This book is already well-known today hence it dismisses the need for an analysis. We will limit ourselves to the analysis of the author’s point of view and deduce its consequences. The author makes a touching dedication to the soul of his sister at the top; although too short it is a fundamental text because it is a profession of faith. We show the full text because it gives rise to important observations of general interest.
-o-
To the pure soul of my sister Henriette, deceased in Biblos on September 24
th, 1861
“
Do you remember, from the heart of God where you rest, those long days in Ghazir where with you alone I wrote these pages inspired by the places that we had just visited? You quietly read and copied them by my side while the ocean, the villages, the ravine and mountains unfolded under our feet. When the extenuating light replaced the innumerable army of stars your smart and kind questions, your discrete doubts redirected me to the sublime object of our common thoughts. One day you said that you would love this book first because it had been written with you and it pleased you. If sometimes you feared the narrow opinion of frivolous people you were also persuaded that the true religious souls would finally like it. Among such sweet meditations death came to hurt us both with its wing. The fever made us sleep at the same time. I woke up alone! You now sleep in Adonis’ land near the sacred Biblos and the sacred waters where the women of the old mysteries came to spill their tears. Reveal to me, oh good genie, the one that you loved, reveal to me those truths that dominate death, impede fear and almost have it loved.”
Unless one does believe that Mr. Renan is unworthy joking it is impossible that such words may come out form a pen of someone that believes in the void. We certainly see writers of elastic talent playing with the most contradictory beliefs to the point of confusing people about their own feelings. They have the skill of imitation. To them an idea does not need to be an article of faith. It is a theme that they work irrespectively if that may or may not excite imagination, but that they modify in a way or another according to the circumstances. But there are subjects that even the most hardened skeptical cannot touch without feeling sacrilege.
Such is Mr. Renan’s dedication. In similar cases a generous person abstains instead of speaking against her own convictions. This is not one of those subjects that are picked to impress people.
Considering the form of dedication as an expression of the author’s mind we find there more than a vague spiritualist thought. It is not about the soul lost in the depth of space absorbed by an eternal and blessed contemplation or in endless pain; it is not the soul of the pantheist either annihilated in the ocean of universal intelligence. It is the picture of the individual soul with the memory of its earthly affections and occupations, returning to the habitual places near the loved ones. Mr. Renan would speak like that about a myth or someone lost in the nothingness. For him the soul of his sister is by his side. She sees and inspire him and is interested in his work. There is an exchange of thoughts, a spiritual communication between them. Like many others he performs a true evocation unnoticeably. What is missing for it to become a complete Spiritist belief? Material communication. Why does Mr. Renan put it in the row of superstitious beliefs? Because he does not accept the marvelous and the supernatural. If he acknowledged, however, the real state of the soul after death as well as the properties of the perispirit he would understand that the phenomenon of the Spiritist manifestations does not distance itself from the natural laws and that for that it is not necessary to resource to the marvelous; that if the phenomenon must have been produced in all periods and with all peoples it has been the source of a number of events certainly classified as supernatural by some and by others attributed to imagination; that nobody has the power to block such manifestations and that in certain cases it is possible to provoke them.
What is it that Spiritism does other than revealing to us a new law of nature? It does to a certain order of phenomena what others did the discovery of the laws of electricity, gravitation, molecular affinity and so for. Would science then have the pretension of having said the last word about nature? Is there anything more astonishing and more wonderful than corresponding with someone five hundred miles away in a matter of minutes? Before the knowledge of the laws of electricity similar communication would have been considered magic, witchcraft, a devilish thing or miracle. A wise person that would have heard it would have undoubtedly denied it and that person would not lack excellent reasons to demonstrate that it was physically impossible. Impossible, no doubt, according to the known laws but perfectly possible according to a law that was not known yet. Why then would that be easier to communicate instantaneously with a living being whose body is five hundred miles away than with the soul of that same creature that is by our side? People will say that it is for the fact that there isn’t a body any more. But who can assure you that? It is precisely the opposite that Spiritism demonstrates, proving that if the soul no longer has a material, dense and ponderable envelope it does have a fluidic, imponderable body but that still is some kind of matter; that such envelope, invisible in its natural state, can in certain circumstances and through some sort of molecular modification, become visible like vapor in condensation. As one can see that is a very natural phenomenon whose key Spiritism provides through the law that governs the relationships between the visible and the invisible world.
Persuaded that the soul or Spirit, same thing, of this sister was close to him, Mr. Renan saw and heard her and hence he should believe that such a soul was something. If someone had come to tell him: that soul, whose presence is guessed in your mind, is not a vague and undefined creature; it is a limited, circumscribed being, with a fluidic body and invisible like the majority of the fluids; for her was only the destruction of her corporeal envelope but she kept her ethereal and indestructible cover so much so that your sister is by your side as she was when alive but without the body that was left behind, like the butterfly leaves its chrysalis; dying she had only undressed from the dense garment that can no longer serve her and that kept her on the surface of the planet, but she kept the light outfit that allows her to transport to wherever she wants and transpose distances with a lightning speed; from a moral point of view it is the same person with the same ideas and affections, the same intelligence but with new, broader and more subtle perceptions for her faculties are no longer compressed by the dense and heavy matter through which they had to communicate. Tell us if such an image is irrational at all! By proving that this is real, is Spiritism ridiculous as some pretend? What is it that Spiritism does, after all? It demonstrates in a positive way the existence of the soul. Demonstrating that she is a defined being Spiritism gives a real objective to our memories and affections. If Mr. Renan’s thoughts were not but a dream, a poetic fiction, with Spiritism such thoughts transform from fiction into reality.
