A sharp surge of interest in spiritualism was caused by the First World War. “The tragedy of my family only increased the desire to share my observations and conclusions with others,” wrote Sir Oliver Lodge, author of the sensational book “Raymond” (which told about his communication with his dead son). “Now I will do it, relying on the sad experience of my own experiences, and not resorting to the experience of others.” Death, touching almost every family with its cold breath, suddenly aroused interest in the issues of life after death. People not only wondered: “If a person dies, can he come to life again?”, But they also passionately desired to establish a connection with the souls of loved ones and loved ones who had so tragically left the earthly world. They longed for "the touch of their native hand and the sound of a painfully familiar voice." Thousands of people took up research, but, as in the early period of the development of the movement, the first discoveries were often made by those who had already left this world. Newspapers and the press could not resist the pressure of public opinion: stories about the return of dead soldiers and, deeper, the problem of life after death received wide coverage in the press.

1. Spiritualism (philosophy)
Spiritualism (from lat. spiritualis "spiritual") is a philosophical doctrine, in contrast to
materialism, which considers the beginning or substance of things not matter , but spirit .
The term was introduced at the end of the 17th century by Leibniz. Spiritualism is
distinguished as a psychological and as a metaphysical teaching. In psychology ,
spiritualism affirms the existence of the human spirit as the substance of mental phenomena
; in metaphysics , he assumes that the basis of the physical world is a substance or
substances similar to the human spirit . Representatives of spiritualism are G. V. Leibniz , J.
Berkeley , Main de Biran , V. Cousin , R. G. Lotze , G. Teichmüller , A. Bergson , in Russia -
L. M. Lopatin , A. A. Kozlov , E. A. Bobrov , S. A. Askoldov and others .
Spiritualism is close to such teachings as personalism and panpsychism , and these terms
can be used as a synonym for it. Thinkers ranked among the supporters of spiritualism
called their doctrines differently: G. Teichmüller - "personalism", A. A. Kozlov -
"panpsychism", L. M. Lopatin - "concrete spiritualism", E. A. Bobrov - " critical individualism,
etc. All these doctrines are united by the recognition of the spirit as a primary, non-derivative
reality, irreducible to either material or ideal principles. Spiritualism should be distinguished
from other forms of idealism , which place the beginning of things in abstract ideas.
According to the supporters of spiritualism, the spirit is not an idea, but a living force or a
being that acts and interacts with other beings .
Philosophical spiritualism should not be confused with spiritualism , an occult doctrine that
believes in communication with the spirits of the dead and is also sometimes called
spiritualism . The greatest philosophers-spiritualists did not express sympathy for

2. spiritualism, and some of them, for example, A. A. Kozlov and G. Teichmüller, treated it
negatively . Kozlov, in particular, believed that the ideas of spiritists about the soul are of a
grossly materialistic nature .
History of Spiritualism
Antiquity
Spiritualistic ideas have existed in philosophy since ancient times. Historians of philosophy
find them in Plato , Aristotle , Augustine , Thomas Aquinas and many others. So, already
Socrates said that a person is not a body, but a soul that rules the body; Socrates believed
that the soul is immortal and is related to the deity - the world mind . A student of Socrates,
Plato, developed a whole system of proofs of the immortality of the soul. Plato proceeded
from the belief that the soul is immaterial and is involved in the world of ideas ., and
therefore is not subject to becoming. The soul serves as the beginning of movement and
moves itself, and that which serves as the beginning of movement can neither die nor arise,
since it does not receive movement from outside. The soul gives life to everything that
exists, therefore, it is involved in the idea of ​
​
life to such an extent that it cannot die .
According to Plato, not only people and animals, but the entire cosmos has a soul that
controls the movement of heaven and earth and brings order and regularity to everything.
The world soul is immortal and created by God from the same source as the souls of people
. Plato's teaching was developed in the Neoplatonist school and was assimilated by some of
the Church Fathers .. In particular, Blessed Augustine proved the immateriality of the soul by
the absence in it of affinity with material principles. If, he said, the soul came from some of
the material elements, it could not but be aware of its kinship with it. But she recognizes
them as equally alien to herself, therefore, her nature is completely different . However,
developed spiritualistic teachings appeared only in modern times. The impetus for their
creation was the philosophy of Rene Descartes , who based his system on the doctrine of a
thinking substance.

