Chapter VI: Introduction (3)

“Do you not know great and rare men who cannot have become what they are at once, in a single human existence? who must have often existed before in order to have attained that purity of feeling, that instinctive impulse for all that is true, beautiful, and good, in short, that elevation and natural supremacy over all around them?

“Do not these great characters appear, for the most part, all at once? Like a cloud of celestial spirits, descended from on high; like men risen from the dead born again, who brought back the old time?

“Have you never had remembrances of a former state, which you could find no place for in this life? In that beautiful period when the soul is yet a half-closed bud, have you not seen persons, been in places, of which you were ready to swear that you had seen those persons, or had been in those places before? And yet it could not have been in this life? The most blessed moments, the grandest thoughts, are from that source. In our more ordinary seasons, we look back with astonishment on ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves. And such are _we_; we who, from a hundred causes, have sunk so deep and are so wedded to matter, that but few reminiscences of so pure a character remain to us. The nobler class of men who, separated from wine and meat, lived in perfect simplicity according to the order of nature, carried it further, no doubt, than others, as we learn from the example of Pythagoras, of Iarchas, of Apollonius, and others, who remembered distinctly what and how many times they had been in the world before. If we are blind, or can see but two steps beyond our noses, ought we therefore to deny that others may see a hundred or a thousand degrees farther, even to the bottom of time, into the deep, cool well of the foreworld, and there discern everything plain and bright and clear?”

To this last strain the listener responds: “I will freely confess to you that those sweet dreams of memory are known to me also, among the experiences of my childhood and youth. I have been in places and circumstances of which I could have sworn that I had been in them before. I have seen persons with whom I seemed to have lived before; with whom I was, as it were, on the footing of an old acquaintance.” He then attempts to explain them as returned dreams, which his interlocutor answers with more wonderful impressions necessarily requiring a former life.

“Have you never observed that children will sometimes, on a sudden, give utterance to ideas which make us wonder how they got possession of them; which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret self-communings; which break forth like a full stream out of the earth, an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground, and, it may be, had broken through many a rock, and contracted many defilements?

“You know the law of economy which rules throughout nature. Is it not probable that the Deity is guided by it in the propagation and progress of human souls? He who has not become ripe in one form of humanity is put into the experience again, and, some time or other, must be perfected.

“I am not ashamed of my half-brothers the brutes; on the contrary, as far as they are concerned, I am a great advocate of metempsychosis. I believe, for a certainty, that they will ascend to a higher grade of being, and am unable to understand how any one can object to this hypothesis, which seems to have the analogy of the whole creation in its favor.

“All the life of nature, all the tribes and species of animated creation,—what are they but sparks of the Godhead, a harvest of incarnate stars, among which the two human sexes stand forth like sun and moon? We overshine, we dim the other figures, but, doubtless, we lead them onward in a chorus invisible to ourselves. Oh, that an eye were given us to trace the shining course of this divine spark; to see how life flows to life, and ever refining, impelled through all the veins of creation, wells up into a purer, higher life.

“And yet Pythagoras, too, spoke of a Tartarus and an Elysium. When you stand before the statue of a high-hearted Apollo, do you not feel what you lack of being that form? Can you ever attain to it here below, though you should return ten times? And yet that was only the idea of an artist—a dream which our narrow breast also inclosed. Has the almighty Father no nobler forms for us than those in which our heart now heaves and groans? The soul lies captive in its dungeon, bound as with a seven-fold chain, and only through a strong grating, and only through a pair of light and air-holes, can it breathe and see, and always it sees the world on one side only, while there are a million other sides before us and in us, had we but more and other senses, and could we but exchange this narrow hut of our body for a freer prospect. That restless discontent shall some time finally release us from our repeated sojourns on earth, through which the Father is training us for a complete divorce from sense life. When even at the sweetest fountains of friendship and love, we so often pine, thirsty and sick, seeking union and finding it not, what noble soul does not lift itself up and despise tabernacles and wanderings in the circle of earthly deserts.

“Purification of the heart, the ennobling of the soul, with all its propensities and cravings, this, it seems to me, is the true palingenesis of this life, after which, I doubt not, a happy, more exalted, but yet unknown metempsychosis awaits us.”

5. Dr. Henry More, the learned and lovable Platonist of the seventeenth century, wrote a charming treatise on the “Immortality of the Soul,” in which (chapter xii.) he argues for preëxistence as follows:—

“If it be good for the souls of men to be at all, the sooner they are, the better. But we are most certain that the wisdom and goodness of God will do that which is the best; and therefore if they can enjoy themselves before they come to these terrestrial bodies, they must be before they come into these bodies. For nothing hinders but that they may live before they come into the body, as well as they may after going out of it. Wherefore the preëxistence of souls is a necessary result of the wisdom and goodness of God.

