ACTION OF SPIRITS UPON MATTER.

Setting aside the materialist opinion, since it is condemned by reason and by the facts, everything comes down to knowing whether the soul, after death, can manifest itself to the living.

Reduced thus to its simplest expression, the question becomes extraordinarily unencumbered. It would be fitting, above all, to ask why intelligent beings, who in a certain way live in our midst, although invisible by nature, could not attest to us in some manner of their presence.

Simple reason says that in this there is absolutely nothing impossible, which is already something. Moreover, this belief has in its favor the assent of all peoples, since we encounter it everywhere and in all ages.

Now, no intuition can show itself to be so generalized, nor survive time, if it does not have some foundation. Add to this that it is found sanctioned by the testimony of the sacred books and by that of the Fathers of the Church, it having been necessary that the skepticism and the materialism of our century should be required for it to be cast into the rank of superstitious ideas.

If we are in error, those authorities are equally so.

But this amounts to no more than considerations of a moral order. One cause, especially, has contributed to strengthening the doubt, in an age as positive as ours, in which everyone insists on being informed of everything, in which one wishes to know the why and the how of all things.

That cause is the ignorance of the nature of Spirits and of the means by which they can manifest themselves. Acquiring the knowledge of that nature and of these means, the manifestations present nothing further that is astonishing and enter into the reckoning of natural facts.

The idea generally formed of Spirits renders at first sight incomprehensible the phenomenon of the manifestations.

Since these cannot take place except by the Spirit exercising action upon matter, those who judge that the idea of Spirit implies that of the complete absence of all that is matter ask, with a certain appearance of reason, how it can act materially.

Now, therein lies the error, for the Spirit is not an abstraction, it is a defined, limited, and circumscribed being.

The Spirit incarnate in the body constitutes the soul.

When it leaves the body, on the occasion of death, it does not come forth stripped of every covering. They all tell us that they preserve the human form and, indeed, when they appear to us, they bear the forms we knew them by.

Let us observe them attentively, at the instant when they have just left life; they are in a state of disturbance; everything appears confused to them, all around; they see, intact or mutilated, according to the kind of death, the body they had; on the other hand they recognize themselves and feel themselves alive; something tells them that that body belongs to them and they do not understand how they can be separated from it.

They continue to see themselves under the form they had before dying, and this vision, in some, produces, for a certain time, a singular illusion: that of believing themselves still alive. They lack the experience of the new state in which they find themselves, to be convinced of the reality.

Once that first moment of disturbance has passed, the body becomes for them a useless garment of which they have divested themselves and for which they keep no longing. They feel themselves lighter and as if relieved of a burden.

They no longer experience the physical pains and consider themselves happy to be able to rise up, to traverse space, as they so often did in dreams, when alive. n Nevertheless, despite the lack of the body, they confirm their personalities; they have a form, but one that neither importunes nor encumbers them; they have, finally, the consciousness of their self and of their individuality.

What must we conclude from this? That the soul does not leave everything in the tomb, that it carries something with it.

Numerous observations and irrefutable facts, of which we shall speak later, have led to the consequence that there are in man three components: 1st, the soul, or Spirit, intelligent principle, in which the moral sense has its seat; 2nd, the body, gross, material covering, with which it has clothed itself temporarily, in fulfillment of certain providential designs; 3rd, the perispirit, fluidic, semimaterial envelope, which serves as a link between the soul and the body.

Death is the destruction, or rather, the disaggregation of the gross covering, of the wrapping that the soul abandons.

The other detaches itself from this and accompanies the soul which, thus, always remains with a covering.

This latter, although fluidic, ethereal, vaporous, invisible to us in its normal state, is no less matter, even though up to the present we have not been able to take hold of it and submit it to analysis.

That second covering of the soul, or perispirit, exists, therefore, during corporeal life; it is the intermediary of all the sensations that the Spirit perceives and by which it transmits its will to the exterior and acts upon the organs of the body.

To make use of a material comparison, we shall say that it is the conducting electric wire, which serves for the reception and the transmission of thought; 9 it is, in sum, that mysterious, imperceptible agent, known by the name of nervous fluid, which plays so great a role in the organic economy [read: in the organism] and which is still not taken much into account in physiological and pathological phenomena.

Taking into consideration only the ponderable material element, Medicine, in the appraisal of the facts, deprives itself of an incessant cause of action. It is not appropriate, however, to examine this question here. We shall only point out that in the knowledge of the perispirit lies the key to countless problems hitherto insoluble.

The perispirit does not constitute one of those hypotheses of which science is accustomed to avail itself, for the explanation of a fact. Its existence has not merely been revealed by the Spirits, it results from observations, as we shall have occasion to demonstrate.

For now, and so as not to anticipate, with regard to the facts that we are to relate, we shall limit ourselves to saying that, whether during its union with the body, or after separating from it, the soul is never detached from its perispirit.

It has been said that the Spirit is a flame, a spark. This must be understood with respect to the Spirit properly speaking, as intellectual and moral principle, to which no determined form could be attributed.

But, whatever the degree at which it may be found, the Spirit is always clothed in a covering, or perispirit, whose nature becomes etherealized, in proportion as it purifies itself and rises in the spiritual hierarchy.

