Introduction to the study of the spiritual fluids.

I.

On method. — II.

On investigation. — III.

On the principle. — IV.

On the spiritual world or world of Spirits and its interaction with the corporeal world. On the soul. — V.

On the perispirit. — VI.

On the connection of these two states: corporeal and spiritual. — VII. On the universal fluid. — VIII.

On the possible transformations of the perispirit. — IX.

On the materiality of the perispirit. — X.

On the states of the universal fluid.

(Summary)

I. ON METHOD: Spiritual fluids and Spiritist phenomena.

How the science of the spiritual fluids was arrived at in the Spiritist Doctrine: This part of the Spiritist science already shows that it is not an individual systematic conception, of one man or one Spirit, but the product of multiple observations, which draw their authority from the concordance existing among them.

II. ON INVESTIGATION: The three kingdoms of Nature.

The chemical elements and their combinations in the composition of bodies.

Example of the compositions and decompositions that take place in Nature.

Despite the infinite combinations that man can give to the elements of nature, the principle of life is in the hand of God.

The action of the various fluids or fluxes, such as caloric, the luminous, the electric, the magnetic, etc.

III. ON THE PRINCIPLE: The investigations of science gradually lead it to the great law of unity.

Simple bodies are nothing but modifications, transformations of a single element, a universal principle designated under the names of ether, cosmic fluid, or universal fluid.

The scope of the investigations into the fundamental element of the universe: between that element in its absolute purity and the point where the investigations of Science stop, the interval is immense.

IV. ON THE SPIRITUAL WORLD OR WORLD OF SPIRITS AND ITS INTERACTION WITH THE PHYSICAL WORLD — ON THE SOUL: The limited ideas about the spiritual world given until now by the Church and the ignorance of science concerning that extension of the material world. In this regard Spiritism teaches us that:

1st the Spirits are the souls of the men who lived on Earth;

2nd the souls pass alternately from the state of incarnation to that of erraticity;

3rd in this latter state they constitute the invisible population of the globe;

4th by the death of the body, corporeal Humanity supplies souls or Spirits to the spiritual world; by births, the spiritual world feeds the corporeal world; there is, then, an incessant transmutation of one into the other.

The intimate nature of the soul, that is, of the intelligent principle, source of thought, escapes our investigations entirely.

The soul is the spiritual principle considered in isolation; it is the acting and thinking force, which we cannot conceive of as isolated from matter except as an abstraction. Clothed in its fluidic envelope, or perispirit, the soul constitutes the being called Spirit, just as when it is clothed in the corporeal envelope, it constitutes man. (…) The Spirits are, then, beings similar to us, since each of us becomes a Spirit after the death of the body, and each Spirit becomes a man by birth.

Without the soul, the perispirit, like the body, is inert matter deprived of life and of sensations.

Materiality of the perispirit.

The soul does not clothe itself in the perispirit only in the state of Spirit; it is inseparable from that envelope, which follows it in incarnation as in erraticity. In incarnation, it is the bond that unites it to the corporeal envelope, the intermediary by whose aid it acts upon the organs and perceives the sensations of external things.

V. ON THE PERISPIRIT: To those who dispute the usefulness of the perispiritual envelope of the soul and, consequently, its existence.

The perispirit is one of the most important mechanisms of the organism. Science has observed it in some of its effects and, successively, it has been designated under the name of vital fluid, nervous fluid or influx, magnetic fluid, animal electricity, etc., without giving itself a precise account of its nature, of its properties, and even less of its origin.

As the envelope of the Spirit after death (the perispirit), it was suspected from the most remote antiquity. All theogonies attribute to the beings of the invisible world a fluidic body. Saint Paul says in precise terms that we are reborn with a spiritual body.

VI. ON THE CONNECTION OF THE CORPOREAL AND SPIRITUAL STATES: The perispirit is the line of union that connects the spiritual world to the corporeal world.