“Again, the face of Providence in the work seems very much to suit with this opinion, there being not any so natural and easy account to be given of those things that seem the most harsh in the affairs of men, as from this hypothesis: that these souls did once subsist in some other state; where, in several manners and degrees, they forfeited the favor of their Creator, and so, according to that just Nemesis that He has interwoven in the constitution of the universe and of their own natures, they undergo several calamities and asperities of fortune and sad drudgeries of fate, as a punishment inflicted, or a disease contracted from the several obliquities of their _apostasy_. Which key is not only able to unlock that recondite mystery of some particular men’s almost fatal averseness from all religion and virtue, their stupidity and dullness and even invincible slowness to these things from their very childhood, and their incorrigible propension to all manner of vice; but also of that squalid forlornness and brutish barbarity that whole nations for many ages have lain under, and many do still lie under at this very day: which sad scene of things must needs exceedingly cloud and obscure the ways of Divine Providence, and make them utterly unintelligible; unless some light be let in from the present hypothesis.

“And as this hypothesis is rational in itself, so has it also gained the suffrage of all philosophers of all ages, of any note, that have held the soul of man incorporeal and immortal. I shall add, for the better countenance of the business, some few instances herein, as a pledge of the truth of my general conclusion. Let us cast our eye, therefore, into what corner of the world we will, that has been famous for wisdom and literature, and the wisest of those nations you shall find the asserters of this opinion.

“In Egypt, that ancient nurse of all hidden sciences, that this opinion was in vogue amongst the wisest men there, the fragments of Trismegist do sufficiently witness: of which opinion, not only the Gymnosophists, and other wise men of Egypt, were, but also the Brachmans of India, and the Magi of Babylon and Persia. To these you may add the abstruse philosophy of the Jews, which they call their Cabbala, of which the soul’s preëxistence makes a considerable part, as all the learned of the Jews do confess.

“And if I should particularize in persons of this opinion, truly they are such of so great fame for depth of understanding, and abstrusest science, that their testimony alone might seem sufficient to bear down any ordinary modest man into an assent to their doctrine. And, in the first place, if we believe the Cabbala of the Jews, we must assign it to Moses, the greatest philosopher certainly that ever was in the world; to whom you may add Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Cebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Boethius, Pfellus, and several others, which it would be too long to recite. And if it were fit to add fathers to philosophers, we might enter into the same list Synesius and Origen; the latter of whom was surely the greatest light and bulwark that ancient Christianity had. But I have not yet ended my catalogue; that admirable physician Johannes Fernelius is also of this persuasion, and is not to be so himself only, but discovers those two grand-masters of medicine, Hippocrates and Galen, to be so, too. Cardan, also, that famous philosopher of his age, expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, and that it does preexist before it comes into the body; and lastly, Pomponatius, no friend to the soul’s immortality, yet cannot but confess that the safest way to hold it is also therewith to acknowledge her preëxistence.

“And we shall evince that Aristotle, that has the luck to be believed more than most authors, was of the same opinion, in his treatise ‘De Anima,’ where he says, ‘for every art must use its proper instruments, and every soul its body.’ He speaks something more plainly in his ‘De Generatione Animæ.’ ‘There are generated,’ saith he, ‘in the earth, and in the moisture thereof, plants and living creatures, and in the whole universe an animal heat; insomuch that in a manner all places are full of souls.’ We will add a third place still more clear, out of the same treatise, where he starts that very question of the preëxistency of souls, of the sensitive and rational especially, and he concludes thus: ‘It remains that the rational or intellectual soul only enters from without, as being only of a nature purely divine; with whose actions the actions of this gross body have no communication.’ Concerning which point he concludes like an orthodox scholar of his excellent master Plato; to whose footsteps the closer he keeps, the less he ever wanders from the truth. For in this very place he does plainly profess what many would not have him so apertly guilty of, that the soul of man is immortal, and can perform her proper functions without the help of this terrestrial body.”

6. Sir Thomas Browne explains and defends his own heresies, by suggesting the added heresy of reincarnation:—

“For, indeed, heresies perish not with their authors: but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another. One general council is not able to extirpate one single heresy: it may be canceled for the present: but revolution of time and the like aspects from heaven will restore it, when it will flourish till it be condemned again. For, as though there were a metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them. To see ourselves again, we need not look for Plato’s year; every man is not only himself: there have been many Diogeneses, and as many Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over again; the world is now as it was in ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since, that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.”[19]

7. One of the rare volumes of the early eighteenth century is Chevalier Ramsay’s remarkable work entitled “The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion,” in which he elaborates the idea that “the sacred mysteries of our holy faith are not new fictions unheard of by the philosophers of all nations,” but that “on the contrary Christianity is as old as the creation.” In this “History of the human mind in all ages, nations, and religions, concerning the most divine truths,” he shows that reincarnation is the common possession of Christianity and of all the other great systems of sacred thought:—