So that, for us, the idea of form is inseparable from that of Spirit and we do not conceive of one without the other.

The perispirit, therefore, forms an integral part of the Spirit, as the body does of man.

But the perispirit, by itself alone, is not the Spirit, just as the body alone does not constitute man, for the perispirit does not think.

It is for the Spirit what the body is for man: the agent or instrument of its action.

It has the human form and, when it appears to us, it is generally with the form that the Spirit wore in the condition of being incarnate.

From this one might suppose that the perispirit, separated from all the parts of the body, is modeled, in a certain manner, upon it and preserves its type; yet, it does not appear that this is so.

With small differences as to particularities and with the exception of the organic modifications required by the environment in which the being has to live, the human form is found by us among the inhabitants of all the globes. At least, that is what the Spirits say.

This is equally the form of all non-incarnate Spirits, who have only the perispirit; the one with which, in all times, the angels, or pure Spirits, have been represented.

We must conclude from all this that the human form is the model form of all human beings, whatever the degree of evolution at which they may find themselves.

But the subtle matter of the perispirit does not possess the tenacity, nor the rigidity of the compact matter of the body; it is, if we may so express ourselves, flexible and expansible, whence it results that the form it takes, although traced upon that of the body, is not absolute, it molds itself to the will of the Spirit, which can give it whatever appearance it understands, whereas the covering offers it insuperable resistance.

Free of that obstacle which compressed it, the perispirit dilates or contracts, transforms itself: it lends itself, in a word, to all metamorphoses, in accordance with the will that acts upon it.

By effect of that property of its fluidic envelope, it is that the Spirit which wishes to make itself known can, when necessary, take on the exact appearance it had when alive, even with the corporeal accidents that may constitute signs for recognizing it.

Spirits, therefore, are, as one sees, beings similar to us, constituting, around us, an entire population invisible in the normal state. We say — in the normal state, because, as we shall see, that invisibility is in no way absolute.

Let us return to the nature of the perispirit, for this is essential to the explanation we have to give.

We have said that, although fluidic, the perispirit is no less a kind of matter, which follows from the fact of the tangible apparitions, to which we shall return.

Under the influence of certain mediums, hands have been seen to appear with all the properties of living hands, which, like these, give off warmth, can be felt, offer the resistance of a solid body, grasp those present and, suddenly, dissipate, like shadows.

The intelligent action of these hands, which evidently obey a will, executing certain movements, even playing melodies on an instrument, proves that they are the visible part of an invisible intelligent being.

The tangibility they reveal, the temperature, the impression, in sum, that they cause to the senses, since it has been verified that they leave marks on the skin, that they give painful blows, that they caress delicately, prove that they are of some kind of matter.

Their sudden disappearances prove, moreover, that this matter is eminently subtle and behaves like certain substances which can alternately pass from the solid state to the fluidic state and vice versa.

The intimate nature of the Spirit properly speaking, that is, of the thinking being, we are entirely ignorant of.

Only by its acts does it reveal itself to us and its acts cannot impress our senses, except through a material intermediary.

The Spirit needs, therefore, matter, in order to act upon matter.

It has as the direct instrument of its action the perispirit, as man has the body.

Now, the perispirit is matter, as we have just seen.

Then, the universal fluid also serves it as an intermediary agent, a kind of vehicle upon which it acts, as we act upon the air, to obtain determined effects, by means of dilation, of compression, of propulsion, or of vibrations.

Considered in this way, the action of the Spirit upon matter is easily conceived. One understands, from then on, that all the effects which result therefrom fall within the order of natural facts and have nothing marvelous about them.

They seemed supernatural only because their cause was unknown. This being known, the marvelous disappears and that cause is included entirely in the semimaterial properties of the perispirit.

It is a new order of facts that a new law comes to explain and at which, within some time, no one will any longer marvel, just as no one marvels today at corresponding with another person, at a great distance, in a few minutes, by means of electricity.

It will perhaps be asked how the Spirit, with the aid of matter so subtle, can act upon heavy and compact bodies, lift tables, etc.

Such an objection will certainly not be formulated by a man of science, seeing that, without speaking of the unknown properties that this new agent may possess, do we not have analogous examples before our eyes? Is it not in the most rarefied gases, in the imponderable fluids, that industry finds its most powerful motors?

When we see the air bring down buildings, steam displace enormous masses, gasified gunpowder lift up boulders, electricity split trees and crack walls, what difficulty shall we find in admitting that the Spirit, with the aid of its perispirit, can lift a table, above all knowing that this perispirit can become visible, tangible, and behave like a solid body?

[1] Whoever wishes to refer back to all that we said in The Spirits' Book about dreams and the state of the Spirit during sleep (nos. 400 to 418), will conceive that those dreams which almost everyone has, in which we see ourselves transported through space and as if flying, are a mere recollection of what our Spirit experienced when, during sleep, it had momentarily left the material body, carrying with it only the fluidic body, which it will preserve after death. Those dreams, then, can give us an idea of the state of the Spirit, when it shall have freed itself from the fetters that hold it bound to the ground.