Jacquard and Vaucanson.

Note. – Mr. Leymarie, our colleague, having one day risen earlier than usual and led by an involuntary force, felt himself prompted to write and obtained the following spontaneous dissertation:

A generation of workmen cursed my name. Were they right? Were they wrong? Ah! the future shall answer.

I had a fixed idea: that of perfecting and, above all, of economizing by suppressing some hands; like Vaucanson, I wished to simplify the loom, which took the child at a tender age to make of it a singular pariah, pale, stunted, feeble, with a dazed air, of burlesque speech, and which formed a population apart in my native city.

My Spirit lived in continual tension; I slept in order to find, on waking, a new plan; instead of images and sentiments, my thought was a gearing, a cylinder, springs, pulleys, levers; in my dreams there appeared to me my guardian angel, who set in motion all my inspirations, all the works of the hands of man. They had said with reason: “Mechanics are the poets of matter.” The most beautiful machines came forth ready and finished from the brain of a workman; the notions of mechanics he does not possess, he created anew; patience and imagination are his only resources. In truth it is an inspiration of the good Spirits, scorned by the academies or scientists by profession; but it is no less certain that if Archimedes and Vaucanson are the geniuses of mechanics, the Virgils, if you will, they are nothing more than that patience, allied to a lively imagination, which creates all the discoveries by which Humanity is honored; and this by whom? By monks, potters, wool-carders, shepherds, sailors, a silk worker, an ignorant blacksmith. Humble workman, I was not a genius, but, like so many others, a predestined one, called to simplify a loom that amputated the limbs, shortening the life of thousands of children. I suppressed a physical torment; serving industry, I served the human race.

One must admire Providence, which makes use of poor Jacquard to transform a loom that feeds thousands, what do I say? millions of men on Earth; and it is an insect, whose tomb it salaries, that transforms and nourishes two-fifths of the globe. Is God not a marvelous mechanic? He created the silkworm, that ingenious artist, in which he made the vastest problem of political economy be found. What a lesson for the proud and the indifferent!

Question of machines! terrible question! Every invention tears the tool and the bread from entire populations; the inventor is, therefore, a near enemy and a distant benefactor; he multiplies tenfold the power of art and industry; he multiplies labor in the future; he deserves well of Humanity, but does he not also cause a harm in the present? The first inventor of the spinning machine destroyed the resource of many people. Who spun the raw material if not the mother of the family, the shepherdess, the old women? However small their wages were, at least it clothed them, made them live in some manner. Like the inventors of religious, political, or moral truths, the inventors of machines revolutionize matter; precursors of the future, they violently open their path through interests, trampling the past; thus, while awaiting a distant reward, they are cursed by their fellow citizens.

Poor Humanity! You are stupid if you stop, cruel if you advance. According to God, you must not remain stationary, if you do not wish to perpetuate evil; but, in order to do good, you are revolutionary in spite of everything.

And it is for this reason that in this time of transition God says to you: Be Spiritists, that is, profoundly imbued with moral and disinterested initiative, that is, ready for all sacrifices, in order that your assistance may be realized.

Like the silkworm, I crawled painfully, sustained by the good Spirits; like it, I built my cocoon, giving all that I had; like it, my contemporaries scorned me; but, also, like it, the Spirit is reborn from the ashes to live truly and to admire that mechanic of the worlds, that God of light and of goodness, who wished to show to my native city that spirit of truth which vivifies and consoles it.

Jacquard n

— After this communication had been read in the Society of Paris, at the session of February 12, 1864, the Spirit Jacquard was evoked, to whom the following questions were addressed, with the following answers.

(Spiritist Society of Paris, February 12, 1864. – Medium:

Mr. Leymarie.)

Question – Without doubt you must already have given communications in Lyon; however, I do not recall having seen communications of yours. How was it that you came to give the dissertation we have just read to Mr. Leymarie, in Paris, and not in one of the Spiritist centers of Lyon? Why was Mr. Leymarie, in a certain way, constrained to rise very early to write the communication? Finally, what do you think of Spiritism in Lyon?

Answer – It is natural that I communicated as much in Paris as in my native city, because the medium's parents are from Lyon and, particularly, because I knew his grandfather, who rendered me an important service in an exceptional circumstance. And then, the medium was designated to me by the Spirit of his grandfather, who carries out in the world of the Spirits a mission identical to my own. And as this mission leaves me some free moments, I judged that I would not abuse the sleep of the medium, whose devotion, like that of so many others, is dedicated to the cause he serves. I also desired that my compatriots should have news of me through the Spiritist Review. Being always near them, sharing their joys and sorrows, never ceasing to say to them: “Love and esteem one another,” I wished, joining mine to other more influential voices, to encourage them, in this moment of unemployment and difficulty, to prepare themselves against eventualities, against the enemy.

Through Lyon you can understand what Spiritism can do when interpreted with good sense. What has become of the violences of the past, those unjust recriminations, those rebellions that bloodied the Lyonnese hive? And those cabarets, formerly witnesses of licentious scenes, why do they empty today? It is that the family has resumed its rights everywhere that Spiritism has penetrated and its beneficial influence has made itself felt; and everywhere the Spiritist workmen have returned to hope, to order, to intelligent labor, to the desire to do well, to the will to progress. In my time it was my invention that, by no longer making the weaver the slave of the machine, was able to regenerate a whole world of workers; and, in its turn, it is Spiritism that transforms the spirit of that population, giving it the true initiation into life; it is a whole legion of good Spirits who come to open to intelligence and to love hearts hitherto perverted.

