By Mr. Herrenschneider
2
nd Article
[1]The principle of duality with the essence of the soul and the spiritual system
In the previous article we tried to demonstrated that if Mr. Free-Thinkers wanted to carry the burden of examining the reason that allow them to say “I”, they would arrive at the knowledge of their own essence; they would be convinced that their soul is constituted in a way that it exists separately from the body as well as from its envelope and would understand erraticism when the soul, after death, it would have left its earthly matter so that their science, if based on the true principle of the constitution of the soul, would confirm the Spiritist facts instead of contradicting them so obstinately.
In fact, our notion of “self” is mainly composed of the feeling and knowledge that we have of ourselves and these two intimate phenomena, evident to everyone, peremptorily imply two distinct elements of the soul: one is passive, sensitive, extensive and solid.. The is the one that receives the impressions. The another one is active, boundless and thinks. This is the one that perceives these same impressions.
Consequently, if we have side by side with a virtual element an element that is resistant and permanent, different from our body, we cannot be dissolved by death; our immortality is demonstrated and our pre-existence is a natural consequence. Our destinies therefore are independent of our earthly dwellings that become a more or less interesting episode to thus according to the events that are associated.
Following those observations, the duality of the essence of the soul is an important principle for it does instruct us about our real and immortal life. However, it is a much more important principle because that is the only source from which we acquire full conscience of our individuality hence being the origin of our science that we cannot doubt and that is the foundation of all of our knowledge.
We all effectively begin to get to know ourselves before we are aware of our surroundings and we use our own measure to assess everything that we examine and judge. Hence, for the study of the truth, it is indispensable to observe that our knowledge comes from within ourselves to return to ourselves. It is a circle formed by ourselves and that in spite of us it fatally surrounds us.
Our contemporary philosophers unnoticeably ignore this. It is what clouds and blinds them, precluding them from looking beyond and above themselves. We will then have many occasions to attest to their blindness. Previous generations, on the contrary, knew this principle and its mysterious influence as symbolized by the
figure of a serpent folded on itself and biting the tip of its own tail. To their eyes it meant that knowledge started from a given point, goes around our intellectual horizon and returns to the starting point. Now if that starting point is elevated and the vision is sharp the horizon is broad and science is vast. If, on the contrary, the starting point is close to ground and vision is impaired, the horizon is restricted the intelligence of things is limited.
Therefore, the way we are personally impacted will be the whole and the reach of our knowledge. In this case, it becomes evident that the first condition of the individual science is the self-examination not only to assess one’s skills, defects and vices but also to get to know, from start, the intimate constitution of our being and from that elevate our spirit and form our character.
Consequently, true science is not made for each one individually. The one that aspires that science must have intelligence and education but above all must be serious, sober and prudent and not allowing oneself to be carried away by the caprices of imagination, vanity, personal interests and self-sufficiency.
Selfless love for that venerable objective is what must guide the true lover of truth; it is the strong and constant will of never stopping, strictly separating the good seed from the weed.
The more a person owns and controls oneself and is calm and noble, the more that person will be able to distinguish the paths that will lead to the truth. The more lighthearted, presumptuous or passionate, the more an impure breath will contaminate the fruits harvested from the tree of life.
Hence the first condition to get to the knowledge of things is the individual character and it is for that reason that in antiquity there were solemn trials preceding initiation. Today knowledge is spread without distinction and each one pretends to have it but at the same time truth, more than never, is well received while the strangest doctrines find numerous followers. It is necessary to be convinced that indifferent Spirits, limited by math and natural sciences, led by imagination or full of impertinence, are inadequate to the search of truth and that it would be wiser to spare such a noble task to some chosen ones. Yet more sensible dispositions manifest today by the advent of Spiritism and in fact the Spiritists are persons well cut for the search of truth because, separating from the turmoil that drags society, they renounce to the mundane vanities, to the principles of free-thinkers and to the official superstition of the known cults. They give proof of healthy independence, of a sincere love to the truth and of a touching solicitude towards their eternal interests. These are the best moral dispositions to deal with the serious issues of the soul, the world and Divinity. For our own eternal good we must try to understand one another and follow together the signs that will lead to the sacred path because we need to help each other to achieve the objective that we all seek, that is the knowledge of what is real and durable.
