THE MEDIUMS’ BOOK

52. Materialistic opinions being put aside, as condemned at once by reason and by facts, we have now to inquire whether the soul, after death, can manifest itself to the living.

Let us begin by considering whether there can be any reason why intelligent beings, living, as it were, in our midst, although, from their nature, we are unable to see them, should not be able to manifest themselves in some way or other. Common sense tells us that there can be no á priori impossibility of their being able to do this; and it is something that the supposition is seen to be not intrinsicaly unreasonable. On the other hand, the belief that they can thus manifest themselves is indigenous among all nations, and has existed everywhere, and at all epochs ; and it is evident that no intuition could be so general, or manifest such vitality, in all ages, without having some foundation. Moreover, this belief is sanctioned by the testimony of Holy Writ and by the Fathers of the Church; and only the materialistic scepticism of our age could have relegated it into the category of superstitions.

But these are only moral considerations. One cause has Contributed beyond all others to develop scepticism in a positive age like ours; an age in which a reason must be given for every statement, and in which people must know the "why" and the "how" of everything. That cause is the general ignorance of mankind in regard to the nature of spirits and of the means by which they are able to manifest themselves. Let the world acquire this knowledge, and the fact of spirit-manifestation will be seen to have nothing surprising in it, and will take its place with all other natural facts.

53. The very idea that people usually form respecting spirits renders the question of their manifestation incomprehensible; for these manifestations can only occur through the action of spirits on matter, and as it is generally supposed that spirits are divested of all matter, it is asked, with some show of reason, "How can a spirit act on material things?" Here is the general error, for a spirit is not an abstraction, but is a definite being, limited, and Circumscribed. The spirit incarnated in the human body constitutes the man's soul; when the spirit quits that body at death, he does not emerge from it stripped of all covering. All spirits assure us that they preserve their human form and, in fact, when they appear to us, they do so in the form by which we knew them during their human life.

If we observe people attentively at the moment of their death, we find that their soul is in a state of confusion ; their perceptions are muddled; they see their bodies, whole, or mutilated, according to the manner of their decease; and, at the same time, these souls see themselves, and feel that they are still living. Something tells them that the body lying there is their body, and they feel a difficulty in comprehending how it can be that they are separated from it. They Continue to see themselves under their previous form, and this sight produces in some of them, for a certain period, a singular illusion, viz., that of believing themselves to be still in the flesh. They have to gain experience of their new state, before they can become convinced of its reality.

When they have got over this first moment of perplexity, they learn to look upon their corpse as an old garment which they have slipped off; and are not sorry to be quit of They feel themselves to be lighter, and to have dropped a burden; they no longer suffer from physical pains, and are delighted with their power of rising into the atmosphere and gliding through space, just as, when in the body, they have often done in their dreams. *

Meanwhile, notwithstanding that they have lost their body, the souls retain their personality; they retain their human form, but a form which neither troubles nor embar- rasses them; and they also retain the consciousness of their self, and of their individuality. What must we conclude from this? Why, that the soul does not leave its all in the coffin, but that it carries something away with it.


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* If the reader will look again at what we have said, in The Spirits’ Book, about dreams and the state of the spirit during slumber (400, 418), he will see that those dreams which almost every one has experienced, in which we find ourselves moving as though we were flying, are nothing but a vague remembrance of the sensation experienced by the spirit, when, during slumber, it has momentarily quitted its body of gross matter, taking with it only its fluidic body; the same fluidic body which it will preserve after death. Those dreams may therefore give us at idea of the state of the spirit, when freed from the fetters which bind it to the earth.

54. Numerous observations, and unanswerable facts, of which we shall speak further on, have led us to this conclusion, viz., that there exist in man three things 1st, the soul or spirit, the intelligent principle in which resides the moral sense; 2nd, the body, a gross material envelope, with which the soul is temporarily clothed, for the accomplishment of certain Providential ends; 3rd, the perispirit, a fluidic envelope, which is semi-material, and constitutes the link between the soul and the body.

Death is the destruction, or rather the disaggregation, of the grosser envelope, from which the soul withdraws itself; the other envelope disengages itself from the grosser one, and accompanies the soul; so that the soul always possesses an envelope. This latter, fluidic, ethereal, vaporous, and invisible to us in its normal state, is none the less matter, although, up to the present time, we have not been able to seize it, so as to submit it to analysis.

This inner envelope of the soul, or perispirit, exists, then. during our corporeal life; it is the go-between or intermediary for all the sensations experienced by the spirit, the means by which the spirit acts upon its fleshly organs and transmits its will to all that is exterior to itself. To employ a comparison borrowed from matter, it is the electric conducting-wire which serves for the transmission of thought it is, in short, that mysterious, inexplicable agent which we call the nervous fluid, and which plays so important a
part in the human economy, but of which we take too little account in our discussion of physiological and pathological questions. Medical students, confining their researches to the material and ponderable elements, leave out of their calculations an incessant cause of vital action, the recognition of which would throw a flood of light on the facts with which they deal. But this is not the place to enter upon this highly important subject ; we would merely point out, in passing, that a knowledge of the perispirit is the key to a host of physiological and physical problems, until now unexplained.

