Paul Gaimard.

Naval physician and traveling naturalist, deceased on the 11th of December 1858, at 58 years of age. Evoked on the 24th of the same month by one of his friends, Mr. Sardou.

Evocation.

Answer. – Here I am. What do you wish?

What is your present state?

Answer. – I wander like the Spirits who leave the Earth and who wish to advance on the path of good. We seek, we study, and then we choose.

Have your ideas about the nature of man been modified?

Answer. – Greatly. You can well appreciate it.

What do you now think of the manner of life you led during the existence you have just left here on Earth?

Answer. – I am content because I worked.

For man, you believed that everything ended in the tomb. Hence your epicureanism and the desire you sometimes expressed to live a long time in order to enjoy life. What do you think of the living who have only this philosophy? Answer. – I pity them, although it serves them; with such a system they can coldly appraise all that fills other men with enthusiasm, allowing them to judge in a sound manner many things that fascinate the credulous. Observation. – It is the personal opinion of the Spirit. We give it as such and not as a maxim.

Does the man who strives morally, more than intellectually, act better than the one who attaches himself above all to intellectual progress and neglects moral progress? Answer. – Yes. Moral progress is more important. God gives spirit as a reward to the good, whereas the moral must be acquired.

What do you understand by spirit that God gives?

Answer. – A vast intelligence.

However, there are many bad persons who possess a vast intelligence.

Answer. – I have already said it. You asked what was preferable to seek to acquire, and I told you that the moral was preferable. But whoever works at the perfecting of his Spirit can acquire a high degree of intelligence. When will you understand with ease?

Are you completely detached from the material influence of the body?

Answer. – Yes. What was told to you on this matter comprehends only one class of Humanity.

Observation. – It has happened many times that evoked Spirits, even some months after their death, declared that they still found themselves under the influence of matter. However, all of them had been men who had progressed neither morally nor intellectually. It is to that part of Humanity that the Spirit of Paul Gaimard refers.

Did you have on Earth other existences besides the last?

Answer. – Yes.

Is this last one the consequence of the preceding?

Answer. – No; there was a great interval between them.

Despite that long interval, might there not, however, be a certain relation between those two existences?

Answer. – If I have made myself understood, each minute of our life is the consequence of the minute that precedes it. Observation. – Dr. B…, who was present at this meeting, expressed the opinion that certain tendencies, certain instincts, at times awakened in us, might well be the reflection of a prior existence. He cited several facts perfectly verified in young women who, during pregnancy, found themselves impelled to ferocious acts, as, for example, one who threw herself upon the arm of a butcher and gave it great bites;

another who cut off the head of a child and herself carried it to the commissioner of police; a third who killed her husband, cut him into little pieces, salted him, and fed on him for several days. The physician asked whether those women had not been cannibals in a prior existence.

You heard what Dr. B… has just said; in pregnant women, would the instincts that we know under the name of cravings not result from habits contracted in a prior existence? Answer. – No; they result from a transitory madness; from a passion at its highest degree. The Spirit is eclipsed by the will. Observation. – Dr. B… points out that physicians really consider these facts as cases of transitory madness. We share that opinion, but not for the same reasons, for persons who are not familiar with the spiritist phenomena are generally led to attribute them exclusively to the causes they know. We are persuaded that we must have reminiscences of certain prior moral dispositions;

we will say even that it is impossible for it to be otherwise, for progress is realized only gradually. But here that is not the case, and what proves it is the fact that the persons mentioned show no sign of aggressiveness outside their pathological state; evidently, in them there was only a momentary disturbance of the moral faculties. The reflection of prior dispositions is recognized by other signs, in a certain way unequivocal, which we will develop in a special article, supported by facts.

In your last existence was there simultaneously moral and intellectual progress?

Answer. – Yes; above all intellectual.

Could you tell us what was the manner of your next-to-last existence?

Answer. – Oh! I was obscure. I had a family that I made unhappy; later I expiated it bitterly. But why do you ask me this? That is already past, and now I find myself in new phases. Observation. – P. Gaimard died a celibate, at 64 years of age. More than once he lamented not having established a home.

