6 GNOSIS & THE SPIRITIST SCHOOLS

In its widest and highest meaning gnosis is knowledge; therefore true gnosticism cannot be a particular school or system but must above all be the search for integral truth. Nonetheless, it must not be thought that gnosticism must accept every doctrine whatsoever under the pretext that all contain a particle of truth, for synthesis is never reached by an amalgamation of disparate elements, as is too readily believed by minds habituated to the analytical methods of modern Western science.

Today there is much talk of unity among the different schools called spiritist, but all the efforts undertaken up to this point have remained fruitless. We believe that this will always be the case, for it is impossible to bring together doctrines so dissimilar as are those listed under the name of spiritism; such elements can never make a stable edifice. The mistake of most of these so-called spiritist doctrines is that in reality they are only materialism transposed onto another plane, and that they aim to apply to the domain of the Spirit methods used by ordinary science to study the hylic world. These experimental methods can never make known anything but mere phenomena, on which basis it is impossible to build any metaphysical theory whatsoever, for a universal principle cannot be inferred from particular facts. Moreover, the attempt to acquire a knowledge of the spiritual world by material means is obviously absurd; it is only in ourselves that we can find the principles of this knowledge, and never in outward objects.

Certain experimental investigations indeed have a relative value in their proper domain, but outside this same domain any such value is lost. This is why, for us, the investigation of so-called psychic forces, for example, can have neither more nor less interest than the investigation of any other natural force, and we have no more reason to show solidarity with the scholar who pursues this investigation than with the physicist or chemist who studies forces of other kinds. We speak of course only of the scientific investigation of so-called psychic forces and not of the practices of those who, starting from a preconception, wish to see in them the manifestation of the dead. These practices do not hold even the relative interest of an experimental science, and they possess the danger that the manipulation of any force by the ignorant always presents.

It is therefore impossible for those who seek to acquire spiritual knowledge to join with the experimenters, psychists or others, and this is not at all due to contempt for these latter, but simply because these latter do not work on the same level as themselves. It is no less impossible for them to accept doctrines with metaphysical claims that rely on an experiment base; these doctrines cannot seriously be granted any value at all and always lead to absurd consequences.

Gnosis must therefore avoid all these doctrines and base itself only on the orthodox Tradition contained in the sacred books of all peoples, a Tradition that in reality is everywhere the same despite the different forms it clothes itself with in order to adapt to every race and age. But here again great care must be taken to distinguish this true Tradition from all the erroneous interpretations and all the fantastic commentaries that have been bestowed on it in our day by a throng of more or less occultist schools, which unfortunately too often wish to speak about things of which they are ignorant. It is easy to attribute a doctrine to imaginary persons in order to lend it more authority and to claim a relation with lost initiatic centers in the furthest reaches of Tibet or on the most inaccessible summits of the Himalayas; but those who know the real initiatic centers know what to think of these pretensions.

This is enough to show that a union of so-called spiritist schools is impossible and that, moreover, even if it were possible, it would produce no worthwhile result and would consequently be far from as desirable as is thought by those who are well intentioned but insufficiently informed of what these different schools really are. In reality, the only possible union is that of all orthodox initiatic centers that have preserved the true Tradition in its original purity; but this union is not merely possible, it exists now as it has existed in all times. When the moment comes, the mysterious Thebah which contains all principles will open and show the immutable edifice of the universal Synthesis to those capable of contemplating the Light without being blinded.

From the first appearance of the journal La Gnose we have very clearly repudiated any solidarity with the different spiritist schools, whether occultist, Theosophist, spiritist, or any other more or less similar group, for we thought it particularly important to leave no room for doubt on this score in the minds of our readers. None of these opinions, which can be combined under the common denomination 'neo-spiritualist',^[1] have any more connection with metaphysics, which alone interests us, than do the different scientific or philosophical schools of the modern West; and in addition, by virtue of their unjustified and unreasonable claims, they possess the serious drawback of being able to create among the insufficiently informed extremely regrettable confusions leading to nothing less than a reflection on others, we among them, of the discredit on the part of all who are serious that ought by right to be attached to them alone.

This is why we consider that we owe no particular circumspection to the theories in question, all the more so in that, if we did so, we are certain that their more or less authorized representatives, far from doing the same for us, would in no way be grateful to us, and would show us no less hostility; it would thus be pure weakness on our part that would do us no good, quite the contrary, and those who know our true thoughts on the subject would always reproach us for it. Thus we do not hesitate to declare that we consider all these neo-spiritist theories to be no less false in their very principle and harmful to the public mentality than is, in our eyes, the modernist tendency under whatever form and in whatever domain it manifests itself.^[2]

