REINCARNATION
1
So much for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go farther and
attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of
souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well
as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of
illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often
disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the
supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to
rely upon them with safety. Nor do I propose to pay attention to the
proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant
prodigies, aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which may
nevertheless be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be
content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’
experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.
First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant
who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific
strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts
certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep and, by means of
downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their
existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their
adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each
of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the
character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding
stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and
sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness,
his convalescence and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a
woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again
suffers the pains of child-birth. Carried back to an age when she was
learning to write, she writes like a child and her writing can be placed
side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.
This in itself is very extraordinary; but, as Colonel de Rochas says:
“Up to the present, we have walked on firm ground; we have been
observing a physiological phenomenon which is difficult of explanation,
but which numerous experiments and verifications allow us to look upon
as certain.”
We now enter a region where still more surprising enigmas await us. Let
us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a
girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the
department of the Isère. By means of downward passes, she is brought
back to the condition of a baby at its mother’s breast. The passes
continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine can no longer
speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be
followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphine no longer answers
except by signs; _she is not yet born_, “she is floating in darkness.”
They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths
of that sleep, rises the voice of another being, a voice unexpected and
unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man.
They question him. At first, he refuses to answer, saying that “of
course he’s there, as he’s speaking;” that “he sees nothing;” and that
“he’s in the dark.” They increase the number of passes and gradually
gain his confidence. His name is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man;
he has long been ailing and bed-ridden. He tells the story of his life.
He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to
school until he was eighteen and served his time in the army with the
7th Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay times there, while
the sleeping girl makes the gesture of twirling an imaginary moustache.
When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a
mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts)
and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.
We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations are not
sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting
their genuineness. He “feels himself growing out of his body;” but he
remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which
is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in
darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last,
the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of
light. The idea comes to him to reincarnate himself and he draws near to
her who is to be his mother (that is to say, the mother of Joséphine).
He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters
the child’s body. Until about the seventh year, this body was surrounded
by a sort of floating mist in which he used to see many things which he
has not seen since.
The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. A
mesmerization lasting nearly three quarters of an hour, without
lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to
babyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, another
voice and an unexpected individual. This time, it is an old woman who
has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at
the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backwards and
of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil
spirits. She speaks in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies
to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as
Jean Claude did. Her name is Philomène Carteron.
“By intensifying the sleep,” adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now
quote, “I induce the manifestations of a living Philomène. She no longer
suffers, seems very calm and always answers very coldly and distinctly.
She knows that she is unpopular in the neighbourhood, but no one is a
penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. She was born in
1702; her maiden name was Philomène Charpigny; her grandfather on the
mother’s side was called Pierre Machon and lived at Ozan. In 1732, she
married, at Chevroux, a man named Carteron, by whom she had two
children, both of whom she lost.
“Before her incarnation, Philomène had been a little girl, who died in
infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who had committed murder; and
it was to expiate this crime that she endured much suffering in the
darkness, even after her life as a little girl, when she had had no time
to do wrong. I did not think it necessary to carry the hypnosis further,
because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to
watch.
“But, on the other hand, I noticed one thing which would tend to show
that the revelations of these mediums rest on an objective reality. At
Voiron, one of the regular attendants at my demonstrations is a young
girl, Louise ——. She possesses a very sedate and thoughtful cast of
mind, not at all open to hypnotic suggestion; and she has in a very high
degree the capacity (which is comparatively common in a lesser degree)
of perceiving the magnetic effluvia of human beings and, consequently,
the fluidic body. When Joséphine revives the memory of her past, a
luminous aura is observed around her and is perceived by Louise. Now, to
the eyes of Louise, this aura becomes dark when Joséphine is in the
phase separating two existences. In every instance, there is a strong
reaction in Joséphine when I touch points where Louise tells me that she
perceives the aura, whether it be dark or light.”
