Union of Philosophy and Spiritism.

— Note. – The following article is the introduction to a complete work that the author, Mr. Herrenschneider, proposes to undertake on the necessity of the alliance between Philosophy and Spiritism.

Ever since Spiritism revealed itself in France, about ten or twelve years ago, the incessant communications of the Spirits have provoked in all classes of society a beneficial religious movement, which it is important to encourage and develop. Indeed, in this century the religious spirit had been lost, above all among the erudite and intelligent classes. Voltairean sarcasm had there stripped Christianity of its prestige; the progress of the sciences had made them recognize the contradictions existing between the dogmas and the natural laws, and the astronomical discoveries had demonstrated the puerility of the idea of God formed by the sons of Abraham, of Moses, and of the Christ. The development of riches, the marvelous inventions of the arts and of industry, the whole of civilization protested, in the eyes of modern society, against renunciation of the world. It was because of these numerous motives that incredulity and indifference insinuated themselves into souls, that neglect of the eternal destinies numbed our love of the good, paralyzed our moral improvement, and that the passion for well-being, for pleasure, for luxury, and for earthly vanities ended by captivating almost all our ambition; but, suddenly, the dead came to remind us that our present life has its morrow, that our acts have their fatal, inevitable consequences, if not always in this life, then infallibly in the future life. That apparition of the Spirits was a thunderclap that made many people tremble, like certain pieces of furniture, set in motion under the impulse of an invisible force; at the hearing of those intelligent thoughts, dictated by means of a crude telegraph; at the reading of those sublime pages, written by our distracted hands, under the impulse of a mysterious direction. How many hearts beat, seized with sudden fear; how many tormented consciences awoke in deserved anguish; how many intelligences struck with stupor! The renewal of these relations with the souls of the dead is and will continue to be a prodigious event, which will have as its consequence the regeneration, so necessary, of modern society.

For when human society has, as the sole object of its activity, material prosperity and the pleasure of the senses, it plunges into egoistic materialism, it appraises all actions according to the goods it derives from them, it renounces all efforts that do not lead to a palpable advantage, it esteems only those who have possessions, and it respects nothing but the power that imposes itself. When men concern themselves only with immediate and lucrative successes, they lose the sense of honesty, they renounce the choice of means, they despise inner happiness, the private virtues, and they cease to guide themselves according to the principles of justice and equity. In a society launched in that immoral direction, the rich man leads a life of ignoble, stupefying softness, and the disinherited man there drags out a painful and monotonous life, of which suicide seems to be the last palliative.

Against such a moral disposition, public and private, philosophy is impotent. Not that it lacks arguments to prove the social necessity of pure and generous principles; not that it cannot demonstrate the imminence of the final responsibility and establish the perpetuity of our existence; but, in general, men have neither the time, nor the taste, nor a spirit circumspect enough, to pay attention to the voice of conscience and to the observations of reason. The vicissitudes of life, moreover, are often too imperious for them to decide upon the exercise of virtue out of simple love of the good. Even if philosophy had been what it truly ought to be – a complete and certain doctrine – it could never have provoked, by its teaching alone, the social regeneration in an effective manner, since to this day it has been unable to give to the authority of its doctrine any sanction other than the abstract love of the ideal and of perfection.

For men require, in order to convince them of the necessity of devoting themselves to the good, facts that speak to the senses. They require the striking picture of their future sufferings, so that they may consent to climb back up the fatal slope down which their vices have dragged them; it is needful that they touch with their finger the eternal misfortunes which, by their moral lack of vigilance, they are preparing for themselves, so that they may understand that the present life is not the object of their existence, but the means given them by the Creator to work personally for the realization of their final destinies. Thus, it was for these motives that all religions supported their commandments upon the terror of hell and upon the seductions of the celestial joys. But ever since, under the empire of incredulity and religious indifference, the populations assured themselves of the ultimate consequences of their sins, an easy and inconsequent philosophy ended by prevailing, aiding the cult of the senses, of temporal interests, and of egoistic doctrines. Today, enlightened, intelligent, and strong men withdraw from the Church and follow their own inspirations; it lacks the authority necessary to recover its twenty-times-secular influence. It may therefore be said that the Church is as impotent as philosophy, and that neither the one nor the other will exercise a salutary influence except by undergoing, each in its own kind, a radical reform. Meanwhile Humanity stirs, events succeed one another, and the arrival of the Spiritist manifestations in this cultured, practical, self-sufficient, and skeptical century is, incontestably, the most considerable event. Behold, then, the tomb opening before us, not as the end of our pains and of our earthly miseries; not as a yawning abyss, where our passions, our pleasures, and our illusions are devoured, but rather as the majestic portal of a new world, where some will gather, despite themselves, the bitter fruits that their weaknesses will have made them sow, while others, on the contrary, will assure, by their merit, the passage to purer and more elevated spheres. It is, then, Spiritism that reveals to us our future destinies; the more it is known, the more the moral and religious regeneration will gain in impulse and in extent.