The corporeal state is connected to the spiritual state not only by the intelligent principle, which is the same, but also by the fluidic envelope, at once semi-material and semi-spiritual, of that same principle (…) The connection of these two states is such, and they react upon each other with such force, that a day will come when it will be recognized that the study of the natural history of man could not be complete without the study of the perispiritual envelope.

VII. ON THE UNIVERSAL COSMIC FLUID: The decomposition of our bodies, like that of any element of Nature, in its ultimate state, would yield the cosmic fluid.

This fluid, being the principle of all matter, is itself matter, although in a complete state of etherealization.

The formation of the fluidic body, or perispirit: it is, likewise, a condensation of the cosmic fluid around a focus of intelligence, or soul. But here the molecular transformation takes place differently, because the fluid preserves its imponderability and its ethereal qualities. The perispiritual body and the human body have, then, their source in the same fluid; both are matter, although in two different states. Thus, we were right to say that the perispirit is of the same nature and of the same origin as the coarsest matter.

The understanding, in the light of Spiritism, of what Moses said: “God formed the body of man from the slime of the earth.” and, when he said: “And He gave him a living soul, made in His likeness.”

These words: in His likeness, do they imply a similitude or an identity? These reflections are an answer to the people who accuse Spiritism of materializing the soul, because it gives it a semi-material envelope.

VIII. ON THE POSSIBLE ALTERATIONS OF THE PERISPIRIT: In the normal state, the perispirit is invisible to our eyes and impalpable to our touch, as are an infinity of fluids and gases. Nevertheless, the invisibility, the impalpability, and even the imponderability of the perispiritual fluid are not absolute; this is why we say in the normal state.

Apparitions.

IX. ON THE MATERIALITY OF THE PERISPIRIT: The question of the qualification of semi-material given to the perispirit.

X. ON THE STATES OF THE UNIVERSAL COSMIC FLUID: As the elementary principle of the Universe, the cosmic fluid assumes two distinct states: that of etherealization or imponderability, which may be considered the primitive normal state, and that of materialization or ponderability, which is, in a certain manner, consecutive to it. The intermediate point is that of the transformation of the fluid into tangible matter.

I.

[ON METHOD.]

The spiritual fluids play an important role in all Spiritist phenomena, or rather, they are the very principle of those phenomena. Until now one has limited oneself to saying that such an effect resulted from a fluidic action; but this general datum, sufficient at the outset, ceases to be so when one wishes to investigate the details. Wisely the Spirits limited their teaching at the beginning; later, they drew attention to the grave question of the fluids, and it was not in a single center that they approached it, but in practically all of them. But the Spirits do not come to bring us this science, like no other, already complete; they put us on the path and furnish us the materials, it being up to us to study them, observe them, analyze them, coordinate them, and make use of them. This is what they did for the constitution of the doctrine, and they acted in the same way with respect to the fluids. It is within our knowledge that in thousands of diverse places they sketched out its study; everywhere we find some facts, some explanations, a partial theory, an idea; but nowhere a complete work of the whole. Why is this? An impossibility on their part? No, certainly not, for what they could have done as men, with all the more reason they will be able to do as Spirits. But, as we have said, it is because they do not in any way come to free us from the labor of the intelligence, without which our faculties, remaining inactive, would wither; we would find it more comfortable for them to work for us. Thus, the work was left to man; but his intelligence, his life, and his time being limited, to none is it given to elaborate all that is necessary for the constitution of a science. This is why there is not a single one that is, in all its parts, the work of a single man; not one discovery that its first inventor has carried to perfection. To each intellectual edifice several men and several generations have brought their contingent of researches and of observations.

The same happens with the question that occupies us, whose various parts were treated separately, then gathered into a methodical body, when sufficient materials could be brought together. This part of the Spiritist science already shows that it is not an individual systematic conception, of one man or one Spirit, but the product of multiple observations, which draw their authority from the concordance existing among them.

