In the second circuit (or race) the soul began once more with a single

sense and passed through another course of sub-races, rehearsing the

scale of the senses with a larger control of them, though less

spiritual. But even in the third circuit the repeated unfoldments of

the senses toward their physical destiny had still retained a large

degree of spiritual quality, as the men themselves were still

ethereal.

Our first terrestrial appearance in the present circuit (the fifth

race) was in spiritual form, having only astral bodies. This primitive

ethereal race occupied the earth long before it was geologically

prepared for the historical human races. The development of the

physical senses in their present form marks the stages of our

reincarnation in the present race, which is called the descent into

matter. Each turn in this circuit has carried forward the evolution of

the senses in a fixed order, until now we have a firmer hold than ever

before upon those five which indicate the extent of our progress in

the present stage. Our repeated re-births have obscured the long vista

of the ages through which we have traveled to this point, running

through the seven-toned gamut over and over again, first in broad

rough outline, then finishing the details more carefully at each

iteration. Their early spiritual forms have gradually given way to the

modern physical forms, but some persons still retain a portion of

those old guises that once were universal, in certain peculiarly

delicate senses known as second sight, psychometry, clairaudence,

tasting through the fingers, and smelling like a hound. In our present

era the sense of taste has become the last and most fully developed

and the characteristic sense. At first the body did not require food;

then becoming grosser it inhaled it with the air, and as the condition

approached which now prevails, man became an eating animal and is

grown to an epicure. When we shall have completed the full number of

rounds on this earth we shall have not only the other two senses, but

shall govern all seven in a triple form as physical, astral, and

spiritual.

The most important fact in our evolution, and the cause of the present

phase of existence, with its blinding encasements of matter and evil,

is the growth of a personal will. This is the forbidden fruit of the

Bible Paradise. It originated many cycles back and gradually

flourished, until its impress was stamped upon all our

fellow-creatures. At first starting as selfish desires, then urging

motives for rivalry, it resulted in fierce contest between man and

man. The concentration of the soul in selfish energy clouded the inner

spiritual nature, destroyed the trace of ethereal descent, and buried

us deep in the material world. But this “fall into matter” is really

but a necessary curve of the spiral, and is the dawn of a brighter day

such as humanity has never seen.

Death marks the origin of the turn which human evolution is at present

describing. The earlier races had no sense of age and did not die.

Like Enoch, they “walked with God” into the next period of their life.

At present when a man dies his _ego_ holds the impetus of his earthly

desires until they are purged away from that higher self, which then

passes into a spiritual state, where all the psychic and spiritual

forces it has generated during the earthly life are unfolded. It

progresses on these planes until the dormant physical impulses assert

themselves and curve the soul around to another incarnation, whose

form is the resultant of the earlier lives.

The successive appearances of the soul upon one or many earths are a

series of personalities which are the various masks assumed by one

individuality, the numerous parts played by one actor. In each birth

the personality differs from the prior and later existence, but the

one line of individual continuity runs unbroken through all the

countless forms; and as the soul enters into its highest development

it gradually comprehends the whole course of forgotten paths which

have led to the summit.

The time spent by each soul in physical life is only a small fraction

of the whole period elapsing before the next incarnation. The larger

part of the time is passed in the spiritual existence following death,

in which the physical desires and spiritual qualities derived from the

earthly life determine the condition of being, until the impetus of

unconscious character brings the individual into another earthly life.

XII.

TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.

All things are but altered, nothing dies,

And here and there th’ unbodied spirit flies

By time and force or sickness dispossessed

And lodges where it lights in man or beast.

PYTHAGORAS, in DRYDEN’S _Ovid_.

What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

What thinkest thou of his opinion?

I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion.

SHAKESPEARE.

Whoever leaves off being virtuous ceases to be human; and since he

cannot attain to a divine nature he is turned into a beast.—BOETHIUS.

Be not under any brutal metempsychosis while thou livest and walkest

about erectly under the form of man. Leave it not disputed at last how

thou hast predominantly passed thy days.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

That which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes and

preserved their fertility is neither the Nile nor the Ganges; it is

the respect for animal life by the mild and gentle heart of

man.—MICHELET.

Oh! the beautiful time will, must come when the beast-loving Brahmin

shall dwell in the cold north and make it warm, when man who now

honors humanity shall also begin to spare and finally to protect the

animated ascending and descending scale of living creatures.—RICHTER.

As many hairs as grow on the beast, so many similar deaths shall the

man who slays that beast for his own satisfaction in this world pass

through in the next from birth to birth.—LAWS OF MANU.

XII.

TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.

The idea of reincarnation is so intimately connected and so generally

identified with the notion that human souls sometimes descend into

lower animals, that it is necessary for us to thoroughly understand

the exoteric and gross nature of this grotesque phrasing of a solemn

and beautiful truth.

All the philosophies and religions teaching reincarnation seem to

teach also the wandering of human souls through brute forms. It was

the common belief in Egypt and still is in Asia. All animals were

sacred to the Egyptians as the masks of fallen gods, and therefore

worshiped. The same reverence for all creatures still reigns in the

East. The Hindu regards everything in the vast tropical jungle of

illusion as a human soul in disguise. The Laws of Manu state: “For

sinful acts mostly corporeal, a man shall assume after death a

vegetable or mineral form; for such acts mostly verbal, the form of a

bird or beast; for acts mostly mental, the lowest of human

conditions.”

“A priest who has drunk spirituous liquors shall migrate into the form

of a smaller or larger worm or insect, of a moth or some ravenous

animal.

“If a man steal grain in the husk he shall be born a rat; if a

yellow-mixed metal, a gander; if water, a plava or diver; if honey, a

great stinging gnat; if milk, a crow; if expressed juice, a dog; if

clarified butter, an ichneumon weasel.

“A Brahman killer enters the body of a dog, a bear, an ass, a tiger,

or a serpent.”

Not only does this conception permeate the domains of Brahmanism and

Buddhism; it prevailed in Persia before the time of Zoroaster as

since. Pythagoras is said to have obtained it in Babylon from the

Magi, and through him it scattered widely through Greece and Italy.

More closely than with any other teacher, this false doctrine is

associated with the sage of Crotona, who is said to have recognized

the voice of a deceased friend in the howling of a beaten dog. Plato

seems to endorse it also. Plotinus says: “Those who have exercised

human faculties are born again men. Those who have used only their

senses go into the bodies of brutes, and especially into those of

ferocious beasts, if they have yielded to bursts of anger; so that

even in this case, the difference between the bodies that they animate

conforms to the difference of their propensities. Those who have

sought only to gratify their lust and appetite pass into the bodies of

lascivious and gluttonous animals. Finally, those who have degraded

their senses by disuse are compelled to vegetate in the plants. Those

who have loved music to excess and yet have lived pure lives, go into

the bodies of melodious birds. Those who have ruled tyrannically

become eagles. Those who have spoken lightly of heavenly things,

keeping their eyes always turned toward heaven, are changed into birds

which always fly toward the upper air. He who has acquired civic

virtues becomes a man; if he has not these virtues he is transformed

into a domestic animal, like the bee.”

Some of the church fathers also believed it. Proclus and Syrianus

argued that the brute kept its own soul, but that the human soul which

passed into the brute body was bound within the animal soul. Nearly

all mythology contains this view of transmigration in some form. In

the old Norse and German religions the soul is poetically represented

as entering certain lower forms, as a rose, a pigeon, etc., for a

short period before assuming the divine abode. The Druids of old Gaul

also taught it. The Welsh bards tell us that the souls of men

transmigrate into the bodies of those animals whose habits and

characters they most resemble, till, after a circuit of such

penitential miseries, they are purified for the celestial presence.

They mention three circles of existence: the circle of the

all-inclosing circle which holds nothing alive or dead but God; the

second circle, that of felicity, in which men travel after they have

meritoriously passed through their terrestrial changes; the circle of

evil, in which human nature passes through the varying stages of

existence which it must undergo before it is qualified to inhabit the

circle of felicity, and this includes the three infelicities of

necessity, oblivion, and death, with frequent trials of the lower

animal lives.[48] “Sir Paul Rycant gives us an account of several

well-disposed Mohammedans that purchase the freedom of any little bird

they see confined to a cage, and think they merit as much by it as we

should do here by ransoming any of our countrymen from their captivity

at Algiers. The reason is because they consider every animal as a

brother or sister in disguise, and therefore think themselves obliged

to extend their charity to them, though under such mean circumstances.

They tell you that the soul of a man, when he dies, immediately passes

into the body of another man, or some brute which he resembled in his

humor, or his fortune, when he was one of us.”[49] Pythagorean

transmigration is apparent also in the natives of Mexico, who think

that the souls of persons of rank after death inhabit the bodies of

beautiful, sweet singing birds and the nobler quadrupeds, while the

souls of inferior persons pass into weasels, beetles, and other low

creatures. Among the negroes, the Sandwich Islanders, the Tasmanians,

in short, among nearly all the world outside of Christendom, this

faith rules unquestioned.

The lowest forms of this belief are found among the tribes of Africa

and America, which think that the soul immediately after death must

seek out a new tenement, and, if need be, enter the body of an animal.

Some of the Africans assume that the soul will choose the body of a

person of similar rank to its former one, and therefore bury the dead

near the houses of their relatives, enabling the unbodied souls to

occupy their new-born children. Sometimes holes are dug in the grave

to facilitate the soul’s egress, and the house-doors are left open for

its admission. The Druses hold firmly to the theory of transmigration.

The folk-lore of all nations has various ways of telling how the soul

of a man can inhabit an animal’s body, in stories of wehr-wolves,

swan-maidens, mermaids, etc. In many parts of Europe the belief in the

man-wolf still flourishes in connection with a crazy person, or a

monomaniac, who is said to be transformed into the brute nature.

Northern Europe receives this superstition as the man-bear. In India

it is the man-tiger; in Abyssinia, the man-hyena; in South Africa, the

man-lion; each country associating the depraved human nature, which

sometimes runs riot as an epidemic mania, with the animal most

dreaded.

But it is all a coarse symbol caricaturing the inner vital truth of

reincarnation, and springing from the striking resemblance between men

and animals, in feature and disposition, in voice and mien. The

intelligence and kindness of the beasts approaching near to human

character, and the brutality of some men, would seem to indicate that

both races were closely enough related to exchange souls. As an

English writer says: “A judicious critic or observant reader will

scarce allow that more than four or five in the long catalogue of

Roman emperors had any humanity; and although they might perhaps have

a just claim to be styled Lords of the Earth, they had no right to the

title of Man. There is an excellent dissertation in Erasmus on the

princely qualities of the eagle and the lion; wherein that great

author has demonstrated that emperors and kings are very justly

represented by those animals, or that there must be a similarity in

their souls, as all their actions are similar and correspondent.”[50]

Emerson has a paragraph upon this in his essay on Demonology: “Animals

have been called ‘the dreams of nature.’ Perhaps for a conception of

their consciousness we may go to our own dreams. In a dream we have

the instinctive obedience, the same torpidity of the highest power,

the same unsurprised assent to the monstrous, as these metamorphosed

men exhibit. Our thoughts in a stable or in a menagerie, on the other

hand, may well remind us of our dreams. What comparison do these

imprisoning forms awaken! You may catch the glance of a dog sometimes

which lays a kind of claim to sympathy and brotherhood. What! somewhat

of me down there? Does he know it? Can he, too, as I, go out of

himself, see himself, perceive relations? We fear lest the poor brute

should gain one dreadful glimpse of his condition. It was in this

glance that Ovid got the hint of his metamorphoses; Calidasa, of his

transmigration of souls. For these fables are our own thoughts carried

out. What keeps these wild tales in circulation for thousands of

years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approximation

of theory? Nor is the fact quite solitary, for in varieties of our own

species where organization seems to predominate over the genius of

man, in Kalmuck or Malay or Flathead Indian, we are sometimes pained

by the same feeling; and sometimes, too, the sharp-witted prosperous

white man awakens it. In a mixed assembly we have chanced to see not

only a glance of Abdiel, so grand and keen, but also in other faces

the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat, and the barn-door

fowl. You think, could the man overlook his own condition, he could

not be restrained from suicide.”