The union of Spiritism with the philosophical sciences seems to us, truly, of great necessity for human happiness and for the moral, intellectual, and religious progress of modern society, since we are no longer in the time when human science could be set aside for the benefit of blind faith. Modern science is too learned, too sure of itself, and too advanced in the knowledge of the laws imposed by God upon intelligence and upon Nature, for the religious transformation to be able to take place without its concurrence. The relative smallness of our globe is perfectly known, too well to confer upon Humanity a privileged place in the providential designs. In the eyes of all, we are no more than a grain of dust in the immensity of the worlds, and it is known that the laws governing that indefinite multitude of existences are simple, immutable, and universal. In short, the requirements for the certainty of our knowledge have been deeply probed, too deeply for a new doctrine to be able to arise and maintain itself upon any basis other than a touching and inoffensive mysticism. If Spiritism wishes to extend its empire over all the classes of society, over the superior and intelligent men, as over the delicate and believing souls, it must launch itself, without reserve, into the current of human thought, and, by its philosophical superiority, must know how to impose upon proud reason the respect of its authority. It is this independent action of the adepts of Spiritism that the elevated Spirits who manifest themselves understand perfectly. He who designates himself under the name of Saint Augustine said recently: “Observe and study carefully the communications that are given to you; accept what reason does not repel, reject what shocks it; ask for clarification on those that leave you in doubt. There you have the course to follow, in order to transmit to future generations, without fear of seeing them denatured, the truths that you disentangle without effort from their inevitable cortege of errors.”

Behold, in a few words, the true spirit of Spiritism, that which Science can admit without derogating, that which will serve us to conquer Humanity. Besides, Spiritism has nothing to fear from its alliance with philosophy, because it rests upon incontestable facts, which have their reason for being in the laws of Creation. It falls to Science to study its scope and to coordinate the general principles, in accordance with this new order of phenomena. For it is evident that, since it had not foreseen the necessary existence, in the space that surrounds us, of the souls of the dead or of those destined to be reborn, Science must understand that its first philosophy was incomplete and that primordial principles had escaped it.

Philosophy, on the contrary, has everything to gain by considering seriously the facts of Spiritism. First; because these are the solemn sanction of its moral teaching; and afterward because such facts will prove, to the most hardened, the fatal scope of their bad conduct. But, however important this positive justification of its maxims may be, the deepened study of the consequences, which are deduced from the verification of the perceptible existence of the soul in the non-incarnate state, will then serve it to determine the constitutive elements of the soul, its origin, its destinies, and to establish the moral law and that of the soul's progress upon certain and unshakable bases. Moreover, the knowledge of the essence of the soul will lead philosophy to the knowledge of the essence of things and, even, of that of God, and will permit it to unite all the doctrines that divide it into one and the same general system, truly complete. Finally, these diverse developments of philosophy, provoked by this precious determination of the soul's essence, will infallibly lead it onto the traces of the fundamental principles of the ancient cabala and of the ancient occult science of the hierophants, of which the Christian trinity is the last luminous ray that has reached us. It is thus that, by the simple apparition of the wandering souls, one will arrive, as we have every right to hope, at constituting an uninterrupted chain of the moral, religious, and metaphysical traditions of ancient and modern Humanity. This considerable future, which we conceive for philosophy allied with Spiritism, will not seem impossible to those who have some notion of this science, if they consider the vacuity of the principles upon which the diverse schools are founded and the impotence resulting therefrom for them, to explain the concrete and living reality of the soul and of God. It is thus that materialism imagines that beings are no more than material phenomena, similar to those produced by chemical combinations, and that the principle which animates them is part of a supposed universal vital principle. According to this system the individual soul would not exist and God would be a completely useless being.

For their part, the disciples of Hegel imagine that the idea, that undisciplined phenomenon of our soul, is an element in itself, independent of us; a universal principle that manifests itself through Humanity and its intellectual activity, as also through Nature and its marvelous transformations. This school denies, consequently, the eternal individuality of our soul, and confounds it in one single whole, with Nature. It supposes that there exists a perfect identity between the visible universe and the moral and intellectual world; that the one and the other are the result of the progressive and fatal evolution of the primitive, universal idea, in a word, of the absolute. God too has, in this system, no individuality, no liberty, and does not know himself personally. He perceived himself, for the first time, only in 1810, through the intermediary of Hegel, when the latter recognized him in the absolute and universal idea. (Historical).