For the reason we have just expressed, we could not claim that this is the final word. As we have said, the Spirits grade their teachings and proportion them to the sum and the maturity of the ideas acquired. Thus, one could not doubt that, later, they will put new observations on the path; but already there are sufficient elements to form a body that, subsequently and gradually, will be completed.

The chain of facts obliges us to take our point of departure from higher up, in order to proceed from the known to the unknown.

II.

[ON INVESTIGATION.]

Everything is connected in the work of creation. Formerly the three kingdoms were considered as entirely independent of one another, and one would have laughed at anyone who claimed to find a correlation between the mineral and the vegetable, between the vegetable and the animal. An attentive observation made the break in continuity disappear, proving that all bodies form an uninterrupted chain, in such a way that the three kingdoms in reality subsist only by the most marked general characteristics; but at their respective limits they merge, to the point that one hesitates to know where one ends and the other begins, and in which of them certain beings should be placed. Such are, for example, the zoophytes, or animal-plants, so called because they contain, at the same time, elements of the animal and of the plant. The same thing happens with regard to the composition of bodies. For a long time the four elements served as the basis of the natural sciences; they fell before the discoveries of modern chemistry, which recognized an indeterminate number of simple bodies. Chemistry shows us all the bodies of Nature formed of these elements combined in various proportions. It is from the infinite variety of these combinations that the innumerable properties of the different bodies arise. It is thus, for example, that one molecule of oxygen gas and two of hydrogen gas, combined, form water. In their transformation into water, oxygen and hydrogen lose their own qualities; properly speaking, there is no longer oxygen, nor hydrogen, but water. By decomposing water, the two gases are found again, in the same proportions. If, instead of one molecule of oxygen, there are two, that is, two of each gas, it will no longer be water, but a very corrosive liquid. It was enough, then, for a simple change in the proportion of one of the elements to transform a salutary substance into a poisonous substance. By an inverse operation, if the elements of a deleterious substance, arsenic, for example, are simply combined in other proportions, without the addition or suppression of any other substance, it will become harmless, or even salutary. There is more: several molecules of a same element, brought together, will enjoy different properties, according to the mode of aggregation and the conditions of the medium in which they are found. Ozone, recently discovered in the atmospheric air, is an example. It has been recognized that this substance is nothing other than oxygen, one of the principal constituents of the air, in a particular state that gives it properties distinct from oxygen properly speaking. The air does not cease to be formed of oxygen and nitrogen, but its qualities vary according as it contains a greater or lesser quantity of oxygen in the state of ozone. These observations, which seem foreign to our subject, nonetheless connect to it in a direct manner, as will be seen later; they are, moreover, essential as points of comparison.

These compositions and decompositions are obtained artificially and on a small scale in laboratories, but they take place on a large scale and spontaneously in the great laboratory of Nature. Under the influence of heat, of light, of electricity, of humidity, a body decomposes, its elements separate, other combinations take place, and new bodies are formed. Thus, the same molecule of oxygen, for example, that forms part of our body, after the destruction of the latter enters into the composition of a mineral, of a plant, or of an animate body. In our present body there are found, therefore, the same parcels of matter that were constituent parts of a quantity of other bodies. Let us cite an example to make the thing clearer.

A small seed is placed in the earth, sprouts, grows, and becomes a great tree which, yearly, gives leaves, flowers, and fruits. Does that mean that this tree was entirely within the seed? Surely not, because it contains a quantity of matter far more considerable. From where, then, did this matter come to it? From the liquids, the salts, the gases that the plant extracted from the earth and from the air, which infiltrated into its stem and, little by little, increased its volume. But neither in the earth nor in the air are wood, leaves, flowers, and fruits to be found. It is that these same liquids, salts, and gases, in the act of absorption, decomposed; their elements underwent new combinations, which transformed them into sap, wood, bark, leaves, flowers, fruits, volatile essences, etc. These same parts, in their turn, will destroy themselves, decompose; their elements will mix again in the earth and in the air; recompose the substances necessary to fructification; be reabsorbed, decomposed, and, once more, transformed into sap, wood, bark, etc. In a word, matter undergoes neither increase nor diminution; it is transformed and, in consequence of these successive transformations, the proportion of the various substances, in quantity, is always sufficient for the needs of Nature. Let us suppose, for example, that a given quantity of water is decomposed, in the phenomenon of vegetation, n to furnish the oxygen and hydrogen necessary for the formation of the various parts of the plant; it is a quantity of water that exists the less in the mass; but these parts of the plant, upon their decomposition, will release the oxygen and the hydrogen that they enclosed, and these gases, combining with each other, will reconstitute a quantity of water equivalent to that which had disappeared.

