But, if you cannot perish
entirely, it is no less certain that those who came before you
have not perished either; and hence it is not altogether
improbable that we may be able to discover them and to
communicate with them. In this wider sense, the spiritualistic
theory is perfectly admissible; but what is not at all admissible
is the narrow and pitiful interpretation which its proponents too
often give it. They see the dead crowding around us like wretched
puppets indissolubly attached to the insignificant scene of their
death by the thousand little threads of insipid memories and
infantile hobbies. They are supposed to be here, blocking up our
homes, more abjectly human than if they were still alive, vague,
inconsistent, garrulous, derelict, futile and idle, tossing
hither and thither their desolate shadows, which are being slowly
swallowed up by silence and oblivion, busying themselves
incessantly with what no longer concerns them, but almost
incapable of doing us a real service, so much so that, in short,
they would end by persuading us that death serves no purpose,
that it neither purifies nor exalts, that it brings no
deliverance and that it is indeed a thing of terror and despair.
7
No, it is not the dead who thus speak and act. Besides, why bring
them into the matter unnecessarily? I could understand that we
should be obliged to do so if there were no similar phenomena
outside them; but in the intuition and clairvoyance of
nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we
obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another
and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which
are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and
tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct
persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity
inasmuch as they know that they do not exist.
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