2
I thought it well to give the report of one of these experiments almost
_in extenso_, because those who maintain the palingenesic theory find in
these the only appreciable argument which they possess. Colonel de
Rochas renewed them more than once with different subjects. Among these,
I will mention only one, a girl called Marie Mayo, whose history is more
complicated than Joséphine’s and whose successive reincarnations take us
back to the seventeenth century and carry us suddenly to Versailles,
among the historical personages moving around Louis XIV.
Let us add that Colonel de Rochas is not the only mesmerizer who has
obtained revelations of this kind, which may be henceforth classed among
the incontestable facts of hypnotism. I have mentioned his alone,
because they offer the most substantial guarantees from every point of
view.
What do they prove? We must begin, as in all questions of this kind, by
entertaining a certain distrust of the medium. It goes without saying
that all mediums, by the very nature of their faculties, are inclined to
imposture, to trickery. I know that Colonel de Rochas, like Dr. Richet
and like Professor Lombroso, was occasionally hoaxed. That is the
inherent defect of the machinery which we must perforce employ; and
experiments of this sort will never possess the scientific value of
those made in a physical or chemical laboratory. But this is not an _a
priori_ reason for denying them any sort of interest. As a question of
fact, are imposture and trickery possible here? Obviously, even though
the experiments be conducted under the strictest supervision. However
complicated it may be, the subject can have learnt his lesson and can
cleverly avoid the traps laid for him. The best guarantee, when all is
said, lies in his good faith and his moral sense, which the
experimenters alone are in a position to test and to know; and for that
we must trust to them. Besides, they neglect no precaution necessary to
make imposture extremely difficult. After taking the subject, by means
of transverse passes, up the stream of his life, they make him come down
the same stream; and the same events pass in the reverse order. Repeated
tests and counter-tests always yield identical results; and the medium
never hesitates or goes astray in the labyrinth of names, dates and
incidents.[16]
Moreover, it would be requisite for these mediums, who are generally
people of merely average intelligence, suddenly to become great poets in
order thus to create, down to every detail, a series of characters,
differing entirely one from the other, in which everything is in
keeping—gestures, voice, temper, mind, thoughts, feeling—and ever ready
to reply, in harmony with their inmost nature, to the most unexpected
questions. It has been said that every man is a Shakspeare in his
dreams; but have we not here to do with dreams which, in their
uniformity, bear a singular resemblance to fact?
I think, therefore, that we may be allowed, until we receive evidence to
the contrary, to leave fraud out of the question. Another objection that
might be raised, as was done with respect to the Myers phantoms, is the
insignificance of their revelations from beyond the grave. I would
rather look on this as an argument in behalf of their good faith. Those
whose imagination is rich enough to create the wonderful persons whom we
see living in their sleep would doubtless find no great difficulty in
inventing a few fantastic but plausible details on the subject of the
next world. Not one of them thinks of it. They are Christians and
therefore carry deep down in themselves the traditional terror of hell,
the fear of purgatory and the vision of a paradise full of angels and
palms. They never allude to any of it. Although they are most often
ignorant of all the theories of reincarnation, they conform strictly to
the theosophical or neospiritualistic hypothesis and are unconsciously
faithful to it in their very indefiniteness: they speak vaguely of “the
dark” in which they find themselves. They tell nothing, because they
know nothing. It is impossible apparently for them to give any account
of a state that is still illumined. In fact, it is very likely, if we
admit the hypothesis of reincarnation and of evolution after death, that
nature, here as elsewhere, does not proceed by bounds. There is no
special reason why she should take a prodigious and inconceivable leap
between life and death.
We did not find the dramatic change which, at first thought, we are
rather inclined to expect. The spirit is first of all confused at losing
its body and every one of its familiar ways; it only recovers itself by
degrees. It resumes consciousness slowly. This consciousness is
subsequently purified, exalted and extended, gradually and indefinitely,
until, reaching other spheres, the principle of life that animates it
ceases to reincarnate itself and loses all contact with us. This would
explain why we never have any but minor and elementary revelations.
All that concerns this first phase of the survival is fairly probable,
even to those who do not admit the theory of reincarnation. For the
rest, we shall see presently that the solutions which man’s imagination
finds there merely change the question and are inadequate and
provisional.
