PART IV. PLATONIC POETS.

The largest inspiration of all western thought is nourished by the

Academe. Not only idealism, but the provinces of philosophy and

literature hostile to Plato are really indebted to him. The noble

loftiness, the ethereal subtlety, the poetic beauty of that teaching has

captivated most of the fine intellects of mediæval and modern times, and

it is impossible to trace the invisible course of exalted thought which

has radiated from this greatest Greek, the king of a nation of

philosophers.

Adopting Emerson’s words, “Out of Plato come all things that are still

written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our

originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all these drift

boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two

centuries, every brisk young man who says fine things to each reluctant

generation, is some reader of Plato translating into the vernacular his

good things.... How many great men nature is incessantly sending up out

of the night to be _his men_—Platonists! the Alexandrians, a

constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More,

Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph

Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor. Calvinism is in his Phædro.

Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its

handbook of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in

Plato all its texts.” We know not how much of the world’s later poetry

is due to the suggestion and nurture of the poet-philosopher. But in

closing our studies of the poetry of reincarnation it may be of interest

to group together the avowed Platonic poets.

Most illustrious of all the English disciples of this master, in the

brilliant coterie of “Cambridge Platonists,” was Dr. Henry More, whom

Dr. Johnson esteemed “one of our greatest divines and philosophers and

no mean poet.” Hobbes said of him that if his own philosophy was not

true he knew none that he should sooner adopt than Henry More’s of

Cambridge; and Hoadley styles him “one of the first men of this or any

other country.” Coleridge wrote that his philosophical works “contain

more enlarged and elevated views of the Christian dispensation than I

have met with in any other single volume; for More had both the

philosophical and poetic genius supported by immense erudition.” He was

a devout student of Plato. In the heat of rebellion he was spared by the

fanatics. They pardoned his refusal to take their covenant and left him

to continue the philosophic occupations which had rendered him famous as

a lovable and absorbed scholar. He wove together in many poems a quaint

texture of Gothic fancy and Greek thought. His “Psychozoia” or “Life of

the Soul,” from which the following verses are taken, is a long Platonic

poem tracing the course of the soul through ancient existences down into

the earthly realm. Campbell said of this work that it “is like a curious

grotto, whose labyrinths we might explore for its strange and mystic

associations.” Dr. More was an intimate friend of Addison and long a

correspondent of Descartes.

From Henry More’s “Philosophical Poems” (“Psychozoia”).

I would sing the preëxistency

Of human souls and live once o’er again

By recollection and quick memory

All that is passed since first we all began.

But all too shallow be my wits to scan

So deep a point and mind too dull to climb

So dark a matter. But thou more than man

Aread, thou sacred soul of Plotin dear,

Tell me what mortals are. Tell what of old they were.

A spark or ray of divinity

Clouded with earthly fogs, and clad in clay,

A precious drop sunk from eternity

Spilt on the ground, or rather slunk away.

For then we fell when we ‘gan first t’ essay

By stealth of our own selves something to been

Uncentering ourselves from our one great stay,

Which rupture we new liberty did ween,

And from that prank right jolly wits ourselves did deem.

Show fitly how the preëxisting soul

Enacts and enters bodies here below

And then entire unhurt can leave this moul,

In which by sense and motion they may know

Better than we what things transacted be

Upon the earth, and when they best may show

Themselves to friend or foe, their phantasmy

Moulding their airy arc to gross consistency.

Milton imbibed from his college friend Henry More an early fondness for

the study of Plato, whose philosophy nourished most of the fine spirits

of that day, and he expresses the Greek sage’s opinion of the soul in

his “Comus”:—

The soul grows clotted by oblivion,

Imbodies and embrutes till she quite lose

The divine property of her first being;

Such as those thick and gloomy shadows damp

Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres

Lingering and setting by a new made grave

As loth to leave the body that it loved.

Milton’s Platonic proclivities are also shown in his poem “On the Death

of a Fair Infant”:—

Wert thou that just maid, who once before

Forsook the hated earth, O tell me sooth,

And cam’st again to visit us once more?

Or wert thou that sweet smiling youth?

Or any other of that heavenly brood

Let down in cloudy throne to do the world some good?

Or wert thou of the golden-winged host,

Who, having clad thyself in human weed,

To earth from thy prefixed seat didst post,

And after short abode fly back with speed

As if to show what creatures heaven doth breed;

Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire,

To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire.

In the old library of poetry known as “Dodsley’s Collection,” is a

Miltonic poem by an anonymous Platonist which is very interesting, and

as it is difficult of access we quote the best part of it.

PREËXISTENCE.

IN IMITATION OF MILTON.

Now had th’ archangel trumpet, raised sublime

Above the walls of heaven, begun to sound;

All æther took the blast and fell beneath

Shook with celestial noise; th’ almighty host,

Hot with pursuit, and reeking with the blood

Of guilty cherubs smeared in sulphurous dust,

Pause at the known command of sounding gold.

At first they close the wide Tartarean gates,

Th’ impenetrable folds on brazen hinge

Roll creaking horrible; the din beneath

O’ercomes the war of flames, and deafens hell.

Then through the solid gloom with nimble wing

They cut their shining traces up to light;

Returned upon the edge of heavenly day,

Where thinnest beams play round the vast obscure

And with eternal gleam drives back the night.

They find the troops less stubborn, less involved

In crime and ruin, barr’d the realms of peace,

Yet uncondemned to baleful beats of woe,

Doubtful and suppliant; all the plumes of light

Moult from their shuddering wings, and sickly fear

Shades every face with horror; conscious guilt

Rolls in the livid eyeball, and each breast

Shakes with the dread of future doom unknown.

’Tis here the wide circumference of heaven

Opens in two vast gates, that inward turn

Voluminous, on jasper columns hung

By geometry divine: they ever glow

With living sculptures; they arise by turns

To imboss the shining leaves, by turns they set

To give succeeding argument their place;

In holy hieroglyphics on they move,

The gaze of journeying angels, as they pass

Oft looking back, and held in deep surprise.

Here stood the troops distinct; the cherub guard

Unbarred the splendid gates, and in they roll

Harmonious; for a vocal spirit sits

Within each hinge, and as they onward drive,

In just divisions breaks the numerous jars

With symphony melodious, such as spheres

Involved in tenfold wreaths are said to sound.

Out flows a blaze of glory: for on high

Towering advanced the moving throne of God.

· · · · ·

Above the throne, th’ ideas heavenly bright

Of past, of present, and of coming time,

Fixed their immoved abode, and there present

An endless landscape of created things

To sight celestial, where angelic eyes

Are lost in prospect; for the shiny range

Boundless and various in its bosom bears

Millions of full proportioned worlds, beheld

With steadfast eyes, till more arise to view,

And further inward scenes start up unknown.

· · · · ·

A vocal thunder rolled the voice of God.

“Servants of God! and virtues great in arms,

We approve your faithful works, and you return

Blessed from the dire pursuits of rebel foes;

Resolved, obdurant, they have tried the force

Of this right hand, and known almighty power;

Transfixed with lightning, down they sunk and fell

Into the fiery gulf, and deep they plunge

Below the burning waves, to hide their heads.

· · · · ·

“For you, ye guilty throng that lately joined

In this sedition, since seduced from good,

And caught in trains of guile, by sprites malign

Superior in their order; you accept,

Trembling, my heavenly clemency and grace.

When the long era once has filled its orb,

You shall emerge to light and humbly here

Again shall bow before his favoring throne,

If your own virtue second my decree:

But all must have their races first below.

See, where below in chaos wondrous deep

A speck of light dawns forth, and thence throughout

The shades, in many a wreath, my forming power

There swiftly turns the burning eddy round,

Absorbing all crude matter near its brink;

Which next, with subtle motions, takes the form

I please to stamp, the seed of embryo worlds

All now in embryo, but ere long shall rise

Variously scattered in this vast expanse,

Involved in winding orbs, until the brims

Of outward circles brush the heavenly gates.

The middle point a globe of curling fire

Shall hold, which round it sheds its genial heat;

Where’er I kindle life the motion grows,

In all the endless orbs, from this machine;

And infinite vicissitudes that roll

About the restless centre; for I rear

In those meanders turned, a dusty ball,

Deformed all o’er with woods, whose shaggy tops

Inclose eternal mists, and deadly damps

Hover within their boughs, to cloak the light;

Impervious scenes of horror, till reformed

To fields and grassy dells and flowery meads

By your continual pains.... Here Silence sits

In folds of wreathy mantling sunk obscure,

And in dark fumes bending his drowsy head;

An urn he holds, from whence a lake proceeds

Wide, flowing gently, smooth and Lethe named;

Hither compelled, each soul must drink long draughts

Of those forgetful streams, till forms within

And all the great ideas fade and die:

For if vast thought should play about a mind

Inclosed in flesh, and dragging cumbrous life,

Fluttering and beating in the mournful cage,

It soon would break its gates and wing away:

’Tis therefore my decree, the soul return

Naked from off this beach, and perfect blank

To visit the new world; and wait to feel

Itself in crude consistence closely shut,

The dreadful monument of just revenge;

Immured by heaven’s own hand, and placed erect

On fleeting matter all imprisoned round

With walls of clay; the ethereal mould shall bear

The chain of members, deafened with an ear,

Blinded by eyes, and trammeled by hands.

Here anger, vast ambition and disdain,

And all the haughty movements rise and fall,

As storms of neighboring atoms tear the soul,

And hope and love and all the calmer turns

Of easy hours, in their gay gilded shapes,

With sudden run, skim o’er deluded minds,

As matter leads the dance; but one desire

Unsatisfied, shall mar ten thousand joys.

“The rank of beings, that shall first advance,

Drink deep of human life, and long shall stay

On this great scene of cares. From all the rest,

That longer for the destined body wait,

Less penance I expect, and short abode

In those pale dreamy kingdoms will content;

Each has his lamentable lot, and all

On different rocks abide the pains of life.

“The pensive spirit takes the lonely grove;

Nightly he visits all the sylvan scenes,

Where far remote, a melancholy moon

Raising her head, serene and shorn of beams,

Throws here and there her glimmerings through the trees.

The sage shall haunt this solitary ground

And view the dismal landscape limned within

In horrid shades, mixed with imperfect light.

Here Judgment, blinded by delusive sense,

Contracted through the cranny of an eye,

Shoots up faint languid beams to that dark seat,

Wherein the soul, bereaved of native fire,

Sets intricate, in misty clouds obscured.

· · · · ·

“Hence far removed, a different being race

In cities full and frequent take their seat,

Where honor’s crushed, and gratitude oppressed

With swelling hopes of gain, that raise within

A tempest, and driven onward by success,

Can find no bounds. For creatures of a day

Stretch their wide cares to ages; full increase

Starves their penurious soul, while empty sound

Fills the ambitious; _that_ shall ever shrink,

Pining with endless cares, while _this_ shall swell

To tympany enormous. Bright in arms

Here shines the hero, out he fiercely leads

A martial throng, his instruments of rage,

To fill the world with death, and thin mankind.

· · · · ·

“There savage nature in one common lies

And feels its share of hunger, care, and pain,

Cheated by flying prey; and now they tear

Their panting flesh; and deeply, darkly quaff

Of human woe, even when they rudely sip

The flowing stream, or draw the savory pulp

Of nature’s freshest viands; fragrant fruits

Enjoyed with trembling, and in danger sought.

“But where the appointed limits of a law

Fences the general safety of the world,

No greater quiet reigns: the blended loads

Of punishment and crime deform the world,

And give no rest to man; with pangs and throes

He enters on the stage; prophetic tears

And infant cries prelude his future woes;

And all is one continual scene of gulf

Till the sad sable curtain falls in death.

· · · · ·

“Then the gay glories of the living world

Shall cast their empty varnish and retire

Out of his feeble views; the shapeless root

Of wild imagination dance and play

Before his eyes obscure; till all in death

Shall vanish, and the prisoner enlarged,

Regains the flaming borders of the sky.”

He ended. Peals of thunder rend the heavens,

And chaos, from the bottom turned, resounds.

The mighty clangor; all the heavenly host

Approve the high decree, and loud they sing

Eternal justice; while the guilty troops,

Sad with their doom, but sad without despair,

Fall fluttering down to Lethe’s lake, and there

For penance, and the destined body wait.