“The holy oracles always represent Paradise as our native country, and our present life as an exile. How can we be said to have been banished from a place in which we never were? This argument alone would suffice to convince us of preëxistence, if the prejudice of infancy inspired by the schoolmen had not accustomed us to look upon these expressions as metaphorical, and to believe, contrary to Scripture and to reason, that we were exiled from a happy state, only for the fault of our first parents. Atrocious maxim that sullies all the conduct of Providence, and that shocks the understandings of the most intelligent children of all nations. The answers ordinarily made to them throw into their tender minds the seeds of a lasting incredulity.

“In Scripture, the wise man says, speaking of the eternal Logos, and his preëxistent humanity: ‘The Lord possessed me from the beginning of his ways, before his works of old; I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning or ever the earth was!’ All this can be said only of the eternal Logos. But what follows may be applied to the preëxistent humanity of the Messiah: ‘When he prepared the heavens I was there, when he encircled the force of the deep, when he established the clouds above, when he appointed the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as one brought up with him, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth, and my delights were with the sons of men.’ It is visible that Solomon speaks here of a time soon after the creation of the world, of a time when the earth was inhabited only by a pure, innocent race. Can this be said after the fall, when the earth was cursed? It is only a profound ignorance of the ancient, primitive tradition of preëxistence that can make men mistake the true sense of this sublime text.

“Our Saviour seems to approve the doctrine of pre-existence in his answer to his disciples when they interrogate him thus about the man born blind: ‘Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’[20] It is clear that this question would have been ridiculous and impertinent, if the disciples had not believed that the man born blind had sinned before his corporeal birth, and, consequently, that he had preëxisted in another state. Our Saviour’s answer is remarkable: ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him!’ Jesus Christ could not mean that neither this man nor his parents had ever sinned, for this can be said of no mortal; but the meaning is, that it was neither for the sins committed by this man in a state of preëxistence, nor for those of his parents, that he was born blind, but in order to manifest one day the power of God. Our Lord, therefore, far from blaming and redressing this error in his disciples, answers in a way that seems to confirm them in the doctrine of preëxistence. If he had looked upon this opinion as a capital error, would it have been compatible with his wisdom to pass it over so slightly, and taciturnly authorize it? On the contrary, does not his silence indicate that he looked upon this doctrine, which was a received maxim of the Jewish church, as the true explication of original sin?

“St. Paul says, in speaking of the origin of mortal and physical evil, ‘By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.’[21] If all have sinned, then all have voluntarily coöperated with Adam in the breach of the eternal law: for where there is no deliberate act of will, there can be no sin. The Apostle does not say that Adam’s sin was imputed to all. The doctrine of imputation, by which God attributes Adam’s sin to his innocent posterity, cannot be the meaning of St. Paul, for, besides that this doctrine is incompatible with the divine perfection, the Apostle adds: ‘For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall all be made righteous.’[22] Now it is certain that men can only be made righteous by their personal, deliberate, and voluntary coöperation with the spirit of grace, or the second Adam. The Apostle assures us in the same passage that ‘all did not sin after the similitude of Adam’s transgression.’ This sin was really committed in a preëxistent state by the individuals of the present human race. The meaning is that one pair gave the bad example, and all the human race co-existent with them in Paradise soon imitated this crime of disobedience against the eternal law, by the false love of natural knowledge and sensible pleasure. St. Paul seems to confirm this when he says: ‘For the children being not yet born, having neither done good nor evil, it was said unto Rebecca, ‘Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.’ God’s love and hatred depend upon the moral dispositions of the creature. Since God says that he loved Jacob and hated Esau ere they were born, and before they had done good or evil in this mortal life, it follows clearly that they must have preëxisted in another state. This would have appeared to be the natural sense of the text, if prejudices imbibed from our infancy, more or less, had not blinded the mind of Christian doctors to the same degree as Judaical prejudices darkened those of the ancient Pharisees.

“If it be said that these texts are obscure; that preëxistence is only drawn from them by induction, and that this opinion is not revealed in Scripture by express words, I answer, that the doctrines of the immortality of the soul are nowhere revealed expressly in the sacred oracles of the Old or New Testament, but because all their morals and doctrines are founded upon these great truths. We may say the same of preëxistence. The doctrine is nowhere expressly revealed, but it is evidently supposed, as without it original sin becomes not only inexplicable, but absurd, repugnant, and impossible.

