REINCARNATION
The weary pilgrim oft doth seek to know
How far he’s come, how far he has to go.
QUARLES.
Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million of them walking the earth
openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished from it, some half
hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch tick one.
CARLYLE.
Truth dwells in gulphs, whose deeps hide shades so rich
That Night sits muffled there in clouds of pitch,
More darke than Nature made her: and requires
(To cleare her tough mists) heaven’s great fire of fires
To wrestle with those heaven-strong mysteries.
GEORGE CHAPMAN.
I am: how little more I know!
Whence came I? Whither do I go?
A central self which feels and is;
A cry between the silences;
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife
With sunshine on the hills of life;
A shaft from Nature’s quiver cast
Into the future from the past.
WHITTIER.
Where wert thou, Soul, ere yet my body born
Became thy dwelling-place? Didst thou on earth
Or in the clouds, await this body’s birth,
Or by what chance upon that winter’s morn
Didst thou this body find, a babe forlorn?
Didst thou in sorrow enter, or in mirth?
Or for a jest, perchance, to try its worth
Thou tookest flesh, ne’er from it to be torn.
WADDINGTON.
REINCARNATION
A STUDY OF FORGOTTEN TRUTH
BY
E. D. WALKER
“_Ex oriente lux_”
[Illustration: [Logo]]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
=The Riverside Press, Cambridge=
1888
Copyright, 1888,
BY E. D. WALKER.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
To
THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH
AND TO
THAT EMBODIMENT OF TRUTH, NAMED
ARIEL,
THIS LITTLE VOLUME PROMPTED BY THEM
=Is Dedicated,=
WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY ARE NOT HERE DISHONORED
BY THEIR DISCIPLE,
THE AUTHOR.
Soul, dwelling oft in God’s infinitude
And sometimes seeming no more part of me—
This me, worms’ heritage—than that sun can be
Part of the earth he has with warmth imbued,—
Whence camest thou? Whither goest thou? I, subdued
With awe of mine own being thus sit still,
Dumb, on the summit of this lonely hill,
Whose dry November grasses dew-bestrewed
Mirror a million suns. That sun so bright,
Passes as thou must pass, Soul, into night.
Art thou afraid who solitary hast trod
A path I know not, from a source to a bourn
Both which I know not? Fearest thou to return
Alone, even as thou camest alone, to God?
D. M. MULOCK.
Insect and reptile, fish and bird and beast,
Cast their worn robes aside, fresh robes to don;
Tree, flower, and moss, put new year’s raiments on;
Each natural type, the greatest as the least,
Renews its vesture when its use hath ceased.
How should man’s spirit keep in unison
With the world’s law of outgrowth, save it won
New robes and ampler as its girth increased?
Quit shrunken creed, and dwarfed philosophy!
Let gently die an art’s decaying fire!
Work on the ancient lines, but yet be free
To leave and frame anew, if God inspire!
The planets change their surface as they roll:
The force that binds the spheres must bind the soul.
HENRY G. HEWLETT.
PREFACE.
“The idea of a transmigration of souls has hitherto remained a dream of
the fancy, nor has any one yet succeeded in giving it a higher moral
significance for the order of the universe.” So writes Hermann Lotze,
the German philosopher, in his magnificent “Microcosm,” expressing the
common feeling of Christendom. If this little book achieves its purpose
it will show the strength and value of that dreamy idea.
The present perplexity of all Christendom upon the deepest problems of
life, the sense of blind fate oppressing mankind, the despairing
restlessness of many leading poets, the absence of sublime ideals in
art, the prevalence of materialism and agnosticism (if not in
philosophy, in the most vital form of practical life), all feed a
flood-tide of dissatisfaction which Christianity tries in vain to
resist, and indicate that the West deeply needs some new truth. Not only
the wavering masses of men, but many of those uncompromising devotees of
truth who dare surrender themselves, like St. Christopher, to the
mightiest, are yearning after a larger revelation. A portion of this is
contained, we believe, in the doctrine variously termed as
Reincarnation, Metempsychosis, Transmigration. By this we do not mean
the theories concerning re-birth of men in brute bodies, which are
attributed to oriental religions and philosophies because popularly
accepted by their followers. These are crude caricatures of the true
conception. They represent the reality as absurdly as ordinary life in
Europe and America illustrates the teaching of Jesus. But we mean the
inner kernel of that husk, which in protean forms has irrepressibly
welled up in every great phase of thought, which is an open secret lying
all around us and not simply a foreign importation, and which
Christendom cannot afford to lose.
For those who are content with the usual creeds this little work will
have no attraction. They may be pleased to regard it as a heathen
invasion of Christendom. But for truth-seekers it may prove useful,
though it claims only to be an earnest investigation of what seems an
undemonstrable proposition. Its doctrine was first met as the
declaration of the profoundest students of the mysteries enveloping
humanity—coming with authority but no proof of weight to most western
thinkers. Its violent antagonism to current ideas compelled the writer
to dispose of it by independent methods. If true, there must be some
confirmation of it such as will impress any candid mind. If false,
nothing can force it to live. This led to a careful study of the
subject, which was summarized in a brief essay read and published to a
small circle of Theosophists. A continuation of that study has resulted
in this volume. Some readers will regard it as a waste of energy, except
as a diverting curiosity, the truth or falsehood of reincarnation being
to them of little consequence. But a sincere motive underlies it. For
reincarnation illuminates the darkest passages in the murky road of
life, dispels many haunting enigmas and illusions, and reveals cardinal
principles which, if apprehended, will steady the shambling gait of
mankind. Virtue, kindliness, and spirituality may thus be seen in their
unveiled splendor as the only proper modes of action and thought. The
noblest life is discerned to be the only sensible kind, and not
abandoned to the accidental expression of impulse or sentiment. The
cause of all the evils of modern society, the parent of the revolutions
of Europe, the source of the labor disturbances aggravating America, is
the arch-enemy of the race—materialism. Reincarnation combats that foe
by a most subtle and deadly warfare.
The sincere thanks of the writer are due to a number of kind friends,
whose assistance has largely facilitated the collection of materials for
this book, and also to the authors who have kindly permitted the use of
extracts from their writings, (in chapters iv and v.)
E. D. W.
Of all the theories respecting the origin of the soul, it
(preëxistence) seems to me the most plausible and therefore the one
most likely to throw light on the question of a life to
come.—FREDERICK H. HEDGE.
It would be curious if we should find science and philosophy taking up
again the old theory of metempsychosis, remodelling it to suit our
present modes of religious and scientific thought, and launching it
again on the wide ocean of human belief. But stranger things have
happened in the history of human opinion.—JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
If we could legitimately determine any question of belief by the
number of its adherents, the _quod semper_, _quod ubique_, _quod ab
omnibus_ would apply to metempsychosis more fitly than to any other. I
think it is quite as likely to be revived and to come to the front
again as any rival theory.—PROFESSOR WILLIAM KNIGHT.
It seems to me, a firm and well-grounded faith in the doctrine of
Christian metempsychosis might help to regenerate the world. For it
would be a faith not hedged round with many of the difficulties and
objections which beset other forms of doctrine, and it offers distinct
and pungent motives for trying to lead a more Christian life, and for
loving and helping our brother-man.—PROFESSOR FRANCIS BOWEN.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
I.
WHAT IS REINCARNATION? 9
II.
WESTERN EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION 15
1. Immortality demands it; 2. Analogy suggests it; 3. Science
confirms it; 4. The nature of the soul requires it; 5. It
answers the theological question of “original sin” and “future
punishment;” 6. Many strange experiences are explained by it;
7. The problems of life and of Nemesis are solved best by it.
III.
WESTERN OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION 49
1. We have no memory of past lives; 2. It is unjust for us to
receive the results of forgotten deeds; 3. Heredity opposes
it; 4. It is an uncongenial doctrine.
IV.
WESTERN AUTHORS UPON REINCARNATION 63
Extracts: 1. Schopenhauer; 2. Lessing; 3. Fichte; 4. Herder; 5.
Henry More; 6. Sir Thomas Browne; 7. Chevalier Ramsay; 8.
Soame Jenyns; 9. Joseph Glanvil; 10. Dowden’s Shelley; 11.
Hume; 12. Southey; 13. William Blake; 14. William Knight; 15.
W. A. Butler; 16. Bulwer; 17. Pezzani; 18. Emerson; 19. James
Freeman Clarke; 20. William R. Alger; 21. Francis Bowen; 22.
Frederick A. Hedge.
V.
WESTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION 125
I. American Poets: Hayne, Whittier, Taylor, Aldrich, Leland,
Thompson, Willis, Trowbridge, Longfellow, Lowell, Whitman,
Parsons.
II. British Poets: Wordsworth, Gosse, Alford, Milnes, Tennyson,
Rossetti, Addison, Bailey, Sharp, Tupper, Browning, Leyden,
Coleridge, Miss Tatham, Dr. Donne, Collins, Matthew Arnold.
III. Continental Poets: Boyesen, Hugo, Béranger, Goethe,
Schiller, Campanella.
IV. Platonic Poets: More, Milton, Anonymous, Shelley, Vaughan,
Emerson, Mrs. Rowe, Hymns.
VI.
REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS 193
I. Brahmans; II. Egyptians; III. Pythagoras; IV. Plato; V. The
Jews.
VII.
REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE 213
VIII.
REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM 223
I. The Gnostics; II. The Neo-Platonists; III. The Orthodox
Church Fathers.
IX.
REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY 239
I. Brahmanism; II. Buddhism; III. Zoroastrianism and Sufism.
X.
EASTERN POETRY OF REINCARNATION 249
Extracts: 1. Kalidésa’s “Sakoontala;” 2. The Katha Upanishad; 3.
The Light of Asia; 4. A Persian Poem; 5. From Hafiz; 6. A Sufi
Poem.
XI.
ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION 261
XII.
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS 271
XIII.
DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL, WHAT THEN OF? 287
XIV.
KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION 297
XV.
CONCLUSION 307
APPENDIX.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF REINCARNATION 327
By the sea, by the dreary darkening sea
There stands a youthful man,
His frame is throbbing with doubt’s agony,
His lips move sadly and wan.
Oh, solve me Life’s enigma, ye waves,
The torturing riddle of old
With which the mind of humanity raves,
Whose answer is never told;
The mystery hidden from hoary sage,
From soldier, saint, and king;
From wisest heads in every age,
Weary and languishing
For light upon the misty road.
Tell me, what am I?
Whence came I, whither do I plod?
Who dwells in the blazing sky?
The billows murmur ceaselessly,
The wind speaks night and day,
Calm and cold sing the stars on high,
But he knows not what they say.
HEINE.
The doctrine of metempsychosis may almost claim to be a natural or
innate belief in the human mind, if we may judge from its wide
diffusion among the nations of the earth and its prevalence throughout
the historical ages.—PROFESSOR FRANCIS BOWEN.
INTRODUCTION.
We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,
We build the house where we may rest,
And then, at moments, suddenly,
We look up to the great wide sky,
Enquiring wherefore we were born,—
For earnest, or for jest?
The senses folding thick and dark
About the stifled soul within,
We guess diviner things beyond,
And yearn to them with yearning fond;
We strike out boldly to a mark
Believed in, but not seen.
And sometimes horror chills our blood
To be so near such mystic things,
And we wrap round us, for defence,
Our purple manners, moods of sense,—
As angels, from the face of God,
Stand hidden in their wings.
MRS. BROWNING.
INTRODUCTION.
Once the whole civilized world embraced reincarnation, and found therein
a complete answer to that riddle of man’s descent and destiny which the
inexorable sphinx Life propounds to every traveler along her way. But
the western branch of the race, in working out the material conquest of
the world, has acquired the compensating discontent of a material
philosophy. It has lost the old faith and drifted into a shadowy region,
where the eagerness for “practical” things rejects whatever cannot be
physically proven. Even God and immortality are for the most part
conjectures, believed only after demonstration, and not vitally then.
The realization of this condition is provoking throughout Christendom a
counter-current of spirituality. The growing freedom of thought and the
eastward look of many leading minds seem to herald a renaissance more
radical, although more subtle and gradual, than the reformations of
Columbus, Luther, and Guthenberg. As surely as the occupation and
development of the western Eldorado revived Europe into unprecedented
vigor, the exploration of Palestine, and beyond into India, for
treasures more precious than gold and dominion, shall revitalize the
West with an unparalleled growth of spiritual power.
Strangely enough, too, just as the “New World” proved to be geologically
the oldest continent, so the “new truths” recently discovered are found
to be the most ancient. They are as universal as the ocean, always
waiting to be used. The latest philosophies and heterodoxies are only
fresh phrasings of early ideas. The most advanced conceptions of art,
education, and government are essentially identical with those of Greece
and Rome. The newest industries are approaching the lost arts of Egypt.
The modern sciences (as electricity and chemistry) are merely ingenious
applications of what the schoolmasters of the primitive races knew
better in some respects than Edison and Cooke. Geology has just dawned
upon us to reveal the sublime synopsis of earth’s history hidden for
over three thousand years in the first chapter of the Bible. The last
great thought of this era—Evolution—is as old as the hills in the East.
Professor Crookes’s wonderful experiment connected with the instability
of certain elements, psychic force, and the fourth dimension of matter
(so far in advance of present scientific culture that many physicists
deride them) are stumblings upon the outskirts of a domain long familiar
to oriental students. After many centuries of tedious jangling with
creeds and sects, we are slowly learning that primitive Christianity
will make earth a paradise. The permanent edifice of the world’s
complete education seems to patiently await the time when men shall tire
of fashioning useless building stuff from their crumbling theories and
revert to the basal granite of which the everlasting foundations are
laid, caring only to shape the superstructure by the Architect’s plan.
Although commonly rejected throughout Europe and America, reincarnation
is unreservedly accepted by the majority of mankind at the present day,
as in all the past centuries. From the dawn of history it has prevailed
among the largest part of humanity with an unshaken intensity of
conviction. Over all the mightiest eastern nations it has held permanent
sway. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose grandeur cannot be
overestimated, was built upon this as a fundamental truth, and taught it
as a precious secret to Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, Virgil, and Ovid,
who scattered it through Greece and Italy. It is the keynote of Plato’s
philosophy, being stated or implied very frequently in his dialogues.
“Soul is older than body,” he says. “Souls are continually born over
again from Hades into this life.” In his view all knowledge is
reminiscence. To search and learn is simply to revive the images of what
the soul saw in its preëxistent state in the world of realities. It was
also widely spread in the Neo-platonism of Plotinus and Proclus. The
swarming millions of India have made this thought the foundation of
their enormous achievements in government, architecture, philosophy, and
poetry. It was a cardinal element in the religion of the Persian Magi.
Alexander the Great gazed in amazement on the self-immolation by fire to
which it inspired the Gymnosophists. Cæsar found its tenets propagated
among the Gauls. The circle of metempsychosis was an essential principle
of the Druid faith, and as such was impressed upon our forefathers the
Celts, the Gauls, and the Britons. It is claimed that the people held
this doctrine so vitally that they wept around the new-born infant and
smiled upon death; for the beginning and end of an earthly life were to
them the imprisonment and release of a soul, which must undergo repeated
probations to remove its degrading impurities for final ascent into a
succession of higher spheres. The Bardic triads of the Welsh are replete
with this thought, and a Welsh antiquary insists that an ancient
emigration from Wales to India conveyed it to the Brahmans. Among the
Arab philosophers it was a favorite idea, and it still may be noticed in
many Mohammedan writers. In the old civilizations of Peru and Mexico it
prevailed universally. The priestly rites of the Egyptian Isis, the
Eleusinian mysteries of Greece, the Bacchic processions of Rome, the
Druid ceremonies of Britain, and the Cabalic rituals of the Hebrews, all
expressed this great truth with peculiar force for their initiated
witnesses. The Jews generally adopted it after the Babylonian captivity
through the Pharisees, Philo of Alexandria, and the doctors. John the
Baptist was to them a second Elijah. Jesus was commonly thought to be a
reappearance of John the Baptist or of one of the old prophets. The
Talmud and the Cabala are full of the same teaching. Some of the late
Rabbins assert many entertaining things concerning the repeated births
of the most noted persons of their nation. Christianity is not an
exception to all the other great religions in promulgating the same
philosophy. Reincarnation played an important part in the thought of
Origen and several other leaders among the early Church Fathers. It was
a main portion of the creed of the Gnostics and Manichæans. In the
Middle Ages many scholastics and heretical sects advocated it. It has
cropped out spontaneously in many western theologians. The elder English
divines do not hesitate to inculcate preëxistence in their sermons. In
the seventeenth century Dr. Henry More and other Cambridge Platonists
gave it wide acceptance. The Roman Catholic Purgatory seems to be a
makeshift improvised to take its place. Sir Harry Vane is said by Burnet
to have maintained this doctrine.
Many philosophers of metaphysical depth, like Scotus, Kant, Schelling,
Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, and the younger Fichte, have upheld
reincarnation. Geniuses of noble symmetry, like Giordano Bruno, Herder,
Lessing, and Goethe, have fathered it. Scientists like Flammarion,
Figuier, and Brewster have earnestly advocated it. Theological leaders
like Julius Müller, Dorner, Ernesti, Rückert, and Edward Beecher have
maintained it. In exalted intuitional natures like Boehme and Swedenborg
its hold is apparent. Most of the mystics bathe in it. Of course the
long line of Platonists from Socrates down to Emerson have no doubt of
it. Nearly all the poets profess it.
Even amid the predominance of materialistic influences in Christendom it
has a considerable following. Traces of it are found among the
aborigines of North and South America, and in many barbaric tribes. At
this time it reigns without any sign of decrepitude over the Burman,
Chinese, Japanese, Tartar, Thibetan, and East Indian nations, including
at least 750,000,000 of mankind and nearly two thirds of the race.
Throughout the East it is the great central thought. It is no mere
superstition of the ignorant masses. It is the chief principle of Hindu
metaphysics,—the basis of all their inspired books. Such a hoary
philosophy, held by the venerable authority of ages, ruling from the
beginning of time the bulk of the world’s thought, cherished in some
form by the disciples of every great religion, is certainly worthy of
the profoundest respect and study. There must be some vital reality
inspiring so stupendous an existence.
But the western fondness for democracy does not hold in the domain of
thought. The fact that the majority of the race has agreed upon
reincarnation is no argument for it to an occidental thinker. The
conceit of modern progress has no more respect for ancient ideas than
for the forgotten civilization of old, even though in many essentials
they anticipated or outstripped all that we boast of. Therefore we
propose to treat this subject largely from a western standpoint.
I.
WHAT IS REINCARNATION?
You cannot say of the soul, it shall be, or is about to be, or is to
be hereafter. It is a thing without birth.—BHAGAVAD GITA.
As the inheritance of an illustrious name and pedigree quickens the
sense of duty in every noble nature, a belief in preëxistence may
enhance the glory of the present life and intensify the reverence with
which the deathless principle is regarded.—WILLIAM KNIGHT.
If we except the belief of a future remuneration beyond this life for
suffering virtue and retribution for successful crimes, there is no
system so simple, and so little repugnant to our understanding, as
that of metempsychosis. The pains and pleasures of this life are by
this system considered as the recompense or the punishment of our
actions in another state.—ISAAC D’ISRAELI.
The experiences gained in one life may not be remembered in their
details in the next, but the impressions which they produce will
remain. Again and again man passes through the wheel of
transformation, changing his lower energies into higher ones, until
matter attracts him no longer, and he becomes—what he is destined to
be—a god.—HARTMANN.
As billows on the undulating main
That swelling fall, and falling swell again,
So on the tide of time incessant roll
The dying body and the deathless soul.
I.
WHAT IS REINCARNATION?
Reincarnation is an extremely simple doctrine rooted in the assurance of
the soul’s indestructibility. It explains at once the descent and the
destiny of the soul by so natural and forcible a method that it has not
only dominated the ingenuous minds of all the primitive races, but has
become the most widely spread and most permanently influential of all
philosophies.
Reincarnation teaches that the soul enters this life, not as a fresh
creation, but after a long course of previous existences on this earth
and elsewhere, in which it acquired its present inhering peculiarities,
and that it is on the way to future transformations which the soul is
now shaping. It claims that infancy brings to earth, not a blank scroll
for the beginning of an earthly record, nor a mere cohesion of atomic
forces into a brief personality soon to dissolve again into the
elements, but that it is inscribed with ancestral histories, some like
the present scene, most of them unlike it and stretching back into the
remotest past. These inscriptions are generally undecipherable, save as
revealed in their moulding influence upon the new career; but like the
invisible photographic images made by the sun of all it sees, when they
are properly developed in the laboratory of consciousness they will be
distinctly displayed. The current phase of life will also be stored away
in the secret vaults of memory, for its unconscious effect upon the
ensuing lives. All the qualities we now possess, in body, mind and soul,
result from our use of ancient opportunities. We are indeed “the heirs
of all the ages,” and are alone responsible for our inheritances. For
these conditions accrue from distant causes engendered by our older
selves, and the future flows by the divine law of cause and effect from
the gathered momentum of our past impetuses. There is no favoritism in
the universe, but all have the same everlasting facilities for growth.
Those who are now elevated in worldly station may be sunk in humble
surroundings in the future. Only the inner traits of the soul are
permanent companions. The wealthy sluggard may be the beggar of the next
life; and the industrious worker of the present is sowing the seeds of
future greatness. Suffering bravely endured now will produce a treasure
of patience and fortitude in another life; hardships will give rise to
strength; self-denial must develop the will; tastes cultivated in this
existence will somehow bear fruit in coming ones; and acquired energies
will assert themselves whenever they can by the _lex parsimoniæ_ upon
which the principles of physics are based. _Vice versa_, the unconscious
habits, the uncontrollable impulses, the peculiar tendencies, the
favorite pursuits, and the soul-stirring friendships of the present
descend from far-reaching previous activities.
Science explains the idiosyncrasies of plants and animals by the
environment of previous generations and calls instinct hereditary habit.
