Kardec’s Careful
Observance
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The scientific tools of study and observation are how
Spiritism originated, when Allan Kardec became a witness to the frequent
and popular spiritual phenomena, such as raptures, table turning, and later
mediumistic writings, of the early 1850s.
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See our web section,
"History of Spirtism" to read
more about this phenomena and the
development of events that followed, leading to the beginnings of
Spiritist
science and the codification of the Spiritism. |
While
skeptical at first, Kardec eventually became a serious student of these spirit
communications, which took on an especially serious, intelligent, and moral
nature when he was present.
The spirits
revealed that they were not a separate class of beings in creation, but the
souls of those who had lived on Earth or other worlds, who were now liberated
from the material body and able to move freely through space.
Kardec was
very careful, for he soon recognized that if such revelation were true, each spirit's knowledge,
then, would be limited to its own level of advancement, and each must be
observed with caution. He wrote, "… avoiding preconceived notions, I observed
attentively, compared observations and deduced the consequences. I tried to
identify the causes of the phenomena by linking the facts logically, and I did
not accept an explanation as valid unless it could resolve all the difficulties
of the question."
Kardec
subjected the numerous spirit communications, received from various places around
the world, to systematic and methodical analysis, cross-examinations that tested
for the universality of general knowledge and agreement between teachings from
spirits of a superior order, and other tests of logic and reason.
The science of
experimental Spiritism was born.
