The science of the concordance of numbers and fatality.

— Several times we have already been asked what we think about the concordance of numbers, and whether we believe in the value of this science. Our answer is quite simple: up to now we think nothing about it, because we have never occupied ourselves with it. n We have indeed seen some cases of singular concordances between the dates of certain events, but in a very small number from which to draw a conclusion, even an approximate one. To tell the truth, we do not see the reason for such a coincidence; but because one does not understand a thing, that is no reason for it not to exist. Nature has not said its last word, and what today is utopia may tomorrow be truth. It is possible that, among the facts, there exists a certain correlation, which we do not suspect, and which could be translated into numbers. In any case, one could not give the name of science to a calculation as hypothetical as that of numerical relations, with regard to the succession of events. A science is a body of facts numerous enough for rules to be deduced from them, and susceptible of demonstration. Now, in the present state of our knowledge, it would be absolutely impossible to give any theory whatever of facts of this kind, nor any satisfactory explanation. It is not, then, or, if you prefer, it is not yet a science, which does not imply its negation. There are facts about which we have a personal opinion; in the case at hand, we have none, and if we were to lean toward one side, it would rather be toward the negative, until proof to the contrary.

We base ourselves on the fact that time is relative; it can be appraised only in terms of comparison, and the points of reference are established by the revolution of the heavenly bodies, and these terms vary according to the worlds, because outside the worlds time does not exist: there is no unit by which to measure the infinite. Thus, there does not seem to be a universal law of concordance for the date of events, since the computation of duration varies according to the worlds, unless there be, in this respect, a particular law for each world, destined for its organization, as there is one for the duration of the life of its inhabitants.

Surely, if such a law exists, one day it will be recognized.

Spiritism, which assimilates all truths, when these are verified, will not reject this one; but since, up to the present, this law is not attested by a sufficient number of facts, nor by a categorical demonstration, we should concern ourselves with it all the less in that it interests us only in a very indirect manner. We do not conceal the gravity of this law, if indeed it exists, but since the door of Spiritism will always be open to all progressive ideas, to all the acquisitions of intelligence, it occupies itself with the needs of the moment, without fearing to be surpassed by the conquests of the future.

— The question having been put to the Spirits in a very serious group of the interior, and for that very reason generally well assisted, the reply was given:

“There are, certainly, in the body of moral phenomena as in physical phenomena, relations founded upon numbers. The law of the concordance of dates is not a chimera; it is one of those that will be revealed to you later, and will give you the key to things that seem to you anomalies. For, believe it well, Nature has no caprices; it marches always with precision and with certainty. Moreover, this law is not such as you imagine; to understand it in its reason for being, in its principle and in its usefulness, you need to acquire ideas that you do not yet possess, and that will come in their time. At present, this knowledge would be premature, which is why it is not given to you; it would be, then, useless to insist. Limit yourselves to gathering the facts; observe without concluding anything, for fear of deceiving yourselves. God knows how to give men intellectual nourishment to the measure that they are in a condition to bear it. Work above all on your moral advancement, the most essential, because it is through this that you will deserve to possess new lights.”

— We are of the same opinion. We think, even, that there would be more drawbacks than advantages in popularizing prematurely a belief which, in ignorant hands, could degenerate into abuse and into superstitious practices, for lack of the counterweight of a rational theory.