“There is nothing in the fathers nor councils that contradicts this doctrine; yea, while the fifth general council and all the fathers after the sixth century condemn a false idea of preëxistence in which the ancient tradition was adulterated by the Origenists and Priscillianists, the true doctrine of preëxistence was not condemned by the church. This supposes that all the individuals of the human species composed of soul and body were created in Paradise, that they all coöperated in Adam’s disobedience, partook of his crime, and so were justly punished. This was the constant tradition of the Jewish church, and confirmed by the Scriptures. This opinion of preëxistence was also very ancient in the Christian church, ere the Origenists spoiled it with the Pythagorean and Platonic fictions.

“It is against the impious degradation of transmigration [through animal bodies] that the fathers declaim, and not the true Scripture doctrine of degraded [human] intelligences. This the schoolmen confound with the false disguises—mixtures of the pagans. This great principle is the true key by which we can understand the meaning of several passages of Scripture, and the sense of many sublime articles of faith. Thus only can we shelter Christianity from the railleries of the incredulous.”

8. Among Soame Jenyns’s “Disquisitions on Several Subjects” is a “Disquisition on a Præexistent State,” from which we quote the following:—

“That mankind had existed in some state previous to the present was the opinion of the wisest sages of the most remote antiquity. It was held by the Gymnosophists of Egypt, the Brachmans of India, the Magi of Persia, and the greatest philosophers of Greece and Rome; it was likewise adopted by the fathers of the Christian Church, and frequently enforced by her primitive writers. Why it has been so little noticed, so much overlooked rather than rejected, by the divines and metaphysicians of later ages, I am at a loss to account for, as it is undoubtedly confirmed by reason, by all the appearances of nature, and the doctrines of revelation.

“In the first place, then, it is confirmed by reason, which teaches us that it is impossible that the conjunction of a male and female can create, or bring into being, an immortal soul: they may prepare a material habitation for it, but there must be an immaterial preëxistent inhabitant ready to take possession. Reason assures us that an immortal soul, which will eternally exist after the dissolution of the body, must have eternally existed before the formation of it; for whatever has no end can never have had any beginning, but must exist in some manner which bears no relation to time, to us totally incomprehensible; if, therefore, the soul will continue to exist in a future life, it must have existed in a former. Reason likewise tells us that an omnipotent and benevolent Creator would never have formed such a world as this, and filled it with inhabitants, if the present was the only, or even the first, state of their existence, a state which, if unconnected with the past and the future, seems calculated for no one purpose intelligible to our understandings; neither of good or evil, of happiness or misery, of virtue or vice, of reward or punishment, but a confused jumble of them all together, proceeding from no visible cause and tending to no end. But, as we are certain that infinite power cannot be employed without effect, nor infinite wisdom without design, we may rationally conclude that this world could be designed as nothing more than a prison, in which we are awhile confined to receive punishment for the offenses committed in a former, and an opportunity of preparing ourselves for the enjoyment of happiness in a future, life.

“Secondly, these conclusions of reason are sufficiently confirmed by the force of nature and the appearance of things. This world is evidently formed for a place of punishment as well as probation,—a prison, or house of correction, to which we are committed, some for a longer, and some for a shorter time; some to the severest labor, others to more indulgent tasks; and if we consider it under this character, we shall perceive it admirably fitted for the end for which it was intended. It is a spacious, beautiful, and durable structure; it contains many various apartments, a few very comfortable, many tolerable, and some extremely wretched; it is inclosed with a fence so impassable that none can surmount it but with the loss of life. Its inhabitants likewise exactly resemble those of other prisons: they come in with malignant dispositions and unruly passions, from whence, like other confined criminals, they receive great part of their punishment by abusing and injuring each other. As we may suppose that they have not all been equally guilty, so they are not all equally miserable; the majority are permitted to procure a tolerable subsistence by their labor, and pass through their confinement without any extraordinary penalties, except from paying their fees at their discharge by death. Others, who perhaps stand in need of more severe chastisement, receive it by a variety of methods, some by the most tedious pains and diseases; some by disappointments, and many by success in their favorite pursuits; some by being condemned to situations peculiarly unfortunate, as to those of extreme poverty or superabundant riches, of despicable manners or painful preëminence, of galley-slaves in a despotic, or ministers in a free, country.

