a sufficient amount of purification and ennobling, it recommences a
second existence, passing into the body of a newly-born child, and
losing the remembrance of its first life. Only when the soul has
attained the suitable degree of perfection, and, after having been
re-incarnate once, or many times, is empowered to leave our globe,
to assume a new body in the bosom of the ethereal plains, and thus
become a superhuman being, can it recover the recollection of its past
existences.
10. That which occurs upon the Earth also takes place in the other
planets of our solar system. In these planets vegetables, or beings
analogous to vegetables are produced by the action of the sun. By means
of his rays animated germs are carried into these globes, and plants
and inferior animals are produced. Then these animated germs contained
in the plants and inferior animals, passing successively through
the whole series of animals, end by producing a being, superior, in
intelligence and sensibility, to all the other living creatures. This
superior being, the analogue of the human being, we call planetary man.
11. The planetary man, who inhabits Mercury, Mars, Venus, &c., being
dead, his material form remains upon the planetary globe, and his
soul, provided it has acquired the necessary degree of purity, passes
into the surrounding ether, is incarnate in a new body, and produces a
superhuman being.
12. Phalanxes of these superhuman beings float in the planetary ether.
It witnesses the reunion of all the purified souls, which have come
from our globe and from the other planets. The organic types of these
beings is the same, whatever may be their planetary abode.
13. The superhuman being is provided with special attributes, he is
endowed with mighty faculties which raise him to a height infinitely
above terrestrial or planetary humanity. In this being, matter, in
comparison with the spiritual principle, is reduced to a much smaller
proportion than in man. His body is light and vaporous. He possesses
senses which are unknown to us, and the senses which he possesses
in common with us, are prodigiously intensified, subtilised, and
perfected. He can transport himself, in a short space of time, to any
distance, he can travel, without fatigue, from one point in space
to another. His vision is of immeasurable extent. He has intuitive
knowledge of many facts of nature which are hidden by an impenetrable
veil from feeble human perception.
14. The superhuman being who comes from the earth can place himself
in communication with men who are worthy of the privilege. He
directs their conduct, watches over their actions, enlightens their
understanding, inspires their hearts. When, in their turn, they too
reach the celestial dwellings, he receives them on the threshold of
their new abode, and initiates them into the life of blessedness beyond
the tomb.
15. The superhuman being is mortal. When he has terminated the normal
course of his existence in the ethereal spaces, he dies, and his
spiritual principle enters into a new body, that of the _archangel_,
or _arch-human being_, in whom the proportion of spiritual principle
predominates still more strongly, in proportion to matter.
16. These re-incarnations, in the depths of the ethereal spaces, are
reproduced more frequently than can be defined, and give us a series of
creatures of ever-increasing activity and power of thought and action.
At each promotion in the hierarchy of space these sublime beings find
the energy of their moral and intellectual faculties, their power of
feeling, and of loving, and their induction into the most profound
mysteries of the Universe, undergoing augmentation.
17. When he has arrived at the highest degree of the celestial
hierarchy, the _spiritualized being_ is absolutely perfect; in strength
and in intelligence. He is entirely freed from all material alloy, he
has no longer a body, he is a pure spirit. In this condition he passes
into the sun.
18. The sun, the king-star, is then the final and common sojourn of all
the _spiritualized beings_ who have come from the other planets, after
having passed through the long series of existences which have rolled
away in the plains of ether.
19. The _spiritualized beings_ gathered together in the sun, send down
upon the earth and upon the planets emanations from their essence, that
is to say, _animated germs_. These _animated germs_ are carried by the
sunbeams, which distribute organization, feeling, and life over all the
planets, at the same time that they preside at all the great physical
and mechanical operations which take place on the earth, and on the
other planets of our solar world.
20. The formation of the aërial and aquatic plants, and the birth of
inferior animals or zoophytes, are, as we have said, the result of the
action of the sun's rays on our globe. Then commences the series of the
transmigrations of souls through the bodies of various animals, which
results in man, in the superhuman being, and in all the succession of
celestial metempsychoses, whose ultimate term is the spiritualized
being or the dweller in the sun.
Thus does the great chain of nature close and complete itself;--that
uninterrupted chain of vital activity, which has neither beginning nor
end, and which links all created beings into one family, the universal
family of the worlds.
Nature is not a straight line, but a circle, and we cannot say where
this wonderful circle begins or ends. The wisdom of the Egyptians,
which represented the world as a serpent coiled around itself, was the
symbol of a great truth which the science of our time has once more
brought to light.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH.