Finally, our spiritualist school, vulgarly called eclectic, considers the soul as being only a force without extension and without solidity, an imperceptible intelligence in the human body which, once disencumbered of its envelope, while conserving its individuality and its immortality, would no longer exist, neither in time, nor in space. Our soul, then, would be an I-know-not-what, without connection with what exists, and would occupy no determined place. According to this same system, God is no longer perceptible. He is perfect thought and has, equally, neither solidity, nor stability, nor form, nor perceptible reality; he is an empty being. Without reason we could have no intuition. Yet, who are those who invented atheism, skepticism, pantheism, idealism, etc.? They are the men of reasoning, the intelligent ones, the learned! The ignorant peoples, whose sensations are their principal guides, have never doubted of God, of the soul, and of its immortality. It seems that reason alone is a bad counselor!

In consequence, it is easy to convince ourselves that these doctrines lack a real, stable, living principle, the notion of the real being. They move in an intelligible world, which does not touch concrete reality. The void of their principles is connected with the whole of their systems and renders them as subtle as they are vague and foreign to the reality of things. Common sense itself is outraged, notwithstanding the talent and the prodigious erudition of their adherents. But Spiritism is even more brutal in regard to them, because it overturns all the abstract systems, opposing to them a single fact: the substantial, living, and actual reality of the non-incarnate soul. It shows it to them as a personal being, existing in time and in space, though invisible to us; as a being having its solid, substantial element and its active and thinking force. It even shows us the wandering souls, communicating with us by their own initiative. It is evident that such an event must overturn all the houses of cards and, at one stroke, eliminate those proud fanciful structures.

But, to increase the confusion, it can be proved to the partisans of these complicated doctrines that every man bears within his own consciousness the elements sufficient to demonstrate the existence of the soul, just as Spiritism has established it by the facts, so that their systems are not only wrong at their point of arrival, but also at their point of departure. Thus, the wisest course that remains for these honorable learned men to take is to remake their philosophy completely and to consecrate their profound knowledge to the founding of an original science, more precise and more in conformity with reality.

For, effectively, we carry within ourselves four irreducible notions, which authorize us to affirm the existence of our soul, just as Spiritism presents it to us. Firstly, we have within us the feeling of our existence. Such a thought can reveal itself only by an impression that we receive of ourselves. Now, no impression is made upon an object deprived of solidity and of extension, so that by the single fact of our sensations we must infer that we have within us a sensible, subtle, extended, and resistant element, that is, a substance. In the second place, we have within us the consciousness of an active, causal element, which manifests itself in our will, in our thought, and in our acts. In consequence, it is again evident that we possess within us a second element: a force. Therefore, by the simple fact that we feel and that we know, we must conclude that we enclose two constitutive elements, force and substance, that is, an essential, soul-related duality.

But these two primitive notions are not the only ones we carry within us. We also conceive in ourselves, in the third place, a personal, original unity, always identical to itself; and, in the fourth place, a destiny equally personal, because all of us seek happiness and our own conveniences in all the circumstances of life. So that, joining these two new notions, which constitute our double aspect, to the two preceding ones, we recognize that our being encloses four quite distinct principles: its duality of essence and its duality of aspect.

Now, since these four elements of the knowledge of our self, which lead us to affirm ourselves personally, are notions independent of the body and have no relation whatever with our material envelope, it is evident and peremptory for every just and unprejudiced spirit, that our being depends upon an invisible principle, called the Soul; and that this soul exists as such, since it has a substance and a force, a unity and a destiny proper and personal to it.

Such are the four primordial elements of our soul-related individuality, of which each of us bears within his bosom the notion and which no man could refuse. In consequence, as we said, in all times philosophy has possessed the elements sufficient for the knowledge of the soul, just as Spiritism makes it known to us. If, then, until the present, human reason has not succeeded in constructing a true and useful metaphysics, that would have made it understand that the soul must be considered as a real being, independent of the body and capable of existing by itself, substantially and virtually, in the body and in space, it is because it disdained the direct observation of the facts of consciousness and because, in its pride and in its presumption, reason was set in the place and in the stead of reality.

