Chapter V: Introduction (2)

The experience of many persons supports this truth. The sacred Hindu books contain many detailed histories of transmigration. Kapila is said to have written out the Vedas from his recollection of them in a former life. The Vishnu Purana furnishes some entertaining instances of memory retained through successive lives. Pythagoras is related to have remembered his former existences in the persons of a herald named Æthalides, Euphorbus the Trojan, Hermotimus of Clazomenæ, and others. It is stated that he pointed out in the temple of Juno, at Argos, the shield with which, as Euphorbus, he attacked Patroclus in the Trojan war. The life of Apollonius of Tyana gives some extraordinary examples of his recognitions of persons he had known in preceding lives. All these cases are considered fictions by most people, because they trespass the limits of historical accuracy. But there are many facts in our own time that point in the same direction. The Druses have no doubt that this life follows many others. A Druse boy explained his terror at the discharge of a gun by saying, “I was born murdered;” that is, the soul of a man who had been shot entered into his body. A scholarly friend of the writer is satisfied that he once lived among the mountains before his present life, for, though born in a flat country destitute of pines, his first young entrance to a wild pine-grown mountain district roused the deepest sense of familiarity and homelikeness. And his last life, he thinks, was as a woman, because of certain commanding feminine traits which continually assert themselves. And this in spite of an apparently strong masculine nature, which never excites a suspicion of effeminacy.

Another friend of the writer says that his only child, a little girl now deceased, often referred to a younger sister of whom he knew nothing. When corrected with the assurance that she had no sister, she would reply, “Oh, yes, I have! I have a little baby sister in heaven!” The same gentleman tells this anecdote of a neighbor’s family where the subject of reincarnation is never mentioned. A group of children was playing in the house at a counting game while their mother watched them. When they reached one hundred they started again at one and climbed up the numbers once more. The brightest boy commented on the proceeding: “We count ten, twenty, thirty, and so on to a hundred. Then we get through and begin all over. Mamma! That’s the way people do. They go on and on till they come to the end, and then they begin over again. I hope I’ll have you for a mamma again the next time I begin.” Lawrence Oliphant gives in “Blackwood’s Magazine” for January, 1881, a remarkable account of a child who remembered experiences of previous lives.

A writer in “Notes and Queries,” second series, vol. iv. p. 157, says, “A gentleman of high intellectual attainments, now deceased, once told me that he had dreamed of being in a strange city, so vividly that he remembered the streets, houses, and public buildings as distinctly as those of any place he ever visited. A few weeks afterward he was induced to visit a panorama in Leicester Square, when he was startled by seeing the city of which he had dreamed. The likeness was perfect except that one additional church appeared in the picture. He was so struck by the circumstance that he spoke to the exhibitor, assuming for his purpose the air of a traveler acquainted with the place. He was informed that the additional church was a recent erection.” It is difficult to account for such a fact by the hypothesis of the double structure of the brain, or by clairvoyance.

In Lord Lindsay’s description of the valley of Kadisha (“Letters,” p. 351, ed. 1847) he says: “We saw the river Kadisha descending from Lebanon. The whole scene bore that strange and shadowy resemblance to the wondrous landscape in ‘Kubla Khan’ that one so often feels in actual life, when the whole scene around you appears to be reacting after a long interval. Your friends seated in the same juxtaposition, the subjects of conversation the same, and shifting with the same dreamlike ease, that you remember at some remote and indefinite period of preëxistence; you always know what will come next, and sit spellbound, as it were, in a sort of calm expectancy.”

Dickens, in his “Pictures from Italy,” mentions this instance, on his first sight of Ferrara: “In the foreground was a group of silent peasant girls, leaning over the parapet of the little bridge, looking now up at the sky, now down into the water; in the distance a deep dell; the shadow of an approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there in some former life I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly, or with more emphatic chilling of the blood; and the real remembrance of it acquired in that minute is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection that I hardly think I could forget it.”

A passage in the story of “The Wool-gatherer” shows that James Hogg, the author, shared the same feeling and attributed it to an earlier life on earth. N. P. Willis wrote a story of himself as the reincarnation of an Austrian artist, narrating how he discovered his previous personality, in “Dashes at Life,” under the title “A Revelation of a Previous Existence.” D. G. Rossetti does the same in his story “St. Agnes of Intercession.”

The well-known lecturer, Eugene Ashton, recently contributed to a Cincinnati paper these two anecdotes:—

“At a dinner party in New York, recently, a lady, who is one of New York’s most gifted singers, said to one of the guests: ‘In some reincarnation I hope to perfect my voice, which I feel is now only partially developed. So long as I do not attain the highest of which my soul is capable I shall be returned to the flesh to work out what nature intended me to do.’ ‘But, madam, if you expect incarnations, have you any evidence of past ones?’ ‘Of that I cannot speak positively. I can recall dimly things which seem to have happened to me when I was in the flesh before. Often I go to places which are new to the present personality, but they are not new to my soul; I am sure that I have been there before.’

