The cataleptic young woman of Swabia.

— Under the title Second sight, several newspapers reproduced the following fact, among others the Patrie of the 26th and the Evénement of the 28th of November.

“The imminent arrival is expected in Paris of a young woman, originally from Swabia, whose mental state presents phenomena that leave far behind the trickery of the Davenport brothers and other spiritists.

“Sixteen and a half years old, Louise B… lives with her parents, owner-farmers in the place called Bondru (Seine-et-Marne), where they settled after having left Germany.

“As a consequence of violent grief, caused by the death of her sister, Louise fell into a lethargic sleep, which lasted fifty-six hours. After that lapse of time she awoke, not to real and normal life, but to a strange existence, which is summed up in the following phenomena:

“Louise suddenly lost her vivacity and her joy, though without suffering, but falling into a kind of beatitude, which is allied to the most profound calm. During the entire day she remains motionless in a chair, answering only in monosyllables the questions put to her. When night comes, she falls into a cataleptic state, characterized by the rigidity of the limbs and the fixity of the gaze.

“At this moment the faculties and senses of the young woman acquire a sensitivity and a reach that surpass the limits fixed for human power. Not only does she possess the gift of second sight, but also that of second hearing, that is, she hears words spoken near her, as well as those that are pronounced in a more or less distant place, toward which she concentrates her attention.

“In the hands of the cataleptic, each object acquires for her a double image. Like everyone, she has the sense of the form and the exterior appearance of the object; in addition, she sees distinctly the representation of its interior, that is, the set of properties it possesses and the uses for which it is destined in the order of creation.

“In a great number of plants, of metallic and mineralogical samples, submitted to her unconscious appraisal, she pointed out latent and unexplored virtues, which carry the thought back to the discoveries of the alchemists of the Middle Ages.

“Louise experiences an analogous effect in relation to the appearance of the persons with whom she enters into communication by the contact of the hands. She sees them at once such as they are and such as they were at a less advanced age. The signs of aging and of illness disappear before her eyes and, if someone has lost a limb, for her it is as though it still subsisted.

“The young peasant woman claims that, protected against all the modifications of the exterior vital action, the corporeal form continues to be integrally reproduced by the nervous fluid.

“Transported to places where tombs are found, Louise sees and describes, in the manner we have just related, the persons whose remains were entrusted to the earth. Then she suffers spasms and nervous crises, in the same way as when she approaches the places where water and metals exist, whatever may be the depth of the soil in which they are found.

“When the young Louise passes from ordinary life to that mode of life, which one may call superior, it seems that a thick veil falls from her eyes.

“For her, Creation, explained in a new manner, represents an object of inexhaustible admiration and, although illiterate, she finds, to express her enthusiasm, comparisons and images that are truly poetic.

“No religious preoccupation mixes with these impressions. The parents, far from finding in these unusual phenomena a motive for speculation, conceal them with the greatest care. If they decide to bring, without commotion, the young girl to Paris, it is because this constant overexcitement of the nervous system exerts upon her organs a destructive influence and she is visibly wasting away. The physicians who care for her were of the opinion that she should be taken to the capital, both to call for the aid of the masters in the art of healing, and to submit to Science facts that escape the ordinary sphere of its investigations, and whose explanation has not yet been found.”

— The author of the article says that the phenomena presented by this young woman leave far behind the trickery of the Davenport brothers and other spiritists. If these phenomena are real, what relations can they have with sleight-of-hand tricks? Why this comparison between unequal things, and to say that one surpasses the other? With the intention of casting a small malice against Spiritism, the author announces, without wishing to, a great truth, in support of what he wishes to denigrate; he proclaims a fact that is essentially spiritist, which Spiritism recognizes and accepts as such, whereas it never took the Messrs. Davenport under its patronage and, still less, presented them as adepts and apostles. This is what those gentlemen journalists would know, if they had taken into account the innumerable protests that reached them from everywhere against the assimilation they sought to establish between a doctrine that is essentially moral and philosophical and theatrical exhibitions.

— The explanation of this phenomenon, they say, has not yet been given by official science; this is certain. But, for the spiritist science, this has long since ceased to be a mystery. However, the means of clarification are not lacking. The cases of catalepsy, of double sight and of natural somnambulism, with the strange faculties that develop in these various states, are not rare. Why is Science still in search of its explanation? It is because Science obstinately seeks it where it is not, where it will never find it: in the properties of matter.

