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

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ALLAN KARDEC
have merited to be thus endowed with a soul of a quality superior to that of the soul which has been given
to that other man?
But the theory of the unity of existence presents a still graver difficulty. A nation, in the course of a
thousand years, passes from barbarism to civilisation. If all men lived a thousand years, we could
understand that. in this period, they would have the time to progress; but many die every day, at all ages,
and the people of the earth are incessantly renewed, so that every day we see them appear and disappear.
Thus, at the end of a thousand years, no trace remains in any country of those who were living in it a
thousand years before. The nation, from the State of barbarism in which it was, has become civilised-but
what is it that has thus progressed? Is it the people who were formerly barbarian? But they died long ago.
Is it the newcomers? But if the soul is created at the same time with the body, it follows that their souls
were not in existence during the period of barbarism; and we should therefore be compelled to admit that
the efforts made to civilise a people have the power, net to work out the improvement of souls that are
created imperfect, but to make God create souls of a better quality than these which He created a
thousand years before.
Let us compare this theory of progress with the one now given by spirits. The souls that come into a
nation in its period of civilisation have had their infancy, like all the others, but they have lived already,
and have brought with them the advancement resulting from progress previously made; they come into it,
attracted by a State of things with which they are in sympathy, and which is suited to their present degree
of advancement, so that the effect of the efforts to civilise a people is not to cause the future creation of
souls of a better quality, but to attract to that people souls that have already progressed, whether they
have already lived among that people, or whether they have lived elsewhere. And the progress
accomplished by each people, when thus explained, furnishes also the key to the progress of the human
race in its entirety, by showing that when all the peoples of the earth shall have reached the same level of
moral advancement, the earth will be the resort of good Spirits only, who will live together in fraternal
union, and all the bad spirits who flow infest it, finding themselves out of place among the others, and
repelled by them, will go away, and will seek in lower worlds the surroundings that suit them, until they
have rendered themselves worthy of coming back into our transformed and happier world. The theory
commonly received leads also to this other consequence, viz.. that the labour of social amelioration is
profitable only to present and future generations; its result is null for the generations of the past, who
made the mistake of coming into the world too Soon, and who have to get on as they can, weighted as they
are through the faults of their barbarian epoch. According to the, doctrine now set forth by spirits, the
progress accomplished by later generations is equally beneficial to the generations that preceded them,
and who, r'-living upon the earth under improved conditions, are thus enabled to improve themselves in
the focus of civilisation. (222.)
Civilisation.
790. Is civilisation a progress, or, according to some philosophers, a decadence, of the
human race?
"A progress, but incomplete. Mankind does not pass suddenly from infancy to the age of
reason."
- Is it reasonable to condemn civilisation?
"You should condemn those who misuse it, rather than condemn the work of God."
791. Will civilisation be eventually purified, so that the evils caused by it will disappear?