The Newspaper La Solidarité.

Spiritism leads precisely to the end proposed by all men of progress. It is, then, impossible that, even without knowing one another, they should not meet on certain points, and that, when they come to know one another, they should not join hands to march together to meet their common enemies: social prejudices, routine, fanaticism, intolerance, and ignorance.

La Solidarité is a newspaper whose editors take their title seriously. And what field more vast and more fruitful for the moralist philosopher than this word, which contains the whole program of the future of Humanity! That is why this paper, if it does not have the popularity of the lightweight papers, has won a more solid credit among serious thinkers. n Although until today it has not shown itself very sympathetic to our doctrines, we do no less justice to the sincerity of its points of view and to the incontestable talent of its editing. It is, then, with lively satisfaction that today we see it, in its turn, do justice to the principles of Spiritism. Its editors will also do us the justice of recognizing that we made no effort to bring them to us. Their opinion, therefore, results from no personal condescension. Under the title of: Bulletin of the philosophical and religious movement, the issue of May 1 contains a remarkable article, from which we extract the following passages:

“The confusion goes on increasing without cease. Where will it end? It is not only in politics that people no longer understand one another; it is not only in social economy [organization], it is also in morals and in religion, so that the disturbance extends to all the spheres of human activity, has invaded the whole domain of conscience, and that civilization itself is at issue.

“Not that the material order is in danger. There are today in society too many acquired elements and too many interests to preserve for the material order to be seriously disturbed in it. But the material order proves nothing. It may persist for a long time, until the very principle of social life is reached and corruption slowly dissolves the organism. Order reigned in Rome under the Caesars, while Roman civilization was crumbling day by day, not under the effort of the barbarians, but under the weight of its own vices.

“Will our society succeed in eliminating from its midst the morbid elements that threaten to turn into germs of dissolution and death? We hope so, but the support of eternal principles is necessary, the assistance of a truly positive science, and the prospect of a new ideal.

“Such are the conditions of social salvation, because therein lie, for individuals, the means of a true rebirth. A society can be no more than the product of the social beings that constitute it, and as the resultant of their physical, intellectual, and moral state. If you want a social transformation, first make the new man. n “Although the circle of readers of philosophical publications has grown much in these last years, how many people still ignore the existence of these newspapers or neglect to read them! It is a mistake. Without them, it is impossible to give an account of the state of souls. The organs of contemporary philosophy have yet another scope: they prepare the questions that events will soon raise, and which it will be urgent to resolve.

“Certainly the confusion is great in the philosophical press; it is somewhat the tower of Babel: each one there speaks his own language and is far more concerned with drowning out his neighbor’s voice than with listening to his reasons. Each system aspires to be unique and excludes all the others. But one must guard against taking them literally in their exclusivism. Perhaps there is not a single one that does not represent some legitimate point of view. All will pass: truth alone is eternal; but, perhaps, none of them is completely sterile; none will have vanished without adding something to the intellectual capital of Humanity. Materialism, religious positivism and philosophical positivism, independentism (forgive the barbarism, which is not mine), criticism, idealism, spiritualism, Spiritism – for one must reckon with this newcomer, which has more adherents than all the others combined – and, on the other hand, liberal Protestantism, liberal idealism, and even liberal Catholicism: such are the names of the principal banners which, under various titles and with unequal forces, are represented in the philosophical field. No doubt there is no army there, because there is no obedience to a leader, no hierarchy, no discipline, but these groups, today divided and independent, may be united by a common danger. “The philosophical movement we are witnessing precedes by a short time the great religious movement that is preparing. Soon religious questions will impassion minds, as social questions did a little while ago, and even more strongly still.