“A Southern literary woman, who now lives in Brooklyn, speaking of her former incarnations, says: ‘I am sure that I have lived in some past time; for instance, when I was at Heidelberg, Germany, attending a convention of Mystics, in company with some friends I paid my first visit to the ruined Heidelberg Castle. As I approached it I was impressed with the existence of a peculiar room in an inaccessible portion of the building. A paper and pencil were provided me, and I drew a diagram of the room even to its peculiar floor. My diagram and description were perfect, when we afterwards visited the room. In some way not yet clear to me I have been connected with that apartment. Still another impression came to me with regard to a book, which I was made to feel was in the old library of the Heidelberg University. I not only knew what the book was, but even felt that a certain name of an old German professor would be found written in it. Communicating this feeling to one of the Mystics at the convention, a search was made for the volume, but it was not found. Still the impression clung to me, and another effort was made to find the book; this time we were rewarded for our pains. Sure enough, there on the margin of one of the leaves was the very name I had been given in such a strange manner. Other things at the same time went to convince me that I was in possession of the soul of a person who had known Heidelberg two or three centuries ago.’”

The writer knows a gentleman who has repeatedly felt a vivid sense of some one striking his skull with an axe, although nothing in his own experience or in that of his family explains it. An extraordinary person to whom he had never hinted the matter once surprised him by saying that his previous life was closed by murder in that very way. Another acquaintance is sure that some time ago he was a Hindu, and recollects several remarkable incidents of that life.

Objectors ascribe these enigmas to a jumble of associations producing a blurred vision,—like the drunkard’s experience of seeing double, a discordant remembrance, snatches of forgotten dreams,—or to the double structure of the brain. In one of the lobes, they say, the thought flashes a moment in advance of the other, and the second half of the thinking machine regards the first impression as a memory of something long distant.[12] But this explanation is unsatisfactory, as it fails to account for the wonderful vividness of some of these impressions in well-balanced minds, or the long trains of thought which come independent of any companions, or the prophetic glimpses which anticipate actual occurrences. Far more credible is it that each soul is a palimpsest inscribed again and again with one story upon another, and whenever the all-wise Author is ready to write a grander page on us He washes off the old ink and pens his latest word. But some of us can trace here and there letters of the former manuscript not yet effaced.

A contributor to the “Penn Monthly,” of September, 1875, refers to the hypothesis of double mental vision as supposed to account for most of these instances, and then concludes: “Such would be my inference as regards ordinary cases of this sort of reminiscence, especially when they are observed to accompany any impaired health of the organs of mental action. But there are more extraordinary instances of this mental phenomenon, of which I can give no explanation. Three of these have fallen within my own range of observation. A friend’s child of about four years old was observed by her older sister to be talking to herself about matters of which she could not be supposed to know anything. ‘Why, W——,’ exclaimed the older sister, ‘what do you know about that? All that happened before you were born!’ ‘I would have you know, L——, that I grew old in heaven before I was born.’ I do not quote this as if it explained what the child meant it to explain, but as a curious statement from the mouth of one too young to have ever heard of preëxistence, or to have inferred it from any ambiguous mental experiences of her own. The second case is that of the presence of inexplicable reminiscences, or what seem such in dreams. As everybody knows, the stuff which dreams are ordinarily made of is the every-day experience of life, which we cast into new and fantastic combinations, whose laws of arrangement and succession are still unknown to us. In the list of my acquaintances is a young married lady, a native of Philadelphia, who is repeatedly but not habitually carried back in her dreams to English society of the eighteenth century, seemingly of the times of George II., and to a social circle somewhat above that in which she now lives. Her acquaintance with literature is not such as to give her the least clue to the matter, and the details she furnishes are not such as would be gathered from books of any class. The dress, especially the lofty and elaborate headdresses of the ladies, their slow and stately minuet dancing, the deference of the servants to their superiors, the details of the stiff, square brick houses, in one of which she was surprised to find a family chapel with mural paintings and a fine organ—all these she describes with the sort of detail possible to one who has actually seen them, and not in the fashion in which book-makers write about them. Yet another, a more wide-awake experience, is that of a friend, who remembers having died in youth and in India. He sees the bronzed attendants gathered about his cradle in their white dresses; they are fanning him. And as they gaze he passes into unconsciousness. Much of his description concerned points of which he knew nothing from any other source, but all was true to the life, and enabled me to fix on India as the scene which he recalled.”

7. The strongest support of reincarnation is its happy solution of the problem of moral inequality and injustice and evil which otherwise overwhelms us as we survey the world. The seeming chaos is marvelously set in order by the idea of soul-wandering. Many a sublime intellect has been so oppressed with the topsy-turviness of things here as to cry out, “There is no God. All is blind chance.” An exclusive view of the miseries of mankind, the prosperity of wickedness, the struggles of the deserving, the oppression of the masses, or, on the other hand, the talents and successes and happiness of the fortunate few, compels one to call the world a sham without any moral law. But that consideration yields to a majestic satisfaction when one is assured that the present life is only one of a grand series in which every individual is gradually going the round of infinite experience for a glorious outcome,—that the hedging ills of to-day are a consequence of what we did yesterday and a step toward the great things of to-morrow. Thus the tangled snarls of earthly phenomena are straightened out as a vast and beautiful scheme, and the total experience of humanity forms a magnificent tapestry of perfect poetic justice.

