Le Livre des Esprits

...ty? This completes the sentence from the previous page: "Are these intelligences within humanity or outside of humanity?" This is the explanation provided by the intelligences who reveal themselves; let us see what they tell us.

VI

The beings who communicate in this way refer to themselves, as we have said, by the name of Spirits or geniuses: here used in the classical sense of "guiding spirits" or "daemons," rather than simply referring to high intelligence, and as having belonged, for some at least, to the men who lived on the earth. They constitute the spiritual world, just as we constitute the corporeal world during our lives.

We summarize here in a few words the most salient points of the doctrine they have transmitted to us, in order to respond more easily to certain objections.

"God is eternal, immutable, immaterial, unique, all-powerful, sovereignly just and good.

"He created the universe, which includes all beings, animate and inanimate, material and immaterial.

"Material beings constitute the visible or corporeal world, and immaterial beings constitute the invisible or spirit world, that is to say, the world of Spirits.

"The spirit world is the normal, primitive, eternal world, pre-existing and surviving everything.

"The corporeal world is only secondary; it could cease to exist, or never have existed, without altering the essence of the spirit world.

"Spirits temporarily don a perishable material envelope, the destruction of which, through death, restores them to freedom.

"Among the different species of corporeal beings, God has chosen the human species for the incarnation of Spirits who have reached a certain degree of development; this is what gives them moral and intellectual superiority over all others.

"The soul is an incarnated spirit whose body is only the envelope.

"There are three things in man: 1st, the body, or material being, analogous to animals and animated by the same vital principle: a 19th-century concept of a non-physical energy that distinguishes living organic matter from dead matter; 2nd, the soul or immaterial being, a Spirit incarnated in the...