Shelley’s Platonic leanings are well known.[29] The favorite Greek

conceit of preëxistence in many earlier lives may frequently be found in

his poems. The title over one of his songs of unrest, “The World’s

Wanderer,” evidently alludes to himself, as do the lines in it

“Like the world’s rejected guest.”

The song of the spirits in “Prometheus Unbound” pictures vividly the

human soul’s descent into the gloom of the material world:—

To the deep, to the deep,

Down, down!

Through the shade of sleep,

Through the cloudy strife

Of Death and of Life,

Through the veil and the bar

Of things which seem and are,

Even to the steps of the remotest throne,

Down, down!

While the sound whirls around,

Down, down!

As the fawn draws the hound,

As the lightning the vapor,

As a weak moth, the taper;

Death, despair; love, sorrow;

Time both; to-day, to-morrow;

As steel obeys the spirit of the stone,

Down, down!

In the depth of the deep,

Down, down!

Like the veiled lightning asleep,

Like the spark nursed in embers,

The last look Love remembers,

Like a diamond which shines

On the dark wealth of mines,

A spell is treasured but for thee alone,

Down, down!

The last stanza of “The Cloud” is Shelley’s Platonic symbol of human

life:—

I am the daughter of earth and water

And the nursling of the sky,

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores,

I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain when with never a stain

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

Another poem, entitled “A Fragment,” certainly refers to preëxistence:—

Ye gentle visitants of calm thought,

Moods like the memories of happier earth

Which come arrayed in thoughts of little worth

Like stars in clouds by weak winds enwrought.

THE RETREAT.

BY HENRY VAUGHAN.

Happy those early days when I

Shined in my angel-infancy,

Before I understood this place

Appointed for my second race,

Or taught my soul to fancy aught

But a white celestial thought;

When yet I had not walked above

A mile or two from my first love,

And, looking back, at that short space,

Could see a glimpse of his bright face;

When on some gilded cloud or flower

My gazing soul would dwell an hour,

And in those weaker glories spy

Some shadows of eternity;

Before I taught my tongue to wound

My conscience with a sinful sound;

Or had the black art to dispense

A several sin to every sense,

But felt through all this flashy dress

Bright shoots of everlastingness.

Oh, how I long to travel back

And tread again that ancient track!

That I might once more reach that plain

Where first I left my glorious train;

From whence the enlightened spirit sees

That shady city of palm-trees.

But ah! my soul with too much stay

Is drunk and staggers in the way.

Some men a forward motion love,

But I by backward steps would move,

And when this dust falls to the urn,

In that state I came, return.

In Emerson, the Plato of the nineteenth century, the whole feeling of

the Greek seems reflected in its most glorious development. Many of his

poems clearly suggest the influence of his Greek teacher, as his

“Threnody” upon the death of his young son, and “The Sphinx” in which

these two stanzas appear:—

To vision profounder

Man’s spirit must dive;

His aye-rolling orb

At no goal will arrive;

The heavens that now draw him

With sweetness untold,

Once found for new heavens

He spurneth the old.

Eterne alteration

Now follows, now flies,

And under pain, pleasure—

Under pleasure, pain lies.

Love works at the centre,

Heart-heaving alway;

Forth speed the strong pulses

To the borders of day.

Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, the friend of Bishop Ken and of Dr. Isaac Watts,

has left this allusion to preëxistence in

A HYMN ON HEAVEN.

Ye starry mansions, hail! my native skies!

Here in my happy, preëxistent state

(A spotless mind) I led the life of Gods,

But passing, I salute you, and advance

To yonder brighter realms, allowed access.

Hail, splendid city of the almighty king,

Celestial salem, situate above, etc.

Some of the common church hymns glow with the enthusiasm of Platonic

preëxistence, and are fondly sung by Christians without any thought

that, while their idea is of Biblical origin, it has been nourished and

perpetuated by the Greek sage, and directly implies reincarnation. For

instance:—

“I’m but a stranger, here, heaven is my home.

Heaven is my fatherland, heaven is my home.”

“My Ain Countrie.”

“This world where grief and sin abideth,

Is not the Christian’s native clime.”

“The home-land, blessed home-land.”

“Jerusalem, my happy home.”

VI.

REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS.

The ancient theologists and priests testify that the soul is conjoined

to the body through a certain punishment, and that it is buried in

this body as in a sepulchre.—PHILOLAUS, (a Pythagorean.)

Search thou the path of the soul, whence she came, or what way, after

serving the body, by joining work with sacred speed, thou shalt raise

her again to the same state whence she fell.—ZOROASTER.

Death has no power th’ immortal soul to slay,

That, when its present body turns to clay,

Seeks a fresh home, and with unlessened might

Inspires another frame with life and light.

So I myself (well I the past recall),

When the fierce Greeks begirt Troy’s holy wall,

Was brave Euphorbus: and in conflict drear

Poured forth my blood beneath Atrides’ spear.

The shield this arm did bear I lately saw

In Juno’s shrine, a trophy of that war.

PYTHAGORAS, in DRYDEN’S _Ovid_.

He [Plato] spoke of Him

The lone, eternal One, who dwells above,

And of the soul’s untraceable descent

From that high fount of spirit, through all the grades

Of intellectual being, till it mix

With atoms vague, corruptible and dark.

Nor yet ev’n thus, though sunk in earthly dross,

Corrupted all, nor its ethereal touch

Quite lost, but tasting of the fountain still

As some bright river, which has rolled along

Through meads of flowery light and mines of gold

When poured at length into the dusky deep

Disdains to take at once its briny taint,

But keeps unchanged awhile the lustrous tinge

Or balmy freshness of the scenes it left.

MOORE.

VI.

REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS.

The origin of the philosophy of reincarnation is prehistoric. It

antedates the remotest antiquity all over the world, and appears to be

cognate with mankind, springing up spontaneously as a necessary

corollary of the immortality of the soul; for its undiminished sway has

been wellnigh universal outside of Christendom. In the earliest dawn of

Mother India it was firmly established. The infancy of Egypt found it

dominant on the Nile. It was at home in Greece long before Pythagoras.

The most ancient beginnings of Mexico and Peru knew it as the faith of

their fathers.

I. In sketching the course of this thought among the men of old, the

first attention belongs to India. Brahmanism, the most primitive form of

this faith, has gone through vast changes during the four thousand years

of history. The initial form of it, dating back into the remotest mists

of antiquity and descending to the first chapters of authentic

chronology, was an ideally simple nature-worship. The Rig Veda and the

oldest sacred hymns display the beauty of this adoration for every phase

of nature, centering with especial fondness upon light as the supreme

power, and upon the cow as the favorite animal. Professor Wilson’s and

Max Müller’s translations have opened to the English race the charming

thought of this primordial people, whose great child-souls found objects

of reverence in all things. There were no distinct gods, but everything

was divine, and through all they saw the flow of ever-changing life.

Gradually an ecclesiastical system climbed up around this religion,

clothing, stifling, and at last burying the vital organism, until Sakya

Muni’s reaction started Buddhism into vigorous growth as the beautiful

protest against the disfigured and decayed form. About Buddhism, too,

there has arisen a heavy weight of lifeless ritual, but every breath of

life with which the slumbering mother and daughter continue their

existence is perfumed with the roseattar of reincarnation. How they have

since continued to disseminate the idea of reincarnation is suggested in

chapter IX, for the East of to-day is essentially a sculptured picture

of what has been monotonously enduring for twenty centuries.

Of the ancient Indians we learn through Pliny, Strabo, Megasthenes,

Plutarch, and Herodotus, who describe the Gymnosophists and Brachmans as

ascetic philosophers who made a study of spiritual things, living singly

or in celibate communities much like the later Pythagoreans. Porphyry

says of them: “They live without either clothes, riches or wives. They

are held in so great veneration by the rest of their countrymen that the

king himself often visits them to ask their advice. Such are their views

of death that with reluctance they endure life as a piece of necessary

bondage to nature, and haste to set the soul at liberty from the body.

Nay, often, when in good health, and no evil to disturb them, they

depart life, advertising it beforehand. No man hinders them, but all

reckon them happy, and send commissions along with them to their dead

friends. So strong and firm is their belief of a future life for the

soul, where they shall enjoy one another, after receiving all their

commands, they deliver themselves to the fire, that they may separate

the soul as pure as possible from the body, and expire singing hymns.

Their old friends attend them to death with more ease than other men

their fellow-citizens to a long journey. They deplore their own state

for surviving them and deem them happy in their immortality.” When

Alexander the Great first penetrated their country he could not persuade

them to appear before him, and had to gratify his curiosity about their

life and philosophy by proxy, though he afterward witnessed them

surrender themselves to the flames.

II. Herodotus asserts that the doctrine of metempsychosis originated in

Egypt. “The Egyptians are the first who propounded the theory that the

human soul is imperishable, and that where the body of any one dies it

enters into some other creature that may be ready to receive it, and

that when it has gone the round of all created forms on land, in water

and in air, then it once more enters a human body born for it; and that

this cycle of existence for the soul takes place in three thousand

years.”[30] He continues, “Some of the Greeks adopted this opinion, some

earlier, others later, as if it were their own.”

The Egyptians held that the human race began after the pure gods and

spirits had left earth, when the demons who were sinfully inclined had

revolted and introduced guilt. The gods then created human bodies for

these demons to inhabit, as a means of expiating their sin, and these

fallen spirits are the present men and women, whose earthly life is a

course of purification. All the Egyptian precepts and religious codes

are to this end. The judgment after death decides whether the soul has

attained purity or not. If not, the soul must return to earth in renewal

of its expiation either in the body of a man, or animal or plant. As the

spirit was believed to maintain its connection with the material form as

long as this remained, the practice of embalming was designed to arrest

the passage of the soul into other forms. The custom of embalming is

also connected with their opinion that after three thousand years away

from the body the soul would return to its former body provided it be

preserved from destruction.[31] If it is not preserved, the soul would

enter the most convenient habitation, which might be a wretched

creature. They maintained, too, that the gods frequently inhabited the

bodies of animals, and therefore they worshiped animals as incarnations

of special divinities. The sacred bodies of these godly visitants were

also embalmed as a mark of respect to their particular class of deities.

For they placed certain gods in certain animals, the Egyptian Apollo

choosing the hawk, Mercury the ibis, Mars the fish, Diana the cat,

Bacchus the goat, Hercules the colt, Vulcan the ox, etc. This conceit

was but a specialization of their general tenet of pantheism, insisting

that all life is divine, that every living thing must be venerated, and

that the highest creatures should be most devoutly worshiped.

The Egyptian conception of reincarnation as shaped by the priesthood is

displayed in their classic, “Ritual of the Dead,” which is one of their

chief sacred books and describes the course of the soul after death. A

copy of it was deposited in each mummy case. It opens with a sublime

dialogue between the soul and the God of Hades, Osiris, to whose realm

he asks admission. Finally Osiris says, “Fear nothing, but cross the

threshold.” As the soul enters he is dazzled with the glory of light. He

sings a hymn to the sun and goes on taking the food of knowledge. After

frightful dangers are passed, rest and refreshment come. Continuing his

journey he reaches at last heaven’s gate, where he is instructed in

profound mysteries. Within the gate he is transformed into different

animals and plants. After this the soul is reunited to the body for

which careful embalming was so important. A critical examination tests

his right to cross the subterranean river to Elysium. He is conducted by

Anubis through a labyrinth to the judgment hall of Osiris, where

forty-two judges question him upon his whole past life. If the decisive

judgment approves him he enters heaven. If not, he is sentenced to pass

through lower forms of existence according to his sins, or, if a

reprobate, is given over to the powers of darkness for purgation. After

three thousand years of this he is again consigned to a human probation.

III. Of the old Persian faith, it is difficult to obtain a trustworthy

statement, except what is derived from its present form among the

Parsees. The Magi, Zoroaster’s followers, believed that the immortal

soul descended from on high for a short period of lives in a mortal body

to gain experience, and to then return again. When the soul is above it

has several abodes, one luminous, another dark, and some filled with a

mixture of light and darkness. Sometimes it sinks into the body from the

luminous abode and after a virtuous life returns above; but if coming

from the dark region, it passes an evil life and enters a worse place in

proportion to her conduct until purified. The dualism of these

fire-worshipers gave reincarnation a briefer period of operation than

the other oriental religions.

