By Mr. Eug. Bonnemère
Mr. Bonnemère was kind enough to send us details that complete those we have given on this subject in the Spiritist Review, July 1867, on the young Breton mentioned in the preface of the interesting book he published with the title
Novel of the future. This new information is of the highest interest, and our readers will be grateful to the author, as we are ourselves, for having made it available to us. We will follow them with a few remarks.
“Sir,A friend has sent me, much delayed, the Spiritist Review in which you give an account of the Novel of the future that I authored. Let me give you some clarification about a passage in that article where this statement is found: “We were told that when he wrote this book, the author did not know Spiritism; it seems difficult, etc.” However, this is rigorously true. I admit it in all sincerity and humility, Sir, I was wrong in not offering you this volume; I have never been to your place; I did not even know the title of the Spiritist Review, and my library does not have any book on the issues discussed there; that is why I called my young Breton a natural ecstatic, while to you he is a medium. I said, in the preface of the Novel of the future, as a result of that strange adventure, that I was a historian in the maturity of my life, and that I was going to become a novelist, after going over fifty years old. The readers have only seen in this one of those familiar processes in which authors spice up their story. I certify on my honor that, with the exception of one detail that does not matter, and that I am not allowed to reveal yet, everything that I affirm in that preface is true, and far from exaggerating, I am not saying everything. My young Breton explains, in twenty passages of his voluminous manuscripts (nearly 18,000 pages), the causes and effects of this sort of condemnation to forced labor that he suffered for having cursed her. Every evening, he wrote on August 24th, 1864, I go to bed very tired after a day's work; I fall asleep; an hour later I wake up; I am sad, a black crepe seems to envelop me; I am speechless, but I do not suffer. Something vague is in my brain; it is under such impression that my eyes sometimes close, with tears in my heart. Then I wake up in the morning with a persistent silence with an intolerable pain on the left side and in the heart, that does not allow me to get back to sleep. I experience an intolerable state of anxiety that forces me to stand up. I am suffocating; there is too much to be relieved. So, I go to my office, and there I am forced to work. The more I suffer, the more and the better I work. I then have an extreme expansion of imagination. When a work is done, and it only needs to be put on paper, I invent another, without ever looking for it, and always mechanically writing the one that was mature. When I must serve as an instrument to some of my disappeared friends, their name rings in my ear. When I write that name does not leave me, and I experience, even amidst my sometimes-acute physical pains, especially in the heart, a kind of gentleness in writing what he brings to me. It's like an inspiration, but very involuntary. All the fibers of my psychological being are awakened. So, I feel more keenly; it seems that I am vibrating; all the noises are louder, more perceptible; I experience intellectual and psychological vibrations at the same time. When I am in this silenced state, I feel like enveloped in a network that establishes a separation between my intellectual being and the mass of material objects or people who surround me. It is an absolute isolation amid the crowd; my word and my mind are elsewhere. The inspiring being who comes to me never leaves me; it's a kind of intimate permeation from him to me; I am like a sponge, soaked in his thoughts. I squeeze it, and it leaves the quintessence of his intelligence, free from all the meanness of our life down here. Sometimes, even without muteness, whether I'm alone or with others, it doesn't matter, I talk, I laugh, I perceive everything in other people's conversations, and yet I work; ideas accumulate, but fleeting; I am there and am no longer there; I come to myself, and remember nothing; but the state of silence revives the erased images. If it's a novel I must write, the title comes first to me, then the events happen; it is sometimes a matter of a day or two to compose it all. If it is about more serious things, the title is also dictated to me, then thoughts abound, even when I seem most strongly distracted. The elaboration is done on time until the moment when the accumulation overflows onto the paper. It has often happened to me, after finishing a long novel, and when I had nothing else ready to transfer to my notebooks, I experienced a strange sensation, as if there was an empty box in my brain. I then suffer a lot more; it's a state of complete atony, until my head fills up with something else. Usually, that very evening, or in bed, in the morning, I envisage some new plan. Sometimes, however, I get up without thinking about anything that I'm going to do, and without having worked out anything in advance. With my candle lit, I stand in front of the paper. I then hear on the left side, in the left ear, a name, a word, a subject of a novel in two or three words. It's enough; the words follow one another, without interruption; events come to align themselves in the pen, without a moment's pause, until the story is over. When things go like this, it's just a very short novel that will be finished in one session. There is still a very singular particularity in my condition; it is when I am worried about the health of someone I love. It really becomes an excruciating pain to me, and I think I am suffering more than the person herself. For a few moments, I am seized in the head, in the stomach, in the heart and in the guts, by a pressure full of anguishes that moves on to an extreme pain. There comes a time when the head alone suffers. So, I have one or several names of remedies in my head. I do not want to speak, for I doubt and fear to hurt when I would like to relieve so much! But these words keep coming back; I am defeated, I give in and say them with an effort, or I write them down. So, it's over, I don't think about it anymore, and everything vanishes." I do not know if I am mistaken, but it seems to me to find there all the characteristics of the possession of the past, and I do believe that many possessed people were burned in the past who were not more wizards than my ecstatic youngster. Obviously, he lives a double life, in which one is not related to other. I saw him often, when one of the people who confided in him came to tell him that she was in pain; with staring eyes, his eyelids open, his pupil dilated, he seemed to be listening, searching. "Yes, Yes! He whispered, as if repeating to himself what an