The crucial test of any hypothesis is whether it meets all the facts better than any other theory. No other view so admirably accounts for the diversity of conditions on earth, and refutes the charge of favoritism on the part of Providence. Hierocles said, and many a philosopher before and since has agreed with him, “Without the doctrine of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the ways of God.” Some of the theologians have found the idea of preëxistence necessary to a reasonable explanation of the world, although it is considered foreign to the Bible. Over thirty years ago, Dr. Edward Beecher published “The Conflict of Ages,” in which the main argument is this thought. He demonstrates that the facts of sin and depravity compel the acceptance of this doctrine to exonerate God from the charge of maliciousness. His book caused a lively controversy, and was soon followed by “The Concord of Ages,” in which he answers the objections and strengthens his position. The same truth is taught by Dr. Julius Müller, a German theologian of prodigious influence among the clergy. Another prominent leader of theological thought, Dr. Dorner, sustains it.

We conclude, therefore, that reincarnation is necessitated by immortality, that analogy teaches it, that science upholds it, that the nature of the soul needs it, that many strange sensations support it, and that it alone grandly solves the problem of life. The fullness of its meaning is majestic beyond appreciation, for it shows that every soul, from the lowest animal to the highest archangel, belongs to the infinite family of God and is eternal in its conscious essence, perishing only in its temporary disguises; that every act of every creature is followed by infallible reactions which constitute a perfect law of retribution; and that these souls are intricately interlaced with mutual relationships. The bewildering maze thus becomes a divine harmony. No individual stands alone, but trails with him the unfinished sequels of an ancestral career, and is so bound up with his race that each is responsible for all and all for each. No one can be wholly saved until all are redeemed. Every suffering we endure apparently for faults not our own assumes a holy light and a sublime dignity. This thought removes the littleness of petty selfish affairs and confirms in us the vastest hopes for mankind.

III.
OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION.

Man has an Eternal Father who sent him to reside and gain experience
in the animal principles.—PARACELSUS.

God, who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand
Him, and be blessed; who never needs to be and never is, in haste; who
welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for
seed he has sown upon the old fallows of eternity.—GEORGE MACDONALD.

It may be doubted whether the strangeness and improbability of this
hypothesis (preëxistence ) among ourselves arises after all from
grounds on which our philosophy has reason to congratulate itself. It
may be questioned whether, if we examine ourselves candidly, we shall
not discover that the feeling of extravagance with which it affects us
has its secret source in materialistic or semi-materialistic
prejudices.—PROFESSOR WILLIAM ARCHER BUTLER’S _Lectures on Platonic
Philosophy_.

Might not the human memory be compared to a field of sepulture,
thickly stocked with the remains of many generations? But of these
thousands whose dust heaves the surface, a few only are saved from
immediate oblivion, upon tablets and urns; while the many are, at
present, utterly lost to knowledge. Nevertheless each of the dead has
left in that soul an imperishable germ; and all, without distinction,
shall another day start up, and claim their dues.—ISAAC TAYLOR.

The absence of memory of any actions done in a previous state cannot
be a conclusive argument against our having lived through it.
Forgetfulness of the past may be one of the conditions of an entrance
upon a new stage of existence. The body which is the organ of
sense-perception may be quite as much a hindrance as a help to
remembrance. In that case casual gleams of memory, giving us sudden
abrupt and momentary revelations of the past, are precisely the
phenomena we would expect to meet with. If the soul has preëxisted,
what we would _a priori_ anticipate are only some faint traces of
recollection surviving in the crypts of memory.—PROFESSOR WILLIAM
KNIGHT.

III.
OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION.

There are four leading objections to the idea of re-births:—

1. That we have no memory of past lives.

2. That it is unjust for us to receive now the results of forgotten deeds enacted long ago.

3. That heredity confutes it.

4. That it is an uncongenial doctrine.

1. Why do we not remember something of our previous lives, if we have really been through them?

The reason why there is no universal conviction from this ground seems to be that birth is so violent as to scatter all the details and leave only the net spiritual result. As Plotinus said, “Body is the true river of Lethe; for souls plunged into it forget all.” The real soul life is so distinct from the material plane that we have difficulty in retaining many experiences of this life. Who recalls all his childhood? And has any one a memory of that most wonderful epoch—infancy?

Nature sometimes shows us what may be the initial condition of a man’s next life in depriving him of his life’s experience, and returning him to a second childhood, with only the character acquired during life for his inseparable fortune. The great and good prelate Frederick Christian von Oetingen of Würtemberg (1702–1782) became in his old age a devout and innocent child, after a long life of usefulness. Gradually speech died away, until for three years he was dumb. Leaving his study, where he had written many edifying books, and his library, whose volumes were now sealed to him, he would go to the streets and join the children in their plays, and spend all his time sharing their delights. The profound scholar was stripped of his intellect and became a venerable boy, lovable and kind as in all his busy life. He had bathed in the river of Lethe before his time. Similar cases might be produced, where the spirits of strong men have been divested of a lifetime’s memory in aged infancy, seeming to be a foretaste of the next existence. They show that the loss of a life’s details does not appear strange to nature, and that the nepenthic waters of Styx, which the ancients represented as imbibed by souls about to reënter earthly life to dispel recollection of former experiences, are not wholly fabulous.

