The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1859

The good spirits approve what they think is good but do not praise in excess. Excessive praise, as everything else that indicates adulation, is a sign of inferiority from the part of the spirits.

 The good spirits do not praise any kind of prejudice, be it political or religious. They may not attack it suddenly since they know it may cause resistance. There is, however, a big difference between such an attitude that we may call oratory precaution and the absolute approval frequently given to the most false ideas, used by the obsessor spirits to gain the trust of those they wish to subjugate, exploring their weaknesses.

 There are people that show a peculiar behavior: find an idea, perfectly elaborated by someone else; the idea seems good to them, particularly useful; they then take over the idea, assume it as theirs, and finally have the illusion that they are the actual authors, even declaring that the idea was stolen from them.

 One day a man witnessed an experiment of electricity and tried to reproduce it. Since he did not have the necessary knowledge or the required instrumentation, the experiment failed. Then, not moving further or without trying to establish if the reason for the failure was his own lack of resources, he declared that electricity was inexistent and that he would write an article to demonstrate that. What should we think about the logic of such reasoning? Doesn’t it look like the blind person who started writing against light and vision, since he could not see? However, this is the reasoning that we find regarding Spiritism, by someone who goes as a smart person. Be it that such a person may show intelligence but his judgment may be something else. He tries to write as a medium and because he fails he concludes that mediumship does not exist. Well, if mediumship is an illusory faculty in his opinion, then the spirits may only exist in the feeble minds. What sage advice!

ALLAN KARDEC