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

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ALLAN KARDEC
nineteenth? To doubt of the continuity of moral progress would be to assume either that the human race
reached the summit of perfection, which would be absurd, or that it is not morally perfectible, which is
disproved by experience.
Degenerate Peoples.
786. History shows us many peoples who, after having been subjected to shocks that have
overthrown their nationality, have relapsed into barbarism. What Progress has there been
made in such cases.?
"When your house threatens to fall about your ears, you pull it down, in order to build
another, stronger and more commodious; but, until the latter is built, there is trouble and
confusion in your dwelling.
"Comprehend this also: you are poor and live in a hovel; you become rich, and quit the hovel
to live in a palace. Then comes a poor devil, such as you formerly were, and takes possession
of the hovel you have quitted; and he is a gainer by the move, for he was previously
altogether without shelter. Learn from this that the spirits now incarnated in the people that
you call 'degenerate' are not those who composed that people in the time ~f its splendour;
those spirits, being of advanced degree, have gone to reside in nobler habitations, and have
progressed, while others less advanced have taken their vacated places, which they too will
vacate in their turn."
787. Are there not races that, by their nature, are incapable of progress?
"Yes, but they are day by day becoming annihilated corporeally."
- What will be the future fate of the souls that animate those races?
"They, like all others, will arrive at perfection by passing through other existences. God
deprives no one of the general heritage."
- The most civilised men may, then, have been savages and cannibals?
"You, yourself, have been such, more than once, before becoming what you now are."
788. The various peoples are collective individualities, that pass, like individuals, through
infancy, manhood, and decrepitude. Does not this truth, attested by history, seem to imply
that the most advanced peoples of this century will have their decline and their end, like those
of antiquity?