3. Rene Descartes
Some authors classify Descartes as a spiritualist, with the proviso that he was a spiritualist in
psychology, while his metaphysics was of a dualistic nature . The starting point of Descartes'
philosophy was methodical doubt, which demanded to doubt everything that does not have
self-evident certainty. Following this method, Descartes came to the conclusion that the first
certain truth is the existence of a thinking self . In his writings, he wrote that we may doubt
the existence of our body and the corporeal world, since these things may turn out to be a
dream or a hallucination; but we cannot doubt the existence of our spirit, for the moment we
doubt all things we think, and if we think we exist: " Cogito ergo sum " . What is the nature of
our "I" ? According to Descartes, it is not our body, because we can imagine it separately
from any body; and everything that can be conceived separately can also exist separately.
However, we cannot imagine it without it thinking, which means that its nature consists in
thinking. So, our "I" is a thinking substance , which does not need any body for its existence
and therefore is non-material. But the immaterial, thinking substance is identical to what we
call the soul or spirit, and therefore, it is the spirit. To this doctrine of thinking substance
Descartes then added the doctrine of material substance, the essence of which consists in
extension in length, depth and breadth. As a result, the teachings of Descartes acquired the
character of metaphysical dualism , in which the thinking and extended substance exist
independently of each other and are united only by God. This Cartesian dualism then
became the starting point for spiritualistic philosophical systems.
The fatal problem of Cartesianism was the problem of the interaction of spirit and matter. It
was not clear how these two substances could affect each other, which even had nothing to

4. touch. An attempt to solve this problem was the teaching of the occasionalists , which
consisted in the fact that there is in fact no causal interaction between matter and spirit;
there is only a certain consistency of their states, the sole cause of which is God. The largest
of the occasionalists, N. Malebranche , on this basis, argued that the knowledge of material
things is not given to us directly, but through the ideal prototypes that we contemplate in
God. However, such a doctrine already eliminated any need for an extended substance, so
the thinkers following Malebranche decided to discard it altogether.
Types of Spiritualism
There are several varieties of spiritualism. First of all, one should distinguish
between spiritualism as a psychological and as a metaphysical teaching. In
the field of philosophical psychology, a spiritualist is anyone who recognizes
the existence of the soul as a special non-material substance. In the field of
metaphysics, such a spiritualist can adhere to both spiritualistic and dualistic
views, considering spirit and matter as two independent substances]. A classic
example of such dualism is the teachings of Descartes and the Cartesians. In
addition, a supporter of psychological spiritualism may refrain from
metaphysical judgments, limiting his theoretical activity to the sphere of
psychology, or assuming the ultimate essence of things is unknowable. Such,
in particular, is the teaching of the founder of French spiritualism, Maine de
Biran, who adhered to the empirical theory of knowledge and attributed all
judgments about the essence of things to the field of beliefs.
In turn, spiritualism as a metaphysical doctrine is also divided into several
varieties. The Russian historian of philosophy E. L. Radlov singled out relative
and absolute spiritualism as such varieties . The essence of relative
spiritualism is that it recognizes the objective reality of the physical world,

5. while absolute spiritualism denies it . As an example of relative spiritualism,
one can cite Leibniz's doctrine of monads - unextended spiritual substances
that underlie the physical world. This is a cautious kind of spiritualism
approaching metaphysical dualism. In Russia, the representative of this
direction was L. M. Lopatin. In his article “Spiritualism as a monistic system of
philosophy” Lopatin wrote: “Spiritualism does not abolish physical nature; he
only assumes that in herself she is not what people usually think of her.
According to Lopatin, in physical reality it is necessary to distinguish two
sides: being-for-itself and being-for-another ; and if for an external observer it
appears in its qualities of extension, impenetrability, movement, then inside
itself it has a spiritual nature .
A. A. Kozlov
A more radical form of spiritualism is absolute spiritualism, which denies the
objective reality of the physical world. The Russian philosopher S. A. Levitsky
suggested calling this trend panpsychism , after the name of the teachings of
A. A. Kozlov . We find the extreme form of this teaching in the subjective
idealism of Berkeley, who believed that the existence of things is reduced to
their perceptibility; According to Berkeley, only God and created spirits exist
objectively, and the visible world is embedded by God directly into our
consciousness. A softened form of this doctrine is the panpsychism of A. A.
Kozlov and G. Teichmüller, who believed that the visible world is an
illusiongenerated by the influence of external substances on our
consciousness. Unlike Berkeley, Kozlov's panpsychism recognizes the
existence of some kind of external world, consisting of spiritual substances
and having no resemblance to our perceptions. The impact of these
substances on our soul causes a reaction in it in the form of sensations, which
are ordered by it in space and time and are projected into the external world.
The goal of philosophical knowledge is to understand the illusory nature of this
projection and thus come to the knowledge of the real, that is, spiritual being

