Henri Martin.

We see certain distinguished writers shrug their shoulders at the mere mention of a history written by the Spirits. “What?” they say, “how can the beings of the other world come to oversee our knowledge, ours, the learned of the Earth? Come now! Is that possible?” Gentlemen, we do not force you to believe; we will not even strive, however little, to dissuade you from that illusion so dear to you. Even in the interest of your future glory, we exhort you to inscribe your names, in indestructible characters, at the foot of this modest sentence: All the partisans of Spiritism are fools, because it falls to us alone to judge how far the power of God extends, and this so that posterity may not forget you; it will see for itself whether it should grant you a place beside those who, until recently, repelled the men to whom science and public recognition today erect statues.

Nevertheless, here is a writer whose ability is unknown to no one and who dares, despite the risk of also being taken for an empty brain, to raise the banner of new ideas about the relations of the physical world with the corporeal world.* In the History of France, by Henri Martin, volume 6, page 143, we read the following, concerning Joan of Arc:

“ (…) There exists, in Humanity, an extraordinary order of moral and physical facts that seem to derogate from the ordinary laws of Nature: these are the states of ecstasy and of somnambulism, whether spontaneous or artificial, with all their impressive phenomena of displacement of the senses, of total or partial insensibility of the body, of exaltation of the soul, in short, of perceptions foreign to all the conditions of habitual life. This class of facts has been judged from entirely opposite points of view. The physiologists, seeing the customary relations of the physical organs disturbed or displaced, qualify the ecstatic or somnambulic state as a disease, admitting the reality of those phenomena that can be included in pathology and denying all the rest, that is, everything that appears foreign to the established laws of physics. In their eyes, the disease even turns into madness when, to the displacement of the action of the organs, there is added the hallucination of the senses, such as the vision of objects that exist only for the visionary. An eminent physiologist defended, with all clarity, the thesis that Socrates was mad, because that philosopher imagined that he conversed with his demon. The mystics reply not only by attesting as real the extraordinary phenomena of magnetic perceptions — a question on which they find numerous helpers, and countless witnesses outside of mysticism — but also by maintaining that the visions of the ecstatics have real objects, seen, it is true, not through the eyes of the body, but of the Spirit. For them, ecstasy is the bridge thrown from the visible world to the invisible world, the means of communication of man with the superior beings, the remembrance and the promise of the existence of a better world, from which we were cast out and which we must reconquer. “In this debate, what side should History and Philosophy take?

“History could not determine, with precision, either the limits or the extent of the ecstatic and somnambulic phenomena and faculties; it observes, however, that they occur everywhere; that men have always believed in them; that they have exercised a considerable action upon the destinies of the human race; that they have manifested themselves not only among the contemplatives, but equally among the most powerful and most active geniuses; in short, among the greater part of the great initiates; that, however unreasonable various ecstatics may show themselves, there is nothing in common between the ramblings of madness and the visions of some; that such visions can establish connections with certain laws; that the ecstatics of all countries and of all centuries have what one might call a language of symbols, of which poetry is only a derivative, a language that expresses, more or less constantly, the same ideas and the same sentiments by the same images.

“Perhaps it is still more rash to attempt to conclude in the name of Philosophy; nevertheless, after having recognized the moral importance of these phenomena, however obscure their law and their purpose may be to us; after distinguishing in them two degrees, one inferior, which is nothing but a strange extension or an inexplicable displacement of the action of the organs, the other superior, being nothing but the prodigious exaltation of the moral and intellectual forces, the philosopher could maintain, it seems to us, that the illusion of the inspired one consists in taking, as a revelation brought by external beings, angels, saints, or geniuses, the interior revelations of that infinite personality which is within us and, very often too, among the best and the greatest, those which manifest themselves as flashes of latent forces that surpass, almost without measure, the faculties of our present condition. In a word, in the language of the masters, they are, for us, facts of subjectivity; in the language of the ancient mystical philosophies and of the more advanced religions, they are the revelations of the Mazdean ferouer, of the good demon (that of Socrates), of the guardian angel, of that other Self which is nothing but the eternal Self, in full possession of itself, hovering over the Self enveloped in the shadows of this life (figure of the magnificent Zoroastrian symbol, figured everywhere in Persepolis and in Nineveh; the winged ferouer or the celestial Self, hovering over the terrestrial creature). “To deny the action of external beings upon the inspired one; to see in his supposed manifestations nothing more than the form given to the intuitions of the ecstatic by the beliefs of his time and his country; and to seek the solution of the problem in the depths of the human personality, is not at all a way of calling into doubt the divine intervention in these great phenomena and in these great existences. The author and sustainer of all life, however essentially independent he may be of each creature and of all creation, however distinct his absolute personality may be from our contingent being, is in no way an external being, that is, foreign to us, and it is not from outside that he speaks to us; when the soul plunges into itself, it finds him there and, in every salutary inspiration, our liberty associates itself with his Providence. Here, as everywhere, there prevails the double reef of incredulity and of ill-enlightened piety: the one sees nothing but illusions and purely human impulses, the other refuses to admit any portion of illusion, of ignorance, or of imperfection, where it sees only the finger of God. As if the envoys of God ceased to be men, men of a certain time and of a certain place, and as if the sublime flashes that cross their soul deposited there universal science and absolute perfection. In the most evident and providential inspirations, the errors that proceed from men mingle with the truth that comes from God. The Infallible Being communicates his infallibility to no one.

“We do not think that this digression may appear superfluous; we had to pronounce ourselves on the character and on the work of her who was inspired and who, in the highest degree, gave testimony of the extraordinary faculties of which we spoke a moment ago, and who applied them to the most resounding mission of modern times; it was therefore necessary to express an opinion as to the category of exceptional beings to which Joan of Arc belongs.”

[1]

Translator’s note: Our emphasis. Would it not be the extra-physical, or extra-corporeal, world?

[Histoire De France - Google Books.]

[2] [cf.

Louis Henri Martin.]