The remarkable mental cleverness of the highest animals, the cunning

of the fox, the tiger’s fierceness, the serpent’s meanness, the dog’s

fidelity, seem to be human traits in other forms, and the animal

qualities are striking enough in many men for them to be fitly

described as a fox, a hog, a snake, etc. The characteristics of

animals are accurately termed in expressions first applied to mankind,

and the community of disposition between the erect and the debased

animal creation has furnished words for human qualities from the lower

orders of life,—as leonine, canine, vulpine, etc. Briefly, “the rare

humanity of some animals and the notorious animality of some men”

first suggested the idea of interchanging their souls among the

primitive peoples, and has nourished it ever since among the oldest

portion of the race as a vulgar illustration of a vital reality.

As the fruits of this idea are beneficial, it was firmly held by the

priests and philosophers as a moral fable, through which they

popularly taught not only reincarnation, but respect for virtue and

for life. It wrought a poetic love of nature in the masses such as has

never been seen under any other influence—and which Christianity has

strangely failed to establish. Lecky candidly says in his “European

Morals”: “In the inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale

the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have considerably surpassed the

Christians.”

To the eastern mind life is a stream flowing through endless

transformations, and everything containing it is divine, from the

commonest onion to the crowned king; and as all living things are the

possible casements of human souls, it is the height of impiety to

abuse anything. The kindness of the Orient toward the brute creation

is a beautiful comment upon the genuineness of this faith. The mercy

due from man to his friends the lower animals is a noble bequest which

has there been treasured for the world. As the wholesome lesson of

transmigration, Asia has thoroughly learned that

He prayeth best who loveth best

All things both great and small,

For the dear Lord who loveth us

He made and loveth all.

But the intelligent leaders of oriental thought were far from

believing transmigration literally. The occult theory of the priests

of Isis, like that of the Brahmans, Buddhists, and Chaldeans, never

really held that human souls inhabit animals, or that animal souls

occupy men, although many orientalists have not penetrated beyond this

outer court of eastern doctrine. It was simply an allegorical gospel

for the masses with a double purpose,—to picture the inner truth which

acute thinkers would reach and which the crowds need not know, and to

instill respect for all life. The Egyptian priesthood adopted three

styles of teaching all doctrine. The vulgar religion of the populace

was a crude shaping of the priestly thought. The priests of the outer

temple received the half-veiled tenets of initiates. But only the

hierophants of the inner temple, after final initiation, were allowed

to know the pure truth. The same triple shaping of the central

thought, adapted to the audience, was followed by Pythagoras, Plato,

and all the great masters. Although the name of Pythagoras is

synonymous with the idea of soul-wandering through animals, a careful

perusal of the fragments of his writings, and of his disciples’ books,

shows that he tremendously realized the fact that souls must always,

by all the forces of the universe, find an adequate expression of

their strongest nature, and that it would be as impossible for a

gallon to be contained in a pint measure, as for a human spirit to

inhabit an animal body. That the teaching of Pythagoras on this point

was purely allegorical is proven by the abridgment of his philosophy

given by his disciple Hierocles: “The man who has separated himself

from a brutal life by the right use of reason, purified himself as

much as is possible from excess of passions, and by this become a man

from a wild beast, shall become a God from a man, as far as it is

possible for a man to become a God.... We can only cure our tendency

downwards by the power that leads upwards, by a ready submission to

God, by a total conversion to the divine law. The end of the

Pythagorean doctrine is to be all wings for the reception of divine

good, that when the time of death comes we may leave behind us upon

earth the mortal body, and be ready girt for our heavenly journey.

Then we are restored to our primitive state. This is the most

beautiful end.”

Hierocles also comments on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras: “If

through a shameful ignorance of the immortality annexed to our soul, a

man should persuade himself that his soul dies with his body, he

expects what can never happen; in like manner he who expects that

after his death he shall put on the body of a beast, and become an

animal without reason, because of his vices, or a plant because of his

dullness and stupidity,—such a man, I say, acting quite contrary to

those who transform the essence of man into one of the superior

beings, is infinitely deceived, and absolutely ignorant of the

essential form of the soul, which can never change; for being and

continuing always man, it is only said to become God or beast by

virtue or vice, though it cannot be either the one or the other.”[51]

The early Neo-Platonists of Alexandria limited the range of human

metempsychosis to human bodies and denied that the souls of men ever

passed downwards into brutal states. Even the apparent endorsement of

that conceit by Plotinus, quoted above, was merely a simile. Porphyry,

Jamblichus, and Hierocles forcibly emphasized this distinction.

Wilkinson shows that the initiated priests taught that “dissolution is

only the cause of reproduction. Nothing perishes which has once

existed. Things which appear to be destroyed only change their natures

and pass into another form.” But Ebers demonstrates that the inner

circle of the temple held this truth in a form wholly above the system

of embalming, animal worship, and transmigration ingeniously devised

by them for the people. Like the ruling priestcraft in all times and

countries, they considered it necessary to disguise their sacred

secrets for the crowd. The symbols of reincarnation which everywhere

have typified the same doctrine,—in Egyptian architecture by the

flying globe, in Chinese pagodas and Indian temples by the intricate

unfoldments of germinant designs ascending through successive stories

to culminate in a gilded ball, in the Grecian friezes of religious

processions, in the Druidical cromlechs and cairns of Wales and the

circular stone heaps of Britain,—all expressed a threefold

significance, telling the masses of their transition through all

living conditions, reminding the common priesthood of an exalted

series of transformations, and picturing for the initiates the hidden

principles of immortal progress. For all alike these emblems

reiterated, the solemn and vital reality of universal brotherhood

throughout Nature; but the keenest students, who guided the bulk of

religious thought, read in them simply the eternal law of cause and

effect divinely ruling the soul through incessant changes. It would be

as unjust to construe literally the poetic statements of the human

soul wandering through animals, etc., by which metaphor the noblest

leaders of western thought convey the idea of spiritual evolution (see

chapter v.), as to call this lowest phase of the philosophy the real

belief of those who shaped it.

And yet there is a sense in which the most intelligent orientals

adhere to this, and in which western science endorses it,—namely in

the axiomatic truth that human atoms and emanations traverse the

entire round of lower natures. When the Laws of Manu speak of the

transmigration of men through all animal stages, these eastern

authorities say that they mean not souls, but men’s physical selves.

When the Laws assert that “a Brahman killer enters the body of a dog,

bear, ass, etc.,” they do not mean that the murderer of a priest

becomes a dog, bear, ass, etc. The inner meaning of the Law is that he

who kills and extinguishes the Brahman or divine nature, condemns his

soul to lower human circumstances, and the downward affinity of his

passions carries every particle of his body by magnetic relations into

more degraded ranks of existence. The Brahmans have distorted the

inward purpose of this Law in their own interest by insisting upon its

outward meaning. So the various accounts of the descent of human into

animal or vegetative nature, whether given by Hindu, Pythagorean,

Platonist, Egyptian, Norse, or Barbarian, are actual facts as far as

the migration of the composing atoms and emanations of the outer

individual are concerned. For these atoms obey the directing impulses

of degrading passion or ascending principle. The imponderable force of

these atomic changes is proven by the psychometric evidence of

sensitives, who perceive the various unexpressed moods of a person by

the kinds of lambent particles flowing from him, and trace the

permanent course of these particles after they have lodged on objects

widely separated from him. The tell-tale characteristics of these

scattered atoms remain a long while as stamped by their source, and

guide them to what is most congenial. This scientific fact, confirmed

by many experiments,[52] but generally ignored, shaped the old atomic

hypotheses in which Pythagoras, Epicurus, Zeno, and all the old

philosophers down to Plato found delight, and Plato himself simply

spiritualized it into a more enduring form.

The attitude of the dominant disciples of reincarnation upon this

point may be gathered from the following statement of a Brahman to the

writer: “The whole question of re-births rests upon the right

understanding of what it is that is born again. Obviously not the

body, nor is it the ego, which is the same whether in a man or in a

worm. The ego is colorless of all attributes of which we have any

knowledge in practice. The only thing that can be said to be re-born

is the character of a being, through spiritual blindness confounded

with the ego, in the same way as light is commonly confounded with the

objects illuminated and said to be red, blue, or any other color. The

essential characteristic of humanity cannot possibly exist in an

animal form, for otherwise it cannot be essential to humanity.

Whenever in a human being the ego is identified in the above manner

with what is essentially human, birth in an animal form is as certain

as any relative truth can be not to take place.”

“Atoms enter into organic combinations according to their affinities,

and when released from one individual system they retain a tendency to

be attracted by other systems, not necessarily human, with similar

characteristics. The assimilation of atoms by organisms takes place in

accordance with the law of affinities. It may be hastily contended

that the relation between the mental characteristics of an individual

and the atoms of his body ceases when the atoms no longer constitute

the body. But the fact that certain atoms are drawn into a man’s body

shows that there was some affinity between the atoms and the body

before they were so drawn together. Consequently there is no reason to

suppose that the affinity ceases at parting. And it is well known that

psychometers can detect the antecedent life history of any substance

by being brought into contact with it. It must be insisted that the

true human ego in no sense migrates from a human body to an animal

body, although those principles which lie below the plane of

self-consciousness may do so. And in this sense alone is

transmigration accepted by Esoteric Science.”

XIII.

WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

When we die, we shall find that we have not lost our dreams; but

that we have only lost our sleep.—RICHTER.

Life is a kind of sleep. Old men sleep longest. They never begin to

wake but when they are to die.—DE LA BRUYERE.

There is no death: what seems so is transition.

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life Elysian,

Whose portal we call Death.

LONGFELLOW.

We can hardly do otherwise than assume that the future being must be

so involved in our present constitution as to be therein

discernible.

ISAAC TAYLOR.

When I leave this rabble rout and defilement of the world, I leave

it as an inn, and not as a place of abode. For nature has given us

our bodies as an inn, and not to dwell in.—CATO.

He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but

he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life

everlasting.

ST. PAUL.

But all lost things are in the angels’ keeping, Love.

No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love.

The years of heaven will all earth’s little pain make good.

Together there we can begin again in babyhood.

HELEN HUNT.

Death is another life. We bow our heads

At going out, we think, and enter straight

Another chamber of the king’s,

Larger than this we leave and lovelier.

BAILEY.

The deep conviction of the indestructibleness of our nature through

death, which everyone carries at the bottom of his heart, depends

altogether upon the consciousness of the original and eternal nature

of our being.—SCHOPENHAUER.

XIII.

WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

The latest developments of science agree with the occultists and poets

that there is no death, and that nothing is dead. What seems to be

extinction is only a change of existence. What appears to have no

vitality has only a lower order of the life principle. Everything is

pulsing with energy, stones and dirt as well as animals and trees. The

same force which animates the human body, the beasts, birds, and

reptiles in their brief periods, also vitalizes the oaks and vines in

a smaller degree with longer lives, and individualizes the mineral

world into crystals on a still lower plane but with lifetimes reckoned

by thousands of years. And below crystal-life, in the constituent

atoms of shapeless matter, is a tremendous thrill of undiminished

activity. Life, the occultists say, is the eternal uncreated energy.

The physicists grasp at the same thing in their Law of Continuity, and

modern science concedes that “energy has as much claim to be regarded

as an objective reality as matter itself.”[53] This life is the one

essential energy acting under protean forms. It always inheres in

every particle of matter, and makes no distinction between organic and

inorganic, except one of grade, the former containing life-energy

actively and the latter in dormant form. Because the scientist is

unable to awaken into activity the latent life of inorganic matter, he

insists, by the law of biogenesis, that life can only come from life.

