The truth about human nature, of life and destiny, of good and evil, of liberty and responsibility, will never be discovered on the point of a scalpel. Material science cannot judge the things of the spirit; the spirit alone can judge and comprehend the spirit in the measure of its own degree of evolution. It is by the consciousness of superior souls, by their thoughts, their works, their examples, by their sacrifices, that great light is cast on humanity to guide it toward a noble ideal. Man is at once spirit and matter - soul and body. But spirit and matter are but words, expressing in an imperfect manner the two forms of eternal life, which sleep in the matter of the brute, awaken in the matter organic, and grow and rise in the spirit. Is there not, as certain philosophers admit, but one only essence in things at once form and thought the form of the mind? That is possible: human knowledge is restricted, and the flashlight of genius is only one rapid ray in the infinite domain of ideas and laws. That which always characterizes the absolute difference of soul from matter is its unity with consciousness. Matter disperses and vanishes under analysis. Physical atoms divide and subdivide indefinitely. There is no unity in matter - such is the latest declaration of our greatest scientists. The spirit alone, in the universe, represents the one element simple, indivisible, indestructible, imperishable, immortal. 36
CHAPTER IV PERSONALITY The conscience, the ME, is the center of the being, the foundation of the personality. To be a person is to have a conscience, a ME, which reflects, examines remembers. But can we analyze and describe the ME, its mysterious windings, its latent forces, its fertile germs, and its secret activities? The philosophies of the past have attempted it in vain. They have only skimmed the surface of conscious being; its internal and profound parts remained obscure and inaccessible up to the hour when hypnotism and spiritual phenomena projected therein some rays of light; and since then we have been enabled to see that in us is reflected the whole universe in its double immensity of space and time. We say space, for the soul, in its full, free manifestations, knows not distance. We say time, because all the past sleeps in the soul, and the future dwells there in an embryo state. The old schools admitted the verity and the continuity of the ME; the permanence and identity of the human personality and its survival. Their studies were based upon the sense which we today call introspection. The new experimental psychology considers the personality as an aggregation, a composite, a ‘colony’. The ME is regarded as a transient arrangement of cells without stability, which decompose eventually. These ideas are based on intellectual observations of alterations of personality, and the relation of maladies of memory to lesions of the brain, etc. How shall we conciliate these dissimilar theories and observe both? Scientifically, in a most simple fashion. By observation itself - vigorous, attentive. Frederick Myers has given the subject the most magnificent effort that has been attempted by the human mind, in his book The Survival of Human Personality. He says in this work (which is recommended to all readers of this volume), ‘After fourteen years of careful research, at the end of a long series of reflections based upon numberless proofs, I have come to the conclusion that the consciousness and the faculties of earth life assert themselves newly, in all their strength, after death.’ There are certain cases when there appears in us a being wholly different from our normal selves, possessing not only knowledge and aptitude more extensive than those of the ordinary personality, but besides, an endowment of more varied and more powerful perceptions. Often the observers of the phenomena of second personality believe they are in the presence of another individual. It is necessary for the student to make the distinction between these cases and the controls of spiritual entities. The proofs furnished by careful students of these different manifestations permit no confusion. The cases of G. Pelham, of Robert Hyslop, and Fourcade, furnished in the book In the Invisible, are among these proofs. Dr. Binet, in his Alterations of the Personality, as does Myers, Dr. James, Dr. Merton Prince, Dr. Bouru and Dr. Bruat, all men of scientific renown. All the examples given by them demonstrate one thing. Above all the level of the normal consciousness, outside of the ordinary personality, there exists in us planes of consciousness - zones or layers, placed in such a manner that under certain conditions one can prove the alterations between these planes. We see emerging to the surface, and manifesting themselves for a given time, attributes and faculties, which penetrate to a deeper consciousness: then they disappear, to plunge again into shadow and inaction. The ordinary superficial ME seems but a fragment of the ME total. In the one is registered a world of facts, information, of memories reaching to a long past of the soul. During the normal life all these reservoirs remain hidden, as if buried under a material envelope. They appear in the somnambulistic state. The call of the will, the suggestion, mobilizes them; they come into action and produce the strange phenomena that the physiologist observes, but has no power to explain. All the cases of double personality, all the phenomena of clairvoyance, telepathy, premonition, enter the scene of the new senses and unknown faculties. All the ensemble of innumerable facts, constantly increasing, should be attributed to the intervention of the hidden personality. The somnambulistic state, which permits these manifestations, should not be regarded as morbid, but rather a superior state, following the experience of Myers’ Evolution. It is true that organic degeneracy and weakness sometimes serves to facilitate the somnambulistic state. In a general way, it might be stated that all that reduces the physical vigor assists in allowing the spirit to free itself. The clear vision often found in the dying gives testimony to this fact. 37