In the same way there is an evolution of individuality, by which the
child opens its new era with characteristics derived from anterior
lives, and adds the experience of a new personality to the sum total of
his treasured traits. In its passage through earthly personalities the
spiritual self, the essential _Ego_, accumulates a fund of individual
character which remains as the permanent thread stringing together the
separate lives. The soul is therefore an eternal water globule, which
sprang in the beginningless past from mother ocean, and is destined
after an unreckonable course of meanderings in cloud and rain, snow and
steam, spring and river, mud and vapor, to at last return with the
garnered experience of all lonely existences into the central Heart of
all. Or rather, it is the crystal stream running from a heavenly
fountain through one continuous current that often halts in favorite
corners, sunny pools, and shady nooks, muddy ponds and clearest lakes,
each delay shifting the direction and altering the complexion of the
next tide as it issues out by the path of least resistance.
That we have forgotten the causes producing the present sequence of
pleasures and pains, talents and defects, successes and failures, is no
disproof of them, and does not disturb the justice of the scheme. For
temporary oblivion is the anodyne by which the kindly physician is
bringing us through the darker wards of sorrow into perfect health.
We do not undertake to trace the details of our earlier stoppages
further than is indicated in the uncontrovertible principle, that as
long as the soul is governed by material desires it must find its homes
in physical realms, and when its inclination is purely spiritual it
certainly will inhabit the domain of spirit. The restless wandering of
all souls must at last conclude in the peace of God, but that will not
be possible until they have gone through all the rounds of experience
and learned that only in that Goal is satisfaction. That men ever dwell
in bodies of beasts, we deny as irrational, as such a retrogression
would contradict the fundamental maxims of nature. That philosophy is a
corruption of Reincarnation, in which the masses have coarsely masked
the truth.
Granting the permanence of the human spirit amid every change, the
doctrine of re-birth is the only one yielding a metaphysical explanation
of the phenomena of life. It is already accepted in the physical plane
as evolution, and holds a firm ethical value in applying the law of
justice to human experience. In confirmation of it there stands the
strongest weight of evidence, argumentary, empirical, and historic. It
untangles the knotty problem of life simply and grandly. It meets the
severest requirements of enlightened reason, and is in deepest harmony
with the spirit of Christianity.
II.
WESTERN EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION.
The house of life hath many chambers.—ROSSETTI.
The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from any
one; nor was any produced from it.—EMERSON.
For men to tell how human life began
Is hard: for who himself beginning knew.
MILTON.
There is surely a piece of divinity in us,—something that was before
the elements and owes no homage unto the sun.
Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end.—SIR THOMAS
BROWNE.
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form and doth the body make.
SPENSER.
Secreted and hidden in the heart of the world and the heart of man is
the light which can illumine all life, the future and the past.
THROUGH THE GATES OF GOLD.
The soul, if immortal, existed before our birth.
What is incorruptible must be ungenerable.
Metempsychosis is the only system of immortality that Philosophy can
hearken to.—HUME.
Nature is nothing less than the ladder of resurrection which, step by
step, leads upward,—or rather is carried from the abyss of eternal
death up to the apex of life.—SCHLEGEL.
Look nature through; ’tis revolution all,
All change; no death. Day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise and set, and set and rise.
Earth takes the example. All to reflourish fades
As in a wheel: all sinks to reascend;
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.
YOUNG.
The blending of mind and matter in the bodily structure of the
sentient and rational orders, we may be assured, is a method of
procedure which, if it be not absolutely indispensable to the final
purposes of the creation, subserves the most important ends and
carries with it consequences such as will make it the general, if not
the universal law of all finite natures, in all worlds.—ISAAC TAYLOR.
II.
WESTERN EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION.
The old Saxon chronicler, Bede, records that at a banquet given by King
Edwin of Northumbria to his nobles, a discussion arose as to how they
should receive the Christian missionary Paulinus, who had just arrived
from the continent. Some urged the sufficiency of their own Druid and
Norse religions and advised the death of the invading heretic. Others
were in favor of hearing his message. At length the king asked the
opinion of his oldest counsellor. The sage arose and said: “O king and
lords. You all did remark the swallow which entered this festal hall to
escape the chilling winds without, fluttering near the fire for a few
moments and then vanishing through the opposite window. Such is the life
of man. Whence it came and whither it goes none can tell. Therefore if
this new religion brings light upon so great a mystery, it must be
diviner than ours and should be welcomed.” The old man’s advice was
adopted.
We are in the position of those old ancestors of ours. The religion of
the churches, called Christianity, is to many earnest souls a dry husk.
The germinant kernel of truth as it came from the founder of
Christianity, when it is discovered under all its barren wrappings, is
indeed sufficient to feed us with the bread of life. It answers all the
practical needs of most people even with the husks. But it leaves some
vital questions unanswered which impel us to desire something more than
Jesus taught—not for mere curiosity, but as food for larger growth. The
divine law which promises to fill every vacuum, and to gratify at last
every aspiration, has not left us without means of grasping a portion of
these grander truths.
The commonest idea of the soul throughout Christendom seems to be that
it is created specially for birth on this world, and after its lifetime
here it goes to a permanent spiritual realm of infinite continuance.
This is a very comfortable belief derived from the appearances of
things, and those holding it may very properly say, “My view agrees with
the phenomena, and if you think differently the burden of proof rests
upon you.” We accept this responsibility. But a careful observer knows
that the true explanation of facts is as a rule very different from the
appearance. Ptolemy thought he could account for all the heavenly
motions on his geocentric theory, and his teachings were at once
received by his contemporaries. But the deeper studies of Copernicus and
Galileo had to wait a century before they were accepted, although they
introduced an astronomy of immeasurably nobler scale. Is it not a relic
of the old confidence in appearances to consider the physical orbits of
human souls as limited to our little view of them?
The theologian seeks to explain life, with its inequalities, its
miseries and injustices, by a future condition rewarding and punishing
men for the deeds of earth. He concedes that benevolence and justice
cannot be proven in God by what is seen of His earthly administration.
The final law of creation is said to be Love, but the sin and suffering
bequeathed to most of the race through no apparent fault of theirs
annuls that dictum in the world’s real thought, and compels men to
regard life as a ceaseless struggle for existence in which the strongest
wins and the weakest fails, and the devil takes the hindermost. But even
if the future life will straighten out this by a just judgment, fairness
demands that all shall have an even chance here,—which only
reincarnation assures.
The materialist takes a more plausible ground. On the basis of the soul
beginning with the present existence, he regards all the developments of
life as results of blind natural forces. He says that the variety of
atomic qualities accounts for all the divergencies of life, physical,
mental, and moral. But he can give no reason why the same particles of
matter should accomplish such stupendous varieties. Moreover Science,
the materialist’s gospel, instead of disposing of psychic facts, is
studying and classifying them as a new branch of supersensuous
knowledge.[1] These investigations will ultimately initiate Science into
the surety of non-physical things. Already a strong advance in that
direction has been made by Isaac Taylor’s “Physical Theory of a Future
Life” and Stewart & Tait’s “Unseen Universe.” The conception of an
Infinite Personality overwhelms all the narrow groove-thinking of every
mechanical school, and rises supremely in the strongest scientific
philosophy of all time—that of Herbert Spencer. Strangest of all,
Evolution, the cornerstone of Spencerian philosophy, is merely a
paraphrase of reincarnation.
There are seven arguments for Reincarnation which seem conclusive.
1. That the idea of _immortality_ demands it.
2. That _analogy_ makes it the most probable.
3. That _science_ confirms it.
4. That the _nature of the soul_ requires it.
5. That it most completely _answers_ the _theological questions_ of
“original sin” and “future punishment.”
6. That it _explains_ many _mysterious experiences_.
7. That it alone _solves_ the problem of _injustice_ and _misery_ which
broods over our world.
* * * * *
1. Immortality demands it.
Only the positivists and some allied schools of thought, comprising a
very small proportion of Christendom, doubt the immortality of the soul.
But a conscious existence after death has no better proof than a
pre-natal existence. It is an old declaration that what begins in time
must end in time. We have no right to say that the soul is eternal on
one side of its earthly period without being so on the other. Far more
rational is the view of certain scientists who, believing that the soul
originates with this life, also declare that it ends with this life.
That is the logical outcome of their premise. If the soul sprang into
existence specially for this life, why should it continue afterward? It
is precisely as probable from all the grounds of reason that death is
the conclusion of the soul as that birth is the beginning of it. As
Cudworth points out, it was this argument which had special weight with
the Greek philosophers, whose reasonings upon immortality have led all
later generations. They asserted the eternity of the soul in order to
vindicate its immortality. For, they held, as nothing which has being
can have originated from nothingness, or can vanish into nothingness,
and as they were certain of their existence, it was impossible that they
could have had a temporal beginning. The present life must be only one
stage of a vast number, stretching backward and forward.
Our instinctive belief in immortality implies a subconscious acceptance
of this view. We are certain of a persevering life outlasting all the
changes of time and death. But birth, as well as death, is one of the
temporal shifts belonging to the transitory sphere which is foreign to
our spirits. It is only because our backs are toward the earlier change
and our faces to the later that we refuse to reason about one on the
principles used about the other. If we lived in the reversed world of
Fechner’s “Dr. Mises,” in which old things grow new and men begin life
by a reversed dying and end by a reversed birth, we would probably
devise arguments for preëxistence as zealously as we do now for future
existence, and that would lead to reincarnation. For all the indications
of immortality point as unfailingly to an eternity preceding this
existence: the love of prolonged life; the analogy of nature; the
prevailing belief of the most spiritual minds; the permanence of the ego
principle; the inconceivability of annihilation or of creation from
nothing; the promise of an extension of the present career; the
injustice of any other thought.
The ordinary Christian idea of special creation at birth involves the
correlative of annihilation at death. What the origin of the soul may
have been does not affect this subject, further than that it long
antedates the present life. Whether it be a spark from God himself, or a
divine emanation, or a cluster of independent energies, its eternal
destiny compels the inference that it is uncreated and indestructible.
Moreover, it is unthinkable that from an infinite history it enters this
world for its first and only physical experience and then shoots off to
an endless spiritual existence. The deduction is rather that it assumed
many forms before it appeared as we now see it, and is bound to pass
through many coming lives before it will be rounded into the full orb of
perfection and reach its ultimate goal.
2. Analogy is strongly in favor of reincarnation. Were Bishop Butler to
work out the problem of the career of the human soul in the light of
modern science, we doubt not that his masterpiece would advocate this
“pagan” thought. For many centuries the literature of nations has
discerned a standard simile of the soul’s deathlessness in the
transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly. But it is known
now that once all the caterpillars and butterflies were alike, and that
by repeated incarnations they have reached the bewildering differences.
When they started off from the procession of life on their own road from
one or a few similar species, the progeny scattered into various
circumstances, and the struggles and devices which they went through for
their own purposes, being repeated for thousands of years in millions of
lives, has developed the surprising heterogeneity of feather-winged
insects. And as each undergoes his rapid changes in rehearsal of his
long pedigree, we may trace the succession of his earlier lives.
The violent energy of the present condition argues a previous stage
leading up to it. It is contended with great force of analogy that death
is but another and higher birth. This life is a groping embryo plane
implying a more exalted one. Mysterious intimations reach us from a
diviner sphere,—
“Like hints and echoes of the world
To spirits folded in the womb.”
But subtle indications rearward argue that birth is the death of an
earlier existence. Even the embryo life necessitates a preparatory one
preceding it. So complete a structure must have a foundation. So swift a
momentum must have traveled far. As Emerson observes: “We wake and find
ourselves on a stair. There are other stairs below us which we seem to
have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward
and out of sight.”
The grand order of creation is everywhere proclaiming as the universal
word, “change.” Nothing is destroyed, but all is passing from one
existence to another. Not an atom but is dancing in lively march from
its present condition to a different form, running a ceaseless cycle
through mineral, vegetable, and animal existence, though never losing
its individuality, however diverse its apparent alterations. Not a
creature but is constantly progressing to something else. The tadpole
becomes a fish, the fish a frog, and some of the frogs have turned to
birds. It was the keen perception of this principle in nature which gave
their vital force to the Greek mythologies and other ancient stories
embodying the idea of transmutation of personality through many guises.
It was this which animated the metamorphoses of Ovid, whose philosophy
is contained in these lines from his poem on Pythagoras:—
“Death, so called, is but old matter dressed
In some new form. And in a varied vest
From tenement to tenement, though tossed,
The soul is still the same, the figure only lost:
And, as the softened wax new seals receives,
This face assumes, and that impression leaves,
Now called by one, now by another name,
The form is only changed, the wax is still the same.
Then, to be born is to begin to be
Some other thing we were not formerly.
That forms are changed, I grant; that nothing can
Continue in the figure it began.”[2]
Evolution has remoulded the thought of Christendom, expanding our
conception of physiology, astronomy and history. The more it is studied
the more universal is found its application. It seems to be the secret
of God’s life. Now that we know the evolution of the body, it is time
that we learned the evolution of the soul. The biologist shows that each
of us physically before birth runs through all the phases of animal
life—polyp, fish, reptile, dog, ape, and man—as a brief synopsis of how
the ages have prepared our tenements. The preponderance of special
animal traits in us is due, he says, to the emphasis of those particular
stages of our physical growth. So in infancy does the soul move through
an unconscious series of existences, recapitulating its long line of
descent, until it is fastened in maturity. And why is it not true that
our soul traits are the relics of former activities? Evolution proves
that the physical part of man is the product of a long series of
changes, in which each stage is both the effect of past influences and
the cause of succeeding issues. Does not the immaterial part of man
require a development equally vast? The fact of an intellectual and
moral evolution proceeding hand in hand with the physical can only be
explained under the economy of nature by a series of reincarnations.
3. Furthermore, the idea that the soul is specially created for
introduction into this world combats all the principles of science. All
nature proceeds on the strictest economic methods. Nothing is either
lost or added. There is no creation or destruction. Whatever appears to
spring suddenly into existence is derived from some sufficient
cause—although as unseen as the vapor currents which feed the clouds.
There is a growing consensus of opinion among spiritualists and
materialists alike, that the quantity both of force and of matter
remains constant. The law of conservation of energy holds in the
spiritual realm as in physics. The uniform stock of energy in the
universe neither declines nor increases, but incessantly changes. The
marvelous developments shown in the protean organisms continually
entering the procession of life indicate that the new manifestations
descend from some patriarchal line, uncreated and immortal, coming
through the hidden regions of previous existences. Science allows no
such miracle as the theological special resurrection, which is contrary
to all experience. But it recognizes the universality of resurrection
throughout all nature, which is a matter of common observation. The idea
of the soul as a phœnix, eternally continuing through myriad
embodiments, is adapted to the whole spirit of modern science.
Especially significant is the axiomatic law of cause and effect. There
is no other adequate explanation of the phenomena of life than the
purely scientific one, that causes similar to those now operating before
our eyes have produced the results we witness. The impelling
characteristics of each personality require some earlier experiences of
physical life to have generated them. All the sensuous proclivities of
human nature point to long earthly experience as their only origin. And
the unsatisfied physical inclinations of the soul necessitate a series
of material existences to work themselves out. The irrepressible
eagerness for all the range of experience seems to be a sufficient
reason for a course of incarnations which shall accomplish that result.
Physiologists contend that the wondrous human organism could not have
grown up out of mere matter, but implies a preëxistent personal idea,[3]
which grouped around itself the organic conditions of physical existence
and constrained the material elements to follow its plan. This dynamic
agent—or the soul—must have existed independent of the body before the
receptacle was prepared. Bouiller and the German scientists Müller,
Hartmann, and Stahl, have especially demonstrated in physiology this
idea of a preëxistent soul monad, whose plastic power unconsciously
constructs its own corporeal organism. The Greeks coiled this idea into
the word σϲἡμα, and the younger Fichte and Lotze have developed it. The
doctrine of modern physiology, as presented by the animists, is
precisely the ground taken by upholders of reincarnation,—that as the
lower animals fashion ingenious nests with incredible skill, so the
unwitting soul blindly frames the fabric of its body in keeping with the
laws of its own adaptation. The unconscious agency of the mind or
instinct in repairing the body, healing its hurts and guiding its
growth, is recognized by most scientists. Plato but expresses the same
idea when he says, “The soul always weaves her garment anew.” This
thought is well worded by Giordano Bruno when he says, “The soul is not
in the body locally, but as its intrinsic form and extrinsic mould, as
that which makes the members and shapes the whole within and without.
The body, then, is in the soul, the soul in the mind (spirit). The
Intellect (Spirit) is God.”
This conception gives the lie to the materialism which limits the forces
of the individual to the complications of a mechanism. A corollary of
this moulding power of the independent soul is Plato’s proposition that
“the soul has a natural strength which will hold out and be born many
times.” Since the ego is older than the body, the resident who builds
its dwelling according to its tastes and materials, and since the
purpose of its corporeal habitation cannot possibly be accomplished in a
single brief lifetime, it is necessary that it should repeat that
experience, always framing its receptacle to suit its growing character,
like the epochs of a lobster’s enlargement, until it has done with
physical life. The new apparitions of men upon the earth thus hail from
older scenes.
Evolution may fairly be claimed as a spiritual truth applying to all the
methods of life. The gradual development of the soul, by the school of
experience, demands a vaster arena of action than one earthly life
affords. If it takes ages of time and thousands of lives to form one
kind of an animal from another, the expansion of human souls from lower
to higher natures surely needs many and many a life for that growth.
Evolutionary science explains the instinctive acts of young animals as
inherited tendencies,—as past experiences transmitted into fresh forms.
Psychic science is learning that the earliest acts of human beings are
also derived from remote habits formed in anterior activities, and
stored away in the unconscious memory. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher
of evolution, speaks of a constant energy manifesting itself through all
transformations. This is the one life which runs eternally in protean
shapes.
The measure of our acquisition of conceptions from the outer universe
resides in the senses. There is no evidence that these have always been
five. Nature, never taking a leap, must have put us through all the
lower stages before she placed us at our present position. And since
nature contains many substances and powers which are partially or wholly
beyond these senses, some of which powers are known to other animals, we
must assume that our present ascending development will introduce us to
higher levels in which the soul shall have as many senses as correspond
with the powers of nature.[4]
4. A much more weighty argument is that the nature of the soul requires
reincarnation. The conscious soul cannot feel itself to have had any
beginning, any more than it can conceive of annihilation. The sense of
persistence overwhelms all the interruptions of forgetfulness and sleep,
and all the obstacles of matter. This incessant self-assurance suggests
the idea of the soul being independent of the changing body, its
temporary prison. Then follows the conception that, as the soul has once
appeared in human form, so it may reappear in many others. The eternity
of the soul, past and present, leads directly to an innumerable
succession of births and deaths, disembodiments and reembodiments.
The identity of the soul surely does not consist in a remembrance of all
its past. We are always forgetting ourselves and waking again to
recognition. But the sense of individuality bridges all the gaps. In the
same way it seems as if our present existence were a somnambulent
condition into which we have drowsed from an earlier life, being
sleepily oblivious of that former activity, and from which we may after
a while be roused into wakefulness.
The study of infant psychology confirms this. The nature and extent of
the mental furniture with which we begin life, apart from all experience
of this world, has obliged many thinkers to resort to preëxistence as
the necessary explanation.
A careful examination of the rarer facts of life, noticeably those found
in dreams, trances, and analogous phenomena, demonstrates that our
complete life is largely independent of the body, and consists in a
perpetual transfer of the sensuous experiences of self-consciousness
into a supersensuous unconsciousness. But this higher storehouse of
character might more truly be called our real consciousness, although we
are not ordinarily cognizant of it, for it comprises our habits,
instincts, and tendencies. This is the essential character of the soul
and must persist after death. Now, unless all our earthly possibilities
are exhausted in one life, these inherent material qualities of our
spiritual nature will find expression in a plurality of earthly
existences. And if the purpose of life be the acquisition of experience,
it would be unreasonable to suppose a final transfer elsewhere before a
full knowledge of earth has been gained. It is apparent that one life
cannot accomplish this, even in the longest and most diverse career,—to
say nothing of the short average, and the curtailed allowance given to
the majority. If one earth life answers for all, what a tiny experience
suffices for the immense masses who prematurely die as children! Men are
willing enough to believe in an eternity of spiritual development after
this world; but is it consistent with the thought of Omnipotence to
consider that the Divine plan is achieved in preparing for that by a few
swift years in one body? In devoting eternity to our education, the
infinite Teacher surely will not put us into the highest grade of all
until we have well mastered the lessons of all the lower classes.
The philosophy of “innate ideas” is an admission of earlier lives than
the present. The intuitionalists emphatically regard the concepts of
cause, substance, time, and space as existing in the mind independent of
experience. The sensationalists consider them entirely due to our
sensations. The Spencerian evolutionalists occupy a middle ground and
call them a mental heredity resulting from the experience of the race.
It has been well shown, as Edgar Fawcett says, by two impartial critics,
that this controversy cannot be solved by any agreement of Western
psychologists. Buckle inveighs against these discordant systems as
having “thrown the study of the mind into a confusion only to be
compared to that in which the study of religion has been thrown by the
controversies of the theologians.”[5] And George Henry Lewes, in his
“History of Philosophy,” deplores this perplexing condition of
metaphysics. The solution of the problem comes, along with
reincarnation, from the eastern students, who assert that a true
conception of the soul is discovered only by the culture of
supersensuous faculties. They concede a portion of truth to both extreme
schools, declaring that the _primary_ acquisition of such ideas was
gained by sensation, but that at present they are innate in the infant
mind. They are now the generalized experience of former existences
rising again into consciousness.
The restlessness of our spirits points to ancient habits of varied
action. And a still more forcible indication is the diversity of
character in the same person. These wavering uncertainties and
contraries in each one of us, which strive for the mastery and are never
crushed even by the sternest fixity of habit—rendering the best of us
amenable to temptations, and making the strongest vacillate, may well
result from meanderings in numerous characters. The main trend of our
natures is still often distracted into old forgotten ways.
