The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1863

Allan Kardec

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The passage below was extracted from an article in the Écho of Sétif on July 23rd, 1863 responding to a brochure entitled Le Budget du Spiritisme which we mentioned in the last June issue of the Spiritist Review.

We did not give much attention to the issue and for a better understanding we follow the order below:


You believe in the immortality of the soul and so do I. We are in agreement on that point.
You send my soul to God after death and me too. This is the second point that we agree.
Once my soul finds God, you want it to remain with God, go to hell or finally to the purgatory. These are the only three places where you allow it to dwell. We are no longer in agreement here. I believe that God allows the soul to travel everywhere. You restrict the space to the soul and I increase it. Tell me openly and frankly if you think that your opinion is better founded than mine. Tell me why God would preclude my soul from traveling after the death of the body. Do you have any insight about this? Any proof from this type of rationale? I do not believe so. I have one: it is the rationale that I utilize from the known to the unknown. God created immutable laws that never contradict one another. I see in nature that everything moves and nothing remains still. It is God’s wish. Only this truth that I touch and feel is enough to demonstrate to me that the same happens to the globes that are not known to me. As for you, tell me why you want it to be different. If you do not contest the fact that my soul can move after the death of the body, if it is alive, if it feels, if it can communicate with something, with someone, tell me why it cannot ever communicate with your soul, still bonded to the body. Give me a reason, but a logical one otherwise I must reject it. If you say that your intelligence refuses to believe in that, it is a reason that I don’t admit because there are millions of things that your reason would refuse to believe and that, nonetheless, you will believe after you saw them. That is what St. Thomas did. I have one request only. I don’t mind what you believe and have no interest in that but I beg you to insult nobody without any need. Regardless of your merit there are people in Spiritism that are as worthy as you are. There are those who want to see, study and enlighten themselves; there are those who saw remarkable things and want to know their causes before they say anything. Well! Do as they did: Study, seek and only after you have found, give us the clear and accurate explanation of the phenomenon. That is more valuable than malicious expressions. You would have helped science to move a step forward and reassured alarmed consciences like yours. That is a nice role to play. Before I finish I have a question to Mr. Leblanc de Prébois: Has he sold his brochure or only had it published for the love of humanity?

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