6. Criticism of Spiritualism
The usual objection to spiritualism is that it is just as one-sided as materialism. Just as
materialism tries to reduce all reality to matter and its movements, so spiritualism tries to
reduce it to the spirit and its activities. Just as materialism wants to abolish spirit, so
spiritualism wants to abolish matter . However, there are no sufficient grounds for such an
abolition. The material world, given to us in sensations, does not reveal in itself any signs of
spirituality. All phenomena of the physical world are well explained by the movement of
material particles and do not require an assumption about the spirit hiding behind them.
Therefore, the spiritualistic teaching can only be considered as an original hypothesis based
on the analogyand having no evidence in its favor .
Spiritualists reproach the materialists for not being able to explain psychic phenomena. But
the spiritualists themselves, S. A. Levitsky believed, find themselves in the same position,
because it is impossible to explain physical phenomena from the properties of the spirit.
Even if we recognize the material world as a mere illusion, spiritualism cannot explain how
this illusion arises in our mind . Spiritualists believe, writes Professor O. Külpe , that the
actions of the forces of nature become more understandable if we assume that they are
similar to the actions of our will. However, the forces of nature must be understood as they
are, that is, as the causes of movements, for all phenomena of nature can be reduced to
motions. On the contrary, the mental changes that our will produces are not the essence of
movement. If the actions are incomparably different, then their causes must be recognized
as such. So, we have no reason to attribute spiritual essence to the forces of nature .

7. Another objection to spiritualism is based on the denial of the very existence of the human
spirit. An example of such a denial can be found in the writings of the German philosophers
W. Wundt and F. Paulsen. Spiritualists believe that we are well aware from inner experience
of the existence of a spiritual substance in us. Meanwhile, in reality, inner experience reveals
to us only individual mental phenomena, but does not reveal any substance to which they
could belong. The very concept of substance is taken by us from the physical world and
illegally transferred to the world of consciousness. But the world of consciousness is not like
the physical world: it does not consist of substances, but of processes that proceed with
great speed and have nothing invariable at their core. This view, which reduces the human
spirit to a set of mental phenomena, was first expressed by the Scottish skeptic D. Hume
and gained great popularity in the philosophy of the 19th century .
V. S. Solovyov
One of the defenders of this view was the Russian philosopher V. S. Solovyov . In the article
"The First Principle of Theoretical Philosophy", he criticized the Cartesian thesis "Cogito ergo
sum". According to Solovyov, the existence of our "I" , as a special being, is not among the
initial facts of consciousness. In immediate consciousness, we are given only separate
mental phenomena, but no thinking substance is given. Our "I" , to which we attribute all our
states, is only an impersonal logical function that unites many mental phenomena. There is
no reason to conclude from the presence of this function to the existence of a thinking
substance, and the very concept of substance was taken by Descartes from the arsenal of
scholasticphilosophy. In real, present consciousness, we never deal with essences and
substances, and the Cartesian subject of thought is "an impostor without a philosophical
passport".
Solovyov's opinion caused a heated debate on the part of L. M. Lopatin. Objecting to
Solovyov, he wrote that Descartes never considered the existence of a thinking substance
as a direct fact of consciousness, but he proved this thesis in detail on many pages of his
writings. Lopatin himself argued that mental life is never made up of pure, impersonal states,
but is always experienced by some conscious and feeling subject. “It is impossible to
perceive and be aware of the states of the soul without being aware of the soul itself,” wrote
the philosopher
Spiritualism