Foundation
With his humanistic background, once he was convinced of the spiritual explanation for the phenomena that he investigated between 1855 and 1856, Kardec began looking for a way to turn the survival of the human soul (and communication with it) into something useful for humankind, in the social and ethical fields. Moreover, he thought that religions were becoming unable to lead men to effective moral improvements, due to their failure as human institutions. Science, concomitantly, grew wider than ever, bringing numerous direct benefits to man. Both factors together contributed to an increasing disbelief in human spirituality at all levels of European societies. Kardec saw in it an undesirable social tendency that should be reverted by a new paradigm for understanding reality. Its main characteristics would be:
- Promoting the dialog between the three classical forms of knowledge (scientific, philosophical and religious) in order to achieve a deeper and wider comprehension of reality;
- Providing access to knowledge for all people, instead of the "Hermetic" way philosophical and scientific knowledge had been produced;
- Human relationship with the Spiritual without any institutional mediation. A natural spirituality would be enough and more appropriate for human realisation.
- Each individual is responsible for its own actions and moral/spiritual evolution is achieved through our inner transformation and charity.
Read more about this topic: History Of Spiritism
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“The Bermudas are said to have been discovered by a Spanish ship of that name which was wrecked on them.... Yet at the very first planting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the first governor, the same year, “built and laid the foundation of eight or nine forts.” To be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship’s company that should be next shipwrecked on to them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)