In accordance with these observations, one can understand how greatly it imports to philosophy to unite itself to Spiritism, for from this it will draw the advantage of creating for itself an original, serious, and complete science, founded upon the knowledge of the essence of the soul and of the four conditions of its reality. But it is no less necessary for Spiritism to ally itself with philosophy, because only through it will it be able to establish the scientific certainty of the Spiritist facts, which form the fundamental basis of its belief, and to draw therefrom the important consequences that they contain. Without doubt, it suffices that good sense see a phenomenon to believe in its reality, and many content themselves with this; but Science has often had reason to doubt the protest of common sense, not to trust in the impressions of our senses and in the illusions of our imagination. Good sense does not suffice, then, to establish scientifically the reality of the presence of the Spirits around us. To be certain of this in an irrefutable manner, it is necessary to establish rationally, in accordance with the general laws of creation, that their existence is necessary in itself, and that their invisible presence is but the confirmation of the rational and scientific data, such as we have just indicated some of them, in a summary manner. Thus, only by the philosophical method is it possible to arrive at this result. Behold a work necessary to the authority of Spiritism, and only philosophy can render it this service. In general, in whatever enterprise it may be, in order to triumph it is necessary to ally the knowledge of principles to the observation of facts. In the particular circumstances of Spiritism, it is still much more necessary to proceed in this rigorous manner to arrive at the truth, because our new doctrine touches our dearest and most elevated interests, those which constitute our present and eternal happiness. Consequently, the union of Spiritism and Philosophy is of the highest importance for the success of our efforts and for the future of Humanity.

F. Herrenschneider.

[Review of November 1863.]

UNION OF PHILOSOPHY AND SPIRITISM.

BY MR. HERRENSCHNEIDER.

(2nd Article. – See the Review of September 1863.)

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE DUALITY OF THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL AND THE SPIRITUAL SYSTEM OF MR. COUSIN AND OF HIS SCHOOL.

In the preceding article we sought to prove that if, in general, the gentlemen freethinkers were willing to take the trouble to examine the motives that permit them to affirm themselves, to say “I,” they would arrive at the knowledge of their double essence; they would convince themselves that their soul is constituted in such a manner as to exist separately from the body, as well as within its envelope, and they would understand its erraticity when, after death, it had left its earthly matter. So that their science, if it were based upon the true principle of the constitution of the soul, would confirm the Spiritist facts, instead of contradicting them with so much persistence. Indeed, our notion of the self is composed principally of the feeling and of the knowledge that we have of ourselves, and these two intimate phenomena, evident to everyone, peremptorily imply two distinct elements in the soul: one passive, sensible, extended, and solid, which receives the impressions; the other active, without extension and thinking, which perceives them. In consequence, if we possess, alongside a virtual element, a resistant and permanent element, different from our body, we cannot dissolve ourselves by death; our immortality is proved and our preexistence is a natural consequence. Our destinies, therefore, are independent of our earthly abode, and the latter is no more than an episode more or less interesting to us, according to the events that fill it. The duality of the essence of our soul, in accordance with such observations, is an important principle, for it instructs us about our real and immortal existence. But it is a principle all the more important inasmuch as it is the sole source from which we draw the certain consciousness of our individuality, being thus the origin of our science, of which we cannot doubt, and upon which reposes all the rest of our knowledge. Effectively, we all begin by knowing ourselves, before perceiving what surrounds us; and we measure by our measure all that we examine and judge. Thus, it is indispensable to observe, for the study of truth, that our knowledge departs from us, to return to us; that there is a circle formed by ourselves, which envelops us and binds us fraternally, despite ourselves. The philosophers of today ignore it and suffer it without perceiving it. It is this that dazzles them, that blinds them and prevents them from looking beyond and above themselves. Thus, we shall have many opportunities to verify their blindness. On the contrary, the ancients knew that circle and its mysterious influence, for they symbolized Science under the figure of a serpent biting its own tail, after having folded itself upon itself. In their eyes this signified that our knowledge departs from a given point, makes the circuit of our intellectual horizon, and returns to the point of departure. Now, if that point of departure be elevated and the gaze be penetrating, the horizon will be broad and the science vast; if, on the contrary, the ground be low and the vision dim, the horizon will be restricted and the intelligence of things limited. In this way, such as we are personally, such will be the whole and the scope of our knowledge. For this reason it becomes evident that the first condition of individual science is that of examining oneself, not only to distinguish one's qualities, one's defects, and one's vices, but, above all, to know the intimate constitution of our being and, afterward, to elevate our spirit and form our character. Consequently, true science is not made for everyone. He who aspires to it must not only have intelligence and instruction, but, above all, be serious, sober, prudent, and not allow himself to be carried away by the caprice of imagination, by his vanity, his interests, his self-sufficiency. What must guide the true lover of truth is a disinterested love for that venerated object; it is the energetic and constant will never to stop and to separate rigorously the chaff from the wheat. The more a man possesses, the more he is calm and noble and the better he will know how to discern the paths that will lead him to truth; the more frivolous, presumptuous, or impassioned he is, the more he will corrupt with his impure breath the fruits that he will gather on the tree of life.