But that only marks the limit of his knowledge. The world’s

development has bridged all the gaps now yawning between the different

kingdoms of nature, though nothing remains now to show how it was

done, and science has to confess its ignorance. There is nothing to

contradict and much to enforce the occult axiom that the same life

animates man, plant, and rock simply in different states of the one

indestructible force,—the Universal Soul,—making all nature what

Goethe terms “the living visible garment of God.”

It is impossible for a person to cease to exist. When the tenant of

the body moves out, the forces binding together the dwelling scatter

to the nearest uses awaiting them. The positivists would have it that

the individual soul also dissolves into an impersonal fund of being—a

sort of immediate chilling Nirvana, out-freezing any eastern

conception of remotest destiny. This melancholy result of western

materialism is boldly confronted by reincarnation with a proven

hypothesis, which illuminates the mystery of death and the future, and

shows the unimpeachable reality of immortality. Reincarnation

demonstrates that the personal ego, which permanently maintains its

identity amid the constant changes of the bodily casement and the

mental consciousness, must continue its individuality. In addition to

the evidences already adduced for the genuineness of this truth, there

stands the honest reliable testimony of spiritualism (a small core of

veritable fact around which is gathered an enormous concretion of

deceptions, mischievously intentional or pathetically unconscious),

and the actual experience of some orientals whose intense devotion to

pure invisible realities has pushed them into the perception of

ultra-mortal things.

It is the strong attachment to physical existence which makes death

the king of terrors. Those who have learned the lesson of life find

him the blessed angel who ushers them through the golden gates. There

shall at length come to every ascending soul the experience of those

whose departure from this life cannot be called death, as Jesus,

Elijah, or Enoch, who “walked with God and he was not, for God took

him.” They became so buoyed with spiritual forces that a slight touch

shifted the equipoise and translated them into the invisible. The

clarified spirit greets death with a welcome, and sings his praise as

did Paul Hamilton Hayne in his dying song:—

Sad mortal! couldst thou but know

What truly it means to die,

The wings of thy soul would glow,

And the hopes of thy heart beat high;

Thou wouldst turn from the Pyrrhonist schools,

And laugh their jargon to scorn,

As the babbling of midnight fools

Ere the morning of Truth be born:

But I, earth’s madness above,

In a kingdom of stormless breath,—

I gaze on the glory of love

In the unveiled face of Death.

I tell thee his face is fair

As the moon-bow’s amber rings,

And the gleam in his unbound hair

Like the flash of a thousand springs;

His smile is the fathomless beam

Of the star-shine’s sacred light,

When the summers of Southland dream

In the lap of the holy Night:

For I, earth’s blindness above,

In a kingdom of halcyon breath,—

I gaze on the marvel of love

In the unveiled face of Death.

When death severs the soul from its mortal shell, the ruling

tendencies of the soul carry it to its strongest affinities. If these

still dwell on earth, the soul hovers affectionately among the old

scenes and insensibly mingles with its heart-friends, ministering and

being ministered to, with no essential difference from the former

condition.[54] Many veritable experiences, apart from all possibility

of delusion, confirm this, although the darkness of matter blinds most

of us to the psychic life. At length, as shifting time unties the

bonds of earth, the soul moves on with its strongest allies to the

realms of its choice. There the soul lives out an era of its true

life, an expression of its deepest nature, as much more full and more

real than the late physical life, as the waking state exceeds the

dreaming. For the escape from material confinement allows the freest

activity, in which the dominant desires, unconsciously nourished in

the spirit, have the mastery. This liberty rouses the spirit from the

earthly lethargy into its permanent individuality. The startling bound

of the spirit into its own sphere must transfer the self-consciousness

from its terrestrial form to a far higher vividness; but, as the

wakefulness of day includes the somnambulence of night and knows

itself superior to that dumb life, so the burst of unconstrained

spiritual existence does not annul, but transcends the material phase.

The condition of the period intervening between death and birth, like

all other epochs, is framed by the individual. The inner character

makes a Paradise, a Purgatory, or an Inferno of any place. As Jesus

said he was in heaven while talking with his followers, as Dante found

all the material for hell in what his eyes witnessed, so in the

environments beyond death, where the subjective states of the soul are

supreme, the appearance of the universe and the feelings of self are

created, well or ill, by the central individual. There must be as many

heavens and hells as there are good and bad beings. All the attempts

to describe the future are inadequate and erroneous, and must

necessarily be so. Plato, in the last book of the Republic, quotes the

narrative of the Pamphylian Er, who had been killed in battle but came

to life again on his funeral pyre, and declared that he was returned

to earth to disclose the nature of the coming life. He found things

about as Plato’s allegory pictures them: the good and the wicked who

had just died being assigned their places in heaven or under the

earth. A number of souls whose thousand years of one or the other

experience had expired were made to cast lots for a choice out of a

large number of human and animal lives, and to drink of the River of

Indifference, and to traverse the Plain of Forgetfulness before

entering the world again. As with all the visions of after death, this

simply reflected the opinions of the Platonic thinker. St. John’s

Revelation paints the scene by colors obtained from his Jewish

training, on the canvas of his Patmos imprisonment. Bunyan’s

description shows a simple imagination saturated with the Apocalypse.

Protestant visionaries always discover a Protestant heaven and hell.

Catholic ecstatics always add purgatory. Swedenborg found the gardens

of heaven laid out in the Dutch fashion of his time. English

clairvoyants and mediums are properly orthodox and evangelical.

American spirits talk broad theology with ridiculous details. The

divergence in all these alleged liftings of the veil betrays their

subjectiveness.

It is impossible in the nature of things that one should permanently

leave the physical condition until the business of that existence is

accomplished in transferring the affections from material to spiritual

things. While the ruling attraction to a soul remains in this world,

all the forces of the universe conspire to continue the association of

the two in repeated lives. On the other hand, a person dominated by

spiritual proclivities finds infinite magnetisms drawing him away from

temporal surroundings to the inscrutable glories of the eternal. In

Swedenborg’s phrase, “a man’s loves make his home.” The residual

impulses coming from the momentums of past lives determine what and

when shall be the next embodiment. The time and manner of

reincarnation vary with each individual according to the impetus

engendered by his lives. Between these lives the spiritual effect of

the earth life is absorbed from the personal soul manifested on earth

into the immortal and unmanifested ego. This process may require days,

years, centuries, or millenniums, depending upon the intensity of the

mundane aspirations which draw the spirit to earth and hinder its

liberation into pure spiritual life. But as in dreams a whole life’s

history is sometimes condensed into a few seconds, time has no

existence to the disembodied spirit. Whether the interval be long or

short, the entire spiritual effect of the last life must be

assimilated and shaped into a form that will spring up in coming

lives. The instances of alternate consciousness indicate that some

such marked difference from the previous incarnation appears in each

earthly life, losing all remembrance of the previous chapter, and

working out the tendencies which embodied that particular life in a

career that will achieve redemption or condemnation.

At the first thought reincarnation carries the unwelcome inference

that death and re-births separate us from the dearest present ties and

introduce us as strangers into new phases of activity where

everything—friends, knowledge, and occupations—must be found afresh.

This is a mistake. The unnoticed habits of thought and action derived

from the alliance of cherished comrades strengthen into ungovernable

steeds whose course directs the soul on every journey toward those

favorite companions. Among the thousands of acquaintances made in a

lifetime, the rare friends whose intimacy strikes down into the inmost

depths of the soul must continue as irresistible attractions in the

next life. Orpheus could not fail to discover Eurydice in the spirit

realm. In this earthly existence, which is the Heaven, or Purgatory,

or Hell of the last one, we go straying among unfamiliar forms,

frequently mistaking them for true friends, until suddenly we meet a

soul with which there comes so intense and permanent an affection that

every other person is forgotten. Such a fusion of spirits must hail

from the shores of long distant loves, and its new unrecognized

mastery develops a mightier union than would be possible in one

uninterrupted flow. The poets like to symbolize this as the blending

of two hemispheres long since separated into their original perfect

whole. The most probable explanation of such intimacies rests in the

idea that they are repetitions of previous attachments. A sense of

ancient familiarity grows upon these closest ties, notwithstanding the

absence of memory’s confirmation. The powerful attractions residing in

families and kinships may well be the result of ancestral affinities

which have bound together in many earlier combinations, like a turning

kaleidoscope, the same individuals.

XIV.

KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION.

We are our own children.—PYTHAGORAS.

Nothing can work me damage but myself.—ST. BERNARD.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill

Our fatal shadows that walk with us still.

BEAUMONT & FLETCHER.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.—JESUS.

We make our fortunes and we call them fate.—B. DISRAELI.

Men must reap the things they sow.

Force from force must ever flow.

SHELLEY.

The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall

it, or the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts.—EMERSON.

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such pain;

I never saw a brute I hated so.

He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

BROWNING.

Not from birth does one become a slave; not from birth does one

become a saint; but by conduct alone.—GAUTAMA.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which

was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up

to-morrow.—BEECHER.

Then spake he of that answer all must give

For all things done amiss or wrongfully,

Alone, each for himself, reckoning with that

The fixed arithmetic of the universe,

Which meteth good for good, ill for ill,

Measure for measure unto deeds, words, thoughts,

Making all futures fruits of all the pasts.

THE LIGHT OF ASIA.

XIV.

KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION.

Karma is the eastern word for what the West knows as the Law of

Causation, applied to personal experience. In Christendom the full

recognition of this great principle, like that of its mate,

reincarnation, lies dormant; but it is merely an extension into the

spiritual domain of the fundamental premise of all science, the

substratum of common sense, the cardinal axiom of every

philosophy,—that each effect has an adequate cause, and each cause

works infinite consequences. Briefly, the doctrine of karma is that we

have made ourselves what we are by former actions, and are building

our future eternity by present actions. There is no destiny but what

we ourselves determine. There is no salvation or condemnation except

what we ourselves bring about. God places all the powers of the

universe at our disposal, and the handle by which we use them to

construct our fate has been and is and always shall be our own

individual will. Action (karma) of the spirit, whether in the inner

consciousness alone, or by vocal expression, or in outward act, is the

secret force which directs our journeys through infinity, driving us

down into the gloomy regions of evil, of matter, and of selfishness,

or up toward the luminous fields of good, of spirit, and of love.

The most adamantine of facts is that of an infinite all-comprehending

power of which nature is the pulsing body, an eternal reality shaping

the shadowy appearances of time, and variously named Force, Fate,

Justice, Righteousness, Love, Mind, The Over-Soul, God. The most

essential attribute of this unfathomable Being is that of Almighty

Equity. Confronting this fact is the puzzling fact of our spiritual

personality enveloped in matter. The thought always associated with

this, never practically forsaken, though sometimes theoretically

denied, is individual responsibility. “Two things fill me with

wonder,” said Kant, “the starry heavens and the sense of moral

responsibility in man.” When Daniel Webster was asked what was the

greatest thought that ever stirred his soul, he replied, “The thought

of my personal accountability to God.” Every balanced mind agrees with

these intellectual giants on this point. The inevitable outcome of

grouping these two actualities (God and responsibility) is the

conception that the Universal Sustainer is giving every creature the

best thing for it, and that each soul is in some way accountable for

its condition. Single observations seem to contradict this idea, but

the long trend of life’s experience verifies it. Because it offers no

shelter for culpable actions and necessitates a sterling manliness, it

is less welcome to weak natures than the easy religious tenets of

vicarious atonement, intercession, forgiveness, and death-bed

conversions. But it rings through the inner soul-world as the

fundamental harmonic tone, setting the key for all wholesome poetry,

philosophy, religion, and art, and inspiring the magnificent sweep of

progress which is rationalizing modern Christendom. For it is

identical with the essence of Bible truth, as these representative

sentences will suggest:—

“Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of

life.” (Solomon.)

“Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee.” (Jesus.)

“Work out your own salvation. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he

also reap.” (St. Paul.)

The embryos of all animals are at the earliest stage indistinguishable

from one another. The biologist who has lost his labels cannot tell

which would become a fish, which a cat, and which a man; but nature

knows the past records and therefore the future possibility of each.

So within souls apparently similar there hide unsuspected germs of

vast difference, resulting from the forgotten pasts, which may develop

into corresponding divergent futures. The ancient behaviors of every

soul have accumulated a grand heritage of influences from which our

present bequest is derived. Using another figure, as each piece of

“new” soil contains through all its depth a multitude of various seeds

sown in past ages, which patiently bide their time to be brought to

light and bear fruit, so the kernels of remote conducts shall

eventually all have their unfoldment in the revolution of our lives,

until at last, if we refuse weeds and harbor only worthy germs, we

shall bear a continual harvest of good.

The “bonds of action” include the whole range of material for

character,—not only the recognized habits of the soul, but, of more

consequence still, the unconscious inner thought whence the outward

manifestations spring. Whatever impulses are secretly cherished, these

feed the acts of life, and mould all our environments to fit them. The

nurtured thought of killing produces a thousand unseen murders and

must continue wreaking crimes in immensely larger degree than hangable

horrors. Our favorite inclinations show what we have been doing in

ancient ages. Within the germ of to-day’s conduct are coiled

interminable consequences of good and evil.

The relentless hand which metes out our fortunes with the stern

justice most vividly portrayed by the Greek dramatists in their

Nemesis, Fates, and Furies, takes from our own savings the gifts

bestowed on us. “Alas! we sow what we reap; the hand that smites us is

our own.” In the domain of eternal justice, the offense and the

punishment are inseparably connected as the same event, because there

is no real distinction between the action and its outcome. He who

injures another in fact only wrongs himself. To adopt Schopenhauer’s

figure, he is a wild beast who fastens his fangs in his own flesh. But

linked with the awful fact of our undivided responsibility for what we

now are, goes the inspiring assurance that we have in our control the

remedy of evil and the increase of good. We can, and we alone can,

extricate ourselves from the existing limitations, by the all-curing

powers of purity, love, spirituality. In eastern phraseology, the

purpose of life is to work out our bad karma (action) and to stow away

good karma. As surely as the harvest of to-day grows from the

seed-time of yesterday, so shall every kernel of thought and feeling,

speech and performance, bring its crop of reward or rebuke. The

inherent result of every quiver of the human will continually tolls

the Day of Judgment, and affords immeasurable opportunities for

amelioration.

The worthy soul straitened with misfortune is shifting off the chains

of old wrong-doing. The vicious soul enjoying comforts is reaping the

benefits of old virtues. So intricately are all situations connected

with untraceable lineages that only the Omniscient can penetrate below

appearances in the real natures of men. The world is like a garden in

which is newly planted a huge assortment of unknown plants. To the

common observer the fresh sprouts are only deceptive, for the most

promising stalk may prove to be a weak, fragile thing, and the

uninviting leaflets may introduce a sturdy growth. But the all-wise

Gardener knows each seed, and that it will ultimately show its

ancestry. The stupendous issues of conduct endure through all changes.

After one has climbed to high summits of character the surprising

reappearance of some forgotten sin may stay his progress and require

all his forces to conquer the viper whose egg he long ago nested in

his bosom. The man plunged into the abyss of degradation may be a

saint much farther advanced than those exalted persons who despise

him.

It is karma, or our old acts, that draws us back into earthly life.

The spirit’s abode changes according to its karma, and this karma

forbids any long continuance in one condition, because _it_ is always

changing. So long as action is governed by material and selfish

motives, just so long must the effect of that action be manifested in

physical re-births. Only the perfectly selfless man can elude the

gravitation of material life. Few have attained this; but it is the

goal of mankind. Some have reached it and have voluntarily returned as

saviors of the race.

An illustrious explanation of karma appears at the close of “The Light

of Asia”:

KARMA—all that total of a soul

Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had,

The “self” it wove with woof of viewless time

Crossed on the warp invisible of acts.

· · · · ·

What hath been bringeth what shall be, and is,

Worse—better—last for first and first for last;

The angels in the heavens of gladness reap

Fruits of a holy past.

The devils in the underworlds wear out

Deeds that were wicked in an age gone by.

Nothing endures: fair virtues waste with time,

Foul sins grow purged thereby.

Who toiled a slave may come anew a prince

For gentle worthiness and merit won;

Who ruled a king may wander earth in rags

For things done and undone.

Before beginning, and without an end,

As space eternal and as surety sure,

Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good,

Only its laws endure.

It will not be contemned of any one:

Who thwarts it loses, and who serves it gains;

The hidden good it pays with peace and bliss,

The hidden ill with pains.

It seeth everywhere and marketh all:

Do right—it recompenseth! do one wrong—

The equal retribution must be made,

Though DHARMA[55] tarry long.

It knows not wrath nor pardon; utter-true

Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs;

Times are as naught, to-morrow it will judge,

Or after many days.

By this the slayer’s knife did stab himself;

The unjust judge hath lost his own defender;

The false tongue dooms its lie; the creeping thief

And spoiler rob, to render.

Such is the law which moves to righteousness,

Which none at last can turn aside or stay;

The heart of it is love, the end of it

Is peace and consummation sweet. Obey!

· · · · ·

The books say well, my brothers! each man’s life

The outcome of his former living is;

The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes,

The bygone right breeds bliss.

That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields!

The sesamum was sesamum, the corn

Was corn. The silence and the darkness knew;

So is a man’s fate born.

He cometh, reaper of the things he sowed,

Sesamum, corn, so much cast in past birth;

And so much weed and poison-stuff, which mar

Him and the aching earth.

If he shall labor rightly, rooting these,

And planting wholesome seedlings where they grew,

Fruitful and fair and clean the ground shall be,

And rich the harvest due.

If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs,

Endureth patiently, striving to pay

His utmost debt for ancient evils done

In love and truth alway;

If making none to lack, he throughly purge

The lie and lust of self forth from his blood;

Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence

Nothing but grace and good:

If he shall day by day dwell merciful,

Holy and just and kind and true; and rend

Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots,

Till love of life have end:

He—dying—leaveth as the sum of him

A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit,

Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near,

So that fruits follow it.

No need hath such to live as ye name life;

That which began in him when he began

Is finished: he hath wrought the purpose through

Of what did make him man.

Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins

Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes

Invade his safe eternal peace; nor deaths

And lives recur. He goes

Unto NIRVÂNA. He is one with Life

Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be.

OM, MANI PADME, OM! the dewdrop slips

Into the shining sea!

· · · · ·

This is the doctrine of the KARMA. Learn!

Only when all the dross of sin is quit,

Only when life dies like a white flame spent,

Death dies along with it.

XV.

CONCLUSION.

The glories of the Possible are ours.—BAYARD TAYLOR.

The majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the

world.—WALT WHITMAN.

There is no life of a man, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed

or unrhymed.—Would’st thou plant for eternity: then plant into the

deep infinite faculties of man.—CARLYLE.

Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and

leads all who accept it astray. Religion, Science, Philosophy,

though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that

every existence is an aim.—MAZZINI.

A sacred burden is this life ye bear.

Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly;

Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly;

Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin;

But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.

FRANCES A. KEMBLE.

Know that this world is one stage of eternity. For those who are

journeying in the right way, it is the road of religion. It is a

market opened in the wilderness where those who are travelling on

their way to God may collect and prepare provisions for their

journey.

AL GAZZALI.

Life is but a means unto an end—that end,

Beginning, mean, and end of all things—God.

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;

In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives

Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

BAILEY.

XV.

CONCLUSION.

We are lotus-eaters, so engrossed with the ignoble attractions around

us as to have forgotten the places through which we have long strayed

away from home, and to heed not the necessity of many more perilous

journeys before we can reach our glorious destination. It is only by

rousing ourselves to the important fact of the past pilgrimage by

which we have traveled hither, and to the still more vital reality of

the incalculable sequences of our present route, that we can attain

the best progress. Our repugnance to the idea of a cycle of lives,

with myriad meanderings through varied forms, is the cry of Tennyson’s

Lotus-Eaters:

While all things else have rest from weariness,

All things have rest, why should we toil alone?

· · · · ·

Nor ever fold our wings

And cease our wanderings.

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

This is virtually the longing for Nirvâna, and the cause of the

irrational belief in an eternal Heaven immediately following this

life. But it is neither wise nor religious to ignore the necessity of

continuing our ascent at the present pace, until we have journeyed all

the way to that distant goal. The restlessness of our nature comes

from the established habit of straying about in temporal realms, and

has developed a love of adventure in which the occidental world finds

profounder delight than in the oriental yearning for inactivity, and

which shall have abundant exercise before it disappears. The only path

to that perfect satisfaction which is found in complete oneness with

the Supreme winds through the ascending planes of material embodiment.

Still must I climb if I would rest:

The bird soars upward to his nest;

The young leaf on the tree-top high

Cradles itself within the sky.

I cannot in the valley stay;

The great horizons stretch away!

The very cliffs that wall me round

Are ladders into higher ground.

And heaven draws near as I ascend;

The breeze invites, the stars befriend.

All things are beckoning to the Best;

I climb to Thee, my God, for rest![56]

In which one of its various guises we shall receive reincarnation

depends upon the individual. Whether it shall be in the crude form of

transmigration through animals as received by most of the world; or in

the Persian and Sufi faith as the unjust banishment from our proper

home by the powers of evil; or, following Egypt, Pythagoras, Plato,

Origen, and the Druids, as a purgatorial punishment for pre-natal

sins; or, in the form of some Christian teaching, as a probationary

stage testing our right to higher existence and ushering us into a

permanent spiritual condition; or, as maintained alike by the acutest

Eastern philosophy and the soundest Western thought, as a wholesome

development of germinal soul-forces;—through all these phrasings the

same central truth abides, furnishing what Henry More called “the

golden key” for the problem of life, and explaining the plot of this

“drama whose prologue and catastrophe are both alike wanting.” But the

broadest intelligence leads us directly into the evolutionary aspect

of reincarnation, and finds the others inadequate to the full measure

of human nature. In this view the present life is one grade of a

stupendous school, in which we are being educated for a destiny so far

beyond our comprehension that some call it a kind of deity. The

experiences through which we have come were needful for our

strengthening. Even though we have descended below former altitudes,

the only path to the absolute lies through the sensuous earthly vale.

Sin itself, after we have escaped it, will lead to a mightier result

than would be possible without it, or it would not be permitted. The

richest trees of all the forest world spring from the unclean miasmic

fens. The severest present disciplines, coming from our earlier

errors, are training us for a loftier growth than we ever knew. Our

physical schooling, through all the grades necessary to our best

unfoldment, will build a character as much sublimer than our primitive

condition as virtue overtowers innocence, and when the race finally

emerges from the jangling turmoil of self-will into complete harmony

with the Perfect One, as it must at last, the multitudes of our lives

will not seem too enormous a course of experience for the

establishment of that consummation. The victorious march of Evolution

through all the provinces of thought will at length be followed by the

triumphal procession of Reincarnation.

There is a spirit in all things that live

Which hints of patient change from kind to kind;

And yet no words its mystic sense can give,

Strange as a dream of radiance to the blind.