“Lastly, the opinion of preëxistence is no less confirmed by revelation than by reason and the appearance of things; for although, perhaps, it is nowhere in the New Testament explicitly enforced, yet throughout the whole tenor of those writings it is everywhere implied. In them mankind are constantly represented as coming into the world under a load of guilt,—as condemned criminals, the children of wrath, and objects of divine indignation, placed in it for a time by the mercies of God, to give them an opportunity of expiating their guilt by sufferings, and regaining by a pious and virtuous conduct their lost estate of happiness and innocence; this is styled working out their salvation, not preventing their condemnation, for that is already past, and their only hope now is redemption, that is, being rescued from a state of captivity and sin, in which they are universally involved. This is the very essence of the Christian dispensation, and the grand principle in which it differs from the religion of nature; in every other respect they are nearly similar. They both enjoin the same moral duties and prohibit the same vices; but Christianity acquaints us that we are admitted into this life oppressed by guilt and depravity, which we must atone for by suffering its usual calamities, and work off by acts of positive virtue, before we can hope for happiness in another. Now, if by all this a preëxistent state is not constantly supposed, in which this guilt was incurred and this depravity contracted, there can be no meaning at all, or such a meaning as contradicts every principle of common sense,—that guilt can be contracted without acting, or that we can act without existing. So undeniable is this inference that it renders any positive assertion of a preëxistent state totally useless; as, if a man at the moment of his entrance into a new country was declared a criminal, it would surely be unnecessary to assert that he had lived in some other before he came there.

“In all our researches into abstruse subjects there is a certain clue, without which, the further we proceed the more we are bewildered; but which, being fortunately discovered, leads us at once through the whole labyrinth, puts an end to our difficulties, and opens a system perfectly clear, consistent, and intelligible. The doctrine of preëxistence, or the acknowledgment of some past state of disobedience, I take to be this very clue; which, if we constantly carry along with us, we shall proceed unembarrassed through all the intricate mysteries both of nature and revelation, and at last arrive at so clear a prospect of the wise and just dispensations of our Creator, as cannot fail to afford complete satisfaction to the most inquisitive skeptic.

“Thus is a preëxistent state, I think, clearly demonstrated by the principles of reason, the appearance of things, and the sense of revelation; all which agree that this world is intended for a place of punishment, as well as probation, and must therefore refer to some former period. For as probation implies a future life, for which it is preparatory, so punishment must imply a former state, in which offenses were committed for which it is due; and indeed there is not a single argument drawn from the justice of God, and the seemingly undeserved sufferings of many in the present state, which can be urged in proof of a future life, which proves not with superior force the existence of another which is already past.”

9. One of the chapters in Joseph Glanvil’s “Lux Orientalis,” a treatise attempting to demonstrate the truth of Platonic preëxistence, and strengthened by the elaborate annotations of Dr. Henry More, is an extension of the following—

“Seven Pillars on which the Hypothesis of Preëxistence stands.

“1. All the divine designs and actions are carried on by pure and infinite goodness.

“2. There is an exact geometrical justice that runs through the universe, and is interwoven in the contexture of things.

“3. Things are carried to their proper place and state by the congruity of their natures; where this fails we may suppose some arbitrary management.

“4. The souls of men are capable of living in other bodies besides terrestrial; and never act but in some body or other.

“5. The soul in every state hath such a body as is fittest to those faculties and operations that it is most inclined to exercise.

“6. The powers and faculties of the soul are either spiritual or intellectual, or sensitive or plastic.

“7. By the same degrees that the higher powers are invigorated, the lower are abated, as to their proper exercise.”

10. In Dowden’s “Life of Shelley” (vol. i. p. 80), the following anecdote of the poet is quoted from his friend Hogg: “One morning we had been reading Plato together so diligently that the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived. We sallied forth hastily to take the air for half an hour before dinner. In the middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life that was past or to come than to a decorous regulation of his behavior according to the established usages of society. With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, who well might fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long train. ‘Will your baby tell us anything about preëxistence, madam?’ he asked in a piercing voice and with a wistful look. The mother made no answer, but perceiving that Shelley’s object was not murderous, but altogether harmless, she dismissed her apprehension and relaxed her hold. ‘Will your baby tell us anything about preëxistence, madam?’ he repeated, with unabated earnestness. ‘He cannot speak, sir,’ said the mother seriously. ‘Worse, worse,’ cried Shelley with an air of disappointment, shaking his long hair most pathetically about his young face. ‘But surely the babe can speak if he will, for he is only a few weeks old. He may fancy that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim. He cannot have forgotten the use of speech in so short a time. The thing is absolutely impossible.’ ‘It is not for me to dispute with you, gentlemen,’ the woman meekly replied, ‘but I can safely declare I never heard him speak, nor any child of his age.’ It was a fine placid boy. So far from being disturbed by the interruption, he looked up and smiled. Shelley pressed his fat cheeks with his fingers. We commended his healthy appearance and his equanimity, and the mother was allowed to proceed, probably to her satisfaction, for she would doubtless prefer a less speculative nurse. Shelley sighed as we walked on. ‘How provokingly close are these new-born babes!’ he ejaculated; ‘but it is not the less certain, notwithstanding the cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence. The doctrine is far more ancient than the times of Plato, and as old as the venerable allegory that the muses are the daughters of memory; not one of the muses was ever said to be the child of invention.’”

