218- Does an incarnate spirit preserve any trace of the perceptions it had and the knowledge it acquired in its previous lives?
“A vague memory remains, giving the incarnate spirit what you call innate ideas.”
– Then the theory of innate ideas is not just a myth?
“No, because the knowledge acquired in each existence is not lost. When a spirit is free of matter, it always recalls such knowledge. While incarnate, it may forget it partially and temporarily, but the intuition that remains helps it advance. Without it, it would always have to start over. Instead, with each new existence the spirit starts from the point at which it had finished the preceding one.”
– Then isn’t there a very close connection between two successive existences?
“Not always as close as you might think, because the conditions of the two lives are often very different; also, the spirit may have progressed in the interval between them.” (See no. 2l6)
219- What is the origin of the extraordinary abilities of those individuals who, without any previous learning, seem to have an intuition about certain areas of knowledge such as languages, mathematics, etc.?
“A memory of the past and the soul’s previous progress, of which it now has no awareness. Where else could such abilities have come from? Bodies change, but the spirit does not – it merely changes its garment.”
220- In changing bodies, can spirits lose certain intellectual faculties; for example, could they cease to have a taste for the arts?
“Yes, if they dishonored that faculty or made a bad use of it. Moreover, a faculty may remain dormant throughout an entire existence because the spirit wishes to exercise an unrelated one. In that case, it remains latent but reappears later.”
221- Are the instinctive sentiment of the existence of God and the presentiment of the future life due to a retrospective memory that humans have even in the primitive state?
“They are a memory they have retained of what they knew as spirits before incarnating, but pride often stifles this sentiment.”
– Is it the same memory to which are owed certain beliefs related to the Spiritist Doctrine and which are found in all cultures?
“This doctrine is as old as the world. That is why we find it everywhere – proof that it is true. Since it preserves an intuition of its spirit state, the incarnate spirit possesses an instinctive awareness of the invisible world. This awareness, however, is frequently distorted by prejudices, as well as by superstitions arising from ignorance.”
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