“Memory of the details of the past is absolutely impossible. The power of the conservative faculty though relatively great is extremely limited. We forget the larger portion of experience soon after we have passed through it, and we should be able to recall the particulars of our past years, filling all the missing links of consciousness since we entered on the present life, before we were in a position to remember our ante-natal experience. Birth must necessarily be preceded by crossing the river of oblivion, while the capacity for fresh acquisition survives, and the garnered wealth of old experience determines the amount and character of the new.”[13]

But it has been shown that there are traces of former existences lingering in some memories. These and other exceptional departures from the general rule furnish substantial evidence that the obliteration of previous lives from our consciousness is only apparent. Sleep, somnambulism, trance, and similar conditions open up a world of supersensuous reality to illustrate how erroneous are our common notions of memory. Experimental evidence demonstrates that we actually forget nothing, though for long lapses we are unable to recall what is stored away in the chambers of our soul; and that the Orientals may be right in affirming that as a man’s lives become purer he is able to look backward upon previous stages, and at last will view the long vista of the æons by which he has ascended to God. Many cases reveal that the reach and clearness of memory are greatly increased during sleep and still more greatly during somnambulent trance; so much so that the memory of some sleepings and of most trances is sufficiently distinct from the memory of the same individual in waking consciousness, to seem the faculty of a different person. And, while the memory of sensuous consciousness does not retain the facts of the trance condition, the memory of the trance state retains and includes all the facts of the sensuous consciousness—exemplifying the superior and unsuspected powers of our unconscious selves. Instances are frequent illustrating how the higher consciousness faithfully stores away experiences which are thought to be long forgotten until some vivid touch brings them forth in accurate order.[14] The higher recollection and the lower sometimes conduct us through a double life. Dreams that vanish during the day are resumed at night in an unbroken course. There is an interesting class of cases on record in which the memory which links our successive dual states of consciousness into a united whole is so completely wanting that in observing only the difference between the two phases of the same person we describe it as “alternating consciousness.” These go far toward an empirical proof that one individual can become two distinct persons in succession, making a practical demonstration of reincarnation. Baron Du Prel’s “Philosophie der Mystik” cites a number of such authentic instances, of which the following is one, given by Dr. Mitchell in “Archiv für thierischen Magnetismus,” IV.

“Miss R—— enjoyed naturally perfect health, and reached womanhood without any serious illness. She was talented, and gifted with a remarkably good memory, and learned with great ease. Without any previous warning she fell one day into a deep sleep which lasted many hours, and on awakening she had forgotten every bit of her former knowledge, and her memory had become a complete _tabula rasa_. She again learned to spell, read, write, and reckon, and made rapid progress. Some few months afterward she again fell into a similarly prolonged slumber, from which she awoke to her former consciousness, _i. e._, in the same state as before her first long sleep, but without the faintest recollection of the existence or events of the intervening period. This double existence now continued, so that in a single subject there occurred a regular alternation of two perfectly distinct personalities, each being unconscious of the other, and possessing only the memories and knowledge acquired in previous corresponding states.”

More singular still are cases in which one individual becomes two interchanging persons, of whom one is wholly unconnected with the known history of that individual, like that narrated in Mr. Stevenson’s story of “The Adventures of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde,” and Julian Hawthorne’s story of “Archibald Malmaison.” The newspapers recently published an account of a Boston clergyman, who strangely disappeared from his city, leaving no trace of his destination. Just before going away he drew some money from the bank, and for weeks his family and friends heard nothing of him, though he had previously been most faithful. Soon after his departure a stranger turned up in a Pennsylvania town and bought out a certain store, which he conducted very industriously for some time. At length a delirious illness seized him. One day he awoke from it and asked his nurse, “Where am I?” “You are in ——,” she said. “How did I get here? I belong in Boston.” “You have lived here for three months and own Mr. ——’s store,” replied his attendant. “You are mistaken, madam; I am the Rev. ——, pastor of the —— church in Boston.” Three months were an absolute blank. He had no memory of anything since drawing the money at his bank. Returning home, he there resumed the broken line of his ministerial life and continued in that character without further interruption.

Numerous similar cases are recorded in the annals of psychological medicine, and justify us in assuming, according to the law of correspondences, that some such alternation of consciousness occurs after the great change known as death. The attempt to explain them as mental aberrations is wholly unsuccessful. Reincarnation shows them to be exceptions proving the rule—the recall of former activities supposed to be forgotten. In these examples of double identity the facts of each state disappear when the other set come forward and are resumed again in their turn. Where did they reside meanwhile? They must have been preserved in a subtler organ than the brain, which is only the medium of translation from that unconscious memory to the world of sense-perception. This must be in the supersensuous part of the soul. This provides that, as a slow and painful training leads to unconscious habits of skill, so the experience of life is stored up in the higher memory, and becomes, when assimilated, the reflex acts of the following life,—those operations which we call instinctive and hereditary.

