Precursors of Spiritism.

— Among the men who, through their writings, prepared the definitive advent of Spiritism, there are those who drew their beliefs about our principles from tradition and teaching, while others arrived at these convictions through their own meditations, with the help of divine inspiration.

Dupont de Nemours, a writer almost forgotten today, and whose works we deem it a duty to point out to our readers, an admirer and follower of the doctrines of Leibnitz, a partisan of the theosophical school, was certainly, at the end of the last century, one of the most eminent precursors of the teachings of the present Spiritist Doctrine.

We affirm with the most complete certainty: it would be difficult to find, whether among his contemporaries or among the thinkers of our era, a writer who has better understood, solely by the force of reasoning, the true destinies of the soul, its probable origin, and the moral and spiritual conditions of its earthly existence.

No one better than he expressed in virile and deeply felt terms the role of God in the Universe, the infinite harmony and justice of the laws that govern creation, the limitless progression that rules all beings, from the invisible infusorium to man, and from man to God; no one better appreciated the importance of our communications with the invisible world, nor better conceived the nature of human trials, rewards, and expiations. Before him, certainly, never had the plurality of existences been better affirmed, the necessity of reincarnation and the forgetting of the past better established, the life of space better determined. Dupont de Nemours regards animals as the younger brothers of Humanity, as the inferior links of the continuous chain through which man had to pass before reaching the human state. Here is a thought that he has in common with that of his master Leibnitz. This great philosopher upholds the possibility, for the human Spirit, of having animated vegetables, then animals. We shall recall that there is no analogy whatever between this ceaselessly progressive system and that of animal metempsychosis for the future, which is evidently absurd. We hand over to our readers, without comment, this conception, which is found in the works of a great number of contemporary philosophers, reserving for ourselves the right to express our opinion on the matter later on. While we wait, we feel happy to see added to the voluminous dossier gathered by Mr. Allan Kardec on this interesting question, the reflections and communications of which it might be the object, whether on the part of isolated Spiritists, or of the groups and societies that may deem it opportune to study it.

— The following passages, drawn from the principal work of Dupont de Nemours, the Philosophy of the Universe, dedicated to the celebrated chemist Lavoisier, will prove better than the longest commentaries his claims to the recognition and admiration of spiritualists in general and, more particularly, of Spiritists.

Epigraph: Nothing from nothing; nothing without cause; nothing that has no effect.

Page 41 and following: There is no chance.

“That intelligent beings could be produced by an unintelligent cause, this is absurd; by chance, is an expression devised to conceal ignorance. There is no chance: not even in the most insignificant events, not even in the odds of gaming. But, because we are ignorant of the causes, we suppose, we believe, we say that there is chance, and we even calculate the number of our clumsinesses as odds of chance, although these clumsinesses are not chances, but physical effects of physical causes set in motion by a little-enlightened intelligence.

“That all intelligent beings have the power, more or less considerable, not to denature, but to arrange, combine, modify unintelligent things, is what all our works and those of the animals, our brothers, prove to us.

“We reject the word and the idea of chance, as empty of meaning and unworthy of philosophy. Nothing happens, nothing can happen except in conformity with the laws.

Theory of the perispirit.

“Two kinds of physical laws have struck us: those that communicate movement to inanimate matter and that are the object of the exact sciences, and those that impress it upon matter through the will of intelligent beings.

“It seemed to us that this manner of imparting movement must be linked to the extreme expansibility of a very subtle matter, and we found an example of this in the steam engine and in gunpowder; but the same difficulty remains, for it is no more comprehensible that an intelligence, a will, passions, should render expansible the most subtle matter than the most compact. Nevertheless, the fact is verified so frequently by each of our movements that we found ourselves forced to recognize in intelligence this force, more or less considerable according to the organization of the Spirits that are endowed with it. Page 51 and following: Solidarity; inner voice.

“Every good action is a kind of loan made to the human race; it is an advance, placed in a commerce where not all the ventures yield profit, but where the greater part bring returns more or less advantageous, so that no one multiplies them without their producing in the mass a great benefit.

“Conscience is, in the depths of the human heart, the perpetual minister of the Creator. It establishes a soul within the soul to judge the soul. It seems that there is a self that agitates and another self that decides whether the desire is honest, whether the action is good. There is no happiness when they are not in agreement, when the more impetuous of the two fails to respect the better and the wiser, for the latter does not lose its rights; it may yield momentarily in a combat, but it takes its revenge; it was born to command and finally commands. It can reward, when men oppress and think they punish. It can punish, when men heap praises and multiply rewards. Society does not see and must not judge anything but actions. Conscience, moreover, sees and judges intentions and motives. It makes one blush over ill-acquired recognition and usurped reputation. Page 127 and following: Existence and communication of disincarnated Spirits.

“Are there only men who have received this protective power of honest actions and who are susceptible to the sentiment that excites them, that directs them? Are they the most ingenious, the noblest, the richest in sensations and in faculty of all the citizens of the Universe, of all the intelligent beings created? Yes, of those known to us. But do we know all beings? Do we know at least those that inhabit our globe? Do we possess the sense that would be necessary to know them? Perhaps pride still answers yes; and it will be a senseless pride.

“Man, your sight plunges below you; you distinguish perfectly the uninterrupted gradation established by imperceptible shades among all the animals… Must progress stop at you? Lift up your eyes, you are worthy of them: you think, you were born to think. Do you dare to compare the frightful distance that you recognize between yourself and God with the distance so small that made me hesitate between you and the ant? Is this immense space empty?