Do you expect to reincarnate within a short time?

Answer. – No; first I wish to investigate. We like this state of erraticity because the soul has more mastery over itself; the Spirit has more consciousness of its strength; the flesh weighs upon, obscures, and hinders. Observation. – All the Spirits affirm that in the state of erraticity they investigate, study, and observe, in order to be able to choose.

Is that not the counterpart of corporeal life? Do we not often wander for years, before fixing ourselves on the career we judge most suited to our evolutionary journey? Do we not at times change, as we advance in age? Is not each day employed in the search for what we will do the following day?

Now, what do the different corporeal existences represent for the Spirits, if not phases, periods, days of the spiritual life which, as we know, is the normal life, since corporeal life is transitory and passing? Will there be anything more sublime than this theory? Is it not in consonance with the grandiose harmony of the Universe? Once again, it was not we who invented it, and we lament not possessing that merit; however, the more we go deeper into it the more fruitful we find it in the solution of problems hitherto unexplained.

On what planet do you think or wish to reincarnate?

Answer. – I do not know: give me time to search.

What manner of existence will you ask of God?

Answer. – The continuation of this last one; the greatest possible development of the intellectual faculties.

It seems that you place in the foreground the development of the intellectual faculties, attributing less importance to the moral faculties, in spite of what you said earlier. Answer. – My heart is not yet sufficiently formed to be able to appreciate the others well.

Do you see other Spirits and enter into relation with them?

Answer. – Yes.

Among them are there not some you knew on Earth?

Answer. – Yes: Dumont-d'Urville.

Do you also see the Spirit of Jacques Arago, with whom you traveled?

Answer. – Yes.

Are these Spirits in the same conditions as you?

Answer. – No; some more elevated; others in an inferior position.

We refer to the Spirits of Dumont-d'Urville and Jacques Arago.

Answer. – I do not wish to particularize.

Are you satisfied that we have evoked you?

Answer. – Yes; especially on account of one person.

Can we do something for you?

Answer. – Yes.

If we were to evoke you within a few months, would you be disposed to answer our questions again?

Answer. – With pleasure. Farewell.

You take your leave; grant us the pleasure of saying where you are going.

Answer. – At this rate (to speak as I did a few days ago) I will cross a space a thousand times more considerable than the course I made on Earth in my voyages, which I considered so far-off; and all this in less than a second, in a thought. I will go to a gathering of Spirits, where I will take lessons and will be able to learn my new science, my new life. Farewell. Observation. – Whoever knew Mr.

Paul Gaimard perfectly will confess that this communication is marked by the stamp of his individuality. To learn, to see, to know was his dominant passion;

it is this that explains his voyages around the world and to the regions of the North Pole, as well as his excursions to Russia and Poland, at the time of the first outbreak of cholera in Europe. Dominated by that passion and by the need to satisfy it, he kept a rare composure in the face of the greatest dangers;

thus, by his calm and by his firmness he knew how to free himself from the clutches of a tribe of cannibals who had surprised him in the interior of an island of Oceania.

A word of his characterizes perfectly that avidity to see new facts, to witness the spectacle of unforeseen accidents. “What happiness!” – he exclaimed one day during the most dramatic period of the revolution of 1848 – “what happiness to live in an epoch so fertile in extraordinary and unforeseen events! His Spirit, turned almost exclusively toward the sciences that dealt with organized matter, had quite neglected the philosophical sciences. Thus, one could say that he lacked elevation in his ideas. However, no act of his life proves that he had ever disregarded the great moral laws imposed upon Humanity. In sum, Mr. Paul Gaimard had a fine intelligence: essentially upright and honest, naturally obliging, he was incapable of committing the least injustice to anyone whatsoever. Perhaps we can only reproach him for having been too fond of pleasures; but the world and pleasures did not corrupt his reasoning nor his heart. For this reason Mr. Paul Gaimard merited the regrets of his friends and of all who knew him. Sardou. n [1]

[cf.

Victorien Sardou.]