A fact that it is fitting to note here is that man, who can execute artificially the compositions and decompositions that take place spontaneously in Nature, is powerless to reconstitute the smallest organized body, even were it a stalk of grass or a dead leaf. After having decomposed a mineral, he can recompose it in all its parts, just as it was before; but when he has separated the elements of a parcel of vegetable or animal matter, he cannot reconstitute it and, even less, give it life. His power stops at inert matter: the principle of life is in the hand of God. Most simple bodies are called ponderable, because we can measure their weight, and this is in proportion to the sum of the molecules contained in a given volume. Others are said to be imponderable, because for us they have no weight and, whatever the quantity in which they accumulate in another body, they do not increase its weight. Such are: caloric, n light, electricity, the magnetic fluid or that of the magnet; this last is nothing but a variety of electricity. Although imponderable, these fluids do not for that reason cease to have a great power. Caloric divides the hardest bodies, reduces them to vapor, and gives to evaporated liquids an irresistible force of expansion. The electric shock breaks trees and stones, bends iron bars, fuses metals, hurls enormous masses far off. Magnetism gives to iron a power of attraction capable of sustaining considerable weights. Light does not possess this kind of force, but it exerts a chemical action upon most bodies; under its influence compositions and decompositions take place incessantly. Without light, vegetables and animals wither, fruits have neither flavor nor coloration. III.

[ON THE PRINCIPLE.]

All the bodies of Nature, mineral, vegetable, animal, animate or inanimate, solid, liquid, or gaseous, are, then, formed of the same elements, combined in such a manner as to produce the infinite variety of the different bodies. Today Science goes further; its investigations gradually lead it to the great law of unity. It is now generally admitted that the bodies reputed simple are nothing but modifications, transformations of a single element, a universal principle designated under the names of ether, cosmic fluid, or universal fluid, in such a way that, according to the mode of aggregation of the molecules of that fluid, and under the influence of particular circumstances, it acquires special properties, which constitute the simple bodies; these, combined with one another in various proportions, form, as we have said, the innumerable variety of compound bodies. According to this opinion, caloric, light, electricity, and magnetism would likewise be nothing but modifications of the primitive universal fluid. Thus that fluid, which in all probability is imponderable, would be at the same time the principle of the imponderable fluids and of the ponderable bodies. Chemistry makes us penetrate into the intimate constitution of bodies; but, experimentally speaking, it does not go beyond the bodies considered simple; its means of analysis are powerless to isolate the primitive element and to determine its essence. Now, between that element in its absolute purity and the point where the investigations of Science stop, the interval is immense. Reasoning by analogy, one arrives at the conclusion that between these two extreme points, that fluid must undergo modifications that escape our instruments and our materials. It is into this new field, until now closed to exploration, that we are going to attempt to penetrate. IV.

[ON THE SPIRITUAL WORLD OR WORLD OF SPIRITS]

AND ITS INTERACTION WITH THE CORPOREAL WORLD. — ON THE SOUL.

