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

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ALLAN KARDEC
862. There are persons who never succeed in anything, and who seem to be pursued by an
evil genius in all their undertakings; is there not, in such cases, something that may be called
a fatality?
"It is certainly a fatality, if you like to call it so, but it results from the choice of the kind of
existence made by those persons in the spirit-state, because they desired to exercise their
patience and resignation by a life of disappointment. But you must not suppose that this
fatality is absolute, for it is often the consequence of a man's having taken a wrong path, one
that is not adapted to his intelligence and aptitudes. He who tries to cross a river without
knowing how to swim stands a very good chance of drowning; and the same may be said in
regard to the greater part of the events of your life. If a man undertook only the things that are
in harmony with his faculties, he would almost always succeed. What causes his failure is his
conceit and ambition, which draw him out of his proper path, and make him mistake for a
vocation what is only a desire to satisfy those passions. He fails, and through his own fault;
but, instead of blaming himself, he prefers to accuse his 'star.' One who might have been a
good workman, and earned his bread honourably in that capacity, prefers to make bad poetry,
and dies of starvation. There would be a place for every one, if every one put himself in his
right place."
863. Do not social habits often oblige a man to follow one road rather than another, and is
not his choice of occupation often controlled by the opinion of those about him? Is not the
sentiment which leads us to attach a certain amount of importance to the judgement of others
an obstacle to the exercise of our free-will?
"Social habits are made, not by God, but by men; if men submit to them, it is because it suits
them to do so, and their submission is therefore an act of their free-will, since, if they wished
to enfranchise themselves from those habits, they could do so. Why, then, do they complain ?
It is not social habits that they should accuse, but their pride, which makes them prefer to
starve rather than to derogate from what they consider to be their dignity. Nobody thanks
them for this sacrifice to opinion, though God would take note of the sacrifice of their vanity.
We do not mean to say that you should brave public opinion unnecessarily, like certain
persons who possess more eccentricity than true philosophy: there is as much absurdity in
causing yourself to be pointed at as an oddity, or stared at as a curious animal, as there is
wisdom in