Plurality of the existences of the soul.

This work, announced some time ago and awaited with impatience, has just appeared at the bookshop of Messrs. Didier & Cie. n All those who know the author, his vast erudition, his judicious spirit of analysis and of investigation, do not doubt that this grave question of the plurality of existences was treated by him in accordance with its importance. We feel happy to say that he has not failed in his task. However, he did not exert himself enough to demonstrate, by his own reasoning, this great law of Humanity, although devoting himself to it. Learned as he is, he is modest, very modest indeed, which is rarely a corollary of knowledge; he says that his personal opinion would weigh little in the balance, a reason that led him to lean more on those of others than on his own. He wished to demonstrate that this principle had been glimpsed by the greatest geniuses of all times; that it is found in all religions, sometimes clearly and categorically formulated, often veiled under allegory; that, implicitly, it is the first source of an immensity of dogmas. He proves, by authentic documents, that the theory of the immortality and of the progression of the soul formed part of the secret teaching reserved only to those initiated into the mysteries. In those remote times it could have utility, as he demonstrates, in concealing from the common people certain truths that the masses were not ripe to understand, and that would have dazzled them, without enlightening them. His work is, then, rich in citations, from the sacred books of the Hindus, the Persians, the Jews, the Christians; the Greek philosophers, the Neoplatonists, the Druidic doctrines [see Spiritism among the Druids], up to the modern writers: Charles Bonnet, Ballanche, Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Jean Raynaud, Henri Martin, etc.; and, as conclusion and last expression, the Spiritist books. In this vast panorama, he passes in review all the opinions, the various theories on the origin and the destinies of the soul. The doctrine of animal metempsychosis is treated there at length and in a new manner. He demonstrates that that of the plurality of human existences preceded it and that the transmigration into bodies of animals is nothing but an altered derivation, and not the principle. It was the belief reserved to the common people, incapable of understanding the high abstract truths, and as a curb to the passions. Incarnation in animals was a punishment, a kind of visible, present hell, which was meant to make more of an impression than the fear of a moral punishment in a spiritual world. Here is what Timaeus of Locri, whom Cicero affirms to have been the master of Plato, says in this regard:

“If anyone is vicious and violates the rules of the State, he must be punished by the laws and by the censures; he must, further, be terrified with the fear of hell, by the dread of the continual penalties, of the punishments, and by the inevitable terrors and chastisements, which are reserved for the unfortunate criminals in the interior of the Earth.

“I greatly praise the Ionian poet (Homer) for having rendered men religious by ancient and useful fables. For, just as we cure bodies with more drastic remedies, if they do not yield to milder remedies, so we repress souls by false discourses, if they do not let themselves be led by the true ones. It is for the same reason that one must establish passing penalties, based on the belief in the transmigration of souls. So that the souls of timid men pass, after death, into bodies of women exposed to contempt and to injuries; the souls of murderers, into bodies of ferocious animals, to receive their punishment there; those of the lewd into the bodies of pigs and wild boars; those of the inconstant and of the frivolous into those of the birds that fly in the air; those of the lazy, of the indolent, of the ignorant, and of the mad into the form of aquatic animals. It is the goddess Nemesis who judges all these things, in the second period, that is, in the circle of the second region around the Earth, with the demons, avengers of crimes, who are the earthly inquisitors of human actions, and to whom the God who conducts all things conferred the administration of the world full of gods, of men, and of other animals that were produced according to the excellent image of the unproduced and eternal form.” It stands out from this and from various other documents that the majority of the philosophers ostensibly professed animal metempsychosis, as a means, since they themselves did not believe it, and had a secret doctrine, more rational, on the future life. Such seems to have been, also, the sentiment of Pythagoras who, as is known, is not the author of metempsychosis; he was only its propagator in Greece, after having found it among the Hindus. Besides, incarnation in animality was nothing but a temporary punishment of some thousands of years, more or less according to the culpability, a kind of prison from which the soul, upon leaving, entered into humanity. Animal incarnation was, then, not an absolute condition, allying itself, as one sees, with human reincarnation. It was a sort of scarecrow for the simple, much more than an article of faith among the philosophers. Just as one says to children: “If you are bad, the wolf will eat you,” the ancients said to criminals: “You will become wolves.” The doctrine of the plurality of existences, emancipated from the fables and the errors of the times of ignorance, tends today, in an evident manner, to enter into modern philosophy, abstraction made of modern Spiritism, because serious thinkers find there the only possible solution of the greatest problems of morals and of human life. The work of Mr. Pezzani comes, then, very opportunely, to project the light of History upon this important question; it will spare many people laborious, difficult, and often impossible researches. The author did not write it from the point of view of Spiritism, which figures in it only in an accessory manner and as teaching; he wrote it from the philosophical point of view, in such a way as to open the doors that would have been closed to him, had he imprinted upon this work the label of a new belief. It is the complement of the Plurality of inhabited worlds, by Mr. Flammarion, who, for his part, popularized one of the great principles of our doctrine, without expressly speaking of it. We shall return to the work of Mr. Pezzani, making use of several of his citations.

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One vol. in-8º on sale. Price: 6 fr. – In press, ed. in-12. Price: 3 fr. [La Pluralité des Existences de l’Ame: conforme a la doctrine de la … — Google Books.]