5. Reincarnation provides a complete answer to the most perplexing
problem of theology,—original sin. Properly this point belongs to the
preceding section, but its importance justifies a separate mention. The
endless controversies centering upon this question show how Christian
metaphysics have vainly wrestled with a Gordian knot which cannot
possibly be untied from the standpoint considering this life the initial
and only earthly one,—a knot which reincarnation not simply cuts, but
reveals how it was made. Between the extreme dogmas of Pelagius, who
maintained that all men are born in a state of innocence and may
therefore live without sin, and of Augustine, who held the total
depravity of mankind, arising from their transgression in Adam and their
absolute bondage to the devil, there has raged a continual warfare,
which has divided Christendom into many sects of thought on this leading
doctrine. The modern church creeds still range themselves in conflicting
battalions, following the discussions during the Reformation between
Erasmus, who denied the power of hereditary sin over free will, and
Luther, who insisted that the race is completely in the devil’s power by
nature. By far the largest part of the Christian world professedly
adheres to the latter faith,—that men are born entirely corrupt. Even
the Arminians, Quakers, and liberal denominations who admit only a germ
of sin in humanity are at a loss to account it. The ordinary theological
explanation which derives our sin from the transgression of Adam, as
apparently taught by St. Paul, although tacitly held by most of the
churches and expressed in the majority of creeds, grates so severely on
the inner consciousness and common sense that it does not answer the
real difficulty. There is a general agreement among mankind, upon which
the codes of practical life are based, that Adam’s responsibility for
our sin is only a makeshift of the theologians: for every sensible man
knows that no one but the individual himself can be blamed for his
wrong-doing. Adam is accepted as a fable for our older selves.
Dismissing all the interminable arguments of theology, which only
obscure truth in a cloud of intellectual wranglings, the broad
foundation of ethics, grounded in our best instincts, attached sin
somehow, though inexplainably, to the sinner; and the only sufficient
explanation traces its beginning to earlier lives.
The moral character of children, especially the occurrence of evil in
them long before it could have been implanted by this existence, has
forced acute observers to assume that the human spirit has made choice
of evil in a pre-natal sphere similar to this. Every one who knows
children rejects the Pelagian theory of their immaculate innocence. As
soon as they have the power to do wrong, without any teaching the wrong
is done as a natural proceeding.
The germ of sin springs up from some old sowing. But the Augustinian
doctrine is equally untrue to human nature. The most incorrigible
tendency to evil in an uninfluenced child cannot conceal the good within
it, but merely indicates that former ill habits are working themselves
out. The depraved criminal at last sees his own folly when his course of
sin is run, and becomes so weary of it that the next lease of life must
be on a better plan. So evil is discovered to be good in the making, and
vice is virtue in the strengthening.
Every person at some stage of growth awakens to the recognition of sin
within him, and is certain that it is so radical as to reach back of all
his present life, although it is surely foreign to his true nature. We
all feel ourselves to have bounded into life like a stag carrying a
panther which must be shaken off. Theology attempts to account for this
by Adam’s sin entailing a hereditary depravity. But our inmost
consciousness agrees with the common sense of mankind in holding us
alone responsible for our tendency to wrong. Remorse seizes us for the
inexplicable evil in us. The only solution is that of the parasite in
the butterfly. The insect allowed the pest to enter when it was a worm.
This blighted condition cannot be the original state of man. It must be
the result of the human will resisting the divine, and choosing wrong in
old existences beyond recollection.
A masterly expression of this thought nourished the childhood of
Christianity in the teaching of Origen,[6] and flourished with wholesome
influence until it was forcibly crushed out of popularity by the Council
of Constantinople, to make room for the harsh dogmas which have since
darkened the rationale of Christianity. It never was intelligently met
and conquered, but was summarily ousted as incompatible with the weight
of prejudice. The same treatment of it appears in Dr. Hodge’s
“Systematic Theology” (under the section on Preëxistence). That it is in
harmony with Scripture has been shown by Henry More, Soame Jenyns,
Chevalier Ramsay, and Professor Bowen, from whom quotations are given in
chapter iv., and by other writers mentioned at the close of this book.
Julius Müller,[7] Lessing,[8] Edward Beecher,[9] Coleridge, and Kant[10]
also sustain it from a religio-philosophical ground. It is the only
rational explanation of the theological idea of sin.
The same is true regarding the church’s dogma of future punishments and
rewards. A reasonable consideration fails to understand how the jump can
be made from this condition of things to an eternity of either suffering
or bliss—as ordinary theology demands. The Roman Catholics recognized
this difficulty sufficiently to provide Purgatory, and in that tenet
they meet the sense of humanity. Reincarnation simply says that there
are many purgatories, and one is earth. The more rational Protestants
get around the incongruity by permitting many grades of existence in
heaven and hell, which approaches the same solution. Reincarnation says
also, there are infinite degrees of heaven and hell, and many of them
slope down through this life. It is inconceivable how earthly natures
(and most of human souls are such) can find their penalties and their
rewards elsewhere than on some kind of earth. The scheme of the universe
presents everywhere a simple and sublime habit of keeping affinities
together, and it certainly seems as if the same economy could apply to
souls as to atoms. This idea meets better than any other the principles
that punishment for sin cannot continue longer than the sin continues,
and that the everlasting mercy of the Supreme will provide some final
release for his erring children.
6. Reincarnation explains many curious experiences. Most of us have
known the touches of feeling and thought that seem to be reminders of
forgotten things. Sometimes as dim dreams of old scenes, sometimes as
vivid lightning flashes in the darkness recalling distant occurrences,
sometimes with unutterable depth of meaning. It appears as if nature’s
opiate which ushered us here had been so diluted that it did not quite
efface the old memories, and reason struggles to decipher the vestiges
of a former state. Almost every one has felt the sense of great age.
Thinking of some unwonted subject often an impression seizes us that
somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflections before. Learning a
fact, meeting a face for the first time, we are puzzled with an obscure
sense that it is familiar. Traveling newly in strange places we are
sometimes haunted with a consciousness of having been there already.
Music is specially apt to guide us into mystic depths, where we are
startled with the flashing reminiscences of unspeakable verities which
we have felt or seen ages since. Efforts of thought reveal the
half-obliterated inscriptions on the tablets of memory, passing before
the vision in a weird procession. Every one has some such experiences.
Most of them are blurred and obscure. But some are so remarkably
distinct that those who undergo them are convinced that their sensations
are actual recollections of events and places in former lives. It is
even possible for certain persons to trace thus quite fully and clearly
a part of their bygone history prior to this life.
Sir Walter Scott was so impressed by these experiences that they led him
to a belief in preëxistence. In his diary was entered this circumstance,
February 17, 1828: “I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth marking
down, that yesterday, at dinner time, I was strangely haunted by what I
would call the sense of preëxistence, viz. a confused idea that nothing
that passed was said for the first time; that the same topics had been
discussed and the same persons had stated the same opinions on them....
The sensation was so strong as to resemble what is called a _mirage_ in
the desert and a calenture on board ship.... It was very distressing
yesterday, and brought to my mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about
an ideal world. There was a vile sense of unreality in all I said or
did.”[11] That this was not due to the strain upon his later years is
evident from the fact that the same experience is referred to in one of
his earliest novels, where this “sentiment of preëxistence” was first
described. In “Guy Mannering,” Henry Bertram says: “Why is it that some
scenes awaken thoughts which belong, as it were, to dreams of early and
shadowy recollections, such as old Brahmin moonshine would have ascribed
to a state of previous existence. How often do we find ourselves in
society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a
mysterious and ill-defined consciousness that neither the scene nor the
speakers nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could
anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place.”
Bulwer-Lytton describes it as “that strange kind of inner and spiritual
memory which often recalls to us places and persons we have never seen
before, and which Platonists would resolve to be the unquenched and
struggling consciousness of a former life.” Again, in “Godolphin”
(chapter xv.), he writes: “How strange is it that at times a feeling
comes over us as we gaze upon certain places, which associates the scene
either with some dim-remembered and dreamlike images of the Past, or
with a prophetic and fearful omen of the Future.... Every one has known
a similar strange and indistinct feeling at certain times and places,
and with a similar inability to trace the cause.”
Edgar A. Poe writes (in “Eureka”): “We walk about, amid the destinies of
our world existence, accompanied by dim but ever present memories of a
Destiny more vast—very distant in the bygone time and infinitely
awful.... We live out a youth peculiarly haunted by such dreams, yet
never mistaking them for dreams. As _memories_ we know them. During our
youth the distinctness is too clear to deceive us even for a moment. But
the doubt of manhood dispels these feelings as illusions.”
Explicit occurrences of this class are found in the narratives of
Hawthorne, Willis, Coleridge, De Quincey, and many other writers. A
striking instance appears in a little memoir of the late William Hone,
the Parodist, upon whom the experience made such a profound effect that
it roused him from thirty years of materialistic atheism to a conviction
of the soul’s independence of matter. Being called in business to a
house in a part of London entirely new to him, he kept noticing that he
had never been that way before. “I was shown,” he says, “into a room to
wait. On looking around, to my astonishment everything appeared
perfectly familiar to me: I seemed to _recognize_ every object. I said
to myself, what is this? I was never here before and yet I have seen all
this, and if so, there is a very peculiar knot in the shutter.” He
opened the shutter, and there was the knot.
The experience of many persons supports this truth. The sacred Hindu
books contain many detailed histories of transmigration. Kapila is said
to have written out the Vedas from his recollection of them in a former
life. The Vishnu Purana furnishes some entertaining instances of memory
retained through successive lives. Pythagoras is related to have
remembered his former existences in the persons of a herald named
Æthalides, Euphorbus the Trojan, Hermotimus of Clazomenæ, and others. It
is stated that he pointed out in the temple of Juno, at Argos, the
shield with which, as Euphorbus, he attacked Patroclus in the Trojan
war. The life of Apollonius of Tyana gives some extraordinary examples
of his recognitions of persons he had known in preceding lives. All
these cases are considered fictions by most people, because they
trespass the limits of historical accuracy. But there are many facts in
our own time that point in the same direction. The Druses have no doubt
that this life follows many others. A Druse boy explained his terror at
the discharge of a gun by saying, “I was born murdered;” that is, the
soul of a man who had been shot entered into his body. A scholarly
friend of the writer is satisfied that he once lived among the mountains
before his present life, for, though born in a flat country destitute of
pines, his first young entrance to a wild pine-grown mountain district
roused the deepest sense of familiarity and homelikeness. And his last
life, he thinks, was as a woman, because of certain commanding feminine
traits which continually assert themselves. And this in spite of an
apparently strong masculine nature, which never excites a suspicion of
effeminacy.
Another friend of the writer says that his only child, a little girl now
deceased, often referred to a younger sister of whom he knew nothing.
When corrected with the assurance that she had no sister, she would
reply, “Oh, yes, I have! I have a little baby sister in heaven!” The
same gentleman tells this anecdote of a neighbor’s family where the
subject of reincarnation is never mentioned. A group of children was
playing in the house at a counting game while their mother watched them.
When they reached one hundred they started again at one and climbed up
the numbers once more. The brightest boy commented on the proceeding:
“We count ten, twenty, thirty, and so on to a hundred. Then we get
through and begin all over. Mamma! That’s the way people do. They go on
and on till they come to the end, and then they begin over again. I hope
I’ll have you for a mamma again the next time I begin.” Lawrence
Oliphant gives in “Blackwood’s Magazine” for January, 1881, a remarkable
account of a child who remembered experiences of previous lives.
A writer in “Notes and Queries,” second series, vol. iv. p. 157, says,
“A gentleman of high intellectual attainments, now deceased, once told
me that he had dreamed of being in a strange city, so vividly that he
remembered the streets, houses, and public buildings as distinctly as
those of any place he ever visited. A few weeks afterward he was induced
to visit a panorama in Leicester Square, when he was startled by seeing
the city of which he had dreamed. The likeness was perfect except that
one additional church appeared in the picture. He was so struck by the
circumstance that he spoke to the exhibitor, assuming for his purpose
the air of a traveler acquainted with the place. He was informed that
the additional church was a recent erection.” It is difficult to account
for such a fact by the hypothesis of the double structure of the brain,
or by clairvoyance.
In Lord Lindsay’s description of the valley of Kadisha (“Letters,” p.
351, ed. 1847) he says: “We saw the river Kadisha descending from
Lebanon. The whole scene bore that strange and shadowy resemblance to
the wondrous landscape in ‘Kubla Khan’ that one so often feels in actual
life, when the whole scene around you appears to be reacting after a
long interval. Your friends seated in the same juxtaposition, the
subjects of conversation the same, and shifting with the same dreamlike
ease, that you remember at some remote and indefinite period of
preëxistence; you always know what will come next, and sit spellbound,
as it were, in a sort of calm expectancy.”
Dickens, in his “Pictures from Italy,” mentions this instance, on his
first sight of Ferrara: “In the foreground was a group of silent peasant
girls, leaning over the parapet of the little bridge, looking now up at
the sky, now down into the water; in the distance a deep dell; the
shadow of an approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered
there in some former life I could not have seemed to remember the place
more thoroughly, or with more emphatic chilling of the blood; and the
real remembrance of it acquired in that minute is so strengthened by the
imaginary recollection that I hardly think I could forget it.”
A passage in the story of “The Wool-gatherer” shows that James Hogg, the
author, shared the same feeling and attributed it to an earlier life on
earth. N. P. Willis wrote a story of himself as the reincarnation of an
Austrian artist, narrating how he discovered his previous personality,
in “Dashes at Life,” under the title “A Revelation of a Previous
Existence.” D. G. Rossetti does the same in his story “St. Agnes of
Intercession.”
The well-known lecturer, Eugene Ashton, recently contributed to a
Cincinnati paper these two anecdotes:—
“At a dinner party in New York, recently, a lady, who is one of New
York’s most gifted singers, said to one of the guests: ‘In some
reincarnation I hope to perfect my voice, which I feel is now only
partially developed. So long as I do not attain the highest of which my
soul is capable I shall be returned to the flesh to work out what nature
intended me to do.’ ‘But, madam, if you expect incarnations, have you
any evidence of past ones?’ ‘Of that I cannot speak positively. I can
recall dimly things which seem to have happened to me when I was in the
flesh before. Often I go to places which are new to the present
personality, but they are not new to my soul; I am sure that I have been
there before.’
“A Southern literary woman, who now lives in Brooklyn, speaking of her
former incarnations, says: ‘I am sure that I have lived in some past
time; for instance, when I was at Heidelberg, Germany, attending a
convention of Mystics, in company with some friends I paid my first
visit to the ruined Heidelberg Castle. As I approached it I was
impressed with the existence of a peculiar room in an inaccessible
portion of the building. A paper and pencil were provided me, and I drew
a diagram of the room even to its peculiar floor. My diagram and
description were perfect, when we afterwards visited the room. In some
way not yet clear to me I have been connected with that apartment. Still
another impression came to me with regard to a book, which I was made to
feel was in the old library of the Heidelberg University. I not only
knew what the book was, but even felt that a certain name of an old
German professor would be found written in it. Communicating this
feeling to one of the Mystics at the convention, a search was made for
the volume, but it was not found. Still the impression clung to me, and
another effort was made to find the book; this time we were rewarded for
our pains. Sure enough, there on the margin of one of the leaves was the
very name I had been given in such a strange manner. Other things at the
same time went to convince me that I was in possession of the soul of a
person who had known Heidelberg two or three centuries ago.’”
The writer knows a gentleman who has repeatedly felt a vivid sense of
some one striking his skull with an axe, although nothing in his own
experience or in that of his family explains it. An extraordinary person
to whom he had never hinted the matter once surprised him by saying that
his previous life was closed by murder in that very way. Another
acquaintance is sure that some time ago he was a Hindu, and recollects
several remarkable incidents of that life.
Objectors ascribe these enigmas to a jumble of associations producing a
blurred vision,—like the drunkard’s experience of seeing double, a
discordant remembrance, snatches of forgotten dreams,—or to the double
structure of the brain. In one of the lobes, they say, the thought
flashes a moment in advance of the other, and the second half of the
thinking machine regards the first impression as a memory of something
long distant.[12] But this explanation is unsatisfactory, as it fails to
account for the wonderful vividness of some of these impressions in
well-balanced minds, or the long trains of thought which come
independent of any companions, or the prophetic glimpses which
anticipate actual occurrences. Far more credible is it that each soul is
a palimpsest inscribed again and again with one story upon another, and
whenever the all-wise Author is ready to write a grander page on us He
washes off the old ink and pens his latest word. But some of us can
trace here and there letters of the former manuscript not yet effaced.
A contributor to the “Penn Monthly,” of September, 1875, refers to the
hypothesis of double mental vision as supposed to account for most of
these instances, and then concludes: “Such would be my inference as
regards ordinary cases of this sort of reminiscence, especially when
they are observed to accompany any impaired health of the organs of
mental action. But there are more extraordinary instances of this mental
phenomenon, of which I can give no explanation. Three of these have
fallen within my own range of observation. A friend’s child of about
four years old was observed by her older sister to be talking to herself
about matters of which she could not be supposed to know anything. ‘Why,
W——,’ exclaimed the older sister, ‘what do you know about that? All that
happened before you were born!’ ‘I would have you know, L——, that I grew
old in heaven before I was born.’ I do not quote this as if it explained
what the child meant it to explain, but as a curious statement from the
mouth of one too young to have ever heard of preëxistence, or to have
inferred it from any ambiguous mental experiences of her own. The second
case is that of the presence of inexplicable reminiscences, or what seem
such in dreams. As everybody knows, the stuff which dreams are
ordinarily made of is the every-day experience of life, which we cast
into new and fantastic combinations, whose laws of arrangement and
succession are still unknown to us. In the list of my acquaintances is a
young married lady, a native of Philadelphia, who is repeatedly but not
habitually carried back in her dreams to English society of the
eighteenth century, seemingly of the times of George II., and to a
social circle somewhat above that in which she now lives. Her
acquaintance with literature is not such as to give her the least clue
to the matter, and the details she furnishes are not such as would be
gathered from books of any class. The dress, especially the lofty and
elaborate headdresses of the ladies, their slow and stately minuet
dancing, the deference of the servants to their superiors, the details
of the stiff, square brick houses, in one of which she was surprised to
find a family chapel with mural paintings and a fine organ—all these she
describes with the sort of detail possible to one who has actually seen
them, and not in the fashion in which book-makers write about them. Yet
another, a more wide-awake experience, is that of a friend, who
remembers having died in youth and in India. He sees the bronzed
attendants gathered about his cradle in their white dresses; they are
fanning him. And as they gaze he passes into unconsciousness. Much of
his description concerned points of which he knew nothing from any other
source, but all was true to the life, and enabled me to fix on India as
the scene which he recalled.”
7. The strongest support of reincarnation is its happy solution of the
problem of moral inequality and injustice and evil which otherwise
overwhelms us as we survey the world. The seeming chaos is marvelously
set in order by the idea of soul-wandering. Many a sublime intellect has
been so oppressed with the topsy-turviness of things here as to cry out,
“There is no God. All is blind chance.” An exclusive view of the
miseries of mankind, the prosperity of wickedness, the struggles of the
deserving, the oppression of the masses, or, on the other hand, the
talents and successes and happiness of the fortunate few, compels one to
call the world a sham without any moral law. But that consideration
yields to a majestic satisfaction when one is assured that the present
life is only one of a grand series in which every individual is
gradually going the round of infinite experience for a glorious
outcome,—that the hedging ills of to-day are a consequence of what we
did yesterday and a step toward the great things of to-morrow. Thus the
tangled snarls of earthly phenomena are straightened out as a vast and
beautiful scheme, and the total experience of humanity forms a
magnificent tapestry of perfect poetic justice.
The crucial test of any hypothesis is whether it meets all the facts
better than any other theory. No other view so admirably accounts for
the diversity of conditions on earth, and refutes the charge of
favoritism on the part of Providence. Hierocles said, and many a
philosopher before and since has agreed with him, “Without the doctrine
of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the ways of God.” Some
of the theologians have found the idea of preëxistence necessary to a
reasonable explanation of the world, although it is considered foreign
to the Bible. Over thirty years ago, Dr. Edward Beecher published “The
Conflict of Ages,” in which the main argument is this thought. He
demonstrates that the facts of sin and depravity compel the acceptance
of this doctrine to exonerate God from the charge of maliciousness. His
book caused a lively controversy, and was soon followed by “The Concord
of Ages,” in which he answers the objections and strengthens his
position. The same truth is taught by Dr. Julius Müller, a German
theologian of prodigious influence among the clergy. Another prominent
leader of theological thought, Dr. Dorner, sustains it.
We conclude, therefore, that reincarnation is necessitated by
immortality, that analogy teaches it, that science upholds it, that the
nature of the soul needs it, that many strange sensations support it,
and that it alone grandly solves the problem of life. The fullness of
its meaning is majestic beyond appreciation, for it shows that every
soul, from the lowest animal to the highest archangel, belongs to the
infinite family of God and is eternal in its conscious essence,
perishing only in its temporary disguises; that every act of every
creature is followed by infallible reactions which constitute a perfect
law of retribution; and that these souls are intricately interlaced with
mutual relationships. The bewildering maze thus becomes a divine
harmony. No individual stands alone, but trails with him the unfinished
sequels of an ancestral career, and is so bound up with his race that
each is responsible for all and all for each. No one can be wholly saved
until all are redeemed. Every suffering we endure apparently for faults
not our own assumes a holy light and a sublime dignity. This thought
removes the littleness of petty selfish affairs and confirms in us the
vastest hopes for mankind.
III.
OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION.
Man has an Eternal Father who sent him to reside and gain experience
in the animal principles.—PARACELSUS.
God, who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand
Him, and be blessed; who never needs to be and never is, in haste; who
welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for
seed he has sown upon the old fallows of eternity.—GEORGE MACDONALD.
It may be doubted whether the strangeness and improbability of this
hypothesis (preëxistence ) among ourselves arises after all from
grounds on which our philosophy has reason to congratulate itself. It
may be questioned whether, if we examine ourselves candidly, we shall
not discover that the feeling of extravagance with which it affects us
has its secret source in materialistic or semi-materialistic
prejudices.—PROFESSOR WILLIAM ARCHER BUTLER’S _Lectures on Platonic
Philosophy_.
