Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1866

With the title “Second Sight”, several journals reproduced the fact below, among them “La Patrie”, on November 26th, and “l‘Evénement”, on November 28th.

“A young lady from Swabia is soon to arrive in Paris; her mental state goes far beyond the charlatanism of the Davenport and other Spiritists. Luisa B… is sixteen years old, lives with her parents, peasants in a place called B)(ondru (Seine-et-Marne), where they settled after leaving Germany.

Following a tremendous grief for the loss of her sister, Luisa fell in a lethargic sleep that lasted fifty six hours. After that time, she woke up to a strange life, summarized in the following terms:

Luisa suddenly lost her vivacity and joyfulness, but she did not suffer, falling in beatitude, added to a profound calmness. She remains still on a chair the whole day, responding by monosyllables when asked. At night she falls on a cataleptic state, characterized by the stiffness of the limbs and a gazing look. At this time her faculties and senses acquire a sensitivity that goes beyond the limits of human capacity. She has not only a second sight but still a second hearing, that is, she hears words said near her or in a more or less distance place where she concentrates her attention. Any object in her hands acquire a doble image. As everybody else, she feels the shape and appearance of the object; she distinctly sees the inside of the object, its properties and the destination in nature.

Having several plants, metallic and mineral samples submitted to her unconscious appreciation, she provided latent and unexplored properties that take us back to the discoveries of alchemy of the Middle Ages. Luisa experiences a similar effect with respect to the appearance of persons that are touched by her hands. She sees them as they are and as they were at an earlier age. Aging effects of time and diseases disappear before her, and if the person had lost a limb, she still sees that limb.

“The young peasant woman claims that, sheltered from all modifications of the external vital action, the bodily form remains fully reproduced by the nervous fluid. Luisa is transported to places where there are graves, describing, as we mentioned, the persons whose remains were confided to earth. She then experiences spasms and nervous breakdowns, in the same way that she does when approaches places with water and metals, irrespective of the depth. When the young Luisa passes from the ordinary life to what one can call a superior life, she seems to have a thick veil lifted from her eyes.

She explains in a new way that the creation is a permanent object of admiration by her, and despite being illiterate, she finds truly poetic mages and comparisons to express her enthusiasm.

There is no religious concern mixed with such impressions. Her parents carefully hide those uncommon phenomena and do not see them as a theme of speculation. They brought her to Paris because that nervous hyperexcitation has a destructive effect on her body that visibly weakens. The doctors that are attending her recommended to have her brought to the capital, to obtain the support of the masters in the art of healing and to submit to them the phenomena that transcend the ordinary circle of investigation, and whose explanation has not yet been found.”

The phenomena presented by that young woman, the author of the article says, leave the charlatanism of the Davenport brothers well behind. If such phenomena are real, what are their relationship with magic? Why such comparison between dissimilar things, saying that one surpasses the other?

With the intent of twisting the arm of Spiritism, the author unwillingly announces a great truth to support what they want to stain. He states a truly Spiritist fact, that Spiritism acknowledges and accepts as such, while it has never supported the Davenport brothers, and even less presented them as followers and apostles. The journalist gentlemen would have known this, had they taken into account the many protests that came to them from all sides, against the assimilation that they pretended to establish between an essentially moral doctrine and their theatrical exhibitions.

They say that an explanation has not yet been given to the phenomena. It is true when it comes to the official science, but this has no longer been a mystery to the Spiritist science for a long time. However, there is no lack of means to learn about it. The cases of catalepsy, double sight, natural somnambulism, and the strange faculties that develop in those several states, are not rare. Why is science still searching for the explanation? Because science stubbornly searches in the wrong place and where it will never be found, that is in the properties of matter.

Take a man that lives: he thinks, reasons; a second later he dies and gives no sign of intelligence. Thus, he carried something, while thinking, that does not exist anymore because he no longer thinks. What was it that thought? According to you, it was matter. But matter is still there, whole, nothing missing. Why then, matter was thinking a short while ago and no longer thinks? It is undoubtedly disorganized; the molecules have disaggregated; a fiber did perhaps break; something broke and the intellectual activity ceased. There we have the genius, the greatest human ideas and conceptions to the mercy of a fiber, an imperceptible atom, and a whole life of endeavors lost! Nothing left from that whole intellectual baggage, acquired with great effort; the most beautiful mind is just a well construed clock that, once disturbed, is just junk material! Not very logical, not much encouraging. With such a perspective, it would no doubt be better to just eat and drink. But, nonetheless, it is a system.

