The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1863

By Hppolyte Renaud, former student at the Polytechnic School^[1]



The Presse on July 27^th, 1862 published the following news about the book mentioned above. It is directly related to the Spiritist Doctrine so the readers must know that we are glad to reproduce it here. We ourselves could have analyzed that work but preferred a person that has no interest in the matter. We will limit ourselves to make comments about this article. The editor says:

“What is there that is more attractive to the Spirit and more refreshing to the soul than finding at this time a man of sincere, plain and profound faith, a man that believes and nonetheless, reasons and reasons without prejudice in order to seek light upon his conscience? That is Mr. Renaud.

For him mathematics and sciences did not kill the feeling or combine the mysterious sources that bond us to infinity through faith. Mr. Renaud is a firm believer, convict, an excellent Christian, even being a bad Catholic, from which he does not defend himself. On the contrary.

His enlightened reason, no less important than his loving heart, allows him to dismiss the idea of a jealous and enraged God; of a God that would have chosen rage to link the creature to the creator; of a God that punishes the son for the fault of the father, something that is iniquitous to the eyes of human justice.

Mr. Renaud’s God is a God of light and love. The harmony of His infinite work manifests His omnipotence and goodness. Man is not a victim but a collaborator in a smallbut still glorious part, proportional to his strength. Why evil then and how to explain it? Evil does not arise from a primitive downfall that would have changed all human condition. Its cause is the noncompliance with God’s law and man’s disobedience by the bad use of one’s free-will. We would find it clearer if Mr. Renaud had simply said that man begins by instinct and that only gradually could develop superior feelings and intelligence. The species man, like all other living creatures, cannot suddenly achieve the plenitude of the being. Goes through successive and normal evolutions. His social infancy is characterized by the domination of instincts. Then his misery, ignorance and brutality.

It gradually detaches from the mud of the first ages as it elevates in life. Intelligence grows, the feelings become stronger and he begins to humanize. The more man understands the more is connected to the law, the more he becomes religious and concur from his side to the general harmony.

Suffering is a warning, a stimulus to get rid of evilness, to move away from the shadows and walk with light. The more he advances, the more he rejects the world of instinct, fight, violence and war; the more he sees and understands, the more he aspires the world of peace and order, the empire of reason, the reign of elevated feelings, that are the dignity and the sacred sign of his species.

It follows that thanks to sciences, technology and to the incessant progress of sociability, mankind tends to become the king or if you prefer a less ambitious term, the manager of the globe. But later on, admitting for a moment this hypothesis that seems to become certain every day, will there be always this insatiable desire of man that cannot be limited to the present however magnificent it can be? What does it matter the material and earthly happiness if my soul remains empty and thirsty? We are taken by a supreme tedium and a great displeasure before such a short living happiness.

That is true, Mr. Renaud responds, and it is here that he triumphs. Illuminated by science, his robust faith in the eternal destines of man show him a whole infinite future of conscientious activity and paradisiacal joy.

At the birth of thought, at the first trembles of the soul, man raises the eye to the sky, interrogates his infinite depths and seeks the link that he foresees with the universe. This earthly existence, so short and sometimes so sad, is not enough. He feels that he is part of the infinity and wants to find his place at any price. He dreads the oblivion as nature does to the vacuum. Instead of going without an ideal he will madly throw himself at the strangest beliefs. Hence so many more or less flamboyant beliefs but that attest this absolute and fundamental need to feel reconnected to the infinity, assured of his own immortality.

The paradise of the Buddhists is well-known; the Greek Champs-Élysées; the paradise of the natives with their abundant forests and hunting prairies; the paradise of Mohamed with its material delights. The Catholic paradise that puts humanity in a state of infinite contemplative beatitude is a concept relative to cruel times in which work was considered suffering and punishment; where the general pain is such that resignation in this world and rest in the other would seem to be the sovereign wisdom and the highest ideal. But this hypothesis is evidently contradictory with the simplest and clearest notions of life. To live is to be; to be is to act with all the strength of one’s skills and its vital energy. To live is to incessantly aspire for transformation.

Pythagoras’ metempsychosis is incomplete, although respecting the idea of activity in the sense that it limits the transformation to passages through organisms that live on the face of Earth and still for not taking into account the law of the ascending progress that governs everything.

According to Mr. Renaud there is only one rational way of looking at the issue of immortality.

For starters the author rejects the idea that after having spent some time in the visible world, a place of atonement, the soul would move to the invisible world, a paradise, in the state of pious contemplation, uninterested about the fate of one’s fellow human beings and the earthly works. That the elected and blessed ones would be these creatures stripped of from any desire and aspiration, of any useful activity, any interest about the past and their neighbors, about the infinite universe where they worked, felt and thought!





Mr. Renaud equally rejects the hypothesis of an indefinite series of existences on Earth and on other globes. This kind of immortality already has an advantage with respect to the first concept because it opens up an indefinite field to human activity. Mr. Jean Reynaud, Mr. Pierre Leroux, Mr. Henri Martin and Mr. Lamennais are more or less connected to this idea. But there is an essential point that deteriorates its foundation: the absence of memory. What does it matter an immortality from which I have no conscience of and only God knows about it? To make my immortality real it would be necessary that in a life different from the current one I have the memory of my previous existences; that I am aware of the continuity and identity of my being. It is only with that condition that I am truly immortal participating to the infinite and conscious of my function in the universe. We only know our being through its manifestations because its virtual essence escapes us. What is it that would harm reason by admitting that our being whose persistence we verify down here in its incessant modifications would persist eternally? It only changes its form and organs according to the environment in the successive incarnations.

That is how Mr. Renaud exposes his conception that satisfies this essential condition of keeping the memory and that is, besides, according to the justice and the omnipotent benevolence of God.