Might not the human memory be compared to a field of sepulture,
thickly stocked with the remains of many generations? But of these
thousands whose dust heaves the surface, a few only are saved from
immediate oblivion, upon tablets and urns; while the many are, at
present, utterly lost to knowledge. Nevertheless each of the dead has
left in that soul an imperishable germ; and all, without distinction,
shall another day start up, and claim their dues.—ISAAC TAYLOR.
The absence of memory of any actions done in a previous state cannot
be a conclusive argument against our having lived through it.
Forgetfulness of the past may be one of the conditions of an entrance
upon a new stage of existence. The body which is the organ of
sense-perception may be quite as much a hindrance as a help to
remembrance. In that case casual gleams of memory, giving us sudden
abrupt and momentary revelations of the past, are precisely the
phenomena we would expect to meet with. If the soul has preëxisted,
what we would _a priori_ anticipate are only some faint traces of
recollection surviving in the crypts of memory.—PROFESSOR WILLIAM
KNIGHT.
III.
OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION.
There are four leading objections to the idea of re-births:—
1. That we have no memory of past lives.
2. That it is unjust for us to receive now the results of forgotten
deeds enacted long ago.
3. That heredity confutes it.
4. That it is an uncongenial doctrine.
1. Why do we not remember something of our previous lives, if we have
really been through them?
The reason why there is no universal conviction from this ground seems
to be that birth is so violent as to scatter all the details and leave
only the net spiritual result. As Plotinus said, “Body is the true river
of Lethe; for souls plunged into it forget all.” The real soul life is
so distinct from the material plane that we have difficulty in retaining
many experiences of this life. Who recalls all his childhood? And has
any one a memory of that most wonderful epoch—infancy?
Nature sometimes shows us what may be the initial condition of a man’s
next life in depriving him of his life’s experience, and returning him
to a second childhood, with only the character acquired during life for
his inseparable fortune. The great and good prelate Frederick Christian
von Oetingen of Würtemberg (1702–1782) became in his old age a devout
and innocent child, after a long life of usefulness. Gradually speech
died away, until for three years he was dumb. Leaving his study, where
he had written many edifying books, and his library, whose volumes were
now sealed to him, he would go to the streets and join the children in
their plays, and spend all his time sharing their delights. The profound
scholar was stripped of his intellect and became a venerable boy,
lovable and kind as in all his busy life. He had bathed in the river of
Lethe before his time. Similar cases might be produced, where the
spirits of strong men have been divested of a lifetime’s memory in aged
infancy, seeming to be a foretaste of the next existence. They show that
the loss of a life’s details does not appear strange to nature, and that
the nepenthic waters of Styx, which the ancients represented as imbibed
by souls about to reënter earthly life to dispel recollection of former
experiences, are not wholly fabulous.
“Memory of the details of the past is absolutely impossible. The power
of the conservative faculty though relatively great is extremely
limited. We forget the larger portion of experience soon after we have
passed through it, and we should be able to recall the particulars of
our past years, filling all the missing links of consciousness since we
entered on the present life, before we were in a position to remember
our ante-natal experience. Birth must necessarily be preceded by
crossing the river of oblivion, while the capacity for fresh acquisition
survives, and the garnered wealth of old experience determines the
amount and character of the new.”[13]
But it has been shown that there are traces of former existences
lingering in some memories. These and other exceptional departures from
the general rule furnish substantial evidence that the obliteration of
previous lives from our consciousness is only apparent. Sleep,
somnambulism, trance, and similar conditions open up a world of
supersensuous reality to illustrate how erroneous are our common notions
of memory. Experimental evidence demonstrates that we actually forget
nothing, though for long lapses we are unable to recall what is stored
away in the chambers of our soul; and that the Orientals may be right in
affirming that as a man’s lives become purer he is able to look backward
upon previous stages, and at last will view the long vista of the æons
by which he has ascended to God. Many cases reveal that the reach and
clearness of memory are greatly increased during sleep and still more
greatly during somnambulent trance; so much so that the memory of some
sleepings and of most trances is sufficiently distinct from the memory
of the same individual in waking consciousness, to seem the faculty of a
different person. And, while the memory of sensuous consciousness does
not retain the facts of the trance condition, the memory of the trance
state retains and includes all the facts of the sensuous
consciousness—exemplifying the superior and unsuspected powers of our
unconscious selves. Instances are frequent illustrating how the higher
consciousness faithfully stores away experiences which are thought to be
long forgotten until some vivid touch brings them forth in accurate
order.[14] The higher recollection and the lower sometimes conduct us
through a double life. Dreams that vanish during the day are resumed at
night in an unbroken course. There is an interesting class of cases on
record in which the memory which links our successive dual states of
consciousness into a united whole is so completely wanting that in
observing only the difference between the two phases of the same person
we describe it as “alternating consciousness.” These go far toward an
empirical proof that one individual can become two distinct persons in
succession, making a practical demonstration of reincarnation. Baron Du
Prel’s “Philosophie der Mystik” cites a number of such authentic
instances, of which the following is one, given by Dr. Mitchell in
“Archiv für thierischen Magnetismus,” IV.
“Miss R—— enjoyed naturally perfect health, and reached womanhood
without any serious illness. She was talented, and gifted with a
remarkably good memory, and learned with great ease. Without any
previous warning she fell one day into a deep sleep which lasted many
hours, and on awakening she had forgotten every bit of her former
knowledge, and her memory had become a complete _tabula rasa_. She again
learned to spell, read, write, and reckon, and made rapid progress. Some
few months afterward she again fell into a similarly prolonged slumber,
from which she awoke to her former consciousness, _i. e._, in the same
state as before her first long sleep, but without the faintest
recollection of the existence or events of the intervening period. This
double existence now continued, so that in a single subject there
occurred a regular alternation of two perfectly distinct personalities,
each being unconscious of the other, and possessing only the memories
and knowledge acquired in previous corresponding states.”
More singular still are cases in which one individual becomes two
interchanging persons, of whom one is wholly unconnected with the known
history of that individual, like that narrated in Mr. Stevenson’s story
of “The Adventures of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde,” and Julian Hawthorne’s
story of “Archibald Malmaison.” The newspapers recently published an
account of a Boston clergyman, who strangely disappeared from his city,
leaving no trace of his destination. Just before going away he drew some
money from the bank, and for weeks his family and friends heard nothing
of him, though he had previously been most faithful. Soon after his
departure a stranger turned up in a Pennsylvania town and bought out a
certain store, which he conducted very industriously for some time. At
length a delirious illness seized him. One day he awoke from it and
asked his nurse, “Where am I?” “You are in ——,” she said. “How did I get
here? I belong in Boston.” “You have lived here for three months and own
Mr. ——’s store,” replied his attendant. “You are mistaken, madam; I am
the Rev. ——, pastor of the —— church in Boston.” Three months were an
absolute blank. He had no memory of anything since drawing the money at
his bank. Returning home, he there resumed the broken line of his
ministerial life and continued in that character without further
interruption.
Numerous similar cases are recorded in the annals of psychological
medicine, and justify us in assuming, according to the law of
correspondences, that some such alternation of consciousness occurs
after the great change known as death. The attempt to explain them as
mental aberrations is wholly unsuccessful. Reincarnation shows them to
be exceptions proving the rule—the recall of former activities supposed
to be forgotten. In these examples of double identity the facts of each
state disappear when the other set come forward and are resumed again in
their turn. Where did they reside meanwhile? They must have been
preserved in a subtler organ than the brain, which is only the medium of
translation from that unconscious memory to the world of
sense-perception. This must be in the supersensuous part of the soul.
This provides that, as a slow and painful training leads to unconscious
habits of skill, so the experience of life is stored up in the higher
memory, and becomes, when assimilated, the reflex acts of the following
life,—those operations which we call instinctive and hereditary.
2. The question is raised, is it just that a man should suffer for what
he is not conscious of having done?
As just as that he should _enjoy_ the results of what he does not
remember causing. It is said that justice requires that the offender be
conscious of the fault for which he is punished. But the ideas of
justice between man and man cannot be applied to the all-wise operations
of the Infinite. In human attempts at justice that method is imperative
because of our liability to mistake. God’s justice is vindicated by the
undisturbed sway of the law of causation. If _I_ suffer it must be for
what _I_ have done. The faith in Providence demands this, and it is
because of unbelief in reincarnation that the seeming negligence on the
part of Providence has obliterated the idea of a Personal God from many
minds. Nature is the arena of infallible cause and effect, and there is
no such absurdity in the universe as an effect without a responsible
cause. A man may suffer from a disease in ignorance of the conditions
under which its germs were sown in his body, but the right sequence of
cause and effect is not imperiled by his ignorance. To doubt that the
experiences we now enjoy and endure properly belong to us by our own
choice is to abandon the idea of God. How and why they have come is
explained only by reincarnation. The universal Over-Soul makes no
mistakes. By veiling our memories the Mother Heart of all, mercifully
saves us the horror and burden of knowing all the myriad steps by which
we have become what we are. We would be staggered by the sight of all
our waywardness, and what we have done well is possessed more richly in
the grand total than would be possible in the infinite details. We are
in the hands of a generous omniscient banker, who says: “I will save you
all the trouble of the accounts. Whenever you are ready to start a new
folio, I will strike the balance and turn over your net proceeds with
all accrued interests. The itemized records of your deposits and
spendings are beyond your calculation.”
3. It may be claimed that the facts of heredity bear against
reincarnation. As the physical, mental, and moral peculiarities of
children come from the parents, how can it be possible that a man is
what he makes himself—the offspring of his own previous lives?
Science is certain of the tendency of every organism to transmit its own
qualities to its descendants, and the intricate web of ancestral
influences is assumed to account for all the aberrations of individual
life. But the forces producing this result are beyond the ken of
science. The mechanical theory of germ cells multiplying their kind is
inadequate: for the germs become more complex and energetic with growth,
and exceed the limitations of molecular physics. The facts of heredity
demand the existence in nature of supersensuous forces escaping our
observation and cognizable only through their effects on the plane of
sensuous consciousness. These forces residing in the inaccessible
regions of the soul mould all individual aptitudes and faculties and
character. Reincarnation includes the facts of heredity, by showing that
the tendency of every organism to reproduce its own likeness groups
together similar causes producing similar effects, in the same lines of
physical relation. Instead of being content with the statement that
heredity causes the resemblances of child to parent, reincarnation
teaches that a similarity of ante-natal development has brought about
the similarity of embodied characteristics. The individual soul seeking
another birth finds the path of least resistance in the channels best
adapted to its qualities. The Ego selects its material body by a choice
more wise than any voluntary selection, by the inherent tendencies of
its nature, in fitness for its need, not only in the particular physique
best suited for its purpose, but in the larger physical casements of
family and nationality. The relation of child and parent is required by
the similarity of organisms. This view accounts also for the differences
invariably accompanying the resemblances. Identity of character is
impossible, and the conditions which made it easy for an individual to
be born in a certain family, because of the adaptation of circumstances
there to the expression of portions of his nature, would not prevent a
strong contrast between him and his relatives in some respects. The
facts observed in the life history of twins show that two individuals
born under precisely identical conditions, and having exactly the same
heredity, sometimes differ completely in physique, in intellect, and in
character. The birth of geniuses in humble and commonplace circumstances
furnishes abundant evidence that the individual soul outstrips all the
trammels of physical birth; and the unremarkable children of great
parents exhibit the inefficiency of merely hereditary influences. These
conspicuous violations of the laws of heredity confirm reincarnation.
4. At the first impression the idea of re-births is unwelcome, because—
a. It is interlaced with the theory of transmigration through animals;
b. It destroys the hope of recognizing friends in the coming existence;
c. It seems a cold, irreligious notion.
a. As will be fully shown in chapter xii., the conceit of a
transmigration of human souls through animal bodies, although it has
been and is cherished by most of the believers in reincarnation, is only
a gross metaphor of the germinal truth, and never was received by the
enlightened advocates of plural existences.
b. The most thoughtful adherents of a future life agree that there must
be there some subtler mode of recognition between friends than physical
appearances, for these outer signs cannot endure in the world of spirit.
The conviction that “whether there be prophecies they shall fail,
whether there be tongues they shall cease, whether there be knowledge it
shall vanish away,” but “love never faileth,” and only character shall
remain as the means of identification, is precisely the view entertained
by believers in reincarnation. The most intimate ties of this life
cannot be explained otherwise than as renewals of old intimacies, drawn
together by the spiritual gravitation of love, and enjoying often the
sense of a previous similar experience. (A further reference to this
point will be found later. See page 295.)
c. The strongest religious natures have been nourished from time
immemorial with the feeling that life is a pilgrimage through which we
tread our darkened way back to God. The Scriptures are full of it, and
the spiritual manhood of every age has found it a source of
invigoration. From Abraham, who reckoned his lifetime as “the days of
the years of his pilgrimage,” through all the phases of Christian
thought to the mightiest book of modern Christendom, “The Pilgrim’s
Progress,” this idea has been universally cherished. A typical
expression of it may be seen in the mediæval churchyard of St. Martin at
Canterbury, upon a stone over the remains of Dean Alford bearing these
words in Latin, which were inscribed by his own direction: “The inn of a
traveler journeying to Jerusalem.” Now this pilgrimage philosophy is
only a simpler phrasing of reincarnation. Our theory extends the journey
in just proportion to the supernal destination, providing many a station
by the way, wherein abiding a few days we may more profitably traverse
the upward road, gathering so much experience that there will be no
occasion to wander again. Instead of being a cold philosophic
hypothesis, reincarnation is a living unfoldment of that Christian germ,
enlarged to a fullness commensurate with the needs of men and the
character of God. It throbs with the warmth of deepest piety combined
with noblest intelligence, providing as no other supposition does, for
the grandest development of mankind.
IV.
WESTERN PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION.
I seem often clearly to remember in my soul a presentiment which I
have not seen with my present, but with some other eye.—J. E. VON
SCHUBERT.
I produced the golden key of preëxistence only at a dead lift, when no
other method could satisfy me touching the ways of God, that by this
hypothesis I might keep my heart from sinking.—HENRY MORE.
The essences of our souls can never cease to be because they never
began to be, and nothing can live eternally but that which hath lived
from eternity. The essences of our souls were a breath in God before
they became living souls; they lived in God before they lived in the
created souls, and therefore the soul is a partaker of the eternity of
God.—WILLIAM LAW.
If there be no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that
period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no
grounds for supposing that we shall continue to exist after our
existence has apparently ceased.—SHELLEY.
The ancient doctrine of transmigration seems the most rational and
most consistent with God’s wisdom and goodness; as by it all the
unequal dispensations of things so necessary in one life may be set
right in another, and all creatures serve the highest and lowest, the
most eligible and most burdensome offices of life by an equitable
rotation; by which means their rewards and punishments may not only be
proportioned to their behavior, but also carry on the business of the
universe, and thus at the same time answer the purposes both of
justice and utility.—SOAME JENYNS.
IV.
WESTERN PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION.
There is a larger endorsement of reincarnation among western thinkers
than the world knows. In many of them it springs up spontaneously, while
others embrace it as a luminous ray from the East which is confirmed by
all the candid tests of philosophy. When Christianity first swept over
Europe the inner thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this
truth. The Church tried ineffectually to eradicate it, and in various
sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the time of Erigena and
Bonaventura, its mediæval advocates. Every great intuitional soul, as
Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg, has adhered to it. The Italian
luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella, embraced it. The best of
German philosophy is enriched by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel,
Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte the younger, it is earnestly advocated. The
anthropological systems of Kant and Schelling furnish points of contact
with it. The younger Helmont, in “De Revolutione Animarum,” adduces in
two hundred problems all the arguments which may be urged in favor of
the return of souls into human bodies, according to Jewish ideas. Of
English thinkers the Cambridge Platonists defended it with much learning
and acuteness, most conspicuously Henry More; and in Cudworth and Hume
it ranks as the most rational theory of immortality. Glanvil’s “Lux
Orientalis” devotes a curious treatise to it. It captivated the minds of
Fourier and Leroux. André Pezzani’s book on “The Plurality of the Soul’s
Lives” works out the system on the Roman Catholic idea of expiation.
Modern astronomy has furnished material for the elaborate speculations
of a reincarnation extending through many worlds, as published in
Fontenelle’s volume “The Plurality of Worlds,” Huygens’s “Cosmotheoros,”
Brewster’s “More Worlds than One; the Philosopher’s Faith and the
Christian’s Hope,” Jean Reynaud’s “Earth and Heaven,” Flammarion’s
“Stories of Infinity” and “The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds,” and
Figuier’s “The To-morrow of Death.” With various degrees of fancy and
probability these writers trace the soul’s progress among the heavenly
bodies. The astronomer Bode wrote that we start from the coldest planet
of our solar system and advance from planet to planet, nearer the sun,
where the most perfect beings, he thinks, will live. Emmanuel Kant, in
his “General History of Nature,” says that souls start imperfect from
the sun, and travel by planet stages, farther and farther away to a
paradise in the coldest and remotest star of our system. Between these
opposites many _savans_ have formulated other theories. In theology
reincarnation has retained a firm influence from the days of Origen and
Porphyry, through the scholastics, to the present day. In Soame Jenyns’s
works, which long thrived as the best published argument for
Christianity, it is noticeable. Chevalier Ramsay and William Law have
also written in its defense. Julius Müller warmly upholds it in his
profound work on “The Christian Doctrine of Sin,” as well as Dr. Dorner.
Another means of its dissemination through a good portion of the
ministry is Dr. Edward Beecher’s espousal of it, in the form of
preëxistence, in “The Conflict of Ages” and “The Concord of Ages.”
English and Irish bishops[15] have not hesitated to promulgate it. Henry
Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks have dared to preach it. James Freeman
Clarke speaks strongly in its favor. Professor William Knight, the
Scotch metaphysician of St. Andrews, and Professor Francis Bowen of
Harvard University, clearly show the logical probabilities in which
reincarnation compares favorably with any other philosophy.[16]
The following extracts from the most interesting of these and other
Western authors who refer to the matter may represent the unsuspected
prevalence of this thought in our own midst.
1. Schopenhauer’s powerful philosophy includes reincarnation as one of
its main principles, as these extracts show, from his chapter on “Death”
in “The World as Will and Idea”:—[17]
“What sleep is for the individual, death is for the will [character]. It
would not endure to continue the same actions and sufferings throughout
an eternity, without true gain, if memory and individuality remained to
it. It flings them off, and this is lethe; and through this sleep of
death it reappears refreshed and fitted out with another intellect, as a
new being—‘a new day tempts to new shores.’”
“These constant new births, then, constitute the succession of the
life-dreams of a will which in itself is indestructible, until,
instructed and improved by so much and such various successive knowledge
in a constantly new form, it abolishes or abrogates itself”—[becomes in
perfect harmony with the Infinite].
“It must not be neglected that even empirical grounds support a
palingenesis of this kind. As a matter of fact, there does exist a
connection between the birth of the newly appearing beings and the death
of those that are worn out. It shows itself in the great fruitfulness of
the human race which appears as a consequence of devastating diseases.
When in the fourteenth century the Black Death had for the most part
depopulated the old world, a quite abnormal fruitfulness appeared among
the human race, and twin-births were very frequent. The circumstance was
also remarkable that none of the children born at this time obtained
their full number of teeth; thus nature, exerting itself to the utmost,
was niggardly in details. This is related by F. Schnurrer, ‘Chronik der
Seuchen,’ 1825. Casper also, ‘Ueber die Wahrscheinliche Lebensdauer des
Menschen,’ 1835, confirms the principle that the number of births in a
given population has the most decided influence upon the length of life
and mortality in it, as this always keeps pace with the mortality: so
that always and everywhere the deaths and the births increase and
decrease in like proportion; which he places beyond doubt by an
accumulation of evidence collected from many lands and their various
provinces. And yet it is impossible that there can be a _physical_
causal connection between my early death and the fruitfulness of a
marriage with which I have nothing to do, or conversely. Thus here the
metaphysical appears undeniable and in a stupendous manner as the
immediate ground of explanation of the physical. Every new-born being
comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free
gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. Its fresh
existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn-out existence
which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of
which the new existence has arisen: they are _one_ being. To show the
bridge between the two would certainly be the solution of a great
riddle.