After the moral dispositions that we have just indicated the most indispensable thing to dedicate to the delicate work of initiation is the knowledge of the principle of the duality of the essence of the soul because that is what constitutes part of the mysterious secrets of the Sphinx
[2]. It is one of the keys of science and without it all efforts are useless to achieve that. The principle of the essence of the soul carries on itself and as consequence the considerable notions that we wish to acquire whereas all secondary principles discovered up until now are not sufficiently elevated to dominate the vast horizon of human knowledge and to embrace every detail.
The inferior principles detour those who use them in the warren of numerous facts that they do not understand and it is for the insufficiency of their first principles that the philosophers veered off and got lost in the arbitrary subtleties of their incomplete doctrines. They definitely led to confusion where they thought the truth to be.
In these more delicate than difficult matters, it is only the true principle that spreads light that easily resolves every problem and opens up the secret doors that lead to the most secret sanctuary. Now, we already know that we carry that principle and that all we need to find it is to study ourselves but to do that with calm and impartiality. We know that that principle is the duality of our spiritual essence so that we must handle the thread carefully for we hold the most important knot. But as we advance in our psychological study we must nonetheless consult the works of our most renowned philosophers to find out where they failed and what the points that confirm our own researches are.
Thus, as observed above, it seems evident that everything in us that connects to the sensitive order depends on the substance of our soul because it is the extensive and solid element that receives every exterior impression and that feels our inner activity.
In fact, our soul could not be touched without presenting an initial obstacle to oscillations of the environment and vibrations of emotions that affect us intimately. Therefore, it is that very natural way of being that explains our relationships with everything that exists, with what is not us, with our non-self-moral, intellectual and physical, visible or invisible.
The solidity and extension of our substance evidently cannot be rejected, in principle. Nevertheless, that is not the broad opinion that reigns in the university and in the Institute
[3]. Spiritualism denies it as absurd under the specious pretext that divisibility that would be its consequence would imply corruptibility of the substance. That is nothing but a mistake because what matters to the corruptibility of the nature of the soul is the chemical simplicity of its corporeal fluidity and not its mechanical indivisibility whose lack of has thousands of ways to remediate while to remain with the scientific truth is necessary to admit an effect without cause, a possible impression without resistance. Hence the sensitivity of our soul teaches nothing to our Spiritualist school. It freely connects feelings to reason, attributes sensations to the material organs and does not explain the connection between those different faculties. That is one of the causes of its philosophical impotence.
As for us, the sensitivity of our soul is the irrefutable proof of the solidity and extension of its substance. And it is the notion of those properties that opens up a vast field of observation to us. Thus, in the beginning, the substantial extension and solidity allow our soul to take different shapes and contains the type of organs that constitute our physical body. It thus serves of origin and support to our nerves, senses, brains, organs, muscles and bones and allows us to incarnate by this law of mutability of the corporeal cells, much known to modern physiologists. Our scientists suppose only and wrongly so in our opinion that such a law is the effect of a mysterious force of matter that renovates, absorb and flows by itself and forms by itself because matter is inert and forms nothing on its own. Such mutability, evidently, is the effect of an instinctive activity of the double essence of our soul that is enclosed in our envelope, and the existence of that law demonstrates that our incarnation is in the natural order because it is continuous and after a number of years our body renovates regularly.
The formation of our material envelope and our successive incarnation are explained very naturally. But still such extensive substantiality of our soul allows us to understand equally the existing link between the soul and the body because since only the cover of our substantial organism is visible everything that is felt by one must affect the other. The emotions of the substance of the soul must disturb the body and its state must inevitably affect its own moral and intellectual dispositions. That is the first teaching resulting from the concrete nature of our substance.
