A recollection of past existences.

— In a biographical article on Méry, published in the Journal littéraire of September 25, 1864, the following passage is found:

“There are singular theories which, for him, are convictions.

“Thus, he firmly believes that he has already lived several times; he remembers the slightest circumstances of his preceding existences and details them with enthusiasm, with such certainty as to impose authority.

“Thus, he was one of the friends of Virgil and of Horace, he knew Augustus Germanicus, he waged war in the Gauls and in Germania. He was a general and commanded the Roman lines when they crossed the Rhine. He would recognize in the mountains places where he had encamped, the valleys of battlefields where he fought. He remembers conversations at the house of Maecenas, which are the tender object of his regrets. He was called Minius.

“One day, in his present life, he was in Rome and was visiting the library of the Vatican. He was received there by young novices, dressed in long dark robes, who began to speak to him in the purest Latin. Méry was a good Latinist, as regards theory and written things, but he had not yet tried to converse familiarly in the language of Juvenal. Hearing these Romans of today, admiring this magnificent idiom, so well harmonized with the monuments, with the customs of the era in which it was used, he had the impression that a veil was falling from his eyes; it seemed to him that he himself had conversed, in other times, with friends who made use of this divine language. Polished and impeccable phrases flowed from his lips; he immediately found elegance and correctness; in short, he spoke Latin as he speaks French; he had in Latin the wit that he has in French. None of this could be done without apprenticeship and, had he not been a subject of Augustus, had he not lived through that century of all splendors, he would not have improvised a science impossible to acquire in a few hours. “Another of his passages on Earth was in the Indies, which is why he knows them well.

For this reason, when he published La Guerre du Nizam — Google Books, none of his readers will have doubted that he had dwelt a long time in Asia. His descriptions are vivid, his pictures are original, he touches with his finger such details that it is impossible he did not see what he recounts, for there is the stamp of truth.

“He claims to have entered that country with a Muslim expedition, in 1035. There he lived for fifty years, spent beautiful days, and settled there never to leave again. He was a poet, but less lettered than in Rome and in Paris. At first a warrior, then a dreamer, he kept in his soul the striking images of the banks of the sacred river and of the Hindu rites. He had several dwellings, in the city and in the country, he prayed in the temples of the elephants, he knew the advanced civilization of Java, he saw standing the splendid ruins that he points out and that are still so little known. “One must hear him recount these poems, for these recollections in the manner of Swedenborg are true poems. He is very serious, do not doubt it. It is not a mystification arranged at the expense of his listeners, but a reality of which he manages to convince you.

“And his doctrines on History, which he possesses admirably! And his anecdotes so fine, which cast new light on everything they touch! And his accounts, which are novels, which almost make us weep, after our not having been able to contain our laughter! All this makes Méry one of the most marvelous men of the times in which he lived and, even, of those in which his wandering soul awaited its turn to enter a body and once more cause successive generations to speak of it.”

Pierre Dangeau.

— The author of the article accompanies this fact with no reflection. After having exalted the high merit of Méry and his great intelligence, he was inconsistent in branding him as mad. If, then, Méry is a man of good sense, of high intellectual value; if the belief of having already lived is in him a conviction; if this conviction is not the product of a system of his manner of seeing, but the result of a retrospective recollection and of a material fact, is the thing not such as to draw the attention of every serious man? Let us see to what incalculable consequences this simple fact leads us. If Méry has already lived, this must not constitute an exception, for the laws of Nature are the same for all and, thus, all men too must have lived; if we have already lived, certainly it is not the body that is reborn, but the intelligent principle, the soul, the Spirit. We have, then, a soul. Since Méry has preserved the recollection of several existences, and since places recall to him what he saw long ago, with the death of the body the soul is not lost in the universal whole; it preserves, then, its individuality, the consciousness of its self.

If Méry remembers what he was two thousand years ago, what became of his soul in the interval? Did it plunge into the ocean of the infinite or lose itself in the depths of space? No; without this it would not recover its individuality of long ago. Then it must have remained in the sphere of terrestrial activity, living the spiritual life, in our midst or in the space that surrounds us, until it took up a new body. Méry not being unique in the world, there must be around us an intelligent, invisible population.

Being reborn into corporeal life, after a more or less long interval, is the soul reborn in the primitive state? as a new soul? or does it make use of the ideas acquired in its anterior existences? The retrospective recollection resolves the question by a fact: If Méry had lost the ideas acquired, he would not have recognized the language he spoke long ago; the sight of the places would have recalled nothing to him.

