Moral responsibility

I am present at all your mental conversations, but without directing them; your thoughts are emitted in my presence, but I do not provoke them. It is the presentiment of cases, which have some chance of presenting themselves, that gives rise in you to the thoughts suited to the resolution of the difficulties they might raise for you. There is free will; it is the exercise of the incarnate Spirit, trying to resolve problems that it raises within itself.

Indeed, if men had only the ideas that the Spirits inspire in them, they would have little responsibility and little merit; they would have only the responsibility of having listened to bad counsels, or the merit of having followed good ones. Now, this responsibility and this merit would evidently be less than if they were the entire result of free will, that is, of acts performed in the full exercise of the faculties of the Spirit, which, in this case, acts without any solicitation.

It results from what I say that men often have thoughts that are essentially their own, and that the calculations to which they give themselves, the reasonings they make, the conclusions at which they arrive are the result of intellectual exercise, in the same way that manual labor is the result of bodily exercise. From this one should not conclude that man is not assisted in his thoughts and in his acts by the Spirits who surround him; quite the contrary; the Spirits, whether benevolent or malevolent, are often the provoking cause of your acts and thoughts; but you are completely unaware of the circumstances in which this influence is produced, so that, in acting, you think you do so by virtue of your own movement: your free will remains intact; there is no difference between the acts you perform without being impelled to them, and those you perform under the influence of the Spirits, except in the degree of merit or of responsibility. In the one case and the other, responsibility and merit exist, but, I repeat, they do not exist in the same degree. I believe that this principle which I enunciate needs no demonstration; to prove it, it will suffice for me to make a comparison with what exists among you.

If a man has committed a crime, and did so seduced by the dangerous counsels of another man who exercises much influence over him, human justice will know how to recognize this, granting him the benefit of extenuating circumstances; it will go further: it will punish the man whose pernicious counsels provoked the crime, and, even without having contributed in any other way, this man will be more severely punished than the one who was the instrument, because it was his thought that conceived the crime, and his influence over a weaker being that made it be carried out. Well then! if men act thus, diminishing the responsibility of the criminal and sharing it with the infamous one who impelled him to commit the crime, how would you have God, who is justice itself, not do the same, since your reason tells you that it is just to act so? As regards the merit of good actions, which I said is less if the man has been solicited to practice them, it is the counterpart of what I have just said concerning responsibility, and it can be demonstrated by inverting the proposition.

Thus, then, when it happens that you reflect and pass your ideas from one subject to another; when you discuss mentally about the facts that you foresee or that have already taken place; when you analyze, when you reason and when you judge, do not believe that it is Spirits who dictate your thoughts to you or who direct you; they are there, near you, and they listen to you; they see with pleasure this intellectual exercise to which you give yourself; their pleasure is twofold, when they see that your conclusions are in conformity with the truth.

At times it happens to them, evidently, that they mingle in this exercise, whether to facilitate it, whether to give the Spirit some nourishment, or to create some difficulties for it, in order to make this intellectual gymnastics more profitable to the one who practices it. But, in general, the man who seeks, when given over to his reflections, almost always acts alone, under the watchful gaze of his protecting Spirit, who intervenes if the case is grave enough to render his intervention necessary.

Your father, who watches over you, and who is glad to see you almost recovered. (The medium was coming out of a grave illness).

Louis Nivard.