INTRODUCTION – I

When new matters arise, new words are needed for the sake of clarity of language in order to avoid the confusion inherent in multiple meanings for the same terms. For example, the words spiritual, spiritualist and spiritualism each have a well-defined meaning. To give each of them a new meaning in order to apply it to the Spirits’ Doctrine would be to multiply the already numerous causes of ambiguity. Strictly speaking, spiritualism is the opposite of materialism and everyone who believes there is something within them that is more than matter are spiritualists; however, it does not necessarily follow that they must therefore believe in the existence of spirits or in communications with the invisible world. Therefore, instead of the words spiritual and spiritualism for designating this latter belief, we have coined and employed the words Spiritist and Spiritism. These two terms reflect their origin and their fundamental meaning, and they thus have the advantage of being perfectly understandable. We will leave spiritualism to its own meaning.
Hence, we will say that the principle of the Spiritist Doctrine or Spiritism is based on the relationship between the material world and the invisible world, the latter being inhabited by beings known as spirits. The adherents of Spiritism will be called Spiritists. In a specialized sense, The Spirits’ Book contains the Spiritist Doctrine; in a generalized sense, it is linked to spiritualism and represents one aspect of it. That is why we have inscribed the words on the title-page: Spiritualist Philosophy.

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