A seed of madness.

The Journal de la Haute-Saône recently narrated the following fact:

“Kings have been seen, dethroned, to bury themselves in the ruins of their palaces; unfortunate gamblers are seen to renounce life after the loss of their fortune; but a proprietor who kills himself in order not to outlive the expropriation of a piece of land, is what has perhaps never been seen, before the case we relate. A proprietor of Saint-Loup was warned that one of his farms would be expropriated, on May 14, by the Eastern Railway Company. The information affected him keenly. Being unable to bear the separation from his lands, he showed signs of mental alienation. On the second of May he left his house at three o'clock in the morning and drowned himself in the river of Combeauté.”

Indeed, it is difficult to kill oneself for a motive so trivial, and an act so unreasonable can be explained only by a cerebral disorder; but what would have produced this disorder? Undoubtedly, it was not belief in the Spirits. The fact of the expropriation of the land? But, then, why do not all those whose lands are expropriated become mad? It will be said that it is because not all have so weak a brain. Then, you admit a natural predisposition to madness; and it could not be otherwise, since the same cause does not always produce the same effect. We have already said this many times, in response to those who accuse Spiritism of provoking madness. Let them say whether, before the Spirits were thought of, there were no madmen and whether there are no madmen among those who do not believe in the Spirits? A physical cause or a violent moral commotion can produce only a momentary madness. Apart from this, if we examine the antecedents, symptoms will always be found, which a fortuitous cause may develop; then the madness takes on the character of the principal preoccupation. The madman speaks of that which preoccupies him, but the cause is not the preoccupation; this, at most, is a kind of form of manifestation. Thus, there being a predisposition to madness, the one who occupies himself with religion will have a religious madness; love will produce amorous madness; ambition, the madness of honors and riches, etc. In the fact narrated above it would be absurd to see anything other than a simple effect, which any other cause would have provoked, for there was predisposition. Now, let us go further: we will say, with all clarity, that if that proprietor, so impressionable in regard to his land, had been deeply imbued with the principles of Spiritism, he would not have gone mad nor drowned himself, two misfortunes that would have been avoided, as numerous examples show us. The reason for this is evident. Madness has as its first cause a relative moral weakness, which renders the individual incapable of bearing the shock of certain impressions, among the number of which figure, at least in three quarters, grief, despair, disappointment and all the tribulations of life. To give man the strength necessary to view such things with indifference, is to attenuate the most frequent cause that leads him to madness and to suicide. Now, this strength he draws from the well-understood Spiritist Doctrine. Before the grandeur of the future that unfolds to our eyes, and of which it gives patent proof, the tribulations of life become so ephemeral that they glide over the soul like water over marble, without leaving traces. The true Spiritist attaches himself to matter only as far as is strictly indispensable for the needs of life; but, if something is lacking to him, he resigns himself, because he knows that he is here in passing and that a much better fate awaits him. He also does not grieve at finding accidentally a stone in his path. If our man had been imbued with these ideas, what would those lands have become in his eyes? The vexation he suffered would have been insignificant or null, and an imaginary misfortune would not have led him to a real misfortune. In sum, one of the effects – and, we may say, one of the benefits of Spiritism – is that of giving the soul the strength it lacks in many circumstances, and it is in this that it can reduce the causes of madness and of suicide. As is seen, the simplest facts can be a source of teachings for whoever wishes to reflect. It is by showing the applications of Spiritism in the most ordinary cases that its whole sublimity will be made comprehensible. Is not the true philosophy there?