Theory of prescience.

— How is knowledge of the future possible? One understands the possibility of foreseeing events that must result from the present state; but not that of those which bear no relation to that state, nor, even less, that of those which are commonly attributed to chance. Future things do not exist, people say; they are still in nothingness; how, then, can one know that they will come to pass? Yet the cases of fulfilled predictions are great in number, whence the conclusion necessarily follows that there occurs here a phenomenon for whose explanation the key is lacking, since there is no effect without a cause. It is this cause that we are going to try to discover, and it is once more Spiritism, in itself the key to so many mysteries, that will furnish it to us, showing us, moreover, that the very fact of predictions is not produced to the exclusion of natural laws.

— Let us take, for comparison, an example from ordinary things. It will help us understand the principle that we shall have to develop.

Let us suppose a man placed at the summit of a high mountain, observing the vast expanse of the plain around him. In that situation, the space of a league will be little to him, who can easily catch, at a glance, all the features of the terrain, from one end to the other of the road that lies before his eyes. The traveler, who for the first time travels that road, knows that, by walking, he will reach its end. This constitutes a simple foreseeing of the consequence his march will have. Meanwhile, the features of the terrain, the ascents and descents, the watercourses he will have to cross, the woods he will have to pass through, the precipices into which he may fall, the hospitable houses where it will be possible for him to rest, the thieves who lie in wait to rob him, all this is independent of his person; it is for him the unknown, the future, because his sight does not reach beyond the small area that surrounds him. As for duration, he measures it by the time he spends in traversing the road. Take away his points of reference and the duration will disappear. For the man who is atop the mountain and who follows him with his gaze, all that is present. Let us suppose that this man comes down from his point of observation and, going to meet the traveler, says to him: “At such a moment, you will encounter such a thing, you will be attacked and rescued.” He will be predicting the future, but a future for the traveler, not for himself, the author of the foreseeing, since, for him, that future is present.

— If, now, we leave the realm of purely material things and enter, in thought, into the domain of spiritual life, we shall see the same phenomenon produced on a larger scale. Dematerialized Spirits are like the man on the mountain; space and duration do not exist for them. But the extent and the penetration of their sight are proportioned to their purification and to the elevation they have attained in the spiritual hierarchy. In relation to the inferior Spirits, the former are like men equipped with powerful telescopes, alongside others who have only their eyes. In inferior Spirits, vision is circumscribed, not only because they can hardly move away from the globe to which they are bound, but also because the coarseness of their perispirits veils distant things from them, just as a fog conceals them from the eyes of the body. It is well understood, then, that, in accordance with the degree of its perfection, a Spirit may encompass a period of some years, of some centuries, even of many thousands of years, for what is a century in the face of the infinite? Before it, events do not unfold successively, like the incidents of the road before the traveler: it sees simultaneously the beginning and the end of the period; all the events that, in this period, constitute the future for the man of Earth are the present for it, which could then come to tell us with certainty: Such a thing will happen at such a time, because that thing it sees as the man on the mountain sees what awaits the traveler in the course of his journey. If it does not act thus, it is because the knowledge of the future could be harmful to man, knowledge that would fetter his free will, would paralyze him in the work he must carry out for the benefit of his progress. The keeping unknown to him of the good and the evil he will meet constitutes a trial for man. If such a faculty, even restricted, can be counted among the attributes of the creature, in what degree of potentiality must it not exist in the Creator, who embraces the infinite? For the Creator, time does not exist: the beginning and the end of worlds are the present to Him. Within this immense panorama, what is the duration of the life of a man, of a generation, of a people?

— Meanwhile, as man must contribute to the general progress, as certain events must result from his cooperation, it may be fitting that, in special cases, he should have a presentiment of those events, in order to prepare their course and to be ready to act when the occasion arrives. That is why God sometimes permits a corner of the veil to be lifted; but always with a useful end, never for the satisfaction of vain curiosity. Such a mission may, then, be conferred, not upon all Spirits, since there are many that know no more of the future than men do, but upon some Spirits advanced enough to fulfill it. Now, it is to be noted that revelations of this kind are always made spontaneously and never, or at least very rarely, in response to a direct question. Such a mission may also be entrusted to certain men, in this manner:

The one to whom the charge is given of revealing a hidden thing receives, without his knowledge and by inspiration of the Spirits who know it, the revelation of it and transmits it mechanically, without perceiving what he does. It is known, moreover, that, both during sleep and in the waking state, in the ecstasies of second sight, the soul detaches itself and acquires, in a greater or lesser degree, the faculties of the free Spirit. If it be an advanced Spirit, if, above all, it has received, like the prophets, a special mission to that effect, it will enjoy, in the moments of the soul's emancipation, the faculty of encompassing, by itself, a more or less extensive period, and will see, as present, the events of that period. It can then reveal them at that very instant, or retain remembrance of them upon awakening. If the events are to remain secret, it will forget them, or will keep only a vague intuition of what was revealed to it, enough to guide it instinctively. It is thus that on certain occasions this faculty develops providentially, in the imminence of dangers, in great calamities, in revolutions, and it is thus too that the majority of persecuted sects acquire numerous seers. It is also for this reason that great captains are seen advancing resolutely against the enemy, certain of victory; that men of genius, for example, Christopher Columbus, march toward a goal, announcing beforehand, so to speak, the instant at which they will reach it. It is because they saw that goal, which, for their Spirits, ceased to be the unknown.

