361- Where do a person’s good or evil moral qualities come from?
“They reflect the qualities of the incarnate spirit. The purer the spirit, the more the person is inclined toward the good.”
– So a moral person is the incarnation of a good spirit and a cruel person that of an evil spirit?
“Yes, but it would be better to say an imperfect spirit; otherwise, one might believe in spirits who will always remain evil – those you call demons.”
362- What is the character of the individuals in whom frivolous and foolish spirits are incarnated?
“They are thoughtless, cunning, and sometimes malicious beings.”
363- Do spirits possess any passions that do not belong to humankind?
“No; otherwise, they would have passed them on to you.”
364- Is it one and the same spirit who gives an individual his or her moral and intellectual qualities?
“Certainly it is one and the same, and such qualities will depend on the degree of the spirit’s evolution. Individuals do not have two spirits within them.”
365- Why are the most intelligent individuals, who display a highly evolved spirit incarnated in them, sometimes and at the same time extremely cruel?
“It is because the incarnate spirit is not sufficiently purified; also, because the person yields to the influence of other spirits who are even worse. A spirit progresses in an imperceptible ascending forward progression, but this progress is not accomplished simultaneously in all senses. During one period a spirit may advance in knowledge; during another, in morality.”
366- What about the opinion according to which the various moral and intellectual qualities of humans are the product of many different spirits incarnate in them, each possessing a special aptitude?
“If you reflect on it, you will realize how absurd that is. A spirit must possess all aptitudes and in order to progress, it needs a unified will. If a person were a collection of spirits, this unified will would not exist. He or she would possess no individuality, because at death all those spirits would be like a flock of birds escaping from a cage. People often complain that they do not understand certain things, but it is interesting to notice how they multiply their problems when they have a very simple and natural explanation right there in their own hands. This notion is another example of taking the effect for the cause; it attributes to the human being what the pagans attributed to God. They believed in as many gods as there were phenomena in the universe. However, even among them sensible persons saw nothing more in those phenomena than effects having as their cause a sole God.”
The physical and moral realms both offer us numerous points of comparison in this respect. Humankind believed in the multiplicity of matter as long as examining it was confined to the appearance of phenomena. Nowadays, we understand that such varied phenomena might very well be no more than modifications of a single elementary matter. The various qualities and faculties are manifestations of the same cause, which is the soul or incarnate spirit, and not several souls – like the different sounds of an organ are the result of the same kind of air, and not of as many types of air as there are sounds. The theory in question would mean that when a person loses or acquires certain aptitudes or tendencies, it indicates that certain spirits had left the person or that others had arrived, which would make him or her into a multiple being without individuality, and consequently, without responsibility. This theory, moreover, is contradicted by the numerous examples of manifestations in which spirits prove their personality and their identity.
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