Until now one had only very incomplete ideas about the spiritual or invisible world. The Spirits were imagined as beings outside of Humanity; the angels too were separate creatures, of a more perfect nature. As for the state of souls after death, the knowledge was no more positive. The most general opinion made of them abstract beings, dispersed in immensity and no longer having relations with the living, unless they were, according to the doctrine of the Church, in the beatitudes of heaven or in the darkness of hell. Moreover, since the observations of Science do not go beyond tangible matter, there results an abyss between the corporeal world and the spiritual world, which seemed to exclude all comparison. It is this abyss that new observations and the study of phenomena still little known come to fill, at least in part. Spiritism teaches us, from the outset, that the Spirits are the souls of the men who lived on Earth; that they progress incessantly, and that the angels are these same souls or Spirits arrived at a state of perfection that brings them near to the Divinity.

In the second place, it teaches us that the souls pass alternately from the state of incarnation to that of erraticity; that in this latter state they constitute the invisible population of the globe, to which they remain connected until they have acquired the intellectual and moral development that the nature of this globe allows for, after which they leave it, passing to a more advanced world.

By the death of the body, corporeal Humanity supplies souls or Spirits to the spiritual world; by births, the spiritual world feeds the corporeal world; there is, then, an incessant transmutation of one into the other. This constant relation makes them interdependent, for they are the same beings who enter into our world and who leave it alternately. Here is a first line of union, a point of contact, which already diminishes the distance that seemed to separate the visible world from the invisible world.

The intimate nature of the soul, that is, of the intelligent principle, source of thought, escapes our investigations entirely; but it is now known that the soul is clothed in an envelope or fluidic body, which makes of it, after the death of the material body, as before, a distinct, circumscribed, and individual being. The soul is the spiritual principle considered in isolation; it is the acting and thinking force, which we cannot conceive of as isolated from matter except as an abstraction. Clothed in its fluidic envelope, or perispirit, the soul constitutes the being called Spirit, just as when it is clothed in the corporeal envelope, it constitutes man. Now, although in the state of Spirit it enjoys special properties and faculties, it has not ceased to belong to Humanity. The Spirits are, then, beings similar to us, since each of us becomes a Spirit after the death of the body, and each Spirit becomes a man by birth. This envelope is not the soul, for it does not think: it is merely a garment; without the soul, the perispirit, like the body, is inert matter deprived of life and of sensations. We say matter, because, in effect, the perispirit, though of an ethereal and subtle nature, does not cease to be matter, like the imponderable fluids, and, moreover, matter of the same nature and of the same origin as the coarsest tangible matter, as we shall presently see.

The soul does not clothe itself in the perispirit only in the state of Spirit; it is inseparable from that envelope, which follows it in incarnation as in erraticity. In incarnation, it is the bond that unites it to the corporeal envelope, the intermediary by whose aid it acts upon the organs and perceives the sensations of external things. During life, the perispiritual fluid identifies itself with the body, penetrating all its parts; with death, it detaches itself from it; deprived of life the body dissolves, but the perispirit, always united to the soul, that is, to the vivifying principle, does not perish; only the soul, instead of two envelopes, retains only one: the lightest, the one most in harmony with its spiritual state. Although these principles are elementary for Spiritists, it was useful to recall them for the understanding of the subsequent explanations and the connection of the ideas.

V.

[ON THE PERISPIRIT.]

Some persons have disputed the usefulness of the perispiritual envelope of the soul and, consequently, its existence. The soul, they say, has no need of an intermediary to act upon the body; and, once separated from the body, it is a superfluous accessory.