And as in time unspeakably remote

Vague frenzies in inferior brains set free

Presaged a power no language could denote,

So dreams the mortal of the God to be.[57]

The Father’s purpose with us seems to be to educate us as His children

so that we shall be in complete sympathy with the divine mind. The

only method of accomplishing this glorious result is for us to enter

with Him into all the phases of His being. Our long series of physical

lives will finally give us a thorough knowledge of the grosser nature

with which He cloaks Himself. We penetrate the animal existence in

human form more successfully than would be possible if we

transmigrated into all the species of zoölogy; for here we carry

sufficient intelligence, along with the material condition, to

comprehend these creatures around us which cannot understand

themselves. We cannot expect to permanently leave this department of

God’s house until we have essentially grasped the secret of all

earthly life. The highest individuals of mankind, the saviors of the

race, the true prophets and poets, attain this intimate communion with

nature, this mastery over the lower creation, which demonstrates their

fitness for introduction to a higher stage.

It is difficult to account for the great geniuses except by the

consideration that they are the result of many noble lives. Emerson

arrives at this conclusion in his essay on Swedenborg. “In common

parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of

extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The

Arabians say that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Scena, the

philosopher, conferred together; and on parting the philosopher said,

‘All that he sees, I know;’ and the mystic said, ‘All that he knows, I

see.’ If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution

would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as reminiscence,

and which is implied by the Brahmans in the tenet of transmigration.

The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, ‘traveling

the path of existence through thousands of births,’ having beheld the

things which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are

beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge:

no wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to one thing, what

formerly she knew. For all things in nature being linked and related,

and the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any

man who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has

learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient

knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage,

and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning

is reminiscence all. How much more, if he that inquires be a holy,

godlike soul! For by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom,

and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily

flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is

present and sympathetic with their structure and law.”

A recent instance of the glaring facts inexplicable by any other

theory than reincarnation appears in the little musical prodigy Josef

Hofmann, whose phenomenal genius holds complete mastery of the piano,

and charms vast audiences with his exquisite rendering of most

difficult concertos, and particularly with his marvelous

improvisations upon themes suggested at a moment’s notice. He presents

the uncanny phenomenon of a child of ten who has little more to learn

in the most difficult of arts. The natural explanation occurring to

any candid mind is thus suggested by the _Boston Herald_ in its report

of a Hofmann concert: “It almost seems as if the spirit of some great

composer had been put into this boy by nature, waiting to be developed

in accordance with our modern art to shine forth again in all its

glory in his work.” What if he actually were the reappearance of

Mozart hastening to fill out the life that was cut sadly short? There

may be means of verifying such a presumption by the character of his

later compositions, when he gets the full expression of his natural

bent. An art so independent of time and place, as music, might fairly

be traced through two historic individuals, when literature and

painting would not permit it. At any rate it is significant that the

young prodigies in any particular kind of skill do not come until that

skill has been well established on the earth. Guido followed

generations of great painters, Pascal was preceded by a long course of

mathematicians. Pope “lisped in numbers” after a vast procession of

poets. And Mozart waited until the new era of musical harmony had been

well inaugurated. The colossal characters who stand out from the race,

with no predecessors equal to them, like Homer, Plato, Jesus, Raphael,

Shakespeare, Beethoven, all reach their maturity later than other

prodigies, after infancy and youth have fastened the Lethean gates

upon the prehistoric scenes from which they seem to hail. But the

unfathomable vagaries of the soul, as it works out successively its

dominant impulses, easily disguise the individual in different

personalities, so long as the physical realm is most attractive to it.

Yet it is noticeable that the great minds of history come together in

galaxies, when the fullness of time for their capacities draws them

together. Witness the Sanskrit sages, the Greek poets and

philosophers, the Augustan writers and generals, the Italian artists

of the Renaissance, the German masters of music, the Elizabethan

authors, the nineteenth-century scientists. The traits of the

commonest child, however, as much as the miracles of a genius, have no

satisfactory explanation outside of the philosophy of re-births.

Evolution of the physical nature and of material strength attaches our

future to body and matter. But the attachment hastens toward a release

by at length proving these to be low steps in the ascent of life. As

in the geological programme of animal development each era carried its

type to gigantic dimensions and then was surmounted by a higher order

of creatures, which in turn grew monstrous as tyrants of their age and

then succumbed to a still higher rank: so the soul’s progress from the

earthly domain lies through the mastery of physical things to mental,

thence to psychic, and at last to spiritual. And the passion for

material achievement animating our side of the planet should not be

underestimated, since it governs an important epoch in the world’s

growth. But the danger lies in esteeming it a finality. It is chiefly

valuable as the foundation upon which we may build skyward, in an

evolution of character. When the structure is made high enough, the

buoyancy of the upper stories will conquer the weight of the base and

float away our abode to ethereal climes. Only the education of the

spiritual in us, of sacrifice, nobility, and divinity, can divorce us

from these uneasy earthly affinities to the permanent rest of union

with God. While we must not abandon the glories of physical beauty,

power and pleasure, we must not forget that the true business of life

is to wean our affections from the visible to the invisible, to

transfer the preponderance of our magnetisms from shadows to

substances. For we bridge the two kingdoms of matter and spirit, and

we have the choice between them more freely than we know.

The mechanical transmigration which was fancifully told in Grecian

mythology, gathered and beautifully rendered by Ovid, which was taught

in the Egyptian and Pythagorean dogmas and still floats broadcast

throughout the vast realms of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and barbarism,

which fascinates the thought of our poets, and which is daily enacted

by a myriad object-lessons in nature, is merely the objective

expression of a subjective truth, discerned by all the mystics, seers,

and philosophers, and most elaborately stated by Swedenborg. It means

that the infinite progress of the soul conveys it through countless

epochs, moving in perfect succession by the dynamic laws of its own

being. During this development, the universe arranges itself

peculiarly to each individual according to his thought and character.

We shape the outer world by our inner nature, and we say just how long

our stay shall be among dust and mortality.

The true and wholesome aspect of the earthly life, under the religious

philosophy of reincarnation, transforms the spectacle from a trivial

show, or a gloomy arena of despair, to a majestic stage in the

ascending series of human sojournings on the way to the Absolute. In

the words of the old martyr-philosopher Giordano Bruno, the father of

Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, the cherisher of that thought,

“being present in the body, is yet, as by an indissoluble oath, bound

and united to divine things, so that he is not sensible either of love

or hatred for mortal things, knowing he is greater than these, and

that he must not be the slave of his body, which is to be regarded as

no other than the prison of his liberty, a snare for his wings, a

chain upon his limbs, and a veil impeding his sight.” His life flows

beauteously in aspiration for the invisible kingdom of permanence, as

this same Bruno, the Nolan, phrased it in verse:—

While that the sun upon his round doth burn

And to their source the roving planets flee,

Things of the earth do to the earth return

And parted waters hasten to the sea:

So shall my spirit to the high gods turn

And heaven-born thought to Heaven shall carry me.

Instead of being a cold pagan philosophy as it is frequently

considered, reincarnation throbs with the most vital spirit of

Christianity. It is no more Buddhism, than kindliness is Christianity.

It is the hidden core of the gospel of Jesus as of all other great

religions and philosophies. This is what has preserved them in spite

of their degrading excrescences. It is “the religion of all sensible

men” who refuse the weak sentiment and bigoted dogmas that obscure the

light of Christianity in the churches: for it clearly unfolds what

they unconsciously believe, in the laws of cause and effect. It spurns

the despairing doctrine of total depravity, but shows the cause of

partial depravity. It teaches salvation as Jesus did, not by heaping

our sins upon him, but by recognizing the Fatherhood of the Supreme,

entering the new birth into spiritual life, and watchfully growing

Godward. It revolts against the thought of everlasting punishment for

brief errors, but provides infinite opportunities for restoration and

advancement, while emphasizing most vigorously the unescapable results

of all action. It is therefore a corrective of modern Christianity

holding fast to the strength and beauty of what the Nazarene taught

and lived, but including those very principles which breed religious

skepticism in the extreme advocates of science and evolution. It

enlarges Christianity to a grander capacity than it has hitherto

known, and so furnishes at once an inspiring religion for the loftiest

spiritual aspiration, a most satisfactory philosophy for the

intellect, and the strongest basis for practical nobility of conduct.

There is no reason why reincarnation and Christianity should not grasp

hands and magnificently advance together, each keeping the other

steadfastly true. Only in this union can Christianity escape its

present downward sag. Since western religion fails to spiritually

sustain us and has largely gone over to the enemy,—materialism, it is

time for another oriental tide to sweep over the West. Having already

a partial possession here, reincarnation promises to flow in freely to

revitalize Christianity, to spiritualize science. As Christianity has

degenerated in the West, so has reincarnation in the East, and the

hope of the race lies in an exalted marriage of them. They need each

other, as husband and wife, allied in purest devotion, supplementing

the defects and strengths of each other, and regenerating their lower

unassociated tendencies. The religion of Jesus tends to sink into an

irrational sentimentality which is commonly relegated to women and

effeminate men. The spiritual philosophy of India declines into

passionless fatalism or an ungenerous self-absorption. Superstition

darkens both alike. But reincarnation keeps Christianity thoroughly

rational, and Christianity will sustain reincarnation in vigorous

unselfishness. This alliance of the best truths of both hemispheres

will teach a reverential submission to the divine will without its

sequel of stagnation, a heroic self-reliance without its danger of

atheism, a regenerative communion with the Highest without the

sacrilegious folly of selfish prayer.

Reincarnation unites all the family of man into a universal

brotherhood more effectively than the prevailing humanity. It promotes

the solidarity of mankind by destroying the barriers that conceit and

circumstances have raised between individuals, groups, nations, and

races. All are alike favored with perfect poetic justice. The children

of God are not ordained some to honor and others to abasement. There

are no special gifts. Physical blessings, mental talents, and moral

successes are the laborious result of long merit. Sorrows, defects,

and failures proceed from negligence. The upward road to the glories

of spiritual perfection is always at our feet, with perpetual

invitations and aids to travel higher. The downward way into sensual

wreckage is but the other direction of the same way. We cannot despise

those who are tending down, for who knows but we have journeyed that

way ourselves? It is impossible for us to scramble up alone, for our

destiny is included in that of humanity, and only by helping others

along can we ascend ourselves. The despondent sadness of the world

which dims the lustre of every joy, chanting the minor key of nature,

haunting us in unaccountable ways, cropping out in all literature and

art, making the grandest of poetry tragic and the sublimest music

sombre, is the unconscious voice of mankind, humming its keynote of

life. While we continue to dwell in the murky realm of sense, that

must prevail. But the bright rifts illuminating the advance guard

herald the approach of day, and assure us that the trend of restless

human gyrations is away from that condition.

Contrary to the common opinion of eastern thought, reincarnation is

optimistic. The law of causation is not a blind meting of eye for eye

and tooth for tooth. It opens out into a scheme of beneficent

progress. Science recognizes this in the _vis medicatrix remedia

naturæ_, the healing power of nature. What was once denied in the

creed of the alchemists concerning the ascending impulse of all things

is now preached by science, which declares in Tyndall’s words that

“matter contains within it the promise and potency of all life.” All

minerals have the rudimentary possibility of plants and animals.

Crystals strive after a higher life by assuming arborescent and mossy

shapes. Plants display the embryonic qualities of low animals. No

naturalist can mark infallibly the boundaries of the three kingdoms,

so closely are they interlinked. A zoölogist does not doubt the

possibility of minerals becoming plants and these mounting into

animals. The movement of vital energy is manward, and the cry of

mankind is “excelsior,” towards God. Poetry cherishes the same

conviction

that somehow good

Shall be the final goal of ill,

For pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroyed

Or cast as useless to the void

When God shall make this pile complete.

Behold! we know not anything.

We can but trust that good shall fall

At last, far off, at last, to all,

And every winter turn to spring.

And Tennyson’s uncertain faith is an undoubted verity in the Orient,

thus phrased by Edwin Arnold:—

Ye are not bound! the soul of things is sweet,

The heart of being is celestial rest;

Stronger than woe is will: that which was good

Doth pass to better—best.