Here is a man who lives: he thinks, he reasons; a second later he dies; he gives no further sign of intelligence. So there was in him, while he thought, something that no longer exists, since he no longer thinks. What was it that thought in him? You say it is matter. But matter is still always there, intact, without one particle less. Why, then, did he think a few moments ago and now no longer thinks? – It is because it is disorganized; doubtless the molecules have disaggregated; perhaps a fiber has been broken; a trifle was disarranged and the intellectual movement stopped. – Here, then, are genius, the greatest human conceptions at the mercy of a fiber, of an imperceptible atom, and lost the efforts of a whole lifetime of labor! Of all that intellectual furniture, acquired by hard pains, nothing remains; the vastest intelligence is no more than a well-assembled pendulum which, once displaced, serves only as scrap iron! It is hardly logical, it is hardly encouraging; with such a prospect, doubtless it would be better to take care only of eating and drinking. But, in short, it is a system. According to you, the soul is only a hypothesis. But does this hypothesis not become reality in cases analogous to that of the young woman in question? Here the soul shows itself uncovered; you do not perceive it, but you see it think and act in isolation from the material envelope; it transports itself far away; it sees and hears, despite the state of insensibility of the organs. Can one explain by the organs alone phenomena that take place outside their sphere of action? And in this is there not the proof of the independence of the soul? How, then, can one not recognize it by signs so evident? It is because, for this, it would be necessary to admit the intervention of the soul in pathological and physiological phenomena, which, thus, would cease to be exclusively material. Now, how to recognize a spiritual element in the phenomena of life, when, constantly, the contrary has been said? This is what they cannot decide, for it would be necessary to admit that they had been mistaken; and it is hard, for certain forms of self-love, to receive a contradiction from the very soul they denied. Thus, as soon as it shows itself anywhere with much evidence, they hasten to cover it with a bushel and no more is heard on the subject. Thus it happened with hypnotism and so many other things. May God grant that it does not happen thus with Louise B… To settle the question, they say that these phenomena are illusions, and that those who promote them are madmen or charlatans. Such are the reasons that caused the study, so interesting and so fertile in moral results, of psycho-physiological phenomena to be neglected; such is, also, the cause of the repulsion of materialism toward Spiritism, which rests entirely upon the ostensible manifestations of the soul, during life and after death.

But, they will say, the religious party, lashed by materialism, must welcome with ardor the phenomena that come to overthrow incredulity by evidence. Why, then, instead of transforming them into a weapon, does it repel them? It is because the soul is an indiscreet one, which comes to present itself in conditions very different from the state in which they show it to us, and upon which they have built a whole system; they would have to return to beliefs which they say are immutable; moreover, it sees very clearly; thus, it was necessary to forbid it speech. But they did not reckon with its subtlety: it cannot be confined like a bird in a cage; if they close one door upon it, it opens a thousand others. Today it makes itself heard everywhere, to say from one extreme of the world to the other: here is what we are. Very skilled will be those who prevent it.

— Let us return to our subject. The young woman in question offers the phenomenon, very common in similar cases, of the extension of the faculties. This extension, says the article, attains a reach that surpasses the limits fixed for human power. One must here distinguish two orders of faculties: the perceptive faculties, that is, sight and hearing, and the intellectual faculties. The former are set in activity by exterior agents, whose action reverberates in the interior; the latter constitute the thought that radiates from the interior to the exterior. Let us first speak of the former.

In the normal state, the soul perceives by means of the senses. Here the young woman perceives what is beyond the reach of sight and hearing; she sees into the interior of things, penetrates opaque bodies, describes what takes place far away; therefore, she sees in a manner other than by the eyes and hears in a manner other than by the ear, and this in a state in which the organism is afflicted with insensibility. If it were a matter of a unique, exceptional fact, one might attribute it to a caprice of Nature, to a kind of monstrosity; but it is very common. It manifests itself in an independent manner, though in differing degrees, in most cases of catalepsy, in lethargy, in natural and artificial somnambulism, and even in numerous individuals who have every appearance of the normal state. It is produced, then, by virtue of a law. How is it that Science, which carries its investigations to the movement of attraction of the most insignificant grain of dust, has neglected a fact so capital?

— The development of the intellectual faculties is still more extraordinary. Here is a young woman, an illiterate peasant girl, who not only expresses herself with elegance, with poetry, but in whom are revealed scientific knowledge about things she has not learned and – a circumstance no less singular – this occurs in a particular state, on emerging from which everything is forgotten: she becomes again as ignorant as before. On entering the ecstatic state, the remembrance returns to her with the same faculties and the same knowledge; for her there are two distinct existences.

If, according to the materialist school, they are the direct product of the organs; if, to make use of the expression of this school, “the brain secretes thought, as the liver secretes bile”, then it also secretes finished knowledge, without the concurrence of a teacher. It is a property not yet known in that organ. In this same hypothesis, how to explain this extraordinary intellectual development, these transcendent faculties, alternately possessed, lost, and recovered almost instantaneously, while the brain is always the same? Is there not in this the patent proof of the duality of man, of the separation of the material principle and the spiritual principle?

— There, nothing yet of the exceptional: this phenomenon is as common as that of the extension of sight and hearing. Like the latter, it depends, then, on a law. It is these laws that Spiritism sought and that observation made known to it.

