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For new things we need new words; thus the clarity of language requires it, so that we avoid the confusion inherent in the multiple sense of the same terms.

The words spiritual, spiritualist, spiritualism have a well-defined acceptation; to give them a new one, in order to apply them to the Doctrine of the Spirits, 62 would be to multiply the causes, already so numerous, of amphibology.

In effect, spiritualism is the opposite of materialism;

whoever believes he has within himself something beyond matter is a spiritualist; but it does not follow from this that he believes in the existence of the Spirits or in their communications with the visible world.

In place of the words spiritual, spiritualism, we shall employ, to designate this latter belief, the words Spiritist and Spiritism, whose form recalls the origin and the radical sense and which, for that very reason, have the advantage of being perfectly intelligible.

We shall say, then, that the Spiritist Doctrine or Spiritism consists in the belief in the relations of the material world with the Spirits or beings of the invisible world.

The adherents of Spiritism will be the Spiritists, or, if you wish, the spiritans. 63 >>> [61] Tr. N.: As we noted in the first volume of the Spiritist Review, “the translation of a work is a thorny task. However careful, however faithful and honest, it will never express, in its entirety, the varied nuances of the original language. There are words, sentences, and maxims that find no satisfactory equivalence in our language. On the other hand, the very emotions are diluted or amplified upon being transferred from one culture to another, not to mention the traps that are laid for us when we translate literally, or — more serious still — when we interpret the author's thought, in the inglorious attempt to surpass the original text. Along with this, the desirable observance of the grammatical and stylistic rules pertaining to the language in which we express ourselves, so as to make the reading agreeable and not tire the reader.” And so much is this so that Allan Kardec himself, in chapter XXIII, item

of The Gospel According to Spiritism , already recognized that, “in the same language, some words lose their value with the passing of the centuries,” it being “for this reason that a rigorously literal translation does not always express the thought perfectly and that, in order to be exact, it must sometimes employ not corresponding terms, but other equivalent ones, or periphrases.” Although referring more particularly to the Sacred Scriptures, these observations of the Codifier find general application in the translation of any work. [62] Tr. N.: Throughout this entire translation, we have maintained the graphic distinction between the universal intelligent element (spirit) and the individualities of the extracorporeal beings (Spirits), with lowercase and uppercase initial, respectively, thus departing, on this point, from the original text of the 1st French edition, although Allan Kardec adopted such a criterion only from the 2nd edition, of 1860, according to a Note of his own authorship inserted after question 76 of that edition.

[63] Tr. N.: A term later replaced by the word spiritist.