A peasant philosopher.

— Decidedly, Spiritism is invading the countryside. The Spirits wish to prove their existence by taking up their instruments everywhere, even outside the circle of adherents, which destroys any supposition of collusion. We have just seen the doctrine implanted in a hamlet of the Aube, among simple cultivators, through a spontaneous manifestation. [See: As Spiritism comes, it comes without being sought.] Here is a fact still more remarkable from another point of view. Mr. Delanne, our colleague, writes us the following: “…During the few hours I spent in the village where my son is being educated, a vine-grower gave me two pamphlets he had published under this title: Natural and spontaneous philosophical ideas on existence in general, from the absolute principle to the end of ends, from the first cause to the infinite, by Father Chevelle, of Joinville (Haute-Marne): The first has for its subject God, the angels, the soul of man, the animal or instinctive soul; the second: the physical forces, the elements, organization, movement. n “From this pompous title and the grave subjects it embraces, you would think it the work of a man who had grown pale over books throughout his entire life. Be undeceived; this metaphysical philosopher is a humble artisan, a true philosopher in wooden clogs, for he goes about the villages selling vegetables and other agricultural produce.”

Here are some passages from his preface:

“I undertook this work because I thought it would be of some use to the public. Man owes himself to his fellows; it is not his condition to live isolated, and society has the right to demand from each individual the communication of his knowledge; egoism is an intolerable vice.

“The work is entirely my own; I was neither helped nor seconded by anyone; I copied nothing from anyone; it is the fruit of the meditations of my whole life… Numerous difficulties opposed the execution of my enterprise; I did not conceal them. For me misery was the worst of all; it prevented me from acting, leaving me no time; I always bore it without complaining; I had learned the secret of living happily without fortune, and that secret is still my best resource. “…I gave my ideas, for I wrote them down as they came to me, naturally, spontaneously, as they reached me through reflection and meditation.

“…In philosophy one does not demonstrate all existences by mathematical calculations; one does not measure Spirits with a meter, nor look at them under the microscope.

“…One must not expect to find in my book a refined style, extremely brilliant. I took no courses; I only attended the school of my village. When one had learned the prayers in Latin and recited the catechism well, one was already learned enough.

“…In those times, one was extremely instructed when one knew how to do the four operations; people came to seek us out to measure the fields. At ten years of age I was the first in the school, and my old father felt proud to see that people came to seek me out to find the spot where they should plant a boundary marker, or to write a note or a receipt.

“I have, then, the right to beg the readers’ pardon for the triviality of my language: I did not learn the rules of rhetoric, and I believe the title of my work is fitting: Natural ideas.

“We went to school from All Saints’ Day until Easter, and were on holiday from Easter until All Saints’ Day. But since my father, poor as he was, was not afraid to spend a few pennies to buy me books, I learned far more in the six months of holiday than I forgot in the six months of class.”

Here now are some fragments from the chapter on God:

“God is the only one who can say: I am that I am; He is one and He is all; everything exists from Him, in Him, and through Him, and nothing can exist without Him and outside of Him; He is one, and yet He produced the multiple and the divisible, both to infinity… If I could well define God, I would be god; but there cannot be two gods.

“God is an infinite, indivisible, eternal, immutable whole; He has no limits in the small nor in the great… A minute and a hundred thousand years, or a hundred thousand centuries, are the same thing for God; eternity admits no division; for Him there is neither past nor future, it is an eternal present; for God the past still is and the future already is; He sees all times at once; there is no yesterday nor tomorrow; and, speaking of His son, He said: I begot you today. “Eternity cannot be measured, just as the infinite of space cannot be measured; they are two abysses which we can reach only by abstraction, and there we would lose ourselves if we wished to penetrate them; they are virgin forests without paths. On arriving there, we are forced to stop.

“God cannot dispense with creating; He would be merely a God without action if He did not create, and His glory would be only for Himself. An impossible monotony. God creates eternally; the beginning of Creation, taken in the infinite, must continue to infinity:

“…It was necessary that He create free intelligences, for what would be the existence of beings that think, if they were not permitted to think freely? Where would the glory of God be, if His creatures were not free to judge Him? It would be the same as having remained alone; the adoration they rendered Him would be nothing but a chimera, a comedy directed toward Him and by Him; He would have been the sole spectator and the sole actor. “For the glory of God, then, it would have been an absolute necessity that the intelligences be created absolutely free, with the right to judge their author, to conduct themselves, in good or in evil, as they wished. It was necessary that evil be permitted in order that good might exist; it is impossible for one to be known without the other being seen.

