IV

“What was my role? Neither that of inventor, nor that of creator.

I saw, I observed, I studied the facts with care and perseverance; I coordinated them and deduced their consequences from them: that is the whole part that falls to me.”

If The Spirits' Book had no other result than to show the serious side of the question and to provoke studies in that direction, that would already be enough, and we would feel happy to have been chosen to carry out a work for which, moreover, we do not claim any personal merit, since the principles it contains are not our creation. Its merit is, therefore, entirely that of the Spirits who dictated it. We hope that it will have another result, that of guiding the men who wish to enlighten themselves, showing them […] a great and sublime end: that of individual and social progress, and of indicating to them the path to follow in order to attain it.

This book is the repository of their teachings. It was written by the order and under the dictation of superior Spirits, in order to establish the foundations of a rational philosophy, free from the prejudices of the spirit of system. It contains nothing that is not the expression of their thought and that has not been examined by them. Only the order and the methodical distribution of the matters, as well as the notes and the form of some parts of the wording, constitute the work of the one who received the mission to publish it.

The Spirits' Book had as its result the making evident of the philosophical scope of Spiritism. If it has any merit, it would be presumption on my part to take pride in it, for the doctrine it contains is not my creation. All the honor of the good it does belongs to the wise Spirits who dictated it and wished to make use of me. I can, therefore, hear praise without my modesty being wounded, and without my self-esteem being thereby exalted. If I had wished to take advantage of this, I would certainly have claimed its conception, instead of attributing it to the Spirits.

Our personal role in the great movement of ideas that is being prepared by Spiritism and that is beginning to operate, is that of an attentive observer, who studies the facts in order to discover their causes and draw their consequences. We have confronted all those it has been possible for us to gather; we have compared and commented on the instructions given by the Spirits at all points of the globe, and then we methodically coordinated the whole; in short, we have studied and given to the public the fruit of our research, without attributing to our work any greater value than that of a philosophical work deduced from observation and experience, without ever considering ourselves the chief of the Doctrine, nor seeking to impose our ideas on anyone whatsoever […]. Our greatest merit is perseverance and devotion to the cause we have embraced. In all this, we have done what any other might have done in our place, which is why we have never had the pretension to judge ourselves a prophet or a messiah, nor, still less, to present ourselves as such.

Our publications may be considered the result of a work of refinement. In them, all opinions are discussed, but the questions are presented in the form of principles only after having received the consecration of all the verifications, which alone can imprint upon them the force of law and permit categorical affirmations. This is why we do not lightly advocate any theory, and it is precisely in this that the Doctrine, deriving from the general teaching, does not represent the product of a preconceived system. It is also from this that it draws its strength and what guarantees its future.

The great criterion of the teaching given by the Spirits is logic. God gave us the capacity to judge and reason in order to make use of them; the good Spirits recommend them to us, thereby giving us a proof of superiority. The others refrain from doing so: they want to be believed on their word, for they know very well that in examination they have everything to lose. We have, therefore, many reasons not to accept lightly all the theories given by the Spirits. When one arises, we limit ourselves to the role of observer; we make abstraction of its spirit origin, without letting ourselves be fascinated by the brilliance of pompous names; we examine it as if it emanated from a simple mortal and see whether it is rational, whether it accounts for everything, whether it resolves all the difficulties. It was thus that we proceeded with the doctrine of reincarnation, which we had not adopted, although it came from the Spirits, until after recognizing that it alone, and it alone, could resolve that which no philosophy had ever resolved, and this to the exclusion of the material proofs that are daily given, to us and to many others. The contradictors, therefore, matter little to us, even if they are Spirits. Provided that it is logical, in conformity with the justice of God; provided that they cannot replace it with anything more satisfactory, we trouble ourselves no more about them than about those who affirm that the Earth does not turn around the Sun — for there are Spirits who think themselves wise — or who claim that man came completely formed from another world, mounted on the back of a winged elephant.

I soon saw that each Spirit, by virtue of his personal position and his knowledge, revealed to me one facet of the spiritual world, in the same way that one comes to know the state of a country by questioning its inhabitants of all classes and all conditions, since each one can teach us something, while no single one, individually, can inform us of everything. It falls to the observer to form the whole, by means of documents gathered from different sides, collated, coordinated, and compared with one another. I conducted myself, therefore, with the Spirits as I would have done with men. To me they were, from the least to the greatest, means of informing myself, and not predestined revealers. These were the dispositions with which I undertook my Spiritist studies and in which I always continued. To observe, to compare, and to judge, such is the rule I constantly followed.

Obstinate criticism reproached us for accepting too easily the doctrines of certain Spirits, above all with respect to scientific questions. Such persons reveal, by this very fact, that they are ignorant of the true objective of the spiritist science, just as they are unaware of the one we propose to ourselves, granting us the right to return to them the reproach of frivolity with which they judged us. It is certainly not for us to teach the reserve with which that which comes from the Spirits should be received; we are far from taking all their words as articles of faith. We know that among them there are those who are found at all degrees of knowledge and morality; for us, it is a population that presents varieties far more numerous than those we perceive among men; what we want is to study that population; it is to come to know it and understand it. For this, we study the individualities, we observe the small differences, and we seek to grasp the distinctive traits of their customs, their habits, and their character; in short, we wish to identify ourselves as much as possible with the state of that world.