The first condition for arriving at the knowledge of things is, then, individual character; it is for this reason that, in antiquity, solemn trials preceded every initiation. Today knowledge is spread without discernment and each one judges himself able to penetrate it; but, also, more than ever truth is poorly received, while the strangest doctrines find numerous adherents. They ought, then, to convince themselves that indifferent spirits, limited by the exact and natural sciences, carried away by imagination, or full of impertinence, are unfit for the research of truth, and that it would be more prudent to reserve that noble labor for a few chosen ones. Meanwhile, more sensible dispositions are manifesting themselves today through the advent of Spiritism; and, indeed, the Spiritists are men well-disposed for the search for truth because, separating themselves from the general whirlwind that drags society along, they have renounced of themselves the worldly vanities, the superficial principles of the freethinkers, and the official superstition of the recognized cults. They give proof of a sound independence, of a sincere love of truth, and of a touching solicitude for their eternal interests. These are the best moral dispositions for approaching the grave problems of the soul, of the world, and of the Divinity. For our eternal good, let us try to understand one another and to follow together the footprints that will lead us to the sacred way. For we have need to help one another reciprocally in order to attain the object that we all seek: that of enlightening ourselves only about what is real and durable. After the moral dispositions that we have just indicated, the most indispensable thing for engaging oneself well in the delicate work of initiation is the knowledge of the principle of the duality of the essence of the soul, since it is this that constitutes a part of the mysterious secret of the Sphinx. It is one of the keys of Science and, without possessing it, all efforts to attain it become useless. By itself alone, this principle of the essence of the soul encloses, as consequences, the considerable notions that we desire to acquire, while all the secondary principles discovered until today do not rise high enough to dominate the vast horizon of human knowledge and to embrace all its details. The inferior principles lead those who make use of them astray in the labyrinth of numerous facts that they do not illuminate; and it is by the insufficiency of their primordial principles that the philosophers have gone astray and lost themselves in the arbitrary subtleties of their incomplete doctrines. They fatally brought confusion where they believed they were touching the truth. In these matters, more delicate than difficult, only the true principle spreads the light, easily resolves all the problems, and opens the secret doors that lead to the most distant sanctuary. Now, we already know that we carry this principle within us and that, in order to discover it, it suffices that we study ourselves, with calm and impartiality. We know that this principle is the duality of our soul-related essence, so that there remains for us only to unroll carefully the thread, of which we have the most important knot. Nevertheless, as we advance in our psychological study, we shall consult the works of our most illustrious philosophers, in order to recognize where they failed and at what point their doctrines confirm our own researches.

