I
The spiritual fluids play an important role in all Spiritist phenomena, or better, they are the principle of those phenomena. Up until now we limited ourselves in saying that a given effect is the result of a fluidic action, but this general definition, although sufficient in the beginning, is no more, when we want to investigate the details. The Spirits wisely limited their teachings in the beginning; later, they called the attention to the serious issue of fluids, and that was not discussed in one center only. It was practically in all of them. But the Spirits do not bring this science ready to us, as with any other. They put us on the path, give us the material, and it is up to us to study, observe, analyze, and coordinate them, and put them in practice. That is what they did for the constitution of the doctrine and acted in the same way regarding the fluids. We know that they sketched their study in a thousand different places; we find some facts everywhere, some explanations, a partial theory, an idea, but we find the complete works nowhere. Why is that? An impossibility on their side? Absolutely not because what they did with men they could do with the Spirits. But, as we said, there is no way for them to preclude us from the works of intelligence, without which our strength would fade away since it would be more comfortable to have them working for us.
The work, therefore, is left to man whose intelligence, time and life are limited and none of them is supposed to constitute a science. That why there isn’t one that is in all its parts the work of a single man; none that has been led to perfection by its first inventor. Several men and multiple generations brought their contribution of research and observations.
The same with the issue at hand, whose several parts were treated separately, then organized in a methodic body when sufficient material could have been collected. This part of the Spiritist science already shows itself not as an individual and systematic conception of a man or a Spirit, but as the product of multiple observations whose authority is in the agreement among them.
For the reason above, we could not pretend that this is the last word. As we have said, the Spirits gauge their teachings and proportionate them to the maturity of the acquired ideas. We cannot doubt, therefore, that later they bring new observations on the way. But for now, there are elements to form a body that will be gradually complemented. The chain of events forces us to start from the top, so that we can move from what is known to the unknown.
II
Everything is interconnected in the works of creation. In the past the three kingdoms were considered entirely independent of one another, and people would have laughed at whoever pretended to find a correlation between the mineral and the vegetable, and the vegetable and the animal. An attentive observation made the solution of continuity disappear and proved that all bodies form an uninterrupted chain, so much so that the three kingdoms do not survive, in reality, but through the more markedly general characters; but, in their definitive limits, they confound to the point of causing difficulties in the determination of where one ends and the other begins, and in which one certain beings must be allocated. These are, for example, the zoophyte, or animal-plants, as they are called by the fact that they present characteristics that are both animal and plant.
The same applies to the composition of matter. For a long time, the four elements served as the foundation to the natural sciences, but they fell before the discoveries of modern Chemistry, that recognized an indetermined number of simple elements. Chemistry shows us that every material body in nature is formed by a combination of those elements in different proportions. The innumerable properties of the different bodies result from the infinite variety of those proportions. That is how, for example, a molecule of the gas oxygen and two of the gas hydrogen combined form water. Through the transformation in water, both oxygen and hydrogen lose their own properties; in other words, there is no more oxygen and hydrogen, but water. By decomposing the water, both gases return in the same proportion as before. If, instead of one there were two molecules of oxygen, the combination is no longer water but a very corrosive liquid
[1]. Just a simple change in the proportion of combinations to result into a poisonous substance instead of a healthy one. Through a reverse operation, if the elements of a deleterious substance like, for example, the arsenic are simply combined in different proportions, without the addition or elimination of any other substance, it will result harmless, or even healthy
[2]. There is more: several molecules of the same element together will yield different properties, depending on the mode of aggregation and the environment when they are located. The recently discovered ozone
[3], in atmospheric air, is an example of that. It has been acknowledged that this substance is nothing more than oxygen, one of the main constituents of air, in a particular state that gives the substance properties that are different from the oxygen itself. Air is still formed by oxygen and nitrogen, but the quality varies depending on the quantity of oxygen in the state of ozone.