Indeed, if there is at least one point on which the Catholic church as presently oriented has all our sympathies, it is its fight against modernism.^[3] The church appears to be much less preoccupied with neo-spiritism which, it is true, has perhaps not spread as far and as rapidly, and moreover is something outside of it and on another terrain, so that it can hardly do more than to point out the dangers to those of the faithful who might risk being seduced by doctrines of this kind. But if someone were to place himself outside of all confessional preoccupations, thus in a much more extended field of action, and could find a practical means of halting the spread of so many ravings and insanities presented more or less cleverly according to whether this is done by men of bad faith or mere imbeciles (and that in either case have already contributed to irremediably confusing such a large number of individuals), we think that he would thus accomplish a true work of mental health and would render an outstanding service to a considerable portion of present-day Western humanity.^[4]

This cannot be our role, for on principle we forego all polemics and remain apart from all outward action and all partisan strife. Nonetheless, without leaving the strictly intellectual domain, we may as occasion arises point out the absurdities of certain doctrines or beliefs and sometimes emphasize certain statements made by the spiritists themselves in order to show how these can be used against their own doctrinal affirmations, for logic is not always their strong point and incoherence is a widespread defect with them, visible to all who do not let themselves be taken in by pompous words and bombastic phrases which very often only hide an emptiness of thought. It is with this end in mind that we write the present chapter, reserving the right to take up the question again whenever we judge it opportune. We hope that our remarks, made in the course of reading and research that drew our attention incidentally to the incriminated theories, might, if there is still time, open the eyes of those of good faith who have gone astray among the neo-spiritualists and of whom at least some may be worthy of a better fate.

We have already made it known on many occasions that we absolutely reject the fundamental hypotheses of spiritism, namely reincarnation,^[5] the possibility of communicating with the dead by material means, and the claim to demonstrate human immortality experimentally.^[6] Moreover, these theories are not unique to the spiritists, the belief in reincarnation in particular being shared, by the majority of them, with the Theosophists and many occultists of different kinds. We can accept nothing from these doctrines because they are formally contrary to the most elementary principles of metaphysics; in addition, and for the same reason, they are clearly anti-traditional, and besides they were invented only during the nineteenth century, although their partisans try by every method of twisting and distorting texts to have us believe that they go back to remotest antiquity. To this end they use the most extraordinary and unexpected arguments; thus in a review that we will have the charity not to name, we recently saw the Catholic dogma of the 'resurrection of the body' interpreted in a reincarnationist sense; and it was a priest, no doubt strongly suspected of heterodoxy, who dared to make such assertions! It is true that reincarnation has never been explicitly condemned by the Catholic church, and some occultists do not fail to note this with obvious satisfaction at every opportunity. But they do not seem to suspect that, if this is so, it is merely because it was not even possible to conceive that a day might come when such folly could be imagined. As to the 'resurrection of the body', this is really only a defective way of speaking of 'the resurrection of the dead', which esoterically can correspond to the inclusion, in the being that has realized Universal Man, of all the states that were considered as having passed away with respect to its present state but that are eternally present in the 'permanent actuality of the extra-temporal being.'^[7]

In another article in the same journal we came across an unintended and even unconscious admission amusing enough to merit a note in passing. A spiritist declares that 'truth lies in the exact relationship between the contingent and the absolute'; now, this relationship, which is that between the finite and the infinite, can rigorously be equal only to zero; draw the conclusion yourself and see if after this there remains anything of that claimed 'spiritist truth' that they offer as future 'experimental evidence'! Poor 'human child' [sic],^[8] poor 'psycho-intellectual', that is to be 'nourished' with such a truth(?) and who is to be made to believe that he is 'made to know, love, and serve it' in a faithful imitation of what the Catholic catechism teaches in regard to its anthropomorphic God. Since in the intention of its promoters this 'spiritist teaching' seems above all to have a sentimental and moral goal, we wonder if it is worth the trouble to substitute for these old religions—which despite all their defects at least have an incontestable validity from this relative point of view—such bizarre ideas which will never replace them to advantage in any respect and which especially will be entirely unable to fulfill the social role that they claim as their own.