For you, the soul is just a hypothesis. But doesn’t such hypothesis become true in cases like that of the young lady in question? The soul here is in the open; you do not see it but you see it act and think separated from the material envelope. It transports itself to far away places. It hears and sees, despite the insensitivity of the organs. Can those phenomena that take place beyond the sphere of activity of the body, be explained? Isn’t that a proof that the soul is independent of those organs? How come the soul is not recognized by such evident signs? Fact is that one does need to admit the intervention of the soul in pathological and physiological phenomena, that would then no longer be purely material. Well, how can one acknowledge a spiritual element in the phenomena of life, when one is constantly saying the opposite? They cannot acknowledge that because they would have to recognize that they were mistaken, hardly belied by the very soul that they denied. Therefore, considering that the soul shows itself in many places and with a lot of evidence, they swiftly cover it with a bushel, and the matter goes quiet. That is what happened to hypnotism and many others. God does not wish it to be the same with Luisa B… They minimize it by saying that the phenomena are illusions, that the promoters are insane persons or charlatans.

That is the reason that made them neglect the interesting and plentiful of moral results of the psychological phenomena; that is also the cause of repugnance of Spiritism by materialism; Spiritism that is entirely founded on the ostensive manifestations of the soul, in this life and beyond.

But they will say, the religious party, overcome by materialism, must welcome, with interest, the phenomena that defeats disbelief by the evidence. Why then, instead of transforming it into a weapon, they repeal it? It is for the fact that the soul is indiscrete, presenting itself in a very different state from the system that they built; they would have to retreat from the so called immutable beliefs; it would then be necessary to keep it silent.

But they did not count on a subtlety; they cannot restrain it like a bird in a cage; if they close one door, a thousand others are open. The soul is now heard everywhere, telling us in all corners of the world: this is what we are. Those that preclude it will be really skillful.

Let us go back to our subject. The lady in question presents the very common phenomenon, similar to many, of extension of her senses. This extension, the article says, reaches a level that goes beyond human limits. We need to differentiate two kinds of faculties here: the perceptive faculties, that is, vision and hearing, and the intellectual faculties. The former is activated by exterior agents, whose action reaches the interior; the latter constitute thought that irradiates from within to the exterior. Let us begin by the first ones.

In its normal state, the soul perceives by the senses. Here, the young woman perceives what is beyond the reach of her vision and hearing. She sees inside things, penetrating opaque bodies, describing things that take place far away, and therefore sees differently from what she would see with her eyes, and hears differently from what she would hear with her ears, and all that in a state that the body is characterized by insensitivity.

If it were a single, isolated, exceptional fact, it could be attributed to some natural singularity, a kind of monstrosity, but it is common fact; it happens in identical way, at different levels, in most cases of catalepsy, lethargy, natural and artificial somnambulism, and even in individuals that show every sign of a normal state. It is then produced by the consequence of a law. How could such an important fact have been neglect by science, that considers the movement of attraction of the tiniest particle?

The development of the intellectual faculties is even more extraordinary. Here we have a young peasant, illiterate woman, that has not only expressed herself with elegance, poetry, but also revealed scientific knowledge about things that she ignored, and not less importantly, all that in a particular state, after which she comes back, forgets everything, and returns to her original state of ignorance. In the ecstatic state, however, she recovers the memory with the same skills and knowledge. It is like two different lives to her.

If, according to the materialistic school, the faculties are the direct product of the organs; if, utilizing an expression from that school, “the brain secretes thoughts, like the liver secretes bile”, it then secretes formal knowledge, without the help of a teacher. It is a property not yet know of that organ. Following the same hypothesis, how can one explain such an extraordinary intellectual development, those transcendental faculties, enjoyed off and on, lost and recovered almost instantaneously, with the same brain? Isn’t that a positive proof of the human duality, of the separation of the material from the spiritual principle?

Nothing exceptional yet here: such a phenomenon is as common as that of the extension of sight and hearing. Like this one, it depends on a law.



These are the laws sought by Spiritism and that were found through experience. The soul is the intelligent being; it is the headquarters of every perception and sensation; it thinks and feels on its own; it is individual, distinct, perfectible, pre-existent and survives the body. The body is its material covering, it is the instrument of relationship with the visible world.

