I do not desire to put forth in these first pages any explanatory hypothesis. My readers will themselves form an opinion from the narratives that follow, and the last chapter of the volume will be devoted to theories. Yet I believe it will be useful to call attention at once to the fact that matter is not, in reality, what it appears to be to our vulgar senses,—to our sense of touch, to our vision,—but that it is identical with energy, and is only a manifestation of the movement of invisible and imponderable elements. The universe is a dynamism. Matter is only an appearance. It will be useful for the reader to bear this truth in mind, as it will help him to comprehend the studies we are about to make.
The mysterious forces we are here studying are themselves manifestations of the universal dynamism with which our five senses put us very imperfectly into relation.
These things belong to the psychical order as well as to the physical. They prove that we are living in the midst of an unexplored world, in which the psychic forces play a rôle as yet very imperfectly studied.
We have here a situation analogous to that in which Christopher Columbus found himself on the evening of the day when he perceived the first hints of land in the New World. We are pushing our prow through an absolutely unknown sea.
CHAPTER II
MY FIRST SÉANCES IN THE ALLAN KARDEC GROUP AND WITH THE MEDIUMS OF THAT EPOCH
One day in the month of November, 1861, under the Galeries de l'Odéon,[6] I spied a book, the title of which struck me,—Le Livre des Esprits ("The Book of Spirits"), by Allan Kardec. I bought it and read it with avidity, several chapters seeming to me to agree with the scientific bases of the book I was then writing, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds. I hunted up the author, who proposed that I should enter, as a free associated member, the Parisian Society for Spiritualistic Studies, which he had founded, and of which he was president. I accepted, and by chance have just found the green ticket signed by him on the fifteenth day of November, 1861. This is the date of my début in psychic studies. I was then nineteen, and for three years had been an astronomical pupil at the Paris Observatory. At this time I was putting the last touches to the book I just mentioned, the first edition of which was published some months afterwards by the printer-publisher of the Observatory.
The members came together every Friday evening in the assembly room of the society, in the little passageway of Sainte Anne, which was placed under the protection of Saint Louis. The president opened the séance by an "invocation to the good spirits." It was admitted, as a principle, that invisible spirits were present there and revealed themselves. After this invocation a certain number of persons, seated at a large table, were besought to abandon themselves to their inspiration and to write. They were called "writing mediums." Their dissertations were afterwards read before an attentive audience. There were no physical experiments of table-turning, or tables moving or speaking. The president, Allan Kardec, said he attached no value to such things. It seemed to him that the instructions communicated by the spirits ought to form the basis of a new doctrine, of a sort of religion.