IV. Pythagoras is mentioned by a Greek tradition as one of the Greeks

who visited India before the age of Alexander. It is almost certain that

he went to Egypt and received there the doctrine of transmigration which

he taught in the Greek cities of lower Italy (B. C. 529). Jamblichus

says: “He spent twelve years at Babylon, freely conversing with the

Magi, was instructed in everything venerable among them, and learned the

most perfect worship of the gods.” He is said to have represented the

human soul as an emanation of the world soul, partaking of the divine

nature. At death it leaves one body to take another and so goes through

the circle of appointed forms. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” contains a long

description of the Pythagorean idea, from which these verses are taken,

as translated by Dryden:—

“Souls cannot die. They leave a former home,

And in new bodies dwell, and from them roam.

Nothing can perish, all things change below,

For spirits through all forms may come and go.

Good beasts shall rise to human forms, and men,

If bad, shall backward turn to beasts again.

Thus, through a thousand shapes, the soul shall go

And thus fulfill its destiny below.”

But it is very difficult to determine exactly what the views of

Pythagoras were. Aristotle, Plato, and Diogenes Laertius say he taught

that the soul when released by death must pass through a grand circle of

living forms before reaching the human again. From Pythagoras himself we

have only some aphorisms of practical wisdom and symbolic sentences;

from his disciples a few fragments—all devoid of the grotesque

hypothesis generally ascribed to him. Although his name is synonymous

with the transmigration of human souls through animal bodies, the strong

probabilities are that if this doctrine came from him it was entirely

exoteric, concealing the inner truth of reincarnation. Some of his later

disciples, especially the author of the work which is attributed to

Timæus the Locian, denied that he taught it in any literal sense, and

said that by it he meant merely to emphasize the fact that men are

assimilated in their vices to the beasts. (See Chapter XII.)

V. Plato is called by Emerson the synthesis of Europe and Asia, and a

decidedly oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise

color. He had traveled in Egypt and Asia Minor and among the

Pythagoreans of Italy. As he died (B. C. 348) twenty years before

Alexander’s invasion of India he missed that opportunity of learning the

Hindu ideas.

In the great “myth,” or allegory, of Phædrus, the classic description of

the relation of the soul to the material world, what he says of the

judgment upon mankind and their subsequent return to human or animal

bodies coincides substantially with the Egyptian and Hindu religions.

But his theory of pre-existence and of absolute knowledge seems to be

original. It grows out of his cardinal doctrine (and that of his master

Socrates) concerning the reality and validity of truth, in opposition to

the skepticism of contemporary sophists, who claimed that truth is mere

subjective opinion—what each man troweth.

The Phædrus myth is evidently suggested by the splendid religious

procession which closed the Athenian festival. With gorgeous ceremony

nearly the whole city’s population participated in this crowning glory

of their most sacred holiday. The procession wound through the finest

streets of the city and then up the steep ascent of the Acropolis, whose

precipitous incline kept the horses struggling for a foothold. That

elevated site commanded a view of the busy city, the plains beyond, and

the distant mountains and sea under the deep blue canopy of the Greek

sky, presenting to the worshipers’ sight a panorama of the changing

aspects of human life and a type of heaven’s repose. From this picture

the poet-philosopher conjures up a sublimer procession marshalled by the

king of gods and men, moving through the heavenly orbits of the soul’s

progress, until they ascend the celestial dome itself, whence the soul

may gaze upon the unspeakable glories of spiritual Truth.[32]

The Socrates of the dialogue first likens the soul to “a winged team and

their charioteer. In the case of the gods both horses and charioteer are

all good and of good breed; those of the rest are mixed. And first of

all, our charioteer drives a pair; in the next place, the one is good

and noble in itself and by breed, while the other is the opposite in

both regards. And so the management of the chariot must needs be

difficult and harassing. Just how the living being which is immortal is

distinguished from that which is mortal, I must endeavor to tell you.

All that is soul has the charge of that which is soulless, and traverses

the whole heaven, appearing now in one form, now in another. When

perfect and possessed of wings, she moves in mid air and controls the

whole world (_kosmos_). But if she lose her feathers, she is borne

hither and thither until she lays hold of something that is fixed and

solid, and there making her home, and taking to herself an earthly body,

which seems to be self-moved by reason of the force she furnishes, soul

and body are fastened together and come to be called mortal.... But let

us take up the reason of that stripping off the feathers by which the

soul is brought to its fall. It is as follows: The power of the wing is

designed to bear up that which is heavy through mid air, where the race

of the gods dwells, and of all that is corporeal this has most in common

with the divine; for the divine is the beautiful, the wise, the good,

and everything of the sort, and by these the wing of the soul is

nourished and groweth especially. But by what is base and evil, and

whatever else is the opposite of divine, it wastes away and is

destroyed.

“Now Zeus, the great Leader in heaven, leads the van, driving a winged

chariot, the marshal and guardian of all. And he is followed by the host

of the gods and demons marshalled in eleven bands, for Hestia alone

remaineth in the house of the gods, and those of the rest who belong to

the number of The Twelve [Great Gods] lead on as captains of their

companies, each in the order to which he has been assigned. Now there

are within heaven many and blessed views and ways of passage in which

the race of the happy gods pass to and fro, each of them doing his own

work, and whoever can and will follows, for envy stands aloof from the

choir of the gods.

“But whenever they go to banquet and to feast, then they proceed all

together up towards the lofty vault of heaven. Now the chariots of the

gods, being well balanced and obedient to the rein, proceed easily, but

the rest with difficulty. For the horse that partakes of evil slips

downward, sinking and gravitating towards the earth, if he has not been

properly broken in by the charioteer. Then it is that toil and extremest

conflict press hard upon the soul. But those souls which are called

immortal, when they reach the summit, go forth and stand upon the back

[the convex] of the heaven, and as they stand the revolution [of the

sphere] carries them around with it, and they behold the things which

are outside of the heaven.

“Now the place which is above the heaven no earthly poet has ever

praised as it deserves, nor ever will: but it is thus. For I must dare

to tell the truth, especially when I am talking about Truth. The

colorless, formless, and intangible Being which is Being, is visible

only to the Reason (_nous_), which is the governor of the soul. Round

about this [pure Being] is located the true sort of knowledge. Since

then the intelligence of God—like that of every soul in so far as it is

to receive what best befits it—is nourished on Reason and pure

Knowledge, in beholding at last the Being it loves it, and in

contemplating the Truth is nourished and gladdened, until the revolution

[of the sphere] brings it round again to its starting-place. And in this

circuit it beholds Righteousness itself, beholds Temperance itself,

beholds Knowledge—not that which has origin, nor that which differs in

the different things to which we ascribe existence, but Knowledge which

has a real being in that which is Being indeed. And other equally real

existences she beholds and is feasted upon, and then reëntering the

heaven she returns homeward. And when she has come thither, the

charioteer, staying his horses at their stall, fodders them with

ambrosia, and waters them with nectar. And this is the life of the gods.

“But as to the other souls, that which best follows God and is most like

Him lifts up the head of the charioteer to the place outside the heaven,

and is carried around the revolution with Him, disturbed indeed by the

horses, and beholding the things which have true being with difficulty.

Another lifts up the head at times, at others draws it in because

compelled by the horses, and therefore beholds some and not others; the

rest one and all desire and follow that which is above, but not being

able to reach it, they are carried around submerged beneath the heaven,

they tread and fall upon each other, each trying to get precedence of

the other. Noise, and rivalry, and sweat to the last degree ensue,

whereupon many are maimed in their wings by the fault of their

charioteers. And all of them, after long toil, depart uninitiated into

the vision of Being, and when they have gone are fed on the food of

opinion. Whence then that great desire of theirs to behold the plain of

Truth? Is it not because the pasturage which befits what is best in the

soul happens to grow in that meadow, and the growth of the wing by which

the soul soars is nourished with this?

“And this is this law of Adrastea [or Nemesis, the inevitable Order]:

whatsoever soul has shared with God, in beholding any of those things

that are true and real, is unharmed until the next period, and if she is

always able to do this, is always unhurt. But should it happen that she

cannot follow on to know, and by any mischance grows heavy through being

filled with forgetfulness and faultiness, and through that heaviness

loses her feathers and falls to the earth, then the law is that this

soul shall not take upon her the nature of any beast in the first

generation [or birth], but the soul that has seen most shall come to the

birth of a man who is to be a philosopher, or an artist, or of some

musician and lover; and the second, [to the birth] of a lawful king, or

warrior and ruler; the third, of a statesman, or of some financier, or

man of affairs; the fourth, of a toil-loving gymnast, or of some one who

is to be a physician; the fifth, the life of a soothsayer, or some

hierophantic function; to the sixth, the life of a poet, or of some

other sort of mimic, will be suitable; to the seventh, that of an

artisan or a husbandman; to the eighth, that of a sophist or a

demagogue; to the ninth, that of a tyrant. And whoever in any of these

positions conducts himself rightly receives a better lot; but whoever

behaves otherwise, a worse.

“No soul arrives at that place from whence it came for ten thousand

years, except it be that one who is honestly a philosopher, or a lover

who has a share of philosophy. These in the third period of a thousand

years, if thrice successively they have chosen this manner of life, and

have thus received their wings, depart thither in the three thousandth

year. But the rest, when they have finished the first life assigned

them, undergo a judgment. And after the judgment, some of them proceed

to the prison-house under the earth and receive punishment; and the

others, having been raised by the judgment to a place in the heaven,

pass their time in a manner worthy of the life they lived in human form.

“And when, in the thousandth year, they come to a casting of lots and a

choice of their second life, each chooses whichever she wishes. And

thereupon a human soul comes to the life of a beast; and one that has

been a man becomes from a beast a man again.

“But that soul which has never beheld the Truth will never come into

this [human] form; the understanding of general truth collected from

many perceptions into unity by rational thought is an essential of

humanity. And this is the recollection of those things which our soul

has once seen when accompanying God, and disdaining those things which

we now speak of as being, and lifting up our heads to behold true Being.

Wherefore it is just that the intelligence of the philosopher alone

receives wings; for he is ever with all his might busied with the

recollections of these things, occupation with which makes God what he

is. And only the man who makes right use of such recollections, and thus

continually attains initiation into perfect mysteries, becomes truly

perfect; and for giving up human pursuits and becoming enwrapt in the

divine, he is esteemed by the many as beside himself, for they fail to

see that he is God-possessed.

... “As has been said, every human soul is by nature a beholder of

Being, else she would not have entered into this form of life. But it is

not easy for every soul to awaken those recollections which she brought

from thence, or they may then have had but scant vision of what was

there, or since they have fallen thence they may have had the mischance

to be diverted by bad associations to that which is unjust, and to fall

into forgetfulness of the holy things which they then beheld. A few are

left, who retain enough of the recollection; but whenever they behold

any resemblance of what is there, they are struck with astonishment, and

are no longer masters of themselves; but they know not why they are thus

affected, because they have no adequate perception. But there is no

brilliancy in those earthly likenesses of justice and temperance, and

whatever else is precious to the soul; for through obscure instruments,

it is given with difficulty and to but few to draw near to those images

and behold what manner of thing it is that they represent. But then it

was permitted to behold Beauty in all its splendor, when along with the

blessed chorus, we [philosophers] following Zeus, others some other of

the gods, we shared in the beatific vision and contemplation, and were

initiated into mysteries which it is just to call the most perfect of

all, and whose rapturous feast we kept in innocence, and while still

inexpert of those evils which were awaiting us in a time still future.

And we beheld visions innocent and simple and peaceful and happy, as if

spectators at the mysteries, in pure array, ourselves pure, and without

a sign upon us of this which we now carry about with us and call a body,

and are bound thereto like an oyster to his shell. Let us indulge in

these memories, whereby we are led to speak the longer from desire of

the things which we then saw.”[33]

We penetrate into the inmost secret of Plato’s thought in the

super-celestial plain, the dwelling-place of substantial ideas, the

essential Truth, the absolute knowledge, in which the pure Being holds

the supreme place which we assign to God, the Hindu to Brahm, and the

Egyptian to Osiris, but which the polytheist could not ascribe to his

gods. Plato, like the initiated priests of India and Egypt, to whom the

highest deity was nameless, knew the objects of common worship were but

exalted men, above whom was One whose nature was undisclosed to men, and

of whom it was audacious childishness to assert human attributes. The

Highest was the centre of those Realities dimly shadowed in earthly

appearance, and Plato’s pictorial representation of his thought is only

a parable cloaking the essential principle that during the eternal past

we have strayed from the real Truth through repeated lives into the

present.

