II

“This book is the repository of their teachings. It was written by 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…”

Allan Kardec's initial contact with the spiritist phenomena took place in May 1855, at the home of Mrs. Plainemaison. It was there that he witnessed, for the first time, the phenomenon of tables that turned, leapt, and ran under conditions such as left no room for any doubt. There he also watched some attempts, very imperfect ones, it is true, at mediumistic writing on a slate, with the aid of a basket. As he himself admits, his ideas were far from being clearly defined, but there was a fact there that necessarily proceeded from a cause, so that in those apparent trivialities, in the pastime they made of those phenomena, he glimpsed something serious, like the revelation of a new law, which he undertook to study thoroughly. Other opportunities presented themselves to him to observe the facts with more attention than he had done until then. Having become acquainted with the Baudin family, he was invited by the head of the household to attend the weekly sessions held at his residence, which he soon began to attend very assiduously. Quite numerous, these meetings had as mediums the Misses Baudin, who wrote on a slate with the aid of a basket called a top, a process which, by requiring the participation of two persons, excludes all possibility of the medium's ideas intruding. In them, Allan Kardec had the chance to see continuous communications and answers to questions posed, even to mental questions, which clearly indicated the intervention of an extraneous intelligence. It was in such meetings that the future Codifier began his serious studies of Spiritism, not so much by means of revelations as of observations. Thus he applied to this new science the experimental method. Instead of elaborating preconceived theories, he observed carefully, compared, deduced consequences, and from the effects sought to trace back to the causes, by deduction and by the logical concatenation of the facts, not admitting an explanation as valid unless it could resolve all the difficulties of the question. From the very outset he perceived the gravity of the exploration he was about to undertake and the key to the problem—so obscure and so controverted—of the future of Humanity, the solution he had sought throughout his whole life, a true revolution in ideas and beliefs, which obliged him to proceed with the greatest circumspection and not lightly, to be a positivist and not an idealist, so as not to let himself be deceived. One of the first results he gathered from his observations was that the Spirits, being nothing more than the souls of men, possessed neither full wisdom nor integral science; that the knowledge they had at their disposal was limited to the degree of advancement they had attained, and that their opinion had only the value of a personal opinion. Recognized from the beginning, this truth preserved him from the grave pitfall of believing in the infallibility of the Spirits and prevented him from formulating immature theories based on what had been said by one or a few of them. From the least to the greatest, the Spirits were means of informing him, and not predestined revealers. To observe, compare, and judge, such was the rule he constantly followed. Until then, the sessions at Mr. Baudin's house had had no determined purpose. There, Professor Rivail attempted to obtain the resolution of the problems that interested him, from the point of view of Philosophy, of Psychology, and of the nature of the invisible world. To that end, he brought to each session a series of questions, prepared and methodically arranged, questions always answered with precision, depth, and logic. At first he had thought only of instructing himself, but when he saw that this constituted a whole and was taking on the proportions of a doctrine, he conceived the idea of publishing the teachings received, for the instruction of everyone. It was those very questions which, successively developed and completed, constituted the basis of The Spirits' Book. 26 *** This marvelous effort of synthesis well demonstrates Allan Kardec's skill in describing, in a summary manner, his initiation into Spiritism, more or less as it is found in Posthumous Works, published in 1890 by his continuators. Nevertheless, and on the same subject, he was already stating in 1858:

Many times questions have been put to us about the manner in which the communications that are the object of The Spirits' Book were obtained. We here summarize, with much pleasure, the answers we have given in this regard, for this will afford us the occasion to fulfill a duty of gratitude toward the persons who, of their own goodwill, lent us their cooperation.

As we have explained, communications by raps, or typtology, are very slow and rather incomplete for a lengthy work; for this reason we never made use of that resource: everything was obtained through writing and by means of various psychographic mediums. We ourselves prepared the questions and coordinated the whole of the work; the answers are, textually, those that were given by the Spirits; most of them were written under our eyes, some were taken from the communications that were sent to us by correspondents or that we collected for study everywhere we went: to this effect, the Spirits seem to multiply before our eyes the occasions for observation. The first mediums who cooperated in our work were the Misses B***, whose goodwill never failed us; this book was written almost entirely through their intermediary and in the presence of a numerous audience, who attended the sessions with the keenest interest. Later the Spirits recommended its complete revision in private conversations, in order to make all the additions and corrections they judged necessary. This essential part of the work was done with the cooperation of Miss Japhet, who lent herself with the greatest goodwill and the most complete disinterestedness to all the demands of the Spirits, for it was they who set the days and the hours for their lessons… 27