Such observations that seem strange to the matter at hand are, nonetheless, connected directly to our subject, as we shall see later. They are, besides, essential as means of comparison. Those compositions and decompositions are artificially obtained in the laboratory, in small scale, but take place spontaneously and in large scale in the great laboratory of nature. Under the influence of heat, light, electricity and humidity, a body decomposes, its elements separate, other combinations take place and new bodies are formed. That is how, the same molecule of oxygen, for example, that is part of our own body, and after its destruction, enters in the composition of a mineral, a plant, or an animated body. In our present bodies, therefore, there are there are the same proportion of elements that were forming parts of a multitude of other bodies. Let us cite an example to make it clearer.
A small seed is sowed onto the ground, it germinates, grows, and becomes a large tree that annually produces leaves, flowers, and fruits. Does it mean that the whole tree was contained in the seed? Certainly not, because it has a much larger amount of matter. Where does this matter come from? From the liquids, salts, and gases that the plant extracted from the earth and the air, that infiltrate in its stem and gradually increase in volume. But wood, flowers and fruits are neither in the ground nor in the air. Those same liquids, salts and gases were decomposed in the process of absorption; their elements suffered new combinations that resulted in sap, wood, bark, leaves, flowers, fruits, volatile aromas, etc. These very parts, in turn, will disappear and decompose; their elements will once again mix up in the earth and in the air; then recompose again into substances that are essential to fruitification; reabsorbed, decomposed and once again transformed into sap, wood, bark, etc. In short, matter does not increase or diminishes, it is transformed, and by force of these successive transformations, the proportion of the multiple substances is always the necessary quantity to the needs of nature
[4].
As an example, suppose that a given quantity of water is decomposed, in the nurturing process of vegetation, to provide oxygen and hydrogen needed for the multiple parts of the plant; it is a quantity of water that is reduced from the mass; but those parts of the plant, when decomposed, will free up the oxygen and the hydrogen that were contained, and those gases, combining again between themselves, will form a new quantity of water, equivalent to the one that had disappeared.
It is important to point out, at this point, that the man that can artificially trigger the compositions and decompositions that spontaneously take place in nature, is impotent to reconstitute the simplest organized body, even if that is a stalk of herb or a dead leaf. After having decomposed a piece of mineral, one can recompose it in all its parts, as it was before; but after separating the elements of a piece of vegetal or animal, one cannot reconstitute it, and even with more so, give it life. Human power stops at the inert matter: the principle of life is in God’s hands.
Most simple bodies are the so called “ponderable” because their weight can be determined, and that weight is proportional to the sum of molecules contained in a given volume of the material. Others are called “imponderable” since they have no weight to us, and irrespective of the amount accumulated on another body, there is no weight added to the latter. These are: heat, light, electricity, and the magnetic fluid. The latter is just a kind of electricity. Despite their imponderability, those fluids are still very powerful. Heat divides the hardest bodies, reducing them to vapor and yields to evaporated liquids an extraordinary force of expansion. Electricity breaks trees and rocks, bends iron bars, melts metallic parts, and transports huge masses over long distances. Magnetism gives iron the capacity of holding considerable masses. Light does not have that kind of power but exert a chemical action upon most of the bodies, and compositions and decompositions continuously take place under its influence. Without light, vegetables and animals weaken, and fruits have no taste or color.
III
Everything in nature, minerals, vegetables, animals, animated and non-animated, solid, liquid, and gaseous, all are formed by the same elements but combined in such a way to produce the infinite variety of bodies. Today, science goes farther; its investigations gradually lead to the great law of unity. Now it is generally accepted that the bodies considered simple are not, but modifications or transformations of a single element, universal principle called ether, cosmic or universal fluid, that depending on the mode of aggregation of its molecules, and under the influence of particular circumstances, it acquires special properties that form the simple bodies. These combined among themselves, and in several proportions, form, as we said, the innumerable variety of compounded bodies. According to this opinion, heat, light, electricity and magnetism are just modifications of the primitive universal fluid. This fluid, therefore, that with all likelihood is imponderable, would be at the same time the principle of the imponderable fluids and the ponderable bodies.