But let us return to the question of reincarnation. This is not the place to demonstrate its metaphysical impossibility, that is to say its absurdity; we have already provided all the elements of this demonstration^[9] and will complete it in further studies. For the moment we must limit ourselves to what its partisans themselves say, so that we may discover what, according their understanding, might be the basis for this belief. The spiritists want above all to demonstrate reincarnation 'experimentally'(?) by facts, and certain occultists follow them in these attempts which naturally have not yet yielded any convincing results, any more than has the 'scientific demonstration of immortality'. On the other hand, most Theosophists seem to see in the reincarnationist theory only a sort of dogma or article of faith that must be accepted for sentimental reasons, but for which it is impossible to give any rational or perceptible proof. We beg our readers to excuse us if in what follows we are unable to give every reference precisely, for there are people whom the truth would perhaps offend. But in order to explain the reasoning by which some occultists try to prove reincarnation we must first advise the reader that those to whom we allude are supporters of the geocentric theory: they see the earth as the center of the universe, either materially in terms of physical astronomy itself, like Auguste Strindberg and others,^[10] or, if they do not go this far, at least by the privilege they accord the nature of its inhabitants. For them the earth is in fact the only world where there can be human beings, because the conditions of life on other planets or in other solar systems are too different from those on Earth for a man to adapt to them; from this it follows that by 'man' they mean exclusively a corporeal individual endowed with five physical senses, the corresponding faculties (without forgetting spoken language... and even written), and all the organs necessary for the different functions of terrestrial human life. They do not conceive that man exists in other forms of life,^[11] or with all the more reason, that he can exist in immaterial mode, informal, extra-temporal, extra-spatial, and above all beyond and above life.^[12] It follows that humans can only be reincarnated on earth since there is no other place in the universe where they can live. Let us note, moreover, that this is contrary to several other ideas according to which man is 'incarnated' on various planets, as Louis Figuier holds,^[13] or in different worlds, either simultaneously, as Blanqui imagines,^[14] or successively, as Nietzsche's theory of the 'eternal return' tends to imply.^[15] Some people have even gone so far as to claim that the human individual can have several 'material bodies'^[16] [sic] living at the same time on different planets of the physical world.^[17] We must say further that the occultists we mentioned add, as usual accompaniment to the geocentric doctrine, a belief in the literal and popular interpretation of the Scriptures, and lose no occasion to publicly mock the triple and sevenfold meanings of the esoterists and Kabbalists.^[18] Thus, according to their theory, which conforms to an exoteric translation of the Bible, in the beginning man, ‘issuing from the hands of the Creator’ (we think that no one can deny that this is anthropomorphism), was placed on Earth to ‘cultivate his own garden’, that is, according to them, to ‘evolve physical matter’, which they suppose to have been more subtle then than today. By ‘man’ must be understood the entire human collectivity, the totality of the human species, so that ‘all men’ without any exception and in an unknown but certainly very large multitude were initially incarnated on Earth at the same time.^[19] In these conditions there obviously could be no birth since there was no man who was not incarnated, and things remained this way as long as man did not die, that is, until the ‘fall’ understood in its exoteric sense as a historical fact,^[20] but which is nevertheless regarded as ‘being able to represent a whole series of events that must have unfolded over the course of several centuries.’ This somewhat broadens ordinary biblical chronology, which finds it easy to place the whole history not only of the Earth but of the World, from the creation to our days, into a total duration of something less than six thousand years (some, however, go to nearly ten thousand).^[21] After the ‘fall’ physical matter became more gross, its properties were modified, it became subject to corruption, and men, imprisoned in this matter, began to die, to ‘disincarnate’; thereupon they also became subject to birth, for these ‘disincarnated’ men who remain ‘in space’(?) in the ‘invisible atmosphere’ of the Earth, would then ‘reincarnate’, that is, once again take on earthly physical life in a new human body. Thus it is always the same human beings (it must not be forgotten that this means the restricted corporeal individuality)