Some persons have said that I was too precipitate in the spiritist theories, that it was not yet time to establish them, and that the observations were not yet complete enough […] Well then! I must say upon what my confidence in the veracity and superiority of the Spirits who instructed me is founded. First I will say that, in conformity with their advice, I accept nothing without control and without examination; I do not adopt an idea unless it seems to me rational, logical, in accord with the facts and the observations, and unless nothing serious comes to contradict it. But my judgment cannot be an infallible criterion. The assent I have found on the part of many persons more enlightened than I furnishes me the first guarantee. But I find another, no less preponderant, in the character of the communications that have been obtained since I have occupied myself with Spiritism. I can say that there never escaped me a single one of those words, a single one of those signs by which inferior Spirits, even the most cunning, always betray themselves. Never any domination; never any equivocal advice or advice contrary to charity and benevolence; never any ridiculous prescriptions. Far from it; in them I found nothing but generous, noble, sublime thoughts, free from pettiness and meanness. In a word: their relations with me, in the smallest as in the greatest things, were always such that, if it had been a man speaking to me, I would have considered him the best, the wisest, the most prudent, the most moralized, and the most enlightened.

Between Spiritism and other philosophical systems there is this capital difference: that these are all the work of men, more or less enlightened, whereas in the one you attribute to me, I do not have the merit of the invention of a single principle. One says: the philosophy of Plato, of Descartes, of Leibnitz; one will never be able to say: the doctrine of Allan Kardec; and this fortunately, for what value can a name have in a matter of such gravity? Spiritism has auxiliaries of greater preponderance, beside whom we are no more than a simple atom.

Such is the basis upon which we rely when we formulate a principle of the Doctrine. It is not because it is in accord with our ideas that we hold it to be true. We do not at all set ourselves up as supreme arbiter of the truth, and we say to no one: ‘Believe such a thing, because it is we who tell it to you.’ In our own eyes, our opinion is no more than a personal opinion, which may be true or false, since we do not consider ourselves more infallible than any other. Nor is it because a principle was taught to us that we consider it true, but because it has received the sanction of concordance.

“is infinitely more than a mere copyist or a simple collector of others' thoughts. He wishes to efface himself individually so that the work may rise above human contingencies; the Doctrine should not remain ‘bound’ to his personal name, as, for example, that of the superman to Nietzsche, Islamism to Mohammed, positivism to Auguste Comte, or the theory of relativity to Einstein; he is, nevertheless, in spite of himself, more than a simple collaborator, attaining the stage of a co-author with respect to the expository plan and the subsequent works. […] A cultured, objective, enlightened man, with enormous reservations toward the religious and philosophical doctrines of his time, he had in mind innumerable inquiries for which he had not yet found an answer. At the same time that he was recording the observations of the Spirits, he was discovering an entirely new and unsuspected world and had the good sense not to let himself be fascinated by his discoveries. […] From then on, that is, from The Spirits' Book onward, his [spiritual] friends assist him, as they always did, but they let him proceed with his own methodology, and in this too he was a consummate master, by centuries of didactic experience. The subsequent works of the Codification no longer arise from direct dialogue with the Spirits, but rather from the speculations and conclusions of Kardec himself, without ever abandoning, nevertheless, the gigantic panel drawn by four hands in The Spirits' Book.”

“very important to all of us is the work of those whom he called ordering Spirits. They are the ones who come charged with putting the great ideas into human, accessible language. Without them, much of what is discovered, thought, and accomplished would remain lost in chaos and in the absence of perspective and hierarchy. It is they — lucid, objective, and essentially organizing Spirits — who discipline the ideas, discovering their connections, implications, and consequences, placing them in orderly fashion within reach of the human mind, in an easily accessible and assimilable way, in the form of new syntheses of thought. It is they, therefore, who sum up a past of conquests and prepare a future of achievements. Without them, knowledge would be a chaotic heap of ideas that contradict one another, because invariably the chaff comes with the wheat, in the harvest, and the gangue with the gold, in the mining. They are the prospectors who take everything, examine, reject, classify, and place in the right spot, at the right time, altruistically, so that whoever comes afterward may take advantage of the stratifications of knowledge and set out toward new syntheses, ever broader, nobler, more beautiful, ad infinitum [to infinity]. Allan Kardec is one of those Spirits.” 53 […] The Spirits' Book did not arise, as is sometimes naively assumed, from a great mass of answers coming from innumerable points. Although […] Kardec […] made use of some communications that were sent to him, the bulk of the book, in its first edition, was the fruit of a systematic work conceived by him and developed with the mediumistic help of the two Baudin sisters, and afterward of Miss Japhet, for the revision. Only with respect to some more delicate points did he judge it prudent to compare the opinions with the help of a few other mediums.

that in the short phase [less than two years] of the elaboration of The Spirits' Book, in its first […] and, perhaps, second edition, there simply was not an extensive network of collaborators, and much less of collaborators perfectly attuned to a project of such complexity.

The attentive study of Kardec's declarations about his role and, above all, the mature reflection upon the whole of his production, leave no doubt as to the centrality of his contribution in the establishment of the bases of Spiritism […] The conception and conduct of the entire program of spiritist research, in its multiple unfoldings, as well as the superior lucidity and precision of his own texts, indicate in an incontestable manner that Kardec was not a mere auxiliary of the Spirits… 57