Thus, as we observed above, it seems evident that all that in us attaches itself to the sensible order depends upon the substance of our soul, because it is its extended and solid element that receives all the exterior impressions and that feels the effect of our interior activity. Indeed, our soul could not be touched in any manner whatever, without first presenting an obstacle to the oscillations of the surrounding medium and, then, to the vibrations of the emotions that affect us intimately. Therefore, it is this very natural manner of being that explains our relations with all that exists, with what we are not, with our moral, intellectual, and physical non-self, visible or invisible. The solidity and extension of our substance must not, in principle, be rejected. Nevertheless, it is not this opinion that reigns in the University and in the Institute. Spiritualism denies it as absurd, under the specious pretext that divisibility, which would be its consequence, would imply the corruptibility of the substance. But this is no more than a misunderstanding, for what matters to the corruptibility of the soul-related nature is the chemical simplicity of its bodily fluidity and not its mechanical indivisibility, for the lack of which there are a thousand ways of remedying, whereas, to remain within scientific truth, it is necessary to avoid admitting an effect without a cause, a possible impression without resistance. Thus, the sensibility of our soul teaches nothing to our spiritualist school; it gratuitously connects the feelings to reason, attributes the sensations to the material organism, and gives no explanations on the connection of these diverse faculties. Behold one of the causes of its philosophical impotence. As for us, the sensibility of our soul is the irrecusable proof of the solidity and of the extension of its substance, and it is the notion of these properties that opens to us a vast field of observation. Thus, to begin with, the extension and the substantial solidity permit our soul to take different forms and to enclose the type of all the organs that constitute our bodily organism. It serves, thus, as the origin and support of our nerves, of our senses, of our brain, of our viscera, of our muscles and bones, permitting us to incarnate ourselves by means of this law of the mutability of the bodily molecules, so well known to our modern physiologists. Our scientists merely suppose, and wrongly, in our opinion, that this law is the effect of a mysterious force of matter, which renews itself, absorbs itself, flows away, and forms itself by itself, for matter is inert and forms nothing by its own initiative. Evidently this mutability is the effect of the instinctive activity of our double soul-related essence, which is found beneath our envelope. The existence of this law proves that our incarnation is in the order of Nature, seeing that it is continuous and, at the end of a series of years, our body renews itself regularly. The formation of our material covering, and our successive incarnation, are explained, very naturally, in this manner. But, moreover, this extended substantiality of our soul makes us understand equally the bond existing between it and our body, since, our visible organism being no more than the covering of our substantial organism, all that is felt by the one must necessarily reverberate in the other. The emotions of the substance of the soul must shake the body and the state of the latter must affect, inevitably, its own moral and intellectual dispositions. Behold the first teaching resulting from the concrete nature of our substance. The second teaching that we draw therefrom is that the part of the substance of our soul, which does not serve as the type for our material organism, must be the basis of our intimate sense, of that which receives all our moral and intellectual impressions, and which puts us in contact with the divine substance itself, so that our substance receives the impressions of the irradiation of all existences and of all possible activities and finds itself among the first origin of all our notions. It is in the same manner that we receive the knowledge of ourselves. For if we ask a skeptic how he can affirm himself, without the least reserve he will answer: “It is because I feel myself,” for the skeptic himself cannot doubt of his sensations. Nevertheless, to feel oneself is not the whole of our knowledge: the skeptic also cannot deny that he knows that he feels himself. Now, the perception of our feeling is a consequence of our intellectual activity, which proves that our soul is not only passive, but also active, has will, perceives, thinks, and is free by its own initiative. Our own organs function without our having consciousness of it, so that one is forced to attribute to our soul a second element, an active, virtual element, that is, an essential force, which is attentive when our sensibility is awake and which, by the effect of its own movement, perceives, thinks, and reflects by means of our cerebral organ, acts aided by our members, and animates our organism with an involuntary movement. It is by the presence in our soul of this double essential order: of the passive and sensible substantial order, and of the active and thinking virtual order, that we feel, that we know, and that we have consciousness of our own personality, without any aid from the exterior world. Our soul-related force is our spiritual element par excellence, because it has, by itself, neither extension nor solidity; it is known to us only by its activity. As soon as it neither wills, nor thinks, nor acts, it is as if it did not exist; and if our soul were not substantially concrete, by virtue of another element, our body would have no consistency and would be no more than a heap of dust; it could not even exist in erraticity, for it would lose itself in nothingness, unless one were to admit, with spiritualism, an impenetrable mystery, which would permit it to exist without having extension or solidity, a supposition that Spiritism and the natural laws render completely inadmissible. Nevertheless, it is our essential force that Leibniz considers as being our substance, without taking into account its fleeting nature; and the French spiritualist school repeats it, after his example, without pausing at this illogical confusion. However, it does not suffice to call a substance a force for the latter really to be one, nor to consider that imaginary substance as being the foundation of our being, for one to come out of the void of abstractions. A substance is not such except by its concrete state, its extension and its solidity, however subtle we may wish to conceive it, and this is what our spiritualist school takes pleasure in passing over in silence. Behold there another cause of its moral and philosophical impotence. Our essential force is the principle of our activity; it animates us, but it does not constitute us. It is the principle of our life, but not that of our existence. It is everywhere in our substance, spreads with it throughout all our being, and receives directly from it the impressions, without our voluntary concurrence. It is by this intimate union of our two essential elements that our organism functions spontaneously; that our sensations next awaken our attention and lead us, without other intermediary, to perceive the cause of our impressions; that our consciousness is a whole composed of feelings and of reflections and that every notion, whatever be its object, requires that we feel it and that we know it. From then on we alone are certain of its existence. It is by this same process that we have knowledge of the Supreme Being. We have the sensation of his presence through our intimate sense, and we explain to ourselves this sublime sensation through our reason, because the ideal of the true, of the good, and of the beautiful is, initially, in our heart, before entering our head. The savage peoples are not mistaken in this; they do not doubt of God; they merely imagine him according to the level of their coarse intelligence, whereas we see our scientists quarreling over his personality, because they claim to admit nothing, except by the force of their reasoning, and because they struggle in abstractions, without a point of support in the sensible order. Such is the constitution of our soul. It is composed of two elements quite distinct from each other and, nevertheless, indissolubly united; for never and nowhere have these elements been found separately: every substance has its force and every force has its substance. Thus, this duality is found reunited in the essence of all that exists; it is in matter, in the soul, in God. We repeat it: this distinction within unity is necessarily admissible, because each of these elements is well characterized; because they have their respective properties and their categorical modality; and because it is a universal law that one same principle cannot have contrary effects, that qualities which exclude one another reveal as many particular principles. But their unity is no less peremptory, because no function, no faculty, no phenomenon is produced in us and elsewhere without the simultaneous concurrence of these two irreducible elements.