The principle of the concordance of dates is, then, entirely hypothetical; but if nothing may yet be affirmed in this regard, experience demonstrates that, in Nature, many things are subordinated to numerical laws, susceptible of the most rigorous calculation. This fact, of great importance, may perhaps one day shed light on the first question. It is thus, for example, that the chances of chance are subjected, in their whole, to a periodicity of admirable precision; the greater part of chemical combinations, for the formation of compound bodies, occur in definite proportions, that is, a determined number of molecules of each of the elementary bodies is needed, and one molecule more or less completely changes the nature of the compound body. (See Genesis, chapter X, no. 7 and following); crystallization operates under angles of a constant aperture; in astronomy, movements and forces follow progressions of a mathematical rigor, and celestial mechanics is as exact as terrestrial mechanics; the same occurs with the reflection of luminous, caloric, and sonorous rays; it is upon positive calculations that the chances of life and of mortality in insurance are established. It is certain, then, that numbers are in Nature and that numerical laws govern the greater part of phenomena of the physical order. Does the same occur in phenomena of the moral and metaphysical order? That is what it would be presumptuous to affirm, without more certain data than those that one possesses. This question, moreover, raises others that have their seriousness, and on which we judge it useful to present some observations from a general point of view.

— Since a numerical law governs the births and the mortality of individuals, could the same not occur, though on a vaster scale, with collective individualities, such as races, peoples, cities, etc.? The phases of their ascending march, of their decadence and of their end, the revolutions that mark the stages of the progress of Humanity, would they not be subject to a certain periodicity? As for the numerical units for the computation of humanitarian periods, if they are not the days, nor the years, nor the centuries, they could have as their basis the generations, as some facts would tend to make one suppose.

There is no system there; it is even less a theory, but a simple hypothesis, an idea founded on a probability, and which one day, perhaps, may serve as a point of departure for more positive ideas.

But, it will be said, if the events that decide the fate of Humanity, of a nation, of a tribe, have terms regulated by a numerical law, it will be the consecration of fatality and, then, what becomes of the free will of man? Is Spiritism laboring in error, when it says that nothing is fatal, and that man is the absolute master of his actions and of his fate?

To answer this objection, the question must be taken from higher up. First of all, let us say that Spiritism has never denied the fatality of certain things and that, on the contrary, it has always recognized it; but it says that this fatality does not hamper free will. Here is what is easy to demonstrate.

All the laws that govern the body of the phenomena of Nature have consequences that are necessarily fatal, that is, inevitable, and this fatality is indispensable to the maintenance of universal harmony. Man, who suffers these consequences, is, then, in some respects, submitted to fatality, in all that does not depend on his initiative. Thus, for example, he must fatally die; it is the common law, from which he cannot withdraw himself and, by virtue of this law, he may die at any age, when his hour comes; but if he voluntarily hastens his death, by suicide or by his excesses, he acts by virtue of his free will, because no one can constrain him to do it. He must eat to live: it is fatality; but if he eats beyond what is necessary, he performs an act of liberty. In his cell, the prisoner is free to move at will, in the space granted to him; but the walls that he cannot cross are for him the fatality that restricts his liberty. For the soldier discipline is a fatality, for it obliges him to acts independent of his will, but he is no less free in his personal actions, for which he is responsible. So it is with man in Nature. Nature has its fatal laws, which oppose to him a barrier, but short of which he can move at will.

— Why did God not give man entire liberty? Because God is like a provident father, who limits the liberty of his children to the level of their reasoning and of the use they can make of it. If man already makes such poor use of the liberty granted to him, if he does not know how to govern himself, what would it be if the laws of Nature were at his disposal, and if they did not oppose to him a salutary curb?

Man can, then, be free in his actions, despite the fatality that presides over the whole; he is free in a certain measure, within the limit necessary to leave him the responsibility for his acts. If, by virtue of this liberty, he disturbs the harmony by the evil he does, if he interposes an obstacle to the providential march of things, he is the first to suffer for it, and since the laws of Nature are stronger than he, he ends up being dragged along in the current; then he feels the need to return to good and everything regains its equilibrium. Thus, the return to good is still a free act, although provoked, but not imposed, by fatality.

The impulse given by the laws of Nature, as well as the limits they establish, are always good, because Nature is the work of divine wisdom. Resistance to these laws is an act of liberty and this resistance always unleashes evil. Man being free to observe or to infringe these laws, in what concerns his person, he is, then, free to do good or evil. If he could be fatally led to do evil, and since this facility could come only from a power superior to him, God would be the first to transgress His laws.