In all times philosophy struggled in the search for the soul, its nature, faculties, its origin and destiny. Countless theories were created about it but the issue had always remained undefined. Why? Apparently because none of them found the knot to untangle the problem and did not resolve it satisfactorily in order to convince everyone.
Spiritism, in turn, brings that solution. It is based on experimental psychology and studies the soul both during life and after death; it isolate the soul and studies it; it follows the soul and its actions in a free state while ordinary philosophy only sees the soul united to the body, enduring the obstacles of matter, reason why cause and effect are frequently confounded. Ordinary philosophy tries to demonstrate the existence of the soul and its attributes by the use of abstract formulas, unintelligible to the crowds, whereas Spiritism provides positive proofs of its existence allowing it to be in a way tangible to the eyes and fingers. It explains that clearly and understandable by anyone. Would the simplicity of its language subtract its philosophical character as intended by certain scholars?
Nevertheless the Spiritist philosophy contains, to the eyes of many, a serious mistake expressed in a single word. The word
soul, even to the nonbelievers, has something of respectable and powerful. The word
Spirit, on the contrary, excites in them the marvelous ideas of the legends, the fairy tales, the will-o’-the-wisp
[1], the werewolf, etc. They accept in good faith that someone may believe in the soul although they don’t believe themselves but they cannot understand that someone may believe in Spirits out of common-sense. Hence the prevention that makes them look at the science as something puerile and unworthy of their attention. Judging it by the name-tag they believe it to be inseparable from magic and witchcraft.
How about this if Spiritism had abstained from using the word Spirit and if in all cases had it replaced by the word
soul their impression would have been absolutely different. Strictly speaking those profound philosophers and free-thinkers would admit, without any issue, that the
soul of a loved one hear our cries and come to inspire us but will not admit that the same happens to their
Spirit. Mr. Renan placed this at the top of his dedication: “
To the pure soul of my sister Henriette”. Couldn’t have him said this: To the pure Spirit of my sister Henriette? Now then, why has Spiritism utilized the word Spirit? Is that a mistake? Not at all and much to the contrary. First of all since the first manifestations and even before the creation of the Spiritist philosophy that word was already used. Since it was about the deduction of the moral consequences of those manifestations, it was useful to keep a usual word to show the connection between the two parts of the science. Moreover it was evident that the prevention associated to that word, circumscribed to a special group of persons, should fade away with time. The inconvenience was just momentary. Second, if on one side the word
Spirit was repulsive to some on the other it was attractive to many and should contribute more than any other to the popularization of the Doctrine. Hence it was preferable to choose the larger number rather than the smaller.
A third reason is more serious than the two preceding ones. The words
soul and
Spirit, although synonyms and employed indifferently, do not express exactly the same idea. The
soul is, as a matter of fact, the intelligent principle, a principle that is undefined and imperceptible like a thought. In our current state of knowledge we cannot conceive the
Spirit isolated from matter in absolute terms. The perispirit, although formed by a subtle matter, turns it into a limited being, defined and circumscribed to its own spiritual individuality from which we can formulate the following proposition: The union between the soul, the perispirit and the body constitute a human being; the soul and the perispirit separated from the body constitute the being called
Spirit. Consequently it is not the soul alone that shows up in the manifestations. The soul is always covered by its fluidic envelope and that envelope is the necessary intermediary through which the soul acts upon dense matter. In the apparitions it is not the soul that is seen but the perispirit, in the same way that when a person is seen it is the body that is seen instead of the thought, the force and the principle that make that body move. In short the
soul is the simple, primitive being; the
Spirit is the double being; a person is the triple being. If we add clothes to a person we have the quadruple. In the circumstance discussed here the word
Spirit is the one that best correspond to what one intends to express. One can conceive the
Spirit in one’s mind but not the soul.
Convinced that the soul of his sister saw him and understood him Mr. Renan could not suppose that she was alone in space. A simple thought should tell him that the same must happen to all those that leave Earth. The souls or Spirits spread like so in the immensity constitute the invisible world that surrounds us and in whose environment we live so that that world is not composed of fantastic creatures, gnomes, elves and demons with their horns and paws but composed of the same beings that formed earthly humanity. What is absurd about that? The visible and invisible world are therefore in perpetual contact thus resulting in a permanent reaction of one upon the other. From that a large number of phenomena enter the order of natural events. Modern Spiritism has not either discovered or invented them. It studied and observed them better. It sought their laws and for that very reason subtracted them from the order of marvelous phenomena. Facts related to the invisible world and its relationships with the visible more or less observed in all times belong to the history of all peoples and in particular to their religious history. That is why many profane as well as sacred writers refer to them in many passages. The lack of knowledge about those relationships made so many passages to remain unintelligible and interpreted so diverse and falsely. It is for the same reason that Mr. Renan was so strangely wrong with respect to the nature of the events reported in the Gospels and about the meaning of the words said by Jesus Christ, their role and true character as we will demonstrate in our next article. These thoughts to which we were led by his dedication, were necessary to appreciate the consequences that he saw from his standpoint.
[1] Something deceptive, deluding (TN)