It is this unity within the constant duality of our soul that explains to us further that important psychological phenomenon, namely: the instinctive spontaneity of all our faculties and of all our functions, as well as the formation of our character and of our intimate moral nature. Effectively, our impressions are conserved for us and reproduce themselves involuntarily, so that, as the substance is the passive and permanent element of our soul, it is necessary to attribute to it the property of conserving our sensations, of making them concrete within itself, and of transmitting them to the attention of our essential force. These impressions being of every kind, there is formed in us, by this conserving property, a permanent moral, intellectual, and practical order, which manifests itself through our instinctive and spontaneous activity, which inspires in us the feelings and the ideas and guides our acts without our voluntary concurrence and, often, without our knowledge. Moreover, these acquired feelings and these acquired ideas group themselves in our soul and produce in us new ideas and new images, which we were far from expecting. The psychological functions of our substance, united to our essential force, are thus multiplied and form for us a spontaneous moral, intellectual, and practical nature, which is the foundation of our character, the origin of our natural dispositions. In this way, our substance encloses, in a latent state, or in potential, as the school expresses it, all our qualities, all our knowledge, all our past habits in a permanent state. In consequence, it is to it and to its instinctive activity that one must attribute memory, imagination, the spirit, and the natural senses, as well as the origin of our ideas and feelings. This instinctive substantial order exists incontestably in our soul. Each one recognizes in himself a permanent moral nature, intellectual dispositions and habits proper to him, which facilitate his career and his conduct, if they be good; or which impede success and drag him into deplorable deviations, if they be bad. Only our philosophers do not perceive it, because, not admitting, as we have already made note, a substantial psychological order, they condemn themselves to attribute all that is resistant in our soul to the influence of matter, and to confound all that is sensible and living with our intelligence. It is true that Aristotle recognized in man a potential order, where all our qualities are in potential; but he defines it badly and also confounds it with matter. From then on, no one else occupied himself with that special order, except Mr. Cousin. But this contemporary philosopher, recognizing in the soul only intelligence, considered only the spontaneous activity, without seeking its origin in the permanent element of our soul-related nature. He designates it as being spontaneous and instinctive reason, in opposition to reflected reason, without realizing the contradiction existing between instinct and reflection, qualities which exclude one another and which, evidently, cannot belong to the same principle! It is for this that Mr. Cousin draws only limited consequences from this discovery, the reason for which his psychology, like his school, became an arid, illogical science of no great scope. Let us now hold our thought upon the whole of the observations that precede, for they have made us know psychological phenomena until today unknown. They have made us verify in our soul the existence of two moral, intellectual, and practical orders quite distinct and strongly characterized: one relating perfectly to the particular properties of our substance, which are permanence, extension, and solidity; the other, to those of our essential force, which are its causality, its non-extension, and its intermittence. The first is passive, sensible, conserving; the second is active, voluntary, and reflected. The intimate union of our two essential elements produces in us, moreover, our triple instinctive activity, which is the direct reflection of the true state of our qualities and of our natural defects.