Chemistry allows us to penetrate the intimate constitution of the bodies, but experimentally it does not go beyond the bodies considered simple. Its analytical means are powerless to isolate the primitive element and determine its essence. There is a huge gap between this element in its absolute purity and the point where the investigations of science ends. Reasoning by analogy, one concludes that between these two extreme points the that fluid must undergo transformations that escape our instruments and material senses. It is in this new field, hitherto closed to exploration, that we will try to penetrate.
IV
Up until now we only have very incomplete ideas about the spiritual or invisible world. We thought the Spirits as beings beyond humanity; the angels were also special creatures, of a more perfect nature. As for the state of the souls after death, the knowledge was not more positive. The more general opinion assumed them to be abstract beings, disperse in space, with no more relationship with the living ones, unless, according to the doctrine of the Church, they were in the beatitude of heavens or in the darkness of hell. Furthermore, since the observations of science stops at the tangible matter, it results in an abyss between the corporeal and incorporeal worlds that seemed to exclude any approximation. This is the chasm that new observations and the study of the still unknown phenomena comes to fulfill, at least partially.
To begin with, Spiritism teaches us that the Spirits are the souls of men that lived on Earth; that they progress incessantly, and that the angels are the same souls or Spirits that arrived at a state of perfection that approach them to the Divinity. Second, it teaches us that the souls move alternately from the state of incarnate to erraticity; that in the latter state they constitute the population of the invisible world, to which they remain connected, until they have acquired the moral and intellectual development in sync with the nature of this globe, after which they leave, moving to a more advanced world.
Humanity supplies souls or Spiritist to the spiritual world, by the death of the body; the spiritual world feeds the corporeal world through births; there is, therefore, an incessant exchange between one and the other world. This constant relationship makes them close-knit because the beings that enter and leave our world are the same. This is the first trace of union, a contact point that already diminishes the distance that seemed to separate the visible from the invisible world.
The intimate nature of the soul, that is, the intelligent principle, the source of thoughts, completely escapes our investigations. But we now know that the soul is surrounded by an envelope or fluidic body that yields the soul a distinct, circumscribed and individual being. The soul is the intelligent principle when considered separately; it is the thinking and acting force, that can only be conceived isolated from matter as an abstraction. The soul, covered by its fluidic envelope, or perispirit, constitutes the being called
Spirit, as it constitutes the human being when covered by the corporeal envelope. Although in its state of Spirit it enjoys special properties and faculties, it still belongs to humanity. The Spirits are, therefore, creatures like us, for each one of us becomes Spirit after death, and each Spirit becomes human through birth.
That envelope is not the soul, since it does not think; it is just the outfit. The perispirit, like the body, without the soul is inert matter, deprived of life and sensations. We say matter because, in fact, the perispirit, although of an ethereal and subtle nature, is not less matter than the imponderable fluids, and even more, “
matter of the same nature and origin as the roughest and tangible matter”, as we shall soon see.
The soul is not dressed up by the perispirit just in the state of Spirit; the soul is inseparable from that envelope both during incarnation and in erraticity. In incarnation, the perispirit is the link between the soul and the material envelope, the intermediary with which the soul acts upon the organs and perceives the sensations of the exterior things. During life, the perispiritual fluid identifies itself with the body, penetrating all its parts; with death, it detaches from the body; deprived from life, the body dissolves but the perispirit remains always attached to the soul, that is, to the vivifying principle, and does not perish; instead of two envelopes, the soul keeps only one: the lighter one, the one that is in greater harmony with its spiritual state.
Although these principles are elementary to the Spiritists, it was useful to remind them for the comprehension of the subsequent explanations, and the connection of the ideas.
V
Some people contested the utility of the perispiritual envelope of the soul, and consequently its existence. They say the soul does not need an intermediary to act upon the body; and once separated from the body, it is a superfluous accessory.