2. The question is raised, is it just that a man should suffer for what he is not conscious of having done?

As just as that he should _enjoy_ the results of what he does not remember causing. It is said that justice requires that the offender be conscious of the fault for which he is punished. But the ideas of justice between man and man cannot be applied to the all-wise operations of the Infinite. In human attempts at justice that method is imperative because of our liability to mistake. God’s justice is vindicated by the undisturbed sway of the law of causation. If _I_ suffer it must be for what _I_ have done. The faith in Providence demands this, and it is because of unbelief in reincarnation that the seeming negligence on the part of Providence has obliterated the idea of a Personal God from many minds. Nature is the arena of infallible cause and effect, and there is no such absurdity in the universe as an effect without a responsible cause. A man may suffer from a disease in ignorance of the conditions under which its germs were sown in his body, but the right sequence of cause and effect is not imperiled by his ignorance. To doubt that the experiences we now enjoy and endure properly belong to us by our own choice is to abandon the idea of God. How and why they have come is explained only by reincarnation. The universal Over-Soul makes no mistakes. By veiling our memories the Mother Heart of all, mercifully saves us the horror and burden of knowing all the myriad steps by which we have become what we are. We would be staggered by the sight of all our waywardness, and what we have done well is possessed more richly in the grand total than would be possible in the infinite details. We are in the hands of a generous omniscient banker, who says: “I will save you all the trouble of the accounts. Whenever you are ready to start a new folio, I will strike the balance and turn over your net proceeds with all accrued interests. The itemized records of your deposits and spendings are beyond your calculation.”

3. It may be claimed that the facts of heredity bear against reincarnation. As the physical, mental, and moral peculiarities of children come from the parents, how can it be possible that a man is what he makes himself—the offspring of his own previous lives?

Science is certain of the tendency of every organism to transmit its own qualities to its descendants, and the intricate web of ancestral influences is assumed to account for all the aberrations of individual life. But the forces producing this result are beyond the ken of science. The mechanical theory of germ cells multiplying their kind is inadequate: for the germs become more complex and energetic with growth, and exceed the limitations of molecular physics. The facts of heredity demand the existence in nature of supersensuous forces escaping our observation and cognizable only through their effects on the plane of sensuous consciousness. These forces residing in the inaccessible regions of the soul mould all individual aptitudes and faculties and character. Reincarnation includes the facts of heredity, by showing that the tendency of every organism to reproduce its own likeness groups together similar causes producing similar effects, in the same lines of physical relation. Instead of being content with the statement that heredity causes the resemblances of child to parent, reincarnation teaches that a similarity of ante-natal development has brought about the similarity of embodied characteristics. The individual soul seeking another birth finds the path of least resistance in the channels best adapted to its qualities. The Ego selects its material body by a choice more wise than any voluntary selection, by the inherent tendencies of its nature, in fitness for its need, not only in the particular physique best suited for its purpose, but in the larger physical casements of family and nationality. The relation of child and parent is required by the similarity of organisms. This view accounts also for the differences invariably accompanying the resemblances. Identity of character is impossible, and the conditions which made it easy for an individual to be born in a certain family, because of the adaptation of circumstances there to the expression of portions of his nature, would not prevent a strong contrast between him and his relatives in some respects. The facts observed in the life history of twins show that two individuals born under precisely identical conditions, and having exactly the same heredity, sometimes differ completely in physique, in intellect, and in character. The birth of geniuses in humble and commonplace circumstances furnishes abundant evidence that the individual soul outstrips all the trammels of physical birth; and the unremarkable children of great parents exhibit the inefficiency of merely hereditary influences. These conspicuous violations of the laws of heredity confirm reincarnation.

4. At the first impression the idea of re-births is unwelcome, because—

a. It is interlaced with the theory of transmigration through animals;

b. It destroys the hope of recognizing friends in the coming existence;

c. It seems a cold, irreligious notion.

a. As will be fully shown in chapter xii., the conceit of a transmigration of human souls through animal bodies, although it has been and is cherished by most of the believers in reincarnation, is only a gross metaphor of the germinal truth, and never was received by the enlightened advocates of plural existences.

b. The most thoughtful adherents of a future life agree that there must be there some subtler mode of recognition between friends than physical appearances, for these outer signs cannot endure in the world of spirit. The conviction that “whether there be prophecies they shall fail, whether there be tongues they shall cease, whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away,” but “love never faileth,” and only character shall remain as the means of identification, is precisely the view entertained by believers in reincarnation. The most intimate ties of this life cannot be explained otherwise than as renewals of old intimacies, drawn together by the spiritual gravitation of love, and enjoying often the sense of a previous similar experience. (A further reference to this point will be found later. See page 295.)

c. The strongest religious natures have been nourished from time immemorial with the feeling that life is a pilgrimage through which we tread our darkened way back to God. The Scriptures are full of it, and the spiritual manhood of every age has found it a source of invigoration. From Abraham, who reckoned his lifetime as “the days of the years of his pilgrimage,” through all the phases of Christian thought to the mightiest book of modern Christendom, “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” this idea has been universally cherished. A typical expression of it may be seen in the mediæval churchyard of St. Martin at Canterbury, upon a stone over the remains of Dean Alford bearing these words in Latin, which were inscribed by his own direction: “The inn of a traveler journeying to Jerusalem.” Now this pilgrimage philosophy is only a simpler phrasing of reincarnation. Our theory extends the journey in just proportion to the supernal destination, providing many a station by the way, wherein abiding a few days we may more profitably traverse the upward road, gathering so much experience that there will be no occasion to wander again. Instead of being a cold philosophic hypothesis, reincarnation is a living unfoldment of that Christian germ, enlarged to a fullness commensurate with the needs of men and the character of God. It throbs with the warmth of deepest piety combined with noblest intelligence, providing as no other supposition does, for the grandest development of mankind.

