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

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THE SPIRITS’ BOOK
God, and their love of goodness; they are "angels" or "pure spirits." The other classes are
more and more distant from this perfection; those of the lower ranks are inclined to most of
our passions, hatred, envy, jealousy, pride, etc.; they take pleasure in evil. Among them are
some who are neither very good nor very bad, but are teazing and troublesome rather than
malicious are often mischievous and unreasonable, and may be classed as giddy and foolish
spirits.
"Spirits do not belong perpetually to the same order. All are destined to attain perfection by
passing through the different degrees of the spirit-hierarchy. This amelioration is effected by
incarnation, which is imposed on some of them as an expiation, and on others as a mission.
Material life is a trial which they have to undergo many times until they have attained to
absolute perfection; it is a sort of filter, or alembic, from which they issue more or less
purified after each new incarnation.
"On quitting the body, the soul re-enters the world of spirits from which it came, and from
which it will enter upon a new material existence after a longer or shorter lapse of time,
during which its state is that of an errant or wandering spirit. ¹
"Spirits having to pass through many incarnations, it follows that we have all had many
existences, and that we shall have others, more or less perfect, either upon this earth or in
other worlds.
"The incarnation of spirits always takes place in the human race; it would be an error to
suppose that the soul or spirit could be incarnated in the body of an animal.
"A spirit's successive corporeal existences are always progressive, and never retrograde; but
the rapidity of our progress depends on the efforts we make to arrive at perfection.
"The qualities of the soul are those of the spirit incarnated in us; thus, a good man is the
incarnation of a good spirit, and a bad man is that of an unpurified spirit.
"The soul possessed its own individuality before its incarnation; it preserves that individuality
after its separation from the body.
"On its re-entrance into the spirit world, the soul again finds there all those whom it has
known upon the earth, and all its former existences eventually come back to its memory, with
the
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¹ There is. between this doctrine of re-incarnation and that of metempsychosis, as held by certain sects, a
characteristic difference, which is explained in the course of the present work.