Discourse pronounced at the tomb of Allan Kardec,

Gentlemen:

Accepting with deference the cordial invitation of the friends of the laborious thinker whose earthly body now lies at our feet, there comes to my mind a somber day in the month of December 1865, on which I pronounced words of supreme farewell at the tomb of the founder of the Librairie Académique, the honorable Didier, who, as publisher, was a convinced collaborator of Allan Kardec in the publication of the fundamental works of a doctrine that was dear to him. He too died suddenly, as if heaven had wished to spare these two upright Spirits the physiological embarrassment of leaving this life by a route different from the one commonly followed. The same reflection applies to the death of our former colleague Jobard, of Brussels. Today my task is greater still, for I should have wished to depict to the minds of those who hear me, and to those of the millions of creatures who throughout all Europe and in the New World have occupied themselves with the still mysterious problem of the phenomena called Spiritist; — I should have wished, I say, to be able to depict to them the scientific interest and the philosophical future of the study of these phenomena, to which, as no one is unaware, eminent men among our contemporaries have devoted themselves. I should have been glad to let them glimpse the unknown horizons that the human mind will see open before it, as it broadens its positive knowledge of the natural forces that act around us; to show them that these confirmations constitute the most effective antidote to the leprosy of atheism, with which our age of transition seems chiefly afflicted; in short, to give here public testimony of the eminent service that the author of The Spirits' Book rendered to philosophy, by calling attention to and provoking discussions on facts that until then belonged to the morbid and fatal domain of religious superstitions. It would, in effect, be an important act to affirm here, beside this eloquent tomb, that the methodical examination of the phenomena erroneously qualified as supranormal, far from renewing the spirit of superstition and weakening the energy of reason, on the contrary dispels the errors and illusions of ignorance and serves progress better than the illegitimate denials of those who do not wish to take the trouble to see.

But this is not a fitting place to set up an arena for disrespectful discussions. Let us merely allow to descend from our minds, upon the impassive face of the man now stretched before us, testimonies of affection and feelings of sorrow, which may remain about him in his tomb, as an embalming of the heart! And, since we know that his eternal soul survives these mortal remains, just as it preexisted them; since we know that indestructible bonds unite our visible world to the invisible world; since this soul exists today as truly as it did three days ago, and since it is not impossible that it may at present be in my presence; let us tell it that we did not wish its earthly image, enclosed in the sepulcher, to vanish without our unanimously rendering homage to its labors and to its memory, without paying a tribute of gratitude to its earthly incarnation, so useful and so worthily fulfilled. I shall first trace, in a rapid sketch, the principal lines of his literary career.

Dead at the age of 65, Allan Kardec had consecrated the first part of his life to writing classical, elementary works, intended above all for the use of the educators of youth. When, around the year 1855, the manifestations, new in appearance, of turning tables, of raps without ostensible cause, of the unusual movements of objects and furniture began to seize public attention, even determining, in those of adventurous imagination, a kind of fever, due to the novelty of such experiments, Allan Kardec, studying at the same time magnetism and its singular effects, followed with the greatest patience and judicious clairvoyance the experiments and numerous attempts that were then being made in Paris. He gathered and put in order the results obtained from that long observation, and with them he composed the body of doctrine that he published in 1857, in the first edition of The Spirits' Book. You all know what success that work achieved, in France and abroad. Having reached its 15th edition, it has spread among all classes that body of elementary doctrine which, in its essence, is not absolutely new, for the school of Pythagoras, in Greece, and that of the druids, in our own Gaul, taught its fundamental principles, but which now takes on a form of true timeliness, by corresponding to the phenomena. After that first work there appeared, successively, The Mediums' Book, or experimental Spiritism; — What is Spiritism? or a summary in the form of questions and answers; — The Gospel According to Spiritism; — Heaven and Hell; — Genesis. Death surprised him at the moment when, with his indefatigable activity, he was working on yet another, on the relations between Magnetism and Spiritism.

Through the Spiritist Review and through the Society of Paris, of which he was president, he had constituted, in a certain manner, the center to which everything came, the link uniting all the experimenters. A few months ago, feeling his end near, he prepared the conditions for the vitality of such studies after his death and instituted the Central Commission that succeeds him.

He aroused rivalries; he founded a school of a somewhat personal character, there still being some dissensions between the “spiritualists” and the “Spiritists.” Henceforth, Gentlemen (such, at least, is the wish formulated by the friends of truth), we must all unite in a fraternal solidarity, in the same efforts toward the elucidation of the problem, in the general and impersonal desire for the true and the good.

It has been said, Gentlemen, of the worthy friend to whom we today render the last homages, that he was not what is called a scholar, that he had not first been a physicist, a naturalist, or an astronomer, and that he preferred to constitute a body of moral doctrine before having submitted to scientific discussion the reality and the nature of the phenomena.