REPLIES TO SOME OBJECTIONS.--FIRST: THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL, WHICH
IS THE BASIS OF THIS SYSTEM, IS NOT DEMONSTRATED.--SECOND: WE HAVE NOT
ANY RECOLLECTION OF ANTERIOR EXISTENCES.--THIRD: THIS SYSTEM IS NO
OTHER THAN THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF THE ANCIENTS.--FOURTH: THIS SYSTEM IS
CONFOUNDED WITH DARWINISM.
HAVING brought into relief, by the preceding summary, the entire
doctrine of successive lives and of re-incarnations, we must now meet
some objections which will have been provoked by these propositions,
and reply to them in a way which has the advantage of still more
distinctly explaining our ideas on several points.
First objection. It will be said: The existence of an immortal soul
in man forms the basis of all this reasoning. Now, the fact of the
existence of an immortal soul is not demonstrated in the course of this
work, and, besides, it could not be demonstrated.
The following is our reply to this first objection.
We are composed of two elements, or of two substances; one which
thinks--the soul, or the immaterial substance; the other, which
does not think--the body, or the material substance. This truth is
self-evident. Thought is a fact, certain in itself; and it is another
fact, equally certain, that my arms, my nails or beard, do not think.
Here, then, is the proof of the immortality of the soul, or thinking
principle.
Matter does not perish; observation and science prove that material
bodies are never annihilated, that they merely change their condition,
their form, and their place; but are always to be found somewhere
intact as to their substance. Our bodies decompose, and are dissolved,
but the matter of which they were formed is never destroyed, it is
dispersed in the air, the fire, and the water, in which it produces
new material combinations, but it is not destroyed for all that. Now,
if matter does not perish, but only becomes transformed, all the more
certainly must the soul be indestructible and imperishable. Like
matter, it must be transformed, without being destroyed.
Descartes has said, _I think, therefore I am_. This reasoning, so much
admired in the schools, has always appeared to us rather weak. To
give force to the syllogism, he should have said, _I think, therefore
I am immortal_. My soul is immortal, because it exists, and it does
exist since I think. Thus the fact of the immortality of the spiritual
principle which we bear within us is self-evident, and we do not need
any of the demonstrations which abound in philosophical works, and have
been put forth from antiquity until our own time; we need no _Treatises
on the Soul_ to establish its existence.
The difficulty does not consist in proving that a spiritual principle
exists within us, that is to say, a principle which resists death,
because, in order to contest the existence of this principle, it would
be necessary to contest thought. The real problem is to find out
whether this spiritual and immortal principle which we bear within
us, is to live again, after our death, in ourselves or in others. The
question is, whether the immortal soul will be born again in the same
individual, physically transformed, in the same person, in the _ego_,
or whether it will pass into the possession of a being strange to that
person.
We may remark here that on this all the interest of the question for
us turns. It would be of very little importance to us, in reality,
whether the soul were immortal or not, if the soul of each of us,
being really indestructible and immortal, should pass to another than
ourselves, or if, reviving in us, it did not possess the memory of our
past existence. The resurrection of the soul without the memory of the
past would be a real annihilation, this would be the nothingness of the
materialists. It must be, then, that the soul lives again after our
death, in ourselves, and that this soul, then, has clear remembrance
of all the actions which took place in its previous existences. It
behoves us, in short, to know, not whether our souls are immortal--that
fact is self-evident--but whether they will belong to us in the other
life, whether, after our death, we shall have identity, individuality,
_personality_. It is to the study of this question that the present
work is devoted. We are endeavouring to prove that the soul of the
man remains always the same, in spite of its numerous peregrinations,
notwithstanding the variety of form of the bodies in which it is
successively lodged, when it passes from the animal to the man, from
the man to the superhuman being, and from the superhuman being, after
other celestial transmigrations, to the spiritualized being who
inhabits the sun. We are endeavouring to establish that the soul,
notwithstanding all its journeys, in the midst of its incarnations and
various metamorphoses, remains always identical with itself, doing
nothing more in each metempsychosis, in each metamorphosis of the
exterior being, than perfect and purify itself, growing in power and in
intellectual grasp. We are endeavouring to prove, that, notwithstanding
the shadows of death, our individuality is never destroyed, and that
we shall be born again in the heavens, with the same moral personality
which was ours here below; in other words, that the human _person_ is
imperishable. It is for the reader to say whether we have attained
our object, whether we have established the truth of this doctrine
conformably with the laws of reasoning and the facts of science.
If an absolute demonstration of the existence of an immaterial
principle in us be insisted upon, we must reply, that philosophy,
like geometry, has its axioms, that is to say, its self-evident
truths, which need not, or, if we choose to say so, which cannot be
mathematically demonstrated. The existence of the soul is one of those
axioms of philosophy. Diogenes answered a rhetorician who denied
movement by walking in his presence. By expressing any thought, by
saying "yes," or "no," we may prove the existence of the immortal soul
to the sophists who would attempt to contest it.