When united to the body, it perceives through the senses and transmit its thoughts with the help of the brain. When separate from the body, it perceives directly and thinks more freely. Since the senses have a limited reach, the perceptions through them are limited and somehow damped; once received without an intermediary, they are indefinite and of a remarkable subtlety, for they go beyond every boundary of our material world. For the same reason, thoughts transmitted by the brains are, say, sifted through that organ. The roughness and defects of the instrument stop them, and partially muffle them, like certain transparent bodies partially absorb the light that crosses them. The soul is forced to utilize the brain, like a very good musician must use an imperfect instrument. Freed from such painful support, the soul unfolds all its faculties.

Such is the soul during life and after death. It thus has two states, of the incarnate, or constrained, and discarnate or of freedom. In other words, the corporeal and the spiritual life. The spiritual life is the normal, permanent life of the soul; the corporeal life is transient.

During the corporeal life, the soul is not constantly constrained by the body and that is the key to those physical phenomena that seems so strange, for they transport us to beyond our normal sphere of observations. They were classified as supernatural, although, in reality, they are submitted to perfectly natural laws, but because such laws were unknown to us. Today, and thanks to Spiritism that revealed those laws, the wonderful has disappeared. During the exterior life, the body needs its soul or Spirit as a guide, to drive it in the world, but during the periods of inactivity of the body, the presence of the soul is no longer needed; it detaches partially detaches from the body, remaining connected by a fluidic link that alerts the soul if its presence is required. When separated, it recovers the freedom of action and thoughts, a state that will only be thoroughly enjoyed with the death of the body, when completely separated. Such a condition was truly described by the Spirit of a living person, by comparing it with a captive balloon, and by another, the Spirit of a mentally ill living person, that it was like a duck held by the foot (Spiritist Review, June 1860). Such a state, that we call emancipation of the soul, occurs normally and periodically during the sleep. It is only the body that rests, to recover the material losses; the Spirit, that lost nothing, takes the opportunity to go wherever it wishes. In addition, the emancipation occurs every time that a pathological or simply physiological cause produces the partial or total inactivity of the senses or movement. That is what takes place in catalepsy and lethargy and somnambulism. The detachment, or the freedom of the soul, is the more far reaching the more absolute is the inertia of the body. That is the reason why the phenomenon acquires its greatest development in catalepsy and lethargy. In such states, the soul no longer perceives through the material senses, but through the psychic sense, if we can say so; that is why the perceptions go beyond the ordinary limits. Its thoughts take place without the intermediary of the brain, and for that reason it manifests faculties that are more transcendental than in the normal state.

That is the situation of the young Luisa B… She thus rightly says that “when she passes from the ordinary life to this superior life, it seems that a thick veil is lifted from her eyes.” That is also the cause of the phenomenon of second sight, that is nothing less than the direct sight of the soul; of the far vision, that results from the transport of the soul to the place that it describes; of the somnambulistic lucidity, etc.

When Luisa sees living persons, “aging effects of time and diseases disappear before her, and if the person had lost a limb, she still sees that limb; the body remains completely reproduced by the nervous fluid. If she saw the body she would see it as she sees the fluidic envelope”.

The material body can be amputated, but not the perispirit. What here is called “nervous fluid” is nothing less than the perispirit. She also sees the dead. Something remains from them. What is it that she sees? It cannot be their bodies since they no longer exist; she sees them, however, with a human shape, the same that they had in life. What she sees is the soul dressed on a fluidic body or the perispirit. The souls, therefore, outlive the body; they are not, therefore, abstract creatures, sparks, flames, lost breaths in the immensities of human reservoirs, but real, distinct, individual beings. If she sees the dead like the living ones, it means that the living ones, like the dead, have the same fluidic, imperishable body, while the rough material envelope dissolves with death. She does not see lost souls in the depths of space, but among us, demonstrating the existence of the invisible world around us, where we live unsuspectedly.

Don’t such revelations provide food for serious thought? Who would give such ideas to this young woman? Did she learn them from the Spiritist books? But she cannot read. Socialization with the Spiritists? She has never heard about them. She thus describes all those things spontaneously. Is it a product of her imagination? But she is not alone. Thousands of clairvoyants said and say the same thing every day, and science remains unaware of that. Low and behold, Spiritism has deduced its theory with the help of that universal observation. Science will fail to find the solution to such phenomena while it makes abstraction of the spiritual element, for it contains the key to all these supposedly mysteries. May science admit it, even if only hypothetically, and everything will be easily explained.

Observations of such a kind, with patients like Luisa B…, require a lot of caution and prudence. One must not lose sight of the fact that, in such state of excessive susceptibility, the least commotion may be tragic; the soul, happy for being detached from the body, but still connected by a thread that can irreversibly break. Careless experiments carried out in similar cases can kill.