“The great truth which is expressed here has never been entirely
unacknowledged, although it could not be reduced to the exact and
correct meaning, which is only possible through the doctrine of the
primary and metaphysical nature of the will, and the secondary, merely
organic nature of the intellect. We find the doctrine of metempsychosis,
springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always
spread abroad in the earth as the belief of the great majority of
mankind; nay, really as the teaching of all religions, with the
exception of that of the Jews and the two which have proceeded from it:
in the most subtle form however, and coming nearest to the truth in
Buddhism. Accordingly, while Christians console themselves with the
thought of meeting again in another world, in which one regains one’s
complete personality and knows one’s self at once, in those other
religions the meeting again is going on now, only incognito. In the
succession of births, and by virtue of metempsychosis or palingenesis,
the persons who now stand in close connection or contact with us will
also be born again with us at the next birth, and will have the same or
analogous relations and sentiments towards us as now, whether these are
of a friendly or a hostile description. Recognition is certainly here
limited to an obscure intimation,—a reminiscence, which cannot be
brought to distinct consciousness, and refers to an infinitely distant
time; with the exception, however, of Buddha himself, who has the
prerogative of distinctly knowing his own earlier births and those of
others,—as this is described in the ‘Jâtaka.’ But in fact, if at a
favorable moment one contemplates, in a purely objective manner, the
action of men in reality, the intuitive conviction is forced upon one
that it not only is and remains constantly the same, according to the
[Platonic] Idea, but also that the present generation, in its true inner
nature, is precisely and substantially identical with every generation
that has been before it. The question simply is, in what this true being
consists. The answer which my doctrine gives to this question is well
known. The intuitive conviction referred to may be conceived as arising
from the fact that the multiplying-glasses, time and space, lose for a
moment their effect. With reference to the universality of the belief in
metempsychosis, Obry says rightly in his excellent book ‘Du Nirvana
Indien,’ p. 13, ‘Cette vielle croyance a fait le tour du monde, et
tellement répandue dans la haute antiquité qu’un docte Anglican l’avait
jugée sans père, sans mère, et sans généalogie.’ Taught already in the
‘Vedas’ as in all the sacred books of India, metempsychosis is well
known to be the kernel of Brahmanism and Buddhism. It accordingly
prevails at the present day in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, thus
among more than half the whole human race, as the firmest conviction,
and with an incredibly strong practical influence. It was also the
belief of the Egyptians, from whom it was received with enthusiasm by
Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato. The Pythagoreans, however, specially
retained it. That it was also taught in the mysteries of the Greeks
undeniably follows from the ninth book of Plato’s Laws. The ‘Edda’ also,
especially in the ‘Voluspa,’ teaches metempsychosis. Not less was it the
foundation of the religion of the Druids. Even a Mohammedan sect in
Hindustan, the Bohrahs, of which Colebrooke gives a full account in the
‘Asiatic Researches,’ believes in metempsychosis, and accordingly
refrains from all animal food. Also among American Indians and negro
tribes, nay, even among the natives of Australia, traces of this belief
are found.... According to all this the belief in metempsychosis
presents itself as the natural conviction of man whenever he reflects at
all in an unprejudiced manner. It would really seem to be that which
Kant falsely asserts of his three pretended ideas of the reason, a
philosopheme natural to human reason, which proceeds from its forms; and
when it is not found it must have been displaced by positive religious
doctrines coming from a different source. I have also remarked that it
is at once obvious to every one who hears of it for the first time. Let
any one only observe how earnestly Lessing defends it in the last seven
paragraphs of his ‘Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.’[18] Lichtenberg
also says in his ‘Selbstcharacteristik’: ‘I cannot get rid of the
thought that I died before I was born.’ Even the excessively empirical
Hume says in his skeptical essay on immortality, ‘The metempsychosis is
therefore the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to.’
What resists this belief is Judaism, together with the two religions
which have sprung from it, because they teach the creation of man out of
nothing, and they have the hard task of linking on to this belief an
endless existence _a parte post_. They certainly have succeeded, with
fire and sword, in driving out of Europe and part of Asia that consoling
primitive belief of mankind; it is still doubtful for how long. Yet how
difficult this was is shown by the oldest church histories. Most of the
heretics were attached to this belief; for example, Simonists,
Basilidians, Valentinians, Marcionists, Gnostics, and Manicheans. The
Jews themselves have in part fallen into it, as Tertullian and Justinus
inform us. In the Talmud it is related that Abel’s soul passed into the
body of Seth, and then into that of Moses. Even the passage of the
Bible, Matt. xvi, 13–15, only obtains a rational meaning if we
understand it as spoken under the assumption of the dogma of
metempsychosis.... In Christianity, however, the doctrine of original
sin, _i. e._, the doctrine of punishment for the sins of another
individual, has taken the place of the transmigration of souls, and the
expiation in this way of all the sins committed in an earlier life. Both
identify the existing man with one who has existed before: the
transmigration of souls does so directly, original sin indirectly.”
2. In the remarkable little treatise on “The Divine Education of the
Human Race,” by Lessing, the German philosopher, a book so sublimely
simple in its profound insight that it has had enormous influence and
was translated into English as a labor of love by the Rev. Frederick W.
Robertson, the author outlines the gradual instruction of mankind and
shows how the enlightenment is still progressing through many important
lessons. His thought mounts to a climax in suggesting the stupendous
programme by which God is developing the individual just as he has been
educating the race:—
“The very same way by which the race reaches its perfection must every
individual man—one sooner, another later—have traveled over. Have
traveled over in one and the same life? Can he have been in one and the
selfsame life a sensual Jew and a spiritual Christian? Can he in the
selfsame life have overtaken both?
“Surely not that: but why should not every individual man have existed
more than once upon this world?
“Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest?
Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools
had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
“Why may not even I have already performed those steps of my perfecting
which bring to men only temporal punishments and rewards? And once more,
why not another time all those steps to perform which, the views of
eternal rewards so powerfully assist us?
“Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh
knowledge, fresh expertness? Do I bring away so much from once that
there is nothing to repay the trouble of coming back?
“Is this a reason against it? Or, because I forget that I have been here
already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection of my
former condition would permit me to make only a bad use of the present.
And that which even I must forget _now_, is that necessarily forgotten
forever?
“Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so much time would have
been lost to me? Lost? And how much then should I miss? Is not a whole
eternity mine?”
3. “The Destiny of Man,” by J. G. Fichte, whose great thoughts still
heave the heart of Germany and grandly mould the world, contains these
paragraphs:
“These two systems, the purely spiritual and the sensuous,—which last
may consist of an immeasurable series of particular lives,—exist in me
from the moment when my active reason is developed, and pursue their
parallel course. The former alone gives to the latter meaning and
purpose and value. I _am_ immortal, imperishable, eternal, so soon as I
form the resolution to obey the law of reason. After an existence of
myriad lives the supersensuous world cannot be more present than at this
moment. Other conditions of my sensuous existence are to come, but these
are no more the true life than the present condition is.
“Man is not a product of the world of sense; and the end of his
existence can never be attained in that world. His destination lies
beyond time and space and all that pertains to sense.
“Mine eye discerns this eternal life and motion in all the veins of
sensible and spiritual nature, through what seems to others a dead mass.
And it sees this life forever ascend and grow and transfigure itself
into a more spiritual expression of its own nature. The sun rises and
sets, the stars vanish and return again, and all the spheres hold their
cycle dance. But they never return precisely such as they disappeared;
and in the shining fountains of life there is also life and progress.
“All death in nature is birth; and precisely in dying, the sublimation
of life appears most conspicuous. There is no death-bringing principle
in nature, for nature is only life, throughout. Not death kills, but the
more living life, which is hidden behind the old, begins and unfolds
itself. Death and birth are only the struggles of life with itself to
manifest itself in ever more transfigured form, more like itself.
“Even because Nature puts me to death she must quicken me anew. It can
only be my higher life, unfolding itself in her, before which my present
life disappears; and that which mortals call death is the visible
appearing of another vivification.”
4. Among the wealth of German geniuses, there is none more lofty and
broad than Herder, whom Jean Paul admiringly pronounced, “a Poem made by
some purest Deity,—combining the boldest freedom of philosophy
concerning nature and God with a most pious faith.” One of the most
suggestive of this master’s works is a series of “Dialogues on
Metempsychosis,” in which two friends discuss the theme together. As the
outcome of their colloquy is a stanch vindication of that hypothesis, it
is not unfair to group together a few of the paragraphs on one side of
the conversation:—
“Do you not know great and rare men who cannot have become what they are
at once, in a single human existence? who must have often existed before
in order to have attained that purity of feeling, that instinctive
impulse for all that is true, beautiful, and good, in short, that
elevation and natural supremacy over all around them?
“Do not these great characters appear, for the most part, all at once?
Like a cloud of celestial spirits, descended from on high; like men
risen from the dead born again, who brought back the old time?
“Have you never had remembrances of a former state, which you could find
no place for in this life? In that beautiful period when the soul is yet
a half-closed bud, have you not seen persons, been in places, of which
you were ready to swear that you had seen those persons, or had been in
those places before? And yet it could not have been in this life? The
most blessed moments, the grandest thoughts, are from that source. In
our more ordinary seasons, we look back with astonishment on ourselves,
we do not comprehend ourselves. And such are _we_; we who, from a
hundred causes, have sunk so deep and are so wedded to matter, that but
few reminiscences of so pure a character remain to us. The nobler class
of men who, separated from wine and meat, lived in perfect simplicity
according to the order of nature, carried it further, no doubt, than
others, as we learn from the example of Pythagoras, of Iarchas, of
Apollonius, and others, who remembered distinctly what and how many
times they had been in the world before. If we are blind, or can see but
two steps beyond our noses, ought we therefore to deny that others may
see a hundred or a thousand degrees farther, even to the bottom of time,
into the deep, cool well of the foreworld, and there discern everything
plain and bright and clear?”
To this last strain the listener responds: “I will freely confess to you
that those sweet dreams of memory are known to me also, among the
experiences of my childhood and youth. I have been in places and
circumstances of which I could have sworn that I had been in them
before. I have seen persons with whom I seemed to have lived before;
with whom I was, as it were, on the footing of an old acquaintance.” He
then attempts to explain them as returned dreams, which his interlocutor
answers with more wonderful impressions necessarily requiring a former
life.
“Have you never observed that children will sometimes, on a sudden, give
utterance to ideas which make us wonder how they got possession of them;
which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret
self-communings; which break forth like a full stream out of the earth,
an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a
few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground,
and, it may be, had broken through many a rock, and contracted many
defilements?
“You know the law of economy which rules throughout nature. Is it not
probable that the Deity is guided by it in the propagation and progress
of human souls? He who has not become ripe in one form of humanity is
put into the experience again, and, some time or other, must be
perfected.
“I am not ashamed of my half-brothers the brutes; on the contrary, as
far as they are concerned, I am a great advocate of metempsychosis. I
believe, for a certainty, that they will ascend to a higher grade of
being, and am unable to understand how any one can object to this
hypothesis, which seems to have the analogy of the whole creation in its
favor.
“All the life of nature, all the tribes and species of animated
creation,—what are they but sparks of the Godhead, a harvest of
incarnate stars, among which the two human sexes stand forth like sun
and moon? We overshine, we dim the other figures, but, doubtless, we
lead them onward in a chorus invisible to ourselves. Oh, that an eye
were given us to trace the shining course of this divine spark; to see
how life flows to life, and ever refining, impelled through all the
veins of creation, wells up into a purer, higher life.
“And yet Pythagoras, too, spoke of a Tartarus and an Elysium. When you
stand before the statue of a high-hearted Apollo, do you not feel what
you lack of being that form? Can you ever attain to it here below,
though you should return ten times? And yet that was only the idea of an
artist—a dream which our narrow breast also inclosed. Has the almighty
Father no nobler forms for us than those in which our heart now heaves
and groans? The soul lies captive in its dungeon, bound as with a
seven-fold chain, and only through a strong grating, and only through a
pair of light and air-holes, can it breathe and see, and always it sees
the world on one side only, while there are a million other sides before
us and in us, had we but more and other senses, and could we but
exchange this narrow hut of our body for a freer prospect. That restless
discontent shall some time finally release us from our repeated sojourns
on earth, through which the Father is training us for a complete divorce
from sense life. When even at the sweetest fountains of friendship and
love, we so often pine, thirsty and sick, seeking union and finding it
not, what noble soul does not lift itself up and despise tabernacles and
wanderings in the circle of earthly deserts.
“Purification of the heart, the ennobling of the soul, with all its
propensities and cravings, this, it seems to me, is the true
palingenesis of this life, after which, I doubt not, a happy, more
exalted, but yet unknown metempsychosis awaits us.”
5. Dr. Henry More, the learned and lovable Platonist of the seventeenth
century, wrote a charming treatise on the “Immortality of the Soul,” in
which (chapter xii.) he argues for preëxistence as follows:—
“If it be good for the souls of men to be at all, the sooner they are,
the better. But we are most certain that the wisdom and goodness of God
will do that which is the best; and therefore if they can enjoy
themselves before they come to these terrestrial bodies, they must be
before they come into these bodies. For nothing hinders but that they
may live before they come into the body, as well as they may after going
out of it. Wherefore the preëxistence of souls is a necessary result of
the wisdom and goodness of God.
“Again, the face of Providence in the work seems very much to suit with
this opinion, there being not any so natural and easy account to be
given of those things that seem the most harsh in the affairs of men, as
from this hypothesis: that these souls did once subsist in some other
state; where, in several manners and degrees, they forfeited the favor
of their Creator, and so, according to that just Nemesis that He has
interwoven in the constitution of the universe and of their own natures,
they undergo several calamities and asperities of fortune and sad
drudgeries of fate, as a punishment inflicted, or a disease contracted
from the several obliquities of their _apostasy_. Which key is not only
able to unlock that recondite mystery of some particular men’s almost
fatal averseness from all religion and virtue, their stupidity and
dullness and even invincible slowness to these things from their very
childhood, and their incorrigible propension to all manner of vice; but
also of that squalid forlornness and brutish barbarity that whole
nations for many ages have lain under, and many do still lie under at
this very day: which sad scene of things must needs exceedingly cloud
and obscure the ways of Divine Providence, and make them utterly
unintelligible; unless some light be let in from the present hypothesis.
“And as this hypothesis is rational in itself, so has it also gained the
suffrage of all philosophers of all ages, of any note, that have held
the soul of man incorporeal and immortal. I shall add, for the better
countenance of the business, some few instances herein, as a pledge of
the truth of my general conclusion. Let us cast our eye, therefore, into
what corner of the world we will, that has been famous for wisdom and
literature, and the wisest of those nations you shall find the asserters
of this opinion.
“In Egypt, that ancient nurse of all hidden sciences, that this opinion
was in vogue amongst the wisest men there, the fragments of Trismegist
do sufficiently witness: of which opinion, not only the Gymnosophists,
and other wise men of Egypt, were, but also the Brachmans of India, and
the Magi of Babylon and Persia. To these you may add the abstruse
philosophy of the Jews, which they call their Cabbala, of which the
soul’s preëxistence makes a considerable part, as all the learned of the
Jews do confess.
“And if I should particularize in persons of this opinion, truly they
are such of so great fame for depth of understanding, and abstrusest
science, that their testimony alone might seem sufficient to bear down
any ordinary modest man into an assent to their doctrine. And, in the
first place, if we believe the Cabbala of the Jews, we must assign it to
Moses, the greatest philosopher certainly that ever was in the world; to
whom you may add Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Cebes, Euripides,
Plato, Euclid, Philo, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus,
Proclus, Boethius, Pfellus, and several others, which it would be too
long to recite. And if it were fit to add fathers to philosophers, we
might enter into the same list Synesius and Origen; the latter of whom
was surely the greatest light and bulwark that ancient Christianity had.
But I have not yet ended my catalogue; that admirable physician Johannes
Fernelius is also of this persuasion, and is not to be so himself only,
but discovers those two grand-masters of medicine, Hippocrates and
Galen, to be so, too. Cardan, also, that famous philosopher of his age,
expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from
the soul of the world, and that it does preexist before it comes into
the body; and lastly, Pomponatius, no friend to the soul’s immortality,
yet cannot but confess that the safest way to hold it is also therewith
to acknowledge her preëxistence.
“And we shall evince that Aristotle, that has the luck to be believed
more than most authors, was of the same opinion, in his treatise ‘De
Anima,’ where he says, ‘for every art must use its proper instruments,
and every soul its body.’ He speaks something more plainly in his ‘De
Generatione Animæ.’ ‘There are generated,’ saith he, ‘in the earth, and
in the moisture thereof, plants and living creatures, and in the whole
universe an animal heat; insomuch that in a manner all places are full
of souls.’ We will add a third place still more clear, out of the same
treatise, where he starts that very question of the preëxistency of
souls, of the sensitive and rational especially, and he concludes thus:
‘It remains that the rational or intellectual soul only enters from
without, as being only of a nature purely divine; with whose actions the
actions of this gross body have no communication.’ Concerning which
point he concludes like an orthodox scholar of his excellent master
Plato; to whose footsteps the closer he keeps, the less he ever wanders
from the truth. For in this very place he does plainly profess what many
would not have him so apertly guilty of, that the soul of man is
immortal, and can perform her proper functions without the help of this
terrestrial body.”
6. Sir Thomas Browne explains and defends his own heresies, by
suggesting the added heresy of reincarnation:—
“For, indeed, heresies perish not with their authors: but like the river
Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up
again in another. One general council is not able to extirpate one
single heresy: it may be canceled for the present: but revolution of
time and the like aspects from heaven will restore it, when it will
flourish till it be condemned again. For, as though there were a
metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do
find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first
begat them. To see ourselves again, we need not look for Plato’s year;
every man is not only himself: there have been many Diogeneses, and as
many Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over again; the
world is now as it was in ages past; there was none then, but there hath
been some one since, that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived
self.”[19]
7. One of the rare volumes of the early eighteenth century is Chevalier
Ramsay’s remarkable work entitled “The Philosophical Principles of
Natural and Revealed Religion,” in which he elaborates the idea that
“the sacred mysteries of our holy faith are not new fictions unheard of
by the philosophers of all nations,” but that “on the contrary
Christianity is as old as the creation.” In this “History of the human
mind in all ages, nations, and religions, concerning the most divine
truths,” he shows that reincarnation is the common possession of
Christianity and of all the other great systems of sacred thought:—
“The holy oracles always represent Paradise as our native country, and
our present life as an exile. How can we be said to have been banished
from a place in which we never were? This argument alone would suffice
to convince us of preëxistence, if the prejudice of infancy inspired by
the schoolmen had not accustomed us to look upon these expressions as
metaphorical, and to believe, contrary to Scripture and to reason, that
we were exiled from a happy state, only for the fault of our first
parents. Atrocious maxim that sullies all the conduct of Providence, and
that shocks the understandings of the most intelligent children of all
nations. The answers ordinarily made to them throw into their tender
minds the seeds of a lasting incredulity.
“In Scripture, the wise man says, speaking of the eternal Logos, and his
preëxistent humanity: ‘The Lord possessed me from the beginning of his
ways, before his works of old; I was set up from everlasting, from the
beginning or ever the earth was!’ All this can be said only of the
eternal Logos. But what follows may be applied to the preëxistent
humanity of the Messiah: ‘When he prepared the heavens I was there, when
he encircled the force of the deep, when he established the clouds
above, when he appointed the foundations of the earth, then I was by
him, as one brought up with him, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing
always before him, rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth, and my
delights were with the sons of men.’ It is visible that Solomon speaks
here of a time soon after the creation of the world, of a time when the
earth was inhabited only by a pure, innocent race. Can this be said
after the fall, when the earth was cursed? It is only a profound
ignorance of the ancient, primitive tradition of preëxistence that can
make men mistake the true sense of this sublime text.
“Our Saviour seems to approve the doctrine of pre-existence in his
answer to his disciples when they interrogate him thus about the man
born blind: ‘Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was
born blind?’[20] It is clear that this question would have been
ridiculous and impertinent, if the disciples had not believed that the
man born blind had sinned before his corporeal birth, and, consequently,
that he had preëxisted in another state. Our Saviour’s answer is
remarkable: ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the
works of God should be made manifest in him!’ Jesus Christ could not
mean that neither this man nor his parents had ever sinned, for this can
be said of no mortal; but the meaning is, that it was neither for the
sins committed by this man in a state of preëxistence, nor for those of
his parents, that he was born blind, but in order to manifest one day
the power of God. Our Lord, therefore, far from blaming and redressing
this error in his disciples, answers in a way that seems to confirm them
in the doctrine of preëxistence. If he had looked upon this opinion as a
capital error, would it have been compatible with his wisdom to pass it
over so slightly, and taciturnly authorize it? On the contrary, does not
his silence indicate that he looked upon this doctrine, which was a
received maxim of the Jewish church, as the true explication of original
sin?
“St. Paul says, in speaking of the origin of mortal and physical evil,
‘By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and death
passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.’[21] If all have sinned,
then all have voluntarily coöperated with Adam in the breach of the
eternal law: for where there is no deliberate act of will, there can be
no sin. The Apostle does not say that Adam’s sin was imputed to all. The
doctrine of imputation, by which God attributes Adam’s sin to his
innocent posterity, cannot be the meaning of St. Paul, for, besides that
this doctrine is incompatible with the divine perfection, the Apostle
adds: ‘For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by
the obedience of one shall all be made righteous.’[22] Now it is certain
that men can only be made righteous by their personal, deliberate, and
voluntary coöperation with the spirit of grace, or the second Adam. The
Apostle assures us in the same passage that ‘all did not sin after the
similitude of Adam’s transgression.’ This sin was really committed in a
preëxistent state by the individuals of the present human race. The
meaning is that one pair gave the bad example, and all the human race
co-existent with them in Paradise soon imitated this crime of
disobedience against the eternal law, by the false love of natural
knowledge and sensible pleasure. St. Paul seems to confirm this when he
says: ‘For the children being not yet born, having neither done good nor
evil, it was said unto Rebecca, ‘Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I
hated.’ God’s love and hatred depend upon the moral dispositions of the
creature. Since God says that he loved Jacob and hated Esau ere they
were born, and before they had done good or evil in this mortal life, it
follows clearly that they must have preëxisted in another state. This
would have appeared to be the natural sense of the text, if prejudices
imbibed from our infancy, more or less, had not blinded the mind of
Christian doctors to the same degree as Judaical prejudices darkened
those of the ancient Pharisees.
“If it be said that these texts are obscure; that preëxistence is only
drawn from them by induction, and that this opinion is not revealed in
Scripture by express words, I answer, that the doctrines of the
immortality of the soul are nowhere revealed expressly in the sacred
oracles of the Old or New Testament, but because all their morals and
doctrines are founded upon these great truths. We may say the same of
preëxistence. The doctrine is nowhere expressly revealed, but it is
evidently supposed, as without it original sin becomes not only
inexplicable, but absurd, repugnant, and impossible.
“There is nothing in the fathers nor councils that contradicts this
doctrine; yea, while the fifth general council and all the fathers after
the sixth century condemn a false idea of preëxistence in which the
ancient tradition was adulterated by the Origenists and Priscillianists,
the true doctrine of preëxistence was not condemned by the church. This
supposes that all the individuals of the human species composed of soul
and body were created in Paradise, that they all coöperated in Adam’s
disobedience, partook of his crime, and so were justly punished. This
was the constant tradition of the Jewish church, and confirmed by the
Scriptures. This opinion of preëxistence was also very ancient in the
Christian church, ere the Origenists spoiled it with the Pythagorean and
Platonic fictions.