We have just said that geometry has its axioms. Let us remember that
an entire school of geometricians amused themselves by disputing the
axioms, under the pretext that it was impossible to demonstrate them.
We were present, in December, 1866, at a curious sitting of the
Institute, during which M. Lionville, a celebrated mathematician, and
professor at the Sorbonne, explained this strange polemic with great
skill.
In attempting to demonstrate the propositions of geometry, certain
axioms, _i.e._, self-evident truths, must be admitted in the first
place. Otherwise, the primary reasoning will have no basis. But, among
the numerous propositions of this kind which present themselves to the
mind, and which result from the admission of one of their number, which
is the most evident? That depends on the nature of the mind of each of
us, and therefore it is that there is not, and that there never will
be, an argument on this question.
There is a school of geometry which pretends to demonstrate everything.
There is another, the true and good school, which, recognizing that the
human mind has limits, and that everything is not accessible by our
thoughts, lays down, under the name of axioms, certain truths which do
not require proof, or, which is often the same thing, are incapable of
proof.
Among the number of self-evident truths, or truths difficult of
demonstration, we find the question of parallel lines. What are two
parallels? Two lines which never meet each other. But how can we prove
this property of two lines by reasoning? That is not, exactly speaking,
possible, since the notion of the infinite is not admitted, or not
understood by everybody, and cannot, therefore, serve as the basis of
an absolutely rigorous argument.
It was for this reason that Euclid, the founder of geometry in ancient
times, laid down this truth as a simple axiom, requiring (hence the
_postulates_ of Euclid, from the Latin verb _postulare_, to demand),
that the truth of this principle, which he acknowledged himself unable
to prove by logical demonstration, should be granted.
A hundred geometricians, since Euclid, who renounced the attempt to
demonstrate it, have tried to prove this theory of parallels, but
not one has succeeded. It was on the occasion of a fresh attempt at
demonstration by a mathematician in the provinces, that M. Lionville
spoke before the Academy, to recall the principles almost unanimously
professed by geometricians on this subject.
The question is, in reality, thoroughly understood; it is treated on
all works on geometry, and has been for a long time a settled matter.
But certain minds are tempted by the subtlety of certain subjects,
and the question of the _postulatum_ turns up periodically before the
learned societies, as it does in the conversations between the teachers
of mathematics.
M. Lionville reminded his audience that many demonstrations of this
celebrated proposition had been attempted, but had not succeeded,
because there are limits within which human reason ceases to be
accepted by all. M. Lionville even proposed that the question of
the _postulatum_ should be classed among those whose examination is
interdicted by the Academy, such as the quadrature of the circle, and
the trisection of the angle. On this point M. Lionville quoted an
anecdote relative to Lagrange. That great mathematician, believing that
he had found an absolute solution of the _postulatum_, went to the
Academy to read his demonstration, but on reflection, he changed his
mind, and decided that it would be better not to publish it. He put his
manuscript in his pocket, and it never came out.
Several geometricians spoke on this occasion, and confirmed the views
of M. Lionville; and when the demonstration submitted by the professor
was examined, it was found to be false. We must therefore recognize and
proclaim that, in geometry, the axioms cannot be demonstrated.
Many people endeavour to derive an argument from that discussion
against the certainty of geometry. Among them is M. Bouillaud, a
learned physician and member of the Institute, who declared that he
could not get over his astonishment at hearing it said that there
were several geometries, and that even the bases of that science were
doubtful. Reassure yourself, great and good physician, geometry has
nothing to lose and nothing to hide, and the certainty of its methods
is not imperilled in this question. That which really was at stake
was the methodical, classical teaching of geometry. That which was
discussed was the best means of instilling the principles of science
into the mind. But, as to the truths of geometry, as to the facts
themselves, they are secure from all uncertainty, all these disputes
upon the truth which must be recognized as axioms, or demonstrated as
theorems, are only fancies of the rhetoricians, as vain as they are
subtle. No trace of them remains when they are transported into the
practice of facts and of mathematical deductions. Ask the astronomers
who calculate the orbit of the stars, who fix the moment of an eclipse
with unerring precision, ask those who have calculated the parallaxes,
whether they trouble themselves by inquiring how it may be demonstrated
that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. All the
scholastic subtleties are gotten rid of in the course of practical
work.
If we may lay aside, without occupying ourselves with them, the
mathematicians who amuse themselves by disputing the axioms of
geometry, we may do the same with the few sophists who desire to
dispute the axioms of philosophy and reason, and especially the
principle of the existence of an immortal soul in man. Let us leave
them to their disputations, and go on our way.
Second objection:--We have no recollection of having existed prior to
our entrance into this world.
