Usefulness of certain particular evocations.

The communications that are obtained from very elevated Spirits or from those who animated great personages of Antiquity are precious for the lofty teaching they contain. These Spirits have acquired a degree of perfection that allows them to embrace a more extensive sphere of ideas, to penetrate mysteries that surpass the common reach of Humanity, and, consequently, to initiate us, better than others, into certain things. It does not follow from this that the communications of Spirits of a less elevated order have no usefulness; far from it: the observer draws from them diverse instructions. To know the customs of a people, one must study it in all the degrees of the scale. Whoever had seen it only under one aspect would know it poorly. The history of a people is not that of its kings and of the social eminences; to judge it one must see it in its intimate life, in its private habits. Now, the superior Spirits are the eminences of the spirit world; their very elevation places them in such a way above us that we are alarmed by the distance that separates us from them. More bourgeois Spirits – may we be permitted the expression – render the circumstances of their new existence more palpable. In them, the connection between corporeal life and spiritual life is more intimate; we understand it better because it touches us more closely. Learning from them themselves what they have become, what they think, what is experienced by persons of all conditions and of all characters, the men of good as well as the vicious, the great and the small, the happy and the unhappy of the age, in a word, the men who lived among us, whom we saw and knew, whose real life is known, as are their virtues and defects, we understand their joys and their sufferings. We associate ourselves with them and draw from them a moral teaching all the more profitable as the relations between them and us are more intimate. We place ourselves more easily in the position of one who was our equal than in that of one whom we see only through the mirage of a celestial glory. The common Spirits show us the practical application of the great and sublime truths, of which the superior Spirits teach us the theory. Besides, nothing is useless in the study of a science: Newton found the law of the forces of the Universe in the simplest of phenomena. These communications have another advantage: to establish the identity of the Spirits in a more precise manner. When a Spirit tells us it was Socrates or Plato, we are obliged to believe on its word, since it brings no certificate of authenticity with it; we can see, in its words, whether or not it belies the origin it attributes to itself: we judge it an elevated Spirit, that is all; in truth, whether it was Socrates or Plato matters little. But when the Spirit of our relatives, of our friends, or of those whom we knew manifests itself to us, a thousand circumstances of intimate detail present themselves in which the identity could not be cast in doubt: in some manner the material proof is acquired. We think, then, that they will be grateful to us, if we make, from time to time, some of these intimate evocations: it is the novel of manners of the spirit life, without fiction.