THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS
1
But, before broaching those questions, it were perhaps well to study two
interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival, solutions
which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to
the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think,
the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as
old as man himself; but a popular movement, of some magnitude in certain
countries, has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the
transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence. It
cannot be denied that of all the religious theories, reincarnation is
the most plausible and the least repellent to our reason. Nor must we
overlook that it has on its side the authority of the most ancient and
widespread religions, those which have incontestably furnished humanity
with the greatest aggregate of wisdom and which we have not yet
exhausted of their truths and mysteries. In reality, the whole of Asia,
whence we derive almost everything which we know, has always believed
and still believes in the transmigration of souls.
As Mrs. Annie Besant, the remarkable apostle of the new theosophy, very
rightly says:
“There is no philosophical doctrine which has behind it so magnificent
an intellectual ancestry as the doctrine of reincarnation; none for
which there is such a weight of the opinion of the wisest of men; none,
as Max Müller declared, on which the greatest philosophers of humanity
have been so thoroughly in accord.”
This is all quite true. But it would need other proofs to win our
distrustful faith to-day. I have sought in vain for a single one in the
leading works of our modern theosophists. They confine themselves to a
mere reiteration of dogmatic statements, which are of the vaguest. Their
great argument—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument which
they adduce—is but a sentimental argument. Their doctrine that the soul,
in its successive existences, is purified and exalted with more or less
rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the
only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we
bear within us. They are right; and, from this point of view, their
posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric
Heaven and the monstrous Hell of the Christians, where rewards and
punishments are for ever meted out to virtues and vices which are for
the most part puerile, unavoidable or accidental. But this, I repeat, is
only a sentimental argument, which has but an infinitesimal value in the
scale of evidence.
2
We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and
what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the
“elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as
our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or
even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us
is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as
different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger
and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which
we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with
invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it
is extremely possible that we shall find one day that the mistake was
not on the side which one imagines. As Sir William Crookes so well puts
it, in a remarkable passage:
“It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense
which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are
sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are
blind. Such beings would practically be living in a different world to
our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of surrounding
objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays of
light but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic
phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies.
Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through
the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious
solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration,
whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediaeval mystics
and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or
consumption of fuel.”
All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not
admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were
offered for what they are, that is to say, very ancient hypotheses that
go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but, when
they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at
once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand,
that, by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing
our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and
with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing
very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived
from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms and so forth.
It is rather surprising that those who call themselves “clairvoyants,”
who pretend to be in communication with this world of discarnate spirits
and with other worlds still nearer to the divine, bring us no evidential
proofs. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the
“immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent
atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their
perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating than
ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena
of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a
multitude of others, phenomena which, although sporadic and open to
question, are still admissible? We are only too eager to allow ourselves
to be convinced, for all that adds anything to man’s importance, range
or duration must needs be gladly welcomed.[3]
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Footnote 3:
To learn the precise truth about the neotheosophical movement and its
first manifestations, the reader should study the striking report
drawn up, after an impartial, but strict enquiry, by Dr. Hodgson, who
was sent to India for this special purpose by the Society for
Psychical Research. In it he unveils, in a masterly fashion, the
obvious and often clumsy impositions of the famous Mme. Blavatsky and
the whole neotheosophical organization (_Proceedings_, Vol. III, pp.
201-400: _Hodgson’s Report on Phenomena connected with Theosophy_).
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