With such a title one reads in the Presse Littéraire from March 15th, 1864 the following article signed by Émile Deschamps:
“If man only believed in what he can understand he would not believe in God, in oneself or in the globes that flow above his head, or not even in the weed that grows below his feet. Miracles, prophecies, visions, ghosts, prognostics, presentiments, supernatural coincidences, etc.… what to think of all that? Strong minds have two words for that: lies or chance. Nothing more convenient. Superstitious people have a good way out or not. I prefer the latter than the former. In fact one does need to have imagination so that it may be sick whereas it is enough to be a voter and subscriber to a couple of technological newspapers to know a lot about that and to believe as little as Voltaire. Besides, I prefer madness to silliness, superstition to incredulity; but what I do prefer above all is truth, light and reason; I seek them with a vivid faith and a sincere heart; I examine everything and takes sides of not taking sides of anything.
Low and behold! The material and visible world is full of impenetrable mysteries, inexplicable phenomena, and wouldn’t we want the intellectual world, the life of the soul that is already a miracle, that it also had its mysteries and miracles? Why a given good thought, an eager prayer, or the other desire wouldn’t have the power of attracting events, blessings or catastrophes? Why wouldn’t there be moral causes, as there are physical causes that go unnoticed by us? And why the seeds of everything wouldn’t be fecund in the soil of hearts and souls to later on blossom out in the form of facts? When God on rare occasions and to some of his children decided to raise the tip of the eternal veil and spread upon their minds the escaping ray of the flame of prescience, let us keep from saying that it is an absurd and from saying blasphemies against the very light and truth. Here is what I have many times thought about: Certain birds and certain animals were given the capacity of foreseeing and announcing storms, floods and earthquakes. The barometers daily tell us what to expect tomorrow; couldn’t man receive sometimes some sort of sign in a dream or a vision from the Providence about some future event that may interest their life, their eternity? Hasn’t the Spirit also its own atmosphere whose variations can be presented? Finally, whatever the misery of the supernatural in this very positive century would there still be enchantment and utility in removing it, if all those that reflect its weak sparks would lead to a common focus all of those divergent rays; if each one, after having consciously interrogated their own memories, wrote in good faith and deposited in the archives the minutes of what had been experienced, of what happened of supernatural and miraculous. One day perhaps someone that would analyze symptoms and events could partially recover a lost science. In any case that person would write a book that would be worth many others.
As for myself I am apparently what is called a subject because I had all that in my life, as a matter of fact an obscure life; I am the first one to deposit my tribute here, persuaded that this internal vision always has a kind of interest. However little the wonderful that I give you is, dear readers, it took place in my real life. Since I learned to read I register everything that is supernatural in paper. These are memories of a singular kind.”
-o-
“I was traveling around France in February 1846. When I got to a rich and large city I strolled around its abundant and beautiful stores. I started raining; I took shelter in an elegant gallery; I suddenly became static; my eyes could not move away from a young lady that stood alone behind a jewelry show window. She was very beautiful but it was not her beauty that attracted me; I don’t know the mysterious interest, the inexplicable bond that dominated and attached my whole being to her. It was a sudden and profound sympathy, beyond any sensual connotation but of an irresistible power, like the unknown in everything. I was mechanically pushed towards the store by a supernatural force. I bought a few little objects and paid saying:
-Thank you Ms. Sara. The young lady looked at me a little bit surprised.
-You are surprised that I know your name, one of your names; but if you want to think about your names I can tell you all of them, without hesitation. Will you do that?
-Yes, Sir, she replied kind of smiley and shaken.
-Well then, I said, and staring at her I said you are Sara, Adèle, and Benjamine N…
- It is right, she said, and after a few seconds of astonishment she laughed out loud and I knew that she thought I might have gotten the information in the neighborhood, and I enjoyed that. But since I knew that it was not reality I was shocked by the instantaneous guess.
On the next and following days I returned to the shop. My guess work renovated every time. I asked her to think about something and almost immediately I read the quiet thought in her mind. I asked her to write a few words with a pencil and hide from me and I would write the words in the same order that she did. I read her mind like an open book but she did not read mine and that gave me the upper hand but she would impose her ideas and emotions. If she seriously thought about an object; if she repeated the words of a text to herself I suddenly guessed everything right. The mystery was between her brain and mine and not between the faculties of intuition and material things. In any case an intimate and pure relationship had been established between us.
One evening I heard a voice shouting to me: Sara is sick, very sick! I went promptly to her house; a doctor was taking care of her, waiting for a crisis. On the eve of that night Sara had returned home with a scorching fever; her delirious state remained the whole night. The doctor called me on the side and said that he was really concerned. From that room I saw Sara’s face and with my intuition overcoming the anxiety I whispered: Doctor, do you want to know what is she thinking about in her feverish sleep? Right now she believes to be in the great opera of Paris where she has never been and a dancer chops a piece of hemlock among other weeds and throw it on her saying: It is for you. The doctor thought I was crazy. A few minutes later the patient woke up with difficulty and her initial words were: Oh the opera is so nice! But why this hemlock thrown by that nymph? The doctor was astonished. Sara was treated for hemlock poison and was healed in a few days.”