inner voice was telling him. He would then indicate the necessary remedy, talk for a moment about the nature and cause of the illness, then little by little, all this was dissipated, and he was not aware either of the moment when the ecstasy had come, or when it was over. That rapid moment of absence did not exist for him, and we avoided talking to him about it. “I want and I have to live in the shadows, he wrote elsewhere. I am told: You are in a society that has gone astray because of bad management. The good we do without interest, emanating from a natural source, but a little extraordinary, seems guilty, ridiculous, indiscreet at least. We must not expose ourselves to mockery, sometimes to contempt, for a good deed. There is an old saying: "A confessed fault is half forgiven," it can be said that a hidden good deed is half forgiven. We must, therefore, do good to others without their suspecting it. It is true charity that gives without expecting retribution." All this does not happen without struggles. Sometimes he rebels against this tyrannical obsession. I saw him resisting, struggling with anger, then tamed by a will greater than his, go to work. He had announced a great and long work about freedom. He declared himself incapable of doing it and protested that he would not. One morning he wrote: “No, I want to fight today. I feel that the form has not come clear enough yet… When will you give me a break? … I am shattered! … Ah! you call it freedom of thought that you infuse in me! But it is slavery to your thoughts, that should be said! You claim that I have its germ, and that it is doing me an immense service to develop it, by adding what you can give!” “I will start with this question already dealt with: What is life?" A sort of program announcement to be completed thus continued for ten pages of his writing and was written in forty minutes. All these things, which seemed very strange to me, will perhaps be less so for you, Sir. In short, I have faith in its mysterious power, because it cured me of more than one illness that might have embarrassed the Faculty. No one is ever sick by his side, without his writing down his little prescription. He often does it despite himself, feeling that his prescriptions will not be considered. One day he ended a consultation with these lines, about a person suffering from chest disease who, in his opinion, was poorly treated and whom he believed he could still save: “This is what I can say. Let them do what they think fit; these are my observations, that is all. I won't have to blame myself for letting them sleep inside me. Nothing should be done without the advice of the doctor. With natures as they all are, this can only serve as an indication. Let no one ever speak to me about it; that no one thank me. I am not a man, but a soul who awakens to the cry of suffering, and who no longer remembers after relief has arrived." When he had no sick people on hand, he prescribed general remedies for ailments that official science does not yet know how to cure. What are these prescriptions worth? I do not know. However, what I have seen, what I have been able to experience, leads me to believe that they could perhaps set the stage for new curative processes. If an individual who has never opened a medical book, prescribes remedies that can cure, without realizing it, in many cases most of the ailments declared incurable today, it seems to me indisputable that these things are revealed to him by an unknown and mysterious power. In the presence of such a fact, the question seems to me settled. We must accept, as demonstrated, that there are sensitive to whom it is granted to serve as intermediaries to the disappeared friends who, having no more organs at the service of their will, come to borrow the voice or the hand of these privileged beings, when they want to heal our body, or strengthen our soul by enlightening it on the things that they are allowed to make known to us. One can risk an experiment in anima vili, [1]on silkworms for example, that are hardly any better than to be thrown to the worms of the grave, so much they are sick. The question is serious, because the losses caused by the illness that affect them adds up to millions of francs annually. The result to be obtained is worth trying this first experiment that, in any case, if it fails, cannot make the situation worse. There might be a mystery here, but I assert that there is no hoax. If I am mystified, I will always have the hundred and a few novels and short stories of this novelist, without knowing it, the publication of which will pleasantly occupy the leisure time of the last years of my existence, and of which I will leave most to the others after me. This winter I will publish a new novel by my ecstatic young Breton. In the preface, I will transcribe verbatim everything he wrote on the healing of silkworms; and I will even add, if you will, his prescriptions for preventing and curing cholera and chest diseases. It doesn't matter if people laugh at me for a few days; but it is very important that these secrets, of which chance has made me the depositary, do not die with me, if they contain something serious, and that it be known whether there are any possible relationships between the higher intelligences of the other side of life and the docile intelligences on this side; and I believe that it would be very important for us to forge more and more sustained relationships with these dead people of goodwill who seem disposed to render us such services. Yours sincerely,E. Bonnemère.”The picture of the impressions of this young man, drawn by himself, is all the more remarkable since, having been written in the absence of any Spiritist knowledge, it cannot be the reflection of ideas drawn from any study that would have sparked his imagination. It is the spontaneous impression of his sensations, from which emerge, with strong evidence, all the characteristics of an unconscious mediumship; the intervention of occult intelligences is expressed there without ambiguity; the resistance that he opposes, the very annoyance that he feels from it, prove abundantly that he is acting under the influence of a will that is not his. This young man is, therefore, a medium in all the acceptance of the word, and moreover endowed with multiple faculties, because he is at the same time a writer, speaking, seeing, auditory, mechanical, intuitive, inspired, impressible, somnambulist, medical medium, literary, philosopher, moralist, etc. But in the described phenomena, there are none of the characteristics of ecstasy; it is, therefore, improperly that Mr. Bonnemère qualifies him as ecstatic, for it is precisely one of the faculties that he lacks. Ecstasy is a specific, well-defined state that did not arise in this case. Neither does he appear to be gifted with physical effect mediumship, nor with healing mediumship.