that must be periodically reborn from the beginning of terrestrial humanity to its end.^[22] As can be seen, this reasoning is very simple and perfectly logical, but only on condition of first admitting the starting-point, that is, the impossibility of the human being existing in modalities other than the terrestrial corporeal form, which, let us repeat, can in no way be reconciled with the most elementary notions of metaphysics; and this seems to be the most solid argument that can be offered to support the hypothesis of reincarnation! Indeed, we cannot for an instant take seriously the moral and sentimental arguments for this hypothesis, which are based on an averred injustice in the inequality of human conditions. This notion arises solely from always considering particular facts in isolation from the whole of which they form a part, while if they are again situated in this whole there can obviously be no injustice, or, to use a term that is both more exact and broader in meaning, there is no disequilibrium,^[23] because these facts, like all the rest, are elements of the total harmony. We have sufficiently explained our position on this question elsewhere and we have shown that evil has no reality whatsoever, that what is so called is only a relativity considered analytically, and that beyond the special point of view of the human mentality imperfection is necessarily illusory, for it cannot exist except as an element of the Perfect which can obviously contain nothing imperfect.^[24] It is easy to understand that the diversity of human conditions arises from nothing else than the differences in nature existing among individuals themselves, that it is inherent in the individual nature of earthly human beings, and that it is no more unjust or less necessary (being of the same order, although of a different species) than the variety of plant or animal species, against which no one has dreamed of protesting in the name of justice, which would be perfectly ridiculous.^[25] The special conditions belonging to each individual work toward the perfection of the total being of which this individual is a modality or particular state, and in the totality of the being everything is joined and given equilibrium by the harmonious linking of cause and effect.^[26] But once it is a matter of causality, no one who possesses the least idea of metaphysics can understand this to mean anything even remotely resembling the mystico-religious idea of reward and punishment,^[27] which, after having been applied to an extra-terrestrial 'future life' is applied by the neo-spiritualists to supposed 'successive lives' on Earth, or at least in the physical world.^[28] The spiritists, especially, have exploited this wholly anthropomorphic idea and have drawn from it conclusions that often reach the extreme of absurdity. Such is the well known example of the victim who pursues vengeance against his murderer into another existence; the victim then becomes murderer in his turn and the murderer, now a victim, must avenge himself in a new existence, and so on indefinitely. Another example of the same sort is the coachman who runs over a pedestrian; as punishment, the coachman, who has become a pedestrian in the next life, will be run over by the pedestrian who has become a coachman; but logically this coachman must then suffer the same punishment, so that these two unhappy individuals will be obliged to run each other over alternately until the end of time, for there is obviously no reason why this should come to an end. But to be impartial we must add that on this point certain occultists concede nothing to the spiritists, for we have heard one occultist give the following account as an example of the frightful consequences that can follow upon actions generally considered indifferent.^[29] A student amuses himself by breaking a pen, then throws it away; the molecules of metal will retain the memory of the mischief committed against them by the child throughout all the transformations they will undergo; finally, after several centuries, these molecules will enter into the parts of some machine and, one day, there will be an accident and a worker will be killed, crushed by this machine; it will turn out that the worker is the student described earlier, who has been reincarnated to suffer the punishment for his earlier act.^[30] It would surely be difficult to imagine anything more extravagant than such fantastic tales, which suffice to give an accurate picture of the mentality of those who invent them and especially of those who believe them. An idea closely linked to reincarnation, which also has many partisans among neo-spiritualists, is that in the course of its evolution each being must pass successively through all forms of life, terrestrial and otherwise.^[31] To this there is only one word in response: such a theory is an impossibility for the simple reason that there exist an indefinity of living forms through which a being could never pass since these forms are occupied by other beings. It is therefore absurd to claim that a being must traverse all possibilities considered individually in order to reach the term of its evolution because this affirmation encloses an impossibility; and here we can see a particular case of that entirely false idea, so widespread in the West, that a synthesis can only be accomplished by analysis, whereas on the contrary it is impossible to achieve it in this fashion.^[32] Even if a being should have traversed an indefinity of possibilities, this entire evolution could never be anything but rigorously zero with respect to Perfection, for the indefinite proceeds from the finite; and since indefinity is produced by the finite (as the generation of numbers clearly shows) and is thus contained in it in potency, in the final analysis it is only the development of the potentialities of the finite and in consequence obviously cannot have any connection with the Infinite, which amounts to saying that, considered from the standpoint of the Infinite (or from Perfection, which is identical with the Infinite), it can be only zero.^[33] The analytic conception of evolution is thus reduced to adding zero to itself indefinitely by an indefinite number of successive and distinct additions, the final result of which will always be zero. This sterile succession of analytical operations can be transcended only by integration, and this is accomplished at one stroke by a transcendent and immediate synthesis that logically has no preceding analysis.^[34] Moreover, since, as we have explained on various occasions, the entire physical world, with the deployment of all the possibilities it contains, is only the domain of manifestation of a single state of the individual being, this same state of the being contains in itself a fortiori the potentialities for all the modalities of terrestrial life, which represents only a very restricted portion of the physical world. Thus, if the complete development of the actual individuality, which extends indefinitely beyond the corporeal modality, includes all the potentialities whose manifestation constitutes the sum of the physical world, it includes in particular all those corresponding to the different modalities of terrestrial life. This therefore renders useless the supposition of a multiplicity of existences through which the being must progressively raise itself from the lowest modality of life, the mineral, to the human modality considered as the highest, passing successively through plant and animal modalities, with all the multiplicity of degrees contained in each of these kingdoms. In his integral extension the individual simultaneously contains the possibilities that correspond to all these degrees; this simultaneity is not expressed in temporal succession except in the development of his corporeal modality, during which, as embryology shows, he passes through all the corresponding stages from the unicellular form of the most elementary organized beings, and, going back still further, even from the crystal (which presents more than one analogy with these rudimentary beings),^[35] to the terrestrial human form. But for us these considerations are in no way a proof of the 'transformist' theory, for we regard the so-called law that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' as a pure hypothesis; for if the development of the individual, or ontogeny, can be proved by direct observation, no one would dare to claim that the same goes for the development of the species, or phylogeny.^[36] Moreover, even in the restricted sense just noted, the point of view of succession loses almost all its interest by the simple observation that the seed, before any development, already contains in potency the complete being; and this point of view must always remain subordinate to that of simultaneity, to which the metaphysical theory of the multiple states of the being necessarily leads us. Thus, leaving to one side the essentially relative question of the embryonic development of the body (which we see only as indicating an analogy with the integral individuality), there can be no question of anything but a purely logical (and not temporal) succession, that is to say a hierarchization of these modalities or possibilities in the extension of the individual state of the being in which they are not realized corporeally, and this because of the simultaneous existence in the individual of an indefinitude of vital modalities, or, what amounts to the same thing, the corresponding possibilities. In this connection, and to show that these ideas are not peculiar to us, we thought it would be interesting to reproduce certain extracts from a chapter devoted to this question in the instruction manuals of one of the rare serious initiatic Fraternities that still exist today in the West:^[37] In the descent of life into outward conditions, the monad had to travel through each of the states of the spiritual world, then the kingdoms of the astral empire,^[38] in order to appear at last on the outward plane, the lowest possible, that is to say the mineral plane. From that point we see it successively penetrate the waves of mineral, plant, and animal life of the planet. In virtue of the higher and most inward laws of its particular cycle, its divine attributes always seek to unfold their imprisoned potentialities. As soon as one form is provided and its capacities are exhausted^[39] another, new form of a higher degree is requisitioned; thus each in its turn becomes more and more complex in structure, more and more diverse in function. Thus we see the living monad begin with the mineral in the outward world, then the great spiral of its evolutionary existence moves slowly forward, imperceptibly but nevertheless always progressing.^[40] There is no form too simple nor organism too complex for the faculty of adaptation (a marvelous and inconceivable power) possessed by the human soul. And through the entire cycle of Necessity the character of its genius, the degree of its spiritual emanation, and the states to which it belonged at the beginning are strictly preserved with a mathematical exactitude.^[41] During the course of its involution the monad is not really incarnated in any form whatever. The course of its descent through the various kingdoms comes about by a gradual polarization of its divine powers due to its contact with the conditions of gradual externalization of the descending and subjective arc of the spiral cycle.