Acknowledging that the forces of evil are terrific and multiply

themselves prodigiously, there can be no question that the predominant

powers are infinitely good. And the supremacy of good in the universe

diminishes the full force of evil, makes the higher attractions outvie

the lower, and hastens the final disappearance of darkness. This

insures the amelioration of all life by the benign process of

re-birth; for

The Heart of all is a boundless Love

Pulsing through every part

In streams that thrill the hosts above

And make the atoms dart.

The strongest objection to reincarnation, our ignorance of past lives,

is met by the fact permeating all nature and experience, that progress

depends upon forgetfulness. Every great stage of advancement is

accompanied by the mental loss of earlier epochs. One of Montaigne’s

best essays shows the blessedness of defective memory. All deep

philosophy agrees that after an experience is absorbed into the soul,

its purpose is accomplished, and the only chance of improvement

consists in “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching

forth unto those things which are before.” It would be intellectually

impossible for the memory to grasp anything new, if it clung to all it

had known. One of the grandest discourses of that greatest English

preacher of the last generation, Frederick W. Robertson, is upon the

theme of “Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past.” The experience

of the race affords no sufficient endorsement of the continuation of

our mortal memories. It is impossible to escape the liberal scientific

teaching that the mind is only an instrument of the soul, and when it

decays with the body, the soul retains of its earthly possessions only

what has sunk down into the character. The logician of the Scriptures

expresses this in saying, “Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish

away.” But the everlastingness of character insures the permanence of

our identity and of our dearest ties. And as the scale of being on

earth shows a gradual development of memory from the lowest protozoön

to man, so in man the unconscious memory shall become more and more

conspicuous, until it reveals the course of our complete career.

The glorious unfoldment of our dormant powers in repeated lives

presents a spectacle magnificent beyond appreciation, and approaches

more grandly than any other conception to the sublimity of human

development. Addison wrote: “There is not, in my opinion, a more

pleasing consideration than that of the perpetual progress which the

soul makes towards the perfection of its nature, without ever arriving

at a period in it. To look upon the soul as going on from strength to

strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions

of glory and brighten to all eternity; that she will be still adding

virtue to virtue and knowledge to knowledge, carries in it something

wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of

man. Nay, it must be a prospect pleasing to God himself, to see his

creatures forever beautifying in his eyes, and drawing nearer to Him

by greater degrees of resemblance.” Reincarnation shows the programme

by which this stupendous scheme is being worked out, step by step, in

the gradual method of all God’s doings, and glorifies the present

cycle as a specimen of eternity which shall ever grow brighter until

the full brilliancy of the Highest shall radiate from every life.

The practical application of this truth not only dispels the haunting

enigmas of life, but incites us to the strongest habits of virtuous

conduct in ourselves, and of generous helpfulness toward others. It

inspires us to nurture all the means of developing noble traits, since

the promise of all good, and the only highway out of the bogs of

physical life into the mountain heights of spirituality, is character.

It reminds us most forcibly that

Every thought of purity,

Every deed of right,

Conquers sin’s obscurity,

Speeds the reign of light;

Moves with might supernal

Toward rest and home,

Leads to life eternal,

Prays, “Thy kingdom come.”

It is not strange, therefore, that one of the leading writers of Great

Britain says of reincarnation: “The ethical leverage of the doctrine

is immense. Its motive power is great. It reveals as magnificent a

background to the present life, with its contradictions and disasters,

as the prospect of immortality opens up an illimitable foreground,

lengthening out the horizon of hope. It binds together the past and

the present and the future in one ethical series of causes and

effects, the inner thread of which is both personal to the individual

and impersonal, connecting him with two eternities, one behind and the

other before. With peculiar emphasis it proclaims the survival of

moral individuality and personal identity along with the final

adjustment of external conditions to the internal state of the

agent.”[58]

Alongside of the Scotch professor’s words we place these sentences

from an eastern teacher, that the wisdom of the antipodes may grasp

hands in one common brotherhood for the instruction of the world:—

“There is in each incarnation but one birth, one life, one death. It

is folly to duplicate these by persistent regrets for the past, by

present cowardice, or fear of the future. There is no Time. It is

Eternity’s now that man mistakes for past, present, and future.

“The forging of earthly chains is the occupation of the indifferent;

the awful duty of unloosing them through the sorrows of the heart is

also their occupation.

“Liberate thyself from evil actions by good actions.”[59]

Emerson, who unites in one personality the sublimest intuitions of the

Orient with the broadest observations of the West, may well represent

a noble harmony of these distant kinships when he says: “We must infer

our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to hive

innumerable experiences which are of no visible value, and we may

revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust them.

Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or

accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in

steady and supported advances.... If there is the desire to live, and

in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is because life

and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural

depositaries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion

to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate a conviction

of immense resources and possibilities proper to us, on which we have

never drawn. All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I

shall not have less in times and places than I do not yet know.”

We conclude, therefore, with the conviction that all the best teachers

of mankind—religion, philosophy, science, and poetry—urge the soul to

Be worthy of death; and so learn to live

That every incarnation of thy soul

In varied realms, and worlds, and firmaments

Shall be more pure and high.

APPENDIX.

Where a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and

courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by: it

is good and made by a good workman.—DE LA BRUYÈRE.

* * * * *

You despise books: you whose whole lives are absorbed in the vanities

of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence; but remember

that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed

by books.—VOLTAIRE.

* * * * *

Within their silent chambers treasures lie

Preserved from age to age; more precious far

Than that accumulated store of gold

And orient gems, which for a day of need

The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs;

These hoards of truth you can unlock at will.

WORDSWORTH.

* * * * *

I not only commend the study of this literature (the eastern), but

wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly enlarged. American

students may well derive from all former lands—all the older

literatures and all the newer ones—bearing ourselves always courteous,

always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the motherworld, to all

its nations dead, as all its nations living.

WALT WHITMAN.

* * * * *

In books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time—the articulate,

audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it

has altogether vanished like a dream. No magic _Rune_ is stranger than

a book. All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been, is lying

in magic preservation in the pages of books. Do not books still

accomplish _miracles_ as _Runes_ were fabled to do? They persuade

men.—CARLYLE.

APPENDIX.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF REINCARNATION.

I. LATIN.

Schilling, Wolfg. Heinrich. De Metempsychosi Dissertatio. Lipsiæ,

1679.

Henrici, Heinrich. De Animarum Transmigratione. 1699.

Haffner, Gotthard. Dissertatio de Transmigratione Animarum, quatenus

ex Lumine Rationis cognosci potest. 1746.

Osiander, Johann Adam. Dissertatio de Transmigratione Animarum

Humanarum ex suis Corporibus in alia Corpora. Tubingae, 1749.

Heusse, M. De Metempsychosi sive Animarum per plura Corpora

Revolutione. 1757.

Haeggroth, Nic. De Metempsychosi. London, 1793.

Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van. Seder Olam sive Ordo Seculorum.

Holland, 1693.

Keil. De Pre-existentia Animarum. (In _Opuscula_.)

Huygens, Christian. Cosmotheoros, sive de Terris Celestibus earumque

Ornatu Conjecturæ. Paris, 1698.

Iamblichus. De Pythagorica Vita. Didot, 1862.

Porphyrius. De Vita Pythagoræ. Didot, 1862.

Barrow, Isaac. Animæ Humanæ Corporibus non præexistunt. (In opposition

to Henry More.) (In his _Opuscula_, vol. iv. of his works.) London,

1687.

Sibbern, Fred. C. De Præexistentia, Genesi et Immortalitate Animæ.

Havniæ, 1823.

Doppert, Joh. De vetusto Metempsycheos Commento. Schneebergæ, 1716.

Irhove, Willem. De Palingenesia Veterum seu Metempsychosi sic dicta

Pythagorica Libri III. Amstelodami, 1733.

Wernsdorf, Gottlieb. Disputatio de Metempsychosi Veterum non figurate

sed proprie intelligenda. Vitembergæ, 1741.

Vangerow, W. G. von. Dissertatio historico-philosophica Metempsychosin

veterum sistens. Halle, 1765.

Sedermark, Pet. De Metempsychosi Veterum. Pars I-III. Upsalæ, 1807.

Wendel, Joh. And. De Metempsychosi nuper Denuo defensa. Coburgi, 1828.

Sai an Sinsin sive Liber Metempsychosis veterum Ægyptiorum. E duabus

Papyris funebribus hieraticis Signis exaratis nunc primum edidit

Latine vertit Notas adjecit Henricus Brugsch. Berolini, 1851.

Haupt, Eberh. Dav. De Metempsychosi sive Pythagoræa Animarum

Transmigratione brevis Disquisition. Ulmæ, 1724.

Bruno, Giordano. De Triplice minimo et mensura ad trium speculatinarum

scientiarum et multarum actinarum artium principia. Francofurti, 1591.

II. GERMAN.

Bertram, J. F. Bescheidene Prüfung der Meynung von der Präexistenz,

oder dem Vorherseyn menschlicher Seelen in organischen Leibern, sammt

einer Historia Præexistentianorum. Bremen, 1741.

Schubert, Johann E. von. Wandelung der Seele nach dem Tode. Jena,

1746.

Trinius, Joh. Anton. Abhandlung von der Seelenwanderung. Frankfurt und

Leipzig, 1760.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.

Berlin, 1780. Translated by Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. “The

Education of the Human Race.” London, 1855.

Schlosser, Joh. Georg. Ueber die Seelenwanderung. Basel, 1781.

Beiträge zur Lehre der Seelenwanderung. Leipzig, 1785.

Wasseljew, W. Der Buddhismus, seine Dogmen, Geschichte und Literatur.

St. Petersburg, 1860.

Koeppen, Carl Friedrich. Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung.

Berlin, 1857. Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche. Berlin, 1857.

Herder, Joh. Gottfried von. Das Land der Seelen—Palingenesis—Ueber die

Seelenwanderung. (Three Dialogues.) 1785. (The Dialogue on

Transmigration is translated by F. H. Hedge in his “Prose Writers of

Germany.” Philadelphia, 1848.)

Bruch, J. Fr. Die Lehre von der Präexistenz der menschlichen Seelen

historisch-kritisch dargestellt. Strassburg, 1859.

Conzius, C. P. Schicksale der Seelenwanderungshypothese under

verschiedenen Völkern und in verschiedenen Zeiten. Königsberg, 1781.

Leibnitz, G. W. Monadologie.

Müller, Joh. T. Ueber die Seelenwanderung. Einige prüfende Gedanken.

Friedrichsstadt, 1785.

Ungern-Sternberg, Chrn. F., Baron von. Blick auf die moralische und

politische Welt, was sie war, was sie ist, was sie seyn wird. Bremen,

1785.

Grosse, Carl. Helim, oder über die Seelenwanderung. Zittau, 1789.

Wedekind, Georg, Baron von. Ueber die Bestimmung des Menschen und die

Erziehung der Menschheit, oder: wer, wo, wozu, bin ich, war ich, und

werde ich sein. Giessen, 1828.

Ritgen, Ferd. Aug. von. Die höchsten Angelegenheiten der Seele, nach

dem Gesetze des Fortschrittes betrachtet. Darmstadt, 1835.

Krug, Wilhelm Traugott. Der neue Pythagoras, oder Geschichte eines

dreimal gebornen Erdenbürgers. Leipzig, 1836.

Meyer, Jürgen Bona. Die Idee der Seelenwanderung. Hamburg, 1861. A

French translation, “De la migration des âmes,” is in the Revue

Germanique, Nov. 30, 1861, XVIII. 239–259.

Klewitz, A. W. von. Ueber Fortdauer und Præexistenz. Magdeburg, 1789.