The second teaching that we extract from there is that the part of substance of our soul that does not serve to the type of our material organization must be the basis of our intimate sense, the one that receives all the moral and intellectual impressions and that puts us in contact with our own divine substance, so that our substance receives impressions from the radiation of all the previous existences and all possible activities, attesting that it is the first impression of all of our notions. In the same way we receive the knowledge of ourselves for if we ask a skeptical person how come that person can affirm itself, the answer will certainly be: - I feel myself – since even the skeptical cannot doubt their own sensations.
The feeling, however, is not our whole knowledge: the skeptics cannot deny that she knows that she feels herself. Now, the perception of our feeling is consequence of our intellectual activity proving not only that our soul is not passive but also that it is active, that it wants, that it perceives, thinks and that it is causative and free by itself.
Our own organs work without our awareness so that we are forced to attribute a second element to our soul, an active, virtual element, that is, an essential force that is aware when our sensitivity is awaken; that wishes as the result of its own movement; that perceives, thinks and reflects through our brain; that acts with the help of our members and that animates our organs by an involuntary movement.
It is by the presence of that essential double order: the passive and sensitive order and the virtual, thoughtful and active order that allow us to feel and know ourselves and that give us the consciousness of our own personality without any support from the exterior world.
The spiritual element of perfection is the power of our soul since it does not have extension and solidity by itself. We do not know it but by its activity. If the soul does not want, think or act, it is as if it does not exist; and if our soul were not substantially concrete by the virtue of another element, our body would not exist and only a pile of dust. Our soul would not even be capable of living because it would be lost in the void unless we would suppose, as it is done by spiritualism, an impenetrable mystery that allowed the soul to exist without extension or solidity, a hypothesis that Spiritism and the natural laws turn absolutely inadmissible. Nonetheless, it is our essential force that Leibnitz considers as a substance, despite its escaping nature and the French spiritualist school repeats that not stopping at the illogical confusion.
It is not enough, however, to call a substance force to make it so and consider such imaginary substance as if being the bottom line of our being to stay away from the emptiness of the abstractions. A substance does not exist but by its tangible state, by its extension and solidity, regardless of how subtle we may conceive it, and that is what our spiritual school quietly passes on. Thus, that is another cause of its moral and philosophical impotence. Our essential force is not but the principle of our activity; it animates but does not constitute us. It is the principle of our life but not of our existence. It is all over our substance, spreading all over our being, receiving directly its impressions without our voluntary support. It is through that union of our essential elements that our organization works spontaneously; that our sensations awake followed by our attention and without any other intermediary leads us to perceive the cause of our impressions; that our conscience is a set of feelings and reflections and that every notion, regardless of the object, demands our feeling and knowledge.
It is only then that we are certain of its existence. It is through the same process that we are aware of the Supreme Being. We have the sensation of his presence by our innate sense and we understand that sublime sensation through our reason because the ideal of the truthful, good and beautiful is primarily in our heart before it reaches our head.
Uncivilized peoples are not mistaken about it. They do not doubt God; they simply imagine him in accordance to the level of their intelligence whereas we see scientists discussing God’s personality because they pretend to not admit anything but by the power of their reason and because they endlessly debate abstractions, not establishing their supporting point in the sensitive order.
That is the constitution of our soul. It is formed by two very distinctive elements that nonetheless are indissolubly together for these elements are never and nowhere found separately since every substance has its force and every force has its substance. Thus, such duality is present in the essence of everything that exists. It is in matter, in the soul and in God. Again, such distinction in unity is necessarily admissible because each of those elements is well characterized. This is because they have their respective properties and categorical types. It is also a universal law that the same principle cannot have contrary effects and that excluding qualities indicate other particular principles. Its unit, however, is not less authoritative because no function, faculty or phenomenon is produced in us or beyond us without the simultaneous support of those two irreducible elements.