This is an absolute truth expressed by the adept author of Ghost Land when he says that, as an impersonal being, man lives in an indefinite number of worlds before arriving in this one. In all these worlds, the soul develops its rudimentary states until its cyclic progress makes it capable of attaining^[42] the special state whose glorious function is to confer consciousness on this soul. It is only at this moment that it truly becomes a man; in every other instant of its cosmic voyage it was but an embryonic being, a passing form, an impersonal creature in which shines a part, but only a part, of the non-individualized human soul. Once the great stage of consciousness has been reached, summit of the series of material manifestations, the soul will never again enter into the matrix of matter, will never again undergo material incarnation; henceforth its rebirths are all in the kingdom of the spirit. Those who maintain the strangely illogical doctrine of the multiplicity of human births have surely never developed in themselves the lucid state of spiritual consciousness; otherwise the theory of reincarnation, asserted and maintained today by a great number of men and women versed in ‘worldly wisdom’, would not be given the least credit. An outward education is relatively worthless as a means of obtaining true Knowledge.

No analogy favoring reincarnation is found in nature, while on the other hand, many are found favoring the contrary.

The acorn becomes oak, the coconut becomes palm; but let the oak produce myriads of other acorns, it will never again become an acorn itself, nor will the palm once again become coconut. The same for man: once the soul is manifested on the human plane and has thus reached consciousness of outward life, it never again passes through any of its rudimentary states.

A recent publication asserts that ‘those who have led a noble life worthy of a king (be this in the body of a beggar) in their last earthly existence will come to life again as nobles, kings, or other persons of high rank’! But we know that kings and nobles in the past have been and in the present are often the worst specimens of humanity that can be conceived from the spiritual point of view. Such assertions serve only to prove that their authors only speak under the inspiration of sentimentality and that they lack Knowledge.

All the alleged ‘re-awakening of latent memories’ by which some people try to insure the recall of their past existences can be explained and even solely explained by simple laws of affinity and of form. Each race of human beings considered in itself is immortal; it is the same for each cycle: the first cycle never becomes the second, but the beings of the first cycle are (spiritually) the parents or generators of those of the second.^[43] Thus each cycle includes a great family made up of the reunion of the different groups of human souls, each condition being determined by the laws of its activity, those of its form, and those of its affinity—a triad of laws.

This is why man can be compared to the acorn and the oak: the embryonic soul, un-individualized, becomes a man just as the acorn becomes an oak, and just as the oak gives birth to an innumerable quantity of acorns, so man in his turn provides an indefinite number of souls with the means to be born in the spiritual world. There is a complete correspondence between the two, and it is for this reason that the ancient Druids paid such great honors to this tree, which was honored above all the others by the powerful Hierophants.

From this one can see how far the Druids were from admitting ‘transmigration’ in the ordinary and material sense of the word, and how little they dreamed of the theory—which, we repeat, is wholly modern—of reincarnation.

