Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1869

“A friend, a great poet, wrote to me in a painful circumstance: - ‘She is always your companion, invisible, but present; you have lost the woman, but not the soul! Dear friend, let us live in the dead!’ - A consoling, salutary thought, that comforts in the struggle and makes us think incessantly of this ascending succession of matter, of this unity in the conception of all that is, of that wonderful and incomparable worker who, for the continuity of progress, attaches the Spirit to this matter, spiritualized in turn by the presence of the superior element.

No, my beloved one, I could not lose your soul that lived glorious, sparkling with all the clarities of the invisible world. My life is a living protest to the looming scourge of skepticism, in its many forms. No one has affirmed more energetically than I have the divine personality, and believed in the human personality, defending freedom. If the feeling of infinity was developed in me, if the divine presence pulsates in enthusiastic pages, it is because I had to tame my path; it is that I lived in the presence of God, and that constantly gushing source has always made me believe in the good, the beautiful, the righteousness, the devotion, the honor of the individual, and even more so in the honor of the nation, the condensed individuality. It is that my partner was of an elite nature, strong and tender. Near her, I understood the nature of the soul and its intimate relationship with the statue of flesh, this wonder! Thus, my studies were spiritualized, and consequently fruitful and rapid, constantly turning towards the forms of beauty and the passion for words. I married science with thought, so that philosophy, in my mind, could use these two precious poetic instruments.

My form was sometimes abstract, and it was not within everyone's reach; but serious thinkers adopted it; all the great minds of my time opened their ranks to me. Catholic orthodoxy looked at me like a sheep fleeing the flock of the Roman pastor, especially when, swept away by events, I shared the responsibility for a glorious revolution.

Driven for a moment by popular aspirations, by this powerful breath of compressed ideas, I was no longer the man of great situations; I had finished my journey, and for me the hours of weariness and discouragement had sounded in the clock of time. I saw my ordeal, and while Lamartine was painfully enduring it, the children of this beloved France spat in his face, with no respect for his white hair, the outrage, the challenge, the insult.

Solemn trial, gentlemen, where the soul retempers and rectifies itself, for oblivion is death, and death on Earth is trade with God, the wise dispenser of all forces!

I died as a Christian; I was born into the Church, I departed before it! For a year, I had a deep intuition. I spoke little, but I traveled incessantly in these ethereal plains where everything is remelted under the gaze of the Lord of the worlds; the problem of life unfolded majestically, gloriously. I understood the thought of the Swedenborg and the school of theosophists, Fourier, Jean Reynaud, Henri Martin, Victor Hugo, and the Spiritism that was familiar to me, although in contradiction with my prejudices and my birth, prepared me for the detachment, for the departure. The transition was not painful; like the pollen of a flower, my Spirit, carried away by a whirlwind, found the sister plant. Like you, I call it erraticity; and to make me love such longed-for sister, my mother, my beloved wife, a multitude of friends and invisibles surrounded me with a luminous halo. Immersed in this beneficent fluid, my Spirit relaxed, like the body of the traveler of the desert who, after a long journey under a sky of lead and fire, would find a generous bath for his body, a clear and fresh fountain for his fierce thirst.

Ineffable joys of a boundless heaven, concerts of all harmonies, molecules that echo the chords of divine science, invigorating warmth of its unnamed impressions that the human language cannot decipher, new well-being, rebirth, complete elasticity, electric depth of certainties, similarities of laws, calm full of splendor, spheres that house humanities, oh! welcome, predicted emotions, indefinitely amplified with radiances of infinity!

Exchange your ideas, Spiritists, who believe in us. Study in the always new sources of our teaching; affirm yourselves and let every member of the family be an apostle who speaks, walks, and acts with will, with the certainty that you give nothing to the unknown. Learn a lot so that your intelligence rises. Human science, united with the science of your invisible but luminous auxiliaries, will make you masters of the future; you will cast the shadows out to come to us, that is, to the light, to God.

Alphonse de Lamartine.”

A disciple of Charles Fourier, who is also a Spiritist, recently sent us the request for an evocation asking for an answer, if possible, to enlighten himself on certain questions. Since both seemed instructive to us, we transcribed them below.



Paris, Group Desliens, March 9^th, 1869

“Brother Fourier, from the top of the ultra-worldly sphere, if your Spirit can see and hear me, I beg you to communicate with me, to strengthen the conviction that your admirable theory of the four movements has given me on the law of universal harmony, or to discourage me if you had the misfortune of deceiving yourself. - You, whose incomparable genius seems to have lifted the curtain that hid nature, and whose Spirit must be even more lucid than it was in the material world, I beg you to tell me if you acknowledge, in the spiritual world as on Earth, that the natural order established by God is crumbling in our social organization; whether passionate attractions are really the lever that God uses to lead man towards his true destiny; whether analogy is a sure way of discovering the truth.

Please also tell me what you think of the cooperative societies that germinate on all sides on the surface of our globe. If your Spirit can read the mind of the sincere man, you must know that doubt makes him unhappy; that is why I beg you, from your abode beyond the grave, to kindly do whatever depends on you to convince me.

Receive, our brother, the assurance of respect I owe to your memory and of my greatest veneration.

J. G.”

Answer: It is a very serious question, dear brother in belief, to ask a man if he was mistaken, when a certain number of years have passed since he exposed the system that best satisfied his aspirations towards the unknown! Was I wrong?... Who was not mistaken when he wanted to lift the veil that hid the sacred fire, with his own strength! Prometheus made men with that fire, but the law of progress condemned those men to physical and moral struggles. I made a system destined to live a time, like all systems, then to transform, to associate with new, more real elements. As you see, it is ideas as well as men. Since they are born, they do not die, they transform. Coarse at first, wrapped in the mist of language, they successively find craftsmen who cut and polish them more and more, until the shapeless pebble becomes the diamond with a bright shine, the precious stone par excellence.

I searched conscientiously and found a lot. Based on the acquired principles, I advanced the intelligent and regenerative thinking by a few steps. What I discovered was true, in principle; I distorted it, by willing to apply it. I wanted to create the series, to establish harmonies; but these series, these harmonies did not need a creator; they existed since the beginning; and I could only disturb them by wanting to establish them on the small bases of my conception, when God had given them the universe as a gigantic laboratory.

My most serious title, and perhaps the most neglected and ignored, 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 this human regeneration by trial, this succession of restorative existences, this communication of the free world and the world chained to matter, that you have the pleasure of touching with your finger. We had foreseen and you are making our dream come true. These are our greatest titles of glory, the only ones that, for my part, I esteem and remember.

You say you doubt, my friend! So much the better, for he who truly doubts seeks, and he who seeks, finds. Seek, therefore, and if it only depends on me to put conviction in your hands, count on my devoted assistance; but listen to a friend's advice that I put into practice in my life and that has always done me good: "If you want a serious demonstration of a universal law, seek its individual application.” Do you want the truth? Seek it in yourself and in observing the facts of your own life. All the evidence is there. Let him who wants to know examine himself, and he will find.

Charles Fourier.”