Though, as I have said, the Vril-ya discourage all speculations on the
nature of the Supreme Being, they appear to concur in a belief by which
they think to solve that great problem of the existence of evil which
has so perplexed the philosophy of the upper world. They hold that
wherever He has once given life, with the perceptions of that life,
however faint it be, as in a plant, the life is never destroyed; it
passes into new and improved forms, though not in this planet (differing
therein from the ordinary doctrine of metempsychosis), and that the
living thing retains the sense of identity, so that it connects its past
life with its future, and is ‘conscious’ of its progressive improvement
in the scale of joy. For they say that, without this assumption, they
cannot, according to the lights of human reason vouchsafed to them,
discover the perfect justice which must be a constituent quality of the
All-Wise and the All-Good. Injustice, they say, can only emanate
from three causes: want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of
benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that each of
these three wants is incompatible in the All-Wise, the All-Good,
the All-Powerful. But that, while even in this life, the wisdom,
the benevolence, and the power of the Supreme Being are sufficiently
apparent to compel our recognition, the justice necessarily resulting
from those attributes, absolutely requires another life, not for man
only, but for every living thing of the inferior orders. That, alike in
the animal and the vegetable world, we see one individual rendered, by
circumstances beyond its control, exceedingly wretched compared to its
neighbours--one only exists as the prey of another--even a plant suffers
from disease till it perishes prematurely, while the plant next to it
rejoices in its vitality and lives out its happy life free from a pang.
That it is an erroneous analogy from human infirmities to reply by
saying that the Supreme Being only acts by general laws, thereby making
his own secondary causes so potent as to mar the essential kindness of
the First Cause; and a still meaner and more ignorant conception of the
All-Good, to dismiss with a brief contempt all consideration of justice
for the myriad forms into which He has infused life, and assume that
justice is only due to the single product of the An. There is no small
and no great in the eyes of the divine Life-Giver. But once grant that
nothing, however humble, which feels that it lives and suffers, can
perish through the series of ages, that all its suffering here, if
continuous from the moment of its birth to that of its transfer to
another form of being, would be more brief compared with eternity than
the cry of the new-born is compared to the whole life of a man; and once
suppose that this living thing retains its sense of identity when so
transformed (for without that sense it could be aware of no future
being), and though, indeed, the fulfilment of divine justice is removed
from the scope of our ken, yet we have a right to assume it to be
uniform and universal, and not varying and partial, as it would be
if acting only upon general and secondary laws; because such perfect
justice flows of necessity from perfectness of knowledge to conceive,
perfectness of love to will, and perfectness of power to complete it.
However fantastic this belief of the Vril-ya may be, it tends perhaps to
confirm politically the systems of government which, admitting different
degrees of wealth, yet establishes perfect equality in rank, exquisite
mildness in all relations and intercourse, and tenderness to all created
things which the good of the community does not require them to destroy.
And though their notion of compensation to a tortured insect or a
cankered flower may seem to some of us a very wild crotchet, yet,
at least, is not a mischievous one; and it may furnish matter for no
unpleasing reflection to think that within the abysses of earth, never
lit by a ray from the material heavens, there should have penetrated so
luminous a conviction of the ineffable goodness of the Creator--so
fixed an idea that the general laws by which He acts cannot admit of any
partial injustice or evil, and therefore cannot be comprehended without
reference to their action over all space and throughout all time. And
since, as I shall have occasion to observe later, the intellectual
conditions and social systems of this subterranean race comprise and
harmonise great, and apparently antagonistic, varieties in philosophical
doctrine and speculation which have from time to time been started,
discussed, dismissed, and have re-appeared amongst thinkers or dreamers
in the upper world,--so I may perhaps appropriately conclude this
reference to the belief of the Vril-ya, that self-conscious or sentient
life once given is indestructible among inferior creatures as well as
in man, by an eloquent passage from the work of that eminent zoologist,
Louis Agassiz, which I have only just met with, many years after I had
committed to paper these recollections of the life of the Vril-ya which
I now reduce into something like arrangement and form: “The relations
which individual animals bear to one another are of such a character
that they ought long ago to have been considered as sufficient proof
that no organised being could ever have been called into existence by
other agency than by the direct intervention of a reflective mind.
This argues strongly in favour of the existence in every animal of
an immaterial principle similar to that which by its excellence and
superior endowments places man so much above the animals; yet the
principle unquestionably exists, and whether it be called sense, reason,
or instinct, it presents in the whole range of organised beings a series
of phenomena closely linked together, and upon it are based not only
the higher manifestations of the mind, but the very permanence of the
specific differences which characterise every organism. Most of the
arguments in favour of the immortality of man apply equally to the
permanency of this principle in other living beings. May I not add that
a future life in which man would be deprived of that great source of
enjoyment and intellectual and moral improvement which results from
the contemplation of the harmonies of an organic world would involve
a lamentable loss? And may we not look to a spiritual concert of the
combined worlds and ALL their inhabitants in the presence of
their Creator as the highest conception of paradise?”--‘Essay on
Classification,’ sect. xvii. p. 97-99.