“I don’t repudiate the presumptive arguments of schoolmen. I merely
supplement them with something positive. For instance, if you assumed
the existence of God this argument of the scholastics is a good one.
God has implanted in all men the desire of perfect happiness. This
desire can not be satisfied in our lives here. If there were not
another life wherein to satisfy it then God would be a deceiver. _Voila
tout._”
There is more: the desire of perfect happiness does not imply
immortality, even if there is a God, for
(1) God may not have implanted it, but merely suffers it to exist, as
he suffers sin to exist, the desire of wealth, the desire to live
longer than we do in this world. It is not held that God implanted all
the desires of the human heart. Then why hold that he implanted that of
perfect happiness?
(2) Even if he did—even if a divinely implanted desire entail its own
gratification—even if it can not be gratified in this life—that does
not imply immortality. It implies _only_ another life long enough for
its gratification just once. An eternity of gratification is not a
logical inference from it.
(3) Perhaps God _is_ “a deceiver;” who knows that he is not? Assumption
of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of
a God who is honorable and candid according to our conception of honor
and candor is another.
(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implanted
in us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be—it is—impossible to
gratify that desire in this life. Still, another life is not implied,
for God may not have intended us to draw the inference that he is going
to gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have
intended whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion’s
illustration, and it may be that God’s knowledge and power are
limited, or that one of them is limited.
M. Flammarion is a learned, if somewhat theatrical, astronomer. He
has a tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home in the
marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar
phenomena. To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is
the master of the show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothing
of logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views of
things have therefore no value; they are nebulous.
Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having
absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of
after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony,
in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it—if it is
enjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given—and it is
the only testimony worth a moment’s consideration—is a disputed point.
Many persons living this life profess to have received it. But nobody
professes, or ever has professed, to have received a communication of
any kind from one in actual experience of the fore-life. “The souls as
yet ungarmented,” if such there are, are dumb to question. The Land
beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously
described: if not explored and surveyed, yet carefully charted. From
among so many accounts of it that we have, he must be fastidious indeed
who can not be suited. But of the Fatherland that spreads before the
cradle—the great Heretofore, wherein we all dwelt if we are to dwell in
the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody professes knowledge of that.
No testimony reaches our ears of flesh concerning its topographical or
other features; no one has been so enterprising as to wrest from its
actual inhabitants any particulars of their character and appearance.
And among educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be
there is a general denial of its existence.
I am of their way of thinking about that. The fact that we have no
recollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter.
To have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable,
for there would be nothing to connect the new life with the old—no
thread of continuity—nothing that persisted from the one life to the
other. The later birth would be that of another person, an altogether
different being, unrelated to the first—a new John Smith succeeding to
the late Tom Jones.
Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. To-day I may get a
thwack o’ the mazzard which will give me an intervening season of
unconsciousness between yesterday and to-morrow. Thereafter I may live
to a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or
did, or was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for
between the old life and the new there will be a _nexus_, a thread
of continuity, something spanning the gulf from the one state to the
other, and the same in both—namely, my body with its habits, capacities
and powers. That is I; that identifies me to others as my former
self—authenticates and credentials me as the person that incurred the
cranial mischance, dislodging memory.
But when death occurs _all_ is dislodged if memory is; for between
two merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only _nexus_
conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity. To live
again without memory of having lived before is to live another.
Re-existence without recollection is absurd; there is nothing to
re-exist.