There is no oblivion in the universe. Now, if the visible world is everywhere the invisible is nowhere, as Mr. Renaud wisely say, unless it is also everywhere.

Man has two very distinctive states on this Earth. During vigil he generally remembers all of his actions and has conscience of himself; during the sleep he loses both memory and conscience. Consequently, why would he not have two distinct modes of existence, always interconnected, always bonded to the life in space and in the planet? Initially the existence that we know down here and in the other life, of a more elevated order, in which the individual organizes himself and reincarnate through imponderable fluids; participates in a broader and more extensive way of the life of our maelstrom; preserves then the memory of his previous existences and had plentiful awareness of his own role and function in the universe? Has the mundane and visible life a relationship to the sleep and the trans mundane or ethereal has an analogy to the vigil state?

With such a hypothesis, the solidarity of mankind in its present and future generations seem to be complete and thorough. Each one of us lived, lives and will live in different times of life on Earth in both worlds, visible and invisible. Each one of us was born there and lives there according to the laws of numbers, weights and measures that presides the harmony of the worlds. Our several alternations are counted as days and seasons. Each one of us is reborn, takes one’s class in the species and function in the general works according to one’s value and the universal law of order. Perhaps each one of us go through the multiples states and functions presented by the species. The most absolute justice certainly presides such transformations like the most harmonious order shines in the eternal creation, in the multiple combinations that characterize every organism and living being. We are reborn for the ethereal life and leave it under the same conditions of order and harmony. That is Mr. Renaud’s conception that I cannot reveal completely here. It is necessary to refer to his book, clear, simple and quick where a profound faith linked to an as much elevated as impartial reason, keep the reader constantly under the enchantment of a theory that is as much reassuring as it is great and religious. The free spontaneity of the man, his intimate and endless solidarity with his fellow human beings, with his planet, his maelstrom, with the universe; his ever more progressive activity, efficient, radiant, in harmony with the divine laws; an infinite career for his eternal aspiration; the omnipotence and goodness of God justified, explained and glorified; love as the link between God and mankind, that is what sticks out of that little book, the most complete of any that was written under the inspiration of this great sentence: “Man’s desires are God’s promises.”

E. de Pompéry

This article provoked the two letters below also published in the Presse on July 31^st and August 5^th 1862.

“Paris, July 29^th 1862

To the Editor,

Dear Sir,

I have just read in the yesterday’s Presse the following passage (article by Mr. de Pompéry about the works of Mr. Renaud):

Mr. Renaud equally rejects the hypothesis of an indefinite series of existences on Earth and on other globes. This kind of immortality already has an advantage with respect to the first concept because it opens up an indefinite field to human activity. Mr. Jean Reynaud, Mr. Pierre Leroux, Mr. Henri Martin and Mr. Lamennais are more or less connected to this idea. But there is an essential point that deteriorates its foundation: the absence of memory. What does it matter an immortality from which I have no conscience of and only God knows about it? To make my immortality real it would be necessary that in a life different from the current one I have the memory of my previous existences; that I am aware of the continuity and identity of my being.

Mr. de Pompéry is right, in my opinion: an indefinite metempsychosis and without memory is not immortality. But, if he is right about the ideas he is not about the persons. Out of the four writers mentioned by him only one professed the doctrine that he combats: Mr. Pierre Leroux, in his book Humanité. As for myself I must give my position considering that I was mentioned. Although without titles to stand side by side with the three eminent philosophers I must say that I share the opinion exposed above by Mr. de Pompéry. As for Mr. Jean Reynaud, in a certain way he crowned his book Terre et Ciel with this idea where he presents the absence of memory as a condition of inferior existences and the acquired and permanently preserved memory as an essential attribute of a more elevated life. I don’t believe either that Mr. Lamennais, at some point in his career, had in any fashion accepted the idea of an unconscious and indefinite transmigration. It was very much opposed to all of his tendencies.

I do appreciate, dear chief editor, if you accept this complaint and please receive my most sincere acknowledgement.

Henri Martin”



“To the Editor,

Dear Sir,

Analyzing Mr. Renaud’s book I said that according to the author Mr. Henri Martin, Jean Reynaud, Pierre Leroux and Lamennais, and according to the systems that they adopted, man could not keep a memory in their future lives. It does not mean that these philosophers did not support the idea of man keeping his own identity and perpetuity of the being through memory.

Mr. Henri Martin’s complaint would then be very just from the point of view of his intention. It still needs to be verified if Mr. Renaud when discussing the systems of his illustrious contradictors, is not right on concluding by their unfoundedness. That is the whole question that I cannot discuss. It is necessary to look at the debate in the book by Mr. Renaud that incidentally expresses his highest sympathy to those renowned men.

Yours sincerely,

E. de Pompéry



This is ia serious debate that takes place in a newspaper without criticism and all of them about the plurality of the existences, one of the fundamental basis of the Spiritist Doctrine, by men of incontestable intellectual value, demonstrating that it cannot be as absurd as some like to say.

If someone wants to study more in depth the ideas given in Mr. de Pompery’s article they will find all of those common to the Spiritist Doctrine in that point. All that is missing to complement them is the relationships between the visible and invisible worlds that is not discussed.

By the simple force of reason and intuition those gentlemen that could be joined by many others like Charles Fourier and Louis Jourdan, they got to the summit of Spiritism without passing through the intermediary levels. The only difference between them and us is that they found the thing on their own whereas to us it was revealed by the Spirits and to the eyes of certain people that is its biggest mistake.

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[1] Single vol, 18-in, price 2 francs. Ledoyen; Palais-Royan – do not confuse with Jean Reynaud.