“It is against the impious degradation of transmigration [through animal
bodies] that the fathers declaim, and not the true Scripture doctrine of
degraded [human] intelligences. This the schoolmen confound with the
false disguises—mixtures of the pagans. This great principle is the true
key by which we can understand the meaning of several passages of
Scripture, and the sense of many sublime articles of faith. Thus only
can we shelter Christianity from the railleries of the incredulous.”
8. Among Soame Jenyns’s “Disquisitions on Several Subjects” is a
“Disquisition on a Præexistent State,” from which we quote the
following:—
“That mankind had existed in some state previous to the present was the
opinion of the wisest sages of the most remote antiquity. It was held by
the Gymnosophists of Egypt, the Brachmans of India, the Magi of Persia,
and the greatest philosophers of Greece and Rome; it was likewise
adopted by the fathers of the Christian Church, and frequently enforced
by her primitive writers. Why it has been so little noticed, so much
overlooked rather than rejected, by the divines and metaphysicians of
later ages, I am at a loss to account for, as it is undoubtedly
confirmed by reason, by all the appearances of nature, and the doctrines
of revelation.
“In the first place, then, it is confirmed by reason, which teaches us
that it is impossible that the conjunction of a male and female can
create, or bring into being, an immortal soul: they may prepare a
material habitation for it, but there must be an immaterial preëxistent
inhabitant ready to take possession. Reason assures us that an immortal
soul, which will eternally exist after the dissolution of the body, must
have eternally existed before the formation of it; for whatever has no
end can never have had any beginning, but must exist in some manner
which bears no relation to time, to us totally incomprehensible; if,
therefore, the soul will continue to exist in a future life, it must
have existed in a former. Reason likewise tells us that an omnipotent
and benevolent Creator would never have formed such a world as this, and
filled it with inhabitants, if the present was the only, or even the
first, state of their existence, a state which, if unconnected with the
past and the future, seems calculated for no one purpose intelligible to
our understandings; neither of good or evil, of happiness or misery, of
virtue or vice, of reward or punishment, but a confused jumble of them
all together, proceeding from no visible cause and tending to no end.
But, as we are certain that infinite power cannot be employed without
effect, nor infinite wisdom without design, we may rationally conclude
that this world could be designed as nothing more than a prison, in
which we are awhile confined to receive punishment for the offenses
committed in a former, and an opportunity of preparing ourselves for the
enjoyment of happiness in a future, life.
“Secondly, these conclusions of reason are sufficiently confirmed by the
force of nature and the appearance of things. This world is evidently
formed for a place of punishment as well as probation,—a prison, or
house of correction, to which we are committed, some for a longer, and
some for a shorter time; some to the severest labor, others to more
indulgent tasks; and if we consider it under this character, we shall
perceive it admirably fitted for the end for which it was intended. It
is a spacious, beautiful, and durable structure; it contains many
various apartments, a few very comfortable, many tolerable, and some
extremely wretched; it is inclosed with a fence so impassable that none
can surmount it but with the loss of life. Its inhabitants likewise
exactly resemble those of other prisons: they come in with malignant
dispositions and unruly passions, from whence, like other confined
criminals, they receive great part of their punishment by abusing and
injuring each other. As we may suppose that they have not all been
equally guilty, so they are not all equally miserable; the majority are
permitted to procure a tolerable subsistence by their labor, and pass
through their confinement without any extraordinary penalties, except
from paying their fees at their discharge by death. Others, who perhaps
stand in need of more severe chastisement, receive it by a variety of
methods, some by the most tedious pains and diseases; some by
disappointments, and many by success in their favorite pursuits; some by
being condemned to situations peculiarly unfortunate, as to those of
extreme poverty or superabundant riches, of despicable manners or
painful preëminence, of galley-slaves in a despotic, or ministers in a
free, country.
“Lastly, the opinion of preëxistence is no less confirmed by revelation
than by reason and the appearance of things; for although, perhaps, it
is nowhere in the New Testament explicitly enforced, yet throughout the
whole tenor of those writings it is everywhere implied. In them mankind
are constantly represented as coming into the world under a load of
guilt,—as condemned criminals, the children of wrath, and objects of
divine indignation, placed in it for a time by the mercies of God, to
give them an opportunity of expiating their guilt by sufferings, and
regaining by a pious and virtuous conduct their lost estate of happiness
and innocence; this is styled working out their salvation, not
preventing their condemnation, for that is already past, and their only
hope now is redemption, that is, being rescued from a state of captivity
and sin, in which they are universally involved. This is the very
essence of the Christian dispensation, and the grand principle in which
it differs from the religion of nature; in every other respect they are
nearly similar. They both enjoin the same moral duties and prohibit the
same vices; but Christianity acquaints us that we are admitted into this
life oppressed by guilt and depravity, which we must atone for by
suffering its usual calamities, and work off by acts of positive virtue,
before we can hope for happiness in another. Now, if by all this a
preëxistent state is not constantly supposed, in which this guilt was
incurred and this depravity contracted, there can be no meaning at all,
or such a meaning as contradicts every principle of common sense,—that
guilt can be contracted without acting, or that we can act without
existing. So undeniable is this inference that it renders any positive
assertion of a preëxistent state totally useless; as, if a man at the
moment of his entrance into a new country was declared a criminal, it
would surely be unnecessary to assert that he had lived in some other
before he came there.
“In all our researches into abstruse subjects there is a certain clue,
without which, the further we proceed the more we are bewildered; but
which, being fortunately discovered, leads us at once through the whole
labyrinth, puts an end to our difficulties, and opens a system perfectly
clear, consistent, and intelligible. The doctrine of preëxistence, or
the acknowledgment of some past state of disobedience, I take to be this
very clue; which, if we constantly carry along with us, we shall proceed
unembarrassed through all the intricate mysteries both of nature and
revelation, and at last arrive at so clear a prospect of the wise and
just dispensations of our Creator, as cannot fail to afford complete
satisfaction to the most inquisitive skeptic.
“Thus is a preëxistent state, I think, clearly demonstrated by the
principles of reason, the appearance of things, and the sense of
revelation; all which agree that this world is intended for a place of
punishment, as well as probation, and must therefore refer to some
former period. For as probation implies a future life, for which it is
preparatory, so punishment must imply a former state, in which offenses
were committed for which it is due; and indeed there is not a single
argument drawn from the justice of God, and the seemingly undeserved
sufferings of many in the present state, which can be urged in proof of
a future life, which proves not with superior force the existence of
another which is already past.”
9. One of the chapters in Joseph Glanvil’s “Lux Orientalis,” a treatise
attempting to demonstrate the truth of Platonic preëxistence, and
strengthened by the elaborate annotations of Dr. Henry More, is an
extension of the following—
“Seven Pillars on which the Hypothesis of Preëxistence stands.
“1. All the divine designs and actions are carried on by pure and
infinite goodness.
“2. There is an exact geometrical justice that runs through the
universe, and is interwoven in the contexture of things.
“3. Things are carried to their proper place and state by the congruity
of their natures; where this fails we may suppose some arbitrary
management.
“4. The souls of men are capable of living in other bodies besides
terrestrial; and never act but in some body or other.
“5. The soul in every state hath such a body as is fittest to those
faculties and operations that it is most inclined to exercise.
“6. The powers and faculties of the soul are either spiritual or
intellectual, or sensitive or plastic.
“7. By the same degrees that the higher powers are invigorated, the
lower are abated, as to their proper exercise.”
10. In Dowden’s “Life of Shelley” (vol. i. p. 80), the following
anecdote of the poet is quoted from his friend Hogg: “One morning we had
been reading Plato together so diligently that the usual hour of
exercise passed away unperceived. We sallied forth hastily to take the
air for half an hour before dinner. In the middle of Magdalen Bridge we
met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive at that
instant to our conduct in a life that was past or to come than to a
decorous regulation of his behavior according to the established usages
of society. With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The
mother, who well might fear that it was about to be thrown over the
parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its
long train. ‘Will your baby tell us anything about preëxistence, madam?’
he asked in a piercing voice and with a wistful look. The mother made no
answer, but perceiving that Shelley’s object was not murderous, but
altogether harmless, she dismissed her apprehension and relaxed her
hold. ‘Will your baby tell us anything about preëxistence, madam?’ he
repeated, with unabated earnestness. ‘He cannot speak, sir,’ said the
mother seriously. ‘Worse, worse,’ cried Shelley with an air of
disappointment, shaking his long hair most pathetically about his young
face. ‘But surely the babe can speak if he will, for he is only a few
weeks old. He may fancy that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim. He
cannot have forgotten the use of speech in so short a time. The thing is
absolutely impossible.’ ‘It is not for me to dispute with you,
gentlemen,’ the woman meekly replied, ‘but I can safely declare I never
heard him speak, nor any child of his age.’ It was a fine placid boy. So
far from being disturbed by the interruption, he looked up and smiled.
Shelley pressed his fat cheeks with his fingers. We commended his
healthy appearance and his equanimity, and the mother was allowed to
proceed, probably to her satisfaction, for she would doubtless prefer a
less speculative nurse. Shelley sighed as we walked on. ‘How provokingly
close are these new-born babes!’ he ejaculated; ‘but it is not the less
certain, notwithstanding the cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that
all knowledge is reminiscence. The doctrine is far more ancient than the
times of Plato, and as old as the venerable allegory that the muses are
the daughters of memory; not one of the muses was ever said to be the
child of invention.’”
11. Hume’s skeptical essay on “The Immortality of the Soul” argues
thus:—
“Reasoning from the common course of nature, and without supposing any
new interposition of the supreme cause, which ought always to be
excluded from philosophy, what is incorruptible must also be
ungenerable. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed before our birth,
and if the former existence noways concerns us, neither will the
latter....
“The metempsychosis is, therefore, the only system of this kind that
philosophy can hearken to.”
12. Southey says in his published “Letters”: “I have a strong and lively
faith in a state of continued consciousness from this stage of
existence, and that we shall recover the consciousness of some lower
stages through which we may previously have passed seems to me not
impossible....
“The system of progressive existence seems, of all others, the most
benevolent; and all that we do understand is so wise and so good, and
all we do or do not, so perfectly and overwhelmingly wonderful, that the
most benevolent system is the most probable.”
13. From a letter written by that curious genius William Blake (the
artist) to his friend John Flaxman (the sculptor):[23]—
“In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of
old which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life;
and these works are the delight and study of archangels.
“You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel, my friend and companion
from eternity. I look back into the regions of reminiscence and behold
our ancient days before this earth appeared and its vegetative mortality
to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity which can
never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the
remotest corners of heaven from each other.”
14. In the “Fortnightly Review” for September, 1878, Professor William
Knight writes: “It seems surprising that in the discussions of
contemporary philosophy on the origin and destiny of the soul there has
been no explicit revival of the doctrines of Pre-existence and
Metempsychosis. Whatever may be their intrinsic worth or evidential
value, their title to rank on the roll of philosophical hypotheses is
undoubted. They offer quite as remarkable a solution of the mystery
which all admit as the rival theories of Creation, Traduction, and
Extinction.”
“If we reject the doctrine of Preëxistence, we must either believe in
non-existence or fall back in one or other of the two opposing theories
of Creation and Traduction; and as we reject Extinction, we may find
Preëxistence has fewer difficulties to face than the rival hypotheses.
Creation is the theory that every moment of time multitudes of souls are
simultaneously born,—not sent down from a celestial source, but freshly
made out of nothing and placed in bodies prepared for them by natural
growth. To the Platonist the theory of Traduction seemed even worse, as
it implied the derivation of the soul from at least two sources,—from
both parents,—and a substance thus derived was apparently composite and
quasi-material.
“Stripped of all extravagance and expressed in the modest terms of
probability, the theory has immense speculative interest and great
ethical value. It is much to have the puzzle of the origin of evil
thrown back for an indefinite number of cycles of lives; to have a
workable explanation of _Nemesis_, and of what we are accustomed to call
the moral tragedies and the untoward birth of a multitude of men and
women. It is much also to have the doctrine of immortality lightened of
its difficulties; to have our immediate outlook relieved by the doctrine
that in the soul’s eternity its preëxistence and its future existence
are one. The retrospect may assuredly help the prospect.”
“Whether we make use of it or not, we ought to realize its alternatives.
They are these. Either all life is extinguished and resolved through an
absorption and reassumption of the vital principle everywhere, or a
perpetual miracle goes on in the incessant and rapid increase in the
amount of spiritual existence within the universe; and while human life
survives, the intelligence and the affection of the lower animals perish
everlastingly.”
15. Professor W. A. Butler’s celebrated lectures upon “The History of
Ancient Philosophy” lean strongly toward an endorsement of Plato’s
philosophy of reincarnation:—
“It must be allowed that there is much in the hypothesis of preëxistence
(at least) which might attract a speculator busied with the endeavor to
reduce the moral system of the world under intelligible laws. The
solution which it at once furnishes of the state and fortunes of each
individual, as arising in some unknown but direct process from his own
voluntary acts, though it throws, of course, no light on the ultimate
question of the existence of moral evil (which it only removes a single
step), does yet contribute to satisfy the mind as to the equity of that
immediate manifestation of it, and of its physical attendants, which we
unhappily witness. There is internally no greater improbability that the
present may be the result of a former state now almost wholly forgotten,
than that the present should be followed by a future form of existence
in which, perhaps, or in some departments of which, the oblivion may be
as complete. And if to that future state there are already discernible
faint longings and impulses which to many men have seemed to involve a
direct proof of its reality, hopes that will not be bounded by the
grave, and desires that grasp eternity, others have found within them,
it would seem, faint intimations scarcely less impressive of the past,
as if the soul vibrated the echoes of a harmony not of this world.
Wordsworth has told us that such convictions seem to be a part, though a
neglected part, of the heritage of our race.”
16. The novelist Bulwer thus expresses his opinion of this truth:
“Eternity may be but an endless series of those migrations which men
call deaths, abandonments of home after home, even to fairer scenes and
loftier heights. Age after age the spirit may shift its tent, fated not
to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it
evermore its two elements, activity and desire.”[24]
17. Pezzani, the author of “The Plurality of the Soul’s Lives,”[25]
writes: “The earthly sojourn is only a new probation, as was said by
Dupont de Nemours, that great writer who, in the eighteenth century,
outstripped all modern thought. Now, if this be so, is it not plain that
the recollection of former lives would seriously hinder probations, by
removing most of their difficulties, and consequently of their deserts,
as well as of their spontaneity? We live in a world where free will is
all-powerful, the inviolable law of advancement and progress among men.
If past lives were remembered, the soul would know the significance and
import of the trials which are reserved for it here below: indolent and
careless, it would harden itself against the purposes of Providence, and
become paralyzed by the hopelessness of mastering them, or even, if of a
better quality and more manly, it would accept and work them out without
fail. Well, neither of these suppositions is necessary; the struggle
must be free, voluntary, safe from the influences of the past; the field
of combat must seem new, so that the athlete may exhibit and practice
his virtues upon it. The experience he has already acquired, the forces
he has learned how to conquer, serve him in the new strife; but in such
a manner that he does not suspect it, for the imperfect soul undergoes
reincarnations in order to develop the qualities that it has already
manifested, to free itself from the vices and faults which are in
opposition to the ascensional law. What would happen if all men
remembered their former lives? The order of the earth would be
overthrown; at least, it is not now established on such conditions.
Lethe, as well as free will, is a law of the actual world.”
18. One of Emerson’s earliest essays (“The Method of Nature”) contains
this paragraph: “We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but
we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities
which house to-day in this mortal frame shall ever reassemble in equal
activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural
history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I
know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick
with my sickness nor buried in my grave; but that they circulate through
the universe: before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar them out,
or shut them in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space and time,
form and essence, and hold the key to universal nature.”
Again, in one of his latest works (on “Immortality”) he says: “The fable
of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, because they want more time
and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher poetic use
must be made of the legend. Take us as we are, with our experience, and
transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants what
we can of the wisdom of this. After we have found our depth there, and
assimilated what we can of the new experience, transfer us to a new
scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by seeing them at a
distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which we were too much
immersed.”[26]
19. James Freeman Clarke writes (in “Ten Great Religions,” ii. 190):
“That man has come up to his present state of development by passing
through lower forms is the popular doctrine of science to-day. What is
called evolution teaches that we have reached our present state by a
very long and gradual ascent from the lowest animal organizations. It is
true that the Darwinian theory takes no notice of the evolution of the
soul, but only of the body. But it appears to me that a combination of
the two views would remove many difficulties which still attach to the
theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. If we are
to believe in evolution, let us have the assistance of the soul itself
in this development of new species. Thus science and philosophy will
coöperate, nor will poetry hesitate to lend her aid.”
20. The noblest work of modern times, and probably of all time, upon
immortality, is a large volume by the Rev. William R. Alger, entitled “A
Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life.” It was published in
1860, and still remains the standard authority upon that topic
throughout Christendom. This little book is substantially indebted to
it. The author is a Unitarian minister, who devoted half his lifetime to
the work, undermining his health thereby. In the first edition (1860)
the writer characterizes reincarnation as a plausible delusion, unworthy
of credence. For fifteen years more he continued studying the subject,
and the last edition (1878) gives the final result of his ripest
investigations in heartily endorsing and advocating reincarnation. No
more striking argument for the doctrine could be advanced than this
fact. That a Christian clergyman, making the problem of the soul’s
destiny his life’s study, should become so overpowered by the force of
this pagan idea as to adopt it for the climax of his scholarship is
extremely significant. And the result is reached by such a sincere
course of reasoning that the seminaries in all denominations are
compelled to accept his book as the masterpiece. From one of the
supplemental chapters we quote the following by his permission:—
“Besides the various distinctive arguments of its own, every reason for
the resurrection holds with at least equal force for transmigration. The
argument from analogy is especially strong. It is natural to argue from
the universal spectacle of incarnated life that this is the eternal
scheme everywhere, the variety of souls finding in the variety of worlds
an everlasting series of adventures in appropriate organisms; there
being, as Paul said, one kind of flesh of birds, another of beasts,
another of men, another of angels, and so on. Our present lack of
recollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality. Every
night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day we reawaken to a
memory of the whole series of days and nights. So in one life we may
forget or dream, and in another recover the whole thread of experience
from the beginning.
“In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtful and
refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had so extensive
and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote of the majority,
having for ages on ages been held by half the human race with an
intensity of conviction almost without a parallel. Indeed, the most
striking fact about the doctrine of the repeated incarnations of the
soul, its form and experience in each successive embodiment being
determined by its merits and demerits in the preceding ones, is the
constant reappearance of that faith in all parts of the world, and its
permanent hold on certain great nations.
“Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that it seems to
be a native and ineradicable growth of the oriental world; but appears
in the western world only in scattered instances, and rather as an
exotic form of thought. In the growing freedom and liberality of
thought, which, no less than its doubt and denial, now characterize
Christendom, it seems as if the full time had come for a greater mental
and æsthetic hospitality on the part of Christians towards Hindus. The
advocates of the resurrection should not confine their attention to the
repellant or the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to
its claim and its charm.”
After reviewing and strengthening the evidences in favor of plural
births, Mr. Alger continues: “The above translation of the
ecclesiastical doctrine of the resurrection into a form scientifically
credible, and reconciled with the immemorial tenet of transmigration,
may seem to some a fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy.
Perhaps it is so. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic
animus. It is advanced solely as an illustration of what may possibly be
true, as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of history
and the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are so
wonderful, the method of it so rational, the region of contemplation
into which it lifts the mind is so grand, the prospects it opens are of
such universal reach and import, that the study of it brings us into
full sympathy with the sublime scope of the idea of immortality, and of
a cosmopolitan vindication of Providence uncovered to every eye. It
takes us out of the littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and
makes it easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever
known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny to
seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty of the
powers of the mind which can conceive such things. After traversing the
grounds here set forth, we feel that if the view based on them be not
the truth, it must be because God has in reserve for us a sequel greater
and lovelier, not meaner, than our brightest dream hitherto.”
21. In the “Princeton Review” for May, 1881, Professor Francis Bowen (of
Harvard University) publishes a very interesting article on “Christian
Metempsychosis,” in which he urges the Christian acceptance of
reincarnation. By his consent we quote a large portion of it, because it
is so able an appeal for the adoption of this truth, from both a
metaphysical and a Christian standpoint:—
“Our life upon earth is rightly held to be a discipline and a
preparation for a higher and eternal life hereafter. But if limited to
the duration of a single mortal body, it is so brief as to seem hardly
sufficient for so grand a purpose. Threescore years and ten must surely
be an inadequate preparation for eternity. But what assurance have we
that the probation of the soul is confined within so narrow limits? Why
may it not be continued, or repeated, through a long series of
successive generations, the same personality animating one after another
an indefinite number of tenements of flesh, and carrying forward into
each the training it has received, the character it has formed, the
temper and dispositions it has indulged, in the stage of existence
immediately preceding? It need not remember its past history, even while
bearing the fruits and the consequences of that history deeply ingrained
into its present nature. How many long passages of any one life are now
completely lost to memory, though they may have contributed largely to
build up the heart and the intellect which distinguish one man from
another! Our responsibility surely is not lessened by such
forgetfulness. We are still accountable for the misuse of time, though
we have forgotten how or on what we wasted it. We are even now reaping
the bitter fruits, through enfeebled health and vitiated desires and
capacities, of many forgotten acts of self-indulgence, willfulness, and
sin—forgotten just because they were so numerous. Then a future life
even in another frail body upon this earth may well be a state of just
and fearful retribution.