Perhaps, Gentlemen, it is to be preferred that things began thus. One must not always refuse value to sentiment. How many hearts have already been consoled by this religious belief! How many tears have been dried! How many consciences have opened to the radiations of spiritual beauty! Not everyone is fortunate in this world. How many affections are here shattered! How many souls have fallen asleep in skepticism! Then, is it nothing to have brought to spiritualism so many beings who floated in doubt and who no longer loved life, neither physical life nor intellectual life?

Had Allan Kardec been a man of science, he certainly could not have rendered this first service and extended it so very far, as an invitation to all hearts. He, however, was what I shall simply call “good sense incarnate.” A straight and judicious reason, he ceaselessly applied to his permanent work the intimate indications of common sense. This was not a minor quality, in the order of things with which we occupy ourselves. It was, on the contrary, one may affirm it, the first of all and the most precious, without which the work could not have become popular, nor cast its immense roots throughout the world. The majority of those who have given themselves to these studies remember that in their youth, or in certain circumstances, they were witnesses to unexplained manifestations. Few are the families that do not count in their history proofs of this nature. The point of departure was to apply to them the firm reason of simple good sense and to examine them according to the principles of the positive method. As its own organizer foresaw, this study, which has been slow and difficult, must now enter a scientific period. The physical phenomena, on which at first there was no insistence, will have to become an object of experimental criticism, to which we owe the glory of modern progress and the marvels of electricity and steam. This method must take the phenomena of the mysterious order that we witness and dissect, measure, and define them.

For, my Gentlemen, Spiritism is not a religion, but a science, of which we know only the A-B-C. The time of dogmas has passed. Nature embraces the Universe, and God himself, once made in the image of man, modern Metaphysics can consider only as a spirit in Nature. The supernatural does not exist. The manifestations obtained with the aid of mediums, like those of magnetism and somnambulism, are of a natural order and must be severely submitted to the verification of experience. There are no miracles. We are present at the dawn of an unknown science. Who can foresee to what consequences the positive study of this new psychology will lead, in the world of thought?

Henceforth, the world is governed by science, and, Gentlemen, it will not be out of place, in this funeral discourse, to point out to it the present work and the new inductions that it reveals to us, precisely from the point of view of our researches.

In no epoch of History has Science unfolded, before the astonished gaze of man, such grandiose horizons. We now know that the Earth is a star and that our present life is completed in heaven. By the analysis of light, we know the elements that burn in the sun and in the stars, at millions and trillions of leagues from our terrestrial observatory. By means of calculation, we possess the history of heaven and of Earth, both in the distant past and in the future, a past and future that do not exist for the immutable laws. By observation, we have weighed the celestial lands that gravitate in the vastness. The globe on which we find ourselves has become a stellar atom that flies through space within the infinite depths, and our own existence on this globe has become an infinitesimal fraction of our eternal life. But what, with reason, may touch us even more keenly is that surprising result of the physical works carried out in these last years: that we live in the midst of an invisible world, acting incessantly around us. Yes, Gentlemen, this is, for us, an immense revelation. Contemplate, for example, the light that at this hour the brilliant sun spreads in the atmosphere; contemplate that so gentle blue of the celestial vault; note the effluvia of this tepid air, which comes to caress our faces; admire these monuments and this earth. Well then: although we have our eyes wide open, do we not fail to see what is happening here? Of a hundred rays emanating from the sun, only a third of them are accessible to our sight, whether directly or reflected by all bodies; the remaining two thirds exist and act around us, but in an invisible, though real, manner. They are warm, without being luminous to us, and yet they are far more active than those that impress us, for it is they that attract the flowers toward the side of the sun, that produce all the chemical actions, and also that raise, in an equally invisible form, the water vapor in the atmosphere to form the clouds, thus exercising ceaselessly, around us, in a hidden and silent manner, a colossal action, mechanically comparable to the work of many billions of horses! If the caloric rays and the chemical rays that constantly act in Nature are invisible to us, it is because the former do not strike our retina with sufficient rapidity and because the latter strike it with excessive rapidity. Our eyes see things only between two limits, short of and beyond which they perceive nothing. Our earthly organism may be compared to a harp of two strings, which are the optic nerve and the auditory nerve. A certain kind of movements sets the first in vibration, and another kind of movements makes the second vibrate: in this is summed up all human sensation, more restricted in this respect than that of certain living beings, of certain insects, for example, which possess these same strings of vision and of hearing more delicately. Now, in Nature, there really exist, not two, but ten, a hundred, a thousand kinds of movements. Physical science teaches us, therefore, that we thus live within a world that is invisible to us, there being nothing impossible in the idea that beings (also invisible to us) may likewise live on Earth, with an order of sensations absolutely different from ours, and without our being able to perceive their presence, unless they manifest themselves to us by facts that fall within the order of our sensations.

In the face of such truths, which only half open, how absurd and worthless does a priori denial reveal itself to be! When one compares the little that we know and the smallness of our sphere of perception with the quantity of that which exists, one cannot fail to conclude that we know nothing, that everything remains for us to learn. By what right, then, shall we utter the word impossible, in the presence of facts of which we were witnesses, without, however, being able to discover their sole cause?