“It is not, it cannot be; the Universe has no gap. If it is full, what fills it? We cannot know it; but, since the place exists, someone or something must be found in it. Why do we have no evident knowledge of these beings, whose fitness, analogy, necessity in the Universe strike reflection, the only thing that could point them out to us? Of these beings who must surpass us in perfection, in faculties, in strength, as much as we surpass the animals of the lowest class and the plants?… It is that we lack the organs and the senses necessary for our intelligence to communicate with them, although they may very well have organs of their own to identify and influence us, just as we identify and dominate entire races of animals that are ignorant of us, and that are inferior to us only in a very small number of senses. What poverty to have but five or six, and to be only men! We may have ten, a hundred… and it is thus that worlds encompass worlds and that intelligent beings are classified. “What we do for our younger brothers (the animals)… the genii, the angels (permit me to employ names in use to designate beings that I divine and that I do not know), those beings who are worth far more than us, do for us… But do not suppose, however, that I take the beings who are superior to us to be pure Spirits…

“We know perfectly well that our passions and our will move our body by a means that is unknown to us and that seems strongly to contradict the laws of gravitation, of physics, of mechanics, etc. This suffices for us to understand what must be, in the world and over us, the action of the superhuman intelligences that we can know by induction and by reasoning, in comparison with what we are to other animals, even fairly intelligent ones, which form not the slightest idea of us.

“We cannot hope to please the intelligences of a superior degree by acts that man himself would find odious. We can no more boast of deceiving them than we do men, by a hypocritical exterior, which only makes the crime more contemptible. They can witness our most secret actions; they can be informed of our soliloquies and even of our unformulated thoughts. We are ignorant of how many ways they have at their disposal to read in our heart; we, whose misery, coarseness, and ineptitude limit our means of knowing by touch, of seeing, hearing, and sometimes analyzing, conjecturing. That house which a celebrated Roman wished to build, open to the sight of all the citizens, exists and we dwell in it. Our neighbors are the chiefs and the magistrates of the great republic, invested with the right and the power to reward and punish, which for them is no mystery. And those who penetrate most completely its slightest variations, its most delicate inflections, are the most powerful and the wisest. “They never abandon us; we find them above all when we are alone. They accompany us in travel, in exile, in prison, in the dungeon. They hover about our pensive and tranquil head. We can question them; and every time we attempt it, one would say that they answer us. Why would they not? Indeed our friends render us a similar service, but only those who inspire in us a great respect.”

Page 161 and following: Plurality of existences.

“If the true self contains only our intelligence, our faculty of feeling, of reasoning; if our body and the organs that compose it are nothing but a machine at our service, that is, at the service of the intelligence that would be the self; if the limits of the present power of this intelligence are not due to its intelligent nature, but only to the greater or lesser degree of perfection of the machine that has been given to it to react; if it can perfect that machine and the use it makes of it, the thesis changes and all the consequences must change.

“I confess that this supposition appears true to me, and I hope to show you before ending this writing that it is the one that best harmonizes with the general laws, with the equitable order full of reason that prevails in the Universe. It seems to me that the I is not my arm, nor my head, nor a mixture of limbs and of spirit, but the intelligent principle that walks by my legs, strikes or labors by my arms, combines by my head, enjoys or suffers by all my organs. I see in these nothing but conductors suited to convey sensations and servants for my use. I shall never convince myself that the I is anything other than what feels, thinks, or reasons in me. “If I am not mistaken, and if there is no other Dupont besides the one who loves you, where is the difficulty, except when his house is destroyed? He will seek a new one for the intelligence that remains to him; he will solicit it and will receive it, whether from the intelligent beings who are superior to him, or from the rewarding God, or even from some law of Nature that is unknown to us and that, in order to animate the bodies of the superior intelligent beings, would give priority to the intelligent principles that had had the best conduct in a body of inferior order; to the one who was the most elevated, above the common reach of the other intelligent beings, bound hand and foot like him, beneath the organs of an animal of the same species…” Page 166 and following: Animal origins.

“Perhaps there is some induction to be drawn from the admirable resemblance found between certain men and certain animals. When I see my eyes, my brow, my nose, my chin, the neck, the loins, the gait, the passions, the character, the defects, the virtues, the probity, the pride, the gentleness, the anger, the laziness, the vigilance, and the obstinacy of a pedigree dog, I have no repugnance whatever in believing that formerly I was a loyal dog, singularly faithful and obedient to my master, hunting marvelously, caressing the children in my own way, defending the crops, guarding the flock by day and the door by night, lifting my paw against lapdogs, valiant to the point of daring to attack the tiger, at the risk of being eaten by it, confronting the wild boar and having no fear of the wolf. For these good qualities, clouded by some grumblings, some unwarranted quarrels, and some untimely caresses, one becomes the animal that I am: in general much esteemed, loved by some people and loving them still more; all in all, very happy; uneasy at times about its friends, sensitive to those incidents like a poor dog that is unjustly whipped. Forgetting of previous existences.

“The remembrance of the preceding life would be a powerful resource for the one that follows it; some beings superior to man, when they are in a gradual march of perfection and uninterrupted advancement, perhaps have this advantage as a reward for their past virtue; without doubt it cannot be granted except to those who are still being tried and who must ascend to God, beginning or beginning anew this career, an undertaking of high morality.”

[A. DESLIENS.]