Charles Fourier.

A disciple of Charles Fourier, who is also a Spiritist, recently sent us an evocation with the request that we solicit a reply, if possible, in order to enlighten him on certain questions. As both seemed to us instructive, we transcribe them below.

(Paris.

– Desliens Group, March 9, 1869.)

“Brother Fourier, “From the heights of the supraterrestrial sphere, if your Spirit can see me and hear me, I ask you to communicate with me, in order to strengthen me in the conviction that your admirable theory of the four movements gave rise to in me concerning the law of universal harmony, or to undeceive me, if you yourself had the misfortune to be mistaken. – To you, whose incomparable genius seems to have lifted the curtain that concealed Nature, and whose Spirit must be even more lucid than it was in the material world, I ask you to tell me whether you recognize, in the world of Spirits, as on Earth, the existence of a disturbance of the natural order established by God, in our social organization; whether the passional attractions are truly the lever of which God makes use to lead man to his true destiny; whether analogy is a sure means of discovering the truth. “I ask you to also tell me what you think of the cooperative societies that are springing up on all sides over the surface of our globe. If your Spirit can read the thought of the sincere man, you must know that doubt makes him unhappy; that is why I beseech you, from your dwelling beyond the grave, to be so kind as to do everything within your power to convince me.

“Receive, our brother, the assurance of the respect that I owe to your memory and of my deepest veneration.”

J. G.

Reply. – It is a very grave question, dear brother in belief, to ask a man whether he was mistaken, when a certain number of years have passed since he set forth the system that best satisfied his aspirations toward the unknown! Was I mistaken?… Who has not been mistaken when he wished to lift, by his own forces alone, the veil that concealed from him the sacred fire!

Prometheus made men with that fire, but the law of progress condemned those men to physical and moral struggles. I made a system, destined, like all systems, to live for a time, then to be transformed, to associate itself with new and truer elements. See, there are ideas like men. Once they are born, they do not die: they are transformed. Coarse at first, wrapped in the gangue of language, they successively find craftsmen who cut them and polish them more and more, until the shapeless pebble has become the diamond of vivid brilliance, the precious stone par excellence.

“I sought conscientiously and found much. Relying on the principles already acquired, I made intelligent and regenerating thought advance a few steps. What I discovered was true in principle; I falsified it in wishing to apply it. I wished to create the series, to establish harmonies; but those series, those harmonies needed no creator; they existed from the beginning; I could only disturb them, in wishing to establish them upon the small foundations of my conception, when God had given them the Universe as a gigantic laboratory. “My most serious title, and the one they are unaware of and perhaps most disdain, is to have shared with Jean Reynaud, Ballanche, Joseph de Maistre and many others, the presentiment of the truth; it is to have dreamed of that human regeneration through trial, that succession of reparatory existences, that communication of the free world and the world chained to matter, which you have the happiness of touching with your finger. We had foreseen, and you realize, our dream. These are our greatest titles of glory, the only ones which, for my part, I esteem and of which I most often recall. “You say that you doubt, my friend! so much the better; for he who truly doubts, searches; and he who searches, finds. Search, then, and if it depends only on me to place conviction in your hands, count on my devoted assistance. But listen to a friend's counsel, which I put into practice in my life and with which I always fared well: “If you wish a serious demonstration of a universal law, seek its individual application. Do you wish the truth? Seek it in yourselves and in the observation of the facts of your own life. All the elements of the proof are there. Let him who wishes to know examine himself, and he will find.” Ch. Fourier. n [1]

[v. Charles Fourier.]