11. Hume’s skeptical essay on “The Immortality of the Soul” argues thus:—

“Reasoning from the common course of nature, and without supposing any new interposition of the supreme cause, which ought always to be excluded from philosophy, what is incorruptible must also be ungenerable. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed before our birth, and if the former existence noways concerns us, neither will the latter....

“The metempsychosis is, therefore, the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to.”

12. Southey says in his published “Letters”: “I have a strong and lively faith in a state of continued consciousness from this stage of existence, and that we shall recover the consciousness of some lower stages through which we may previously have passed seems to me not impossible....

“The system of progressive existence seems, of all others, the most benevolent; and all that we do understand is so wise and so good, and all we do or do not, so perfectly and overwhelmingly wonderful, that the most benevolent system is the most probable.”

13. From a letter written by that curious genius William Blake (the artist) to his friend John Flaxman (the sculptor):[23]—

“In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; and these works are the delight and study of archangels.

“You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel, my friend and companion from eternity. I look back into the regions of reminiscence and behold our ancient days before this earth appeared and its vegetative mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity which can never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each other.”

14. In the “Fortnightly Review” for September, 1878, Professor William Knight writes: “It seems surprising that in the discussions of contemporary philosophy on the origin and destiny of the soul there has been no explicit revival of the doctrines of Pre-existence and Metempsychosis. Whatever may be their intrinsic worth or evidential value, their title to rank on the roll of philosophical hypotheses is undoubted. They offer quite as remarkable a solution of the mystery which all admit as the rival theories of Creation, Traduction, and Extinction.”

“If we reject the doctrine of Preëxistence, we must either believe in non-existence or fall back in one or other of the two opposing theories of Creation and Traduction; and as we reject Extinction, we may find Preëxistence has fewer difficulties to face than the rival hypotheses. Creation is the theory that every moment of time multitudes of souls are simultaneously born,—not sent down from a celestial source, but freshly made out of nothing and placed in bodies prepared for them by natural growth. To the Platonist the theory of Traduction seemed even worse, as it implied the derivation of the soul from at least two sources,—from both parents,—and a substance thus derived was apparently composite and quasi-material.

“Stripped of all extravagance and expressed in the modest terms of probability, the theory has immense speculative interest and great ethical value. It is much to have the puzzle of the origin of evil thrown back for an indefinite number of cycles of lives; to have a workable explanation of _Nemesis_, and of what we are accustomed to call the moral tragedies and the untoward birth of a multitude of men and women. It is much also to have the doctrine of immortality lightened of its difficulties; to have our immediate outlook relieved by the doctrine that in the soul’s eternity its preëxistence and its future existence are one. The retrospect may assuredly help the prospect.”

“Whether we make use of it or not, we ought to realize its alternatives. They are these. Either all life is extinguished and resolved through an absorption and reassumption of the vital principle everywhere, or a perpetual miracle goes on in the incessant and rapid increase in the amount of spiritual existence within the universe; and while human life survives, the intelligence and the affection of the lower animals perish everlastingly.”

15. Professor W. A. Butler’s celebrated lectures upon “The History of Ancient Philosophy” lean strongly toward an endorsement of Plato’s philosophy of reincarnation:—

“It must be allowed that there is much in the hypothesis of preëxistence (at least) which might attract a speculator busied with the endeavor to reduce the moral system of the world under intelligible laws. The solution which it at once furnishes of the state and fortunes of each individual, as arising in some unknown but direct process from his own voluntary acts, though it throws, of course, no light on the ultimate question of the existence of moral evil (which it only removes a single step), does yet contribute to satisfy the mind as to the equity of that immediate manifestation of it, and of its physical attendants, which we unhappily witness. There is internally no greater improbability that the present may be the result of a former state now almost wholly forgotten, than that the present should be followed by a future form of existence in which, perhaps, or in some departments of which, the oblivion may be as complete. And if to that future state there are already discernible faint longings and impulses which to many men have seemed to involve a direct proof of its reality, hopes that will not be bounded by the grave, and desires that grasp eternity, others have found within them, it would seem, faint intimations scarcely less impressive of the past, as if the soul vibrated the echoes of a harmony not of this world. Wordsworth has told us that such convictions seem to be a part, though a neglected part, of the heritage of our race.”

