared by the people whose superiority they acknowledge. By gathering and coordinating the partial idea of each one it would certainly constitute the complete Spiritist Doctrine according to the most renowned and trustworthy persons. We thank our subscriber from Joinville that kindly sent us the two passages cited above and will always be very thankful to the persons that have the kindness of sending us the result of their readings, as he did.

NOTE: We take the opportunity to thank the person that sent us a brochure entitled “Dissertation about the floods”. Since the parcel came without a letter we cannot thank directly. A glance at the brochure convinced us that the very original system of the author is in contradiction with the most common and positive data of geological science that irrespective of people say have its value. Thus, it would be easy to refute his theory by observations that are at least as rigorous as his own.





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