Of Plato’s philosophy of preëxistence, Professor W. A. Butler says in

his masterly lectures on Ancient Philosophy: “It is certain that with

Plato the conviction was associated with a vast and pervading principle,

which extended through every department of nature and thought. This

principle was the priority of mind to body, both in order of dignity and

in order of time; a principle which with him was not satisfied by the

single admission of a _divine_ preëxistence, but extended through every

instance in which these natures could be compared. A very striking

example of the manner in which he thus generalized the principle of

priority of mind to body is to be found in the well-known passage in the

tenth book of his ‘Laws,’ in which he proves the existence of divine

energy. The argument employed really applies to every case of motion and

equally proves that every separate corporeal system is but a mechanism

moved by a spiritual essence anterior to itself. The universe is full of

gods, and the human soul is, as it were, the god or demon of the human

body.”

VI. The Jews had the best parallel of Plato’s Phædrus in the third

chapter of Genesis, describing the fall of Adam and Eve. The theological

comments upon that popular summary of the origin of sin have always

groped after reincarnation, by making all Adam’s descendants responsible

in him for that act. Many Jewish scholars undertook to fuse Greek

philosophy with their national religion. The Septuagint translation,

made in the third century before Christ, gives evidence of such a

purpose in suppressing the strong anthropomorphic terms by which the Old

Testament mentioned God. Aristobulus, a Jewish-Greek poet of the second

century, writes of Hebrew ideas in Platonic phrases. Similar passages

are found in Aristeas and in the second book of the Maccabees.

Pythagoreanism was blended with Judaism in the beliefs and practices of

the Jewish Therapeutæ of Egypt, and their brethren the Essenes of

Palestine.

Of the Essenes, Josephus writes: “The opinion obtains among them that

bodies indeed are corrupted, and the matter of them not permanent, but

that souls continue exempt from death forever; and that emanating from

the most subtle ether they are unfolded in bodies as prisons to which

they are drawn by some natural spell. But when loosed from the bonds of

flesh, as if released from a long captivity, they rejoice and are borne

upward.”

The most prominent Jewish writer upon this subject is Philo of

Alexandria, who lived in the time of Christ, and adapted a popular

version of Platonic ideas to the religion of his own people. He turned

the Hebrew stories into remarkably deft Platonic allegories. His theory

of preëxistence and re-births is practically that of his master Plato,

as is shown in this extract: “The company of disembodied souls is

distributed in various orders. The law of some of them is to enter

mortal bodies and after certain prescribed periods be again set free.

But those possessed of a diviner structure are absolved from all local

bonds of earth. Some of these souls choose confinement in mortal bodies

because they are earthly and corporeally inclined. Others depart, being

released again according to supernaturally determined times and seasons.

Therefore, all such as are wise, like Moses, are living abroad from

home. For the souls of such formerly chose this expatriation from

heaven, and through curiosity and the desire of acquiring knowledge they

came to dwell abroad in earthly nature, and while they dwell in the body

they look down on things visible and mortal around them, and urge their

way thitherward again whence they came originally: and call that

heavenly region in which they live their citizenship, fatherland, but

this earthly in which they live, foreign.” In choosing between the

Mosaic and the Platonic account of the Fall, as to which best expressed

the essential truth, although a Jew, he decided for Plato. He considers

men as fallen spirits attracted by material desires and thus brought

into the body’s prison, yet of kin to God and the ideal world. The

philosophic life is the means of escape, with the aid of the divine

Logos, or Spirit, to the blessed fellowship from which they have fallen.

Regeneration is a purification from matter. Philo renounced the creed of

his fathers in order to reform it, and his influence was profoundly felt

for centuries.

The origin of the Jewish Cabala is involved in endless dispute. Jewish

scholars claim that it is prehistoric. Although a portion of it is held

to have been composed in the Middle Ages, it is certain that its

teachings had been handed down by tradition from very early times, and

that some parts come from the Jewish philosophers of Alexandria and

others from the later Neo-Platonists and Gnostics. Preëxistence and

reincarnation appear here, not in Philo’s speculative form of it, but in

a much simpler and more matter-of-fact character,—affirming that human

spirits are again and again born into the world, after long intervals,

and in entire forgetfulness of their previous experiences. This is not a

curse, as in Plato’s religions, but a blessing, being the process of

purification by repeated probations. “All the souls,” says the Zohar, or

Book of Light, “are subject to the trials of transmigration; and men do

not know which are the ways of the Most High in their regard. They do

not know how many transformations and mysterious trials they must

undergo; how many souls and spirits come to this world without returning

to the palace of the divine king. The souls must reënter the absolute

substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this end they must

develop all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and

if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must

commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the

condition which fits them for reunion with God.”

VII.

REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.

Out from the heart of nature rolled

The burdens of the Bible old.

EMERSON.

The more diligently the student works this mine (the Bible), the

richer and more abundant he finds the ore; new light continually beams

from this source of heavenly knowledge to direct and illustrate the

work of God and the ways of men.—SIR WALTER SCOTT.

The divine oracles are not so silent in this matter as is imagined.

But truly I have so tender a sense of the sacred authority of that

holy volume that I dare not be so bold with it as to force it to speak

what I think it intends not. Wherefore I would not willingly urge

Scripture as a proof of anything, but what I am sure by the whole

tenor of it is therein contained. Would I take the liberty to fetch in

everything for a Scripture evidence that with a little industry a man

might make serviceable to his design, I doubt not but I should be able

to fill my margent with quotations which should be as much to purpose

as have been cited in general Catechisms and Confessions of Faith....

And yet I must needs say that there is very fair probability for

Pre-existence in the written word of God, as there is in that which is

engraved upon our rational natures.—GLANVIL, in _Lux Orientalis_.

VII.

REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.

The vitality of the doctrine of Reincarnation does not in the least

depend upon a scriptural endorsement of it, but the fact that it is

surprisingly conspicuous here is certainly interesting and confirmatory.

Every candid Christian student must acknowledge that the revelation of

truth is no more confined to the central book of Christendom than

sunshine is limited to the Orient. There must be great principles of

philosophy, like that of evolution, outside of the Bible; and yet the

most skeptical thinker has to concede that this volume is the richest

treasury of wisdom,—the best of which is still unlearned.

Although most Christians are unaware of it, reincarnation is strongly

present in the Bible, chiefly in the form of preëxistence. It is not

inculcated as a doctrine essential to redemption. Neither is

immortality. But it is taken for granted, cropping out here and there as

a fundamental rock. Some scholars consider it an unimportant oriental

speculation which is accidentally entangled into the texture. But the

uniform strength and beauty of its hold seem to rank it with the other

essential threads of the warp upon which is woven the noblest fabric of

religious thought.

A sufficient evidence of the Biblical support of pre-existence, and of

the consequent wide-spread belief in it among the Jews, is found in

Solomon’s long reference to it among his Proverbs. The wise king wrote

of himself: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way before

the works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or

ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when

there were no foundations abounding with water. Before the mountains

were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he had

not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of

the world. When he prepared the heavens I was there: when he set a

compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds

above: when he strengthened the foundations of the deep: when he gave to

the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment:

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 part of the earth; and my

delights were with the sons of men.”[34] This passage disposes of the

theory of Delitzsch that preëxistence in the Bible means simply an

existence in the foreknowledge of the creator. Such a mere foreknowledge

would not place him previous to the parts of creation which preceded his

earthly appearance. And the last two clauses clearly express a prior

physical life. The prophets, too, are assured of their pre-natal

antiquity. Jeremiah hears Jehovah tell him, “Before I formed thee in the

belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I

sanctified thee.”[35]

Skipping passages of disputed interpretation in Job and the Psalms which

suggest this idea, there is good evidence for it all through the Old

Testament, which is universally conceded by commentators, and was always

claimed by the Jewish rabbis. The translators have distinguished the

revealed form of Deity, as successively recorded in the Hebrew

Scriptures, by the word LORD, in capitals, separating this use of the

word from other forms, as the preëxistent Christ. “The angel of the

Lord” and “the angel of Jehovah” are other expressions for the same

manifestation of the Highest, which modern theology regards as the

second person of the Trinity. Wherever God is said to have appeared as

man, to Abraham at Mamre, to Jacob at Peniel, to Joshua at Gilgal, to

the three captives in the Babylonian furnace as “a fourth, like to the

Son of God,” etc., Christian scholarship has maintained this to be the

same person who afterward became the son of Mary. The Jews also consider

these various appearances to be their promised Christ. After the

captivity they held the same view concerning all persons. The apocryphal

“Wisdom of Solomon” teaches unmistakably the preëxistence of human souls

in Platonic form, although it probably is older than Philo, as when it

says (ix. 15), “I was an ingenuous child, and received a good soul; nay,

more, being good, I came into a body undefiled;” and “the corruptible

body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down

the mind that museth upon many things.” Glimpses of it appear also in

“Ecclesiasticus.”

The assertion of Josephus that this idea was common among the Pharisees

is proven in the Gospels, where members of the Sanhedrin cast the retort

at Jesus, “Thou wast altogether born in sins.”[36] The prevalence of

this feeling in the judgments of daily life is seen in the question put

to Jesus by his disciples, “Which did sin, this man or his parents, that

he was born blind?”[37] referring to the two contending popular

theories, that of Moses, who taught that the sins of the fathers would

descend on the children to the third and fourth generation, and that of

reincarnation, subsequently adopted, by which a man’s discomforts

resulted from his former misconduct. Jesus’ reply, “Neither,” is no

denial of the truth of reincarnation, for in other passages he

definitely affirms it of himself, but merely an indication that he

thought this truth had better not be given those listeners then, just as

he withheld other verities until the ripe time for utterance. This very

expression of preëxistence used by the disciples he employs toward the

man whom he healed at Bethesda’s pool after thirty-eight years of

paralysis: “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.”[38]

Repeatedly he confirms the popular impression that John the Baptist was

a reincarnation of Elijah. To the throng around him he said: “Among them

that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the

Baptist.” “If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to

come.”[39] That John the Baptist denied his former personality as Elijah

is not strange, for no one remembers distinctly his earlier life. Often

Jesus refers to his descent from heaven, as when he says, “I came down

from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent

me;”[40] and what he means by heaven is shown by his words to Nicodemus,

“No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven,

even the Son of man _which is in heaven_.”[41] The inference is that the

heaven in which he formerly lived was similar to the heaven of that

moment, namely earth. Again, Jesus asked his disciples, “Whom say men

that I am?” And his disciples state the popular thought in answering,

“Some say Elijah, others Jeremiah, and others one of the old prophets.”

“But whom say ye that I am?” Peter, the spokesman, replies, “Thou art

the Christ, the Son of God,” and so expresses another phase of the same

prevailing idea, for the Christ was also an Old Testament personage. And

Jesus approves this response. After Herod had decapitated John the

Baptist, the appearance of Jesus, also preaching and baptizing, roused

in him the apprehension that the prophet he killed had come again in a

second life.

Preëxistence, the premise necessarily leading to reincarnation, is the

keynote of the most spiritual of the Gospels. The initial sentence

sounds it, the body of the book often repeats it, and the final climax

is strengthened by it. From the proem, “In the beginning was the word,

and the word was with God,” all through the story occur frequent

allusions to it: “The word was made flesh” (John i. 14); “I am the

living bread which came down from Heaven” (vi. 51); “Ye shall see the

Son of man ascend up where he was before” (vi. 62); “Before Abraham was,

I am” (viii. 58); and finally, “Glorify thou me with the glory which I

had with thee before the world was” (xvii. 5); “For thou lovedst me

before the foundation of the world” (xvii. 24). It is always phrased in

such a form as might be asserted by any one, though the speaker says it

only of himself.

