46. Allan Kardec - Heaven and Hell

Or Divine Justice according to the Revelations of the Spirit; then illuminated by numerous examples concerning the real state of the soul during and after death. Translated into German by Christ. Heinr. Wilhelm Feller. Berlin 1890

We live in a time in which a large part of scientific activity has become entirely a matter of the intellect, and in which even the most important representatives of scholarship no longer know what to offer that could somehow satisfy the needs of the heart and mind. It is no wonder, then, that religiously inclined natures seek to achieve in a way remote from science what the latter denies them. One could now believe that religion itself opens up such a path. This would also be the case if the minds of many of our contemporaries had not been led in a direction that is incompatible with the unbiased way of looking at things of religious people. People have a need for religious truths, but they do not want to believe them, they want to prove them experientially. They want to use the means of contemplation and experimentation to recognize what religions seek to convey through faith. In this way, a very unclear and unhealthy mixture of religion and apparent empirical knowledge is created, which has no right to exist on either side. The work to which these lines are dedicated has all the bad qualities that arise from the marked fusion of two unrelated half-measures. It first develops the doctrines of heaven, hell, angels, devils and life after death from the standpoint of a completely egoistic moral view of the world. Then, quite uncritically, apparent facts are cited as evidence for these doctrines. A number of deceased people are said to have appeared to members of a "spirit research society", to which the author also belonged, and made statements about the afterlife. When recounting these "facts", no mention is made of whether any precautions were taken at the meetings to prevent intentional or unintentional deception. The fact that they take such precautions is something that even the followers of the crudest spiritualism try to teach the world today. We are not so short-sighted as to doubt that there may be phenomena for the explanation of which our present scientific views are too narrow; but such facts must be investigated just as methodically and objectively-scientifically as the phenomena of optics and electricity. As little as it would lead us to our goal if we explained the refraction of light or electrical phenomena with the help of "spirits", it can be of just as little value to use such means to deal with the small remnant of facts that would remain if we removed everything that is based on deception and fraud from the claims and stories of the "spiritualists" and "spiritualists".