2.11 Matter, Life, and Spirit
Minerals and Plants
The division of nature into three kingdoms, or into two classes—organic beings and inorganic beings—is equally valid. Some also regard the human species as a fourth kingdom. It depends on one’s point of view: from a material point of view, there are only inorganic and organic beings. From the moral point of view, however, there are clearly four degrees.
These four degrees have well-marked characteristics, although their boundaries seem to blend into one another. Inert matter, which comprises the mineral kingdom, possesses only mechanical energy. Plants, although composed of inert matter, are endowed with vitality. Animals, composed of inert matter and endowed with vitality, also possess a kind of instinctive, limited intelligence, together with an awareness of their existence and individuality. Lastly, human beings possess everything found in plants and animals, and they dominate all the other classes through a special and unlimited intelligence that gives them awareness of their future, perception of extra-material things, and knowledge of God.
Plants do not have any awareness of their existence. They do not think; they have only organic life.
Plants receive the physical impressions that act upon matter, but they do not have perceptions; consequently, they do not feel the sensation of pain.
The force that attracts plants toward each other is independent of their will, because they do not think. It is a mechanical force of matter acting upon matter; they cannot oppose it.
Some plants—the mimosa and the dionaea, for example—show movements that indicate great sensitivity and, in some cases, a kind of will, like the latter, whose lobes seize the fly that lands on it in order to suck its juices, seeming to have set a trap to kill it. Everything in nature is transitional, in the sense that no one thing resembles another, and yet everything is linked together. Plants do not think and therefore have no will. The oyster, which opens itself, and all other zoophytes do not possess thought. They have only a blind and natural instinct.
The human organism furnishes examples of analogous movements that do not involve any participation of the will, such as the digestive and circulatory functions. The pylorus closes itself on contact with certain substances to refuse them passage. The same applies to the mimosa, whose movements do not imply any perception at all, much less a will.
In plants, as in animals, there is, if one wishes, a kind of instinct for self-preservation that leads them to seek what may be useful to them and to avoid what may harm them. This depends on the extent attributed to the word, but it is purely mechanical. When two bodies combine during a chemical reaction, it is because they harmonize with each other—that is, there is an affinity between them—but this is not called instinct.
On more highly evolved worlds, everything is more perfect, but plants are always plants, just as animals are always animals, and human beings are always human beings.
Animals and Human Beings
If human beings are compared with animals in relation to intelligence, it seems difficult to establish a line of demarcation, because certain animals on this earth have an obvious superiority over certain humans. A precise line of demarcation cannot be established in that way. Philosophers are far from agreement on this subject. Some would make humans into animals, and others would make animals into humans. Both are mistaken. Humans are beings apart, who sometimes sink very low and who may sometimes rise very high. In their physical nature, humans are like animals, and less well endowed than many of them. Nature has given animals everything that humans are obliged to invent with their intelligence in order to provide for their needs and self-preservation. Their body is destroyed like that of animals; that is certain. But their spirit has a destiny that they alone can comprehend, because they alone are completely free. Poor human beings, who debase yourselves more than wild animals—recognize your humanity through your ability to think about God.
It is only a theory to say that animals act solely through instinct. It is quite true that instinct dominates most animals, but some act from a determined will because they possess limited intelligence.
Certain animals perform complex actions that indicate the will to act in a determined way beyond instinct and according to circumstances. Therefore, there is in them a kind of intelligence, but in exercising it they apply it chiefly to the means of satisfying their physical needs and ensuring their self-preservation. Among them there is no creation and no improvement. However admirable the skill shown in their labors, what they did yesterday is the same as what they do today, neither better nor worse, according to constant and unvarying forms and proportions. Offspring separated from their species do not fail to build their nest according to the same model without having been taught. If some animals are capable of a certain amount of learning, such intellectual development is always restricted within narrow limits and is due to human action upon a flexible nature. They cannot make progress by themselves, and when they do make progress, it is ephemeral and purely individual, because, if left to themselves, they quickly return to the limits traced out for them by nature.