What the fourth Gospel dwells upon so fondly, and what is echoed in

other New Testament books,—as in Philippians ii. 7, “He took on him the

form of a servant,” in 2 Cor. viii. 9, “Though he was rich, yet for your

sakes he became poor,” and in 1 John i. 2, “That eternal Life which was

with the Father, and was manifested unto us,”—is a thought not limited

to the Christ. Precisely the same occurs in the mention of the

prophet-baptizer John: “There was a man sent from God” (John i. 6). The

obvious sense of this verse to the Christians nearest its publication

appears in the comments upon it by Origen, who says that it implies the

existence of John the Baptist’s soul previous to his terrestrial body,

and hints at the universal belief in preëxistence by adding, “And if the

_Catholic opinion_ hold good concerning the soul, as not propagated with

the body, but existing previously and for various reasons clothed in

flesh and blood, this expression, ‘sent from God,’ will no longer seem

extraordinary as applied to John.” No words could more exactly suit the

aspirations of an oriental believer in reincarnation than these in the

Apocalypse: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of

my God, _and he shall go no more out_” (Rev. iii. 12).

More important than any separate quotations is the general tone of the

Scriptures, which points directly toward reincarnation. They represent

the earthly life as a pilgrimage to the heavenly country of spiritual

union with God. It is our conceit and ignorance alone which deems a

single earthly life sufficient to accomplish that purpose. They teach

the sinful nature of all men and their responsibility for their sin,

which certainly demands previous lives for the acquisition of that

condition, as shown well by Chevalier Ramsay. (See pages 83–87.) St.

Paul’s idea of the Fall and of God are precisely those of Philo and

Origen. The Bible also treats Paradise as the ancient abode of man and

his future home, which requires a series of reincarnations as the

connecting chain.

VIII.

REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.

Our soul having lost its heavenly mansion came down into the earthly

body as a strange place.—PHILO.

The soul leaving the body becomes that power which it has most

developed. Let us fly, then, from here below, and rise to the

intellectual world, that we may not fall into a purely sensible life,

by allowing ourselves to follow sensible images; or into a vegetative

life, by abandoning ourselves to the pleasures of physical love and

gluttony: let us rise, I say, to the intellectual world, to

intelligence, to God himself.—PLOTINUS.

The order of things is regulated by the providential government of the

whole world; some powers falling down from a loftier position, others

gradually sinking to earth: some falling voluntarily, others being

cast down against their will: some undertaking of their own accord the

service of stretching out the hand to those who fall, others being

compelled to persevere for a long time in the duty which they have

undertaken.—JEROME.

All that flesh doth cover

Souls by source sublime

Are but slaves sold over

To the master Time,

To work out their ransom

For the ancient crime.

VIII.

REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.

The first centuries of Christianity found reincarnation still the

prevailing creed, as in all the previous ages, but with various shades

of interpretation. What these different phases of the same central

thought were may be gathered from Jerome’s catalogue, after the strife

between Eastern and Western ideas had been working for some centuries

and the present tendency of Europe had asserted itself. Jerome writes:

“As to the origin of the soul, I remember the question of the whole

church: whether it be fallen from heaven, as Pythagoras and the

Platonists and Origen believe; or be of the proper substance of God, as

the Stoics, Manichæans and Priscillian heretics of Spain believe; or

whether they are kept in a repository formerly built by God, as some

ecclesiastics foolishly believe; or whether they are daily made by God

and sent into bodies according to that which is written in the Gospel:

‘My Father worketh hitherto and I work;’ or whether by traduction, as

Tertullian, Apollinarius, and the greater part of the Westerns believe,

_i. e._, that as body from body so the soul is derived from the soul,

subsisting by the same condition with animals.”

In the form of Gnosticism it so strongly pervaded the early church that

the fourth Gospel was specially directed against it; but this Gospel

according to John attacked it only by advocating a broader rendering of

the same faith. We have seen that Origen refers to preëxistence as the

general opinion. Clemens Alexandrinus (Origen’s master) taught it as a

divine tradition authorized by St. Paul himself in Romans v. 12, 14, 19.

Ruffinus in his letter to Anastasius says that “This opinion was common

among the primitive fathers.” Later, Jerome relates that the doctrine of

transmigration was taught as an esoteric one communicated to only a

select few. But Nemesius emphatically declared that all the Greeks who

believed in immortality believed also in metempsychosis. Delitzsch says,

“It had its advocates as well in the synagogues as in the church.”

The Gnostics and Manichæans received it, with much else, from

Zoroastrian predecessors. The Neo-Platonists derived it chiefly from a

blending of Plato and the Orient. The Church Fathers drew it not only

from these sources, but from the Jews and the pioneers of Christianity.

Several of them condemn the Persian and Platonic philosophies and yet

hold to reincarnation in other guises. Aside from all authority, the

doctrine seems to have been rooted among the inaugurators of our era in

its adaptation to their mental needs, as the best explanation of the

ways of God and the nature of men.

I. The Gnostics were a school of eclectics which became conspicuous amid

the chaotic vortex of all religions in Alexandria, during the first

century. They sought to furnish the young Christian church with a

philosophic creed, and ranked themselves as the only initiates into a

mystical system of Christian truth which was too exalted for the masses.

Their thought was an elaborate structure of Greek ideas built upon

Parsee Dualism, maintaining that the world was created by some fallen

spirit or principle, and that the spirits of men were enticed from a

preëxistent higher stage by the Creator into the slavery of material

bodies. The evils and sins of life belong only to the degraded

prison-house of the spirit. The world is only an object of contempt.

Virtue consists in severest asceticism. To combat their theory that

Jesus was one of a vast number of beings between man and God, the fourth

Gospel was written. They spread widely through the first and second

centuries in many branches of belief. But most of their strength was

absorbed into Manichæism, which was a more logical union of Persian with

Christian and Greek ideas. In this simple faith the world is a creation

not of a fallen spirit, but of the primary evil principle, while the

spirit of man is the creation of God, and the conflict between flesh and

spirit is that between the powers of light and darkness. The Gnostic and

Manichæan notions of preëxistence perpetuated themselves in many of the

medieval sects, especially the Bogomiles, Paulicians, and Priscillians.

Seven adherents of the Priscillian heresy were put to death in Spain A.

D. 385, as the first instance of the death penalty visited by a

Christian magistrate for erroneous belief. The Italian Cathari were

another sect holding this form of reincarnation, against whom the

Albigensian Crusade of the elder De Montfort was sent, and the

inquisition devised by St. Dominic. Still they thrived in secret and

possessed a disguised hierarchy which long survived their violent

persecution. Similar sects descended from them still exist among the

Russian dissenters.

II. Contemporary with the Alexandrian Gnostics arose the philosophical

school of the Neo-Platonists which gathered into one the doctrines of

Pythagoras, Plato, and Buddhism,[42] and constructed a theology which

might make headway against Christianity by satisfying in a rational way

the longings which the new religion addressed. They too disclosed the

reality and nearness of a spiritual world, a reconciliation with God,

and the pathway for returning to Him. The distinguishing principle of

Neo-Platonism is _emanation_, which took the place of creation. From the

eternal Intelligence proceeds the multiplicity of souls which comprise

the intelligible world, and of which the worldsoul is the highest and

all-embracing source. They insisted upon the distinct individuality of

each soul, and earnestly combated the charge of Pantheism. Souls who

have descended into the delusion of matter did so from pride and a

desire of false independence. They now forget their former estate and

the Father whom they have deserted. The mission of men, in the dying

words of Plotinus, is “to bring the divine within them into harmony with

that which is divine in the universe.” The Neo-Platonists fought

Gnosticism as fiercely as Christianity. Plotinus, by far the best of

their writers, as well as the oldest whose works are preserved, devotes

a whole book of his Enneads to the refutation of the doctrines of

Valentinus, the brightest of the Gnostics. Contrary to the latter’s

thought, that men are fallen into the miry pit of matter which is wholly

bad, Plotinus claims that the world of matter, although the least divine

part of the universe because remotest from the One, is still good and

the best place for man’s development. From its former life he insists

the soul has not fallen and cannot, but has descended into the lower

stage of existence through innate weakness of intellect in order to be

prepared for a higher exaltation.

The most important of this group of thinkers were Ammonius Saccas,

Plotinus, and Porphyry in the third century, Jamblichus in the fourth,

Hierocles and Proclus in the fifth, and Damascius in the sixth. It

flourished with energy for over three hundred years, and as its ideas

were largely appropriated by Christian theologians and philosophers,

beginning with Origen, it has never ceased to be felt through

Christendom. Giordano Bruno, the martyr of the Italian reformation,

popularized it, and handed it over to later philosophers. The philosophy

of Emerson is substantially a revival of Plotinus. Coleridge is also

strongly influenced by him.

As Plotinus is in some respects the most interesting of all the older

writers, and taught reincarnation in a form thoroughly rational and

supremely helpful, meeting Western needs in this regard more directly

than any other philosopher, we quote at some length from his scarce

essay on “The Descent of the Soul.”

“When any particular soul acts in discord from the One, flying from the

whole and apostasizing from thence by a certain disagreement, no longer

beholding an intelligible nature, from its partial blindness, in this

case it becomes deserted and solitary, impotent and distracted with

care; for it now directs its mental eye to a part, and by a separation

from that which is universal, attaches itself as a slave to one

particular nature. It thus degenerates from the whole and governs

particulars with anxiety and fatigue, assiduously cultivating externals

and becoming not only present with body, but profoundly entering into

its dark abodes. Hence, too, by such conduct the wings of the soul are

said to suffer a defluxion and she becomes fettered with the bonds of

body, after deserting the safe and innoxious habit of governing a better

nature which flourishes with universal soul. The soul, therefore,

falling from on high, suffers captivity, is loaded with fetters, and

employs the energies of sense; because in this case her intellectual

longing is impeded from the first. She is reported also to be buried and

to be concealed in a cave; but when she converts herself to intelligence

she then breaks her fetters and ascends on high, receiving first of all

from reminiscence the ability of contemplating real beings; at the same

time possessing something supereminent and ever abiding in the

intelligible world. Souls therefore are necessarily of an amphibious

nature, and alternately experience a superior and inferior condition of

being; such as are able to enjoy a more intimate converse with Intellect

abiding for a longer period in the higher world, and such to whom the

contrary happens, either through nature or fortune, continuing longer

connected with these inferior concerns.”...

“Thus, the soul, though of divine origin, and proceeding from the

regions on high, becomes merged in the dark receptacle of the body, and

being naturally a posterior god, it descends hither through a certain

voluntary inclination, for the sake of power and of adorning inferior

concerns. By this means it receives a knowledge of its latent powers,

and exhibits a variety of operations peculiar to its nature, which by

perpetually abiding in an incorporeal habit, and never proceeding into

energy, would have been bestowed in vain. Besides the soul would have

been ignorant of what she possessed, her powers always remaining dormant

and concealed: since energy everywhere exhibits capacity, which would

otherwise be entirely occult and obscure, and without existence, because

not endued with one substantial and true. But now indeed every one

admires the intellectual powers of the soul, through the variety of her

external effects.”...

“Through an abundance of desire the soul becomes profoundly merged into

matter, and no longer totally abides with the universal soul. Yet our

souls are able alternately to rise from hence carrying back with them an

experience of what they have known and suffered in their fallen state;

from whence they will learn how blessed it is to abide in the

intelligible world, and by a comparison, as it were, of contraries, will

more plainly perceive the excellence of a superior state. For the

experience of evil produces a clearer knowledge of good. This is

accomplished in our souls according to the circulations of time, in

which a conversion takes place from subordinate to more exalted natures.

“Indeed, if it were proper to speak clearly what appears to me to be the

truth, contrary to the opinions of others, the whole of our soul also

does not enter into the body, but something belonging to it always

abides in the intelligible, and something different from this in the

sensible world: and that which abides in the sensible world, if it

conquers, or rather if it is vanquished and disturbed, does not permit

us to perceive that which the supreme part of the soul contemplates; for

that which is understood then arrives at our nature when it descends

within the limits of sensible inspection. For every soul possesses

something which inclines downwards to body, and something which tends

upwards toward intellect; and the soul, indeed, which is universal and

of the universe, by its part which is inclined towards body, governs the

whole without labor and fatigue, transcending that which it governs.

“But souls which are particular and of a part are too much occupied by

sense, and by a perception of many things happening contrary to nature

are surrounded by a multitude of foreign concerns. It is likewise

subject to a variety of affections, and is ensnared by the allurements

of pleasure. But the superior part of the soul is never influenced by

fraudulent delights, and lives a life always uniform and divine.”