Science affords us perspectives as authoritative as the foregoing, on the phenomena of life and of death and on the force that animates us. It suffices that we observe the circulation of existences.

All are mere metamorphoses. Carried along in their eternal course, the atoms constituting matter pass incessantly from one body to another, from the animal to the plant, from the plant to the atmosphere, from the atmosphere to man, and our own body, as long as life lasts for us, continually changes its constituent substance, just as the flame, which shines only by means of the elements that are continually renewed. And when the soul takes flight, this same body, already so many times transformed during life, restores definitively to Nature all its molecules, never to take them back again. The inadmissible dogma of the resurrection of the flesh is found replaced by the lofty doctrine of the transmigration of souls.

The April sun radiates in the heavens and inundates us with its first caloric dew. Already the meadows awaken, already the first shoots half open, already the spring blooms anew, the celestial blue smiles, and the resurrection is wrought. Yet this new life is formed by death and covers only ruins! Whence comes the sap of these trees that grow green in the fields of the dead? Whence comes this moisture that nourishes their roots? Whence come all the elements that will make appear, under the caresses of May, the silent little flowers and the singing birds? — From death!… Gentlemen… from these corpses buried in the sinister night of the tombs!… Supreme law of Nature, the material body is no more than a transitory aggregate of particles that absolutely do not belong to it and that the soul has grouped, according to its own type, in order to create for itself organs that put it in relation with our physical world. And, while our body thus renews itself, piece by piece, by means of the perpetual exchange of matter; while one day it falls, an inert mass, never to rise again, our Spirit, a personal being, has constantly preserved its indestructible identity, has reigned sovereignly over the matter in which it had clothed itself, establishing, by means of that perennial and universal fact, its independent personality, its spiritual essence not subject to the empire of space and time, its individual greatness, its immortality. In what does the mystery of life consist? By what bonds is the soul attached to the organism? By what loosening does it escape from it? Under what form and in what conditions does it exist after death? What memory, what affections does it preserve? How does it manifest itself? — Here, my Gentlemen, are problems that are far from being resolved and that, in their entirety, will constitute the psychological science of the future. Certain men may deny the very existence of the soul, as that of God; they may affirm that moral truth does not exist, that there are no intelligent laws in Nature, and that we, spiritualists, are victims of an immense illusion. Others may, on the contrary, declare that they know, by special privilege, the essence of the human soul, the form of the Supreme Being, the state of the future life, and treat us as atheists, because our reason refuses to adopt the faith that they parade. The one and the other, Gentlemen, will not prevent us from being here in the presence of the greatest problems, from interesting ourselves in these things (which are in no way foreign to us), and from having the right to apply the experimental method of contemporary science to the search for truth.

It is by the positive study of effects that one ascends to the appreciation of causes. In the order of studies that are grouped under the denomination of “Spiritism,” the facts exist; but no one knows their mode of production. They exist as much as the electrical, luminous, and caloric phenomena; but, Gentlemen, we know neither Biology nor Physiology. What is the human body? what is the brain? what is the absolute action of the soul? We are ignorant of it. We are equally ignorant of the essence of electricity, the essence of light. It is prudent, then, that we observe without partiality all these facts and attempt to determine their causes, which are perhaps of diverse kinds and more numerous than we have supposed until now.

Let those whose sight is restricted by pride or by prejudice fail entirely to understand the yearnings of our minds eager to know, and let them cast upon this kind of studies their sarcasms or anathemas, it matters little. We place our contemplations higher!… You were the first, oh! master and friend! you were the first to give, from the beginning of my astronomical career, testimony of lively sympathy to my deductions relative to the existence of celestial humanities, for, taking from the book on the Plurality of inhabited worlds, you placed it immediately at the base of the doctrinal edifice of which you dreamed. Very often we conversed about that celestial life so mysterious; now, oh! soul, you know, by direct vision, in what consists the spiritual life to which we shall return and which we forget during existence on Earth. You have returned to that world whence we came, and you gather the fruit of your terrestrial studies. At our feet sleeps your covering, your brain is extinguished, your eyes have closed never to open again, your word will be heard no more… We know that we shall all have to plunge into that same last sleep, to return to that same inertia, to that same dust. But it is not in that covering that we place our glory and our hope. The body falls, the soul remains and returns to Space. We shall meet again in a better world and in the immense heaven where we shall use our most precious faculties, where we shall continue the studies for whose development the Earth is too cramped a theater.

It is more pleasing to us to know this truth than to believe that you lie wholly within that corpse and that your soul has been annihilated with the cessation of the functioning of an organ. Immortality is the light of life, as this resplendent sun is the light of Nature.

Until we meet again, my dear Allan Kardec, until we meet again!

[1] In 1869.

[2] Our retina is insensible to those rays; but there are substances that see them, as, for example, iodine and the salts of silver. Once the chemical solar spectrum, which our eye does not perceive, has been photographed, the photographic plate, on leaving the dark chamber, never presents any visible image, although there indeed exists one upon it, since a certain chemical operation makes it appear.