! cured! good gentlemen."

"All right! enough! Let us alone."

Petit, a man of advanced ideas, thought the doctor's explanation
commonplace and unenlightened. Science is a monopoly in the hands of the
rich. She excludes the people. To the old-fashioned analysis of the
Middle Ages it is time that a large and ready-witted synthesis should
succeed. Truth should be arrived at through the heart. And, declaring
himself a spiritualist, he pointed out several works, no doubt
imperfect, but the heralds of a new dawn.

They sent for them.

Spiritualism lays down as a dogma the fated amelioration of our species.
Earth will one day become Heaven. And this is the reason why the
doctrine fascinated the schoolmaster. Without being Catholic, it was
known to St. Augustine and St. Louis. Allan Kardec even has published
some fragments dictated by them which are in accordance with
contemporary opinions. It is practical as well as benevolent, and
reveals to us, like the telescope, the supernal worlds.

Spirits, after death and in a state of ecstasy, are transported thither.
But sometimes they descend upon our globe, where they make furniture
creak, mingle in our amusements, taste the beauties of Nature, and the
pleasures of the arts.

Nevertheless, there are amongst us many who possess an astral
trunk--that is to say, behind the ear a long tube which ascends from
the hair to the planets, and permits us to converse with the spirits of
Saturn. Intangible things are not less real, and from the earth to the
stars, from the stars to the earth, a see-saw motion takes place, a
transmission, a continual change of place.

Then Pecuchet's heart swelled with extravagant aspirations, and when
night had come Bouvard surprised him at the window contemplating those
luminous spaces which are peopled with spirits.

Swedenborg made rapid journeys to them. For in less than a year he
explored Venus, Mars, Saturn, and, twenty-three times, Jupiter.
Moreover, he saw Jesus Christ in London; he saw St. Paul; he saw St.
John; he saw Moses; and in 1736 he saw the Last Judgment.

He has also given us descriptions of Heaven.

Flowers, palaces, market-places, and churches are found there, just as
with us. The angels, who were formerly human beings, lay their thoughts
upon leaves, chat about domestic affairs or else on spiritual matters;
and the ecclesiastical posts are assigned to those who, in their earthly
career, cultivated the Holy Scripture.

As for H