III. Many of the orthodox Church Fathers welcomed reincarnation as a

ready explanation of the fall of man and the mystery of life, and

distinctly preached it as the only means of reconciling the existence of

suffering with a merciful God. It was an essential part of the church

philosophy for many centuries in the rank and file of Christian thought,

being stamped with the authority of the leading thinkers of Christendom,

and then gradually was frowned upon as the Western influences

predominated, until it became heresy and at length survived only in a

few scattered sects.

Justin Martyr expressly speaks of the soul inhabiting more than once the

human body, and denies that on taking a second time the embodied form it

can remember previous experiences. Afterwards, he says, souls which have

become unworthy to see God in human guise, are joined to the bodies of

wild beasts. Thus he openly defends the grosser phase of metempsychosis.

Clemens Alexandrinus is declared by a contemporary to have written

“wonderful stories about metempsychosis and many worlds before Adam.”

Arnobius, also, is known to have frankly avowed this doctrine.

Noblest of all the church advocates of this opinion was Origen. He

regarded the earthly history of the human race as one epoch in an

historical series of changeful decay and restoration, extending backward

and forward into æons; and our temporal human body as the place of

purification for our spirits exiled from a happier existence on account

of sin. He taught that souls were all originally created by God _minds_

of the same kind and condition, that is of the same essence as the

infinite Mind, and that they exercised their freedom of will, some

wisely and well, others with abuse in different degrees, producing the

divergences now apparent in mankind. From that old experience some souls

have retained more than others of the pristine condition. The lapsed

souls God clothed with bodies and sent into this world, both to expiate

their temerity and to prepare themselves for a better future. The

variety of their offenses caused the diversity of their terrestrial

conditions. In these bodies, each enjoys that lot which most exactly

suited his previous habits. On these the whole earthly circumstances of

man, internal and external, even his whole life from birth, depend. In

this way alone he thought the justice of God could be defended. But when

men keep themselves free from contagion in bodily existence and restrain

the turbulent movements of sense and imagination, being gradually

purified from the body they ascend on high and are at last changed into

_minds_, of which the earthly souls are corruptions. In his own words,

“Here is the cause of the diversing among rational creatures, not in the

will or decision of the creature, but in the freedom of individual

liberty. For God justly disposing of his creatures according to their

desert united the diversities of minds in one congruous world, that he

might, as it were, adorn his mansion (in which ought to be not only

vases of gold and silver, but of wood also and clay, and some to honor

and some to dishonor) with these diverse vases, minds, or souls. To

these causes the world owes its diversity, while Divine Providence

disposes each according to his tendency, mind, and disposition.”

“If from unknown reasons the soul be already not exactly worthy of being

born in an irrational body, nor yet exactly in one purely rational, it

is furnished with a monstrous body, so that reason cannot be fully

developed by one thus born, the nature of the body being fashioned

either of a higher or lower body according to the scope of the reason.”

“I think this is a question how it happens that the human mind is

influenced now by the good now by the evil. The causes of this I suspect

to be more ancient than this corporeal birth.”

“If our course be not marked out according to our works before this

life, how is it true that it is not unjust in God that the elder should

serve the younger and be hated, before he had done things deserving of

servitude and of hatred.”

“By the fall and by the cooling from a life of the Spirit came that

which is now the soul, which is also capable of a return to her original

condition, of which I think the prophet speaks in this: ‘Return unto thy

rest, O my soul.’ So that the whole is this—how the mind becomes a soul

and how the soul rectified becomes a mind.”

Concerning preëxistence in the Bible, Origen writes, in his “De

Principiis”: “The Holy Scriptures have called the creation of the world

by a new and peculiar name, terming it καταβολή, which has been very

improperly translated into Latin by ‘constitutio’; for in Greek

καταβολή; signifies rather ‘dejicere,’ _i. e._, to cast downwards,—a

word which has been improperly translated into Latin by the phrase

‘constitutio mundi,’ as where the Saviour says, ‘And there will be

tribulation in those days, such as was not since the beginning of the

world;’[43] in which passage καταβολή is rendered by beginning

(constitutio). The Apostle also has employed the language, saying, ‘Who

hath chosen us before the foundation of the world;’[44] and this

foundation he calls καταβολή, to be understood in the same sense as

before. It seems worth while, then, to inquire what is meant by this new

term; and I am, indeed, of the opinion that as the end and consummation

of the saints will be in those (ages) which are not seen, and are

eternal, we must conclude that rational creatures had also a similar

beginning. And if they had a beginning such as the end for which they

hope, they existed undoubtedly from the very beginning in those (ages)

which are not seen, and are eternal. And if this is so, then there has

been a descent from a higher to a lower condition, on the part not only

of those souls who have deserved the change by the variety of their

movements, but also on that of those who, in order to serve the whole

world, were brought down from those higher and invisible spheres to

these lower and visible ones, although against their will. From this it

follows that by the use of the word καταβολή, a descent from a higher to

a lower condition, shared by all in common, would seem to be pointed

out. The hope of freedom is entertained by the whole of creation—of

being liberated from the corruption of slavery—when the sons of God, who

either fell away or were scattered abroad, shall be gathered into one,

and when they shall have fulfilled their duties in this world.”

Many contemporaneous and subsequent writers censured Origen for this

opinion, but his doctrine was maintained by a large number of strong

followers and independent thinkers.

Even in Jerome and Augustine certain passages indicate that they held

this theory in part. In his Epistle to Avitus, Jerome agrees with Origen

as to the interpretation of the passage above mentioned by Origen, “Who

hath chosen us before the foundation of the world.” He says “a divine

habitation, and a true rest above, I think, is to be understood, where

rational creatures dwelt, and where, before their descent to a lower

position, and removal from invisible to visible (worlds), and fall to

earth, and need of gross bodies, they enjoyed a former blessedness.

Whence God the Creator made for them bodies suitable to their humble

position, and created this visible world and sent into the world

ministers for their salvation.”

The Latin Fathers Nemesius, Synesius, and Hilarius boldly defend

preëxistence, though taking exception to Origen’s form of it. Of

Synesius, most familiar to English readers as the convent patriarch in

“Hypatia,” it is known that when the citizens of Ptolemais invited him

to their bishopric, he declined that dignity for the reason that he

cherished certain opinions which they might not approve, as after mature

reflection they had struck deep roots in his mind. Foremost among these

he mentioned the doctrine of preëxistence. Vestiges of this belief are

discerned in his writings; for example, in the Greek hymn paraphrased as

follows:—

Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark

Through this thin vase of clay

Athwart the waves of chaos dark

Emits a timorous ray!

This mind-enfolding soul is sown

Incarnate germ in earth.

In pity, blessed Lord, then own

What claims in Thee its birth.

Far forth from Thee, Thou central fire,

To earth’s sad bondage cast,

Let not the trembling spark expire,

Absorb Thine own at last.

Another of this group, Prudentius, entertained nearly the same idea as

that of Origen concerning the soul’s descent from higher seats to earth,

as appears in one of his hymns:—

O Saviour, bid my soul, thy trembling spouse,

Return at last to Thee believing.

Bind, bind anew those all unearthly vows

She broke on high and wandered grieving.

Although Origen’s teaching was condemned by the Council of

Constantinople in 551, it permanently colored the stream of Christian

theology, not only in many scholastics and medieval heterodoxies, but

through all the later course of religious thought, in many isolated

individuals and groups.

IX.

REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.

A man may travel from one end of the kingdom to the other without

money, feeding and lodging as well as the people.

A MISSIONARY IN BURMAH.

Buddhism has not deceived, and it has not persecuted. In this

respect it can teach Christians a lesson. The unconditioned command,

“Thou shalt not kill,” which applies to all living creatures, has

had great influence in softening the manners of the Monguls. This

command is connected with the doctrine of transmigration of souls,

which is one of the essential doctrines of this system as well as of

Brahmanism. Buddhism also inculcates a positive humanity consisting

of good actions.—JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

He lived musing the woes of man,

The ways of fate, the doctrines of the books,

The secrets of the silence whence all come,

The secrets of the gloom whereto all go,

The life that lies between like that arch flung

From cloud to cloud across the sky, which hath

Mists for its masonry and vapory piers.

THE LIGHT OF ASIA.

IX.

REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.

The religious philosophy of the Orient, like everything else there,

remains now substantially the same as in the earliest times. History

cannot say when Brahmanism did not flourish among the multitudes of

India. Buddhism, the later Protestant phase of the old faith, which

abolished its abuses of priesthood and caste and spread its

reformation broadcast through Asia, did not alter the original

teaching of re-birth, but rather confirmed and popularized the truth

that has lain at the heart of India from remotest ages. Reincarnation

is the sap-root of eastern religion and permeates the Veda scriptures.

While it is claimed by the West that the religion of Sakya Muni is

below that of Jesus, as inspiring an exalted selfishness in

distinction to the generous sacrifice taught by Christianity; while it

is true that the best Buddhists lead a passive, submissive life which

made them easy spoil for conquering races and has not accomplished any

result in civilization since the first ancient subjugation; while

Buddhism with its mortification and self-centred goodness is even more

distasteful to the western race than the meditative dreamy asceticism

of Brahmanism: it is equally certain that these eastern religions are

far more really lived by their followers than Christianity is with us;

it must be admitted that a spiritual selfishness, which is so

thoroughly practiced as to bear all the fruits of generous love, is

preferable to a noble sacrifice, which is so largely precept as to

appear to the naked eye a civilized barbarism; and it is worth

considering whether Christendom may not gain as much by learning the

secret of Eastern superiority to materialism, as the Orient is gaining

by the infusion of Western activity. Travelers agree that in many

parts of inner China, Thibet, Central India, and Ceylon the daily life

of Buddhism is so like the realization of Christianity, as to give

strong support to the theory of the Indian origin of our religion.

There is a practical demonstration of what reincarnation will do for a

race, and a hint of the grander result which would accrue from

grafting that principle into the real life of the stronger Saxon,

Teutonic, and Celtic stock. Knowing the indestructibility of the soul,

the evanescence of the body, and the permanence of spiritual traits as

formed by thought, word, and deed, the whole energy of life is focused

upon purity of self and charity to others. To love one’s enemies, to

abstain from even defensive warfare, to govern the soul, to obey one’s

superiors, to venerate age, to provide food and shelter, to tolerate

all differences of opinion and religion, are guiding maxims of actual

life. They are as vitally and generally translated into flesh and

blood as in primitive Christianity or in Count Tolstoi’s flock.

Honesty, modesty, and simplicity prevail in these sections. Women are

held in the same esteem as in the ancient Sanskrit epoch, and children

are treated more beautifully than in many Christian homes. A lady

traveler, known to the writer, who witnessed this, said that if her

lot were that of a friendless woman, she knew no place on earth where

she would labor and dwell more happily than in Ceylon. As the

peasantry receive reincarnation in the simplest and extremest form of

human re-births in animal bodies, every living creature is regarded by

them as a possible relative. Gentleness to the animal creation abounds

as nowhere else in the world. It is a sin to kill any beast. It is a

virtue to offer one’s life for a distressed animal, as the popular

tradition holds that Buddha did in one life by throwing himself to a

famished tigress. Death is no object of dread, but a welcome

benefactor, transferring them forward in their progress to the goal of

rest. To die for any good purpose, as under the sacred Brahman car of

Juggernaut, or in some one’s behalf, is the common aspiration; so much

so that it is difficult for the missionaries to gain any feeling for

the death on the cross, as they think any one would easily suffer

that.

The Brahmans have for ages studied the problems of ontology and the

soul’s future, by severest introspection and acutest thought, to build

their system, which is a vast elaboration of religious metaphysics,

upon a theistic basis. Reincarnation is the cornerstone of this

structure. Many of the higher Brahmans are believed to have penetrated

the veils concealing past existences. It is related, for instance,

that when Apollonius of Tyana visited India, the Brahman Iarchus told

him that “the truth concerning the soul is as Pythagoras taught you

and as we taught the Egyptians,” and mentioned that he (Apollonius) in

a previous incarnation was an Egyptian steersman, and had refused the

inducements offered him by pirates to guide his vessel into their

hands. The common people of India are sure that certain of the

Brahmans and Buddhists are still able to verify by their finer senses

the reality of reincarnation. And many educated natives and resident

foreigners in India have witnessed evidences of this keen power of

insight associated with other extraordinary qualities which compelled

them to believe in it.