IV.
WESTERN PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION.

I seem often clearly to remember in my soul a presentiment which I
have not seen with my present, but with some other eye.—J. E. VON
SCHUBERT.

I produced the golden key of preëxistence only at a dead lift, when no
other method could satisfy me touching the ways of God, that by this
hypothesis I might keep my heart from sinking.—HENRY MORE.

The essences of our souls can never cease to be because they never
began to be, and nothing can live eternally but that which hath lived
from eternity. The essences of our souls were a breath in God before
they became living souls; they lived in God before they lived in the
created souls, and therefore the soul is a partaker of the eternity of
God.—WILLIAM LAW.

If there be no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that
period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no
grounds for supposing that we shall continue to exist after our
existence has apparently ceased.—SHELLEY.

The ancient doctrine of transmigration seems the most rational and
most consistent with God’s wisdom and goodness; as by it all the
unequal dispensations of things so necessary in one life may be set
right in another, and all creatures serve the highest and lowest, the
most eligible and most burdensome offices of life by an equitable
rotation; by which means their rewards and punishments may not only be
proportioned to their behavior, but also carry on the business of the
universe, and thus at the same time answer the purposes both of
justice and utility.—SOAME JENYNS.

IV.
WESTERN PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION.

There is a larger endorsement of reincarnation among western thinkers than the world knows. In many of them it springs up spontaneously, while others embrace it as a luminous ray from the East which is confirmed by all the candid tests of philosophy. When Christianity first swept over Europe the inner thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this truth. The Church tried ineffectually to eradicate it, and in various sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the time of Erigena and Bonaventura, its mediæval advocates. Every great intuitional soul, as Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg, has adhered to it. The Italian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella, embraced it. The best of German philosophy is enriched by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel, Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte the younger, it is earnestly advocated. The anthropological systems of Kant and Schelling furnish points of contact with it. The younger Helmont, in “De Revolutione Animarum,” adduces in two hundred problems all the arguments which may be urged in favor of the return of souls into human bodies, according to Jewish ideas. Of English thinkers the Cambridge Platonists defended it with much learning and acuteness, most conspicuously Henry More; and in Cudworth and Hume it ranks as the most rational theory of immortality. Glanvil’s “Lux Orientalis” devotes a curious treatise to it. It captivated the minds of Fourier and Leroux. André Pezzani’s book on “The Plurality of the Soul’s Lives” works out the system on the Roman Catholic idea of expiation. Modern astronomy has furnished material for the elaborate speculations of a reincarnation extending through many worlds, as published in Fontenelle’s volume “The Plurality of Worlds,” Huygens’s “Cosmotheoros,” Brewster’s “More Worlds than One; the Philosopher’s Faith and the Christian’s Hope,” Jean Reynaud’s “Earth and Heaven,” Flammarion’s “Stories of Infinity” and “The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds,” and Figuier’s “The To-morrow of Death.” With various degrees of fancy and probability these writers trace the soul’s progress among the heavenly bodies. The astronomer Bode wrote that we start from the coldest planet of our solar system and advance from planet to planet, nearer the sun, where the most perfect beings, he thinks, will live. Emmanuel Kant, in his “General History of Nature,” says that souls start imperfect from the sun, and travel by planet stages, farther and farther away to a paradise in the coldest and remotest star of our system. Between these opposites many _savans_ have formulated other theories. In theology reincarnation has retained a firm influence from the days of Origen and Porphyry, through the scholastics, to the present day. In Soame Jenyns’s works, which long thrived as the best published argument for Christianity, it is noticeable. Chevalier Ramsay and William Law have also written in its defense. Julius Müller warmly upholds it in his profound work on “The Christian Doctrine of Sin,” as well as Dr. Dorner. Another means of its dissemination through a good portion of the ministry is Dr. Edward Beecher’s espousal of it, in the form of preëxistence, in “The Conflict of Ages” and “The Concord of Ages.” English and Irish bishops[15] have not hesitated to promulgate it. Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks have dared to preach it. James Freeman Clarke speaks strongly in its favor. Professor William Knight, the Scotch metaphysician of St. Andrews, and Professor Francis Bowen of Harvard University, clearly show the logical probabilities in which reincarnation compares favorably with any other philosophy.[16]

The following extracts from the most interesting of these and other Western authors who refer to the matter may represent the unsuspected prevalence of this thought in our own midst.

