Jean Reynaud and the precursors of Spiritism.

— Our turn has come to cast a few flowers upon the recently closed tomb of a man as commendable for his learning as for his eminent moral qualities, and to whom – a rare thing – all parties agree in doing justice. Jean Reynaud was born in Lyon in February 1808 and died in Paris on the 28th of June 1863. We could give no juster idea of his character than by reproducing the brief obituary that his friend, Mr. Ernest Legouvé, published in the Siècle of June 30, 1863. “Democracy, philosophy, and, I do not fear to say it, religion, have just suffered an immense loss: Jean Reynaud died yesterday, after a short illness. From whatever point of view one judges his doctrines, his work, like his life, was eminently religious; for his life, like his work, was one of the most eloquent protests against the great scourge that threatens us: scepticism under all its forms. No one believed more energetically in the divine personality, no one believed more strongly in the human personality, no one loved liberty more ardently. His book Earth and Heaven, which from the outset opened so deep a furrow, and whose trail will mark itself out ever more, breathes such a sense of the infinite, such a sense of the divine presence, that one may say that God palpitates on every one of its pages! And how could it be otherwise, when he who wrote them lived always in the presence of God! We know it well, all of us who knew and loved him, and whose finest title of honor is to have been loved by such a man. He was a fountain of moral life ever gushing forth; one could not approach him without being more firmly established in the good; his very countenance was a lesson in honesty, in honor, in devotion; sinful souls were troubled before that clear gaze, as if they stood before the very eye of justice. And all this has departed! It departed in full strength, when so many useful words, so great examples could still issue from that mouth, from that heart!… We do not weep for Reynaud for ourselves alone; we weep for him for our whole country.” É. Legouvé.

In the same newspaper of July 16, Mr.

Henri Martin gave more circumstantial details on the life and work of Jean Reynaud. He says: “Reared in the freedom of the countryside by a mother of strong and tender soul, it was there that he acquired those habits of intimacy with Nature, which never left him, and developed those robust organs, with which, later on, he would do twenty leagues in one stretch and pass from glacier to glacier, from one crest to another of the Alps, by narrow precipices where the hunters of the mountain goat do not venture. His studies were rapid and fruitful. Manifesting from his youth the most lively taste for letters and for all the forms of the beautiful, he at first turned his attention to the sciences, a fortunate direction which was to furnish him the nourishment and the instruments of his thought and to make of the scholar the useful servant of the philosopher. Having come out in the first rank of the Polytechnic School, he was a mining engineer in Corsica when the July revolution broke out. He returned to Paris; there Saint-Simonism had just burst forth;

he was caught up in that great and singular movement, which then carried away so many young intelligences, by the attraction of the dogma of the perfectibility of the human race. Meanwhile, the school sought to become a church.

Jean Reynaud did not follow it, leaving Saint-Simonism for democracy.

He set about reconstituting a group and a center of intellectual action with the friends who, like himself, had withdrawn from the school. Pierre Leroux, Carnot and he took back from the hands of Julien (of Paris) the Revue Encyclopédique - Google Books; it was there that Pierre Leroux published his notable Essai sur la doctrine du progrès continu, [Oeuvres de Pierre Leroux - Google Books.] and Jean Reynaud the so admirable passage of Infinité des cieux, the germ of his great book Terre et Ciel. Then, with Pierre Leroux, he founded the Encyclopédie Nouvelle - Google Books, an immense work, which remained unfinished. The 24th of February tore the philosopher from his peaceful labors to cast him into active politics. President of the commission of higher scientific and literary studies, then Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Public Instruction, he elaborated with the minister Carnot, one of his most ancient and most constant friends, plans destined to place public instruction at the level of the democratic institutions. Transferred from Public Instruction to the Council of State, Jean Reynaud there rapidly won an authority that proceeded as much from his character as from his enlightenment and, however short his passage through the said Council may have been, he left in the memory of the most eminent men an indelible impression.”