Animals do not have a language formed of words and syllables, but they do have a way of communicating among themselves. They say much more than might be supposed, but their language is limited to their needs, just as their thoughts are.
Animals that possess no voice are not deprived of language. They understand one another by other means. Human beings use more than speech to communicate with one another, and those who are mute do as well. Since animals are endowed with a life of relationships, they have means of warning one another and of expressing the sensations they experience. Fish also understand one another. Human beings do not have the exclusive privilege of language, but the language of animals is instinctive and limited exclusively to the circle of their needs and thoughts, whereas that of humans is perfectible and lends itself to all the conceptions of their intelligence.
Fish, like swallows that migrate in groups under a common lead, must have means of warning and understanding one another and of grouping together. Perhaps they do so among themselves, or perhaps the water serves as a vehicle that transmits certain vibrations to them. Whatever the case, it is undeniable that they have means of understanding one another, just as all animals deprived of voice perform activities in common. In light of this, it should not be surprising that spirits can communicate with one another without recourse to articulated speech.
Animals are not simple machines, but their freedom of action is limited to their needs and cannot be compared to human freedom. Since they are far less evolved than human beings, they do not have the same duties. Their freedom is restricted to the actions of their material life.
The aptitude of certain animals to imitate human language comes from the particular conformation of their vocal organs, aided by the instinct of imitation. Apes imitate gestures; certain birds imitate the voice.
Since animals possess an intelligence that gives them a certain freedom of action, there is in them a principle independent of matter, and it survives the body.
This principle may be called a soul, depending on the meaning attached to the word. It is much less evolved than that of human beings, however. Between the souls of animals and human beings there is as great a difference as there is between the human soul and God.
The animal’s soul retains its individuality after death, but not its self-awareness. Its intelligent life remains in a latent state.
An animal soul cannot choose the species in which it prefers to incarnate, because it does not possess free will.
Since the animal’s soul survives its body, it remains in a kind of errant state because it is no longer united to a body, but it is not an errant spirit. The errant spirit is a being who thinks and acts of its own free will. Animal spirits do not have the same faculty. Self-awareness is the principal attribute of the human spirit. After death, an animal’s soul is classified by the spirits charged with doing so and is utilized almost immediately. It is not given time to enter into relations with other creatures.
Animals follow a law of progress as humans do. That is why, on higher worlds where human beings are more advanced, animals are also more advanced and possess more developed means of communication. However, they are always lower than human beings and subject to them; they are their intelligent servants.
There is nothing extraordinary about this. If more intelligent animals, such as the dog, the elephant, and the horse, were endowed with a physical conformation appropriate for manual labor, what might they not do under human direction?
Animals progress not by their own will, as human beings do, but by necessity. That is why there is no expiation for them.
On highly evolved worlds, animals do not know about God. Human beings are gods to them, just as spirits once were gods to humans.
Since animals—even the perfected ones of higher worlds—are always beneath humans, this does not mean that God created intelligent beings perpetually condemned to inferiority. Everything in nature is linked together by ties that cannot yet be perceived, and the things that appear most disparate have points of contact that human beings, in their present state, can never fully comprehend. They may glimpse them through an effort of intelligence, but only when that intelligence has reached its full development and freed itself from the prejudices of pride and ignorance will they be able to see clearly into the works of God. Until then, their limited ideas lead them to view everything from a narrow and restricted point of view. God cannot be self-contradictory, and everything in nature is harmonized through general laws that never depart from the sublime wisdom of the Creator.
Intelligence is a common property, a point of contact between the souls of animals and those of human beings. But animals have only the intelligence of material life; in human beings, intelligence produces moral life.
Human beings do not possess two souls. The body has its instincts, which result from the sensations of its organs. In human beings there is only a dual nature: the animal nature and the spiritual nature. Through the body and its instincts, they participate in the nature and instincts of animals. Through the soul, they participate in the nature of spirits.