Our answer, to begin with, is that the perispirit is not an imaginary creation, an invented hypothesis to get to a conclusion; its existence is a fact attested by observation. As for its utility, during life and after death, one must admit that, considering that it does exist, it must serve something. Those that contest its utility are like the one that, by not understanding the functions of certain gears in a mechanism, would conclude that they only serve to unnecessarily complicate the engine. That person does not see that if the tiniest piece were removed, everything would be disorganized. How many things, in the great mechanism of nature, seem useless to the eyes of the ignorant, and even to certain scientists that believe, in good faith, that if the construction of the universe were up to them, they would have done a much better job!
The perispirit is one of the most important gears of the economy. Science has observed it in some of its effects and has alternately called it by the names of vital fluid, nervous fluid or impulse, magnetic fluid, animal electricity, etc., without accounting for its precise nature and properties, and even less for its origin. It was suspected as the envelope of the Spirit after death since the remotest antiquity. All theologies attribute a fluidic body to the beings of the invisible world. St. Paul says, in precise terms, that we are born with a spiritual body (First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chap. XV, verses 35 to 44 and 50).
The same happens to all great truths based on the laws of nature, and from which the men of genius always had an intuition, in all epochs. That is how, since before out time, notable philosophers suspected the roundness of Earth and its movement of rotation, without any demerit to Copernicus and Galileo, even by supposing that they had taken those ideas from their predecessors. Thanks to their work, a theory without proof, something that was only their individual opinion,
unknown to the masses, became a scientific truth, practical and popular.
The doctrine of the perispirit is in the same case. Spiritism was not the first one to discover it. But, as with Copernicus in the movement of Earth, Spiritism studied it, demonstrated, and analyzed it, defined, and extracted fruitful results from it. Without the more modern studies, this great truth, as with many others, would still be in the state of dead letter.
VI
The perispirit is the bond that connects the corporeal to the spiritual world. Spiritism show them in such an intimate and constant relationship that the transition from one to the other is almost imperceptible. As with nature, in which the vegetable kingdom is connected to the animal kingdom by semi-vegetable or semi-animal beings, the corporeal state connects to the spiritual one not only by the intelligent principle, that is the same, but also by the fluidic envelope of that very principle that is, at the same time, semi-material and semi-spiritual. The corporeal and spiritual beings are confounded during the earthly life, and act in agreement; the death of the body just separates them. The link of those states is such, and they act one upon the other with such a force that a day will come in which it will be acknowledged that the study of natural history of mankind cannot be complete without the study of the perispiritual covering, that is, without setting one foot onto the domain of the invisible world. Such proximity is still greater when the origin, nature, formation, and properties of the perispirit are observed, observation that naturally results from the study of the fluids.
VII
It is well-known that all animal matter has oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon for constituent principle, combined in different proportions. As we said, those very simple elements have a unique principle that is the universal cosmic fluid. Through their many combinations they form all varieties of substances that form the human body, the only we one that we mention here, although the same is true to the animals and plants. It follows that the human body is not more than a concentration, condensation, or solidification of carbon gas, if you will. In fact, let us suppose the complete disaggregation of all molecules of the body, and there we find oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon again; and in other terms, the body would have been volatized. Returning to their primitive states, these four elements, through a new and more complete decomposition, if our means of analysis would allow, would yield the cosmic fluid. This fluid, as the principle of every matter, is matter on its own right, although in a thoroughly ethereal state.
