The soul.

THE SOUL, a demonstration of its reality, deduced from the study of the effects of chloroform and curare upon the animal economy [upon the animal organism], by Mr. RAMON DE LA SAGRA [1798-1871], corresponding member of the Institute of France. (Academy of Moral and Political Sciences), of the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands, etc. n

— We said in an article above [Spontaneous generation and genesis] that the researches of Science, even aiming at the exclusive study of matter, would lead to spiritualism, through the impossibility of explaining certain effects with the aid of the laws of matter alone; on the other hand, we have repeated many times that in catalepsy, in lethargy, in anesthesia n by chloroform or other substances, in natural somnambulism, in ecstasy and in certain pathological states, the soul reveals itself by an action independent of the organism, and gives, through its isolation, the patent proof of its existence. We do not refer to magnetism, nor to artificial somnambulism, nor to double sight, nor to Spiritist manifestations, which official Science has not yet recognized, but to the phenomena upon which it is in a position to make experiments every day. Science has sought the soul with the scalpel and the microscope in the brain and in the nervous ganglia, and has not found it; the analysis of those substances gave it nothing but oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon, whence it concluded that the soul was not distinct from matter. If it does not find it, the reason is very simple: it makes of the soul a fixed, preconceived idea; it imagines it endowed with the properties of tangible matter; it is under that form that it seeks it and, naturally, it could not recognize it, even when it had it before its eyes. Since certain organs are the instruments of the manifestations of thought, and since, by destroying those organs, manifestation ceases, Science concludes very unphilosophically that it is the organs that think, exactly as if a person who had cut the telegraph wire and interrupted the transmission of a dispatch claimed to have destroyed the one who sent it. The telegraphic apparatus offers us, by comparison, an exact image of the functioning of the soul in the organism. Let us suppose that an individual receives a telegram and that, being ignorant of its origin, he gives himself over to the following researches: He follows the transmitting wire back to its point of departure; along the way he looks for its sender all along the wire and does not find him; the wire leads him to Paris, to the telegraph office, to the apparatus. He says: “It was from here that the telegram departed, I have no doubt; it is a fact materially demonstrated.” He explores the apparatus and dismantles it to look for its sender, and finding nothing but wood, copper, a wheel, he says: “Since the telegram departed from here and here I find no one, it was this mechanism that conceived the dispatch; this is demonstrated to me no less materially.” Meanwhile, another individual, placing himself beside the apparatus, sets about repeating the telegram, word for word, and says to him: “How can you suppose, you, an intelligent man, that this mechanism, composed of inert, destructible matter, could have conceived the thought of the telegram you received, and known the fact that this dispatch communicated to you? If matter had the faculty of thinking, why would iron, stone and wood not have ideas? If that faculty depends on the order and arrangement of the parts, why does man not build thinking automatons? Has it ever come into your mind to believe that those dolls which say: papa, mama, have consciousness of what they do? On the contrary, did you not admire the intelligence of the author of that ingenious mechanism?” Here, the new interlocutor is the soul, which conceives the thought; the apparatus is the brain, where it concentrates and formulates itself; electricity is the fluid directly impregnated with thought and charged with carrying it far, as the air carries sound; the metallic wires are the nervous cords destined for the transmission of the fluid; the first individual is the scholar in search of the soul, who follows the nervous cords, seeks it in the brain and, not finding it, concludes that it is the brain that thinks; he does not hear the voice that says to him: “You persist in seeking me within, when I am without; look to the side and you will see me; the nerves, the brain and the fluids think no more than the metallic wire, the telegraphic apparatus and electricity; they are nothing but instruments of the manifestation of thought, ingeniously combined by the inventor of the human machine.”