To this we answer, first, that the perispirit is not an imaginary creation, a hypothesis invented in order to arrive at a solution; its existence is a fact established by observation. As for its usefulness, whether during life or after death, one must admit that, since it exists, it is because it serves for something. Those who dispute its usefulness are like an individual who, not understanding the functions of certain mechanisms in a machine, were to conclude that they serve only to complicate the machine needlessly. He does not see that if the smallest part were suppressed, everything would be disorganized. How many things, in the great mechanism of Nature, seem useless to the eyes of the ignorant and even of certain scientists, who in good faith believe that if they had been charged with the construction of the Universe, they would have done it better! The perispirit is one of the most important mechanisms of the economy [of the organism]. Science has observed it in some of its effects and, successively, it has been designated under the name of vital fluid, nervous fluid or influx, magnetic fluid, animal electricity, etc., without giving itself a precise account of its nature, of its properties, and even less of its origin. As the envelope of the Spirit after death, it was suspected from the most remote antiquity. All theogonies attribute to the beings of the invisible world a fluidic body. Saint Paul says in precise terms that we are reborn with a spiritual body (1st epistle to the Corinthians, 15:35 to 44 and 50). The same happens with all the great truths based on the laws of Nature, and of which, in all epochs, men of genius have had the intuition. It is thus that, even before our era, able philosophers had suspected the roundness of the Earth and its movement of rotation, which takes nothing away from the merit of Copernicus and of Galileo, it being even to be presumed that these latter took advantage of the ideas of their predecessors. Thanks to their labors, what was nothing but an individual theory, an incomplete theory and without proofs, unknown to the masses, became a scientific, practical, and popular truth. The doctrine of the perispirit is in the same case; Spiritism was not the first to discover it. But, just as Copernicus did for the movement of the Earth, it studied it, demonstrated it, analyzed it, defined it, and drew fruitful results from it. Without the more complete modern studies, this great truth, like many others, would still be in the state of a dead letter.

VI.

[ON THE CONNECTION OF THESE TWO STATES: CORPOREAL AND SPIRITUAL.]

The perispirit is the line of union that connects the spiritual world to the corporeal world. Spiritism shows them to us in a relation so intimate and so constant, that from one to the other the transition is almost imperceptible. Now, just as in Nature the vegetable kingdom is connected to the animal kingdom by semi-vegetable and semi-animal beings, the corporeal state is connected to the spiritual state not only by the intelligent principle, which is the same, but also by the fluidic envelope, at once semi-material and semi-spiritual, of that same principle. During terrestrial life, the corporeal being and the spiritual being are merged and act in accord; the death of the body merely separates them. The connection of these two states is such, and they react upon each other with such force, that a day will come when it will be recognized that the study of the natural history of man could not be complete without the study of the perispiritual envelope, that is, without setting a foot in the domain of the invisible world. This parallel is even greater when one observes the origin, the nature, the formation, and the properties of the perispirit, an observation that follows naturally from the study of the fluids.

VII.

[ON THE UNIVERSAL FLUID.]

It is known that all animal matters have as constituent principles oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, combined in different proportions. Now, as we have said, these same simple bodies have a single principle, which is the universal cosmic fluid. By their various combinations they form all the varieties of substances that compose the human body, the only one of which we speak here, although it is the same with respect to animals and plants. From this it results that the human body is, in reality, nothing but a kind of concentration, of condensation or, if you will, of solidification of the universal fluid, as the diamond is a solidification of carbonic gas. In effect, let us suppose the complete disaggregation of all the molecules of the body: we shall recover the oxygen, the hydrogen, the nitrogen, and the carbon; in other terms, the body will be volatilized. These four elements, returning to their primitive state by a new and more complete decomposition — if our means of analysis permitted it — would yield the cosmic fluid. That fluid being the principle of all matter, it is itself matter, although in a complete state of etherealization. An analogous phenomenon takes place in the formation of the fluidic body, or perispirit: it is, likewise, a condensation of the cosmic fluid around a focus of intelligence, or soul. But here the molecular transformation takes place differently, because the fluid preserves its imponderability and its ethereal qualities. The perispiritual body and the human body have, then, their source in the same fluid; both are matter, although in two different states. Thus, we were right to say that the perispirit is of the same nature and of the same origin as the coarsest matter. [item 4] As one sees, there is nothing supernatural, since the perispirit is connected, by its principle, to the things of Nature, of which it is nothing but a variety. The universal fluid being the principle of all the bodies of Nature, animate and inanimate and, consequently, of the earth, of stones, Moses was right when he said: “God formed the body of man from the slime of the earth.” This does not mean that God took earth, petrified it, and with it modeled the body of man, as one models a statue with clay and as those believed who take the biblical words literally; but rather that the body was formed of the same principles or elements as the slime of the earth.