We have recently read in a foreign spiritist journal an article in which the author criticizes with good reason the preposterous idea of those who announce the impending 'second coming' of Christ as necessarily being a reincarnation.^[44] But where things become rather amusing is when the same author declares that if this thesis cannot be admitted, it is simply because according to him the return of Christ is even now an accomplished fact... thanks to spiritism! 'It has already happened,' says he, 'because in certain centers his communications are registered.' One must truly have a very robust faith in order to thus believe that Christ and his Apostles reveal themselves in spiritist seances and speak through the mouthpiece of mediums! If there are people for whom such a belief is necessary (and this seems to be the case with the great majority of Westerners) we do not hesitate to assert how much we still prefer the belief of the least enlightened Catholic or even the faith of the sincere materialist, for this also exists.^[45] As we have already said, we think that neo-spiritism in any form is absolutely incapable of replacing the ancient religions in their social and moral roles, and nevertheless this is certainly the goal it proposes in a more or less open way. Earlier we alluded in particular to the claims of its promoters for education; in fact we just read a speech on this subject by one of them. Whatever he may have said on the subject, we find very little stability in the 'liberal spiritualism' of those 'aviators of the spirit'(?!) who, seeing in the atmosphere 'two colossal rain clouds full to the jaws [sic] with contrary electricities', ask 'how to avoid the series of lightning flashes, the scales of thunder [sic], the cataracts of lighting, and who despite these threatening omens wish to brave the freedom of education' as others have 'braved the freedom of space'. They nonetheless admit that 'education in the schools must remain neutral', but on condition that this 'neutrality' lead to 'spiritualist' conclusions. It seems to us that this would only be an apparent neutrality, not a real one, and whoever has the least sense of logic can hardly think otherwise. But for them, on the contrary, this is 'profound neutrality'! A systematic mentality and preconceived ideas sometimes lead to strange contradictions, and this is an example that we wished to point out.^[46] As for us, who are far from aspiring to any social action, it is obvious that this question of education thus posed cannot interest us in any way. The only method that could have a real value would be 'integral instruction';^[47] and unfortunately, given the present mentality, it will no doubt be a long time before the least application of this can be made in the West, particularly in France, where the Protestant mentality so dear to certain 'liberal spiritualists' reigns as the absolute master at all levels and in all branches of government. Recently the author of the speech in question (we do not wish to name him here in order not to wound his... modesty, and the circumstances do not matter) decided it was good to reproach us for having said that we have 'absolutely nothing in common with him' (no more than with the other neo-spiritualists of any sect or school), and he objected that this must lead us to 'reject comradeship, virtue, to deny God, the immortality of the soul, and Christ'—a rather disparate collection of things! Although we formally forbid ourselves any polemics in this Journal we think that it would not be useless to reproduce here our response to these objections, for a more complete enlightenment of our readers and to mark more clearly and more precisely (at the risk of repeating ourselves somewhat) certain profound differences which we cannot emphasize too much. First of all, whatever Mr X may say..., his God is certainly not ours, for he evidently believes, as do all modern Westerners, in a ‘personal’ (not to say individual) and rather anthropomorphic God who has ‘nothing in common’ with the metaphysical Infinite.^[48] We will say as much of his idea of Christ, that is to say a unique Messiah who is an ‘incarnation’ of the Divinity; we on the contrary recognize a plurality (and even an indefinite number) of divine ‘manifestations’ which are not in any way ‘incarnations’, for above all it is important to maintain the purity of monotheism, which cannot agree with such a theory.

As to the individualistic idea of the ‘immortality of the soul’, this is even simpler, and Mr X... is strangely mistaken if he believes that we hesitate to state that we reject it completely, both in the form of an extra-terrestrial ‘future life’, as well as in the surely much more ridiculous and all too well known theory of ‘reincarnation’. Questions of ‘pre-existence’ and ‘post-existence’ obviously do not arise for anyone who envisages all things outside of time; moreover, ‘immortality’ can only be an indefinite extension of life, and it will never be otherwise than rigorously equivalent to zero in the face of Eternity,^[49] which alone interests us, and which is above life as well as time and all the other limitative conditions of individual existence. We know very well that Westerners are attached above all to their ‘I’; but what value can a purely sentimental tendency like this have? Too bad for those who prefer illusory consolations to the Truth!

Finally, ‘fraternity’ and ‘virtue’ are manifestly nothing other than mere moral concepts; and morality, which is wholly relative and concerns only the very particular and restricted domain of social action,^[50] has absolutely nothing to do with Gnosis, which is exclusively metaphysical. And we do not think we are ‘risking’ too much, as Mr X says, in asserting that he is entirely ignorant of metaphysics; this being said, moreover, without reproaching him in the least, for it is incontestably allowable to be ignorant of what one has never had the occasion to study; no one is held to the impossible!

