SUMMARY OF THE SPIRITIST DOCTRINE - Preliminaries.

(Summary)

Preliminaries.

— God.

— The Spirits.

— Manifestations of the Spirits.

— Progression of the Spirits.

— The worlds.

— Man.

— Faculties of man.

— Emancipation of the soul.

— Destiny of man.

— Return to corporeal life.

— Influence of the Spirits.

— Good and evil.

— Prayer.

— Moral consequences of Spiritism.

PRELIMINARIES.

Spiritism is founded on the existence of the intelligent and invisible beings that people space and which we call Spirits.

The existence of the Spirits is attested by the facts of which we are witnesses today, and by history, both sacred and profane, which shows the universality of this belief in all ages.

The Spirits have been designated under different names according to the epoch, the places, the customs, and the traditions of the nations; ignorance lent them more or less absurd attributes. They formed part of the theogony of all peoples: among the pagans they were considered gods, and they communicated with them through the oracles; for others they were angels or demons; for others still, the genii, the sylphs. According to Spiritism and in accordance with modern observations, they are not beings of a special nature, created apart from humanity: they are the very souls of those who lived upon the Earth or in other inhabited worlds, stripped of their material envelope, and who have attained different degrees of perfection. The Spirits are everywhere: they are among us, at our side, jostling us and observing us constantly.

By their incessant presence in our midst, the Spirits are the agents of diverse phenomena; they play an important role in the moral world and to a certain extent in the physical world, and they thus constitute one of the powers of Nature.

The facts prove that the Spirits can manifest their presence among us; that we can enter into communication with them, and have with them an exchange of thoughts.

In the communications they have with us, the Spirits inform us, within the limit of their power, of their knowledge, and according to the degree of their elevation, about their own nature, their situation, their influence in the world, the conditions of our happiness or our misfortune in the hereafter; they initiate us into the mysteries of the future life, and, by their own example, make us know the destiny that awaits us. The whole of the knowledge taught by the Spirits constitutes Spiritism, which is thus the science of all that relates to the knowledge of the Spirits or of the invisible world.

It is from the communications we have had with the Spirits that we have drawn all that we have written on this matter. Of all the principles we have expounded, there is not one that is not the result of their teachings. If we have adopted them, if they have, on certain points, modified our first convictions, it is because we have found, more than in all the other philosophical systems, the clearest and most logical solution to the questions that have long divided men, and that interest in the highest degree their future. We give below the summary of this teaching. [1] In this second version of this book, published in 1860, the author presents What is Spiritism from a new point of view.