Moral responsibility(Parisian Society, July 7
th, 1867 – medium Mr. Nivard)
“I watch all your mental conversations, but without directing them; your thoughts are emitted in my presence, but I do not provoke them. It is the presentiment of cases that have some chance of occurring, that excites in you the adequate thoughts to resolve the difficulties that they could bring about to you. That is free will; it is the exercise of the incarnate Spirit, trying to solve problems that he poses to himself.
In fact, if men only had ideas inspired by the Spirits, they would have little responsibility and little merit; they would only have the responsibility of having listened to bad advice, or the credit for having followed the good ones. Now, this responsibility and this merit would obviously be less than if they were the result of total free will, that is to say, of acts carried out in the full exercise of the faculties of the Spirit, that in this case, acts without any solicitation.
It follows from what I say that very often men have thoughts that are essentially their own, and that the calculations to which they engage, the reasonings that they develop, the conclusions to which they arrive, are the result of their intellectual exercise, just as the manual labor is the result of the bodily exercise. It should not be concluded from this that man is not assisted in his thoughts and actions by the spirits around him, quite the contrary; the Spirits, either benevolent or malevolent, are often the provocative cause of your actions and your thoughts; but you are completely unaware of under what circumstances such influence occurs, so that by acting, you believe to do it by virtue of your own drive: your free will remains intact; There is no difference between the acts that you do without being urged to do so, and those that you do under the influence of the Spirits, only in the level of merit or responsibility.
In either case, responsibility and merit exist, but I repeat, they do not exist to the same degree. I believe that this principle that I am enunciating does not need demonstration; to prove it, I only need to make a comparison of what exists among you.
If a man has committed a crime, and has done it seduced by the dangerous advice of another man that exercises great influence over him, human justice will know how to acknowledge it, by granting him the benefit of mitigating circumstances; it will go further: it will punish the man whose malicious advice provoked the crime, and without having otherwise contributed to it, this man will be punished more severely than the one who was only the instrument, because it was his thought that conceived the crime, and its influence on a weaker being who carried it out. Well! What men do in this case, reducing the responsibility of the criminal, and sharing it with the infamous who pushed him to commit the crime, how would you expect God, who is justice itself, not to do s, since your reason tells you that it is the right thing to do?
Regarding the merit of the good deeds, that I said it was smaller if the man was asked to do them, it is the counterpart of what I have just said about responsibility, and can be demonstrate by reversing the proposition.
Thus, when it happens to you to reflect and to move your ideas from one subject to another; when you mentally discuss the facts that you foresee or that have already been accomplished; when you analyze, when you reason and when you judge, do not believe that it is Spirits that dictate your thoughts to you or that direct you; they are there, near you, they listen to you; they see with pleasure this intellectual exercise in which you indulge; their pleasure is doubled, when they see that your conclusions are in accordance with the truth.
It sometimes happens, of course, that they take part in this exercise, either to facilitate it, or to give the Spirit some nourishment, or to create some difficulties, in order to make this intellectual gymnastics more beneficial to the one that practices it; but, in general, the man who seeks, when he is left to his thoughts, almost always acts alone, under the watchful eye of his protective Spirit, who intervenes if the case is serious enough to make his intervention necessary.
Your father who watches over you, and who is happy to see you almost recovered. (The medium was emerging from a serious illness).
Louis Nivard”