Today Spiritism enters a new phase, for it is the time of generous aspirations. The bourgeoisie, still submitted to the high clergy, remains as a spectator of the peaceful combat that the new idea offers to the non possumus of the past. And all await the end of the battle, in order to place themselves on the side of the victors.

Thus, dear compatriots, listen to and follow the counsels of Allan Kardec: they are those of your protecting Spirits. It is through them that you will ward off the danger of collisions and even of coalitions. The more humble and serious you are, the stronger you will be. The arrogant will lower the flag before the truth that will dazzle them; it is then that the spiritual transformation of that great city will take place, which we all love and which bears particular goodwill toward the Spiritist Society of Paris, for its faith in the future and the good hopes it has known how to realize. Jacquard.

— At the same session, while Jacquard was writing the communication we have just read, another medium, Mr. d'Ambel, obtained another on the same subject, signed by the Spirit Vaucanson.

FINAL AIM OF MAN ON EARTH.

Formerly men were harnessed to the plough and sacrificed in gigantic labors. The construction of the walls of Babylon, where several chariots marched side by side, the building of the Pyramids and the installation of the Sphinx cost more than ten bloody battles. Later the animals were subjugated together with men, and we saw, in young Lutetia, harnessed oxen dragging the chariot in which lolled the indolent kings of the second race.

This preamble has for its object to show those who hear us that all the questions put in this sympathetic center to the Spirits have their solution, by one or another of us. That dear Jacquard, that glory of the loom, that ingenious artisan who fell like a valiant soldier on the field of honor of labor, treated one side of the economic questions that are linked to humanitarian toil. He brought me a little into question; speaking of the modifications I had made in the art of the weaver, he called me, so to speak, to do my part in this spiritual concert. That is why, finding among you a medium, like me born in the old city of the Allobroges, that queen of the Grésivaudan, I take possession of him with the permission of his habitual guides and come to complete on one part the exposition that my illustrious friend of Lyon gave you through another medium. In his dissertation, very remarkable moreover, he still expresses certain complaints which, beneath the inventor, reveal the workman jealous of his livelihood and fearful of homicidal unemployment; one feels that the father of the family is terrified by the suspension of the labor on which the life of his own depends; one divines the citizen who shudders before the disaster that may strike the majority of his compatriots. In truth this sentiment is of the most honorable, but it denotes a point of view of a certain narrowness. I come to treat the same question as Jacquard, if not more amply than he, at least from a more general point of view. Nevertheless, I must observe, in order to render homage to whom it is due, that the generous conclusion of my friend's communication amply redeems the defective side I point out. Man was not made to remain as an unintelligent instrument of productions; by his aptitudes and his place in the Creation, by his destiny, he is called to another function, beyond the machine, to another role than that of the carousel horse; he must, within the limits fixed by his advancement, come to produce more and more intellectually and, at last, to emancipate himself from that state of servility and of gearing without intelligence, to which, during so many generations, he remained enslaved. The workman is called to become an engineer, to see his laborious arms replaced by machines more active, more indefatigable, and more precise; the artisan must become an artist and conduct mechanical labor by an effort of his thought, and no longer by an effort of his arm. There is the irrefutable proof of this so vast law of progress, which governs all humanities. Now that it is permitted you to glimpse, by a glimpse into the future life, the truth of human destinies; now that you are convinced that this existence is but one of the links of your immortal life, you can exclaim: What does it matter that a hundred thousand individuals succumb, when a machine has been discovered to do the work of those hundred thousand? For the philosopher, who rises above earthly prejudices and interests, the fact proves, with much simplicity, that man was no longer on his path when he devoted himself to that labor condemned by Providence. Indeed, it is within the domain of his intelligence that man, henceforth, must pass the harrow and the plough that make fruitful; it is solely through his intelligence that he will be able and will have to reach the better. I beg that you not give to my words too revolutionary a sense; no! But leave them the broad and superior sense, which comports a Spiritist teaching, which is addressed to intelligences already advanced and ready to understand the full scope of our instructions. It is proved that, if from one day to the next the artisan abandoned the loom that makes him live, under the pretext that, at a given moment, it would be replaced by a mechanism or some other invention, he would certainly follow a fatal path, contrary to all the lessons given by Spiritism. But all our reflections have but one object: to demonstrate that no one should cry out against a progress that replaces human arms with mechanical springs and gearings. Moreover, it is well to add that Humanity has paid a heavy price to misery and that, penetrating more and more into all the social layers, instruction will make each individual more and more apt for functions intelligently called liberal.

It is difficult for a Spirit, who communicates for the first time to a medium, to express his thought with much clarity. Thus, you will overlook the disorder of my communication, whose conclusion is here in two words: Man is a spiritual agent who must come, in a time not very distant, to submit to his service and for all material operations matter itself, giving it as its sole motor the intelligence that blossoms in human brains.

Vaucanson. n [1]

[v. Jacquard.]

[2] [v.

Vaucanson.]