“But, at the same time that God gives free will to the intelligences, He also gives them that inner forum, that intellectual sentiment of their freedom to think, that act of the free spirit, which we call conscience, an individual tribunal that warns each free existence of the value of its action. No one does evil without knowing it; only the will makes sin.

“We also have reasons to presume that the Spirits or angels have some part in the universal government, for it has been received as a dogma of faith that men are guarded by angels and that each of us has his guardian angel.

“The intelligences, or Spirits detached from matter, may well have, at times, influence over the spirit of man. How many persons have had revelations that came to pass, like Joan of Arc and so many others of whom the history books I have read speak, and which can be found. But I do not need to know them by heart to cite the passages to you; I seek the revelations within myself, and not elsewhere. “Until the moment my eldest sister died of cholera at Midrevay (Vosges), I had not heard of the existence of cholera anywhere. I had not the slightest idea that my sister was ill; I had seen her healthier than ever, there being therefore no reason to worry about her. I saw her in a dream at my house, in Joinville: — “My Joseph, I come to tell you that I have died; you know that I always loved you very much, and I myself wished to bring you the news of my return to the other world.” The next day the postman brought a letter announcing my sister’s death. “On receiving the black-bordered letter, I said to my wife: “You know the dream I told you yesterday; who knows whether the reality is not here?” I was not mistaken.

“Sometimes I have had visions, to which I paid attention only when they came to pass, even if much later. At those moments I was not asleep; I was wide awake, working. This happened to me some three or four times in the course of my life; I remember them only vaguely, but I am certain. I am not the only one who has had mental revelations; others will prove that I am right, which has perhaps already been proven. “The animal soul can only be individual and, consequently, indecomposable; therefore, the animal soul does not die. People thought of it before me, and this is what gave rise to the doctrine of metempsychosis. If metempsychosis exists, it could only be among individuals of the same species: the vital or animal soul of a mammal cannot pass into a tree.

“As concerns human intelligence, it is impossible for it to pass into the body of an animal; there it could not act, for the physical constitution of the animal cannot serve as a dwelling for human intelligence, although it has been asserted that demons united with and possessed animals. I cannot believe that, in such organizations, they could do anything reasonable; they would no longer be able to speak; they could not annihilate the instinct, which would always act, for good or for ill; it is one of the laws established by the Creator; these would be unworthy of Him if they could be derogated, if it were possible to modify them. The nerve bundles, or, as we said above, the telegraph stations of this species cannot be directed by intelligence. “In these latter times there has been much talk of Spiritism; some persons tell me that this chapter has many relations with it. But if so, it will be by pure chance, for it is a work I have never read, and of which I have never heard a single sentence.”

Here now are the author’s reflections on Creation:

“All geologists, all naturalists agree that the days of God were not like ours, which are regulated by the Sun. Indeed, the days of God in the Creation could not have been regulated by the Sun, because, according to the texts of the Holy Scriptures, the Sun had not yet been created, or did not appear; hence the word which in the holy scriptures, in the language in which these were written, means both day and time. Thus, the error may well be the translators’, who should have said in six times, instead of in six days; and, besides, why should we wish to make the days of God as short as ours, He who is eternal? “Not that I wish to say that God could not have created the world in six days, each of twenty-four hours, and that each of those years was worth hundreds of thousands of our years. If I wished to understand it thus, I would be in contradiction with myself, because, in my first volume, I said that a minute, a hundred thousand years, or a hundred thousand centuries were the same thing for God. “Although God disposed of only one day for each creation indicated in Genesis, between each of those days there were perhaps millions of years and even of centuries.

“When one examines the layers of the earth and how they were formed, we call those different revolutions epochs; the physical proofs are there, for those deposits did not occur in twenty-four hours.

“They want to take the Holy Scriptures too literally; they are true, but one must know how to understand them. It is not a matter of doing as those Israelites who let themselves be slaughtered, not daring to defend themselves because it was the Sabbath day. If they wished to kill me on a Sunday, I would not wait until Monday to defend myself. There are only seven days in the week for us; God has but one day in all, and that day has neither beginning nor end; for our own good He wishes us to rest one day a week, but He never rests, never sleeps, and His action is unceasing. “Our days are nothing but the appearance and disappearance of the one that gives us light; when the Sun sets for us, it rises for other peoples; at every hour of the day or night it rises, shines at the zenith, or sets. And when the snows, the ices, and the frosts make us stay by the fireside, there are other peoples who are gathering flowers and fruits. And, besides, there is only one world, there is only one Sun; all the stars we see are suns that illuminate worlds like ours, and perhaps more perfect than ours. God is the author of all these worlds and of many others which we do not see; thus, the six days of Creation are six epochs that lasted more or less time, and that were called days in order to be put within reach of our manner of seeing.”