1. Schopenhauer’s powerful philosophy includes reincarnation as one of its main principles, as these extracts show, from his chapter on “Death” in “The World as Will and Idea”:—[17]

“What sleep is for the individual, death is for the will [character]. It would not endure to continue the same actions and sufferings throughout an eternity, without true gain, if memory and individuality remained to it. It flings them off, and this is lethe; and through this sleep of death it reappears refreshed and fitted out with another intellect, as a new being—‘a new day tempts to new shores.’”

“These constant new births, then, constitute the succession of the life-dreams of a will which in itself is indestructible, until, instructed and improved by so much and such various successive knowledge in a constantly new form, it abolishes or abrogates itself”—[becomes in perfect harmony with the Infinite].

“It must not be neglected that even empirical grounds support a palingenesis of this kind. As a matter of fact, there does exist a connection between the birth of the newly appearing beings and the death of those that are worn out. It shows itself in the great fruitfulness of the human race which appears as a consequence of devastating diseases. When in the fourteenth century the Black Death had for the most part depopulated the old world, a quite abnormal fruitfulness appeared among the human race, and twin-births were very frequent. The circumstance was also remarkable that none of the children born at this time obtained their full number of teeth; thus nature, exerting itself to the utmost, was niggardly in details. This is related by F. Schnurrer, ‘Chronik der Seuchen,’ 1825. Casper also, ‘Ueber die Wahrscheinliche Lebensdauer des Menschen,’ 1835, confirms the principle that the number of births in a given population has the most decided influence upon the length of life and mortality in it, as this always keeps pace with the mortality: so that always and everywhere the deaths and the births increase and decrease in like proportion; which he places beyond doubt by an accumulation of evidence collected from many lands and their various provinces. And yet it is impossible that there can be a _physical_ causal connection between my early death and the fruitfulness of a marriage with which I have nothing to do, or conversely. Thus here the metaphysical appears undeniable and in a stupendous manner as the immediate ground of explanation of the physical. Every new-born being comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. Its fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn-out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which the new existence has arisen: they are _one_ being. To show the bridge between the two would certainly be the solution of a great riddle.

“The great truth which is expressed here has never been entirely unacknowledged, although it could not be reduced to the exact and correct meaning, which is only possible through the doctrine of the primary and metaphysical nature of the will, and the secondary, merely organic nature of the intellect. We find the doctrine of metempsychosis, springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always spread abroad in the earth as the belief of the great majority of mankind; nay, really as the teaching of all religions, with the exception of that of the Jews and the two which have proceeded from it: in the most subtle form however, and coming nearest to the truth in Buddhism. Accordingly, while Christians console themselves with the thought of meeting again in another world, in which one regains one’s complete personality and knows one’s self at once, in those other religions the meeting again is going on now, only incognito. In the succession of births, and by virtue of metempsychosis or palingenesis, the persons who now stand in close connection or contact with us will also be born again with us at the next birth, and will have the same or analogous relations and sentiments towards us as now, whether these are of a friendly or a hostile description. Recognition is certainly here limited to an obscure intimation,—a reminiscence, which cannot be brought to distinct consciousness, and refers to an infinitely distant time; with the exception, however, of Buddha himself, who has the prerogative of distinctly knowing his own earlier births and those of others,—as this is described in the ‘Jâtaka.’ But in fact, if at a favorable moment one contemplates, in a purely objective manner, the action of men in reality, the intuitive conviction is forced upon one that it not only is and remains constantly the same, according to the [Platonic] Idea, but also that the present generation, in its true inner nature, is precisely and substantially identical with every generation that has been before it. The question simply is, in what this true being consists. The answer which my doctrine gives to this question is well known. The intuitive conviction referred to may be conceived as arising from the fact that the multiplying-glasses, time and space, lose for a moment their effect. With reference to the universality of the belief in metempsychosis, Obry says rightly in his excellent book ‘Du Nirvana Indien,’ p. 13, ‘Cette vielle croyance a fait le tour du monde, et tellement répandue dans la haute antiquité qu’un docte Anglican l’avait jugée sans père, sans mère, et sans généalogie.’ Taught already in the ‘Vedas’ as in all the sacred books of India, metempsychosis is well known to be the kernel of Brahmanism and Buddhism. It accordingly prevails at the present day in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, thus among more than half the whole human race, as the firmest conviction, and with an incredibly strong practical influence. It was also the belief of the Egyptians, from whom it was received with enthusiasm by Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato. The Pythagoreans, however, specially retained it. That it was also taught in the mysteries of the Greeks undeniably follows from the ninth book of Plato’s Laws. The ‘Edda’ also, especially in the ‘Voluspa,’ teaches metempsychosis. Not less was it the foundation of the religion of the Druids. Even a Mohammedan sect in Hindustan, the Bohrahs, of which Colebrooke gives a full account in the ‘Asiatic Researches,’ believes in metempsychosis, and accordingly refrains from all animal food. Also among American Indians and negro tribes, nay, even among the natives of Australia, traces of this belief are found.... According to all this the belief in metempsychosis presents itself as the natural conviction of man whenever he reflects at all in an unprejudiced manner. It would really seem to be that which Kant falsely asserts of his three pretended ideas of the reason, a philosopheme natural to human reason, which proceeds from its forms; and when it is not found it must have been displaced by positive religious doctrines coming from a different source. I have also remarked that it is at once obvious to every one who hears of it for the first time. Let any one only observe how earnestly Lessing defends it in the last seven paragraphs of his ‘Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.’[18] Lichtenberg also says in his ‘Selbstcharacteristik’: ‘I cannot get rid of the thought that I died before I was born.’ Even the excessively empirical Hume says in his skeptical essay on immortality, ‘The metempsychosis is therefore the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to.’ What resists this belief is Judaism, together with the two religions which have sprung from it, because they teach the creation of man out of nothing, and they have the hard task of linking on to this belief an endless existence _a parte post_. They certainly have succeeded, with fire and sword, in driving out of Europe and part of Asia that consoling primitive belief of mankind; it is still doubtful for how long. Yet how difficult this was is shown by the oldest church histories. Most of the heretics were attached to this belief; for example, Simonists, Basilidians, Valentinians, Marcionists, Gnostics, and Manicheans. The Jews themselves have in part fallen into it, as Tertullian and Justinus inform us. In the Talmud it is related that Abel’s soul passed into the body of Seth, and then into that of Moses. Even the passage of the Bible, Matt. xvi, 13–15, only obtains a rational meaning if we understand it as spoken under the assumption of the dogma of metempsychosis.... In Christianity, however, the doctrine of original sin, _i. e._, the doctrine of punishment for the sins of another individual, has taken the place of the transmigration of souls, and the expiation in this way of all the sins committed in an earlier life. Both identify the existing man with one who has existed before: the transmigration of souls does so directly, original sin indirectly.”