“Why should it be thought incredible that the same soul should inhabit
in succession an indefinite number of mortal bodies, and thus prolong
its experience and its probation till it has become in every sense ripe
for heaven or the final judgment? Even during this one life our bodies
are perpetually changing, though by a process of decay and restoration
which is so gradual that it escapes our notice. Every human being thus
dwells successively in many bodies, even daring one short life. This
physiological fact seems to have been known by Plato, as in a well-known
passage of the Phædo, a clear statement of it is put into the mouth of
Cebes, who argues, however, that this fact affords no sufficient proof
of the immortality of the soul. ‘You may say with reason,’ Cebes is made
to argue, ‘that the soul is lasting, and the body weak and short-lived
in comparison. And every soul may be said to wear out many bodies,
especially in the course of a long life. For if, while the man is alive,
the body deliquesces and decays, and yet the soul always weaves her
garment anew and repairs the waste, then of course, when the soul
perishes, she must have on her last garment, and this only will survive
her; but then, again, when the soul is dead, the body will at last show
its native weakness and soon pass into decay.’ And again: ‘Suppose we
admit also that, after death, the souls of some are existing still, and
will exist, and will be born and die again and again, and that there is
a natural strength in the soul which will hold out and be born many
times,—for all this, we may still be inclined to think that she will be
weary in the labors of successive births, and may at last succumb in one
of her deaths and utterly perish.’[27]
“If every birth were an act of absolute creation, the introduction to
life of an entirely new creature, we might reasonably ask why different
souls are so variously constituted at the outset. We do not all start
fair in the race that is set before us, and therefore all cannot be
expected, at the close of one brief mortal pilgrimage, to reach the same
goal, and to be equally well fitted for the blessings or the penalties
of a fixed state hereafter. The commonest observation assures us that
one child is born with limited capacities and perhaps a wayward
disposition, strong passions, and a sullen temper; that he has
tendencies to evil which are almost sure to be soon developed. Another,
on the contrary, seems happily endowed from the start; he is not only
amiable, tractable, and kind, but quick-witted and precocious, a child
of many hopes. The one seems a perverse goblin, while the other has the
early promise of a Cowley or a Pascal. The differences of external
condition also are so vast and obvious that they seem to detract much
from the merit of a well-spent life and from the guilt of vice and
crime. One is so happily nurtured in a Christian home, and under so many
protecting influences, that the path of virtue lies straight and open
before him,—so plain, indeed, that even the blind could safely walk
therein; while another seems born to a heritage of misery, exposure, and
crime. The birthplace of one is in Central Africa, and of another in the
heart of civilized and Christian Europe. Where lingers eternal justice
then? How can such frightful inequalities be made to appear consistent
with the infinite wisdom and goodness of God?
“If metempsychosis is included in the scheme of the divine government of
the world, this difficulty disappears altogether. Considered from this
point of view, every one is born into the state which he has fairly
earned by his own previous history. He carries with him from one stage
of existence to another the habits or tendencies which he has formed,
the dispositions which he has indulged, the passions which he has not
chastised, but has voluntarily allowed to lead him into vice and crime.
No active interference of retributive justice is needed, except in
selecting for the place of his new birth a home with appropriate
surroundings—perhaps such a home as through his evil passions he has
made for others. The doctrine of inherited sin and its consequences is a
hard lesson to be learned. We submit with enforced resignation to the
stern decree, corroborated as it is by every day’s observation of the
ordinary course of this world’s affairs, that the iniquity of the
fathers shall be visited upon the children even to the third and fourth
generation. But no one can complain of the dispositions and endowments
which he has inherited, so to speak, from himself; that is, from his
former self in a previous stage of existence. If, for instance, he has
neglected his opportunities and fostered his lower appetites in his
childhood, if he was then wayward and self-indulgent, indolent,
deceitful, and vicious, it is right and just that, in his manhood and
old age, he should experience the bitter consequences of his youthful
follies. If he has voluntarily made himself a brute, a brute he must
remain. The child is father of the man, who often inherits from him a
sad patrimony. There is an awful meaning, if we will but take it to
heart, in the solemn announcement of the angel in the apocalyptic
vision: ‘He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is
filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be
righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still!’ And it
matters not, so far as the justice of the sentence is concerned, whether
the former self, from whom we receive this heritage, was the child who,
not many years ago, bore the same name with our present self, or one who
bore a different name, who was born in another age and perhaps another
hemisphere, and of whose sad history we have not now the faintest
remembrance. We know that our personal identity actually extends farther
back, and links together more passages of our life, than what is now
present to consciousness; though it is true that we have no direct
evidence of this continuity and sameness of being beyond what is
attested by memory. But we may have indirect evidence of it from the
testimony of others in the case of our own infancy, or from revelation,
or through reasoning from analogy and from the similarity of cases and
characters. The soul, said the Hindoos, is in the body like a bird in a
cage, or like a pilot who steers a ship, and seeks a new vessel when the
old one is worn out.
“Nothing prevents us, however, from believing that the probation of any
one soul extends continuously through a long series of successive
existences upon earth, each successive act in the whole life history
being retributive for what went before. For this is the universal law of
being, whether of matter or mind; everything changes, nothing dies in
the sense of being annihilated. What we call death is only the
resolution of a complex body into its constituent parts, nothing that is
truly one and indivisible being lost or destroyed in the process. In
combustion or any other rapid chemical change, according to the
admission of the materialists themselves, not an atom of matter is ever
generated or ever ceases to be; it only escapes from one combination to
enter upon another. Then the human soul, which, as we know from
consciousness, is absolutely one and indivisible, only passes on after
the dissolution of what was once its home to animate another body. In
this sense we can easily accept the doctrine of the resurrection of the
body. Our future life is not, at any rate not while the present
administration of this world’s affairs continues, to be some
inconceivable form of merely spiritual being. It will be clothed again
with a body, which may or may not be in part the same with the one which
it has just left. Leibnitz held that the soul is never entirely divorced
from matter, but carries on some portion of what was its earthly
covering into a subsequent stage of existence.... We can easily imagine
and believe that every person now living is a _re_presentation of some
one who lived perhaps centuries ago under another name, in another
country, it may be not with the same line of ancestry, and yet one and
the same with him in his inmost being and essential character. His
surroundings are changed; the old house of flesh has been torn down and
rebuilt; but the tenant is still the same. He has come down from some
former generation, bringing with him what may be either a help or a
hindrance; namely, the character and tendencies which he there formed
and nurtured. And herein is retribution; he has entered upon a new stage
of probation, and in it he has now to learn what the character which he
there formed naturally leads to when tried upon a new and perhaps
broader theatre. If this be not so, tell me why men are born with
characters so unlike and with tendencies so depraved. In a sense far
more literal than was intended by the poet, it may be true of every
country churchyard, that
‘Some mute inglorious Milton there may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’
They bring with them no recollection of the incidents of their former
life, as such memory would unfit them for the new part which they have
to play. But they are still the same in the principles and modes of
conduct, in the inmost springs of action, which the forgotten incidents
of their former life have developed and strengthened. They are the same
in all the essential points which made them formerly a blessing or a
curse to all with whom they came immediately in contact, and through
which they will again become sources of weal or woe to their
environment. Of course, these inborn tendencies may be either
exaggerated or chastised by the lessons of a new experience, by the
exercise of reflection, and by habitually heeding or neglecting the
monitions of conscience. But they still exist as original tendencies,
and as such they must make either the upward or the downward path more
easy, more natural, and more likely to reach a goal so remote that it
would otherwise be unattainable.
“To make this more clear, let me refer to the pregnant distinction so
admirably illustrated by Kant between what he calls the Intelligible
Character and the Empirical or acquired Character. The former is the
primitive foundation on which the latter, which directly determines our
conduct for the time being, is built. To a great extent, though not
entirely, we are what we are through the influence of what have been our
surroundings—through our education, our companions, our habits, and our
associations. But these influences must have had a primitive basis to
work upon, and can only modify the operation of the native germs, not
change their nature; and they will modify these more or less profoundly
according as they are more or less amenable to outside influences and
manifest more or less decidedly a bias in one direction or another. What
the future plant will be depends much more on the specific nature of the
seed which is sown than on the fertility or barrenness of the soil into
which it is cast. The latter only determine whether it shall be a
vigorous plant or a weak one, whether in fact it shall grow at all or
only rot in the ground; but they do not determine the specific direction
of its development, whether it shall be an oak, a willow, or an
ivy-bush. The Empirical or acquired Character, as it is open to
observation, is a phenomenon; it is what the man _appears_ to be, or
what he has become under the shaping influence of the circumstances to
which he has been exposed. But the Intelligible Character, the inmost
kernel of his real being, is a noumenon, and escapes external
observation; we can judge of its nature only indirectly from its
effects; that is to say, from the conduct which it has coöperated to
produce. A change taking place in any substance must be the joint result
of two factors; namely, its proper cause operating upon it from without,
and the thing’s own nature or internal constitution. Thus the same
degree of heat acts very differently upon different substances, say, on
wax, iron, water, clay, or powder. In like manner, a given motive, say,
the desire of wealth, when acting on different persons, though with the
same strength or intensity, may lead to very dissimilar results; it
makes one man a thief and another a miser, renders one envious and
another energetic and industrious. If frequently indulged, it forms a
fixed habit, and thus becomes an element in the acquired or empirical
character.
“Now Kant, with the bias of a necessitarian, places our freedom and our
responsibility in the realm of noumena, attributing them exclusively to
our Intelligible Character. As to the acquired character when once
formed, he says we _must_ act in accordance with it, and therefore we
are not accountable for the particular act to which it led, since that
we could not help. After I have once formed a habit of lying or
stealing, should an opportunity and temptation recur, I _must_ repeat
the offense. But our inborn character, which expresses what we really
are, as a noumenon, lies outside of time, space, and causality, and
therefore cannot be led astray by temptation or external circumstances,
but is entirely free. Herein solely consists our merit or our guilt.
Hence Kant would make us responsible not for the particular crime, which
we could not help committing, but for being such a person as to be
capable of that crime. We are accountable not for what we do, but for
what we are. We are to be punished not for stealing this horse, but for
being a rogue, or thief in grain, for being naturally inclined to
stealing....
“I know not how it may seem to others, but to me there is something
inexpressibly consolatory and inspiring in the thought that the great
and good of other days have not finally accomplished their earthly
career, have not left us desolate, but that they are still with us, in
the flesh, though we know them not, and though in one sense they do not
really know themselves, because they have no remembrance of a former
life in which they were trained for the work which they are now doing.
But they are essentially the same beings, for they have the same
intellect and character as before, and sameness in these two respects is
all that constitutes our notion of personal identity. We are unwilling
to believe that their beneficent activity was limited to one short life
on earth, at the close of which there opened to them an eternity without
change, without farther trial or action, and seemingly having no other
purpose than unlimited enjoyment. Such a conception of immortality is
exposed to Schopenhauer’s sarcasm, that if effort and progress are
possible only in the present life, and no want or suffering can be
endured except as the penalties of sin, there remains for heaven only
the weariness of nothing to do. An eternity either of reward or
punishment would seem to be inadequately earned by one brief period of
probation. It is far more reasonable to believe that the future life
which we are taught to expect will be similar to the present one, and
will be spent in this world, though we shall carry forward to it the
burden or the blessing entailed upon us by our past career. Besides the
spiritual meaning of the doctrine of regeneration, besides the new birth
which is ‘of water and of the Spirit,’ there may be a literal meaning in
the solemn words of the Saviour, ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot
see the kingdom of God.’...
“I should be sorry to believe that that remarkable group of excellent
scholars, thinkers, and divines, the Port-Royalists, who upheld the
cause of Jansenism for three quarters of a century, have finally passed
away from earth. On the contrary, if anywhere in these later times the
model of a Christian scholar and historian could be found, we might well
say that the spirit of Tillemont lives again in him. If we could find
one who united in himself all the best qualities of a Christian teacher,
stainless in heart and life, we might well believe that it was Lancelot
in another earthly form. For either Pascal or Arnauld, it must be
admitted that we should not know where to look; if their spirits are yet
in this world, they must be in the obscurity of some lowly station.[28]
“All this speculation, I repeat, is completely fanciful, and can serve
no other purpose than to show, even if the doctrine of metempsychosis
were true, that we should not be able to identify one person in any two
of his successive appearances upon earth. We surely could not know of
him in this respect any more than he knows of himself; and, as already
said, the total break in memory at the beginning of every successive
life must prevent the newly born from recognizing the oneness of his own
being with any former existence in an earthly shape.
“Curiously enough this want of self-knowledge is confessed in the only
case in which we have a direct assertion in Scripture (if language is to
be interpreted in its ordinary literal meaning and not strained into a
figurative sense), that one of the heroes of the olden time had
reappeared upon earth under a new name, as the forerunner of a new
dispensation. At the time of the Saviour there appears to have been a
general expectation among the Jews that the coming of the Messiah was to
be heralded by the reappearance upon earth of the prophet Elijah, this
expectation being founded upon the text in Malachi: ‘Behold, I will send
you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day
of the Lord.’ Early in the public ministry of John the Baptist, we read
that the belief prevailed among his hearers that this prophecy was
fulfilled in him. But when directly asked, ‘Art thou Elias?’ he replied,
‘I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No.’ He had no memory
of his former life under that name; and though he must have been aware
of the popular belief upon the subject, and of the many points of
similarity between his own career and that of the great restorer of the
worship of the true God at an earlier period, he was too honest to claim
an authority which he did not positively know to belong to him.
“Yet we learn that our Lord subsequently twice declared, in very
distinct language, that Elijah and John the Baptist were really one and
the same person. Once, while John was still alive but in prison, Jesus
told the multitude who thronged around him, ‘Among them that are born of
women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist;’ and he
directly goes on to assert, ‘If ye will receive it, _this is Elias_,
which was for to come.’ (Matt. xi. 14.) And again, after John was
beheaded, Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Elias is come already and they
knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed.’ ‘Then the
disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist.’
(Matt. xvii. 12, 13.) Still again, in the scene on the mount of
Transfiguration. ‘Behold there talked with him two men, which were Moses
and Elias;’ and it is said of the three disciples who were then in
company with Jesus that, ‘When they were awake, they saw his glory and
the two men that stood with him.’ (Luke ix. 30, 32.) That the
commentators have not been willing to receive, in their obvious and
literal meaning, assertions so direct and so frequently repeated as
these, but have attempted to explain them away in a non-natural and
metaphorical sense, is a fact which proves nothing but the existence of
an invincible prejudice against the doctrine of the transmigration of
souls....
“Assuming the doctrine to be well founded, it is for every person to
determine with what character he will leave the world at the close of
one stage of his earthly being, believing that with this same character
thus trained for weal or woe he is inevitably at once to begin a new
life, and thus either to rise or fall farther than ever. It seems to me
that the dogma of a future life, so prolonged through a countless
succession of other lives on earth until it becomes an immortality, is
thus brought home to one with a force, a vividness and certainty, of
which in no other form it is susceptible. It has been said that no
prudent man, if the election were offered to him, would choose to live
his present live over again; and as he whom the world calls _prudent_
does not usually cherish any lofty aspirations, the saying is probably
true. We are all so conscious of the many errors and sins that we have
committed that the retrospect is a saddening one; and worldly wisdom
would probably whisper, ‘It is best to stop here, and not try such a
career over again.’ But every one would ardently desire a renewal of his
earthly experience if assured that he could enter upon it under better
auspices, if he believed that what we call death is not the end of all
things even here below, but that the soul is then standing upon the
threshold of a new stage of earthly existence, which is to be brighter
or darker than the one it is just quitting, according as there is
carried forward into it a higher or lower purpose....
“This doctrine also suggests, as it seems to me, a clearer and more
satisfactory explanation than would otherwise be possible of the fall of
man through disobedience and its consequences, as narrated in Genesis
and interpreted by St. Paul. Certainly the primeval man, the Adam of
each one of us, when he first through the inspiration of Deity ‘became a
living soul,’ was born into a paradise, an Eden, of entire purity and
innocence, and in that state he talked directly with God. There was also
given to him through his conscience the revelation of a divine law, an
absolute command, to preserve this blessed state through restraining his
appetites and lower impulses to action, and making the love of holiness
superior even to the love of knowledge. But man was tempted by his
appetites to transgress this law; he aspired after a knowledge of good
and evil, which can be attained only through experience of evil, and he
thereby fell from innocence into a state of sin, which necessarily
corrupted his whole future being. The habit of disobedience once formed,
sin in the same person has a self-continuing and self-multiplying power.
The stain carried down from a former life becomes darker and more
inveterate in the life that follows. We have no reason to complain of
the corruption of human nature, for the world is what we have made it to
be by our own act. The burden has not been transmitted to us by others,
but has been inherited from ourselves; that is, from our former selves.
Redemption from it by man’s own effort thus became impossible. This is
death, moral death, the only death of which a human soul is capable.
“Thus far we have considered metempsychosis as a means of retribution;
that is, of awarding to each soul in the next future life upon which it
is entering that compensation either of weal or woe which it has earned
for itself,—has in fact necessarily entailed upon itself by its conduct
in the life which it has just completed. But the transmigration of souls
may be regarded also in another light, as that portion of the divine
government of this world’s affairs which maintains distributive justice,
since, through its agency, in the long run, all inequalities of
condition and favoring or unfavoring circumstances may be compensated,
and each person may have his or her equitable share of opportunities for
good and of the requisite means for discipline and improvement. If our
view be confined within the limits of a single earthly life, it must be
confessed that the inequality is glaring enough, so that it seems to
justify the honest doubts of the trembling inquirer, while it has
offered a broad mark for the scoffs and declamation of the confirmed
unbeliever.
“This hypothesis—and I do not claim for it any other character than that
of a highly probable and consolatory hypothesis—also throws a new and
welcome light upon the deep and dark problem of the origin of evil. In
the first place, according to the views which have now been taken, the
sufferings which are the immediate consequence and punishment of sin are
properly left out of the account, since these evince the goodness of God
no less than the happiness resulting from virtue, the purpose in both
cases being to advance man’s highest interests by the improvement of his
moral character; just as the affectionate parent rewards the obedience
and punishes the faults of his child, love equally constraining him to
adopt either course. And how many of the evils borne both by individuals
and by communities are attributable directly to their own misconduct, to
their willful disregard of the monitions of conscience! The body which
is now languid from inaction through sloth, and enfeebled or racked by
disease, might have been active, vigorous, and sound, prompt to second
every wish of its owner, and ministering to his enjoyment through every
sense and limb. And could we know all, could we extend our vision over
the whole history of our former self, how would our estimate of this
purely retributive character of our present suffering be enlarged and
confirmed! It would then be evident that no portion of it is gratuitous
or purposeless. And the community which is now torn with civil
dissension, desolated by war, or prostrated in an unequal strife with
its rivals, might have been peaceful, affluent, and flourishing, if
rulers and ruled had heeded the stern calls of duty, instead of blindly
following their own tumultuous passions. And as nations, too, have a
continuous life, like that of a river, through a constant change of
their constituent parts, many of their woes are clearly attributable to
the misdeeds of their former selves. Once admit the great truth that
virtue, not happiness, is man’s highest interest, and most of the pains
of this life indicate the goodness and justice of God quite as much as
its pleasures.
“But according to the theory which we are now considering, a still
larger deduction must be made from the amount of apparent evil at any
one time visible in the world. All the inequalities in the lot of
mankind, which have prompted what are perhaps the bitterest of all
complaints, and have served skeptics like Hume and J. S. Mill as a
reason for the darkest imputations upon divine justice in the government
of the world, disappear from the picture altogether. Excepting only what
we have just considered, the retributive consequences of more or less
sin, there are no inequalities. All start from the same point, and
journey through the same vicissitudes of existence, exhausting sooner or
later all varieties of condition. Prince and peasant, bond and free,
barbarian and cultured, all share alike whatever weal or woe there is in
the world, because all must at some future time change places with each
other. But after these two large deductions from the amount complained
of, what remains? Very little, certainly, which we cannot even now see
through; that is, which we cannot assign an adequate reason for; and to
the eye of faith nothing remains. The world becomes a mirror which
reflects without blot or shadow the infinite goodness of its Creator and
Governor. Death remains; but that is no evil, for what we call death is
only the introduction to another life on earth, and if this be not a
higher and better life than the one just ended, it is our own fault. Our
life is really continuous, and the fact that the subsequent stages of it
lie beyond our present range of immediate vision is of no more
importance, and no more an evil, than the corresponding fact that we do
not now remember our previous existence in antecedent ages. Death alone,
or in itself considered, apart from the antecedent dread of it which is
irrational, and apart from the injury to the feelings of the survivors,
which is a necessary consequence of that attachment to each other from
which, so much of our happiness springs, is not even an apparent evil;
it is mere change and development, like the passage from the embryonic
to the adult condition, from the blossom to the fruit.”
22. In “Ways of the Spirit, and other Essays,” by Professor Frederick
Henry Hedge, the twelfth chapter, upon “The Human Soul,” strongly
advocates reincarnation. By the publishers’ consent we reprint the pages
referring to it:—
“We reach back with our recollection and find no beginning of existence.
Who of us knows anything except by report of the first two years of
earthly life? No one remembers the time when he first said ‘I,’ or
thought ‘I.’ We began to exist for others before we began to exist for
ourselves. Our experience is not co-extensive with our being, and memory
does not comprehend it. We bear not the root, but the root us.
“What is the root? We call it soul. _Our_ soul, we call it; properly
speaking, it is not ours, but we are its. It is not a part of us, but we
are a part of it. It is not one article in an inventory of articles
which together make up our individuality, but the root of that
individuality. It is larger than we are, and other than we are—that is,
than our conscious self. The conscious self does not begin until some
time after the birth of the individual. It is not aboriginal, but a
product,—as it were, the blossoming of an individuality. We may suppose
countless souls which never bear this product, which never blossom into
self. And the soul which does so blossom exists before that blossom
unfolds.
“How long before, it is impossible to say; whether the birth, for
example, of a human individual is the soul’s beginning to be; whether a
new soul is furnished to each new body, or the body given to a
preexisting soul. It is a question on which theology throws no light,
and which psychology but faintly illustrates. But so far as that faint
illustration reaches it favors the supposition of preëxistence. That
supposition seems best to match the supposed continued existence of the
soul hereafter. Whatever had a beginning in time, it should seem must
end in time. The eternal destination which faith ascribes to the soul
presupposes an eternal origin. On the other hand, if the preëxistence of
the soul were assured it would carry the assurance of immortality.