Brahmanism and Buddhism are practically agreed upon the philosophy of

reincarnation, as the great Buddhist revolt against priestcraft only

emphasized this doctrine. Every branch of these systems aims at the

means of winning escape from the necessity of repeated births. The

ardent and final desire of all is expressed by the words of the sage

Bharata:—

“And may the purple self-existent god (Siva),

Whose vital energy pervades all space,

From future transmigrations save my soul.”

There are, however, great differences in these two faiths as to the

means and the result. Both contend that all forms are the penance of

nature. They regard personal existence as an empty delusion and the

exemption from it as true salvation. The Brahman seeks Nirvana, which

is absorption in Brahm, as the reality at the heart of things; the

Buddhist considers this also unreal, and finds no reality but in the

silence and peace attained beyond Nirvana. In the Brahman’s paradise,

one is so free from desire that no need remains for perpetuating his

individual existence. But after that comes Pan-Nirvana, which is utter

inaction and disappearance, a condition so difficult for a Western

mind to comprehend that it persists in falsely calling it and Nirvana

alike—annihilation. The Buddhist’s one duty of life and the means of

attaining his goal is mortification, the extinction of affection and

desire. But the Brahman’s work is contemplation, illumination,

communion with Brahm, religious study, and asceticism. The creed of

Buddhism is universal; that of Brahmanism is exclusive. The Buddhist

saint may come from any class, for the _raison d’être_ of his faith is

the abolition of caste. But only the wearer of the sacred Brahman

thread can aspire to direct union with Brahm; the lower castes must

undergo painful fakir penances until they attain the Brahman estate.

Northern Buddhism has been defined as almost identical with

Gnosticism. It has spun a dense fabric of legend and speculation about

this central thought of the soul’s gradual evolution from the natural

to the spiritual. The Hindus believe that human souls emanated from

the Supreme Being, and became gradually immersed in matter, forgetting

their divine origin, and straying in bewildered condition back to him

through many lives, after a protracted round of births in partial

reparation. Having become contaminated with sin, we must work out our

release through earthly lives in the delusive arena of sense until the

reality of spiritual existence is attained. So long as the soul is not

pure enough for re-mergence into Brahm, we must be born again

repeatedly, and the degree of our impurity determines what these

births shall be. So closely is the account of the soul’s misdeeds kept

that it may pass through thousands of years in one or another of the

heavens in reward for good deeds, and yet be obliged later to descend

to earth for certain ancient sins. The Laws of Manu give a standard by

which the moral consequences of various human actions are measured

with great detail.[45] A more general doctrine is based on the

assumption of three Cosmic qualities—goodness, passion, and

darkness—in the human soul. On this ground Manu and other writers

built an intricate theory, providing that souls of the first quality

become deities, those of the second, men, and those of the third,

beasts.

The Hindu conception of reincarnation embraces all existence—gods,

men, animals, plants, minerals. It is believed that everything

migrates, from Buddha down to inert matter. Hardy tells us that Buddha

himself was born an ascetic eighty-three times, a monarch fifty-eight

times, as the soul of a tree forty-three times, and many other times

as ape, deer, lion, snipe, chicken, eagle, serpent, pig, frog, etc.,

amounting to four hundred times in all. A Chinese authority represents

Buddha as saying, “The number of my births and deaths can only be

compared to those of all the plants in the universe.” Birth is the

gate which opens into every state, and merit determines into which it

shall open. Earth and human life are an intermediary stage, resulting

from many previous places and forms and introducing many more. There

are multitudes of inhabited worlds upon which the same person is

successively born according to his attractions. To the earthly life he

may return again and again, dropping the memory of past experiences,

and carrying, like an embryonic germ, the concisest summary of former

lives into each coming one. Every act bears upon the resultant which

shall steer the soul into its next habitation, not only on earth, but

in the more exalted or debased regions of “Heaven” and “Hell.” Thus

“the chain of the law” binds all existences, and the only escape is by

the final absorption into Brahm.

While the Hindus generally hold that the same soul appears at

different births, the heretical Southern Buddhists teach that the

succession of existences is a succession of souls, bred from one

another, like the sprouting of new generations from plants and

animals, and like the new light kindled from an old lamp, the result,

but not the identity of the former. Another curious aspect of these

Indian speculations is the view of certain Northern Buddhists, who

divide eternity into gigantic cycles which shall at length bring

around again a precise repetition of earlier events. This is similar

to the grand periodic year of the Stoics and of the Epicurean

Atomists, and to the continual metempsychosis of Pythagoras, which

provided that the identical Plato would again and again, at certain

tremendous intervals staggering any one but a Greek or Hindu

metaphysician, appear at the same Academy and deliver the same

lectures, etc.

Zoroastrians and Sufi Mohamedans, with their usual antipathy to Indian

thought, limit their conceptions of reincarnation to a few repeated

lives on earth, which some of the Persian and Arabian mystics stretch

out to a larger number, but soon disappearing either back into the

original source or into darker scenes.

X.

EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.

Here shalt thou pluck from the most ancient shells

The whitest pearls of wisdom’s treasury.

EDWIN ARNOLD.

Young and enterprising is the West,

Old and meditative is the East.

Turn, O youth! with intellectual zest

Where the sage invites thee to his feast.

Eastward roll the orbs of heaven,

Westward tend the thoughts of men.

Let the poet, nature-driven,

Wander eastward now and then.

MILNES.

X.

EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.

All Eastern poetry finds a favorite theme in metempsychosis, and the

literature of India is thoroughly saturated with it. The fervent

passion, the subtle thought, the luxuriant imagery which permeate

Asiatic life are centred upon this common philosophy. But the best

portion of this enormous wealth of fantasy is withheld from us, simply

because of its revelry in this very thought which is generally

unattractive to the West. What oriental poetry enters our language is

chiefly erotic or epic, and the most characteristic of all is left for

the few educated natives to enjoy. We can therefore only select a few

representative gems from this unworked mine, illustrating the Muses of

India, Persia, and Arabia. Among the ancient Sanskrit epics are

discovered beautiful renderings of the thought of many births. The

delicacy and tenderness of Persian poetry furnish charming expressions

of the Zoroastrian aspirations for release from earthly bondages to

reascend homeward. The Arabian mysticism of the Sufis directs their

intense subjectivity into ecstatic phrasings of the same idea.

In the wonderful ancient Sanskrit drama “Sakoontala” by Kalidésa,

translated by Monier Williams, occur these passages:—

This peerless maid is like a fragrant flower

Whose perfumed breath has never been diffused.

A gem of priceless water, just released

Pure and unblemished from its glittering bed.

Or rather is she like the mellowed fruit

Of virtuous actions in some former birth

Now brought to full perfection.

That song has filled me with a most peculiar sweetness.

I seem to yearn after some long forgotten love.

Not seldom in our happy hours of ease

When thought is still, the sight of some fair form,

Or mournful fall of music breathing low

Will stir strange fancies thrilling all the soul

With a mysterious sadness and a sense

Of vague yet earnest longing. Can it be

That the dim memory of events long passed,

Or friendships formed in other states of being

Flits like a passing shadow o’er the spirit?

The Sanskrit “Katha Upanishad,” in Edwin Arnold’s rendering as “The

Secret of Death,” contains a full explanation of the Eastern doctrine.

For his noble sacrifice Yama (Death) grants to Nachikêtas the

privilege of asking three boons. After naming and receiving the first

two Nachikêtas says:—

“Thou dost give peace—is that peace nothingness?

Some say that after death the soul still lives,

Personal, conscious; some say, nay, it ends:

Fain would I know which of these twain be true,

By the enlightened. Be my third boon this.”

Then Yama answered, “This was asked of old,

Even by the gods! This is a subtle thing,

Not to be told, hard to be understood:

Ask me some other boon: I may not grant.”

Nachikêtas insists upon this, and will not accept the wealths, powers,

and pleasures which Death offers as a substitute.

Then Yama yielded, granting the great boon,

And spake: “Know, first of all, that what is Good

And what is Pleasant—these be separate!

By many ways, in diverse instances

Pleasure and Good lay hold upon each man!

Blessed is he who, choosing high, lets go

Pleasure for Good. The Pleasure-seekers lose

Life’s end, so lived. The Pleasant and the Good

Solicit men: the sage, distinguishing

By understanding, followeth the Good,

Being more excellent. The foolish man

Cleaveth to Pleasure, seeking still to have,

To keep, enjoy. The foolish ones who live

In ignorance, holding themselves as wise

And well instructed, tread the round of change

With erring steps, deluded, like the blind

Led by the blind. The necessary road

Which brings to life unchanging is not seen

By such: wealth dazzles heedless hearts: deceived

With shows of sense, they deem their world is real

And the unseen is naught; so, constantly,

Fall they beneath my stroke. To reach to Being

Beyond all seeming Being, to know true life—

This is not gained by many; seeing that few

So much as hear of it, and of those few

The more part understandeth not.

“The uttermost true soul is ill-perceived

By him who, unenlightened, sayeth: I

Am I: thou, thou; and the life divided: He

That knoweth life undifferenced, declares

The spirit, what it is, One with the All.

And this is Truth. But nowise shall the truth

Be compassed, if thou speak of small and great.

“Excellent youth! the knowledge thou didst crave

Comes not with speech: words are the false world’s signs.

By insight surely comes it if one hears.

Lo! thou hast loved the Truth, and striven for it.

I would that others, Nachikêtas, strove!

“Only the wise who patiently do sever

Their thought from shows and fix it upon truths,

See HIM, the Perfect and Unspeakable,

Hard to be seen, retreating, ever hid

Deeper and deeper in the uttermost;

Whose house was never entered, who abides

Now and before and always; and so seeing

Are freed from griefs and pleasures.”

“Make it known to me,” he saith,

“Who is HE? what? whom thou hast knowledge of.”

Then Yama spake:

“The answer whereunto all vedas lead;

The answer whereunto as penance strives;

The answer whereunto those strive that live

As seekers after God—hear this from me.

Who knoweth the word Om (which meaneth God)

With all its purports; what his heart would have

His heart possesseth. This of spoken speech

Is wisest, deepest, best, supremest. He

That speaketh it, and wotteth what he speaks

Is worshiped in the place of Brahm, with Brahm!

Also, the soul which knoweth thus itself

It is not born. It doth not die. It sprang

From none, and it begetteth none. Unmade,

Immortal, changeless, primal. I can break

The body, but that soul I cannot harm.”

“If he that slayeth thinks ‘I slay’; if he

Whom he doth slay thinks ‘I am slain,’ then both

Know not aright. That which was life in each

Cannot be slain nor slay. The untouched soul,

Greater than all the worlds (because the worlds

By it subsist); smaller than subtleties

Of things minutest; last of ultimates,

Sits in the hollow heart of all that lives!

Whoso hath laid aside desire and fear,

His senses mastered and his spirit still,

Sees in the quiet light of verity

Eternal, safe, majestical—his soul:

Resting it ranges everywhere: asleep

It roams the world, unsleeping: who, save I,

Know that divinest spirit as it is,

Glad beyond joy, existing outside life?

Beholding it in bodies bodiless,

Amid impermanency permanent,

Embracing all things, yet in the midst of all

The mind enlightened casts its grief away:

It is not to be known by knowledge: man

Wotteth it not by wisdom: learning vast

Halts short of it: only by soul itself

Is soul perceived—when the Soul wills it so

There shines no light save its own light to show

Itself unto itself: none compasseth

Its joy who is not wholly ceased from sin,

Who dwells not self-controlled, self-centred, calm,

Lord of himself. It is not gotten else.

Brahm hath it not to give.

“The man unwise, unmindful, evil-lived

Comes not to that fixed place of peace; he falls

Back to the region of sense life again.

The wise and mindful one, heart purified,

Attaineth to the changeless Place, wherefrom

Never again shall births renew for him.

Then hath he freedom over all worlds

And, if it wills the region of the Past,

The fathers and the mothers of the Past

Come to receive it; and that soul is glad:

And if it wills the regions of the Homes,

The Brothers and the Sisters of the Homes

Come to receive it; and that soul is glad:

And if it wills the region of the Friends,

The well-beloved come to welcome it

With love undying; and that soul is glad.

And if it wills a world of grace and peace

Where garlands are and perfumes and delights

Of delicate meats and drinks, music and song,

Lo! fragrances and blossoms and delights

Of dainty banquets and the streams of song

Come to it; and that soul is glad.