— Of all the writings of Jean Reynaud, the one that contributed most to his popularity was, incontestably, his book Terre et ciel - Google Books, although the abstract form of the language does not put it within the reach of all; but the depth of the ideas and the logic of the deductions made it appreciated by all serious thinkers and placed the author in the first rank of spiritualist philosophers.

This work seemed to the Church a danger to the orthodoxy of the faith; in consequence it was condemned and placed on the Index by the curia of Rome [Index Librorum prohibitorun et expurgandorum], which increased still more the credit it already enjoyed and made it sought after with greater avidity.

At the time the work appeared, around 1840, the Spirits were not yet thought of;

meanwhile, Jean Reynaud seems to have had, as, indeed, many other modern writers had, the intuition and the presentiment of Spiritism, of which he was one of the most eloquent precursors. [See:

Letter from Mr. Jean Reynaud to the Journal des Débats.] Like Charles Fourier, he admits the infinite progress of the soul and, as a consequence of such progress, the necessity of the plurality of existences, demonstrated by the diverse states of man on Earth.

— Jean Reynaud had seen nothing; he had gathered everything from his profound intuition. Spiritism saw what the philosopher had only sensed; in this way, it added the sanction of experience to the purely speculative theory and, naturally, experience led it to discover details that imagination alone could not glimpse, but which come to complete and corroborate the fundamental points. Like all the great ideas that have revolutionized the world, Spiritism did not spring up all at once; it germinated in more than one brain, showed itself here and there, little by little, as if to habituate men to the idea. A sudden, complete appearance would have met a very lively resistance: it would have dazzled without convincing. Besides, each thing must come in its time and every plant must germinate and grow, before reaching its complete development. In politics the same thing happens: there is no revolution that has not been long elaborated; and whoever, guided by experience and by the study of the past, follows attentively these preliminaries, can, almost infallibly and without being a prophet, foresee its outcome. It was thus that the principles of modern Spiritism showed themselves partially and under diverse aspects in various epochs: in the past century, with Swedenborg; at the beginning of this century, in the doctrine of the theosophists, who clearly admitted communications between the visible and the invisible world; with Charles Fourier, who admits the progress of the soul through reincarnation; with Jean Reynaud, who accepts the same principle, sounding the infinite, with Science in hand. About twelve years ago, in the American manifestations, which had such great repercussion and came to prove the material relations between the dead and the living and, finally, in the Spiritist philosophy which, gathering these diverse elements into a body of doctrine, deduced from them the moral consequences.

— Who would have said, when they busied themselves with the turning tables, that from that amusement a whole philosophy would issue? When this philosophy appeared, who would have said that in a few years it would go around the world and win millions of adherents? Today, who could affirm that it has said the last word? Certainly it has not said it, for, although the fundamental bases are already established, there are still many details to elucidate which will come in their time. Then, the further one advances, the more one sees how multiple are the interests that bear upon all the questions of the social order. Thus, the future alone can develop all its consequences, or, better said, these consequences will develop by themselves, by the force of things, because in Spiritism is found what was vainly sought elsewhere. For this very reason we shall be led to recognize that it alone can fill the moral void that is daily created around man, a void that threatens society itself at its base and that already begins to terrify. At a given moment Spiritism will be the anchor of salvation. But it was not necessary to wait for that moment to throw the rope, just as one does not wait for the time of the harvest to sow. In its wisdom, Providence prepares things slowly. This is why the mother idea has had, as we said, numerous precursors who opened the way and prepared the ground to receive the seed, some in one sense, others in another, and one day it will be recognized by how many numerous threads all these partial ideas are linked to the fundamental idea. Now, since each of these ideas has its partisans, there results in some a very natural predisposition to accept the complement of the idea, for each of these theories prepared a portion of the ground. Incontestably, here is one of the causes of this propagation, which touches the bounds of the marvelous and of which the history of philosophical doctrines offers no example. The adversaries are already astonished at the resistance it presents to their attacks. Later they will have to yield before the force of opinion. Among the precursors of Spiritism one must still place a number of contemporary writers, whose works are sown, perhaps without their being conscious of it, with Spiritist ideas. Volumes upon volumes would have to be written, if one wished to gather the innumerable passages in which more or less direct allusion is made to the pre-existence and the survival of the soul, to its presence among the living, to its manifestations, to its peregrinations through progressive worlds, to the plurality of existences, etc. Granting that all this be, on the part of certain authors, no more than a play of the imagination, the idea none the less infiltrates itself into the spirit of the masses, where it remains latent until the moment when it will be demonstrated as truth. Will there be a thought more Spiritist than that which is contained in the letter of Mr. Victor Hugo, on the death of Mrs. Lamartine, acclaimed with enthusiasm by the majority of the newspapers, even those that most criticize the belief in the Spirits? Here is the letter, which says much in few lines:

— “Hauteville-House, May 23.

“Dear Lamartine, “A great misfortune strikes you. I need to put my heart beside yours. I venerated her whom you loved. Your lofty Spirit sees beyond the horizon; you distinctly perceive the future life. “It is not to you that one needs to say: Hope. You are among those who know and who hope.

“She is still your companion, invisible, but present. You have lost the wife, but not the soul. Dear friend, let us live in the dead.”

Victor Hugo. n

— It is not only isolated writers who sow, here and there, a few ideas; it is Science itself that comes to prepare the ways. Magnetism was the first step toward the knowledge of the perispiritual action, source of all the Spiritist phenomena; somnambulism was the first manifestation of the isolation of the soul. Phrenology proved that the cerebral organism is a keyboard at the service of the principle for the expression of diverse faculties; contrary to the intention of Gall, its founder, who was a materialist, it served to prove the independence of the Spirit and of matter. Homeopathy, by proving the power of the action of spiritualized matter, links itself to the important role that the perispirit plays in certain afflictions; it attacks the evil at its very source, which is outside the organism, whose alteration is only consecutive. Such is the reason why homeopathy triumphs in an immensity of cases in which ordinary medicine fails: more than the latter, it takes into account the spiritualist element, so preponderant in the economy [in the organism], which explains the ease with which homeopathic doctors accept Spiritism and why the majority of Spiritist doctors belong to the school of Hahnemann. Finally, even down to the recent discoveries on the properties of electricity, there is none that has not come to bring its contingent to the question that occupies us, casting its share of light on what one might call the physiology of the Spirits. We would never finish if we wished to analyze all the circumstances, small or great, which for a century past have come to open the road of the new philosophy. We would see the most contradictory doctrines provoke the development of the idea, political events themselves prepare its introduction into practical life. But, of all the causes, the most preponderant is the Church, which seems fatally predestined to impel it forward. Everything comes to its aid; and if one knew the innumerable quantity of documents that reach us from all sides; if, like us, one could follow this providential march across the world, favored by the least expected events and which, at first sight, would seem contrary to it, one would understand still better how irresistible it is and would be less surprised at our impassibility. It is that we see all working toward it, for good or for ill, voluntarily or involuntarily; it is that we see the goal and know when and how it will be attained; we see the whole that advances, which is why we scarcely trouble ourselves about a few individualities that march against the current.

— By his writings Jean Reynaud was, then, a precursor of Spiritism; he too had his providential mission and was to open a furrow. He would be useful to it after his death. An eminent Spirit thus appreciated the event: “One more circumstance that will redound to the benefit of Spiritism. Jean Reynaud had done what he was to do in this last existence. They will speak of his death, of his life and, more than ever, of his works. Now, to speak of his works is to set foot upon the road of Spiritism. Many intelligences will learn our belief by studying this philosopher who won authority. They will make comparisons and will see that you are not so mad as those who laugh at you and at your faith pretend. Believe me that all that God does is well done. He will be praised by your very detractors, and you know that it is these who, without wishing it, work most to win you adepts. Let them act, let them shout: all will be according to the will of God. A little more patience and the elite of the men of intelligence and of learning will unite with you; and, before certain ostensible adhesions, criticism will have to lower its voice.” Saint Augustine. n Note - See further on, in the dissertations, some communications of Jean Reynaud.

[1]

[see Victor Hugo.]

[2] [see Saint Augustine.]