— All the phenomena whose cause was unknown were held to be marvelous. Once the law according to which they are realized is known, they entered into the order of natural things. There is, then, nothing supernatural in the gift of prediction, any more than in an immensity of other phenomena. It is founded on the properties of the soul and on the law of the relations of the visible world with the invisible world, which Spiritism came to make known. But how can one admit the existence of an invisible world, if one does not admit the soul, or if one does not admit its individuality after death? The unbeliever who denies prescience is consistent with himself; it remains to be seen whether he is consistent with natural law.

— The theory of prescience may perhaps not resolve in an absolute manner all the cases of revelation of the future that may present themselves, but one cannot fail to agree that it establishes its fundamental principle. If it does not explain everything, it is because of the difficulty, for man, of placing himself at that extraterrestrial point of view; by his very inferiority, his thought, incessantly dragged toward the byway of material life, is often powerless to detach itself from the ground. In this respect, certain men are like fledgling birds, whose wings, too weak, do not allow them to rise into the air, or like those whose sight is too short to see far off, or, finally, like those who lack a sense for certain perceptions. Meanwhile, with some efforts and the habit of reflection, they have reached it: Spiritists, more easily than others, can identify themselves with the spiritual life, which they understand.

— In order to understand spiritual things, that is, to form of them an idea as clear as the one we form of a landscape we have before our eyes, we truly lack a sense, exactly as the man born blind lacks one that would enable him to understand the effects of light, of colors, and of sight, without contact. From this it follows that only by an effort of the imagination and by means of comparisons with material things that are familiar to us do we manage to attain it. Material things, however, can give us only very imperfect ideas of spiritual things, which is why one must not take these comparisons literally and believe, for example, that the extent of the perceptive faculties of Spirits depends on their effective elevation, nor that they need to be atop a mountain or above the clouds in order to encompass time and space. Such a faculty is inherent to them in the state of spiritualization, or, if you prefer, of dematerialization. This means that spiritualization produces an effect that can be compared, albeit very imperfectly, to that of the overall vision the man placed on the mountain has. This comparison was meant simply to show that events still belonging, for some, to the future are, for others, in the present and can thus be predicted, which does not imply that the effect is produced in the same manner.

Therefore, in order to enjoy this perception, the Spirit does not need to transport itself to any point of space. The one who on Earth is at our side can possess it in all its plenitude, just as much as if it were a thousand leagues away, whereas we see nothing beyond our visual horizon. Vision not operating, in Spirits, in the same manner, nor with the same elements as in man, the visual horizon of the former is very different. Now, it is precisely this sense that we lack for conceiving it. The Spirit, beside the incarnate one, is like the seer beside the blind man.

We must, moreover, consider that this perception is not limited to what concerns extent; that it embraces the penetration of all things. It is, we repeat, a faculty inherent and proportioned to the state of dematerialization. Incarnation dulls it, without, however, completely annulling it, because the soul is not enclosed in the body as in a box. The incarnate one possesses it, by reason of the advancement of its Spirit, although always in a lesser degree than when it is completely freed; it is this that confers upon certain men a power of penetration that others entirely lack; greater grandeur of moral vision; easier comprehension of extramaterial things. The incarnate Spirit not only perceives, but also remembers what it saw in the state of free Spirit, and that remembrance is like a picture that is drawn in its mind. In incarnation, it sees, but vaguely, as through a veil; in the state of freedom, it sees and conceives clearly. The principle of vision is not exterior to it, it is within it; that is the reason why it does not need exterior light. By the effect of moral development the circle of ideas and of conception widens; by the effect of the gradual dematerialization of the perispirit, the latter purifies itself of the coarse elements that altered the delicacy of its perceptions, which makes it easy to understand that the amplification of all the faculties accompanies the progress of the Spirit. It is the degree of the extent of the Spirit's faculties that, in incarnation, makes it more or less apt to conceive spiritual things. This aptitude, however, is not a forced corollary of the development of intelligence; common science does not give it, so much so that there are men of great learning as blind to spiritual things as others are to material things; they are refractory to them, because they do not understand them, which means that they have not yet progressed in that direction, whereas others, of common instruction and intelligence, apprehend them with the greatest ease, which proves that they already had a prior intuition of such things.

— The faculty of changing one's point of view and of looking down from on high not only gives the solution of the problem of prescience; it is, moreover, the key to true faith, to solid faith; it is also the most powerful element of strength and of resignation, because from there earthly life, appearing as a point in immensity, one understands the little value of the things that, seen from below, seem so important. The incidents, the miseries, the vanities of life diminish as the immense and splendid horizon of the future unfolds. He who thus sees the things of this world is little or not at all affected by vicissitudes and, for this very reason, is as happy as he can be on Earth. Those, then, are to be pitied who concentrate their thoughts on the narrow earthly sphere, because they feel, in all its force, the recoil of all the tribulations that, like so many goads, wound them incessantly.

— As for the future of Spiritism, the Spirits, as is known, are unanimous in affirming its near triumph, in spite of the obstacles created for it. This foreseeing is easy for them, first, because its propagation is their personal work: contributing to the movement, or directing it, they naturally know what they must do; secondly, it is enough for them to glimpse a period of short duration: they see, in that period, along the way, the powerful auxiliaries that God raises up for it and that will not be slow to manifest themselves.

Let Spiritists transport themselves, although without being disincarnate Spirits, only thirty years forward, into the midst of the generation that is arising; from there let them consider what is happening today with Spiritism; let them follow its progressive march and they will see those who believe themselves destined to overthrow it consume themselves in vain efforts. They will see that such men little by little disappear from the scene and that, in parallel, the tree grows and lengthens its roots more each day.

We shall complete this study with the references that exist between prescience and fatality. In the meantime, we refer the readers to what, on the latter point, was said in The Spirits' Book, no. 851 and following.

[1] Translator's Note: See Genesis, chapter XVI.