Moses adds: “And He gave him a living soul, made in His likeness.” He thus makes a distinction between the soul and the body; he indicates that it is of a different nature, that it is not matter, but spiritual and immaterial like God. He says: a living soul, in order to specify that in it alone is the principle of life, whereas the body, formed of matter, does not by itself live. These words: in His likeness, imply a similitude and not an identity. If Moses had considered the soul as a portion of the Divinity, he would have said: God animates him by giving him a soul drawn from His own substance, as he said that the body had been drawn from the earth. These reflections are an answer to the people who accuse Spiritism of materializing the soul, because it gives it a semi-material envelope.

VIII.

[ON THE POSSIBLE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE PERISPIRIT.]

In the normal state, the perispirit is invisible to our eyes and impalpable to our touch, as are an infinity of fluids and gases. Nevertheless, the invisibility, the impalpability, and even the imponderability of the perispiritual fluid are not absolute; this is why we say in the normal state. In certain cases it is possible that it undergoes a greater condensation, or a molecular modification of a special nature, that renders it momentarily visible or tangible; it is thus that apparitions are produced. Without there being an apparition, many persons feel the fluidic impression of the Spirits through the sensation of touch, which is an indication of a material nature. Whatever the manner in which the atomic modification of the fluid takes place, there is no cohesion as in material bodies; the appearance forms and dissipates instantaneously, which explains the sudden apparitions and disappearances. Apparitions being the product of an invisible material fluid, rendered visible in consequence of a momentary change in its molecular constitution, they are no more supernatural than the vapors that, alternately, make themselves visible or invisible by condensation or by rarefaction. We cite vapor as a point of comparison, without claiming that there is a similitude of cause and effect. IX.

[ON THE MATERIALITY OF THE PERISPIRIT.]

Some persons have criticized the qualification of semi-material given to the perispirit, saying that a thing is either matter or it is not. Granting that the expression is improper, one would have to resort to it, in default of a special term to express that particular state of matter. If there existed one more appropriate to the thing, the critics ought to have indicated it. Philosophically speaking, and by its intimate essence, the perispirit is matter, as we have just seen; no one could dispute it. But it does not have the properties of tangible matter, such as it is commonly conceived; it cannot be submitted to chemical analysis, since, although it has the same principle as flesh and marble, in reality it is neither flesh nor marble. By its ethereal nature, it belongs, at the same time, to materiality by its substance, and to spirituality by its impalpability, so that the word semi-material is no more ridiculous than semi-double and so many others, because one can also say that a thing is either double or it is not. X.

[ON THE STATES OF THE UNIVERSAL FLUID.]

As the elementary principle of the Universe, the cosmic fluid assumes two distinct states: that of etherealization or imponderability, which may be considered the primitive normal state, and that of materialization or ponderability, which is, in a certain manner, consecutive to it. The intermediate point is that of the transformation of the fluid into tangible matter. But, even there, there is no abrupt transition, since our imponderable fluids may be considered as a middle term between the two states.

Each of these two states naturally gives rise to special phenomena: to the second belong those of the visible world and to the first those of the invisible world. The former, the so-called material phenomena, are within the purview of Science properly speaking; the latter, qualified as spiritual phenomena, because they are connected to the existence of the Spirits, are within the competence of Spiritism. But there are between them numerous points of contact, which serve for mutual elucidation and, as we have said, the study of the former could not be complete without the study of the latter. It is to the explanation of these latter that the study of the fluids leads, of which we shall later make the subject for a special work.

[1] Translator's note: In the original: phénomène de la végétation. Might it not be photosynthesis?

[2] Translator's note: Allan Kardec made use of the theory of heat, in vogue in the 19th century, according to which caloric was the fluid responsible for thermal phenomena.