Allan Kardec was a disciple and collaborator of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and a teacher in courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, physiology, comparative anatomy and French in Paris. For one of his research papers, he was inducted in 1831 into the Royal Academy of Arts. He organized and taught free courses for the underprivileged.
When, about 1850, the phenomenon of table-turning was exciting the attention of Europe and ushering in the other phenomena since known as "Spiritist", he quickly divined the real nature of those phenomena, as evidence of the existence of an order of relationships hitherto suspected rather than known, namely, those which unite the visible and invisible worlds. Foreseeing the vast importance, to science and to religion, of such an extension of the field of human observation, he entered at once upon a careful investigation of the new phenomena. A friend of his had two daughters who had become what are now called Mediums. They were gay, lively, amiable girls, fond of society, dancing, and amusement, and habitually received, when sitting by themselves or with their young companions, communications in harmony with their worldly and somewhat frivolous disposition. But, to the surprise of all concerned, it was found that, whenever he was present, the messages transmitted through these young ladies were of a very grave and serious character; and on his inquiring of the invisible intelligences as to the cause of this change, he was told that Spirits of a much higher order than those who habitually communicated through the two young mediums came expressly for him, and would continue to do so, in order to enable him to fulfill an important religious mission.
Much astonished at so unlooked-for an announcement, he at once proceeded to test its truthfulness by drawing up a series of progressive questions in relation to the various problems of human life and the universe in which we find ourselves, and submitted them to his unseen interlocutors, receiving their answers to the same through the instrumentality of the two young mediums, who willingly consented to devote a couple of evenings every week to this purpose, and who thus obtained, through table-rapping and planchette-writing, the replies which have become the basis of the spiritist theory, and which they were as little capable of appreciating as of inventing.
This philosophy is distinct from spiritualism as it is built on the main tenet that spiritual progress is effected by a series of compulsory reincarnations. Allan Kardec became so dogmatic on this point that he always disparaged physical mediumship the objective phenomena of which did not bear out his doctrine and encouraged automatic -writing where the danger of contradiction, owing to the psychological influence of preconceived ideas, was less[1].
As a consequence experimental psychic research remained twenty years behind in France.
In England Miss Anna Blackwell, a member of the Golden Dawn, was the most prominent exponent of the philosophy of Allan Kardec. [1] He was proved wrong. In his paper "De la baguette", Chevreul explained how human muscular reactions, totally involuntary and subconscious, are responsible for seemingly magical movements. In the end Chevreul discovered that once a person holding divining rods/magic pendulum became aware of the brain's reaction, the movements stopped and could not be willingly reproduced.
[2] A writer on spiritism, J. Arthur Hill, calls attention to the fact that spiritism in France is reincarnationist, while in England and the United States on the whole it is not. The reason in the case of France is found in the fact that an early writer on spiritism, Kordec taught reincarnation.http://pvrguymale.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-open-vision-study-of-psychic.html
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