SPIRITUAL DEATH.

The question of spiritual death is one of the new principles that mark the advances of the spiritist science. The manner in which it was presented in a certain personal theory determined, at first, its rejection, because it seemed to imply the annihilation, at a given time, of the individual self and to liken the transformations of the soul to those of matter, whose elements disaggregate to form new bodies. The blissful and perfected beings would, in reality, be new beings, which is inadmissible. The equity of future penalties and enjoyments becomes evident only with the perpetuity of beings ascending the scale of progress and purifying themselves through work and through the efforts of their own will. Such were the consequences that could be drawn, a priori, from that theory. Nevertheless, we must agree that it was not presented with the arrogance of a proud man who sought to impose his system. The author said modestly that he merely wished to cast an idea into the field of discussion, given that from that idea a new truth might arise.

In the opinion of our eminent spiritual guides, he would have sinned less with regard to the substance than with regard to the form, which lent itself to a false interpretation. This determines us to study the question seriously. That is what we shall try to do, basing ourselves on the observation of the facts that stand out from the situation of the Spirit at two epochs that are, for it, of capital importance: that of its descent into corporeal life and that of its return to spiritual life.

At the moment of corporeal death, the Spirit enters into a state of disturbance and loses consciousness of itself, so that it never witnesses the last breath of its body. Little by little the disturbance dissipates and the Spirit recovers, like a man who awakens from a deep sleep. Its first sensation is that of being free of the carnal burden; there follows astonishment, on noticing the new milieu in which it finds itself. It is in the situation of one who is chloroformed for an amputation and who, while still asleep, is carried to another place. On awakening, he feels himself free of the limb that was making him suffer; often he searches for it, surprised at no longer possessing it. In the same way, the Spirit, at the first moment, searches for the body it had; it discovers it at its side; it recognizes that it is its own and is astonished at being separated from it, and only gradually does it become aware of its new situation. In this phenomenon, only a change of material situation has taken place. As to the moral aspect, the Spirit is exactly what it was a few hours before; it has undergone no perceptible modification; its faculties, its ideas, its tastes, its inclinations, its character are the same, and the transformations it may experience will only gradually take place, through the influence of what surrounds it. In short, death occurred solely for the body; for the Spirit, there was only sleep.

In reincarnation, things happen in another way.

At the moment of the conception of the body destined for it, the Spirit is seized by a fluidic current that, like a net, takes hold of it and draws it near to its new dwelling. From then on, it belongs to the body, as the body will belong to it until it dies. However, complete union, real possession, occurs only at the time of birth.

From the instant of conception, the disturbance overtakes the Spirit; its ideas become confused; its faculties fade away; the disturbance grows as the bonds tighten; it becomes complete in the last phases of gestation, so that the Spirit no more perceives the act of its body's birth than it perceives that of its death; it has no consciousness either of the one or of the other.

From the moment the child breathes, the disturbance begins to dissipate, the ideas return little by little, but under conditions different from those observed at the death of the body.

In the act of reincarnation, the faculties of the Spirit are not merely numbed by a kind of momentary sleep, as happens upon the return to spiritual life; all of them, without exception, pass into a state of latency. The aim of corporeal life is to develop them through exercise, but not all can be developed simultaneously, because the exercise of one might hinder that of another, whereas, by means of successive development, some are consolidated upon others. It is fitting, then, that some should remain at rest while others increase. This is the reason why, in its new existence, the Spirit may present itself under an aspect very different, above all if it is little advanced, from the one it had in the preceding existence. In one, the musical faculty, for example, will be more active; it will conceive, perceive and, consequently, do all that is necessary for the development of that faculty; in another existence, the turn will come for painting, for the exact sciences, for poetry, etc. While these new faculties are exercised, that of music will remain latent, but preserving the progress it has achieved. The result is that one who was an artist in one existence may be a sage, a statesman, or a strategist in another, being null from the artistic point of view, and reciprocally.