— In all ages very frequent spontaneous phenomena, such as catalepsy, lethargy, natural somnambulism and ecstasy, have shown the soul acting outside the organism; but Science has disdained them from this point of view. Now, behold, a new discovery, anesthesia by chloroform, of incontestable utility in surgical operations, and whose effects, for that very reason, one is forced to study, daily makes Science a witness of this phenomenon, laying bare, so to speak, the soul of the patient; it is the voice that cries: “Look outside, and not inside, and then you will see me.” But there are creatures who have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear.

Among the numerous facts of this kind, the following occurred in the practice of Dr. Velpeau:

“A woman who had manifested no sign of pain while I was freeing her of a voluminous tumor awoke smiling and said to me: ‘I know well that it is over; let me come back completely and I will explain this… I felt absolutely nothing,’ she soon added, ‘but here is how I knew that I had been operated upon. In my sleep, I went to pay a visit to a lady of my acquaintance, to speak about a poor child whom we were to place in an institution. While we were conversing, the lady said to me: You believe you are at this moment in my house, do you not? Well then! my dear friend, you are completely mistaken, for you are in your own house, in your bed, where they are performing an operation upon you this very instant. Far from being alarmed by her words, I answered her ingenuously: Ah! if it is so, I ask your permission to prolong my visit a little, so that everything may be finished when I return home. And thus it is that, opening my eyes, even before being fully awakened, I was able to announce to you that I had been operated upon.’” Chloroform offers thousands of examples as conclusive as this one.

Communicating this and other analogous facts to the Academy of Sciences, on March 4, 1850, Mr. Velpeau exclaimed: “What a fertile source for psychology and physiology are these acts which go so far as to separate the spirit from matter, or the intelligence from the body!”

Then Mr. Velpeau saw the soul in action outside the organism; he was able to verify its existence by its independence; he heard the voice that said to him: I am without, and not within. Why, then, did he make profession of materialist faith? He said afterward, when he was in the world of the Spirits: “The pride of the scholar, who did not wish to contradict himself.” Yet he did not fear to go back on certain erroneous scientific opinions that he had publicly professed. In his Treatise on Operative Medicine, published in 1839, volume I, page 32, he says: “To avoid pain in operations is a chimera which today it is not permitted to pursue. Cutting instrument and pain, in operative medicine, are two words which do not present themselves one upon the other to the mind of the sick, and whose association must necessarily be admitted.” Chloroform came to give him the lie on this point, as on the question of the soul. Why, then, did he accept the one and not the other? Mystery of human weaknesses! If, in his lessons, Mr. Velpeau had said to his students: “Gentlemen, you are told that you will not find the soul at the tip of your scalpel, and you are right, for it is not there and you would seek it there in vain, as I myself did; but study the intelligent manifestations in the phenomena of anesthesia and you will have the irrefutable proof of its existence; it was there that I found it and every observer of good faith will find it. In the presence of such facts, it is no longer possible to deny it, since one can verify its action independent of the organism and, to put it well, isolate it at will.” Speaking thus, he would have done nothing but complete the thought he had expressed before the Academy of Sciences. With such language, supported by the authority of his name, he would have made a revolution in the medical art. It was a glory that he repudiated and that he today bitterly laments, but which others will inherit.

— Such is the thesis that has just been developed with remarkable talent by Mr. Ramon de la Sagra, in the work that constitutes the object of this article. The author there describes with method and clarity, from the point of view of pure science, which is familiar to him, all the phases of anesthesia by chloroform, by ether, by curare n and other agents, according to his own observations and those of the most accredited authors, such as Velpeau, Gerdy, Bouisson [Prof. of Surgical Clinic at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier], Flourens, Simonin [Amédée H. Simonin?], etc. The technical and scientific part there occupies a large space, but this was necessary for a rigorous demonstration. Moreover, it contains numerous facts, from which we gathered what we referred to above. From it we likewise take the following conclusions: “Since it is a fact perfectly established by the anesthetic phenomena that ether extinguishes the life of the nerves that conduct the impressions of the senses, while leaving free the intellectual faculties, it also becomes incontestable that these faculties do not essentially depend upon the nervous organs. Now, since the organs of the senses, which produce the impressions, act only by the nerves, it is clear that, these being paralyzed, the whole organism of animal life, of the life of relation, is annihilated for those intellectual faculties which, nonetheless, continue to function. It is therefore necessary to confess that their existence, or rather, their reality, does not essentially depend upon the organism and that, from then on, they proceed from a principle distinct from it, independent of it, able to function without it and outside of it. “Here, then, is the reality of the soul rigorously demonstrated, incontestably established, without any physiological observation being able to prejudice it. We can see issuing from this conclusion, like jets of light illuminating distant horizons, which, however, we shall not approach, because that kind of study escapes the framework we have set for ourselves.