2. In the remarkable little treatise on “The Divine Education of the Human Race,” by Lessing, the German philosopher, a book so sublimely simple in its profound insight that it has had enormous influence and was translated into English as a labor of love by the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson, the author outlines the gradual instruction of mankind and shows how the enlightenment is still progressing through many important lessons. His thought mounts to a climax in suggesting the stupendous programme by which God is developing the individual just as he has been educating the race:—

“The very same way by which the race reaches its perfection must every individual man—one sooner, another later—have traveled over. Have traveled over in one and the same life? Can he have been in one and the selfsame life a sensual Jew and a spiritual Christian? Can he in the selfsame life have overtaken both?

“Surely not that: but why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world?

“Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?

“Why may not even I have already performed those steps of my perfecting which bring to men only temporal punishments and rewards? And once more, why not another time all those steps to perform which, the views of eternal rewards so powerfully assist us?

“Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge, fresh expertness? Do I bring away so much from once that there is nothing to repay the trouble of coming back?

“Is this a reason against it? Or, because I forget that I have been here already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection of my former condition would permit me to make only a bad use of the present. And that which even I must forget _now_, is that necessarily forgotten forever?

“Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so much time would have been lost to me? Lost? And how much then should I miss? Is not a whole eternity mine?”

3. “The Destiny of Man,” by J. G. Fichte, whose great thoughts still heave the heart of Germany and grandly mould the world, contains these paragraphs:

“These two systems, the purely spiritual and the sensuous,—which last may consist of an immeasurable series of particular lives,—exist in me from the moment when my active reason is developed, and pursue their parallel course. The former alone gives to the latter meaning and purpose and value. I _am_ immortal, imperishable, eternal, so soon as I form the resolution to obey the law of reason. After an existence of myriad lives the supersensuous world cannot be more present than at this moment. Other conditions of my sensuous existence are to come, but these are no more the true life than the present condition is.

“Man is not a product of the world of sense; and the end of his existence can never be attained in that world. His destination lies beyond time and space and all that pertains to sense.

“Mine eye discerns this eternal life and motion in all the veins of sensible and spiritual nature, through what seems to others a dead mass. And it sees this life forever ascend and grow and transfigure itself into a more spiritual expression of its own nature. The sun rises and sets, the stars vanish and return again, and all the spheres hold their cycle dance. But they never return precisely such as they disappeared; and in the shining fountains of life there is also life and progress.

“All death in nature is birth; and precisely in dying, the sublimation of life appears most conspicuous. There is no death-bringing principle in nature, for nature is only life, throughout. Not death kills, but the more living life, which is hidden behind the old, begins and unfolds itself. Death and birth are only the struggles of life with itself to manifest itself in ever more transfigured form, more like itself.

“Even because Nature puts me to death she must quicken me anew. It can only be my higher life, unfolding itself in her, before which my present life disappears; and that which mortals call death is the visible appearing of another vivification.”

4. Among the wealth of German geniuses, there is none more lofty and broad than Herder, whom Jean Paul admiringly pronounced, “a Poem made by some purest Deity,—combining the boldest freedom of philosophy concerning nature and God with a most pious faith.” One of the most suggestive of this master’s works is a series of “Dialogues on Metempsychosis,” in which two friends discuss the theme together. As the outcome of their colloquy is a stanch vindication of that hypothesis, it is not unfair to group together a few of the paragraphs on one side of the conversation:—