An analogue phenomenon occurs in the formation of the fluidic body or perispirit: it is equally a condensation of the cosmic fluid around the focus of intelligence, or soul. But the molecular transformation here takes place directly, for the fluid keeps its imponderability and ethereal properties. Both the human and perispiritual body have the same fluid as their source; one and the other are matter, although in two different states. We were then right by saying that the perispirit has the same nature and origin as the grossest matter. As it can be seen, there is nothing supernatural because, by its principle, it is connected to the things of nature, of which it is no more than a variety. Since the universal fluid is the principle of all bodies in nature, animate and inanimate, and consequently, of earth and stones, Moses was right when he said: “
And God formed man of the dust of the ground”.[5] This does not mean that God took a handful of dirt, petrified and modelled the body of man, as one does with a statue of mud, according to the belief of those that take the words of the Bible literally, but instead that the body was formed from the same principles or elements of the earth or that were used to form earth. And Moses adds: “
And he gave him a living soul, made in his likeness”. He then makes a distinction between the body and the soul; indicates that this is of different nature, and not matter, but spiritual and immaterial like God. He says: “
a living soul”, specifying that it has the principle of life, whilst the body, formed by matter, does not live on its own. The words “
in his likeness” mean similarity and not identity. Had Moses seen man as part of Divinity, he would have said: “
God animates him by giving him a soul taken out of His own substance” as he said that the body had been taken from earth. These thoughts are an answer to the persons that accuse Spiritism of materializing the soul, because it gives the soul a semi-material envelope.
VIII
In the normal state, the perispirit is invisible to our eyes and impalpable to our feel, as are an infinity of gases and fluids. However, the invisibility, impalpability, and even the imponderability of the perispiritual fluid are not absolute. That is why we say in the
normal state. In certain cases, it suffers, perhaps, a greater condensation, or a special molecular modification that makes it momentarily visible or tangible. That is how the apparitions are produced. Even without apparition, some persons feel the fluidic impression of the Spirits, and that is an indication of material nature.
Whatever the way there is an atomic transformation of the fluid, there is no cohesion like in the material bodies; the appearance forms and dissipates instantaneously, explaining the subtle appearances and disappearances. Since the appearances are the product of an invisible material fluid, made visible by the force of a momentarily change in its molecular structure, they are not more supernatural than vapors that alternately become visible or invisible by condensation or rarefaction. We mention vapor as a comparative example, not pretending that there is similarity of cause and effect.
IX
Some people criticized the qualification of semi-material given to the perispirit, saying that something is or is not matter. Admitting that the expression is improper, it would still be necessary to adopt it given the lack of a special word to express this particular state of matter. If there were a more appropriate word to this thing, the critics should have indicated it. The perispirit is matter, as we have just seen, and speaking philosophically, and for its intimate essence; nobody can dispute that; but it does not have the properties of tangible matter, as it is commonly conceived; it cannot be submitted to a chemical analysis, for although it has the same principle as the flesh and the marble, and it may take their appearances, in reality it is neither flesh nor marble. From its ethereal nature, it has, at the same time, the appearance of materiality for its substance, and spirituality, for its impalpability, and the word semi-material is not more ridiculous than semi-double and many others, because one can also say that something is a double or is not.
X
As a universal elemental principle, the cosmic fluid offers two distinct states: the ethereal or imponderable, that we may consider as the normal primitive state, and that of materialization or ponderable, that in a way is consecutive. The intermediary point is the transformation of the fluid into tangible matter. However, here also there is not sudden transition, for we can consider our imponderable fluids as a midterm between the two states. Each of these two states necessarily gives rise to special phenomena. Those of the visible world belong to the latter, and those of the invisible world to the former. Some, called
material phenomena, are in the field of science itself; the others, called
spiritual phenomena, for being connected to the existence of the Spirits, are the subject of Spiritism. But there are so many points of contact between them that they serve to mutual clarification, and as we said, the study of ones could not be complete without the study of the others. The study of the fluids leads to the explanation of the latter, the subject of a future special work.
[1] Note: H
2O
2 is the formula of Hydrogen Peroxide (T.N.)
[2] Arsenic was a common “poison”, the so called “white poison” for its similarity to salt and sugar in appearance, utilized as a murder weapon for generations, even before the nineteenth century. (T.N.)
[3] Ozone, or trioxygen, is an inorganic molecule with the chemical formula O ₃. It is a pale blue gas with a distinctively pungent smell. It is an allotrope of oxygen that is much less stable than the diatomic allotrope O ₂, breaking down in the lower atmosphere to O
2. Source Wikipedia (T.N.)
[4] The principle of conservation of mass was proposed by Antoine Lavoisier in 1773 (T.N.)
[5] Genesis 2, 7