16. The novelist Bulwer thus expresses his opinion of this truth: “Eternity may be but an endless series of those migrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home after home, even to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after age the spirit may shift its tent, fated not to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it evermore its two elements, activity and desire.”[24]

17. Pezzani, the author of “The Plurality of the Soul’s Lives,”[25] writes: “The earthly sojourn is only a new probation, as was said by Dupont de Nemours, that great writer who, in the eighteenth century, outstripped all modern thought. Now, if this be so, is it not plain that the recollection of former lives would seriously hinder probations, by removing most of their difficulties, and consequently of their deserts, as well as of their spontaneity? We live in a world where free will is all-powerful, the inviolable law of advancement and progress among men. If past lives were remembered, the soul would know the significance and import of the trials which are reserved for it here below: indolent and careless, it would harden itself against the purposes of Providence, and become paralyzed by the hopelessness of mastering them, or even, if of a better quality and more manly, it would accept and work them out without fail. Well, neither of these suppositions is necessary; the struggle must be free, voluntary, safe from the influences of the past; the field of combat must seem new, so that the athlete may exhibit and practice his virtues upon it. The experience he has already acquired, the forces he has learned how to conquer, serve him in the new strife; but in such a manner that he does not suspect it, for the imperfect soul undergoes reincarnations in order to develop the qualities that it has already manifested, to free itself from the vices and faults which are in opposition to the ascensional law. What would happen if all men remembered their former lives? The order of the earth would be overthrown; at least, it is not now established on such conditions. Lethe, as well as free will, is a law of the actual world.”

18. One of Emerson’s earliest essays (“The Method of Nature”) contains this paragraph: “We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mortal frame shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness nor buried in my grave; but that they circulate through the universe: before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar them out, or shut them in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space and time, form and essence, and hold the key to universal nature.”

Again, in one of his latest works (on “Immortality”) he says: “The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, because they want more time and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as we are, with our experience, and transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants what we can of the wisdom of this. After we have found our depth there, and assimilated what we can of the new experience, transfer us to a new scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which we were too much immersed.”[26]

19. James Freeman Clarke writes (in “Ten Great Religions,” ii. 190): “That man has come up to his present state of development by passing through lower forms is the popular doctrine of science to-day. What is called evolution teaches that we have reached our present state by a very long and gradual ascent from the lowest animal organizations. It is true that the Darwinian theory takes no notice of the evolution of the soul, but only of the body. But it appears to me that a combination of the two views would remove many difficulties which still attach to the theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. If we are to believe in evolution, let us have the assistance of the soul itself in this development of new species. Thus science and philosophy will coöperate, nor will poetry hesitate to lend her aid.”

20. The noblest work of modern times, and probably of all time, upon immortality, is a large volume by the Rev. William R. Alger, entitled “A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life.” It was published in 1860, and still remains the standard authority upon that topic throughout Christendom. This little book is substantially indebted to it. The author is a Unitarian minister, who devoted half his lifetime to the work, undermining his health thereby. In the first edition (1860) the writer characterizes reincarnation as a plausible delusion, unworthy of credence. For fifteen years more he continued studying the subject, and the last edition (1878) gives the final result of his ripest investigations in heartily endorsing and advocating reincarnation. No more striking argument for the doctrine could be advanced than this fact. That a Christian clergyman, making the problem of the soul’s destiny his life’s study, should become so overpowered by the force of this pagan idea as to adopt it for the climax of his scholarship is extremely significant. And the result is reached by such a sincere course of reasoning that the seminaries in all denominations are compelled to accept his book as the masterpiece. From one of the supplemental chapters we quote the following by his permission:—

“Besides the various distinctive arguments of its own, every reason for the resurrection holds with at least equal force for transmigration. The argument from analogy is especially strong. It is natural to argue from the universal spectacle of incarnated life that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety of souls finding in the variety of worlds an everlasting series of adventures in appropriate organisms; there being, as Paul said, one kind of flesh of birds, another of beasts, another of men, another of angels, and so on. Our present lack of recollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality. Every night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day we reawaken to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. So in one life we may forget or dream, and in another recover the whole thread of experience from the beginning.

“In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtful and refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had so extensive and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote of the majority, having for ages on ages been held by half the human race with an intensity of conviction almost without a parallel. Indeed, the most striking fact about the doctrine of the repeated incarnations of the soul, its form and experience in each successive embodiment being determined by its merits and demerits in the preceding ones, is the constant reappearance of that faith in all parts of the world, and its permanent hold on certain great nations.

“Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that it seems to be a native and ineradicable growth of the oriental world; but appears in the western world only in scattered instances, and rather as an exotic form of thought. In the growing freedom and liberality of thought, which, no less than its doubt and denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if the full time had come for a greater mental and æsthetic hospitality on the part of Christians towards Hindus. The advocates of the resurrection should not confine their attention to the repellant or the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to its claim and its charm.”

