Progress of the Spirits

The Spirits can advance intellectually, if they sincerely and firmly will it. Like men, they have free will, and the wandering state does not prevent the exercise of their faculties; it even aids it, affording them means of observation of which they can take advantage.

The evil Spirits are not fatally condemned to remain such. They can improve, but they rarely will it, since they lack discernment and find a kind of sickly pleasure in the evil they practice. For them to return to good it is necessary that they be violently impressed and punished, since their shadowy minds are not enlightened except by chastisement.

The weak Spirits, who do not do evil for pleasure, but who do not advance, are held back by their own weakness and by a kind of torpor that paralyzes their faculties; they go without knowing where; time passes, without their measuring it; they take little interest in what they see, draw no profit from it, or rebel against it.

It is necessary that the Spirit have reached a certain degree of moral progress in order to be able to progress in erraticity; thus, these poor Spirits often choose their trials very badly; above all they seek to be as well off as possible in the corporeal life, without troubling themselves much about what they will be later on. These weak Spirits aspire ardently to reincarnation, not in order to purify themselves, but in order to live still. The beings who have made many migrations are more experienced than the others; each of their existences has deposited in them a more considerable sum of knowledge; they have seen and retained; they are less naive than those who find themselves closer to the point of departure. The Spirits who have left the Earth reincarnate there more than elsewhere, because the experience acquired there is more applicable. They scarcely aim at other worlds, except before or after their perfecting. On each planet the conditions of existence are different, since God is inexhaustible in the variety of his works. Nevertheless, the beings who inhabit them obey the same laws of expiation and all tend toward the same objective of complete perfection. [See in the Review of August 1862: The planet Venus, dictated by the same Spirit, and also: Preliminary Observations.] Georges.