The soul is the intelligent being; in it resides the seat of all perceptions and of all sensations; it feels and thinks by itself; it is individual, distinct, perfectible, pre-existent to and surviving the body. The body is its material envelope: it is the instrument of its relations with the visible world. During its union with the body, it perceives by means of the senses, transmits its thought with the aid of the brain; separated from the body, it perceives directly and thinks more freely. The senses having a circumscribed reach, the perceptions received through their intermediary are limited and, in a certain way, deadened; received without intermediary, they are indefinite and of a surprising subtlety, because it surpasses, not human force, but all the products of our material means. For the same reason, the thought transmitted by the brain is, so to speak, filtered through that organ. The coarseness and the defects of the instrument paralyze it and in part stifle it, as certain transparent bodies absorb a part of the light that traverses them. Obliged to make use of the brain, the soul is like a very good musician, before an imperfect instrument. Freed from this troublesome auxiliary, it unfolds all its faculties. Such is the soul during life and after death. For it there are, therefore, two states: that of incarnation or of constraint, and that of disincarnation or of liberty; in other words: that of corporeal life and that of spiritual life. The spiritual life is the normal, permanent life of the soul; the corporeal life is transitory and passing.

During the corporeal life, the soul does not constantly suffer the constraint of the body, and therein is the key to the physical phenomena, which seem strange to us only because they transport us outside the habitual sphere of our observations. They were qualified as supernatural, although, in reality, they are submitted to perfectly natural laws, because these laws were unknown to us. Today, thanks to Spiritism, which made these laws known, the marvelous has disappeared.

During the exterior life of relation, the body needs its soul or Spirit as guide, in order to direct it in the world; but in the moments of inactivity of the body, the presence of the soul is no longer necessary; it detaches itself from it, without, however, ceasing to be bound to it by a fluidic tie, which recalls it to it, as soon as its presence becomes necessary. In these moments it partially recovers the liberty of acting and of thinking, which it will only fully enjoy after the death of the body, when it will be completely separated from it. This situation was described, spiritually and very truthfully, by the Spirit of a living person, who compared itself to a captive balloon [See: The Spirit on one side, the body on the other], and by another, the Spirit of a living idiot, who said it was like a bird, tied by the foot. (Spiritist Review, June 1860). This state, which we call emancipation of the soul, occurs normally and periodically during sleep. Only the body rests in order to recover the material losses; but the Spirit, which has lost nothing, takes advantage of this little respite to transport itself wherever it wishes. Moreover, this state also occurs every time a pathological cause, or simply a physiological one, produces the total or partial inactivity of the organs of sensation and of locomotion. This is what takes place in catalepsy, in lethargy, in somnambulism. The detachment or, if one wishes, the liberty of the soul, is the greater the more absolute the inertia of the body. It is for this reason that the phenomenon acquires its greatest development in catalepsy and in lethargy. In this state, the soul no longer perceives by the material senses, but, if we may so express ourselves, by the psychic sense; it is for this that its perceptions surpass the ordinary limits; its thought acts without the intercession of the brain, which is why it unfolds faculties more transcendent than in the normal state. Such is the situation of the young B…; she too says, and with reason, that “when she passes from ordinary life to that superior mode of life it seems to her that a thick veil falls from her eyes”. Such is, also, the cause of the phenomenon of second sight, which is nothing but direct vision by the soul; of vision at a distance, which results from the transport of the soul to the place it describes; of somnambulic lucidity, etc.

— “When Louise B… sees living persons, the signs of aging disappear, and if someone has lost a limb, for her it is as though it still subsisted; the corporeal form continues to be integrally reproduced by the nervous fluid.” If she saw the body simply, she would see it such as it is; what she sees is the fluidic envelope; the material body can be amputated: the perispirit cannot; what is here designated by nervous fluid is nothing but the perispiritual fluid.

She sees also those who are dead; so something remains of them. What does she see? It cannot be the body, which no longer exists; nevertheless, she sees them with a human form, the one they possessed in life. What she sees is the soul, clothed in its fluidic body or perispirit. Therefore, souls survive the body and, thus, they are not abstract beings, sparks, flames, breaths lost in the immensity of the common reservoir, but real, distinct, circumscribed, individual beings. If she sees the dead as well as the living, it is because the living have, like the dead, the same imperishable fluidic body, whereas the coarse material envelope dissolves with death. She does not see souls lost in the infinite depths of space, but in the midst of us, which proves the existence of the invisible world that surrounds us, and in the midst of which we live without suspecting it. Do such revelations not lead one to reflect seriously? Who could have given such ideas to this girl? The reading of spiritist works? But she cannot read. Association with spiritists? She has never heard them spoken of. It is, then, spontaneously that she describes all these things. Is it the product of her imagination? But she is not the only one: thousands of seers have said and say the same thing every day, of which Science has not the slightest suspicion. Now, it is from this universal concurrence of observations that Spiritism deduced the theory.

In vain will Science seek the solution of these phenomena, so long as it abstracts the spiritual element, for here is the key to all these pretended mysteries. Let it admit it, even if by way of hypothesis, and everything will be explained without difficulty.

Observations of this nature, on patients like Louise B…, require much tact and prudence. One must not lose sight of the fact that, in this state of excessive susceptibility, the slightest commotion can be fatal; the soul, happy to be detached from the body, is bound to it only by a thread, which a trifle can break forever. In similar cases, experiments made without caution can kill.