Whoso once perceiveth HIM that is

Without a name, Unseen, Impalpable,

Bodiless, Timeless, such an one is saved,

Death hath not power upon him.”

Although not an Asiatic poem in the ordinary sense, we do not hesitate

to place in this cluster Edwin Arnold’s “Light of Asia.” After the

festival scene in which the prince distributed prizes to the maiden

victors in the sports, and his love had centred upon Yasôdhara, the

last of the contestants, follow these lines:—

Long after, when enlightenment was full,

Lord Buddha, being prayed why thus his heart

Took fire at first glance of the Sâkya girl,

Answered: “We were not strangers as to us

And all it seemed; in ages long gone by

A hunter’s son, playing with forest girls

By Yamun’s springs, where Nandadevi stands

Sate umpire while they raced beneath the firs

Like hares at eve that run their playful rings;

One with flower-like stars crowned he, one with long plumes,

Plucked from the pheasant and the jungle cock,

One with fir apples; but who ran the last

Came first for him, and unto her the boy

Gave a tame fawn and his heart’s love beside.

And in the wood they lived many glad years,

And in the wood they undivided died.

Lo! as hid seed shoots after rainless years,

So good and evil, pains and pleasures, hates

And loves, and all dead deeds come forth again

Bearing bright leaves or dark, sweet fruit or sour.

Thus was I he and she Yasôdhara;

And while the wheel of birth and death turns round

That which hath been must be between us two.”

In other passages of the same poem Buddha tells how his athletic

triumph over the suitors for Yasôdhara, in which she wore a black and

gold veil, was but a new version of an ancient forest battle, when as

a tiger he conquered all the rival claimants for the black and

gold-striped tigress Yasôdhara; how ages before in time of famine,

when he was a Brahman, he compassionately threw himself to a starving

tigress; and how his final salvation of Yasôdhara by the enlightened

doctrine repeated a transaction centuries old, when he was a pearl

merchant and sacrificed the priceless gem containing all his fortune

to rescue this same wife Yasôdhara from hunger.

* * * * *

A typical expression of the Zoroastrian phase of reincarnation is

found in this poem:—

FROM THE PERSIAN.

BY ARCHBISHOP R. C. TRENCH.

Happy are you, starry brethren, who from heaven do not roam,

In the eternal Father’s mansion from the first have dwelt at home.

Round the Father’s throne forever standing in his countenance,

Sunning you, you see the seven circling heavens around you dance.

Me he has cast out to exile in a distant land to learn

How I should love Him the Father, how for that true country yearn.

I lie here, a star of heaven, fallen upon this gloomy place,

Scarce remembering what bright courses I was once allowed to trace.

Still in dreams it comes upon me, that I once on wings did soar;

But or e’er my flight commences this my dream must all be o’er.

When the lark is climbing upward in the sunbeam, then I feel

Even as though my spirit also hidden pinions could reveal.

I a rosebud to this lower soil of earth am fastly bound,

And with heavenly dew besprinkled still am rooted to the ground.

Yet the life is struggling upward, stirring still with all their

might,

Yearning buds that cry to open to the warmth and heavenly light.

From its stalk released, my flower soars not yet a butterfly,

But meanwhile my fragrant incense evermore I breathe on high.

By my Gardener to his garden I shall once transplanted be,

There where I have been already written from eternity.

Oh, my brothers blooming yonder, unto Him the ancient—pray

That the hour of my transplanting He will not for long delay.

Hafiz, the prince of Persian poets, figures the soul as the phœnix

alighting on Tuba, the Tree of Life:—

My phœnix long ago secured

His nest in the sky-vault’s cope;

In the body’s cage immured

He was weary of life’s hope.

Round and round this heap of ashes

Now flies the bird amain,

But in that odorous niche of heaven

Nestles the bird again.

Once flies he upward he will perch

On Tuba’s golden bough;

His home is on that fruited arch

Which cools the blest below.

If over this sad world of ours

His wings my phœnix spread,

How gracious falls on land and sea

The soul-refreshing shade!

Either world inhabits he,

Sees oft below him planets roll;

His body is all of air compact,

Of Allah’s love, his soul.

The following Sufi poem will illustrate the passionate phase of

reincarnation which appears in the spiritual absorption of the

Mohammedan mystics. It is not surprising that the intensity of their

rapturous piety has drawn among their ranks of meditative devotees the

most distinguished religionists, philosophers, and poets of the whole

Persian and Arabian Orient:

THE SUCCESSFUL SEARCH.

I was ere a name had been named upon earth,—

Ere one trace yet existed of aught that has birth,—

When the locks of the Loved One streamed forth for a sign,

And being was none save the Presence Divine!

Ere the veil of the flesh for Messiah was wrought

To the Godhead I bowed in prostration of thought.

I measured intensely, I pondered with heed

(But ah! fruitless my labor) the Cross and its creed.

To the Pagod I rushed, and the Magian’s shrine,

But my eye caught no glimpse of a glory divine:

The reins of research to the Caaba I bent,

Whither hopefully thronging the old and young went;

Candasai and Herát searched I wistfully through,

Nor above nor beneath came the Loved One to view!

I toiled to the summit, wild, pathless and lone,

Of the globe-girding Kâf, but the Phœnix had flown.

The seventh earth I traversed, the seventh heaven explored,

But in neither discerned I the Court of the Lord.

I questioned the Pen and the Tablet of Fate,

But they whispered not where He pavilions his state.

My vision I strained, but my God-scanning eye

No trace that to Godhead belongs could descry.

But when I my glance turned within my own breast,

Lo! the vainly sought Loved One, the Godhead confessed.

In the whirl of its transport my spirit was tossed

Till each atom of separate being I lost:

And the bright sun of Tanniz a madder than me

Or a wilder, hath never yet seen, nor shall see.

XI.

ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.

Life’s thirst quenches itself

With draughts which double thirst, but who is wise

Tears from his soul this Trishna, feeds his sense

No longer on false shows, files his mind

To seek not, strive not, wrong not; bearing meek

All ills which flow from foregone wrongfulness,

And so constraining passions that they die.

Thus grows he sinless: either never more

Needing to find a body and a place,

Or so informing what freer frame it takes

In new existence that the new toils prove

Lighter and lighter not to be at all,

Thus “finishing the path”; free from earth’s cheats;

Released from all the skandhas of the flesh;

Broken from ties—from Upâdân—saved

From whirling on the wheel; aroused and sane

As is a man wakened from hateful dreams.

Till aching craze to live ends, and life glides

Lifeless—to nameless quiet, nameless joy,

Blessed NIRVANA—sinless, stirless rest—

That change which never changes.

THE LIGHT OF ASIA.

XI.

ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.

Throughout the East to-day, as in all past time, the higher priesthood

controls a spiritual science which has been accumulated by long ages

of severest study, and is concealed from the vulgar world. This is no

mere elaboration of fanciful philosophy, as is much of eastern

metaphysics, patiently spun from secluded speculation like the

mediæval scholasticism of Europe. It is a purely rational development

of psychology by the aid of scientific inquiry. Through protracted

investigation and crucial tests repeatedly applied to actual

experience and through retrospective and prophetic insight they have

probed many of the secrets of the soul. The falsity of materialism and

the all-commanding power of spirit are proven beyond a cavil. How the

soul is independent of the physical body, sometimes leaving and

returning to it, and moulding it to suit its needs; how all nature is

but a vast family embodied in physical clothing and inextricably

interlaced in living brotherhood, from lowest atom to sublimest

archangel; how the gradual evolution of all races proceeds through

revolving cycles in a constantly ascending order of things;—these and

many other stupendous spiritual facts are to them familiarly known.

These masters of human mystery hold themselves apart from the populace

and seldom appear to any but their special disciples, but they are

universally believed in by the natives of India, as the miraculous

evidences of their penetration into nature’s heart have been seen of

many. Moreover, ocular demonstration of the existence and phenomenal

capacities of these Mahatmas has frequently been given to well-known

officials and reputable foreigners, whose testimony is on record.

Although these highest adepts keep most of their discoveries secret,

preferring to enlighten mankind indirectly and by a wholesome gradual

uplifting, occasional expressions have been given of the occult

philosophy derived from their funds of science, and from these we

abridge what they are said to teach concerning reincarnation. Even in

the books containing their doctrine, as “Man,” “Esoteric Buddhism,”

“Light on the Path,” and “Through the Gates of Gold,”[46] we surmise

that portions relating to specific details are more or less arbitrary

and exoteric. Therefore we confine our attention to a synopsis of

their central principles of the subject.

These masters tell us that man is composed of seven principles

intricately interwoven so as to constitute a unit and yet capable of

partial separation. This septenary division is only a finer analysis

of the common triple distinctions, body, soul, and spirit, and runs

through the entire universe. The development of man is in the order of

these divisions, from body to spirit and from spirit to body, in a

continual round of incarnations. The progress may be best illustrated

by a seven-coiled spiral which sweeps with a wider curve at every

ascent. The spiral is not a steady upward incline, but at one side

sags down into materiality and at the other side rises into

spirituality,—the material portion of each ring being the lowest side

of its curve, but always higher than the corresponding previous

descent. Furthermore, each ring of the spiral is itself a seven-fold

spiral, and each of these again is a seven-fold spiral, and so on to

an indefinite number of subdivisions.

The evolutionary process requires for its complete unfoldment a number

of planets[47] corresponding to the seven principles. On each of these

planets a long series of lives is necessary before one can advance to

the next. After a full circuit is made the course must be repeated

again on a higher plane, until many successive series of the planetary

rotations, each involving hundreds of separate lives, has developed

the individual into the perfect fullness of experience. Some of these

planets are unknown to astronomy, being of too fine a materiality for

our present perceptions, and on them man is very unlike his

terrestrial appearance.

Since the first human souls began their career through these cycles

they have moved along the entire planetary chain three times, and now,

for the fourth time, we have reached the fourth planet—Earth. We are

therefore, roughly speaking, about half developed, physically. During

the previous series of earthly inhabitations we were exceedingly

different from our present form, and during the later ones we shall

enter upon still more marvelous stages. With each grand series (or

round) a dimension is added to man’s conception of space. The fourth

dimension will be a common fact of consciousness before we complete

the present set of earthly lives. Before reaching the perfection

attainable here at each round every soul must pass through many minor

circuits. We are said to be in the middle of the fifth circuit (or

race) of our fourth round, and the evolution of this fifth race began

about a million years ago. Each race is subdivided, and each of these

divisions again dissected, making the total number of lives allotted

to each round very large. No human being can escape the earth’s

attraction until these are accomplished, with only rare exceptions

among those who by special merit have outstripped the others: for

although all began alike, the contrasted uses of the universal

opportunities have produced all the variations now existing in the

human race. The geometrical progression of characteristics selected by

each soul has resulted in vast divergences.

Long before the twilight of our birth into the present life we passed

through an era of immense duration on this planet as spiritual beings,

gradually descending into matter to enter the bodies which were

developed up from the highest animal type for our reception. Our

evolution therefore is a double one—on the spiritual side from

ethereal races of infinite pedigree, and on the physical side from the

lower animals.

In the first earthly circuit of the last great series (or round) we

passed through seven ethereal sub-races. Each of these developed one

astral sense, until the seventh sub-race had seven senses. What the

sixth and seventh were we cannot imagine, but in time we shall know,

as we are at present tracing over again that path more perfectly, and

have reached only the fifth of the seven stages on this circuit. The

first of these seven sub-races slowly acquired the sense of physical

sight. All the other parts of the sensuous nature were in shadowy

latency. They had no notion of distance, solidity, sound, or smell.

Even colors were hidden from the earliest men, all being white at

first. Each incarnation in this race developed more of the prismatic

hues in their rainbow order, beginning with red. But the one sense of

sight was so spiritual that it amounted to clairvoyancy. The second

sub-race inherited sight and developed newly touch. Through the

repeated lives in this rank the sense of feeling became wonderfully

delicate and acute, possessing the psychometric quality and revealing

the inner as well as the outer nature of the things to which it was

applied. The third sub-race attained hearing, and its spiritual

development of this sense was so keen that the most subtle sounds, as

the budding leaf and the motion of the heavenly bodies, was clearly

perceived. The fourth sub-race added smell to the other three senses,

and the fifth entered into taste. The sixth and seventh unfolded the

remaining senses, which are beyond our present ken.