We said earlier, but without dwelling on it, that there are people, spiritists and others, who strive to prove the reincarnationist thesis ‘experimentally’.^[51] Such an attempt must appear so improbable to any person with the least amount of common sense that one is tempted a priori to suppose it to be merely a bad joke; but it seems that it is not. Indeed, an experimenter of serious repute who has acquired a certain scientific esteem for his work on ‘psychism’^[52] but who, unfortunately for him, seems little by little to have been converted almost entirely to the spiritist theories (it frequently happens that scholars are not exempt from a certain... naiveté),^[53] has quite recently published a work containing a description of his researches into so called ‘successive lives’ by means of the phenomena of ‘memory regression’ which he believes he has seen in certain subjects of hypnosis or magnetism.^[54] We say: 'which he believes he has seen', for while we do not in any way wish to doubt his good faith, we think that the facts that he interprets in this way by virtue of a preconceived hypothesis are really explained in another, much simpler way. These facts can be summed up as follows: The subject, being in a certain state, can be placed mentally in conditions where he finds himself in a past age, and to be thus 'situated' at some age or another about which he then speaks as if it were the present, whence it is concluded that in this case there is no 'remembrance' but 'memory regression'. This latter, by the way, is a contradiction in terms, for there can obviously be no question of memory where there is no remembering; but leaving this observation aside, it must first be asked if the possibility of remembrance pure and simple is truly excluded for the sole reason that the subject speaks of the past as if it were present to him again. To this one can immediately respond that memories as such are always mentally present;^[55] what marks them in our present consciousness as memories of past events is their comparison with our present perceptions (we mean present as perceptions), a comparison that only allows one to be distinguished from the other by the establishment of a relationship (temporal, that is, of succession) between outward events^[56] of which they are for us the respective mental representations. If for some reason (either by the momentary suppression of every outward impression or in some other way), this comparison comes to be impossible, memory, no longer localized in time with respect to other psychological elements at present different, loses its characteristic quality of past and preserves only its quality of present. Now this is precisely what happens in the case we are considering. The state in which the subject is placed corresponds to a modification of his present consciousness, implying an extension of the individual faculties in a certain direction to the momentary detriment of the development in another direction that these faculties possess in their normal state. If therefore the subject is prevented in such a state from being affected by present perceptions and if, further, all events after a certain determinate moment are kept from his consciousness (conditions that are perfectly attainable with the help of suggestion), they cannot be situated in the past or considered in this aspect because in the present field of consciousness there is no longer any element to which they can be related as temporally past. In all of this it is a question of nothing more than a mental state implying a modification of the conception of time (or better, of its comprehension) with respect to the normal state; moreover, these two states are both only two different modifications of one and the same individuality.^[57] Indeed, there can be no question of higher and extra-individual states in which the being is freed from the temporal condition, nor even of an extension of the individuality implying such freedom in part, since on the contrary the subject is placed in a determinate instant which essentially presupposes that his present state is conditioned by time. Besides, on the one hand states like those to which we have just alluded obviously cannot be reached by means that remain entirely within the domain of the present and restricted individuality, as every experimental process necessarily is; on the other hand, even if these states should in some way be reached, they could never be discerned by this individuality whose particular conditions of existence have no contact with those of the higher states, and because, as a particular individuality, it is necessarily incapable of assenting to, and a fortiori of expressing, all that is above the limits of its own possibilities.^[58] As for really returning to the past, this is something which is as we have said elsewhere manifestly just as impossible for the human individual as is travel into the future;^[59] and we never would have thought that Wells’ ‘time machine’^[60] could have been considered to be anything but pure fantasy, nor that anyone would come to speak seriously about the ‘reversibility of time’. Space is reversible, that is to say that after any one of its parts has been traversed in a given direction it can thereafter be traversed in the opposite direction; this is because it is a coordination of elements considered in present and permanent mode; but time, on the contrary, is a coordination of elements considered in successive and transitory mode and thus cannot be reversible, for such a supposition would be the very negation of the point of view of succession, or, in other words, it would amount precisely to the abolition of the temporal condition.^[61] Nonetheless there are people who have conceived this singular—to say the least—idea of the ‘reversibility of time’ and who have attempted to base it on a ‘theorem of mechanics’(?) which we believe interesting enough to reproduce in its entirety in order to show more clearly the origin of their fantastic hypothesis.

The complex series of all the successive states of a system of bodies being known, and these states following and developing from each other in a determinate order from the past, which serves as cause, to the future, which has the rank of effect [sic], let us then consider one of these successive states, and without changing anything of the composing masses or of the forces that act between these masses,^[62] or of the laws of these forces nor of the present situations of these masses in space, let us replace each velocity by an equal and contrary velocity.^[63] We shall call this ‘reverting’ all the speeds; this change itself will take the name of reversion, and we shall call its possibility reversibility of the movement of the system.

Let us pause a moment here, for it is precisely this possibility that we cannot admit even from the point of view of movement, which is necessarily effected in time; in a new series of successive states but in the opposite direction, the system under consideration will regain the positions that it had earlier occupied in space, but time will never be the same as before, and it is obviously sufficient for one condition to change in order that the new states of the system be completely unable to identify with the preceding ones. Moreover, in the reasoning that we cited, it is explicitly supposed (although in rather dubious French) that the relation of past to future is a relation of cause and effect, while on the contrary the causal relationship essentially implies simultaneity, whence the result that from this point of view the states considered to follow each other cannot develop from one another.^[64] But let us continue:

Now when the reversion of velocities in a system of bodies has been effected,^[65] the complete series of future and past states for this reverted system must be found. Will this inquiry be any more difficult than the corresponding problem for the successive states of a non-reverted system? Neither more nor less,^[66] and the solution to one of these problem will give the solution to the other by a very simple change, that in technical terms consists in changing the algebraic sign for time, writing -t instead of +t, and inversely. This is indeed very simple in theory, but leaving aside the fact that the notation of 'negative numbers' is only a wholly artificial process meant to simplify calculations and that it does not correspond to any kind of reality, the author of this argument falls into a serious error that is shared, moreover, by almost all mathematicians, and in order to interpret the change of sign that he has just noted he immediately adds: That is to say that the two complete series of successive states of the same system of bodies differ only in that the future becomes past and the past becomes future.^[67] The same series of successive states will be traversed in the opposite direction. The reversion of velocities simply reverses time; the original series of successive states and the reverted series have at all corresponding moments the same systemic figures with the same equal and contrary velocities [sic]. Unfortunately, the reversion of velocities really only reverses the spatial situations and not time; instead of being 'the same series of successive states traversed in the opposite direction' there will be a second series inversely homologous to the first with respect only to space. This will not make the past become the future, and the future will not become the past except in virtue of the normal and natural law of succession, as this occurs at every instant. It is truly too easy to show the unconscious and multiple sophisms hidden behind such arguments; yet this is all they can find to show us in justification, 'before science and philosophy', of a theory like that of so-called 'memory regressions'! This being said, in order to complete the psychological explanations mentioned at the beginning, we must also point out that the claimed 'return to the past' (which is really only a recalling to clear and distinct consciousness of memories preserved in a latent state in the subconscious memory of the subject) is facilitated from the psychological point of view by the fact that every impression necessarily leaves a trace in the organism that has experienced it. Here we do not have to investigate the way in which this impression may be recorded in various nerve centers; this is an investigation that belongs to experimental science pure and simple, which, moreover, has already been able to 'localize' almost exactly the centers corresponding to the different modalities of the memory.^[68] The action exerted on these centers, aided by the psychological factor of suggestion, allows the subject to be placed in the desired conditions to realize the experiences we discussed, at least as to their first part, that relating to events in which he has really played a role or has witnessed at a more or less remote period.^[69] But of course the physiological correspondence that we just pointed out is possible only for impressions that have really affected the subject's organism; likewise from the psychological point of view the individual consciousness of some being can obviously not contain anything except elements that have some connection with the actual individuality of this being. This should suffice to show that it is useless to pursue experimental investigations beyond certain limits, that is, in the present case, before the birth of the subject, or at least before the beginning of his embryonic life; yet it is this that they claim to do on the basis of the preconceived hypothesis of reincarnation (as we said), and they think they are thus able to 'revive' the subject's 'anterior lives' while in the interval also studying 'what is taken to be the non-incarnated spirit'! Here we are in complete fantasy. How can one speak of the 'anteriority of the living being' when it is a question of a time when this living being did not yet exist in the individualized state; and how can one wish to take him back before his origin, that is to say into conditions in which he never existed, thus conditions that for him do not correspond to any reality? This amounts to creating an artificial reality from scratch, if one may express oneself thus, that is to say a present mental reality that is not the representation of any kind of sensible reality; the suggestion given by the experimenter provides the starting-point for it, and the imagination of the subject does the rest. The same thing, minus the initial suggestion, happens in the state of ordinary dreams where the 'individual soul creates a world that comes entirely from itself and whose objects consist exclusively in mental images'^[70] without it being possible to distinguish these images from perceptions originating from outside, at least as long as no comparison is established between these two kinds of psychological elements, which can only occur by a more or less clearly conscious passage from the dream state to the state of waking.^[71] Thus an induced dream, a state similar in every respect to those in which partially or wholly imaginary perceptions are provoked in a subject by the appropriate suggestions, but with this one difference that here the experimenter is himself the dupe of his own suggestion and takes the mental creations of the subject for the 'awakening of memories'^[72]—behold what the would-be 'exploration of successive lives' is reduced to, the sole 'experimental proof' that the reincarnationists have been able to furnish in favor of their theory. That an attempt should be made to apply suggestion to 'psychotherapy', to use it to heal drunkards or maniacs or to develop the mentality of certain idiots, is an endeavor that does not fail to be most praiseworthy, and whatever the results obtained, we shall not change our opinion on the matter. But let this be the limit and let there be an end to the use of phantasmagorias like those of which we have just spoken. Nevertheless, people will still come forth to vaunt the 'clarity and evidence of spiritism' and oppose it to the 'obscurity of metaphysics', which they confuse with the most commonplace philosophy;^[73] peculiar evidence, at least if it is not evidence of absurdity! But all of this does not surprise us in the least, for we know very well that the spiritists and other 'psychists' of different ilks are all like a certain person with whom we recently had dealings; they are profoundly ignorant of what metaphysics is, and we shall certainly not undertake to explain it to them. Sarebbe lavar la testa all' asino [Let them wash the head of a donkey],^[74] as they irreverently say in Italian.