But if we have already lived, why would we not live again still? Why would this existence be the last? If we are reborn with the intellectual development accomplished, the intuition that we bring of the ideas acquired is a foundation that aids the acquisition of new ideas, that makes study easier. If, in one existence, a man is only half a mathematician, he will need less labor to be a complete mathematician. It is a logical consequence. If he has become more or less good, if he has corrected himself of some faults, he will have less difficulty in becoming better still, and so on. Nothing of what we acquire in intelligence, in knowledge, and in morality is lost; whether we die young or old, whether or not we have time to make use of it in the present existence, we shall reap its fruits in subsequent existences. The souls that animate the civilized Frenchmen of today may, then, be the same that animated the barbarian Franks, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, the savage Gauls, the Roman conquerors, the fanatics of the Middle Ages, but which, at each existence, took a step forward, supported on the preceding steps, and which will progress still. Here, then, is resolved the great problem of Humanity, against which so many philosophers have collided! it is resolved by the simple fact of the plurality of existences. But how many problems shall find their solution in the solution of this one! What new horizons this opens up! It is a whole revolution in beliefs and ideas. Thus will the serious thinker, the reflective man, reason. A fact is a point of departure, from which he draws consequences. Now, what are the thoughts that the case of Méry awakens in the author of the article? He himself sums them up in these words: “There are singular theories which, for him, are convictions.”

But if this author sees in all this only a bizarre thing, little worthy of his attention, it is not the same with everyone. Someone finds on his path a rough diamond which, because he does not know its value, he does not deign to pick up, while another person will know how to appreciate it and turn it to profit.

Today Spiritist ideas are produced under all forms; they are the order of the day and, without wishing to confess them, the press records them and sows them in profusion, believing that it merely enriches its columns with witticisms. Is it not striking that all the adversaries of the idea, without exception, work without respite for its propagation? They would like to speak what the force of things drags them to speak. So Providence wills it – for those who believe in Providence.

It will be said that we reason upon an isolated fact, incapable of making a law, for, if the plurality of existences were a condition inherent to Humanity, why do not all men remember, like Méry? To this we reply: Take the trouble to study Spiritism and you will know. We shall not repeat, then, what has a hundred times been demonstrated regarding the uselessness of recollection for making use of the experience acquired in preceding existences, and the danger of that recollection for social relations.

But there is another cause for this forgetting, in a certain way physiological, due at the same time to the materiality of our envelope and to the identification of our little-advanced Spirit with matter. As the Spirit purifies itself, the material bonds are less tenacious, the veil that obscures the past less opaque; thus, the faculty of retrospective recollection follows the development of the Spirit. The fact is rare on our Earth, because Humanity is still very material; but it would be an error to suppose that Méry is a unique example. From time to time God permits a Méry to present himself, in order to bring to men the knowledge of the great law of the plurality of existences, the only one that explains the origin of their good or bad qualities, shows them the justice of the miseries they here endure, and traces for them the route of the future. The uselessness of recollection for making use of the past is what those who have not studied Spiritism find hardest to comprehend; for Spiritists it is an elementary question. Without repeating what has already been said on the subject, the following comparison may facilitate its understanding.

The pupil runs through the series of classes, from the eighth grade up to philosophy. What he learned in the eighth serves him to learn what is taught in the seventh. Let us suppose now that at the end of the eighth he has lost all recollection of the time spent in this class; his Spirit will be no less developed and endowed with acquired knowledge on this account; he simply will not remember either where or how he acquired it, but, in view of the progress accomplished, he will be fit to make use of the lessons of the seventh. Let us imagine, further, that in the eighth he was lazy, irascible, unruly, but that, having been punished and moralized, his character was modified, becoming industrious, gentle, and obedient; he will carry these qualities into the new class, which will seem to him to be the first. Of what use would it be to him to know that he was scourged for laziness, if now he is no longer lazy? The essential thing is that he arrive in the seventh better and more capable than he was in the eighth. So will it be from class to class. Well then! what does not happen to the schoolboy, nor to the man in the different periods of his life, exists for him from one existence to another: that is the whole difference; but the result is exactly the same, though on a greater scale. (See another example of recollection of the past related in the Spiritist Review of July 1860.)