The perispirit is not one of those mere hypotheses to which science sometimes finds it necessary to have recourse, in order to explain a fact; its existence has not only been revealed by spirits, but is proved by observation, as we shall show further on. For the present, and not to anticipate facts which will be brought forward in due time, we confine ourselves to saying that, whether during its union with its fleshly body, or after its disjunction therefrom, the soul is never separated from its perispirit.

55. It has been said that the spirit is a flame, a spark this should be understood of the soul, properly so called, the intellectual and moral principle, to which we cannot attribute any determinate form ; but, whatever its degree of advancement, the soul is always clothed with an envelope, or perispirit, the nature of which becomes more and more etherealised, in proportion as the soul itself becomes purer and raises itself higher and higher in the hierarchy of spirits. This conjunction of the soul and perispirit is as absolute as that of the idea of spirit with the idea of form , so that we cannot conceive of the one without the other. The perispirit is therefore an integral part of the spirit, as the body is an integral part of the man; but the perispirit, alone, is no more the spirit, than the body, alone, is the man For the perispirit does not think ; it is, to the soul, what the body is to the man; it is the agent, the instrument, of the soul's action.

56. The form of the perispirit is the human form ; and, as previously stated, when it appears to us, it generally resembles the form by which we knew the spirit, when in the flesh. It might thence be supposed that the perispirit, being disengaged from every particle of flesh, must have moulded itself in some way upon the body, and thus have preserved its impress; but this does not appear to be the case. The human form, though differenced in some details, and with certain organic modifications necessitated by the nature of the sphere in which the soul is called to exist, appears to be common to the inhabitants of all the globes of the universe ; this, at least, is what spirits tell us ; an this form appears to be equally that of all spirits when not incarnated, and possessing only their perispirit. It is also the form under which, through all tune, angels, or pure spirits, have been represented ; from all of which we may conclude that the human form is the type of every human being, to whatever degree he may have attained. But the subtle matter of the perispirit has neither the tenacity nor the rigidity of compact bodily matter ; it is, if we may so express ourselves, flexible and expansive ; and therefore, the form assumed by the perispirit, although similar to that of the body, is not absolutely the same. It yields to the will of the spirit, who can give it any similitude he pleases whereas the resistance of the solid envelope of flesh renders such changes of similitude impossible. Freed from the "vile body" which once compressed it, the perispirit spreads, contracts, or otherwise transforms itself; accomplishing every metamorphosis determined at the moment by the spirit's will. It is through this property of his fluidic envelope that the spirit who desires to make himself known can, when necessary, assume the exact appearance he had when living, and can even show the bodily defects, or other peculiarities, that may serve to identify him.

Spirits, as we have seen, are beings like ourselves, and constitute a population environing us on every side, though invisible to us in our normal state; we say, our normal state, because, as we shall see, this invisibility is not absolute.

57. Let us return to our consideration of the nature of the perispirit, essential to the explanation we are about to give. We have said that, although fluidic, it is none the less a species of matter, as is proved by the fact of tangible apparitions, to which we have now to recur. Through the influence of certain mediums, we have seen hands appear, with all the properties of living hands; hands that were warm, that we could touch, that offered the resistance of a solid body, that could grasp ours, and then suddenly vanish, like a shadow. The intelligent action of these hands, which, evidently, by their execution of Certain movements, obey a will, playing airs on an instrument, etc.-proves that they are visible portions of an invisible, intelligent being. Their tangibleness, their temperature, in a word, the impression they make on our senses (for we have seen them leave marks on the skin, deal painful blows, or give the gentlest. caresses), all prove that they consist of some sort of matter. Their instantaneous disappearance proves, still further, that this matter is eminently subtle, and that it has the property (like that of certain substances already known to us) of passing alternately from a solid to a fluidic state, and vice- versa.

58. The peculiar nature of the soul, properly so called, that is to say, of the thinking being, is entirely unknown to us : it only reveals itself by its acts, and these acts cannot strike our material senses, unless through a material intermediary. The spirit, then, has need of matter, in order to act upon matter He has, as his direct instrument, his perispirit, just as a man has his body ; and this perispirit is matter, as we are about to show. He has, as his intermediary agent, the universal fluid ; a sort of vehicle on which he acts, as we act upon the air, in order to produce certain effects, by the aid of expansion, compression, propulsion, or vibration.

The action of a spirit on matter is easily understood when thus explained; and we see that all the effects produced by that action belong to the order of natural pheno- mena, and have nothing of the miraculous about them. They have only appeared to be supernatural, because people were ignorant of their cause ; their cause known, they no longer appear to be prodigies, and that cause is found in the semimaterial properties of the perispirit. All this is only a new order of facts, explained by a new law, and about which, ere long, people will feel no more wonder than they now feel at correspondence by the electric telegraph.

59. It may perhaps be asked, how it is that a spirit, by the aid of matter so subtle, can act upon bodies which are both heavy and compact, raise tables, etc. But no scientific man could make such an objection; for, without reference to any special properties which this novel agent may possess and of which we are ignorant, have we not, before our eyes, analogous examples? Is it not in the most rarefied gases, and in imponderable fluids, that industry finds its most powerful motors? When we see the air overthrowing edifices, vapour dragging enormous masses, powder, transformed into gas, blowing up rocks, electricity splitting trees and piercing walls, why should it be thought strange that a spirit, with the aid of his perispirit, should raise a table, especially when we know that this very perispirit may also become visible and tangible, and behave like a solid body?