Unless we deny the immortality of man and the existence of soul,
there are no sound arguments against the doctrine of preëxistence
and re-birth save such as rest on the dictum of the church that each
soul is a new creation. This dictum can be supported only by blind
dogmatism, for given a soul we must sooner or later arrive at the
theory of re-birth, because even if each soul is new on this earth
it must keep on living somewhere after passing away, and in view of
the known order of nature will have other bodies in other planets or
spheres. Theosophy applies to the self—the thinker—the same laws which
are seen everywhere in operation throughout nature, and those are all
varieties of the great law that effects follow causes and no effect
is without a cause. The soul’s immortality—believed in by the mass of
humanity—demands embodiment here or elsewhere, and to be embodied means
reïncarnation. If we come to this earth for but a few years and then go
to some other, the soul must be embodied there as well as here, and if
we have travelled from some other world we must have had there too our
proper vesture. The powers of mind and the laws governing its motion,
its attachment, and its detachment as given in theosophical philosophy
show that its reëmbodiment must be here, where it moved and worked,
until such time as the mind is able to overcome the forces which chain
it to this globe. To permit the involved entity to transfer itself to
another scene of action before it had overcome all the causes drawing
it here and without its having worked out its responsibilities to other
entities in the same stream of evolution would be unjust and contrary
to the powerful occult laws and forces which continually operate upon
it. The early Christian Fathers saw this, and taught that the soul had
fallen into matter and was obliged by the law of its nature to toil
upward again to the place from which it came. They used an old Greek
hymn which ran:
Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark,
Through this thin vase of clay,
Athwart the waves of chaos dark
Emits a timorous ray.
This mind enfolding soul is sown,
Incarnate germ in earth:
In pity, blessed Lord, then own
What claims in Thee its birth.
Far forth from Thee, thou central fire,
To earth’s sad bondage cast,
Let not the trembling spark expire;
Absorb thine own at last!
Each human being has a definite character different from every other
human being, and masses of beings aggregated into nations show as
wholes that the national force and distinguishing peculiarities go to
make up a definite and separate national character. These differences,
both individual and national, are due to essential character and not to
education. Even the doctrine of the survival of the fittest should show
this, for the fitness cannot come from nothing but must at last show
itself from the coming to the surface of the actual inner character.
And as both individuals and nations among those who are ahead in the
struggle with nature exhibit an immense force in their character,
we must find a place and time where the force was evolved. These,
Theosophy says, are this earth and the whole period during which the
human race has been on the planet.
So, then, while heredity has something to do with the difference in
character as to force and morale, swaying the soul and mind a little
and furnishing also the appropriate place for receiving reward and
punishment, it is not the cause for the essential nature shown by every
one.
But all these differences, such as those shown by babes from birth, by
adults as character comes forth more and more, and by nations in their
history, are due to long experience gained during many lives on earth,
are the outcome of the soul’s own evolution. A survey of one short
human life gives no ground for the production of his inner nature. It
is needful that each soul should have all possible experience, and
one life cannot give this even under the best conditions. It would be
folly for the Almighty to put us here for such a short time, only to
remove us just when we had begun to see the object of life and the
possibilities in it. The mere selfish desire of a person to escape the
trials and discipline of life is not enough to set nature’s laws aside,
so the soul must be reborn until it has ceased to set in motion the
cause of rebirth, after having developed character up to its possible
limit as indicated by all the varieties of human nature, when every
experience has been passed through, and not until all of truth that can
be known has been acquired. The vast disparity among men in respect
to capacity compels us, if we wish to ascribe justice to Nature or to
God, to admit reïncarnation and to trace the origin of the disparity
back to the past lives of the Ego. For people are as much hindered and
handicapped, abused and made the victims of seeming injustice because
of limited capacity, as they are by reason of circumstances of birth or
education. We see the uneducated rising above circumstances of family
and training, and often those born in good families have very small
capacity; but the troubles of nations and families arise from want of
capacity more than from any other cause. And if we consider savage
races only, there the seeming injustice is enormous. For many savages
have good actual brain capacity but still are savage. This is because
the Ego in that body is still savage and undeveloped, for in contrast
to the savage there are many civilized men with small actual brain
force who are not savage in nature because the indwelling Ego has had
long experience in civilization during other lives, and being a more
developed soul has power to use the brain instrument to its highest
limit.
Each man feels and knows that he has an individuality of his own, a
personal identity which bridges over not only the gaps made by sleep
but also those sometimes supervening on temporary lesions in the brain.