— Who is he to whom it has often happened to say: “If I had not acted as I acted in such a circumstance, I would not be in the position in which I am; if I had to begin again, I would act in another manner”? Was this not to recognize that he was free to do or not to do? that he was free to do better another time, if the occasion presented itself? Now, God, who is wiser than he, foreseeing the errors into which he may fall, the ill use he may make of his liberty, gives him indefinitely the possibility of beginning again through the succession of his corporeal existences, and he will begin again until, instructed by experience, he no longer mistakes his path.

Man can, then, according to his will, hasten the term of his trials, and it is in this that liberty consists. Let us thank God for not having closed forever to us the path of happiness, deciding our definitive fate after an ephemeral existence, notoriously insufficient for us to reach the top of the ladder of progress, and for having given us, by the very fatality of reincarnation, the means to acquire incessantly, renewing the trials in which we have failed.

— Fatality is absolute for the laws that govern matter, because matter is blind; it does not exist for the Spirit, itself called to react upon matter, by virtue of its liberty. If materialist doctrines were true, they would be the most formal consecration of fatality; because if man were only matter, he could not have initiative. Now, if you grant him initiative, in whatever it may be, it is because he is free; and if he is free, it is because he has within himself something beyond matter. Materialism being the negation of the spiritual principle, it is, for that very reason, the negation of liberty and, bizarre contradiction! the materialists, the very ones who proclaim the dogma of fatality, are the first to take advantage of their liberty; to claim it as a right in its most absolute plenitude, against those who restrict it, and this without suspecting that it is to claim the privilege of the Spirit, and not of matter.

— Here another question presents itself. Fatality and liberty are two principles that seem to exclude each other. Is the liberty of individual action compatible with the fatality of the laws that govern the whole, and does this action not come to disturb its harmony? Some examples taken from the most ordinary phenomena of the material order will make the solution of the problem evident.

We have said that the chances of chance balance out with surprising regularity. Indeed, it is a result well known in the game of red and black that, despite the irregularity of its outcome at each throw, the colors are equal in number at the end of a certain number of plays; that is, in one hundred plays, there will be fifty reds and fifty blacks; in a thousand, five hundred of one and five hundred of the other, approximately. The same occurs with even and odd numbers and with all the so-called double chances. If, instead of two colors, there are three, there will be a third of each; if there are four, a quarter, etc. Often the same color comes out in a series of two, three, four, five, six times in succession; in a certain number of plays, there will be as many series of two reds as of two blacks, as many of three reds as of three blacks, and so on; but the plays of two will be half as numerous as those of one; those of three, a third of those of one; those of four, a quarter, etc. In dice, since these have six faces, throwing them sixty times, one will arrive at ten times one point, ten times two points, ten times three points, and so with the others.

In the old lottery of France, there were ninety numbers placed in a wheel; five were drawn at a time. The registers of several years verified that each number had come out in the proportion of one ninetieth and each group of ten in the proportion of one ninth.

The proportion is all the more exact the more considerable the number of plays. In ten or twenty plays, for example, it may be very unequal, but the equilibrium is established to the measure that the number of plays increases, and this with a mathematical regularity. This being a constant fact, it is quite evident that a numerical law presides over this distribution, when it is left to itself and when nothing comes to force it or to hamper it. What is called chance is, then, submitted to a mathematical law or, better said, there is no chance. The capricious irregularity that manifests in each play, or in a small number of throws, does not prevent the law from following its course, whence one may say that there is in this distribution a true fatality; but this fatality, which presides over the whole, is null, or at least imperceptible, for each isolated throw or play. We have dwelt a little on the example of games, because it is one of the most admirable and easy to verify, by the possibility of multiplying the facts at will, in a short space of time; and since the law stands out from the body of facts, it was this multiplicity that allowed it to be recognized, without which it is probable that it would still be unknown.

