O Livro dos Médiuns — Part II, ch. I — Action of spirits on matter

52The materialistic opinion being withdrawn as condemned at once by reason and by facts, the whole question is to know if the soul, after death, can manifest itself to the living. The question, thus reduced to its simplest expression, is found to be singularly free. It might be asked, first, why intelligent beings, who live in some way in our very midst, though, by their very nature, invisible, should not attest their presence. Simple reason says there is nothing in it absolutely impossible, and this is something gained. Besides, this belief has the assent of all people, for we find it everywhere, and at all epochs: an intuition could not be so general nor survive time without resting on something. More, it is sanctioned by the testimony of sacred books and by the Fathers of the Church, and it has taken the skepticism and materialism of our age to consign it to superstition; if we are in error, so are these authorities.
But these are only moral considerations. One cause, above all others, has helped to fortify doubt, in an epoch so positive as ours, where people believe in giving a reason for all, where they want to know the why and the how of everything; it is ignorance of the nature of spirits, and of the means by which they can manifest themselves. This knowledge acquired, the fact of the manifestations is no longer surprising, and enters into the order of natural facts.

53The idea formed of spirits renders, at first sight, the phenomena of the manifestations incomprehensible. These manifestations can take place only by the action of the spirit on matter; this is why those who believe that spirit is the absence of all matter ask, with some appearance of reason, how it can act materially. But there is the error, for spirit is not an abstraction; it is a being defined, limited, and circumscribed. The spirit incarnated in the body constitutes the soul; when it leaves the body at death, it does not leave it entirely stripped of an envelope. All tell us they preserve the human form, and in fact, when they appear to us it is in the form in which we have known them.
Observe them attentively at the moment they leave this life; they are in a troubled state, everything around them is confused; they see their body, whole or mutilated, according to the kind of death: on the other hand, they see themselves and feel that they are living. Something tells them that body belongs to them, and they do not understand that they may be separated from it. They continue to see themselves under their primitive form, and this sight, with some, produces a singular illusion — that of believing themselves still living; experience of their new state is necessary to convince them of the reality. This first troubled moment dissipated, the body becomes for them like an old garment, which they have stripped oft"and no longer regret; they feel lighter, and as if disencumbered of a burden; they no longer experience physical pains, and are perfectly happy in the power of elevating themselves, traversing space, as tbey have a thousand times in their dreams while living. Fourth. In the mean time, spite of the absence of the body, they realize their personality; they have a form, but a form that neither troubles nor embarrasses them; they have the consciousness of their me and of their individuality. What must we conclude? That the soul does not leave all in the coffin, and that it carries something with it.

54Numerous observations and incontestable facts, of which we will speak further on, have led to this conclusion — that there are in men three things: first, the soul or spirit, intelligent principle in which resides the moral sense; second, the body, gross, material envelope with which it is temporarily clothed, for the accomplishment of certain providential views; third, the perisprit, semi-material, fluidic envelope serving as a link between the soul and the body.
Death is the destruction, or rather the disintegration, of the grosser envelope — that which the soul abandons; the other is disengaged, and follows the soul, which thus finds itself always in possession of an envelope; this last, though fluidic, ethereal, vaporous, invisible to us in its normal state, is not the less matter, though we have not as yet been able to catch and subject it to analysis.
This second envelope of the soul — the perisprit — exists during the corporeal life; it is the intermediary of all the sensations perceived by the spirit, that by which the spirit transmits its will to the exterior, and acts upon the organs. To make use of a material comparison, it is the conductor, the electric thread, which serves for the reception and transmission of thought; it is, lastly, that mysterious, unseizable agent, denominated nervous fluid, which plays so great a part in the economy, and of which too little is thought in physiological and pathological phenomena. Medicine, considering only the material, ponderable element, is deprived, in the appreciation of facts, of an incessant cause of action. But this is not the place to examine that question; we would only remark that the knowledge of the perisprit is the key to a crowd of problems hitherto inexplicable.
The perisprit is not one of those hypotheses to which recourse is sometimes had in science for the explanation of a fact; its existence is not revealed solely by the spirits; it is a result of observations, as we shall have occasion to show. For the present, and not to anticipate facts we shall have to relate, we limit ourselves to say that, whether during its union with the body or after its separation, the soul is never separated from its perisprit.