This identity never breaks from beginning to end of life in the normal
person, and only the persistence and eternal character of the soul will
account for it.
So, ever since we began to remember, we know that our personal identity
has not failed us, no matter how bad may be our memory. This disposes
of the argument that identity depends on recollection, for the reason
that if it did depend alone on recollection we should each day have
to begin over again, as we cannot remember the events of the past in
detail, and some minds remember but little yet feel their personal
identity. And as it is often seen that some who remember the least
insist as strongly as the others on their personal identity, that
persistence of feeling must come from the old and immortal soul.
Viewing life and its probable object, with all the varied experience
possible for man, one must be forced to the conclusion that a single
life is not enough for carrying out all that is intended by Nature, to
say nothing of what man himself desires to do. The scale of variety
in experience is enormous. There is a vast range of powers latent in
man which we see may be developed if opportunity be given. Knowledge
infinite in scope and diversity lies before us, and especially in these
days when special investigation is the rule. We perceive that we have
high aspirations with no time to reach up to their measure, while the
great troop of passions and desires, selfish motives and ambitions, war
with us and among themselves, pursuing us even to the door of death.
All these have to be tried, conquered, used, subdued. One life is not
enough for all this. To say that we have but one life here with such
possibilities put before us and impossible of development is to make
the universe and life a huge and cruel joke perpetrated by a powerful
God who is thus accused, by those who believe in a special creation of
souls, of triumphing and playing with puny man just because that man is
small and the creature of the Almighty. A human life at most is seventy
years; statistics reduce this to about forty; and out of that little
remainder a large part is spent in sleep and another part in childhood.
Thus in one life it is perfectly impossible to attain to the merest
fraction of what Nature evidently has in view. We see many truths
vaguely which a life gives us no time to grasp, and especially is this
so when men have to make such a struggle to live at all. Our faculties
are small or dwarfed or weak; one life gives no opportunity to alter
this; we perceive other powers latent in us that cannot possibly be
brought out in such a small space of time; and we have much more than a
suspicion that the extent of the field of truth is vastly greater than
the narrow circle we are confined to. It is not reasonable to suppose
that either God or nature projects us into a body simply to fill us
with bitterness because we can have no other opportunity here, but
rather we must conclude that a series of incarnations has led to the
present condition, and that the process of coming here again and again
must go on for the purpose of affording us the opportunity needed.
The mere fact of dying is not of itself enough to bring about
development of faculties or the elimination of wrong tendency and
inclination. If we assume that upon entering heaven we at once acquire
all knowledge and purity, then that state after death is reduced to a
dead level and life itself with all its discipline is shorn of every
meaning. Some of the churches teach of a school of discipline after
death where it is impudently stated that the Apostles themselves, well
known to be ignorant men, are to be the teachers. This is absurd and
devoid of any basis or reason in the natural order. Besides, if there
is to be such subsequent discipline, why were we projected into life
at all? And why after the suffering and the error committed are we
taken from the place where we did our acts? The only solution left is
in reïncarnation. We come back to earth because on it and with the
beings upon it our deeds were performed; because it is the only proper
place where punishment and reward can be justly meted out; because
here is the only natural spot in which to continue the struggle toward
perfection, toward the development of the faculties we have and the
destruction of the wickedness in us. Justice to ourselves and to all
other beings demands it, for we cannot live for ourselves, and it
would be unjust to permit some of us to escape, leaving those who were
participants with us to remain or to be plunged into a hell of eternal
duration.
The persistence of savagery, the rise and decay of nations and
civilizations, the total extinction of nations, all demand an
explanation found nowhere but in reïncarnation. Savagery remains
because there are still Egos whose experience is so limited that they
are still savage; they will come up into higher races when ready. Races
die out because the Egos have had enough of the experience that sort
of race gives. So we find the red Indian, the Hottentot, the Easter
Islanders, and others as examples of races deserted by high Egos and as
they are dying away other souls who have had no higher life in the past
enter into the bodies of the race to go on using them for the purpose
of gaining such experience as the race body will give. A race could
not possibly arise and then suddenly go out. We see that such is not
the case, but science has no explanation; it simply says that this is
the fact, that nations decay. But in this explanation no account is
taken of the inner man nor of the recondite subtle and occult laws that
unite to make a race. Theosophy shows that the energy drawn together
has to expend itself gradually, and therefore the reproduction of
bodies of the character of that race will go on, though the Egos are
not compelled to inhabit bodies of that sort any longer than while
they are of the same development as the race. Hence a time comes when
the whole mass of Egos which built up the race leaves it for another
physical environment more like themselves. The economy of Nature will
not permit the physical race to suddenly fade away, and so in the real
order of evolution other and less progressed Egos come in and use the
forms provided, keeping up the production of new bodies but less and
less in number each century. These lower Egos are not able to keep up
to the limit of the capacity of the congeries of energies left by the
other Egos, and so while the new set gains as much experience as is
possible the race in time dies out after passing through its decay.