Besides freeing itself from its own imperfections, the spirit must also struggle against the influence of matter. The less evolved it is, the tighter the bonds between spirit and matter. Human beings do not have two souls; the soul is always one in each individual. The soul of animals and that of humans are so very different that the soul of one cannot animate the body created for the other. But although humans do not possess an animal soul, whose passions would place them on the level of the animals, they nonetheless have an animal body, which often drags them down to that level—a body endowed with vitality but unintelligent, and possessed only of the limited instincts required for self-preservation.
When a spirit incarnates in a human body, it transmits to it the intellectual and moral principle that places it on a higher order than the animals. The two natures in human beings give rise to two distinct sources of their passions: some spring from the instincts of nature; others from the impurities of the incarnate spirit, which sympathizes to a greater or lesser degree with the baseness of animal appetites. In purifying itself, a spirit gradually frees itself from the influence of matter. Under such influence, it approaches the animals; freed from it, it rises toward its true destiny.
Animals receive the intelligent principle that comprises the particular kind of soul with which they are endowed from the universal intelligent element.
The intelligence of both humans and animals emanates from a single principle, but in human beings it undergoes a development that elevates it above that of animals.
The human soul, at its origin, resembles the state of human infancy in corporeal life; its intelligence is only beginning to unfold, and it is preparing itself for life. The soul accomplishes this primary phase in a series of existences preceding the period called humanity.
Thus the soul had been the intelligent principle of the lower beings of creation. Everything in nature is linked together and tends toward unity. It is in those beings, whom humans are far from knowing completely, that the intelligent principle is developed, gradually individualized, and prepared for life. In a certain way, it is a preparatory work like germination, after which the intelligent principle undergoes a transformation and becomes a spirit. It is then that the period of humanity begins for it, and with it the consciousness of its future, the distinction between good and evil, and responsibility for its acts—just as childhood comes before adolescence, then youth, and finally adulthood. There is nothing humiliating in this origin. If anything ought to humble the greatest geniuses, it is their lowliness before God and their powerlessness to probe the depths of the divine designs and the wisdom of the laws regulating the harmony of the universe. The greatness of God is revealed in the admirable harmony that establishes the solidarity of all things in nature. To believe that God could have made anything without a purpose, or created intelligent beings without a future, would be to blaspheme God’s goodness, which extends over all creatures.
The period of humanity does not begin on our earth. The earth is not the starting point of a human being’s first incarnation. The human period usually begins on worlds even less evolved. This, however, is not an absolute rule, and it may happen that a spirit at the beginning of its human stage is suited to live on the earth. Such a case is uncommon and would be an exception rather than a rule.
After death, a human spirit has no awareness of the existences that preceded its human period, because it is only after that period that its life as a spirit began. It even has difficulty remembering its first human existences, just as human beings no longer remember the earliest days of childhood, and still less the time spent in the maternal womb. That is why spirits say that they do not know how they began.
Having entered the human period, a spirit may retain traces of what it had previously been—that is, of the state in which it found itself during the period that could be called non-human. That depends on the distance separating the two periods and on the progress it has accomplished. For a few generations it may preserve a more or less pronounced reflection of the primitive state, for nothing in nature occurs through an abrupt transition. There are always links connecting the ends of the chain of beings or events. However, such traces disappear with the development of free will. The first steps of progress are accomplished slowly because they are not yet aided by the will, but they proceed more rapidly as the spirit acquires a more complete consciousness of itself.
Spirits who have said that humans are beings apart in the order of creation are not mistaken, but the matter has not been fully developed, and there are things that can be revealed only in their proper time. Human beings are in fact beings apart, for they have faculties that distinguish them from all others and they have another destiny. The human species is the one God has chosen for the incarnation of the beings who can know God.
