Psychological period.

— Although Spiritist manifestations have occurred in all epochs, it is incontestable that today they are produced in an exceptional manner. Questioned about this fact, the Spirits were unanimous in their answer: “The times — they say — marked by Providence for a universal manifestation are come. They are charged with dissipating the darkness of ignorance and of prejudices; it is a new era that is beginning and that prepares the regeneration of Humanity.” This thought is found developed in a remarkable manner in a letter we received from one of our subscribers, from which we extract the following passage:

— “Each thing has its time; the period that has just elapsed seems to have been especially destined by the Almighty for the progress of the mathematical and physical sciences and, probably, it was with a view to disposing men toward exact knowledge that He opposed himself, for a long time, to the manifestation of the Spirits, as if such a manifestation could be prejudicial to the positivism that requires the study of Science; in a word, He wished to accustom man to seek, in the sciences of observation, the explanation of all the phenomena that were to be produced before his eyes.

“Today, the scientific period seems to have reached its term. After the immense progress accomplished, it would not be impossible that the new period that is to succeed it should be consecrated by the Creator to the initiations of a psychological order. In the immutable law of perfectibility that He established for human beings, what will He be able to do after having initiated them into the physical laws of movement and having revealed to them the motive forces with which the face of the globe is changed? Man has sounded the most distant depths of space; the march of the stars and the general movement of the Universe no longer hold any secrets for him; he reads in the geological strata the history of the formation of the globe; at his will, light is transformed into durable images; he masters the lightning; with steam and electricity he suppresses distances and thought traverses space with the rapidity of the lightning flash. Having arrived at this culminating point, of which the history of Humanity offers no example, whatever may have been its degree of advancement in the remote centuries, it seems to me rational to think that the psychological order opens for it a new path in the way of progress. It is, at least, what one might deduce from the facts that are produced in our days and that multiply on all sides. Let us hope, then, that the moment is approaching, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Almighty will come to initiate us into new, great and sublime truths. It is for us to understand Him and to second Him in the work of regeneration.”

— This letter is from Mr. Georges, of whom we had spoken in our first issue. We cannot but congratulate him on his progress in the Doctrine; the elevated points of view that he develops demonstrate that he understands it in its true sense; for him the Doctrine is not summed up in the belief in Spirits and in their manifestations: it is a whole philosophy. Like him, we admit that we have entered the psychological period and we find perfectly rational the reasons he presents to us, without believing, however, that the scientific period has said its last word; on the contrary, we believe that it still holds many other marvels in store for us. We are in an epoch of transition, in which the characters of the two periods are blended.

The knowledge that the Ancients possessed about the manifestation of the Spirits would not serve as an argument against the idea of the psychological period that is in preparation. Indeed, we note that in Antiquity this knowledge was confined to the narrow circle of the elite men; about it the people possessed only ideas falsified by prejudices and disfigured by the charlatanism of the priests, who made use of them as a means of domination. As we have already said elsewhere, never was this knowledge lost and the manifestations were always produced; but they remained as isolated facts, certainly because the time to understand them had not yet come. What is happening today has a quite different character; the manifestations are general; they impress society from the base to the summit. The Spirits no longer teach in the closed and mysterious precincts of a temple inaccessible to the common people. These facts take place in the light of day; they speak to all in a language intelligible to all. Everything, then, announces, from the moral point of view, a new phase for Humanity.