Allan Kardec-THE Spirit's Book_ The Principles of Spiritist Doctrine (1989)

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THE SPIRITS’ BOOK
which often contrast so strikingly with the situation into which they are born?
5. Why is it that some men, independently of education, are more advanced than others?
6. Why is it that among the races which people the globe some are savage and others
civilised? If you took a Hottentot baby from its mother's breast, and brought it up in our most
renowned schools, could you succeed in making of it a Laplace or a Newton?
What is the philosophy or the theosophy that can solve these problems? Either the souls of
men are equal at their birth, or they are unequal. If they are equal, why these inequalities of
aptitude? Will it be said that these inequalities depend on the corporeal organisation of each
child? But such a doctrine would be the most monstrous and the most immoral of hypotheses;
for, in that case, man would be a mere machine, the sport of matter; he would not be
responsible for his actions, but would have the right to throw all the blame of his wrongdoing
on the imperfections of his physical frame. If, on the other hand, souls are created
unequal, God must have created them so; but, in that case, why is this innate superiority
accorded to some and denied to others? And would such partiality be consistent with the
justice of God, and the equal love He bears to all His creatures?
Admit, on the contrary, a succession of existences, and everything is explained. Men bring
with them, at their birth in flesh, the amount of intuition they have previously acquired. They
are more or less advanced, according to the number of existences they have previously
accomplished, according as they are nearer to or farther from the common starting-point;
exactly as, in a company made up of individuals of different ages, each will possess a degree
of development proportionate to the number of years he has already lived; the succession of
years being, to the life of the body, what the succession of existences is to the life of the soul.
Bring together in the same place, at the same time, a thousand individuals of all ages, from
the new-born babe to the patriarch of eighty. Suppose that a veil is thrown over their past, and
that you, in your ignorance of that past, imagine them all to have been born on the same day.
You would naturally wonder how it is that some are whinkled and others little; that some are
wrinkled and others fresh; that some are learned and others ignorant; but if the cloud which
hid their past were dispersed, and you discovered that some