Correspondence.

— Brussels, June 15, 1858.

My dear Mr. Kardec:

I receive and read your Spiritist Review avidly, and I recommend to my friends not the simple reading of it, but the thorough study of your The Spirits' Book. I greatly regret that my physical preoccupations leave me no time for metaphysical studies, although I have carried them far enough to foresee how near you are to absolute truth, above all when I see the perfect coincidence that exists between the answers that have been given to me and yours. Even those who attribute the authorship of your writings personally to you are stupefied by the depth and the logic they contain. Suddenly and at a single bound, you have raised yourself up to the level of Socrates and Plato, in morality and in aesthetic philosophy; as for me, knowing the phenomenon and your loyalty, I do not doubt the exactness of the explanations that are given to you, and I abjure all the ideas I had published in that regard, while I saw in them, together with Mr. Babinet, nothing more than physical phenomena or charlatanism unworthy of the attention of the learned. Like me, do not be discouraged before the indifference of your contemporaries; what is written is written; what is sown will germinate. The idea that life is a tuning of souls, a trial and an expiation, is grand, consoling, progressive, and natural. Those who adhere to it are happy in every position; instead of complaining of the physical and moral sufferings that oppress them, they ought to rejoice or, at least, to bear them with Christian resignation. To be happy, flee from pleasure:

Such is the philosopher's device;

The effort made to obtain it Costs far more than one judges But it comes sooner or later, In a sudden and imprecise manner;

Of chance it is a quiet game That seeks to be worth ten thousand times.

The fool always denies what he does not understand;

Even the marvelous is to him a poor garden;

He knows nothing, and wishes for nothing nor learns anything;

— Of the unbeliever this is, then, a faithful portrait.