This is, we acknowledge the greatest and most serious argument against
our system. But we must hasten to add, that if this difficulty did not
exist, if the remembrance of a life anterior to our present existence
were always before us, the doctrine of plurality of lives would need
no reinforcement from the proofs for which we appeal to argument, to
the facts of observation, and to logical induction. It would be plain
before our eyes, it would be self-evident. All our merit, all our task
in this work, is to endeavour to procure admission of the plurality of
existences, though we have no remembrance of our past lives.
We have already treated this question incidentally, and we will now
summarize all that has been advanced in former chapters to explain the
absence of recollection of our past existences.
The soul in its first human incarnation, if it proceeds from a superior
animal, could not possess memory, because in animals that faculty has a
small range, and brief duration. If a second or third human incarnation
is in question, the difficulty is serious, because it implies that the
man who has lived and who is born again, has forgotten his previous
life.
But, in the first place, this forgetfulness is not absolute. We have
remarked before that in the human soul certain results of impressions
received prior to the terrestrial life always linger. Natural
aptitudes, special faculties, vocations, are the traces of impressions
formerly received, of knowledge already acquired, and, being revealed
from the cradle, cannot be explained otherwise than by a life gone by.
We have lost the remembrance of the facts, but there remains the moral
consequence, the _resultant_, the philosophy, so to speak, and thus
the _innate ideas_ indicated by Descartes, which exist in the soul
from its birth, and also the _principle of causality_, which teaches
us that every effect has a cause, are explained. This principle can
only be derived from facts, because an abstraction can only be based
upon concrete facts, upon accomplished events, and this abstraction, or
this metaphysical idea, which we have from our birth, implies anterior
facts, which must belong to a past life.
We have already said that when the soul gives free course to reverie,
it beholds mysterious and undefined spectacles, which seem to belong
to worlds which are not quite unknown to us, but in no wise resembling
this earth. In this vague contemplation there is something like a
confused remembrance of an anterior life. The love which we bear to
flowers, plants, and all vegetation, may be as we have already pointed
out, a grateful recollection of our first origin.
If, however, these considerations be not accepted as valid, there
is another, which, to our mind, perfectly explains the absence of
a remembrance of our former existences. It is, we believe, by a
premeditated decree of nature, that the memory of our past lives is
denied to us while we are on the earth. M. André Pezzani, the author of
an excellent book called "_Pluralité des existences de l'âme_," replies
to the argument of oblivion, thus:
"Our terrestrial sojourn is only a new trial, as Dupont de Nemours,
that wonderful writer of the eighteenth century, who outstripped
all modern beliefs, has said. If this be so, can we not perceive
that the remembrance of past lives would embarrass these trials
by removing the greater part of their difficulties, and, in
proportion, of their merit, and destroying their spontaneity? We
live in a world in which free-will is all powerful, the inviolable
law of the advancement and the progressive initiation of men. If
past existences were known, the soul would know the meaning and
the bearing of the trials reserved for it here below; indolent and
idle, it would harden itself against the designs of Providence,
and would be either paralyzed by its despair of overcoming them,
or, if better disposed and more virile, it would accept and
accomplish them unfailingly. But neither one nor the other of
these positions is fitting. Our efforts must be free, voluntary,
sheltered from the influences of the past; the field of strife must
be seemingly untrodden, so that the athlete shall show and exercise
his virtue. Previously gained experience, the energies which he
has acquired, help him in the new strife, but in a latent way of
which he is unconscious, for the imperfect soul undergoes these
re-incarnations, in order to develop its previously manifested
qualities, and to strip itself of those vices and defects which
oppose themselves to the law of its ascension. What would happen
if all men remembered their previous lives? The order of the earth
would be overturned, or at least, it would not remain in its
present condition. _Léthé_, like free-will, is a law of the world
as it is."[18]
To this it will be objected that there is destruction of identity where
memory does not exist, and that expiation, in order to be profitable
to the guilty soul, must co-exist with the remembrance of faults
committed in the previous existence, for the man is not punished who
does not know that he is punished. We may remark here that we do not
use the word "expiation" precisely as theologians employ it, but
rather as a new dwelling conferred on the soul, in order that it may
resume the interrupted course of its advance towards perfection. We
believe that the remembrance of our previous life, forbidden to us
during our terrestrial sojourn, will come back when we shall have
attained the happy realms of ether, in which we shall pass through
the existences which are to succeed our life on earth. Among the
number of the perfections and moral faculties forming the attributes
of the superhuman being, the memory of his anterior lives will be
included. Identity will be born again for him. Having suffered a
momentary collapse, his individuality will be restored to him, with his
conscience and his liberty.
Let us hearken awhile to Jean Reynaud, as he tells us in his fine book,
_Terre et Ciel_, the marvels of that memory which shall be restored to
man after his being shall have undergone a series of changes.