Collective communication.

— As usual, the Society being gathered on November 1st for the commemoration of the dead, many communications were received, among which one above all stood out for its entirely new form, consisting of a series of separate thoughts, each signed by a different name, which link together and complete one another. Here is this communication: My friends, how many Spirits around you, who would like to communicate and tell how much they love you! And how happy you would be if the name of all those who are dear to you were pronounced at the table of the mediums! What happiness! what joy for each of you, if your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your children, and your friends came to speak with you! But you understand that it is impossible for you all to be satisfied: the number of mediums is not sufficient. But what is not impossible is that a Spirit, in the name of all your relatives and friends, should come to tell you: Thank you for your kind remembrance and for your fervent prayers; take courage! have the hope that one day, after your liberation, we shall all come to extend our hand to you. Be assured that what Spiritism teaches you is the echo of the laws of the Almighty; through love become all brothers, and you will lighten the heavy burden you carry.

— Now, dear friends, all your protecting Spirits will come to bring you their thought. You, medium, listen and let your pencil follow their ideas.

Medicine does what frightened crayfish do. — Dr. Demeure.

Because magnetism progresses and, progressing, crushes present-day medicine, in order to replace it shortly. — Mesmer.

War is a duel that will only cease when the combatants have equal forces. — Napoleon.

Forces equal materially and morally. — General Bertrand.

Moral equality will reign when pride is dethroned.

— General Brune.

Revolutions are abuses that destroy other abuses.

— Louis XVI.

But those abuses give birth to liberty. — (No name.)

To be equal they must be brothers. Without fraternity, no equality and no liberty. — Lafayette.

Science is the progress of intelligence. — Newton.

But what is preferable to it is moral progress. — Jean Reynaud.

Science will remain stationary until morality has overtaken it. — François Arago.

To develop morality it is first necessary to extirpate vice. — Béranger.

To extirpate vice it is necessary to unmask it. — Eugène Sue.

This is what all strong and superior Spirits seek to do. — François Arago.

Three things must progress: music, poetry, painting. Music transports the soul by striking the ear. — Meyerbeer.

Poetry transports the soul by opening the heart. — Casimir Delavigne.

Painting transports the soul by caressing the eyes. — Flandrin.

Therefore poetry, music, and painting are sisters and take each other by the hand; one to sweeten the heart, another to soften the customs, and the last to open the soul; the three to raise you to the Creator. — Alfred de Musset.

But nothing, nothing must progress more momentarily than philosophy; it must take an immense step, leaving science and the arts stationary, but in order to raise them so high, when the time comes, because that elevation would be too sudden for you today. In the name of all, Saint Louis.

— On December 6th Mr. Bertrand received, in Mr. Desliens' group, a communication of the same kind, which, in a certain way, is a continuation of the preceding one:

Love is a lyre whose vibrations are divine chords. — Heloise.

Love has three strings on its lyre: the divine emanation, poetry, and song; if one of them is missing, the chords will be imperfect. — Abelard.

True love is harmonious; its harmonies intoxicate the heart, elevating the soul. Passion drowns the chords, debasing the soul. — Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

It was love that Diogenes sought, looking for a man… who came some centuries later, and whom hatred, pride, and hypocrisy crucified. — Socrates.

The sages of Greece were sometimes more so in their writings and words than in their person. — Plato.

To be wise is to love; let us therefore seek love by the path of wisdom. — Fénelon.

You do not know how to be wise if you do not know how to raise yourselves above the wickedness of men. — Voltaire.

Wise is he who does not believe himself to be so. — Corneille.

He who deems himself small is great; he who deems himself great is small. — Lafontaine.

The wise man deems himself ignorant and he who deems himself wise is ignorant. — Aesop.

Humility still believes itself proud and he who believes himself humble is not. — Racine.

Do not confuse with the humble those who say, out of false modesty, or out of interest, the contrary of what they are. You would err. In that case truth is silent. — Bonnefond.