-o-
The examples of telepathy are very frequent but perhaps not in such a characteristic way as in the fact above but in other forms. How many phenomena are daily presented to our eyes like conducting wires of the spiritual life and to which, however, science does not give any attention!
Not all of those that repeal it are materialistic; many admit a spiritual life but without a direct relationship with the organic life. The day in which those relationships are recognized as a physiological law an immense progress will be realized because it is only science that will have the key to a number of effects that are apparently mysterious and that it prefers to deny for not having the power of explanation with the means limited to the laws of brute matter.
Intimate relationship between the spiritual and organic life; destruction of organic life and persistence of the spiritual life after death; action of the spiritual fluid upon the body; incessant reaction of the invisible world upon the visible world and vice versa, such is the law that Spiritism comes to demonstrate and that opens up completely new horizons to science and mankind.
Which purely material law of physiology could explain phenomena of the kind referred above? In order to have Dr. Deschamps reading so clearly the thoughts of the lady there would be the need of an intermediary between both, some kind of link. After giving some thought to the article above one will recognize that such link is nothing more than the fluidic radiation that gives the spiritual sight that is not blocked by material bodies.
It is a known fact that the Spirits do not need the spoken language. They understand one another without the use of words, just by the transmission of their thoughts that is the universal language. The same sometimes happens among people because they are incarnate Spirits and for that reason enjoy in a greater or lesser degree the attributes and faculties of the Spirit.
But in that case why the young lady did not read Mr. Deschamp’s mind? Because spiritual sight was developed in one but not in the other. Does it follow that he could see everything, read on the spiritual mirrors, for example, or see from a distance like the somnambulistic? No because his faculty was developed in a special and partial way. Could he equally read everybody’s mind in the same way? He does not say so but it is unlikely because there could be fluidic relationships that facilitate such transmission of thoughts from individual to individual and the same does not exist with respect to another person. We still do know but imperfectly the properties of that universal fluid, a so powerful agent that exerts important role in the phenomena of nature. We know the principle and that is already a lot for us to understand a number of things; the details will come when time is right.
Having the above event communicated to the Parisian Society, a Spirit gave the following instruction:
Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies, July 8th 1864
Medium Mr. A. Didier
The ignorant – and there are many – become uneasy and full of doubts when they hear about the Spiritist phenomena. According to them the world is lost, the intimacy of the heart, feelings and the virginity of thoughts are all thrown out there and given away to the first that shows up. In fact, the world would change dramatically and private life would be threatened behind the each one’s personality if everybody were able to read each other’s minds. An ignorant person naively says: however justice, police persecutions, commercial operations, government trades, everything could be significantly revised, corrected, clarified, etc. with the support of such processes. Let us make no mistake. Ignorance has the particularity of completely forgetting the objective of things, throwing the simple mind into a series of contradictions. Jesus was right when said: My kingdom is not of this world – which also means that in this world things are not like in his kingdom. Spiritism, absolutely the spiritualism of Christianity, can equally tell the ambitious and terrorizing ignorance that its objective is not that of providing someone with mountains of gold; of allowing the weak to be dominated by the strong mind, joining weakness and strength in an eternally unavoidable and imminent struggle. No. The satisfactions produced by Spiritism are those of calmness, hope and faith. If it sometimes warns through presentiments, visions in the vigil or sleep state it is for the fact that the Spirits know perfectly well that a charitable and private fact will not transform the surface of the planet. Besides, if we observe the march of the phenomena evil has a minimal contribution there. Dismal science seems to be renegaded to the papyrus of the old alchemists and if Cagliostro returned he certainly wouldn’t come back with the magic wand or the enchanted flask but with his electric power, his flamboyant, spiritualist and somnambustic power that every superior being has and that simultaneously touches brain and heart. Foretelling was the greatest gift of Jesus as I said (the Spirit refers to another communication). Destined to become superiors as Spirits let us ask God for a portion of the enlightenment given to certain privileged beings like myself and that I should have spread out more humbly.
Mesmer
Observation: There isn’t a single God given faculty that cannot be abused by man due to the free-will. It is not the faculty that is bad on its own but the use that is given to that. If people were good none of those would be reason for fear because nobody would use them badly. Given the current state of inferiority of people on Earth if they were allowed to penetrate each other’s mind that would be undoubtedly dangerous since there is a lot to hide and many could abuse. But letting aside the inconveniences if that exist it is a fact that must be accepted in one way or another since one cannot suppress a natural phenomenon. But God that is sovereignly good measures the extension of that faculty by our weakness. God shows that to us from time to time to help us better understand our spiritual essence and warn us to work our betterment to have no fear of that.