55It has been said that the spirit is a flame, a spark; this should be understood of the spirit, so called, as intellectual and moral principle, and to which we know not how to attribute a determined form; but in whatever degree it may be found, it is always clothed with an envelope or p&risprit, whose nature is etherealized to the same degree in which it is purified and elevated in the hierarchy; in such a manner that the idea of form is inseparable from that of spirit, and that we cannot conceive the one without the other.
Thus the perisprit makes an integral part of the spirit, as the body makes an integral part of the man: but the perisprit alone is not the spirit any more than the body alone is the man, for the perisprit does not think; it is to the spirit what the body is to the man; it is the agent or instrument of his action.

56The form of the perisprit is the human form, and when it appears to us it is usually that under which we have known the spirit during his life. It might be believed from this, that the perisprit, disengaged from all the parts of the body, is moulded on it in some sort, and so preserves its imprint; but it does not appear to be so. The human form, with some shades of difference, and with the organic modifications made necessary by the medium in which the being is called to live, is found among all the inhabitants of all the globe; this, at least, is what the spirits say: it is equally the form of all non-incarnated spirits, who have only the perisprit; it is that under which, from all time, angels and pure spirits have been represented: from whence we conclude that the human form is the type form of all human beings to whatever degree they may belong. But the subtile matter of the perisprit has neither the tenacity nor the rigidity of the compact matter of the body; it is, if we may so express, ourselves, flexible and expansible; this is why the form it takes, though counterdrawn on that of the body, is not absolute; it changes at the will of the spirit, who can give himself such or such an appearance at his will, while the solid envelope would offer an insurmountable resistance. Disencumbered of these shackles that compressed it, the perisprit is elongated or contracted, transformed, in a word lends itself to all metamorphoses, according to the will that acts on it. It is in consequence of this property of his fluidic envelope, that the spirit who wishes to be recognized can, when it is necessary, take the exact appearance he had when living, nay, even those of the corporeal accidents which may be signs of recognition. Spirits, then, as may be seen, are beings similar to ourselves, forming around us a whole population invisible in the normal state, because, as we shall see, this invisibility is not absolute.

57Let us return to the nature of the perisprit, for that is essential to the explanation we have to give. We have said that, though fluidic, it is not the less a kind of matter; and this follows from the fact of the tangible apparitions to which we shall return. Under the influence of certain mediums, hands have appeared having all the properties of living hands, which have the heat, could be handled, offer the resistance of a solid body, which could grasp you, and which suddenly vanished like a shade. The intelligent action of these hands, which evidently obey a will in executing certain movements, in even playing airs on an instrument, proves that they are the visible part of an invisible being. Their tangibility, their temperature, in a word the impression they make on the senses, — for they have been known to leave impressions on the skin, give painful blows or caress gently, — prove that they are of some kind of matter: especially does their instantaneous disappearance prove that this matter is eminently subtile, and is like some substances that can pass alternately from the solid- to the fluid state, and vice versa.

58The intimate nature of the spirit, properly so called, — that is to say, of the thinking being, — is entirely unknown to us: it is revealed to us only by its action, and its actions can strike our material senses only by an intermediate material. It has for direct instrument its peris p rit, as a man has his body, and its perisprit is matter, as we shall see. It has, besides, for intermediary agent, the universal fluid — a sort of vehicle on which it acts, as we act on the air to produce certain effects by the aid of dilatation, comprehension, propulsion, or vibrations.
Seen by this light, the action of the spirit on matter may be easily conceived: we comprehend from this that all the effects that result from it enter into the order of natural facts, and have nothing of the marvelous in them. They appeared supernatural only when the cause was unknown; the cause known, the marvelous disappeared; and this cause lies entirely in the semi-material properties of the perisprit. It is a new order of facts which a new law comes to explain, and which, in a short time, will no more astonish any one than we are now astonished with correspondence at a distance in a few minutes by electricity.

59It may perhaps be asked how the spirit, by the aid of a matter so subtile, can act on heavy and compact bodies, raise tables, &c. Assuredly it could not be a man of science who could make such objections; for, without speaking of the unknown properties this new agent may possess, have we not under our eyes analogous examples? Is it not in the most rarefied gas, in the most imponderable fluids, that industry finds its most powerful motors? When we see the air overthrow edifices, steam carry enormous masses, gasified powder raise rocks, electricity break trees and pierce walls, what is there more strange in admitting that-the spirit, by the aid of his perisprit, can raise a table? above all, when we know that this perisprit can become visible, tangible, and behave altogether like a solid body