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

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THE SPIRITS’ BOOK
on a rational basis. Both admit the reality of the material and moral phenomena of Spiritism,
but deny the intervention of spirits in their production.
According to the first of these objections, all the manifestations attributed to spirits are
merely effects of magnetism, and mediums are in a state that might be called waking
somnambulism, a phenomenon which may have been observed by any one who has studied
animal magnetism. In this state the intellectual faculties acquire an abnormal development;
the circle of our intuitive perceptions is extended beyond its ordinary limits; the medium
finds in himself, and with the aid of his lucidity, all that he says, and all the notions
transmitted by him, even in regard to subjects with which he is least familiar in his usual
state.
It is not by us, who have witnessed its prodigies and studied all its phases during thirty-five
years, that the action of somnambulism could be contested, and we admit that many spiritmanifestations
may be thus explained; but we assert that sustained and attentive observation
shows us a host of facts in which any intervention of the medium, otherwise than as a passive
instrument, is absolutely impossible. To those who attribute the phenomena in question to
magnetism, we would say, as to all others, "See, and observe, for you have certainly not seen
everything;" and we would also ask them to consider the two following points, suggested by
their own view of the subject. In the first place, we would ask them, What is the origin of the
hypothesis of spirit-action? Is it an explanation invented by a few individuals to account for
those phenomena? Not at all. By whom, then, has it been broached? By the very mediums
whose lucidity you extol. But if their lucidity be such as you declare it to be, why should they
attribute to spirits what they have derived from themselves? How can they have given
information so precise, logical, sublime in regard to the nature of those extra-human
intelligences? Either mediums are lucid, or they are not; if they are, and if we trust to their
veracity, we cannot, without inconsistency, suppose them to be in error on this point. In the
second place, if all the phenomena had their source in the medium himself, they would
always be identical in the case of each individual; and we should never find the same medium
making use of different styles of expression, or giving utterance to contradictory statements.
The want of unity so often observed in the manifestations obtained by the same medium is a
proof of the diversity of the