The point of view.

— There is no one who has not noticed how much things change in aspect, according to the point of view under which they are considered. It is not only the aspect that is modified, but also the very importance of the thing. Let us place ourselves at the center of any setting: however small, it will seem immense to us; from outside, however, it will be another matter. Whoever sees something from the summit of a mountain finds it insignificant, whereas it would seem gigantic to him when seen from below.

This is an effect of optics, but one that applies equally to moral things. A whole day of suffering will seem eternal to us. As that day recedes from us, we are astonished at having fallen into despair over so little. The sorrows of childhood also have a relative importance, being as bitter for the child as for those who have reached maturity. Why, then, do they seem so futile to us? Why do we no longer feel them, whereas the child feels them completely and sees nothing beyond his little circle of activities? He sees them from within; we, from without. Let us suppose a being placed, in relation to us, in the position in which we are in relation to the child: he will judge our preoccupations from the same point of view, and will find them puerile.

A carter is insulted by another; they argue and fight. If a great lord is reviled by a carter he will not feel offended and will not fight with him. Why? Because he places himself outside his sphere; he judges himself so superior that the offense cannot reach him. Yet, if he were to descend to the level of the adversary, he would place himself, in thought, in the same setting and would fight.

— Spiritism shows us an application of this principle, but one of differing importance in its consequences. It makes us see earthly life as it in fact is, placing us at the point of view of the future life; by the material proofs that it furnishes us, by the clear, precise, logical intuition that it gives us, by the examples set before our eyes, it transports us in thought: we see it and understand it; it is no longer that vague, uncertain, problematic notion that was taught us of the future and that, involuntarily, left doubts; for the Spiritist it is an acquired certainty, a reality.

It does still more: it shows us the life of the soul, the essential being, because it is the thinking being, going back into the past to an unknown epoch and extending indefinitely into the future, in such a way that earthly life, even of a century, is but a point in that long course. If the whole of life is so little a thing compared with the life of the soul, what then are the difficulties of life? Yet man, placed at the center of life, is preoccupied as if it were to last forever; for him everything assumes colossal proportions: the smallest stone that wounds him seems to him a boulder; a disappointment drives him to despair; a setback casts him down; a word infuriates him. Having his vision limited to the present, to that which touches him immediately, he exaggerates the importance of the smallest incidents; a business deal that fails takes away his appetite; a question of precedence is an affair of State; an injustice puts him beside himself. To triumph is the end of his efforts, the object of all his combinations; but, for the majority, what is it to triumph? Is it, if one has not the means to live, to create by honest means a tranquil existence? Is it the noble emulation of acquiring talent and developing the intelligence? Is it the desire to leave, after oneself, a justly honored name and to accomplish works useful to Humanity? No. To triumph is to supplant one's neighbor, to eclipse him, to push him aside, even to overthrow him, in order to take his place. And for so fine a triumph, which death will perhaps not let one enjoy for twenty-four hours, how many preoccupations, how many tribulations! How much talent sometimes expended that could have been better employed! Then, how much rage, how many sleepless nights if one does not triumph! What a fever of envy the success of a rival causes! Then, they blame the bad star, fate, fatal chance, whereas the bad star is most often inability and incapacity. One would say, in truth, that man takes upon himself the task of making as painful as possible the few moments he must spend on the Earth and of which he is not the master, for he is never certain of the next day.

— How all this changes in aspect when, in thought, man leaves the narrow valley of earthly life and rises into the radiant, splendid and immeasurable life beyond the tomb! How he then pities the torments he voluntarily created for himself! How petty and puerile then seem to him the ambitions, the envy, the susceptibilities, the vain satisfactions of pride! It is as if, in mature age, he considered the games of childhood; as if from the summit of a mountain he contemplated men in the valley. Starting from this point of view, will he become of his own will the plaything of an illusion? No. He will, on the contrary, be in reality, in the true, and for him the illusion is to see things from the earthly point of view. Indeed, there is no one on the Earth who does not attach more importance to that which, for himself, must last much longer than a day lasts; who does not prefer a durable happiness to an ephemeral happiness. We worry little about a passing vexation; what interests us, above all, is the normal situation. If, then, we raise our thought so as to embrace the life of the soul, we shall necessarily arrive at this consequence: to see earthly life as a passing station; spiritual life as the real life, because it is infinite; that it is an illusion to take the part for the whole, that is, the life of the body, only transitory, for the definitive life. The man who considers things only from the earthly point of view is like one who, being inside a house, cannot judge the form nor the importance of the building: he judges under false appearances because he does not see everything, whereas one who sees from outside, because he judges the whole, judges more sensibly. It will be said that to see things in this manner one needs an uncommon intelligence, a philosophical mind that could not be found in the masses; whence it would be necessary to conclude that Humanity, with few exceptions, will always drag along in mundane matters. This is an error. To identify oneself with the future life one needs neither an exceptional intelligence, nor great efforts of imagination, since each one carries within himself the intuition and the desire; the manner, however, in which it is generally presented is very little seductive, because it offers as an alternative the eternal flames or perpetual contemplation, which leads many to prefer nothingness. Hence the absolute incredulity of some and doubt in the greater number. What has been lacking until now is the irrefutable proof of the future life, proof that Spiritism comes to give, no longer by a vague theory, but by patent proofs. Still more: it shows it such as the most severe reason can accept it, because it explains everything, justifies everything and resolves all difficulties. Because it is clear and logical, it is within the reach of all; for this reason Spiritism leads back to belief so many people who had strayed from it. Experience demonstrates every day that simple workmen and uneducated peasants understand this reasoning without effort; they place themselves all the more at ease in this new point of view, the more they find in it, like all unhappy people, an immense consolation, and the only possible compensation in their painful and laborious existence. If this manner of regarding earthly things were to become general, would it not have as a consequence only the destruction of ambition, the stimulant of great enterprises, of the most useful labors, even of works of genius? If the whole of Humanity thought only of the future life, would not everything be imperiled in this world? What do the monks in the convents do, if not occupy themselves exclusively with Heaven? Now, into what would the Earth be transformed if all became monks?