-----
Footnote 16:
In order to hide nothing and to bring all the documents into court, we
may point out that Colonel de Rochas ascertained upon enquiry that the
subjects’ revelations concerning their former existences were
inaccurate in several particulars:
“Their narratives were also full of anachronisms which disclosed the
presence of normal recollections among the suggestions that came from
an unknown source. Nevertheless, one perfectly indubitable fact
remains, which is that of the existence of certain visions recurring
with the same characteristics in the case of a considerable number of
persons unknown to one another.”
-----
3
We now come to the most serious objection, that of suggestion. Colonel
de Rochas declares that he and all the other experimenters who have
given themselves up to this study “have not only avoided everything that
could put the subject on a definite tack, but have often tried in vain
to lead him astray by different suggestions.” I am convinced of it:
there can be no question of voluntary suggestion. But do we not know
that, in these regions, unconscious and involuntary suggestion is often
more powerful and effective than the other? In the hackneyed and rather
childish experiment of table-turning, for instance, which, after all, is
only a crude and elementary form of telepathy, the replies are nearly
always dictated by the unconscious suggestion of a participant or a mere
on-looker.[17] We should therefore first of all have to make sure that
neither the hypnotizer nor the onlookers, nor yet the subject himself,
have ever heard of the reincarnated persons. It will be enough, I shall
be told, to employ for the counter-tests another operator and different
onlookers who are ignorant of the previous revelations. Yes, but the
subject is not ignorant of them; and it is possible that the first
suggestion has been so profound that it will remain for ever stamped
upon the unconsciousness and that it will reproduce the same
incarnations indefinitely, in the same order.
All this does not mean that the phenomena of suggestion are not
themselves laden with mysteries; but that is another question. For the
moment, as we see, the problem is almost insoluble and control
impracticable. Meanwhile, since we have to choose between reincarnation
and suggestion, it is right that we should confine ourselves, in the
first instance, to the latter, in accordance with the principles which
we have observed in the case of automatic speech and writing. Between
two unknowns, common sense and prudence decree that we should turn first
to the one on whose frontiers lie certain facts more frequently
recorded, the one which shows a few familiar glimmers. Let us exhaust
the mystery of our life before forsaking it for the mystery of our
death. Throughout this vast expanse of treacherous ground, it is
important that, until fresh evidence arrives, we should keep to one
inflexible rule, namely, that thought-transference exists as long as it
is not absolutely and physically impossible for the subject or some
person in the room to have cognizance of the incident in question,
whether the cognizance be conscious or not, forgotten or actual. Even
this guarantee is not sufficient, for it is still possible, as we saw in
the case of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for some one taking no part in the
sitting and even very far away from it to be placed in communication
with the medium by some unknown means and to influence the medium at a
distance and unwittingly. Lastly, to provide for every contingency,
before letting death come upon the boards, it would be necessary to make
certain that atavistic memory does not play an unforeseen part. Cannot a
man, for instance, carry hidden in the depths of his being the
recollection of events connected with the childhood of an ancestor whom
he has never seen and communicate it to the medium by unconscious
suggestion? It is not impossible. We carry in ourselves all the past,
all the experience of our ancestors. If, by some magic, we could
illumine the prodigious treasures of the subconscious memory, why should
we not there discover the events and facts that form the sources of that
experience? Before turning towards yonder unknown, we must utterly
exhaust the possibilities of this terrestrial unknown. It is moreover
remarkable but undeniable that, despite the strictness of a law which
seems to shut out every other explanation, despite the almost unlimited
and probably excessive scope allotted to the domain of suggestion, there
nevertheless remain some facts which perhaps call for another
interpretation.
But let us return to reincarnation and recognize, in passing, that it is
very regrettable that the arguments of the theosophists and
neospiritualists are not compelling, for there never was a more
beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful and consoling, nor,
to a certain point, a more probable creed than theirs. It alone, with
its doctrine of successive expiations and purifications, accounts for
all the physical and intellectual inequalities, all the social
iniquities, all the hideous injustices of fate. But the quality of a
creed is no evidence of its truth. Even though it is the religion of six
hundred millions of mankind, the nearest to the mysterious origins, the
only one that is not odious and the least absurd of all, it will have to
do what the others have not done, to bring unimpeachable testimony; and
what it has given us hitherto is but the first shadow of a proof begun.
