The Spiritist Fallacy

Necessary Distinctions and Clarifications

Since we propose first to distinguish spiritism from various other things with which it is too often confused, though they are very different from it, we must begin by defining it precisely. At first sight, it seems that we can say this: spiritism consists essentially in admitting the possibility of communicating with the dead. This is what properly constitutes it, the point on which all spiritist schools necessarily agree, whatever their theoretical disagreements on other matters of greater or lesser importance, which they always regard as secondary to this one. But this is not enough: the fundamental postulate of spiritism is that communication with the dead is not merely a possibility but a fact; admitting it only as a possibility does not in itself make one truly a spiritist. It is true that in the latter case one rules out an absolute refutation of the spiritists’ doctrine, which is already serious. As we shall have to show later, communication with the dead, as they understand it, is a pure and simple impossibility, and only on this basis can all their claims be completely and definitively disposed of. Any other position can lead only to more or less regrettable compromises; once one enters upon the path of concessions and accommodations, it is difficult to know where one will stop. We have proof of this in what has happened to certain people, notably theosophists and occultists, who would vigorously and rightly protest if they were called spiritists, but who have admitted for various reasons that communication with the dead could actually take place in more or less rare and exceptional cases. To acknowledge this is, in sum, to grant the spiritists the truth of their hypothesis; but they are not satisfied with that. They claim that this communication occurs routinely, so to speak, at all their séances, and not merely once in a hundred or a thousand times. Thus, for spiritists, it is enough to place oneself in certain conditions for communication to be established. They therefore regard it not as an extraordinary fact but as a normal and habitual one, and this specification must be incorporated into the very definition of spiritism.