Utility of Certain Private Evocations
The communications obtained from highly elevated spirits or who animated the great characters of
the antiquity is precious for its highly educational content. These spirits have acquired a degree of
perfection that allows them to cover a more extensive sphere of ideas; to penetrate mysteries
beyond the reach of common humanity and therefore, better than others, initiate us on certain
things. It does not follow that communications from spirits of lower orders are useless. Far from it:
the observer collects many teachings from them. To learn about the customs of a people we must
study it in all degrees of the scale.
Those who only had seen one face would hardly know it. The story of a people is not the story of
their kings and social luminaries. To judge the people it is necessary to see them in their private life,
in their particular habits. However, the superior spirits are the celebrities of the spiritual world.
Their own elevation puts them at such a height above us that we are amazed by the distance that
separates us. Spirits more bourgeois – kindly allow us to use the expression – describe the condition
in their new existence in a more tangible way. In them, the connection between bodily life and the
spirit’s life is more intimate; we understand it better, because it touches us more closely. Learning
from them about what they became, what they think, what people of all conditions and all
characters experience, both good men and the vicious ones, great and small, the happy as the
unhappy ones of the century, in a word, men who lived among us, who we have seen and known,
whose real life is known to us, as their virtues and caprices, understanding their joys and their
sufferings; we associate with them and harvest a moral teaching which is so more useful the more
intimate are the relationships between them and us.
We put ourselves in place of the one who was like us more easily than in place of those who we
only see through the mirage of a heavenly glory. Vulgar spirits show us the practical application of
the great and sublime truths, whose theory the superior spirits teach us. Moreover, there is nothing
useless in the study of a science. Newton found the law of the forces of the universe in an extremely
simple phenomenon.
Such communications have another advantage: to verify the identity of the spirits in a more precise
manner. When a spirit tells us that he was Socrates or Plato, we are compelled to believe his word
because he has no identity card. We can see in his words if he confirms or not the origin he assigns
to himself: we judge him an elevated spirit - that is all. If he was really Socrates or Plato, it does not
matter. But when the spirit of our relatives, our friends or those who we know manifest to us, there
are a thousand circumstances of intimate details that the identity could not be mistaken. Thus we
obtain, in a certain way, the material evidence. We therefore think that it will be appreciated if we
carry out, from time to time, some of these intimate evocations: it is the romance of the spiritual life
without fiction.