-----
Footnote 17:
In this connexion may I be permitted to quote a personal experience?
One evening, at the Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille, where I am wont to
spend my summers, some newly-arrived guests were amusing themselves by
making a small table spin on its foot. I was quietly smoking in a
corner of the drawing-room, at some distance from the little table,
taking no interest in what was happening around it and thinking of
something quite different. After due entreaty, the table replied that
it held the spirit of a seventeenth-century monk, who was buried in
the east gallery of the cloisters, under a flagstone dated 1693. After
the departure of the monk, who suddenly, for no apparent reason,
refused to continue the interview, we thought that we would go, with a
lamp, and look for the grave. We ended by discovering, in the far
cloister on the eastern side, a tombstone in very bad condition,
broken, worn down, trodden into the ground and crumbling, on which, by
examining it very closely, we were able, with great difficulty, to
decipher the inscription, “A.D. 1693.” Now, at the moment of the
monk’s reply, there was no one in the drawing-room except my guests
and myself. None of them knew the abbey; they had arrived that very
evening, a few minutes before dinner, after which, as it was quite
dark, they had put off their visit to the cloisters and the ruins
until the following day. Therefore, short of a belief in the “shells”
or the “elementals” of the theosophists, the revelation could only
have come from me. Nevertheless, I believed myself to be absolutely
ignorant of the existence of that particular tombstone, one of the
least legible among a score of others, all belonging to the
seventeenth century, which pave this part of the cloisters.
-----
4
And even that would not put an end to the riddle. In principle,
reincarnation, sooner or later, is inevitable, since nothing can be lost
nor remain stationary. What has not been demonstrated in any way and
will perhaps remain indemonstrable is the reincarnation of the whole
identical individual, notwithstanding the abolition of memory. But what
matters to him that reincarnation, if he be unaware that he is still
himself? All the problems of the conscious survival of man start up
anew; and we have to begin all over again. Even if scientifically
established, the doctrine of reincarnation, just like that of a
survival, would not set a term to our questions. It replies to neither
the first nor the last, those of the beginning and the end, the only
ones that are essential. It simply shifts them, pushes them a few
hundreds, a few thousands of years back, in the hope perhaps of losing
or forgetting them in silence and space. But they have come from the
depths of the most prodigious infinities and are not content with a
tardy solution. I am most certainly interested in learning what is in
store for me, what will happen to me immediately after my death. You
tell me:
“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering,
will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere
until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”
I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears
the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old
religions; I am willing to believe it, but even then? What matters to me
is not what will be for some time, but what will be for always; and your
divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even
seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help.
Now, if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles
the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my
conscience. Your infinity or your God, while even more unintelligible
than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it
means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged
from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is
He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because
I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He
purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part
of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that
this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of
millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found
time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not
able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He
will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are
equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My
principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence
out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence
without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of
incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is
hardly likely that the idea only came to me yesterday. All the chances
of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and
all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the
number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer
to these interrogations which spring up everywhence the moment our
thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know
nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I
had rather keep to an infinity whose incomprehensibility has no bounds
than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on
every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take
upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be
superior to the silence which they break.
5
It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as
this God; but then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the
beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow
the tracks of our dead for a few seconds, in a world where seconds no
longer count; and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not
reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all
probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we
know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of
the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can
be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without
bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of
times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet
possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as
inexhaustible as the universe itself. The fact none the less remains
that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death
detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations;
at best, it is but a short space gained; and it is not by this juggling
on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to pass over what
may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am
even now passing over what befalls me in my life. My destiny does not
lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are
genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead,
if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because, at
the moment when they can speak to us, they have nothing yet to tell us,
or because, at the moment when they might have something to reveal to
us, they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw for ever and lose
sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.