Or I would prefer them to be false. And if they are true, if it is actually a law of nature that during long years to come, after this terrestrial existence, we must drag ourselves miserably from table to table and medium to medium, the best of us (not to speak of the others) displaying without shame the proofs of our mental decrepitude in pitiable nonsense and wretched verses—oh, so much the worse!
It is one misery and shame the more added to all those of which this satanic world is made up, a new calamity coming to crown the physical and moral ills of a world against which the Christian continually protests as he repeats “Thy kingdom come,” an additional scandal condemned to disappear when “His kingdom shall have come.”
There is nothing in common between the empirical, spatial, and temporal survivals which spiritism pretends to establish and that “eternal life” proclaimed by the Prophet of Nazareth. These things, said Pascal, are not of the same order. That is why I am not a spiritist.
Here rises a last point, which worries me when I ought to speak my mind in regard to spiritism in the presence of spiritists. “You do not personally hold,” it has been often objected to me, “to these communications of the living with those who have gone before us into the great unknown, and you cry out against spiritistic demonstrations. It is all very well for you, who are a mystic, and to whom the existence of God in Jesus Christ seems a sufficient guarantee of the destinies of human personality and its ultimate palingenesis. But every one has not the same temperament, and does not take so blithely his ignorance of the kind of life which awaits him beyond the tomb. To believe in God, and to abandon to Him with closed eyes the fate of those who leave us, carrying away with them the best portions of our being, is all very well, but it is very difficult. The times of the psalmist who could say ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him’ are no more; and as for Christ, He was certainly a very remarkable medium, but His simple affirmation would scarcely be taken to-day for gospel words. The solid and the palpable are necessary to the ‘fools’ of our epoch. They are not capable of admitting a higher world than that of sense, unless they are enabled to touch it with their finger by means of messages and the return of the dead themselves. Whence it results that every attack, every hostile attitude towards spiritism tends directly to break down the only rampart which might henceforth be efficacious against materialism and its disastrous consequences —infidelity, egotism, vice, despair, suicide, and, finally, the destruction and annihilation of the entire social organism. On the other hand, when science at length shall recognize and consecrate spiritism officially, thereupon, simultaneously with the tangible certainty of another life, courage and strength will return to the hearts of individuals, devotion and all virtues will begin to flourish once again, and an elevated humanity will soon see heaven descend upon the earth, thanks to the connection established and daily practised between the living and the spirits of the dead.”
My embarrassment is easily seen. On the one hand, I do not in any way admit the foregoing objection. I do not think that the gospel has had its day or is above the reach of “fools,” since it was for them that its author designed it. I believe, on the contrary, that the Christian faith, the faith of Christ or faith in Christ, is, in its inmost essence, a psychological reality, a personal experience accessible to the most humble, a fact of consciousness which will survive when all theological systems shall have been forgotten and all the clergy shall have been abolished. That vital and regenerating power will save our civilization (if anything can save it) by means of the individuals whom it shall have regenerated, without owing anything to spiritistic theories or practices. Inversely, I do not share the optimism of those who would make of spiritism a social panacea, and who imagine that when the moral consciousness on the one side and the religious consciousness on the other have ceased to make themselves heard, the messages of the “disincarnates” will have better success. (“If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”)
But, on the other hand, there are individual cases which are interesting and which certainly merit consideration. And for millions, and by a hundred different titles—religious belief, moral consolation, solemn and mysterious rites, old habit, etc.—spiritism is to-day the pivot around which existence turns, and also its only support; would not the destruction of it, then, be productive of more harm than good, and would it not be better to let matters take their course? Why prevent man from delighting in dreams, if he so pleases?
All things are possible, and was it not of the revenants that Hamlet was thinking in his celebrated apostrophe, from which I have taken this principle?
These are the things which perplex me: while waiting to find a way out of them, and by way of summing up, it seems to me indispensable to separate distinctly spiritism-religion, which is an assemblage of beliefs and practices dear to many, from spiritism-science, a simple hypothesis designed to explain certain phenomena arising from observation. The first tells me nothing, or rather it amuses me or repels me according to circumstances; but the more elevated sentiments, and those worthy of all respect, which it inspires in its adepts, impose upon me the duty of passing it by and ignoring it here. The second, on the contrary, does not fail to interest me, as it does all who are curious in regard to natural phenomena.
For the question, Do human or animal individualities continue to intervene in an effective manner in the physical, physiological, or psychological phenomena of this universe after the loss of their corporeal and visible organism? is not an ordinary one. If there are facts which peremptorily establish an affirmative answer, what problems will arise, what an unexpected field of investigation will it not open up to our experimental sciences! And even if the hypothesis is false, how captivating the study of the singular phenomena which have been able to give it birth, which simulate the return of the dead to our observable world! It is understood, therefore, that, even despoiled of all the emotional accessories in which it so easily wraps itself in the heart and imagination of men, the empirical question of immortality and spiritistic interventions, apparent or real, preserves its scientific importance, and merits being discussed with the calm serenity, independence, and strictness of analysis which belong to the experimental method.