“Whatever order is to be founded by a simple evolution of the Christian idea, restored to its primitive purity, as some think, or by a kind of fusion of beliefs on the vague ground of a Judeo-Christian deism, as other men of good will hope, or, what seems to us much more probable, by the intervention of a broader and more comprehensible idea, which gives human life its true object, the first necessity of the epoch in which we are is liberty: liberty to think and to publish one’s thought, liberty of conscience and of worship, liberty of propaganda and of preaching! Certainly, amid so many systems confronting one another, it is impossible not to see a phase of ardent, impassioned, apparently disorderly discussions open up, although this preparatory phase is necessary, as chaotic agitation is necessary to creation. Like the flashes of lightning and the thunderbolts in the terrestrial atmosphere, the fermentation of ideas stirs the moral atmosphere in order to purify it. Who can fear the storm, knowing that it must restore the disturbed equilibrium and renew the sources of life?” The same issue contains the following appraisal of our work on Genesis. We reproduce it only because it bears on the general interests of the doctrine:

“There is taking place in our epoch a fact of capital importance, and people pretend not to see it. Yet there are phenomena to observe there, which interest Science, notably physics and human physiology; but, even if the phenomena called Spiritism existed only in the imagination of their adepts, the belief in Spiritism, spread with such rapidity everywhere, is in itself a considerable phenomenon and very worthy of occupying the meditations of the philosopher.

“It is difficult, even impossible, to appraise the number of people who believe in Spiritism, but it may be said that this belief is general in the United States, and that it propagates itself more and more in Europe. In France there is a whole Spiritist literature. Paris possesses two or three newspapers that represent it. Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, each has its own.

“In France, Mr. Allan Kardec is the most eminent representative of Spiritism. It was a good fortune for this belief to have found an intelligence that knew how to keep it within the limits of rationalism. It would have been easy, with all that mixture of real phenomena and of purely ideal and subjective creations that constitute the marvel of what is called Spiritism, to let oneself be carried away by the attraction of the miraculous and by the resurrection of the old superstitions! Spiritism could have given the enemies of reason a powerful support, had it returned to demonology, and there exists within the Catholic world a party that still makes every effort toward this. There is also a whole deplorable, harmful literature, but happily without influence. On the contrary, Spiritism, in France as in the United States, has resisted the spirit of the Middle Ages. The demon plays no role in it, and the miracle does not come there to introduce its foolish explanations. “Setting aside the hypothesis that constitutes the foundation of Spiritism, and that consists in the belief that the Spirits of dead persons commune with the living by means of certain processes of correspondence, very simple and within everyone’s reach; setting aside, we were saying, the hypothesis of this point of departure, we find ourselves in the presence of a general doctrine which is perfectly in relation with the state of Science in our epoch, and which responds perfectly to modern needs and aspirations. And what is remarkable is that the Spiritist Doctrine is more or less the same everywhere. If it is studied only in France, one may believe that the works of Mr. Allan Kardec, which are like the encyclopedia of Spiritism, are so there for many. But this parity of the doctrine extends to other countries; for example, the teachings of Davis, in the United States, do not differ essentially from those of Mr. Allan Kardec. It is true that in the ideas put forth by Spiritism, nothing is found that could not have been found by the human mind left to the resources of imagination and positive science alone; but, since the syntheses proposed by Spiritist writers are scientific and rational, they deserve to be examined without prejudice, without preconceived idea, by philosophical criticism. “The new work of Mr. Allan Kardec addresses the questions that constitute the object of our studies. Today we cannot give a report of it. We shall return to it in a coming issue and, at the same time, we shall say what we think of the so-called Spiritist phenomena, and of the explanations that can be given of them in the present state of Science.”

Note – This same issue contains a remarkable article by Mr.

Raisant, entitled: My religious ideal, and which Spiritists would not disapprove of. [See in the Review of August: The newspaper La Solidarité.]

[1] La Solidarité, monthly newspaper of 16 pages in quarto, appearing on the 1st of each month. Price: Paris, 5 francs per year; Departments, 6 francs; abroad: 7 francs. Price of an issue: 25 centimes; by post: 30 centimes. – Editorial office: rue des Saints-Pères, 13, at the Bookshop of Social Sciences.

[2] We wrote in 1862: “Before making institutions for men, one must form men for the institutions.” (Spiritist Journey.)