Indeed, on one hand, the more sensible, delicate, and conserving our substantial nature is, and the more lively and energetic our instinctive activity, the more pure and elevated will be our ideas and feelings, the more just our good sense, and the more easy and sure our memory and our imagination. On the contrary, the less perfected our substantial state, the more slow and limited will be our memory and our imagination, the more coarse our ideas, the more vile our feelings, and the more obtuse our common sense. But, on the other hand, the more energetic, constant, and flexible our causal force, the stronger will be our attention, our will, our virtue, and our dominion over ourselves, the more scope will have our perception, our thought, our judgment, and our reason and, finally, the greater our ability and the more honorable our conduct, because all these qualities and faculties derive from our virtual element. On the contrary, the more soft, numbed, or rigid our essential force, the more our brutality and our moral and intellectual cowardice will manifest themselves in full light. In this way, our worth depends as much on the state of the qualities and properties of the one as of the other element of our soul. Such is the summary picture that the intimate constitution of our soul-related essence presents, and which reveals to us our double faculty of feeling ourselves and of knowing ourselves. This picture shows it to us, to begin with, in its living unity, for we discover the double principle of its activity and of its passivity, of its permanence and of its causality, of its existence in time and in space, and of its own independence, distinct from God, from the world, and from its material envelope. It shows it to us afterward in its marvelous diversity, for we recognize the origin of its qualities and of its faculties, of its functions and of its organism, in the respective properties of our essential elements and in their reciprocal concurrence. Nevertheless, this picture is no more than a first sketch and, yet, it is easy to note in it the method of rigorous observation that we have followed and which is the same that Bacon discovered, that Descartes introduced into psychology, that the Scottish school applied, and that the spiritualist and eclectic school observed throughout its doctrine. We find ourselves, then, on the same ground as that of all serious philosophy, and if we are often in disagreement with our academic celebrities, it is because we cannot help but believe that the majority of the facts of consciousness were poorly observed and poorly explained by them. Indeed, spiritualist eclecticism recognizes in us three principal faculties: the will, the sensation, and reason. These faculties are distinguished from our body, which is solid and extended, so that we necessarily possess a non-extended and spiritual soul. This consideration made, eclecticism does not ask how our soul must be constituted in order to be sensible, nor whether the will and reason, which are both active, are not two manifestations of one same virtual principle. These are questions that do not trouble it. It merely maintains that, of these three faculties, only the will in fact belongs to us, for it alone is the result of a non-extended substantial force, which is the primordial principle of our self. In its eyes, sensibility is no more than the effect of the shock resulting from the action that the force of the exterior world exercises upon ours, by means of our organism. But, also, eclecticism does not investigate how our non-extended force connects itself to our organism, nor how, in that non-extended isolation, it can receive the shock, just as it does not explain how we can be sensible. These are small mysteries that could not detain it. Reason, according to Mr. Cousin, is the sovereign faculty of knowledge, but it is impersonal, that is, it does not belong to us, although we make use of it. To say my reason, according to him, is a folly, for the same reason that one does not say my truth. Such a motive does not seem to us very conclusive, but, probably, the fault is ours. Indeed, in his system, reason is the whole composed of the necessary and universal truths, such as the principles of causality, of substance, of unity, of the true, etc. The collection of these principles forms, then, according to him, the divine reason, of which we partake by the ineffable will of the Almighty. But it is here that one must believe upon his word, for we have not seen precisely how a collection of truths, however universal they may be, could constitute the divine and human reason. Commonly, truths are laws and reason is a faculty. Now, I see the Sun, but never has the faculty of seeing been taken for the Sun, nor for the least of its rays. Behold, then, a new mystery, to add to the preceding ones; so that, in this doctrine, nothing is explained by itself, nothing connects, and our soul is there represented only as a heterogeneous assemblage of faculties, of qualities, of distinct functions, connected at random, like scattered leaves that had been gathered into a volume, under the pompous title of Philosophical Doctrine of the 19th Century. The second preface to the third edition of the Philosophical Fragments brings him a summary of it, interesting under several aspects. In accordance with these considerations, one can judge the causes that make of the official spiritualist philosophy, despite its good intentions, a bizarre and indigestible doctrine. We would even be authorized to treat it more harshly, if one were to lose sight of the eminent services that it rendered to the French spirit, turning it away from an immoral sensualism and from a despairing skepticism. There, evidently, were the principal preoccupations of the illustrious philosopher at the beginning of his brilliant career; and, studying his notable works, one sees that Condillac and Kant were his principal adversaries. Thus, this struggle is the most important part of his works. On the contrary, his own system seems to us very defective and his morality, his theodicy, and his ontology contain numerous very controverted points. Truth is so delicate a flower! the least breath of error withers it in our hands and reduces it to a pernicious and dazzling dust. It is, above all, in the heat of combat or in the emotion of ambition that it becomes difficult to conserve the calm of spirit and the delicacy of the feeling of evidence, so that the preoccupied man is easily dragged into overstepping the limits of true wisdom. Fortunately the Creator has reserved for us facts, circumstances, providential events, shocking enough to lead us back to the good path. And, certainly, the doctrines and the facts upon which Spiritism is founded are among this number. Let our great and learned philosophers not repel it under the futile pretext of superstition. Let them study it without prejudice! In it they will recognize the extended and solid nature of our soul, its preexistence and its perpetuity. In it they will find a gentle and salutary morality, suited to lead everyone back to the good. If, then, their spirit asks to give an account of it, let them throw themselves frankly into the work, let them examine scientifically its principles and consequences. And, then, perhaps the principle of the duality of the essence of the soul will appear to them in all its splendor and in all its force, because, it seems to us, it casts a vivid light upon the intimate secrets of our being. This is what we shall continue to examine before long. F. Herrenschneider.

[1] The other principle is the duality of the aspect of things, which we shall encounter later.

[2] [v.

Victor Cousin.]