Metempsychosis
The common origin of living beings in the intelligent principle is not an affirmation of the doctrine of metempsychosis. Two things may have the same origin and yet later differ completely. No one would recognize the tree, its leaves, its flowers, and its fruit in the shapeless germ contained in the seed from which they came. From the moment the intelligent principle reaches the degree necessary for becoming a spirit and entering the human period, it no longer bears any relation to its primitive state. It is no longer the soul of the animal, just as the tree is no longer a seed. In humans there is only the animal-like body, the passions arising from that body’s influence, and the instincts of self-preservation inherent in matter. Therefore, one cannot say that such and such a person is the incarnation of such and such an animal. Consequently, metempsychosis, as commonly understood, is incorrect.
A spirit that has animated a human body cannot incarnate in an animal. That would be a regression, and a spirit does not regress. The river does not flow back to its source. See no. 118.
However erroneous the idea linked to metempsychosis may be, it may result from the intuitive sense of an individual’s different existences. Such an intuitive sense is found in this belief, as in many others, but like most intuitive ideas, it has been distorted by human beings.
Metempsychosis would be correct if one understood it to mean the progression of the soul from a lower to a higher state, accomplishing the developments that transform its nature.
However, it is erroneous if understood as direct transmigration from the animal to the human and vice versa, which would imply the idea of regression or fusion. Since such fusion is not possible between corporeal beings of two different species, this indicates that they belong to degrees that cannot assimilate one another, and the same must apply to the spirits that animate them. If the same spirit could animate them alternately, an identity of nature would follow, and this would imply the possibility of material reproduction. On the contrary, the reincarnation taught by the Spirits is founded on the evolutionary march of nature and the progression of human beings within their own species, which in no way diminishes their dignity. What degrades them is the bad use they make of the faculties God has given them for their advancement. Be that as it may, the antiquity and universality of the doctrine of metempsychosis, and the number of eminent individuals who have professed it, prove that the principle of reincarnation has its roots in nature itself. These are arguments in its favor rather than against it.
The point of departure of a spirit is one of those questions connected with the origin of things and belonging to the secrets of God. It has not been given to human beings to know such matters completely, and regarding them they can only form suppositions, constructing more or less probable theoretical systems. Spirits themselves are far from knowing everything, and regarding what they do not know, they too may have opinions that are more or less sensible.
Thus, all do not think alike concerning the connections between humans and animals. According to some, a spirit reaches the human period only after having been prepared and individualized in the different degrees of the lower order of beings in creation. According to others, the human spirit would always have belonged to the human race, without having passed through the animal experience. The first of these theories has the advantage of assigning an aim to the future of animals, which would thus form the first links in the chain of thinking beings. The second is more in conformity with the dignity of the human being and may be summarized as follows:
The different species of animals do not proceed intellectually from one another by way of evolution. Thus, the spirit of the oyster does not subsequently become that of the fish, the bird, the quadruped, and finally the biped. Each species is an absolute type in itself, physically and mentally, and each individual draws from the universal source the quantity of intelligent principle it needs, according to the perfection of its organs and the work it must perform in the phenomena of nature. It then returns to the general mass at death. The worlds more advanced than ours (see no. 188) are likewise inhabited by distinct species of animals appropriate to the needs of those worlds and to the degree of advancement of the humans they serve, but these do not proceed spiritually from those of the earth. It is not the same with human beings, however. From the physical point of view, humans are obviously a link in the chain of living beings, but from the moral point of view there is a break in continuity between humans and animals. Only human beings possess a soul or spirit—a divine spark that endows them with a moral sense and an intellectual reach that animals do not possess. It is the principal being, pre-existent to and surviving the body, preserving individuality. What is the origin of the spirit? Where is its starting point? Is it formed from the individualized intelligent principle? This is a mystery that would be useless to search out, and regarding which, as has been said, only theories can be constructed.
What is constant, and what stands out to reason and experience at the same time, is the survival of the spirit, the preservation of its individuality after death, its ability to evolve, its happy or unhappy state in proportion to its advancement on the path of the good, and all the moral truths that follow from that principle. As for the mysterious connections between humans and animals, that is God’s secret, like many other matters whose present understanding is of no importance to our advancement, and on which it would be useless to dwell.