It is in the air.

Q. – When something is foreboded by the masses, it is generally said that it is in the air. What is the origin of this expression?

Answer. – Its origin, like that of a host of things of which we are not aware and which Spiritism comes to explain, lies in the intimate and intuitive sentiment of reality. The expression is truer than one thinks.

This general presentiment at the approach of some grave event has two causes: the first comes from the innumerable masses of Spirits who incessantly traverse space and who have knowledge of the things that are being prepared; in consequence of their dematerialization they are more apt to follow their course and to foresee their outcome. These Spirits incessantly brush against Humanity, communicating their thoughts to it by the fluidic currents that link the corporeal world to the spiritual world. Although you do not see them, their thoughts reach you like the aroma of flowers hidden in the foliage, and you assimilate them without perceiving it. The air is literally rent by these fluidic currents, which everywhere sow the idea, in such a way that the expression it is in the air is not only a figure of speech, but positively true. Certain Spirits are more especially charged by Providence with transmitting to men the presentiment of inevitable things, with a view to giving them a secret warning, and they fulfill this mission by spreading among the creatures. They are like intimate voices, that resound in their inner forum. The second cause of this phenomenon lies in the disengagement of the incarnate Spirit during the repose of the body. In those moments of liberty it mingles with similar Spirits, with those for whom it has the most affinity; it penetrates itself with their thoughts, sees what it cannot see with the eyes of the body, relates its intuition upon awakening, as of an idea wholly personal to it. This explains how the same idea arises at the same time in a hundred different places and in thousands of brains.

As you know, certain individuals are more apt than others to receive the spiritual influx, whether by the direct communication of foreign Spirits, or by the easier disengagement of their own Spirit. Many enjoy, in diverse degrees, second sight, or spiritual vision, a faculty much more common than you think, and which reveals itself in a thousand ways; others retain a more or less distinct remembrance of what they saw in the moments of emancipation of the soul. In consequence of this aptitude, they have more precise notions of things; it is in them not a simple vague presentiment, but intuition, and in some the knowledge of the very thing whose realization they foresee and announce. If one asks them how they know, the greater part would not know how to explain; some will say that an inner voice spoke to them, others that they had a revealing vision, and others, finally, that they feel it without knowing how. In times of ignorance, and in the eyes of superstitious persons, they pass for diviners and sorcerers, when they are merely persons endowed with spontaneous and unconscious mediumship, a faculty inherent in human nature, and which has nothing supernatural about it, but which those who admit nothing outside of matter are incapable of comprehending. This faculty has existed in all times, but it is to be noted that it develops and multiplies under the dominion of circumstances that increase the activity of the spirit, in moments of crisis and at the approach of great events. Revolutions, wars, the persecutions of parties and of sects have always given birth to a great number of seers and inspired ones, who have been qualified as illuminati.

Dr. Demeure.

Observation. – The relations of the corporeal world with the spiritual world have nothing surprising about them, if one considers that these two worlds are formed of the same elements, that is, of the same individuals, who pass alternately from one to the other. Such as it is today among the incarnate beings of the Earth, so will it be tomorrow among the disincarnate beings of space, and reciprocally. The world of the Spirits, therefore, is not a world apart; it is Humanity itself stripped of its material envelope, and which continues its existence under a new form and with more liberty.

The relations of these two worlds, in incessant contact, form part, then, of the natural laws. The ignorance of the law that governs them was the stumbling block of all philosophies; it is for want of their knowledge that so many problems have remained insoluble. Spiritism, which is the science of these relations, gives us the only key that can resolve them. Thanks to it, how many things are no longer mysteries!