The latent state of the faculties in reincarnation explains the forgetting of the preceding existences, whereas, at the moment of death, the faculties being in a state of sleep of little duration, the remembrance of the life just elapsed is complete when the Spirit awakens in spiritual life.

The faculties that manifest themselves are naturally in relation to the position the Spirit is to occupy in the world and to the trials it may have chosen.

Nevertheless, it often happens that social prejudices displace it, which causes certain persons to be intellectually and morally above or below the position they occupy. This displacement, by the obstacles it entails, forms part of the trials; it will cease with progress. In an advanced social order, everything is regulated in accordance with the logic of the natural laws, and one who has aptitude only for making shoes will not be called, by right of birth, to govern peoples.

Let us return to the child. Until it is born, all the faculties are in a latent state, and the Spirit has no consciousness of itself. Those that are to develop do not blossom suddenly in the act of being born; their development accompanies that of the organs that will serve for their manifestations; by means of the intimate activity into which they are set, they impel the development of the organs that correspond to them, in the same way that the bud, on being born, forces the bark of the tree. From this it results that, in early infancy, the Spirit does not enjoy any of its faculties in their fullness, not only as an incarnate being, but also as a free Spirit. It is truly infantile, like the body to which it is bound, without, however, being painfully compressed within it. Were it not so, God would have made of incarnation a torment for all Spirits, good or bad. The same, however, does not happen with the idiot or the cretin. In these, the organs not having developed in parallel with the faculties, the Spirit ends up finding itself in the position of a man bound by ties that take away his freedom of movement. Such is the reason why one can evoke the Spirit of an idiot and obtain sensible answers, whereas that of a child of very tender age, or which has not yet come into the light, is incapable of answering.

All the faculties, all the aptitudes are found in germ in the Spirit, from its creation, but in a rudimentary state, like all the organs in the first filament of the formless fetus, like all the parts of the tree in the seed. The savage who will later become a civilized man thus possesses within himself the germs that, one day, will make of him a sage, a great artist, or a great philosopher.

As these germs come to maturity, Providence gives them, for terrestrial life, a body appropriate to their new aptitudes. It is thus that the brain of a European is organized in a more complete manner, provided with a greater number of keys, than that of the savage. For spiritual life, it gives them a fluidic body, or perispirit, more subtle and impressionable by new sensations. In proportion as the Spirit grows greater, nature provides it with the instruments that are necessary to it.

In the sense of disorganization, of the disaggregation of parts, of the dispersion of elements, there is no death except for the material envelope and the fluidic envelope; but, as to the soul, or Spirit, this cannot die in order to progress; otherwise, it would lose its individuality, which would be equivalent to nothingness. In the sense of transformation, regeneration, it may be said that the Spirit dies at each incarnation, to be resurrected with new attributes, without ceasing to be the self that it was. Such, for example, is a peasant who grows rich and becomes an important lord. He has exchanged the hut for a palace, the modest clothing for garments of brocade. All his habits have changed, his tastes, his language, even his character. In a word, the peasant died, he buried the garments of coarse cloth, to be reborn a man of society, being nevertheless always the same individual, but transformed. Each corporeal existence is, then, for the Spirit a means of progressing more or less perceptibly. On returning to the world of the Spirits, it carries there new ideas; a wider moral horizon; perceptions more acute, more delicate. It sees and understands what before it neither saw nor understood; its vision, which at first did not go beyond the last existence it had had, comes to embrace successively its past existences, like the man who climbs a mountain and for whom the mist gradually dissipates, embracing with his gaze an ever vaster horizon.

At each new stage in erraticity, new marvels of the invisible world unfold before its gaze, because, at each one of these stages, a veil is torn away. At the same time, its fluidic envelope is purified;

it becomes lighter, more brilliant, and later will be resplendent. It is almost a new Spirit; it is the peasant refined and transformed. The old Spirit has died, but the self is always the same.

And thus, we believe, spiritual death should be understood.