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Marta, of Colonel de Rochas, and my own experiences, establish the fact that not only memory of the smallest
details of life, even to childhood’s hours, are remembered by the disembodied spirits, but those of anterior
lives are engraved in the hidden recesses of the soul. An entire past, veiled in a waking state, reappears and
lives again in a trance condition. Colonel de Rochas speaks of this in his book Successive Lives, and this
subject will be specially dealt with farther on. Modern spiritual research cannot be considered as a purely
metaphysical conception, as was the doctrine of the early spirituality. It now presents itself in quite another
character and responds to the demands of an educated generation and to the school of rational criticism - a
school rendered definite by the exaggerations of an agonizing and sickly mysticism.
To believe does not suffice for today - we want to know! No philosophical or moral conception has a
chance of success if it does not lean on demonstration at once logical, mathematical, and positive, and if
besides it is not crowned by the satisfying sanction of our ideas of justice. Leibnitz has said, ‘If some one
would write mathematically of philosophy and morality, nothing could prevent its being done with exactness.
This’ he adds, ‘has been rarely attempted, and more rarely has succeeded.’
We might here remark, that in Allan Kardec’s Book of Spirits, this has been done in a masterly
manner. That book is the result of immense labor, classification, coordination, elimination, and gives only the
messages from the spirit world, which the author was able to prove authentic beyond question. All the others
were discarded.
This work of Allan Kardec is not ended; it continues since his death. Already we possess a powerful
synthesis; the large lines were traced by Allan Kardec, and have been developed by the interpreters of his
thought with the collaboration of the invisible world.
Each one brings a grain of sand to the common edifice, and the foundations are strengthened every day
by scientific experimentation, while its towers reach higher and higher. For myself, I can say that I have been
favored by teachings of spiritual guides, and that they have never failed me or misled me, during forty years.
Their revelation have been of a particularly didactic character in the course of the last eight years. I have
written fully of this in a former work, In the Invisible.
A rule scrupulously observed by Allan Kardec is that of presenting all his conclusions and ideas in a
manner easily comprehended by any reader. That is why we purpose to adopt here the terms and method
utilized by Allan Kardec, while adding to our own work the developments of fifty years of research and
experimentation which have flowed by since the appearance of his works. Facts are nothing without reason,
which analyses them and discovers the underlying law. Phenomena are transitory; the certitude that they give
us is not enduring. History demonstrates this. During centuries, men believed (and many still believe) that the
sun rises. To intellectual minds it was given to discover the movement of the earth, not grasped by the senses.
What has become of the greater part of the old beliefs of science and chemistry? Our scientific men seem now
only positive of the Law of Gravitation. In consequence, the methods I use in this work are observations of
facts, their generalization, and search for the law governing them; and the rational deduction, which, beyond
the fugitive and changing aspect of phenomena, perceives the permanent cause, which produces it.
In the study of spiritual phenomena there are two things to consider - a revelation from the spirit
world, and a human discovery, that is to say, one part from invisible realms, essentially educative in itself, and
the other a personal and human confirmation that pursues it with the laws of logic and reason.
Until now, we have had in this study only personal systems and individual revelations. Today there are
thousands of voices the realm of the dead, which speak to earth. The invisible world enters into action, and
eminent spirits, agents from beyond, are recognized by the beauty and power of their teachings. The great
geniuses of space, impelled by divine impulse, have come to guide us to radiant summits. Is not this a grander
dispensation than ever was ours in the past? The methods and the results are equally remarkable.
Personal revelation is always fallible. All the individual theories whether of Aristotle, of Thomas
Aquinas, of Kant, of Descartes, or of Spinoza, are necessarily influenced by the opinions, tendencies, and
prejudices of the revealer, and by the times and condition in which they are received. One might say the same
of all religious doctrines. The revelations of impersonal spirits are free from the greater part of these
influences; no man, no Church, no nation has the power to stifle them. They defy all inquisitions, and we have
seen the most hostile minds brought to a new viewpoint by the power of their manifestations, and souls moved
to the depths of their being by appeals and exhortations from the dear dead who urged them to become
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