Fichte, Joh. Gottlieb. Ideen über Gott und Unsterblichkeit, als

Nachtrag zu seinen “Sämmtlichen Werken.” 1853.

Nürnberger, Jos. C. E. Still-Leben, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der

Seele. Kempten, 1839.

Meyer, Joh. Friedrich von. Prüfung der Lehre von der Seelenwanderung.

(In his Blätter für höhere Wahrheit. Neue Folge, 1830, I. 244–299.)

Fichte, Imman. Herm. Die Idee der Persönlichkeit und der individuellen

Fortdauer. Leipzig, 1855.

Schubert, G. H. Die Geschichte der Seele. Stuttgart, 1833.

Bastian, Adolf. Der Mensch in der Geschichte. See Vol. II. Psychologie

und Mythologie. Leipzig, 1860. Die Vorstellungen von der Seele.

Berlin, 1875. Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 vols. Leipzig, 1866.

Beiträge zur vergleichenden Psychologie. Berlin, 1868. Weltauffassung

der Buddhisten. Berlin, 1870. Der Buddhismus in seiner Psychologie.

Berlin, 1882.

Müller. Lehre von der Sünde. Augsburg, 1854. See Vol. II. 495 et seq.

Froschammer, J. Ueber den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen. München,

1854.

Marcus, Joh. Vorstellungen über den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen

in den ersten Jahren der Kirche. 1854.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Sämmtliche Werke. Die Welt als Wille und

Vorstellung. Leipzig, 1873.

Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Ueber die Seelenfrage; ein Gang durch die

sichtbare Welt, um die unsichtbare zu finden. Leipzig, 1861.

Philo. Versuch eines systematischen Entwurfs des Lehrbegriffs Philo’s

von Alexandrien. E. H. Stahl. Eichhorn’s Allgem. Bibl. 1792. (IV.

767–890.)

Seelenwanderung. Zeitschrift der Morgenländ. Gesellschaft. VI., IX.,

XXVII., XXIX.

Kern. Der Buddhismus. Leipzig, 1882.

Spiesz, E. Entwicklungsgeschichte der Vorstellungen vom Zustande nach

dem Tode. Jena, 1877. (Contains a bibliography at the end of each

chapter.)

Müller, J. G. Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligion. Basel, 1867.

Simrock, K. Handbuch der Deutschen Mythologie. Bonn, 1878.

Pfleiderer, O. Religions-Philosophie. Berlin, 1878.

Döllinger, J. J. I. Heidenthum und Judenthum. Regensburg, 1857.

Karsten, S. Verhandeling over Palingenesie en Metempsychosis.

Amsterdam, 1846.

Weber. Indische Studien.

Twesten, C. Die religiösen, politischen und socialen Ideen der

asiatischen Culturvölker. 2 vols. Berlin, 1872.

Vierteljahrschrift für die Seelenlehre.

Delitzsch, Franz. System der Biblischen Psychologie. Leipzig, 1855.

III. FRENCH.

Olivier, Jean. La Metempsychose, discours prononcé par Pythagore dans

l’école de Crotone. Amsterdam et Paris, 1760.

Duguet, Charles. Pythagore, ou Precis de philosophie ancienne et

moderne dans ses rapports avec les metamorphoses de la nature ou la

metempsychose. Paris, 1841.

Reynaud, Jean. Philosophie Religieuse du Tierre et Ciel. Paris, 1854.

Bouchet, Père. Lettre sur la metempsychose. In Picart’s Ceremonies.

Paris, 1867.

Erckmann-Chatrian. Le Docteur Malthéus. Paris, 1859.

Linner, Jean R. Essai sur les Dogmes de la Metempsychose et du

Purgatoire enseigne par les Bramins de l’Indostan. Berne, 1771.

Leroux, Pierre. De l’Humanité. Paris. (See Fortnightly Review, V. 17,

1872, p. 324–333.)

Beausobre, Isaac de. Histoire du Manichéisme. Paris.

Bonnet, Charles. La Palingenesis Philosophique, ou Idées sur l’état

passé et sur l’état futur des êtres vivans. Geneve, 1769.

Pezzani, André. La Pluralité des Existences de l’Âme. Paris, 1865.

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer de. Entretiens sur la Pluralité des

Mondes. Paris, 1686. Bibliothèque National. Paris, 1871.

Flammarion, Camille. La Pluralité des Mondes Habitués. Paris, 1864.

Histoires d’Infinité. Paris, 1867. Les Mondes Imaginaires, et les

Mondes Réel. Paris, 1865. (Contains a list and analysis of all the

works on the plurality of worlds.)

Fourier, F. Charles Marie. La Fausse Industrie Morcelée, et

l’Antidote, l’Industrie Naturelle, combinée. Paris, 1835–36.

Picart, Bernard. Céremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les

peuples du monde: 12 tom. Paris, 1807.

Franck, Ad. Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques. Paris, 1875. See

the article “Metempsychose.”

Bibliothèque Orientale. Chef-d’œuvre Littéraires de l’Inde, de la

Perse, de l’Égypte et de la Chine. Tomes 4. Paris, 1872–78. Vol. I.

Rig Veda. II. Hymnes Sanscrit, Persans, Egyptiens, Assyriens et

Chinois. III. Burnouf, E. Introduction à l’Histoire du Buddhisme

Indien. IV. Le Koran Analysé.

Bibliothèque Orientale Elzévirienne. Tomes 30. Paris, 1873–1880. (A

vast collection of valuable works upon the religions, literatures, and

peoples of the East.)

Plotinus. Les Ennéades de Plotin. Traduits pour la première fois en

français, accompagnée de sommaires, de notes—par M. N. Bouillet. Tomes

3. Paris, 1858–61. (With fragments from Porphyry, Iamblichus, and

other Neo-Platonists.)

Regnaud, P. Materiaux pour servir à l’histoire de la philosophie de

l’Inde. Paris, 1876.

Draward, L. La Science Occulte. Paris.

Burnouf, E. Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme Indien. Paris,

1844. Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi. Traduit du Sanscrit, accompagnée d’un

Commentaire. Paris, 1852.

IV. ENGLISH.

Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London,

1678. (“A storehouse of learning on the ancient opinions of the

nature, origin, pre-existence, transmigration, and future of the

soul.”)

More, Henry. Philosophical Poems. “A Platonick Song of the Soul;

treating of the Life of the Soul, her Immortality, the Sleep of the

Soul, the Unitie of Souls, and Memorie after Death.” Cambridge, 1647.

(See page 18, above.)

More, Henry. The Immortality of the Soul, so farre as it is

demonstrable from the knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason.

London, 1659. (See Book II, chapter xvi.)

Glanvil, Joseph (Rector of Bath). Lux Orientalis; or an Inquiry into

the opinions of the Eastern sages concerning the Præ-existence of

Souls. Being a key to unlock the Grand Mysteries of Providence in

Relation to man’s sin and misery. London, 1662. Republished with

annotations by Dr. Henry More. 1682.

Dunton, John. The Visions of the Soul before it comes into the Body.

In several Dialogues. London, 1692. (Satirical.)

Helmont, F. M. Two Hundred Queries moderately Propounded concerning

the Doctrine of the Revolution of Human Souls. London, 1684.

Parker, Samuel (Bishop). A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick

Philosophie; with an account of the Origenian Hypothesis, concerning

the Pre-existence of Souls. London, 1666.

Evidence (An) for Immortality, and for Transmigration. To which is

added a Treatise concerning those who sleep in the Dust of the Earth.

London, 1732.

Mede. The Mystery of Godliness. London, 1708. (Chapter III upholds

“the reasonable doctrine” of pre-existence as “a key for some of the

main mysteries of Providence, which no other can so handsomely

unlock.”)

Warren, Edward. No Pre-Existence; or a brief Dissertation against the

Hypothesis of Humane Souls living in a state antecedaneous to this.

London, 1667.

Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. London. See Nos. 211 and 343.

Newcomb, Thomas. Pre-existence and Transmigration. A Poem. London,

1743.

Pre-existence. A Poem. Bath, 1763. (In Dodsley’s Collection, I. pp.

158–172.) (See pp. 181–187, above.)

Berrow, Capel, Rector of Rossington. A Lapse of Human Souls in a State

of Pre-existence, the only Original Sin, and the Groundwork of the

Gospel Dispensation. London, 1766.

(He considers that men are apostate angels, and that the brute

creation labors under a severer stroke of divine justice than the

human race because it was guiltier than mankind in æons past.)

Jenyns, Soame. Disquisitions on Several Subjects. London, 1782. Disq.

III, pp. 27–46. (See page 88, above.)

Preëxistence of Souls and Universal Restoration. From the Minutes and

Correspondence of the Burnam Society. Taunton, 1798.

Ramsay, Chevalier. Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed

Religion unfolded in a Geometrical Order. Edinburgh, 1748.

Brocklesby, Richard. An Explication of Gospel Theism and the Divinity

of the Christian Religion, containing the true account of the System

of the Universe. 1706.

(Maintains preëxistence.)

Goodwin, John. Works. London, 1652.

(Defends preëxistence.)

Bulstrode, Whitelocke. An Essay on Transmigration, in Defence of

Pythagoras. London, 1692.

Wheeler, J. T. History of India. London, 1874. (For Hindu

Transmigration, see pp. 72–76.)

Garrett, J. Classical Dictionary of India. 1871. (See

“Transmigration,” on pp. 637–642.)

Tulloch, John, D.D. Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in

England in the 17th Century. Edinburgh and London, 1872. (Vol. II: The

Cambridge Platonists.)

Wilkinson, Sir John Gardiner. A second series of the Manners and

Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, including their Religion, etc. 3

vols. London, 1878. (Vol. II. chap, xvi., pp. 440–451, relate to

transmigration.)

Bunsen, Christian Carl J. Egypt’s Place in Universal History. 5 vols.

London, 1848–1860. (Vol. IV. pp. 638–653, treat of animal worship and

metempsychosis.)

Ginsburg, Dr. The Kabbala: its Doctrines, Development and Literature.

London.

Taylor, Isaac. Physical Theory of Another Life. London and New York,

1836.

Hume, David. Essay on Immortality. In his Essays, moral, political and

literary. Edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Gosse. London, 1875. (See p.

94, above.)

Cox, Edward W. What am I? A Popular Introduction to Mental Philosophy

and Psychology. 2 vols. London, 1871. Vol. I., chap. 42,

“Pre-existence.”

Hudson, C. F. Debt and Grace, as related to the Doctrine of a Future

Life. Boston, 1858. (See p. 111.)

Timbs, John. The Mysteries of Life, Death and Futurity. London, 1880.

(See the chapters on Pre-existence of Souls, pp. 43 and 262.)

Butler, Wm. Archer. Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy,

edited by William Hepworth Thompson. London, 1856. (See Vol. II.,

Lecture IV., pp. 240–264, Psychology of Plato.)

Mozley, J. B., D.D. (Canon of Christ Church). Essays, Historical and

Theological. London, 1878. (Vol. II. pp. 317 sq., “Indian Conversion,”

severely attacks the Brahmanical doctrine.)

Liddon, H. P., D.D. (Canon of St. Paul’s). Some Elements of Religion.

Lent Lectures. London, 1870. (Lecture II. pp. 95–106, is devoted to a

refutation of Preëxistence.)

Jennings, H. The Rosecrucians. Their Rites and Mysteries. London,

1870. (References to transmigration occur on pages 94, 97, 101, 106.)

Davies, Edward. Mythology and Rites of the British Druids. London,

1809.

Mosheim, Joh. L. von. Commentaries on the Affairs of the Christians in

the First Three Centuries. London and New York. (See Sections 27–29

for Origen.)

Beecher, Edward. The Conflict of Ages; or the Great Debate on the

Moral Relations of God and Man. Boston, 1853. The Concord of Ages. New

York, 1860.

Alger, Wm. R. A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life.

