EUREKA

EUREKA

If that primitive formula had always kept peace with the accessional movement of the human mind, the same harmony would always have existed between them, and there would have never been any unbelievers, because the need of believing is natural to the human heart, and men will believe if they are presented with religious ideas in harmony with their intellectual needs. Man would joyfullyknow whence he comes and whither he is going; but if that which is set before him as the object of life does not correspond either to his aspirations, to the idea that he has formed to himself of God, or to the data of physical science, - if, moreover, it is sought to impose on him, as necessary to the attainment of that object, conditions of which the utility is not perceived by his reason, - he naturally rejects the whole. Materialism and Pantheism appear to him more rational simply because they reason and discuss. They reasoning is false, but, at all events, they reason; and he would rather reason falsely than not reason at all.

But let the doctrine of a future life be presented to him under an aspect that is, at once, satisfactory to his reason, and worthy, in all respects, of the greatness, the justice, and the infinite goodness of God, and he will renounce both Materialism and Pantheism, of which every man fells the hollowness in his secret soul, and which are only accepted for lack of something better; and, as Spiritism gives something very much better than those empty and comfortless theories, it is eagerly welcomed by all those who do not find, in the common beliefs and philosophies of the day, the certainty for which they long, and who are consequently undergoing the tortures of doubt. The Spiritist theory is confirmed both by argument and by facts; and it therefore furnishes the broad and solid basis of belief that no other theory is able to supply.