It is that unity in the permanent duality of our soul that explains this important psychological phenomenon: the instinctive spontaneity of all of our faculties and functions, as well as the formation of our character and our intimate moral constitution. Effectively, our impressions are preserved in us and are reproduced involuntarily so much so that since the substance is the passive and permanent of our soul, it is necessary to attribute to it the property of preserving our sensations, making them concrete and, in time, transmitting it to the attention of our essential force. Since those impressions are of all sorts, a moral order is formed in us through that conservative property, a permanently moral, intellectual and practical order that manifests through our spontaneous and instinctive activities; that inspire in us feelings and ideas and that involuntarily guides our actions, sometimes even in spite of us. Besides, these acquired ideas and feelings gather in our soul producing new ideas and images that we were far from expecting.
The psychological functions of our substance united to the essential force are therefore multiplied, forming our spontaneous moral, intellectual and practical nature, the bottom line of our character, the origin of our natural dispositions. Hence, our substance remains in a latent or potential state as expressed by the school, all of our qualities, all of our knowledge and past habits, permanently in us. Consequently, it is to that substance and its instinctive activity that memory, imagination, the Spirit and natural senses must be attributed to, as well as the origin of our ideas and feelings.
That instinctive substantial order does incontestably exist in our soul. Each one of us acknowledges a permanent moral nature, intellectual dispositions and habits that facilitate career and behavior, if good, or that preclude success dragging us to deplorable deviations, if bad. It is only our philosophers that do not notice them because not admitting a substantial psychological order they condemn themselves to the attribution of the influence of matter to everything that is resistant in our soul and confound everything that is sensitive and alive with our intelligence.
It is true that Aristotle acknowledged a potential order in men in which all of our qualities are in potential state, but he defines it badly and also confuse it with matter. Since then nobody else dealt with that special order with the exception of Mr. Cousin. But this contemporary philosopher considered only the spontaneous activity, not acknowledging anything else in the soul beyond intelligence, not seeking its origin in the permanent element of our essential nature.
He names it the spontaneous and instinctive reason, as opposed to reflected reason, without noticing the contradiction between instinct and thought, excluding qualities that evidently cannot belong to the same principle! Thus, Mr. Cousin only extracts limited consequences from that discovery and that is why his psychology, like his that of his school, became a dry, illogical and inexpressive science.
Let us now analyze the preceding observation that showed us psychological phenomena unknown up until now. They helped us to attest the existence of two orders: moral and intellectual, and very distinctive and strongly characterized practices, one perfectly related to the particular properties of our substance that are permanence, extension and solidity; the other related to our essential force that are causality, intermittence and in extension. The former is passive, sensitive, conservative; the latter is active, voluntary, and thoughtful. The intimate union of the two essential elements produces in us our triple instinctive activity, the direct reflex of the true state of our natural qualities and defects.
In fact, on one side the more sensitive our substantial nature and the more delicate and conservative and the livelier and the more energetic our instinctive activity the purer and more elevated our ideals and feelings; the fairer our common sense and the easier and safer our memory and imagination. Contrary to that, the less perfect our substantial state the slower and the more limited our memory and imagination, the cruder our ideas, the viler our feelings and the more distorted our common sense.
On another hand, though, the more energetic, constant and flexible our causal force, the stronger our attention, our will, our virtue and our control upon them; the more reach our perception, thoughts, judgement and reason will have and, finally, the greater our skills and more honorable our behavior because all qualities and faculties derive from our virtual element.
In opposition, the softer, blocked or heavier our essential force, the more our brutality and moral and intellectual cowardness will manifest in daylight. Therefore, our value depends on both the state of our qualities and the properties of one and the other element of our soul.
Such is the summary image that represents the intimate constitution of our essential soul and that reveals our double faculty of feeling and knowing ourselves. For starter the picture shows the soul in its living unity because we discover the double principle of its activity and its passivity; of its permanence and causality; of its existence in time and space and its independence that is proper and distinct from God, the world and its material envelope.
Then it shows its wonderful diversity for we acknowledge the origin and quality of its faculties, functions and organization, in the respective properties of our essential elements and in their reciprocal support.