An obvious objection, and one often urged against this hypothesis, is
the absence of any recollection of a previous life. If the soul existed
before its union with this present organization, why does it never
recall any circumstance, scene, or experience of its former state? There
have been those who professed to remember a past existence; but without
regarding those pretended reminiscences, or regarding them only as
illusions, I answer that the previous existence may not have been a
conscious existence. In that case there would have been no recorded
experience, and consequently nothing to recall. But suppose a conscious
existence antecedent to the present, the soul could not preserve the
record of a former organization. The new organization with its new
entries must necessarily efface the record of the old. For memory
depends on the continuity of association. When the thread of that
continuity is broken, the knowledge of the past is gone. If, in a state
of unconsciousness, one were taken entirely out of his present
surroundings; if falling asleep in one set of circumstances, like
Christopher Sly in that play, he were to wake in another, were to wake
to entirely new conditions; especially if during that sleep his body
were to undergo a change,—he would lose on waking all knowledge of the
former life for want of a connecting link between it and the new. And
this, according to the supposition, is precisely what has happened to
the soul at birth. The birth into the present was the death of the
old,—‘a sleep and a forgetting.’ The soul went to sleep in one body, it
woke in a new. The sleep is a gulf of oblivion between the two.
And a happy thing, if the soul preëxisted, it is for us that we remember
nothing of its former life. The memory of a past existence would be a
drag on the present, engrossing our attention much to the prejudice of
this life’s interests and claims. The backward-looking soul would dwell
in the past instead of the present, and miss the best uses of life.
But though on the supposition of a former existence the soul would not
be likely to preserve the record of that existence, it would
nevertheless retain the effect. It would not, on assuming its present
conditions, be as though it had never before been. Its past experience
would essentially modify it; it would take a character from its former
state. If a moral and intellectual being, it would bring into the world
of its present destination certain tendencies and dispositions, the
growth of a previous life. And thus the moral law and the moral nature
of the soul would assert themselves with retributions transcending the
limits of a single existence, and reaching on from life to life of the
pilgrim soul.
It is commonly conceded that there are native differences of character
in men,—different propensities, tempers, not wholly explained by
difference of circumstances or education. They show themselves where
circumstances and education have been the same; they seem to be innate.
These are sometimes ascribed to organization. But organization is not
final. That, again, requires to be explained. According to my thinking,
it is the soul that makes organization, not organization the soul. The
supposition of a previous existence would best explain these differences
as something carried over from life to life,—the harvest of seed that
was sown in other states, and whose fruit remains, although the sowing
is remembered no more.
“This was the theory of the most learned and acute of the Christian
Fathers (Origen), and though never adopted and sanctioned by the church,
has been occasionally revived in later time. Of all the theories
respecting the origin of the soul it seems to me the most plausible, and
therefore the one most likely to throw light on the question of a life
to come.”
V.
THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION IN WESTERN LITERATURE.
Poets, the first instructors of mankind.—HORACE.
Poets are the truest diviners of nature.—BULWER-LYTTON.
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves
understand.—PLATO.
Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration
should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead.—EMERSON.
We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth’s dull mist the coming of the dawn,
Who see in twilight’s gloom the first pale spark
While others only note that day is gone.
HOLMES.
O brave poets, keep back nothing,
Nor mix falsehood with the whole.
Look up Godward! Speak the truth in
Worthy song from earnest soul!
Hold, in high poetic duty
Truest Truth, the fairest beauty.
MRS. BROWNING.
The spirit of the Poets came at morn
To Sinai, summoned by the Lord’s command,
Singers and Seers; those born and those unborn
The chosen souls of men, a solemn band.
The noble army ranged, in viewless might
Around that mountain peak which pierces heaven;
Greater and lesser teachers, sons of light,
Their number was ten thousand score and seven.
Then Allah took a covenant with his own,
Saying, “My wisdom and my word receive.
Speak of me unto men, known or unknown,
Heard or unheard: bid such as will believe.”
“Bear witness then,” spake Allah, “souls most dear,
I am your Lord, and ye heralds of mine.”
Thenceforward through all lands his Poets bear
The message of the mystery divine.
EDWIN ARNOLD.
V.
THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION IN WESTERN LITERATURE.
The poets are the seers of the race. Their best work comes from the
intuitional heights where they dwell, conveying truths beyond reason,
not understood even by themselves, but merely transmitted through them.
They are the few tall pines towering above the common forest to an
extraordinary exaltation, where they catch the earliest and latest
sunbeams which prolong their day far beyond the limits below, and
penetrating into the rare upper currents whose whisperings seldom
descend to the crowd.
However diverse the forms of their expression, the heart of it is
thoroughly harmonious. They are always prophets voicing a divine message
received in the mount, and in these modern days they are almost the only
prophets we have. Therefore it is not a mere pleasantry to collect their
testimony upon an unusual theme. When it is found that, though working
independently, they are in deep accord upon reincarnation, the
inevitable conclusion is that their common inspiration means
something—namely, that their gospel is worth receiving.
It may be objected that these poems are merely dreamy effusions along
the same line of lunacy, with no real attachment to the solid
foundations upon which all wholesome poetry is based; that they are
kinks in the intellects of genius displaying the weakness of men
otherwise strong. But so universal a feeling cannot be disposed of in
that way, especially when it is found to contribute to the solution of
life’s mystery. All the poets believe in immortality, though unaided
reason and observation cannot demonstrate it. Some inexperienced people
deride the fact that nearly all poetry centres upon the theme of
Love—the most illogical and airy of sentiments. But the deepest sense of
the world is nourished by the certainty of these “vague” truths. So the
presence of reincarnation in the creed of the poets may give us courage
to confide in our own impressions, for “all men are poets at heart.”
What they have dared publish we may venture to believe and will find a
source of strength.
It is well known that the idea of reincarnation abounds in oriental
poetry. But as our purpose is to demonstrate the prevalence of the same
thought among our own poets, most of whom are wholly independent of
eastern influence, we shall here confine our attention to the
spontaneous utterances of American and European poets. We shall find
that the great majority of the highest occidental poets lean toward this
thought, and many of them unhesitatingly avow it. For convenience we
divide our study into four parts, comprising forty-two authors.
Part I. American Poets, (twelve.)
II. British Poets, (seventeen.)
III. Continental Poets, (six.)
IV. Platonic Poets, (seven.)
PART I. AMERICAN POETRY.
PREËXISTENCE.
BY PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE.
While sauntering through the crowded street
Some half-remembered face I meet,
Albeit upon no mortal shore
That face, methinks, hath smiled before.
Lost in a gay and festal throng
I tremble at some tender song
Set to an air whose golden bars
I must have heard in other stars.
In sacred aisles I pause to share
The blessing of a priestly prayer,
When the whole scene which greets mine eyes
In some strange mode I recognize,
As one whose every mystic part
I feel prefigured in my heart.
At sunset as I calmly stand
A stranger on an alien strand
Familiar as my childhood’s home
Seems the long stretch of wave and foam.
A ship sails toward me o’er the bay
And what she comes to do and say
I can foretell. A prescient lore
Springs from some life outlived of yore.
O swift, instructive, startling gleams
Of deep soul-knowledge: not as dreams
For aye ye vaguely dawn and die,
But oft with lightning certainty
Pierce through the dark oblivious brain
To make old thoughts and memories plain:
Thoughts which perchance must travel back
Across the wild bewildering track
Of countless æons; memories far
High reaching as yon pallid star,
Unknown, scarce seen, whose flickering grace
Faints on the outmost rings of space.
A MYSTERY.
BY J. G. WHITTIER.
The river hemmed with leaving trees
Wound through the meadows green,
A low blue line of mountain showed
The open pines between.
One sharp tall peak above them all
Clear into sunlight sprang,
I saw the river of my dreams,
The mountain that I sang.
No clue of memory led me on,
But well the ways I knew,
A feeling of familiar things
With every footstep grew.
Yet ne’er before that river’s rim
Was pressed by feet of mine,
Never before mine eyes had crossed
That broken mountain line.
A presence strange at once and known
Walked with me as my guide,
The skirts of some forgotten life
Trailed noiseless at my side.
Was it a dim-remembered dream
Or glimpse through æons old?
The secret which the mountains kept
The river never told.
THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF THE PINE.
BY BAYARD TAYLOR.
As when the haze of some wan moonlight makes
Familiar fields a land of mystery,
Where, chill and strange, a ghostly presence wakes
In flower or bush or tree,
Another life, the life of day o’erwhelms,
The past from present consciousness takes hue
As we remember vast and cloudy realms
Our feet have wandered through:
So, oft, some moonlight of the mind makes dumb
The stir of outer thought: wide open seems
The gate where through strange sympathies have come
The secret of our dreams:
The source of fine impressions, shooting deep
Below the falling plummet of the sense
Which strike beyond all Time and backward sweep
Through all intelligence.
We touch the lower life of beast and clod
And the long progress of the ages see
From blind old Chaos, ere the breath of God
Moved it to harmony.
All outward vision yields to that within
Whereof nor creed nor canon holds the key;
We only feel that we have ever been
And evermore shall be.
And thus I know, by memories unfurled
In rarer moods, and many a nameless sign
That once in Time and somewhere in the world
I was a towering pine.
Rooted upon a cape that once o’erhung
The entrance to a mountain gorge
The wintry shadow of a peak was flung
Long after rise of sun.
There did I clutch the granite with firm feet,
There shake my boughs above the roaring gulf,
When mountain whirlwinds through the passes beat
And howled the mountain wolf.
· · · · ·
Some blind harmonic instinct pierced the rind
Of that slow life which made me straight and high,
And I became a harp for every wind,
A voice for every sky.
And thus for centuries my rhythmic chant
Rolled down the gorge or surged about the hill,
Gentle or stern or sad or jubilant,
At every season’s will.
No longer memory whispers whence arose
The doom that tore me from my place of pride,
Whether by storms that load the peak with snows,
Or hands of men I died.
All sense departed with the boughs I wore,
And though I moved with mighty gales at strife
A mast upon the seas, I sang no more,
And music was my life.
Yet still that life awakens, brings again
Its airy anthems, resonant and long,
Till earth and sky transfigured fill my brain
With rhythmic sweeps of song.
Thence am I made a poet; thence are sprung
Those shadowy motions of the soul that reach
Beyond all grasp of art,—for which the soul
Is ignorant of speech.
And if some wild full-gathered harmony
Rolls its unbroken music through my line,
There lives and murmurs, faintly though it be,
The spirit of the pine.
THE POET IN THE EAST.
BY BAYARD TAYLOR.
The poet came to the land of the East
When spring was in the air,
The East was dressed for a wedding feast
So young she seemed and fair,
And the poet knew the land of the East
His soul was native there.
All things to him were the visible forms
Of early and precious dreams,
Familiar visions that mocked his quest
Beside the western streams,
Or gleamed in the gold of the clouds unrolled
In the sunset’s dying beams.
THE METEMPSYCHOSIS.
BY T. B. ALDRICH.
I know my own creation was divine.
Strewn on the breezy continents I see
The veinéd shells and burnished scales which once
Enclosed my being,—husks that had their use;
I brood on all the shapes I must attain
Before I reach the Perfect, which is God,
And dream my dream, and let the rabble go;
For I am of the mountains and the sea,
The deserts, and the caverns in the earth,
The catacombs and fragments of old worlds.
I was a spirit on the mountain-tops,
A perfume in the valleys, a simoom
On arid deserts, a nomadic wind
Roaming the universe, a tireless Voice.
I was ere Romulus and Remus were;
I was ere Nineveh and Babylon;
I was, and am, and evermore shall be,
Progressing, never reaching to the end.
A hundred years I trembled in the grass,
The delicate trefoil that muffled warm
A slope on Ida; for a hundred years
Moved in the purple gyre of those dark flowers
The Grecian women strew upon the dead.
Under the earth, in fragrant glooms, I dwelt;
Then in the veins and sinews of a pine
On a lone isle, where, from the Cyclades,
A mighty wind, like a leviathan,
Ploughed through the brine, and from those solitudes
Sent Silence, frightened. To and fro I swayed,
Drawing the sunshine from the stooping clouds.
Suns came and went, and many a mystic moon,
Orbing and waning, and fierce meteors,
Leaving their lurid ghosts to haunt the night.
I heard loud voices by the sounding shore,
The stormy sea-gods, and from fluted conchs
Wild music, and strange shadows floated by,
Some moaning and some singing. So the years
Clustered about me, till the hand of God
Let down the lightning from a sultry sky,
Splintered the pine and split the iron rock;
And from my odorous prison-house a bird,
I in its bosom, darted: so we flew,
Turning the brittle edge of one high wave,
Island and tree and sea-gods left behind!
Free as the air from zone to zone I flew,
Far from the tumult to the quiet gates
Of daybreak; and beneath me I beheld
Vineyards, and rivers that like silver threads
Ran through the green and gold of pasture-lands,
And here and there a hamlet, a white rose,
And here and there a city, whose slim spires
And palace-roofs and swollen domes uprose
Like scintillant stalagmites in the sun;
I saw huge navies battling with a storm
By ragged reefs along the desolate coasts,—
And lazy merchantmen, that crawled, like flies,
Over the blue enamel of the sea
To India or the icy Labradors.
A century was as a single day.
What is a day to an immortal soul?
A breath, no more. And yet I hold one hour
Beyond all price,—that hour when from the sky
I circled near and nearer to the earth,
Nearer and nearer, till I brushed my wings
Against the pointed chestnuts, where a stream,
That foamed and chattered over pebbly shoals,
Fled through the briony, and with a shout
Leapt headlong down a precipice; and there,
Gathering wild-flowers in the cool ravine,
Wandered a woman more divinely shaped
Than any of the creatures of the air,
Or river-goddesses, or restless shades
Of noble matrons marvellous in their time
For beauty and great suffering; and I sung,
I charmed her thought, I gave her dreams, and then
Down from the dewy atmosphere I stole
And nestled in her bosom. There I slept
From moon to moon, while in her eyes a thought
Grew sweet and sweeter, deepening like the dawn—
A mystical forewarning! When the stream,
Breaking through leafless brambles and dead leaves,
Piped shriller treble, and from chestnut-boughs
The fruit dropt noiseless through the autumn night,
I gave a quick, low cry, as infants do:
We weep when we are born, not when we die!
So was it destined; and thus came I here,
To walk the earth and wear the form of Man,
To suffer bravely as becomes my state,
One step, one grade, one cycle nearer God.
IDENTITY.
BY T. B. ALDRICH.
Somewhere—in desolate wind-swept space—
In twilight-land,—in no-man’s land,
Two hurrying shapes met face to face
And bade each other stand.
“And who are you?” cried one agape,
Shuddering in the gloaming light.
“I know not,” said the other shape,
“I only died last night.”
ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO.
BY CHARLES G. LELAND.
Thou and I in spirit land
One thousand years ago,
Watched the waves beat on the strand,
Ceaseless ebb and flow,
Vowed to love and ever love,
One thousand years ago.
Thou and I in greenwood shade
Nine hundred years ago
Heard the wild dove in the glade
Murmuring soft and low,
Vowed to love for evermore
Nine hundred years ago.
Thou and I in yonder star
Eight hundred years ago
Saw strange forms of light afar
In wildest beauty glow.
All things change, but love endures
Now as long ago.
Thou and I in Norman halls
Seven hundred years ago
Heard the warden on the walls
Loud his trumpets blow,
“Ton amors sera tojors,”
Seven hundred years ago.
Thou and I in Germany,
Six hundred years ago.
Then I bound the red cross on,
“True love, I must go,
But we part to meet again
In the endless flow.”
Thou and I in Syrian plains
Five hundred years ago
Felt the wild fire in our veins
To a fever glow.
All things die, but love lives on
Now as long ago.
Thou and I in shadow land
Four hundred years ago
Saw strange flowers bloom on the strand,
Heard strange breezes blow.
In the ideal, love is real,
This alone I know.
Thou and I in Italy
Three hundred years ago
Lived in faith and died for God,
Felt the fagots glow,
Ever new and ever true,
Three hundred years ago.
Thou and I on Southern seas
Two hundred years ago
Felt the perfumed even-breeze,
Spoke in Spanish by the trees,
Had no care or woe.
Life went dreamily in song,
Two hundred years ago.
Thou and I ’mid Northern snows
One hundred years ago
Led an iron silent life
And were glad to flow
Onward into changing death,
One hundred years ago.
Thou and I but yesterday
Met in fashion’s show.
Love, did you remember me,
Love of long ago?
Yes: we kept the fond oath sworn
One thousand years ago.
THE FINAL THOUGHT.
BY MAURICE THOMPSON.
What is the grandest thought
Toward which the soul has wrought?
Has it the spirit form,
And the power of a storm?
Comes it of prophecy
(That borrows light of uncreated fires)
Or of transmitted strains of memory
Sent down through countless sires?
· · · · ·
Which way are my feet set?
Through infinite changes yet
Shall I go on,
Nearer and nearer drawn
To thee,
God of eternity?
How shall the Human grow,
By changes fine and slow,
To thy perfection from the life-dawn sought?
What is the highest thought?
Ah! these dim memories,
Of when thy voice spake lovingly to me,
Under the Eden trees,
Saying, “Lord of all creation thou shalt be,”—
How they haunt me and elude—
How they hover, how they brood
On the horizon, fading yet dying not!
What is the final thought?
What if I once did dwell
In the lowest dust germ-cell,
A faint fore-hint of life called forth of God,
Waxing and struggling on,
Through the long flickering dawn,
The awful while His feet earth’s bosom trod?
What if He shaped me so,
And caused my life to blow
Into the full soul-flower in Eden-air?
Lo! now I am not good,
And I stand in solitude,
Calling to Him (and yet He answers not):
What is the final thought?
What myriads of years up from the germ!
What countless ages back from man to worm!
And yet from man to God,—oh, help me now!
A cold despair is beading on my brow!
I may see Him, and seeing know Him not!
What is the highest thought?
· · · · ·
So comes, at last,
The answer from the Vast....
Not so, there is a rush of wings—
Earth feels the presence of invisible things,
Closer and closer drawn
In rosy mists of dawn!
One dies to conquer Death
And to burst the awful tomb—
Lo, with his dying breath
He blows love into bloom!
Love! Faith is born of it!
Death is the scorn of it!
It fills the earth and thrills the heavens above:
And God is love,
And life is love, and, though we heed it not,
Love is the final thought.
FROM “A POEM READ AT BROWN UNIVERSITY.”
BY N. P. WILLIS.
But what a mystery this erring mind?
It wakes within a frame of various powers
A stranger in a new and wondrous world.
It brings an instinct from some other sphere,
For its fine senses are familiar all,
And with the unconscious habit of a dream
It calls and they obey. The priceless sight
Springs to its curious organ, and the ear
Learns strangely to detect the articulate air
In its unseen divisions, and the tongue
Gets its miraculous lesson with the rest,
And in the midst of an obedient throng
Of well trained ministers, the mind goes forth
To search the secrets of its new found home.
FROM “BEYOND.”
BY J. T. TROWBRIDGE.
From her own fair dominions
Long since, with shorn pinions
My spirit was banished.
But above her still hover in vigils and dreams
Ethereal visitants, voices and gleams
That forever remind her
Of something behind her
Long vanished.
Through the listening night
With mysterious flight
Pass winged intimations;
Like stars shot from heaven, their still voices call to me—
Far and departing they signal and call to me,
Strangely beseeching me,
Chiding yet teaching me
Patience.
FROM “RAIN IN SUMMER.”
BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.
Thus the seer, with vision clear,
Sees forms appear and disappear
In the perpetual round of strange
Mysterious change
From birth to death, from death to birth,
From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth,
Till glimpses more sublime
Of things unseen before
Unto his wondering eyes reveal
The universe, as an immeasurable wheel
Turning for evermore
In the rapid rushing river of time.
FROM “THE TWILIGHT.”
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
Sometimes a breath floats by me,
And odor from Dreamland sent,
Which makes the ghost seem nigh me
Of a something that came and went,
Of a life lived somewhere, I know not
In what diviner sphere:
Of mem’ries that come not and go not;
Like music once heard by an ear
That cannot forget or reclaim it;
A something so shy, it would shame it
To make it a show.
A something too vague, could I name it,
For others to know:
As though I had lived it and dreamed it,
As though I had acted and schemed it
Long ago.
And yet, could I live it over,
This Life which stirs in my brain;
Could I be both maiden and lover,
Moon and tide, bee and clover,
As I seem to have been, once again,—
Could I but speak and show it,
This pleasure more sharp than pain,
Which baffles and lures me so,—
The world would not lack a poet,
Such as it had
In the ages glad,
Long ago.
FROM “FACING WEST FROM CALIFORNIA’S SHORES.”
BY WALT WHITMAN.
Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the
land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled:
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous.
(But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)
FROM “LEAVES OF GRASS.”
BY WALT WHITMAN.
I know I am deathless.
I know that this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass;
And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million
years,
I can cheerfully take it now or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
· · · · ·
As to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths.
No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.
· · · · ·
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years.
· · · · ·
Births have brought us richness and variety, and other births have
brought us richness and variety.
STANZAS.
BY THOMAS W. PARSONS.
“_We are such stuff as dreams are made of._”
We have forgot what we have been,
And what we are we little know;
We fancy new events begin,
But all has happened long ago.
Through many a verse life’s poem flows,
But still, though seldom marked by men,
At times returns the constant close,
Still the old chorus comes again.
The childish grief—the boyish fear—
The hope in manhood’s breast that burns;
The doubt—the transport, and the tear—
Each mood, each impulse, oft returns.
Before mine infant eyes had hailed
The new-born glory of the day,
When the first wondrous morn unveiled
The breathing world that round me lay;
The same strange darkness o’er my brain
Folded its close mysterious wings,
The ignorance of joy or pain,
That each recurring midnight brings.
Full oft my feelings make me start,
Like footprints on a desert shore,
As if the chambers of my heart
Had heard their shadowy step before.
So looking into thy fond eyes,
Strange memories come to me, as though
Somewhere—perchance in Paradise—
I had adored thee long ago.