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‘The occult world exists; at risk of being regarded by my contemporaries as insane, I believe in phantoms.’ In
my own group of students that I long directed in Tours, the mediums described apparitions of the dead whom
they had never seen or known so perfectly that they were readily recognized by those present. In the works of
Aksakof, he relates the reproduction by a spirit of the penmanship of the banker Livermore, which was
identical with that in the possession of his wife. Often spirits incorporate in the body of the sleeping medium,
and speak and write, furnishing proofs of their identity. The medium abandons momentarily her body to their
use. Voice, language, and gestures are those of the spirit, not of the medium at those times. A curious case is
testified to by Abbé Grimond, director of the Asylum for Deaf-Mutes at Vaucluse. By the means of the organs
of Mme. Gallas, medium, while in trance, he received from the spirit of Focade, eight years deceased, a
message by the silent motion of the lips. This was after a special method of speech for the mute which this
spirit had invented and communicated to Abbé Grimond, and that this venerable ecclesiastic alone knew.
Twelve witnesses who were present have given their signatures to the truth of this remarkable séance. Doctor
Maxwell, Avocat-Géneral, speaks in his book of a case of incorporation as follows; ‘A curious personality is
that of a doctor who has been dead a hundred years; his medical language is archaic. He gives the ancient
names to medicinal plants. His diagnosis is generally exact, but the description of internal symptoms which he
perceives are astonishing to a physician of the twentieth century! I have studied my confrère from beyond the
tomb for ten years, and he has not failed to present a striking continuity of logic.’
If we take into consideration the difficulties which surround the communications by the aid of an
organism, and particularly a brain which he has not himself fashioned and accustomed himself to by
experience, if we consider that by reason of the difference in planes of existence one cannot demand of
discarnate man all the proofs we demand of a material man, we must them recognize that the phenomenon of
incorporation is one of those which co-operates the most powerfully to demonstrate the spirituality of life and
its survival.
It is not a question in these cases of a simple influence at a distance, it is an impulsion which the
subject cannot resist, and which often takes possession of the entire organism. These phenomena are analogous
to that of the second personality. There the profound ME substitutes itself for the normal ME, and directs the
physical body, with the purpose of regeneration. But here it is a strange spirit which plays a role and
substitutes itself in place of the personality of the sleeping medium. The word ‘possession’ which we have just
used has often been employed in an evil sense. One attributes to it facts which are designed as diabolical. But
as Myers has said, "The evil is not a creature recognized in science. In these phenomena we find ourselves in
presence of spirits who have been men like ourselves, animated by the same motives which inspire us.’
Thanks to these experiences, to these observations, to these testimonials a million times repeated, we
must see the existence of the soul rising out of the domain of hypothesis, or of simple metaphysical
conception, to become a living reality, a fact vigorously established.
All the terror, all the superstitions suggested by the idea of death to man vanish. Our conception of the
universal life and of divine work enlarges, and at the same time our confidence in the future is fortified. We
see under the alternate forms of existence, carnal and etheric, that the progress of life and the development of
the personality continues, and one law supreme presides over the evolution of souls through time and space.
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