There are natural mediums, just as there are natural somnambulists, who act spontaneously and unconsciously; in others, where the mediumistic phenomena are provoked by the will, the faculty is developed by exercise, as in some individuals, somnambulism is provoked and developed by magnetic action.
So, there are unconscious mediums and conscious mediums. The first category, to which the young Breton belongs, is the most numerous; it is almost general, and we can say, without exaggeration, that out of 100 individuals there are 90 who are endowed with this aptitude to more or less noticeable degrees; if everyone were to study themselves, we would find in this kind of mediumship, that takes on the most multiple appearances, the reason for a host of effects that cannot be explained by any of the known laws of matter.
These effects, whether material or not, apparent or occult, to have this origin, are nonetheless natural; Spiritism admits nothing supernatural or marvelous; according to it everything is in the order of the laws of nature. When the cause of an effect is unknown, it must be sought in the fulfillment of these laws, and not in their breach, caused by the act of any will, that would be a true miracle; a man invested with the gift of miracles would have the power to suspend the course of the laws that God has established, that is not admissible. But the spiritual element, being one of the active forces of nature, gives rise to special phenomena that only appear supernatural because one persists in seeking the cause in the laws of matter alone. Therefore, the Spiritists do not work miracles and have never claimed to do so. The qualification of miracle workers, that criticism gives them out of irony, proves that they are talking about something of which they do not know the first word, since they call miracle workers even those who come to destroy them.
Another fact that emerges from the explanations given in the letter above, is that the
Novel of the future is indeed a mediumistic work of the young Breton, and we can only be grateful to Mr. Bonnemère for having declined its paternity. Such elevated and deep thoughts had nothing to surprise us on his part, and that is why we had not hesitated in attributing them to him, and we only had even more esteem for his character, and for his talent as a writer, that was already known to us; however, they borrow a particular interest from the source from which they emanate; strange as this source may appear, at first glance, it is not surprising to anyone familiar with Spiritism. Facts of this kind are frequently seen, and there isn’t a somewhat enlightened Spiritist who does not fully realize it, without having to recourse to miracles.
Attributing the work, therefore, to Mr. Bonnemère, and finding facts and thoughts there that seem borrowed from the doctrine itself, it seemed difficult to us that the author was foreign to it. As soon as he affirms the opposite, we can easily believe it, and we find in his very ignorance the confirmation of the fact, repeated many times in our writings, that the Spiritist ideas are so much in nature that
they germinate outside of the teaching of Spiritism and that a host of people are or become Spiritists without knowing it, and by intuition; all that is lacking in their ideas is the name. Spiritism is like those plants whose seeds are carried by the winds and that grow without cultivating; it arises spontaneously in thought, without prior study. What can, therefore, those who dream of its annihilation do against it, by striking the mother stump?