Philadelphia, 1860. (See p. 100, above.)

Clarke, James Freeman. Ten Great Religions. Boston, 1871. (Vol. I.

chapter iii. Brahmanism; chap. iv. Buddhism; chap. vi. The Religion of

Egypt. Vol. II. chap. vi. The Soul and its Transmigrations in all

Religions.)

Johnson, Samuel. Oriental Races and Religions. India. Boston, 1875.

Channing, Wm. Henry. Lectures on Eastern Religions. London.

Haldred. An Account of the Hindoo Land.

D’Israeli, Isaac. Curiosities of Literature. London. (Vol. II.

contains a short section on “Metempsychosis.”)

Hardy, R. Spence. A Manual of Buddhism, in its Modern Development.

London, 1853. New York, 1886.

Wilson, Prof. H. H. Lectures on the Religious Opinions of the Hindus.

Upham, Edward. The History and Doctrine of Buddhism, popularly

illustrated. London, 1829. (Transmigration occupies pp. 25–43.)

Lillie, Arthur. Buddha and Early Buddhism.

Brewster, David. More Worlds than One: the Philosopher’s Faith and the

Christian’s Hope. London.

Man: Fragments of Forgotten History. By Two Chelas. London, 1885.

Hartmann, Franz, M.D. Magic, White and Black; or the Science of the

Finite and Infinite Life. London, 1886.

Sinnet, A. P. Esoteric Buddhism. Boston, 1884. Five Years of

Theosophy. London, 1885.

Arnold, Edwin. The Light of Asia. Boston, 1879. Pearls of the Faith.

Boston, 1883.

Collins, Mabel. Light on the Path. Boston, 1885. Through the Gates of

Gold. A Fragment of Thought. Boston, 1887.

Tredwell, Daniel N. Apollonius of Tyana. New York, 1886.

Chasseaud, Geo. Washington. The Druses of the Lebanon: their Manners,

Customs, and History. With a translation of their Religious Code.

London, 1855.

Fleming’s Vocabulary of Philosophy. London, 1886. (See under

Metempsychosis, etc.)

Hedge, Frederick Henry. Ways of the Spirit and other Essays. Boston,

1877. (See above, page 120.)

Tyler, E. B. Primitive Culture. New York, 1876.

Myers, F. W. H. Modern Essays. (See page 55.)

Poe, Edgar Allan. Eureka. In his Complete Works. New York.

Smedley. The Occult Sciences. London, 1855. Dreamland and Ghostland. 3

vols. London, 1887.

Hodson, B. H. Essays on the Language, Literature and Religion of Nepal

and Tibet. London, 1874.

King, C. W. The Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and Medieval.

London and New York, 1864 and 1887.

McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological and

Ecclesiastical Literature. New York, 1867–1877. (See Gnostics,

Metempsychosis, Pre-existence, Origen, etc.)

Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of

Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. New York, 1877. (See

references in index to Metempsychosis, Reincarnation and

Transmigration.)

Frith, J. Life of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan. London and Boston, 1887.

Meyer, Isaac. Qabbalah. The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben

Yehudah Ibn Gebirol or Avicebron, and their connection with the Hebrew

Qabbalah and Sepher haz-Zohar, etc. Philadelphia, 1888.

V. ENGLISH. (TRANSLATIONS.)

Manu, The Institutes of. The Twelfth Book treats of Transmigration.

Trans. by Sir Wm. Jones. Vol. VIII. of his Works. 1807.

Rig Veda. Vishnu Purana. Translated by Prof. H. H. Wilson. London,

1840.

Sacred Books of the East. Translated or edited by Max Müller. Oxford.

See especially Upanishads, Vol. I.; Sacred Laws of the Aryas, Vol.

II.; Bhagavadgita, Vol. VIII.

Picart, Bernard. Ceremonies and Religious Customs of all the People of

the World. 6 vols. London, 1733–37. Vol. IV. Part II. pp. 159–187,

describe Hindu Transmigration. See also Vol. I. Part II. p. 23 seq.;

Vol. II. Part I. p. 157 seq.

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology. Trans. by F. H. Hedge. In the

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I. pp. 129. New York, 1867.

Hafiz. Persian Lyrics. London, 1800.

Bibliothèque Orientale. London, 1692. (See the essay on

Transmigration.)

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. The Education of the Race. Trans, by Rev.

F. W. Robertson. London, 1855.

Fichte, J. G. The Destiny of Man. In Dr. Hedge’s “Prose Writers of

Germany.” Philadelphia, 1848. New York, 1856. (See pages 58–59,

above.)

Helmont, F. M. von. Seder Olam: or the Order of All the Ages of the

Whole World; also the Hypothesis of the Pre-existency and Revolution

of Human Souls. Translated by J. Clark, M.D. London, 1694.

Herder, John. Dialogues on Transmigration. Translated by F. H. Hedge

in his “Prose Writers of Germany” (pp. 248 et seq.). Philadelphia,

1848. New York, 1856. (See pp. 59–63, above.)

Plotinus. Select Works. Translated by Thomas Taylor. London, 1817.

Five Books. (See especially “The Descent of the Soul.”) Translated by

Thomas Taylor. London, 1794.

Virgil. Eneid. Translated by William Morris. Boston, 1876. Trans. by

C. P. Cranch. Boston, 1872. (See latter part of the sixth Eneid.)

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Pythagorean Philosophy. Translated by Dryden.

London and New York.

Plato. Phædro. Translated by B. Jowett. New York, 1871. Also in Bohn’s

Classical Library.

Plutarch. Essay on the Delay of Heavenly Justice. In his Miscellaneous

Essays. London and New York.

Origen, The Writings of. Translated by Rev. Frederick Crombie. 2 vols.

Edinburgh, 1869. In Clark’s Ante-Nicene Christian Library.

Richter, Jean Paul. Levana. London, 1848. (p. 346.)

Israel, Manasseh Ben. Conciliata. Translated by Dr. Linde. (A rich

mine of information concerning the Kabala, and Jewish preëxistence.)

Fourier, Charles. Passions of the Human Soul. Translated by Hugh

Dougherty. London, 1851. (For Fourier’s ideas on immortality see

Introduction, pp. xiv-xviii.)

Herodotus. Book II. cap. 123.

Timæus, the Locrian. (A Pythagorean.)

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Translated by R. B.

Haldane and I. Kemp. 3 vols. London, 1883–86. (See Vol. III. p. 468.)

Essay on Death and Immortality. Translated by C. L. Bernays in the

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I. 1867.

Talmud, The. J. Barclay. 1878. Selections from the Talmud. H. Polano.

1848.

Figuer, Louis. The To-morrow of Death. Translated by S. R. Crocker.

Boston, 1872.

Bonnet, Charles. Philosophic Palingenesis. Paris.

Hen, Llywarch. Heroic Elegies. Translated by Owen. (Welsh Poems of

Druidism.)

Diogenes Laertius. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers of

Antiquity. Translated by C. D. Yonge. In Bohn’s Standard Library.

London, 1853. (See Plato, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Hierocles.)

Dacier, A. Life of Pythagoras, with his Symbols and Golden Verses.

From the French. London, 1797. Hierocles, upon the Golden Verses of

the Pythagoreans. Trans, by J. Moor. Glasgow, 1756. Life of

Pythagoras, with his Symbols and Golden Verses, together with the Life

of Hierocles and his Commentaries upon the Verses. From the French.

London, 1721.

Müller, Julius. Christian Doctrine of Sin. Trans. by Wm. Pulsford. In

Clark’s Foreign Theological Library. Edinburgh.

Hagenbach, Karl R. History of Doctrine. Trans. by Carl W. Buch. In

Clark’s Foreign Theological Library. Edinburgh. (For Patristic

Preëxistence see pp. 143-, 285-.) New York, 1863.

Schlegel, W. F. von. Æsthetics and Miscellaneous Works. In Bohn’s

Library. 1849. (See p. 468.)

Kuenen, A. National Religions and Universal Religions. (Hibbert

Lectures, 1882.) Trans. by Rev. P. H. Wicksteed. New York, 1882.

(Lecture V. is upon Buddhism.)

Renouf, P. Le Page. The Religion of Ancient Egypt. (Hibbert Lectures

for 1879.) New York, 1879.

Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology. See the article on Transmigration, Vol.

II. pp. 655, 826.

Oldenberg, Hermann. Buddha, his Life, his Doctrine, his Order.

Translated by William Hoey. London, 1882.

Buddhist Birth Stories. Edited by Faurboël. Translated by Rhys David.

VI. FICTION.

Rossetti, D. G. St. Agnes of Intercession. An autobiographical story.

In Rossetti’s Collected Works. London. (Vol. I. p. 399.)

Willis, N. P. A Revelation of a Previous Life. An autobiographical

sketch. In his “Dashes at Life.” New York, 1841.

Macnish, R. The Metempsychosis by a Modern Pythagorean. In Tales,

Essays, and Sketches. London, 1844. Also in Blackwood’s Magazine, XIX.

496; Littell, LVII. p. 500; Tales from Blackwood, Vol. II.; Good

Stories, Part II.

Confessions of a Metempsychosian. Fraser’s Magazine, XII. 496.

Cooke, Rose Terry. Metempsychosis. Atlantic Monthly, II. 59.

Fielding, Henry. A Journey from this World to the Next. In his

Complete Works. London.

Sinnet, A. P. Karma. Boston, 1886.

Hogg, James. The Wool Gatherer. In his Winter Evening Tales. Glasgow.

Stevenson, R. L. The Adventures of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. New York,

1887.

Hawthorne, Julian. Archibald Malmaison. New York, 1885.

Flammarion, Camille. Stories of Infinity. Trans. by S. R. Crocker.

Boston, 1873.

Duchess, Emilia. Boston, 1887.

Hunt, Mrs. E. B. The Wards of Plotinus. London and New York, 1881. (In

this historical novel Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists of his time are

the principal figures, though not much of their philosophy of

preëxistence appears.)

Balzac, Honoré de. Peau de Chagrin. Paris, 1839.

Erckman, E., and Chatrian, A. L’Illustre Docteur Mathéus. Paris, 1859.

Fechner, Gustav T. Dr. Mises. Leipzig.

(These stories of doubles may also be added, as showing more or less

the impersonation of the higher and lower self in separate

embodiments:)

Fouqué. Sintram and his Companion.

Andersen, Hans C. The Shadow.

Browning, Mrs. E. B. The Romaunt of Margret.

Gautier. Le Chevalier Double.

Hale, E. E. My Double and How he undid me.

Poe, E. A. William Wilson.

VII. ARTICLES IN PERIODICALS, PAMPHLETS, ETC.

Bowen, Prof. Francis. Christian Metempsychosis. Princeton Review, New

Series, VII. 315. (May, 1881.)

Alger, Wm. R. The Transmigration of Souls. North American Review,

LXXX. 58. (January, 1855.)

Glanvil, Joseph, wrote a long letter full of curious learning to

Richard Baxter, in defense of the soul’s preëxistence, which is among

the Baxter MSS. in the Red-Cross Street Library, Cripplegate.

Sentiment of Pre-existence. Chamber’s Journal. (May 17, and Oct. 11,

1845.)

Doctrine of Pre-existence. The Radical, III. 517.

Pre-existence of Souls. American Presbyterian Review, II. 546. (March,

1854.)

Knight, Prof. William. Doctrine of Metempsychosis. Fortnightly Review,

XXX. 422. (See p. 96, above.)

Pontius, J. W. Transmigration of Souls. Reformed Quarterly Review,

XXVIII. 625.

Pre-existence of Souls. Bibliotheca Sacra, XII. (Jan., 1855.) From

Keil’s Opuscula Acad.

Pre-existence. Methodist Review, Oct., 1853.

Concerning Preëxistence. Penn Monthly, VIII. 655. Sept., 1877.