This is the explanation of what we may call descending savagery, and
no other theory will meet the facts. It has been sometimes thought by
ethnologists that the more civilized races kill off the others, but
the fact is that in consequence of the great difference between the
Egos inhabiting the old race body and the energy of that body itself,
the females begin to be sterile, and thus slowly but surely the number
of deaths exceeds the births. China itself is in process of decay,
she being now in the almost stationary stage just before the rush
downward. Great civilizations like those of Egypt and Babylon have gone
because the souls who made them have long ago reïncarnated in the great
conquering nations of Europe and the present American continents. As
nations and races they have been totally reïncarnated and born again
for greater and higher purposes than ever. Of all the old races the
Aryan Indian alone yet remains as the preserver of the old doctrines.
It will one day rise again to its old heights of glory.
The appearance of geniuses and great minds in families destitute of
these qualities, as well as the extinction from a family of the genius
shown by some ancestor, can only be met by the law of rebirth. Napoleon
the First came in a family wholly unlike him in power and force.
Nothing in his heredity will explain his character. He said himself,
as told in the Memoirs of Prince Talleyrand, that he was Charlemagne.
Only by assuming for him a long series of lives giving the right line
of evolution or cause for his mind and nature and force to be brought
out, can we have the slightest idea why he or any other great genius
appeared at all. Mozart when an infant could compose orchestral score.
This was not due to heredity, for such a score is not natural, but
is forced, mechanical, and wholly conventional, yet he understood it
without schooling. How? Because he was a musician reïncarnated, with
a musical brain furnished by his family and thus not impeded in his
endeavors to show forth his musical knowledge. But stronger yet is the
case of Blind Tom, a negro whose family could not by any possibility
have a knowledge of the piano, a modern instrument, so as to transmit
that knowledge to the atoms of his body, yet he had great musical power
and knew the present mechanical musical scale on the piano. There are
hundreds of examples like these among the many prodigies who have
appeared to the world’s astonishment. In India there are many histories
of sages born with complete knowledge of philosophy and the like,
and doubtless in all nations the same can be met with. This bringing
back of knowledge also explains instinct, for that is no more than
recollection divisible into physical and mental memory. It is seen in
the child and the animal, and is no more than the result of previous
experience. And whether we look at the new-born babe flinging out its
arms for self-protection, or the animal with very strong instinctual
power, or the bee building a cell on the rules of geometry, it is all
the effect of reïncarnation acting either in the mind or physical
cell, for under what was first laid down no atom is devoid of life,
consciousness, and intelligence of its own.
In the case of the musician Bach we have proof that heredity counts for
nothing if the Ego is not advanced, for his genius was not borne down
his family line; it gradually faded out, finally leaving the family
stream entirely. So, too, the coming of idiots or vicious children to
parents who are good, pure, or highly intellectual is explained in the
same way. They are cases where heredity is set at nought by a wholly
bad or deficient Ego.
And lastly, the fact that certain inherent ideas are common to the
whole race is explained by the sages as due to recollection of such
ideas, which were implanted in the human mind at the very beginning of
its evolutionary career on this planet by those brothers and sages who
learned their lessons and were perfected in former ages long before the
development of this globe began. No explanation for inherent ideas is
offered by science that will do more than say, “they exist.” These were
actually taught to the mass of Egos who are engaged in this earth’s
evolution; they were imprinted or burned into their natures, and always
recollected; they follow the Ego through the long pilgrimage.
It has been often thought that the opposition to reïncarnation has been
solely based on prejudice, when not due to a dogma which can only stand
when the mind is bound down and prevented from using its own powers.
It is a doctrine the most noble of all, and with its companion one
of Karma, next to be considered, it alone gives the basis for ethics.
There is no doubt in my mind that the founder of Christianity took it
for granted and that its present absence from that religion is the
reason for the contradiction between the professed ethics of Christian
nations and their actual practices which are so contrary to the morals
given out by Jesus.