Such a state of things would be disastrous and the inconveniences greater than is supposed, because, by this, men would lose on the Earth and gain nothing in Heaven; but the result of the principle we set forth is completely otherwise for whoever does not understand it by halves, as we are going to explain.

Corporeal life is necessary to the Spirit, or to the soul, which is the same thing, in order that it may carry out in this material world the functions assigned to it by Providence: it is one of the gears of universal harmony. The activity that, in spite of itself, it is forced to develop in the functions it exercises, believing it acts of itself, aids the development of its intelligence and facilitates its advancement. The happiness of the Spirit in the spiritual life being proportional to its progress and to the good it was able to do as a man, it results that, the greater the importance the spiritual life acquires in the eyes of man, the more he feels the necessity of doing what is necessary to secure for himself the best possible place. The experience of those who have lived comes to prove that an earthly life that is useless or ill-employed has no profit for the future, and that those who here seek only material satisfactions pay very dearly for them, whether by sufferings in the world of Spirits, or by the obligation to begin the task anew under conditions more painful than those of the past; such is the case of those who suffer on the Earth. Thus, considering the things of this world from the extracorporeal point of view, man, far from being stimulated to unconcern and idleness, understands better the necessity of work. Starting from the earthly point of view, this necessity is an injustice in his eyes, when he compares himself to those who can live without doing anything: he is jealous of them; he envies them. Starting from the spiritual point of view, this necessity has its reason for being, its usefulness, and he accepts it without murmuring, for he understands that without work he will remain indefinitely in inferiority and deprived of the supreme happiness to which he aspires and which he cannot attain, in case he does not develop intellectually and morally. In this respect it seems that many monks poorly understand the object of earthly life and, still less, the conditions of the future life. By their enclosure, they deprive themselves of the means of becoming useful to their fellows, and many of those who are now in the world of Spirits have confessed to us that they were thoroughly mistaken and that they suffer the consequences of their error.

— For man, such a point of view has another immense and immediate consequence: it is that of making the tribulations of life more bearable for him. Let him seek well-being and strive to make his time on the Earth as agreeable as possible: this is very natural and no one forbids it to him. But, knowing that he is here only momentarily, that a better future awaits him, he torments himself little over the disappointments he experiences and, seeing things from on high, accepts setbacks with less bitterness; he becomes indifferent to the vexations of which he is the victim, on the part of the envious and the jealous; he reduces to their just value the objects of his ambition and places himself above the petty susceptibilities of self-love. Freed from the preoccupations created by the man who does not leave his limited sphere, by the grandiose perspective that unfolds before him, he is freer to give himself over to a profitable work; for himself and for others.

For him, the humiliations, the diatribes and the malices of his enemies are but imperceptible clouds in a vast horizon; he worries about them no more than about the flies that buzz at his ears, because he knows that he will soon be free. Thus, all the petty miseries that they stir up against him slide off him like water over marble. Placing himself at the earthly point of view, he would become irritated and would perhaps avenge himself. From the extraterrestrial point of view, he despises them like the splatters of mud of a heedless passerby. They are thorns thrown in the path and over which he passes, without even taking the trouble to remove them, in order not to slow his march toward a more serious object that he proposes to attain. Far from bearing ill will toward his enemies, he is grateful to them for furnishing the opportunity to exercise patience and moderation for the benefit of his future progress, whereas he would lose his fruits if he descended to reprisals. He pities them for giving themselves over to so much useless labor and says that they are the very ones who walk upon thorns, with the cares they take to do evil. Such is the result of the difference of the point of view under which one regards life: one gives us vexation and anxiety; the other, calm and serenity. Spiritists who experience disappointments, even if only in thought, leave the Earth for a few moments; ascend to the regions of the infinite and look at them from on high: you will see what they will be. Sometimes they say: You, who are unhappy, look downward and not upward and you will see still more unhappy ones. This is true. But many say that another's ill does not cure us. The remedy is not always in comparison and for some it is not difficult to look upward without saying: “Why do these have what I have not?” Nevertheless, if they placed themselves at the point of view of which we speak, to which we shall soon be forced, they would naturally be above those whom we might envy, because, seen from there, the greatest would seem very small.

— We remember having attended at the Odéon, about forty years ago, a play in one act, entitled The Ephemerals, by what author we no longer know. Although still young, it made a vivid impression on us. The scene took place in the country of the Ephemerals, whose inhabitants live only twenty-four hours. In the space of one act one sees them pass from the cradle to adolescence, to youth, to maturity, to old age, to decrepitude and to death. In that interval they perform all the acts of life: baptism, marriage, civil and governmental affairs, etc.; but as the time is short and the hours counted, haste is necessary; everything is done with prodigious rapidity, which does not prevent them from occupying themselves with intrigues and from taking trouble to satisfy ambitions and supplant others. As one sees, the play contained a profoundly philosophical thought; and involuntarily the spectator, who in an instant saw unfold all the phases of a very full existence, set himself to saying: How foolish these people are! To do so much harm, when they have so little time to live! What remains to them of this confusion of a life of a few hours? Would it not be better to live in peace?

This is, in brief, a perfect picture of human life. Yet the play did not survive longer than its heroes: they did not understand it. If the author were still living, which we do not know, he would probably be a Spiritist today.