The same law could be observed with precision in the chances of mortality. Death, which seems to strike indistinctly and blindly, nonetheless follows, in its whole, a regular and constant march, according to age. It is perfectly known that, in a thousand individuals of all ages, in one year so many will die between one and ten years, so many between ten and twenty years, so many between twenty and thirty years, and so on; or, else, that after a period of ten years, the number of survivors will be so many between one and ten years, so many between ten and twenty years, etc. Accidental causes of mortality may momentarily disturb this order, as in the game the appearance of a long series of the same color breaks the equilibrium; but if, instead of a period of ten years and a number of a thousand individuals, the observation is extended to fifty years and a hundred thousand individuals, the equilibrium will be reestablished. In accordance with this, it is permissible to suppose that all the eventualities that seem to be the effect of chance, thus in individual life, as in that of peoples and of Humanity, are governed by numerical laws, and what is lacking in order to recognize them is to be able to embrace at a single glance a mass sufficiently considerable of facts, and a lapse of time sufficient.

— For the same reason, there would be nothing absolutely impossible in that the body of facts of the moral and metaphysical order be equally subordinated to a numerical law, whose elements and bases, up to now, are totally unknown to us. In any case, one sees, by what precedes, that this law or, if one prefers, this fatality of the whole, would in no way annul free will. That is what we had proposed to demonstrate. Free will being exercised only over the isolated points of detail, it would not hamper the realization of the general law, as the irregularity of the outcome of each number does not hamper the proportional distribution of these same numbers over a certain number of outcomes. Man exercises his free will in the small sphere of his individual action; this small sphere may be in confusion, without this preventing it from gravitating in the whole according to the common law, just as the small eddies caused in the waters of a river by the fish that stir do not prevent the mass of the waters from following the forced course that the law of gravitation impresses upon it. Man having his free will, fatality does not participate in his individual actions; as for the events of private life, which at times seem to strike him fatally, they have two quite distinct sources: some are the direct consequence of his conduct in the present existence; many persons are unhappy, ill, infirm through their own fault; many accidents are the result of improvidence; he can complain only of himself, and not of fatality or, as it is said, of his bad star. The others are completely independent of the present life and, for that very reason, seem due to a certain fatality; but, even here, Spiritism demonstrates to us that this fatality is only apparent, and that certain painful situations of life have their reason for being in the plurality of existences. The Spirit chose them voluntarily in erraticity, before its incarnation, as trials for its advancement; they are, then, the product of free will, and not of fatality. If sometimes they are imposed, as expiation, by a superior will, it is still by reason of the evil actions voluntarily committed by man in a preceding existence, and not as a consequence of a fatal law, for he could have avoided them, by acting in another manner. Fatality is the curb imposed on man by a will superior to his, and wiser than he, in all that is not left to his initiative; but it is never a hindrance to the exercise of his free will, in what concerns his personal actions. Neither can it impose on him either evil or good; to excuse any evil action whatever by fatality or, as is often said, by destiny, would be to abdicate the judgment that God gave him, to weigh the pros and the cons, the opportuneness or the inopportuneness, the advantages or the drawbacks of each thing. If an event is in the destiny of a man, it will be realized, despite his will, and it will always be for his good; but the circumstances of the realization depend on the use he makes of his free will, and often he may make redound to his prejudice what should have been a good, if he acts with improvidence, and if he lets himself be dragged along by the passions. He deceives himself still more if he takes his desire or the wanderings of his imagination for his destiny. (See The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter V, no. 1 to 11.) Such are the reflections suggested to us by the three or four small calculations of concordance of dates, which were presented to us, and on which our opinion was asked. They were necessary to demonstrate that in such a matter, from a few identical facts one could not conclude to a general application. We took advantage of them to resolve, by new arguments, the grave question of fatality and of free will.

[1] [See article: A few words to the Spiritist Review.]