— We read with attention the two pamphlets of Father Chevelle, and we should certainly have to contradict him on several points. But the citations we have just made nonetheless prove ideas of high philosophical scope, and which are not devoid of a certain character of originality. His work is a little encyclopedia, because in it he treats a little of everything, even of common things. He announces for later a Manual of the Medical Herbalist, or Treatment of diseases through the use of indigenous medicinal plants. Whence come to him all these ideas? Without doubt he has read: this is evident. But his position did not permit him to read much and, besides, he needed a special aptitude to profit from those readings and to treat subjects so abstract. Natural poets have been seen emerging from the working class, but it is rarer to see metaphysicians emerge without prior studies, and rarer still from the class of cultivators. Father Chevelle presents, in his genre, a phenomenon analogous to those calculating shepherds who confounded Science. Is this not a serious subject of study? They are facts. Now, since every effect has a cause, did the learned seek this cause? No, because it would have been necessary to sound the depths of the soul. And the spiritualist philosophers? They lacked the key, the only one that could give them the solution. To this question scepticism answers: A freak of Nature; a result of the cerebral organization. Spiritism says: Intelligences largely developed in previous existences and which, having lost nothing of what they had acquired, are reflected in the present existence, such acquisition serving as a basis for new acquisitions.

But why are these intelligences, which ought to have shone in an elevated social sphere, today relegated to the most inferior classes? Another problem no less insoluble without the key furnished by Spiritism. This one says: trials or voluntary expiations chosen by those same intelligences which, in view of their moral advancement, wished to be born in a lowly milieu, whether out of humility, or to acquire practical knowledge that will be of use to them in another existence. Providence permits it to be so for their own instruction and for that of men, setting the latter on the path of the origin of the faculties through the plurality of existences.

— Having been reported in the Spiritist Society of Paris, these facts gave rise to the following communication:

(Society of Paris, November 10, 1865. – Medium: Mrs. Breul.)

My dear friends, in the reading made by your president, of various facts related by your brother Delanne, you have seen that a notable philosophical work was brought to light by a simple peasant of the Vosges. Is this not the place to note how many prodigies are being realized at this moment, in order to shock the incredulous and the learned of the world? to confound those men who think they have the monopoly of Science, and wish to admit nothing outside their petty conceptions, limited by matter? Yes, in this time of preparation for the humanitarian renewal that the Spirits of the Lord are to accomplish, one can recognize more and more the truth of these words of the Christ, which men have little understood: “I give You thanks, my Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for having hidden these things from the wise and the powerful and for having revealed them to the little ones.” n When I say the wise, I do not speak of those modest men who, tireless pioneers of Science, make Humanity advance, discovering for it the marvels that reveal the goodness and the power of the Creator; but of those who, infatuated with their knowledge, believe quite willingly that what they have not discovered, sponsored, and published cannot exist. These will be punished in their pride, and God already permits them to be confounded by the superiority of intellectual works that issue from the pen of men who are far from wearing the doctor’s cap. As in the time of the Christ, who wished to honor and redeem the laborer, choosing to be born among artisans, the angels of the Lord now recruit their helpers among simple and honest hearts, among men of good will who exercise the most humble professions.

Understand, then, friends, that pride is the greatest enemy of your advancement, and that humility and charity are the only virtues that please God and attract to man those divine effluvia which help him to progress and which make him draw near to Him.

Louis of France. n [1]

Two pamphlets, large in-12. Price: 1 fr. each, at the author’s house, in Joinville (Haute-Marne); in Bar-le-Duc, at the Numa Rolin house. – The author announces that he will complete his work with five other pamphlets, which will make, in all, one volume. [Idées philosophiques, naturelles et spontanées sur l’existence en général, à partir du principe absolu jusqu’à la fin des fins, de la cause première jusqu’à l’infini (de l’infini à l’infini), par Chevelle père… — Google books.] [2] Tr. Note: Matthew, 11:25.

[3]

[see Louis of France.]