Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1869

Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies, March 14^th, 1869 – medium Mr. Leymarie



“A friend, a great poet, wrote to me in a painful circumstance: - ‘She is always your companion, invisible, but present; you have lost the woman, but not the soul! Dear friend, let us live in the dead!’ - A consoling, salutary thought, that comforts in the struggle and makes us think incessantly of this ascending succession of matter, of this unity in the conception of all that is, of that wonderful and incomparable worker who, for the continuity of progress, attaches the Spirit to this matter, spiritualized in turn by the presence of the superior element.

No, my beloved one, I could not lose your soul that lived glorious, sparkling with all the clarities of the invisible world. My life is a living protest to the looming scourge of skepticism, in its many forms. No one has affirmed more energetically than I have the divine personality, and believed in the human personality, defending freedom. If the feeling of infinity was developed in me, if the divine presence pulsates in enthusiastic pages, it is because I had to tame my path; it is that I lived in the presence of God, and that constantly gushing source has always made me believe in the good, the beautiful, the righteousness, the devotion, the honor of the individual, and even more so in the honor of the nation, the condensed individuality. It is that my partner was of an elite nature, strong and tender. Near her, I understood the nature of the soul and its intimate relationship with the statue of flesh, this wonder! Thus, my studies were spiritualized, and consequently fruitful and rapid, constantly turning towards the forms of beauty and the passion for words. I married science with thought, so that philosophy, in my mind, could use these two precious poetic instruments.

My form was sometimes abstract, and it was not within everyone's reach; but serious thinkers adopted it; all the great minds of my time opened their ranks to me. Catholic orthodoxy looked at me like a sheep fleeing the flock of the Roman pastor, especially when, swept away by events, I shared the responsibility for a glorious revolution.

Driven for a moment by popular aspirations, by this powerful breath of compressed ideas, I was no longer the man of great situations; I had finished my journey, and for me the hours of weariness and discouragement had sounded in the clock of time. I saw my ordeal, and while Lamartine was painfully enduring it, the children of this beloved France spat in his face, with no respect for his white hair, the outrage, the challenge, the insult.

Solemn trial, gentlemen, where the soul retempers and rectifies itself, for oblivion is death, and death on Earth is trade with God, the wise dispenser of all forces!

I died as a Christian; I was born into the Church, I departed before it! For a year, I had a deep intuition. I spoke little, but I traveled incessantly in these ethereal plains where everything is remelted under the gaze of the Lord of the worlds; the problem of life unfolded majestically, gloriously. I understood the thought of the Swedenborg and the school of theosophists, Fourier, Jean Reynaud, Henri Martin, Victor Hugo, and the Spiritism that was familiar to me, although in contradiction with my prejudices and my birth, prepared me for the detachment, for the departure. The transition was not painful; like the pollen of a flower, my Spirit, carried away by a whirlwind, found the sister plant. Like you, I call it erraticity; and to make me love such longed-for sister, my mother, my beloved wife, a multitude of friends and invisibles surrounded me with a luminous halo. Immersed in this beneficent fluid, my Spirit relaxed, like the body of the traveler of the desert who, after a long journey under a sky of lead and fire, would find a generous bath for his body, a clear and fresh fountain for his fierce thirst.

Ineffable joys of a boundless heaven, concerts of all harmonies, molecules that echo the chords of divine science, invigorating warmth of its unnamed impressions that the human language cannot decipher, new well-being, rebirth, complete elasticity, electric depth of certainties, similarities of laws, calm full of splendor, spheres that house humanities, oh! welcome, predicted emotions, indefinitely amplified with radiances of infinity!

Exchange your ideas, Spiritists, who believe in us. Study in the always new sources of our teaching; affirm yourselves and let every member of the family be an apostle who speaks, walks, and acts with will, with the certainty that you give nothing to the unknown. Learn a lot so that your intelligence rises. Human science, united with the science of your invisible but luminous auxiliaries, will make you masters of the future; you will cast the shadows out to come to us, that is, to the light, to God.

Alphonse de Lamartine.”