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

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ALLAN KARDEC
"He has created the universe, which comprehends all beings, animate and inanimate, material
and immaterial.
"The material beings constitute the visible or corporeal world, and the immaterial beings
constitute the invisible or spiritual world, that is to say, the spirit-world, or world of spirits.
"The spirit-world is the normal, primitive, eternal world, pre-existent to, and surviving,
everything else.
"The corporeal world is only secondary; it might cease to exist, or never have existed, without
changing the essentiality of the spiritual world.
"Spirits temporarily assume a perishable material envelope, the destruction of which, by
death, restores them to liberty.
"Among the different species of corporeal beings, God has chosen the human species for the
incarnation of spirits arrived at a certain degree of development; it is this which gives it a
moral and intellectual superiority to all the others.
"The soul is an incarnated spirit, whose body is only its envelope.
"There are in man three things -(1.) The body, or material being, analogous to the animals,
and animated by the same vital principle; (2.) The soul, or immaterial being, a spirit
incarnated in the body; (3.) The link which unites the soul and the body, a principle
intermediary between matter and spirit.
"Man has thus two natures.: by his body he participates in the nature of the animals, of which
it has the instincts; by his soul, he participates in the nature of spirits.
"The link, or perispirit, which unites the body and the spirit, is a sort of semi-material
envelope. Death is the destruction of the material body, which is the grossest of man's two
envelopes; but the spirit preserves his other envelope, viz., the perispirit, which constitutes
for him an ethereal body, invisible to us in its normal state, but which he can render
occasionally visible, and even tangible, as is the case in apparitions.
"A spirit, therefore, is not an abstract, undefined being, only to be conceived of by our
thought; it is a real, circumscribed being, which, in certain cases, is appreciable by the senses
of sight, hearing, and touch.
"Spirits belong to different classes, and are not equal to one another either in power, in
intelligence, in knowledge, or in morality. Those of the highest order are distinguished from
those below them by their superior purity and knowledge, their nearness to