This image, however, is a first sketch but it is easy to notice the method of rigorous observation that we follow that is the one discovered by Bacon; that Descartes introduced in Psychology; that the Scottish school applied; that the spiritualist and Eclectic School observed in its whole doctrine. Hence, we share the same terrain of every serious philosophy and if occasionally we are not in agreement with our academic hypotheses fact is that we cannot help it but believe that the majority of cases of conscience were both badly observed and badly explained by them.
As a matter of fact, the Spiritualist Ecletism acknowledges three faculties in us: will, sensation and reason. These faculties are distinct from our body that is solid and ample so that we necessarily have a spiritual and extensive soul.
Given that assumption Ecletism does not question how the soul must be formed to be sensitive or if will and reason, both active, are two manifestations of the same virtual principle. These are questions that do not shake Ecletism. It only sustains that out of those three faculties only the will effectively belong to us because alone it is the result of a substantial inextensive that is the essential principle of our
self.
To Ecletism sensitivity is not more than the effect of the shock resulting from the action that the force of the exterior world exerts upon us through our body. However, Ecletism does not investigate how come our extensive force acts onto the body or how come that force may receive impressions in this extensive isolation or explain how we can be sensitives. These are small mysteries that would not stop Ecletism. Reason, according to that belief, is the sovereign faculty of knowledge, but it is impersonal, meaning that it does not belong to us although we may utilize it. Hence according to Mr. Cousin, the expression – my reason – is senseless for the same reason that one does not say this is
my truth. Such explanation does not seem much concluding to us but it is probably our fault.
In fact, in that system reason is the set of necessary and universal truths, truths like the principles of causality, the substance, the unity, the true, etc. The set of those principles makes them, according to him, the divine reason that we share by the ineffable will of the Almighty. But it is precisely here that we have to accept the word since we don’t see how a set of truths, regardless of how universal they are, could form the divine and human reason. It is commonly believed that truths are laws and reason is a faculty. However, I see the sun but this faculty has never been taken by the sun or by the smallest of its rays. Therefore, there we have a mystery to be added to the preceding ones so much so that nothing is explained by itself in that doctrine, nothing is connected and our soul is there presented just as an heterogeneous set of faculties, qualities and distinct functions randomly interconnected like sparse leaves gathered in a book pompously entitled
Philosophical Doctrine of the XIX Century.
The second preface of the third edition of
Philosophical Fragments brings an interesting summary about that book in several aspects. According to those considerations we can assess the causes that make the official spiritualist philosophy, despite the good intentions, something bizarre and indigestible. We would be even authorized to treat it with severity had the eminent services done to the French Spirit been forgotten, deviating it from an immoral sensuality and from a desperate skepticism. Those were evidently the concerns of the illustrious philosopher in the beginning of his brilliant career. Studying his remarkable books, one can see that Condillac and Kant were his main adversaries. Therefore, this fight is the most important part of his work. His own system, however, seems very defective to us and his morale, theology and ontology contain several very controversial points.
Truth is such a delicate flower! The slightest breath of error makes it wither in our hands reducing it to an obfuscating and pernicious powder. In the heat of the fight or in the emotion of ambition it is particularly difficult to keep the calm of Spirit and the kind feeling of evidence so much so that the person involved is easily dragged to go beyond the limits of true wisdom.
Fortunately, the Creator has given us facts, circumstances and providential events that are shocking enough to bring us back to the good path. Certainly, the doctrines and facts that form the foundation of Spiritism are among them. May our great and wise philosophers do not repeal it under the futile pretext of superstition! May they study it without prejudice! They will find the extensive and solid nature of our soul, its preexistence and perpetuity! They will find a kind and healthy morale, well established to guide everyone to good.
If they really want to get to know it they must frankly study the work; they must examine scientifically its principles and consequences and then perhaps the principle of the duality of the essence of the soul may be found in all of its splendor and power because it does seem to us that it casts a lively light upon the intimate secrets of our being. That is what we will examine in the near future.
F. Herrenschneider
[1] See Spiritist Review, September 1863
[2] The other principle is the duality of the aspect of things that we will see later on.
[3] The way the Parisian Institute of Sciences was referred to in those days (TN).