After reviewing and strengthening the evidences in favor of plural births, Mr. Alger continues: “The above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the resurrection into a form scientifically credible, and reconciled with the immemorial tenet of transmigration, may seem to some a fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy. Perhaps it is so. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic animus. It is advanced solely as an illustration of what may possibly be true, as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of history and the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are so wonderful, the method of it so rational, the region of contemplation into which it lifts the mind is so grand, the prospects it opens are of such universal reach and import, that the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublime scope of the idea of immortality, and of a cosmopolitan vindication of Providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of the littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes it easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny to seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty of the powers of the mind which can conceive such things. After traversing the grounds here set forth, we feel that if the view based on them be not the truth, it must be because God has in reserve for us a sequel greater and lovelier, not meaner, than our brightest dream hitherto.”

21. In the “Princeton Review” for May, 1881, Professor Francis Bowen (of Harvard University) publishes a very interesting article on “Christian Metempsychosis,” in which he urges the Christian acceptance of reincarnation. By his consent we quote a large portion of it, because it is so able an appeal for the adoption of this truth, from both a metaphysical and a Christian standpoint:—

“Our life upon earth is rightly held to be a discipline and a preparation for a higher and eternal life hereafter. But if limited to the duration of a single mortal body, it is so brief as to seem hardly sufficient for so grand a purpose. Threescore years and ten must surely be an inadequate preparation for eternity. But what assurance have we that the probation of the soul is confined within so narrow limits? Why may it not be continued, or repeated, through a long series of successive generations, the same personality animating one after another an indefinite number of tenements of flesh, and carrying forward into each the training it has received, the character it has formed, the temper and dispositions it has indulged, in the stage of existence immediately preceding? It need not remember its past history, even while bearing the fruits and the consequences of that history deeply ingrained into its present nature. How many long passages of any one life are now completely lost to memory, though they may have contributed largely to build up the heart and the intellect which distinguish one man from another! Our responsibility surely is not lessened by such forgetfulness. We are still accountable for the misuse of time, though we have forgotten how or on what we wasted it. We are even now reaping the bitter fruits, through enfeebled health and vitiated desires and capacities, of many forgotten acts of self-indulgence, willfulness, and sin—forgotten just because they were so numerous. Then a future life even in another frail body upon this earth may well be a state of just and fearful retribution.

“Why should it be thought incredible that the same soul should inhabit in succession an indefinite number of mortal bodies, and thus prolong its experience and its probation till it has become in every sense ripe for heaven or the final judgment? Even during this one life our bodies are perpetually changing, though by a process of decay and restoration which is so gradual that it escapes our notice. Every human being thus dwells successively in many bodies, even daring one short life. This physiological fact seems to have been known by Plato, as in a well-known passage of the Phædo, a clear statement of it is put into the mouth of Cebes, who argues, however, that this fact affords no sufficient proof of the immortality of the soul. ‘You may say with reason,’ Cebes is made to argue, ‘that the soul is lasting, and the body weak and short-lived in comparison. And every soul may be said to wear out many bodies, especially in the course of a long life. For if, while the man is alive, the body deliquesces and decays, and yet the soul always weaves her garment anew and repairs the waste, then of course, when the soul perishes, she must have on her last garment, and this only will survive her; but then, again, when the soul is dead, the body will at last show its native weakness and soon pass into decay.’ And again: ‘Suppose we admit also that, after death, the souls of some are existing still, and will exist, and will be born and die again and again, and that there is a natural strength in the soul which will hold out and be born many times,—for all this, we may still be inclined to think that she will be weary in the labors of successive births, and may at last succumb in one of her deaths and utterly perish.’[27]

“If every birth were an act of absolute creation, the introduction to life of an entirely new creature, we might reasonably ask why different souls are so variously constituted at the outset. We do not all start fair in the race that is set before us, and therefore all cannot be expected, at the close of one brief mortal pilgrimage, to reach the same goal, and to be equally well fitted for the blessings or the penalties of a fixed state hereafter. The commonest observation assures us that one child is born with limited capacities and perhaps a wayward disposition, strong passions, and a sullen temper; that he has tendencies to evil which are almost sure to be soon developed. Another, on the contrary, seems happily endowed from the start; he is not only amiable, tractable, and kind, but quick-witted and precocious, a child of many hopes. The one seems a perverse goblin, while the other has the early promise of a Cowley or a Pascal. The differences of external condition also are so vast and obvious that they seem to detract much from the merit of a well-spent life and from the guilt of vice and crime. One is so happily nurtured in a Christian home, and under so many protecting influences, that the path of virtue lies straight and open before him,—so plain, indeed, that even the blind could safely walk therein; while another seems born to a heritage of misery, exposure, and crime. The birthplace of one is in Central Africa, and of another in the heart of civilized and Christian Europe. Where lingers eternal justice then? How can such frightful inequalities be made to appear consistent with the infinite wisdom and goodness of God?