silence in regard to them, two hypotheses which reach the unknown
by more or less divergent paths, to wit, the spiritualistic
hypothesis and the mediumistic hypothesis. The spiritualists, or
rather the neospiritualists or scientific spiritualists, who must
not be confused with the somewhat over-credulous disciples of
Allan Kardec, maintain that the dead do not die entirely, that
their spiritual or animistic entity neither departs nor disperses
into space after the dissolution of the body, but continues an
active though invisible existence around us. The
neospiritualistic theory, however, professes only very vague
notions as to the life led by these discarnate spirits. Are they
more intelligent than they were when they inhabited their flesh?
Do they possess a wider understanding and mightier faculties than
ours? Up to the present, we have not the unimpeachable facts that
would permit us to say so. It would seem, on the contrary, if the
discarnate spirits really continue to exist, that their life is
circumscribed, frail, precarious, incoherent and, above all, not
very long. To this the objection is raised that it only appears
so to our feeble eyes. The dead among whom we move without
knowing it struggle to make themselves understood, to manifest
themselves, but dash themselves against the inpenetrable wall of
our senses, which, created solely to perceive matter, remain
hopelessly ignorant of all the rest, though this is doubtless the
essential part of the universe. That which will survive in us,
imprisoned in our body, is absolutely inaccessible to that which
survives in them. The utmost that they can do is occasionally to
cause a few glimmers of their existence to penetrate the fissures
of those singular organisms known as mediums. But these vagrant,
fleeting, venturous, stifled, deformed glimmers can but give us a
ludicrous idea of a life which has no longer anything in common