Genius is possessed through inspiration and is not acquired; God wills that the greatest things be discovered or invented by beings without instruction, in order to paralyze pride, making man dependent on man. — François Arago.

They treat as madmen only those whose ideas are not sanctioned by the authority of science; thus those who claim to know everything reject the thoughts of genius of those who know nothing. — Béranger.

Criticism is the stimulant of study, but it is the paralysis of genius. — Molière.

Learned science is but a sketch of innate science; it becomes intelligence only in the new incarnation. — J. J. Rousseau.

Incarnation is the sleep of the soul; the vicissitudes of life are its dreams. — Balzac.

Sometimes life is a horrible nightmare for the Spirit and often it is slow to end. — La Rochefoucault.

There is its trial; if it resists, it takes a step toward progress; if not it obstructs the path that must lead to the port. — Martin.

At the awakening of the soul that has come forth victorious from the earthly struggles, the Spirit is greater and more elevated; if it succumbs, it finds itself just as it was. — Pascal.

It is to deny progress to wish that language be an emblem of the immutability of a religious doctrine; moreover, it is to force man to pray more with the lips than with the heart. — Descartes.

Immutability does not reside in the form of words, but above all in the word of thought. — Lamennais.

Jesus told his apostles to go preach the Gospel in their own tongue, and that all peoples would understand them. — Lacordaire.

Disinterested faith works miracles. — Boileau.

The doctrine of Jesus is felt and understood only by the heart; thus, in whatever manner it is spoken, it is always love and charity. — Bossuet.

Prayers spoken or written that one does not understand let the thought wander, allowing the eyes to be distracted by the pomp of the ceremonies. — Massillon.

Everything will change, without, however, returning to the simplicity of former times, which would be the negation of progress. Things will be done without pomp and without pride. — Sibour.

Love will triumph and, with it, will come wisdom, charity, prudence, strength, science, humility, calm, justice, genius, tolerance, enthusiasm, and the majestic glory, and divine, will crush, by its splendor, pride, envy, hypocrisy, wickedness, and jealousy, which drag in their train laziness, gluttony, and lust. — Eugène Sue.

Love will reign; and, that it may not delay, it is necessary, like Dionysius, to take in one hand the torch of Spiritism and show to humans the gnawing worms that form the sore in their soul. — Saint Louis.

Observation. – This kind of communication raises an important question. How can the fluids of so great a number of Spirits assimilate almost instantaneously with the fluid of the medium, in order to transmit their thought to him, when often that assimilation is difficult on the part of a single Spirit, and is generally not established except with time?

The spiritual guide of the medium seems to have foreseen this, because two days later he spontaneously gave him the following explanation: “The communication you received on All Saints' Day, as well as the last one, which is its complement, although there are repeated names, were obtained in the following manner: since I am your protecting Spirit, my fluid is similar to yours. I placed myself above you, transmitting to you as exactly as possible the thoughts and the names of the Spirits who wished to manifest themselves. They formed around me an assembly whose members dictated, alternately, the thoughts that I transmitted to you. This was spontaneous, and what made the communications easier on that day is that the Spirits present had saturated the apartment with their fluids. “When a Spirit communicates with a medium, he does so all the more easily the better established are the fluidic relations between them, without which the Spirit is obliged, in order to communicate his fluid to the medium, to establish a kind of magnetic current that reaches the brain of the latter; and if the Spirit, by reason of his inferiority, or for any other cause, cannot establish this current, he resorts to the assistance of the medium's guide, and the relations are established as I have just indicated.” Slener.

— Another question is this: Among the number of these Spirits are there not some incarnated in this and in other worlds, and, in that case, how can they communicate? Here is the answer that was given: “Spirits of a certain degree of advancement have a radiation that allows them to communicate simultaneously at several points. In some, the state of incarnation does not deaden that radiation completely enough to prevent them from manifesting themselves, even while awake. The more advanced the Spirit, the weaker are the bonds that unite it to the matter of the body; it is in a state of almost constant detachment, and one may say that it is where its thought is.” A Spirit.