“The psychological point of view, under which we have just presented the effects of anesthetic substances upon the animal economy [the animal organism], and the consequences that we deduce from it in favor of the reality of the existence of the soul, must suggest the hope that a similar method, applied to the study of other analogous phenomena of life, could lead to the same result.

“No deduction would be more just, for the physiological and psychological effects that show themselves during alcoholic intoxication, pathological delirium, natural and magnetic sleep, ecstasy and even madness, offer the greatest resemblance, in many points, to the effects of the anesthetic substances that we have just studied in this work. Such a concordance of diverse phenomena, proceeding from different causes, in favor of an identical conclusion, ought not to surprise us. It is nothing but the consequence of what we have proved: the reality of the existence of an essence distinct from matter in the human organism, and to which are restored the intellectual functions that matter alone could never fulfill. “This would be the place to examine another question, to make an incursion into the domain of animal magnetism, which sustains the permanence of the sensorial faculties outside the senses, that is, of sight, hearing, taste, smell, during the complete paralysis of the organs which, in the normal state, provide those impressions. But this doctrine, whose truth we wish neither to contest nor to sustain, is not admitted by physiological science, which is sufficient for us to eliminate it from our present researches.”

— This last paragraph proves that the author did, for the demonstration of the soul, what Mr. Flammarion did for that of God, that is, that he placed himself on the very ground of experimental science and that he wished to draw, from facts officially recognized alone, the proof of his thesis. He promises us another work, which cannot fail to be of great interest, in which there will be studied, from the same point of view, the various phenomena that he only mentions, for he limited himself to those of anesthesia by chloroform.

Certainly this proof is not necessary to establish the conviction of Spiritists, nor of spiritualists; but, after God, the existence of the soul being the fundamental basis of Spiritism, we must consider as eminently useful to the Doctrine every work that tends to demonstrate to it its fundamental principles. Now, the action of the soul, abstraction made of the organism, once proved, is a point of departure which, like the plurality of existences and the perispirit, little by little and by logical deduction, leads to all the consequences of Spiritism.

Indeed, the example referred to above is of the purest Spiritism, which Mr. Velpeau did not even suspect when he published it; and if we had been able to cite them all, it would be seen that the anesthetic phenomena prove not only the reality of the soul, but that of Spiritism.

It is thus that everything concurs, as was announced, to open the way of the new doctrine; one arrives at it by a host of exits, all converging toward a common center, and many people bring to it their stone, some consciously, others without realizing it.

The work of Mr. Ramon de la Sagra is one of those whose publication we have the pleasure of applauding, because, notwithstanding that abstraction has been made of Spiritism in it, we can consider them — like God in Nature, by Mr. Flammarion, and The Plurality of Existences, by Mr. Pezzani — as monographs of the fundamental principles of the Doctrine, to which they give the authority of Science.

Allan Kardec.

[1] One vol. in-12. Price: 2 fr. 50; by Post, 2 fr.

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[2] Anesthesia, suspension of sensibility; from the Greek a, privative, and aistesin, to feel.

[3] Curare is an eminently toxic substance, which the savages of the Orinoco extract from certain plants and with which they moisten the tip of their arrows, which produce mortal wounds.

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