Transmission of thought.

— Under this latter title, the following article, signed by Émile Deschamps, is read in the Presse littéraire of March 15, 1854:

“If man believed only in what he understands, he would believe neither in God, nor in himself, nor in the stars that roll above his head, nor in the grass that grows beneath his feet.

“Miracles, prophecies, visions, phantoms, prognostics, presentiments, supernatural coincidences, etc., what is one to think of all this? The strong spirits get out of this predicament with two words: lie or chance. Nothing more convenient. The superstitious souls get out of it well, or they do not. I much prefer those souls to those spirits. Indeed, one must have imagination in order to have it diseased, whereas it suffices to be an elector and a subscriber to two or three industrial newspapers to know a great deal about this and to believe as little as Voltaire. And, besides, I prefer madness to foolishness, superstition to incredulity; but what I prefer above all is truth, light, reason; I seek them with a living faith and a sincere heart; I examine all things and take the part of having no prejudice about anything whatsoever. “Let us see. What! the material and visible world is full of impenetrable mysteries, of inexplicable phenomena, and one would not want the intellectual world, the life of the soul, which is already a miracle, also to have its phenomena and its mysteries! Why should not such a good thought, such a fervent prayer, such another desire have the power to produce or to give rise to certain events, blessings or catastrophes? Why should there not exist moral causes, as there exist physical causes, of which we take no account? And why should not the germs of all things be deposited and fecundated in the soil of the heart and of the soul, to spring forth later in the palpable form of facts? Now, when God, in rare circumstances, and for some of His children, judges it fitting to lift the corner of the eternal veil and to spread over their brows a fleeting ray from the torch of prescience, we ought to refrain from crying out that it is absurd and, thus, from blaspheming against light and truth itself. “Here is a reflection I have often made: It was given to birds and to certain animals to foresee and to announce the storm, the floods, the earthquakes. Daily the barometers tell us the weather there will be tomorrow; and could not man, by means of a dream, of a vision, of some sign of Providence, sometimes be warned of some future event that concerns his soul, his life, his eternity? Then does not the Spirit too have its atmosphere, whose variations it can sense beforehand? In short, whatever the poverty of the marvelous in this very positive century, there would still be charm and utility in suppressing it, if all those upon whom it casts faint glimmers brought to a common focus all those divergent rays; if each one, after having conscientiously questioned his recollections, drew up in good faith and deposited in the archives a detailed account of what he experienced, of what befell him of the supernatural and the miraculous. Perhaps one day someone will be found who, by analyzing the symptoms and the events, will manage to recompose, in part, a lost science. In any case, he would compose a book that would be worth many others. “As for me, apparently I am what is called an impressionable person, because I have had all of this in my life, otherwise so obscure. I am the first to present my tribute, convinced that this interior vision always has a kind of interest. All the marvelous that I give you, readers, however small it may be, took place in my real life. Ever since I have known how to read, I record on paper everything supernatural that happens to me. They are memoirs of a singular kind.

— “In the month of February 1846 I was traveling through France. Arriving at a rich and large city, I went to take a stroll in front of the beautiful shops with which it is filled. It began to rain; I took shelter in an elegant arcade; suddenly I stood motionless; my eyes could not turn away from the figure of a young woman, alone behind a jewelry window. Although very beautiful, it was not her beauty that fascinated me. I know not what mysterious interest, what inexplicable bond dominated and held my whole being. It was a sudden and profound sympathy, without any sensual connotation, but of an irresistible force, like the unknown in all things. I was pushed like a machine toward the shop, by a supernatural power. I bought a few small objects and paid, saying: Thank you, Miss Sara. The young woman looked at me with a somewhat surprised air. — It is a thing to wonder at, I continued, that a stranger should know your name, one of your names; but if you would think attentively of all your names, I will tell them without faltering. Would you do this? — Yes, sir, she answered, half smiling, half trembling. — Well then! I continued, looking her fixedly in the face, your name is Sara, Adèle, Benjamine N... — That is correct, she replied; and after a few seconds of stupor she began to laugh freely, and I saw that she thought I had obtained such information in the neighborhood, which amused me. But I, convinced that I knew not a word of all this, was perplexed by this instantaneous divination. “The following day, and on many others, I hastened to the beautiful shop; my divination renewed itself at every moment. I would ask her to think of something, without telling me, and almost immediately I read on her face the unexplained thought. I would ask her to write, without my seeing, a few words with the pencil; after looking at her for a minute, I would write the same words and in the same order. I read in her thought as in an open book, and she did not read in mine: such was my superiority. But she imposed upon me her ideas and emotions. If she thought seriously of an object; if she repeated inwardly the words of the writing, at once I divined everything. The mystery was between her brain and mine, and not between my faculties of intuition and material things. Be that as it may, there had been established between us a relation all the more intimate as it was more pure. “One night I heard close to my ear a strong voice, which cried to me: Sara is ill, very ill! I ran to her house; a physician was watching over her and awaiting a crisis. The evening before, Sara had returned with a burning fever; the delirium had continued throughout the whole night. The physician called me aside and told me that he was very fearful. From that room I saw fully Sara's face, and my intuition, overcoming my anxiety, made me say softly to the physician: Doctor, do you wish to know with what images her feverish sleep is occupied? At this moment she believes herself at the grand Opera of Paris, where she has never been, and a dancer, among other herbs, cuts a hemlock plant and throws it to her, saying: It is for you. The physician thought I was raving. A few minutes later the patient awoke heavily and her first words were: “Oh! how beautiful the Opera is! but why this hemlock, which the beautiful nymph throws to me?” The physician was stupefied. A potion, which included hemlock, was administered to Sara who, in a few days, was cured.”