So, here is a complete, remarkable medium and an observer who does not suspect what Spiritism is, and the observer that comes, by himself, to all consequences of Spiritism, through a logical deduction from what he sees. What he first notices is that the facts he has before him present to him, in the same individual, a double life, of which one has no relation to the other. Obviously these two lives, where divergent thoughts are manifested, are subject to different conditions; they both cannot proceed from matter; it is the recognition of the spiritual life; it is the soul that we see acting outside the organism. This phenomenon is very vulgar; it occurs daily during the sleep of the body, in dreams, in natural or induced somnambulism, in catalepsy, in lethargy, in double sight, in ecstasy. The intelligent principle, isolated from the organism, is a fundamental fact, because it is the proof of its individuality. The existence, independence and individuality of the soul can thus be the result of observation. If, during the life of the body, the soul can act without the co-operation of the material organs, it is because it has an existence of its own; the extinction of the bodily life does not, therefore, necessarily entail that of the spiritual life. We see by this where, from consequence to consequence, we arrive by a logical deduction. Mr. Bonnemere did not arrive at this result by a preconceived theory, but by observation; Spiritism did not proceed otherwise; the study of facts preceded the doctrine, and the principles were formulated, as in all observational sciences, as they were deduced from experience. Mr. Bonnemère has done what any serious observer can do, for the spontaneous phenomena that emerge from the same principle, are numerous and vulgar; Mr. Bonnemère having seen only one point, he could only arrive at a partial conclusion, while Spiritism, having embraced the whole of these phenomena, so complex and so varied, was able to analyze them, compare them, control them one against the others, and find the solution to a greater number of problems. Since Spiritism is a result of observations, whoever has eyes to see, judgment to reason, patience and perseverance to go to the end, could come to constitute Spiritism, just as we could reconstitute all sciences; but the work being done, it is time saved and trouble spared. If we had to always restart, there would be no possible progress. Considering that the Spiritist phenomena are in nature, they have occurred in all times; and precisely because they touch spirituality in a more direct way, they find themselves involved in all theogonies. Spiritism coming in an epoch less accessible to prejudices, enlightened by the progress of the natural sciences, that were lacking to the first men, and by a more developed reason, Spiritism was able to observe better than it was formerly done; today, it comes to bring out what is true from the mixture introduced by superstitious beliefs, daughters of ignorance.
Mr. Bonnemère congratulated himself on the chance that placed the documents provided by the young Breton in his hands. Spiritism does not admit
chance any more than the
supernatural in the events of life. Chance, that by its nature is blind, would sometimes show itself to be singularly intelligent. Hence, we believe that it was intentionally that these documents came into his possession, after he was able to ascertain their origin. In the hands of the young man, they would have been lost, and that is probably what should not be. Someone, therefore, had to take it up to bring them out of obscurity, and it seems that such a mission was assigned to Mr. Bonnemère.
As for the value of these documents, judging by the sample of thoughts contained in the
Novel of the Future, there must surely be some excellent things; are they all good? That's another question. In this respect, their origin is not a guarantee of infallibility, since the Spirits, being only the souls of men, do not have sovereign knowledge. Their advancement being relative, there are some more enlightened than others; if there are some who know more than men, there are also men who know more than certain Spirits. Up to this day, Spirits have been considered as beings outside humanity, and endowed with exceptional faculties; this is a fundamental error that has given rise to so many superstitions and that Spiritism has come to rectify. Spirits are part of humanity, and until they have reached the culmination of perfection, towards which they gravitate, they are liable to be mistaken. Therefore, one should never abnegate one’s free will and one’s judgment, even with regard to what comes from the world of the Spirits; one should never accept anything with one’s eyes closed, and without the strict control of logic. Without prejudging anything about the documents in question, it could therefore be that there were some good and some bad, some true and some false, and that, consequently, there had to be a judicious choice for which the principles of the doctrine can provide useful guidance.
Among these principles, there is one that is important not to lose sight of, that is the providential aim of the manifestation of Spirits; they come to attest to their existence and to prove to man that everything does not end for him with the corporeal life; they come to educate him on his future condition, to encourage him to acquire what is useful for his future and what he can take away, that is to say, the moral qualities, but not to give him the means of enrichment. The care of his fortune and the improvement of his material well-being must be the work of his own intelligence, his activity, his work, and his research. If it were otherwise, the lazy and the ignorant could easily get rich, since it would be enough to turn to the Spirits to obtain a lucrative invention, to discover treasures, to win on the stock exchange or the lottery; therefore, all hopes of fortune founded on the co-operation of Spirits have failed miserably.
This is what inspires in us some doubts about the effectiveness of the process for the silkworms, a process that would have the effect of earning millions, endorsing the idea that the Spirits can provide the means of enrichment, an idea that would pervert the very essence of Spiritism. It would, therefore, be unwise to create chimeras on this subject, because it could be here as with certain recipes that were to make the Pactolus
[2] flow into certain hands, and that have only resulted in ridiculous mystifications. This is not, however, a reason for silencing the process, and for neglecting it; if success is to have a more important and more serious result than fortune, such a revelation may be permitted. But in the face of uncertainty, it is good not to be lulled into hopes that could be disappointed. We then approve of Mr. Bonnemère's plan to publish the recipes that were given to his young Breton, because, among them, there may be some useful, especially for diseases.
[1] Latin expression meaning -
on a subject of little worth (T.N.)
[2] A river near the Aegean coast of
Turkey (T.N.)