— Examples of the transmission of thought are very frequent, not, perhaps, in so characteristic a manner as in the fact above, but under various forms. How many phenomena of this kind take place daily before our eyes, which are like the conducting wires of spiritual life, and to which, nevertheless, Science does not deign to grant the least attention! Certainly, not all those who reject them are materialists; many admit a spiritual life, but without direct relations with organic life. On the day when these relations are recognized as a physiological law, an immense progress will be seen to come about, for only then will Science have the key to a host of apparently mysterious effects, which it prefers to deny, because it cannot explain them in its own manner and with its own means, limited to the laws of brute matter. The intimate connection of spiritual life and organic life during terrestrial existence; the destruction of organic life and the persistence of spiritual life after death; the action of the perispiritual fluid upon the organism; the incessant reaction of the invisible world upon the visible world and reciprocally: such is the law that Spiritism comes to demonstrate, and which opens to Science and to moral man entirely new horizons.

By what law of purely material physiology could one explain phenomena of the kind related above? In order for Mr. Deschamps to be able to read so clearly in the young woman's thought, there had to be an intermediary between the two, some bond. Whoever reflects well upon the preceding article will recognize that this bond is the fluidic radiation, which gives spiritual vision, a vision that is not obstructed by material bodies.

It is known that Spirits have no need of articulate language. They understand one another without the aid of words, solely by the transmission of thought, which is the universal language. At times this also occurs among men, because men are incarnate Spirits and, for this reason, enjoy, in greater or lesser degree, the attributes and faculties of the Spirit.

But then, why did the young woman not read Mr. Deschamps's thought? Because in the one spiritual vision was developed; in the other, it was not. Does it follow that he could see everything, read in the spiritual mirrors, for example, or see at a distance, in the manner of somnambulists? No, because his faculty might be developed only in a special sense, and partially. Could he read with the same ease the thought of everyone? He does not say so, but it is probable that he could not, for there can exist, from individual to individual, fluidic relations that facilitate this transmission and do not exist from the same individual to another person. We still know only imperfectly the properties of this universal fluid, an agent so powerful and which plays so great a role in the phenomena of Nature. We know the principle, and that is already much for giving us an account of many things; the details will come in their time.

— The above fact having been communicated to the Society of Paris, a Spirit gave the following instruction concerning it:

(Spiritist Society of Paris, July 8, 1864. — Medium: Mr. A.

Didier.)

The ignorant — and how many there are! — become filled with doubts and disquiet when they hear talk of Spiritist phenomena. According to them, the face of the world is overturned; the intimacy of the heart, of the feelings, and the virginity of thought are cast throughout the world and delivered to the mercy of the first comer. Indeed, the world would be singularly changed and private life would not be protected behind the personality of each one, if all men could read in the spirit of one another.

An ignorant man tells us with great naivety: But justice, the pursuits of the police, commercial, governmental operations, could be considerably revised, corrected, clarified, etc., with the aid of these processes. Errors are very widespread. Ignorance has this peculiarity: it makes one completely forget the object of things, in order to cast the uncultivated mind into a series of incoherences.

Jesus was right to say: “My kingdom is not of this world,” which also meant that in this world things do not happen as in His kingdom. Spiritism, which in all things and through all things is the spiritualism of Christianity, can likewise say to the ambitious and to the ignorant terrorists, that its great object is not to give piles of gold to one and to leave the conscience of a weak being at the mercy of a stronger being, and to ally strength and weakness in an eternally inevitable duel, ever on the point of happening; no. If Spiritism affords satisfactions, they are those of calm, of hope, and of faith; if at times it warns through presentiments, or through vision asleep or awake, it is because the Spirits know perfectly well that one particular charitable action will not overturn the surface of the globe. Moreover, if one observes the course of the phenomena, evil has a minimal part in it. The baleful science seems relegated to the old tomes of the old alchemists, and if Cagliostro returned, he would certainly not come armed with the magic wand or the enchanted vial with which he presented himself, but with his electric, communicative, spiritualist, and somnambulic force, a force that every superior being possesses within himself and which, at the same time, touches the heart and the brain. As I said recently (the Spirit alludes to another communication), divination was the greatest gift of Jesus. Destined to become superior, as Spirits, we ask of God a portion of the rays that He granted to certain privileged beings, that He vouchsafed to myself and that I could have spread more judiciously.

Mesmer. n Remark. – There is not a single one of the faculties granted to man of which he cannot abuse, by virtue of his free will. It is not the faculty that is evil in itself, but the use that is made of it. If men were good, none would be to be feared, because no one would use them for evil. In the state of inferiority in which men on Earth still find themselves, the penetration of thought, if it were general, would be, perhaps, one of the most dangerous, because one has much to hide, and many could abuse it. But, whatever the drawbacks may be, if it exists it is a fact that must be accepted, for better or for worse, since one cannot suppress a natural effect. God, however, who is sovereignly good, measures the extent of this faculty by our weakness. He shows it to us from time to time, in order to make us better understand our spiritual essence and to warn us to work at our purification, so that we may not have to fear it. [1]

[v. Mesmer.]