Part 11
This is about all that we can cite in favour of the doctrine of reincarnation. It is not enough to weigh down the scales. But all the other suppositions, theories or religions, excepting spiritualism, which for the rest is perfectly consistent with successive existences, have less solid foundations and are even, to be truthful, devoid of any. It would therefore be ungracious on their part to reproach the supposition which we are considering with the instability of the arguments whereon it is based.
Once again, how desirable it would be that all this were true! There would be no more moral uncertainties, no more uneasiness in respect of justice. And it is so beautiful, so complete, that it is perhaps real. It is difficult indeed to admit that such a dream is untrue from first to last, a dream which has been dreamed so long, since the beginning of the world, by so many thousands of millions of men and which, despite numerous and far-reaching distortions, has, when all is said, been the one dream of humanity. It is not possible to prove that it is based upon truth; but, unlike most of the religions derived from it, it is not possible either to demonstrate that it is imaginary and fabricated throughout; and, there being this doubt, why should not reason, which it never offends, be allowed to accept it and at heart to hope and act as though it were true, while waiting for science to confirm it completely, or to invalidate it, or to give us another hypothesis which it will perhaps never be able to elaborate?
What at first repels many of those who investigate it is the unduly assured and arbitrary insistence upon a thousand petty details, probably interpolated, as in all religions, by inferior minds, animated by a narrow and maladroit zeal. But these details, viewed from a certain elevation, do not in any way alter the great outlines, which remain immeasurable, admirable and unspoiled.
6
For the rest, whether reincarnation be accepted or rejected, there is surely such a thing as survival, since death and nothingness cannot be conceived; and the whole matter is once more reduced to the problem of continued identity. Even in reincarnation this identity, from our present, limited point of view, would possess only a relative interest, seeing that, all memory of previous existences being abolished, it would necessarily evade us. Let us ask ourselves, moreover, whether this question of personality without solution of continuity does really possess the importance which we attach to it and whether this importance is not a delusion, a temporary blindness of our egoism, of our terrestrial intelligence. For the fact remains that we interrupt it and lose it every night without disquieting ourselves. It is enough for us to be certain that we shall recover it on awaking; and we are reassured. But suppose that this were not the case and that one evening we were warned that we should not recover it, that on the following morning we should have forgotten all our past existence and should begin a new life, without any memory to connect us with the old. Should we feel the same terror, the same despair, as if we had been told that we should never wake again and that we should be hurled into our death? I do not believe it, I even think that we should accept our lot fairly cheerfully. It would not greatly matter to us that we should have to lose the memory of a past, consisting, like the past of all of us, of more evil than good, provided that life continued. It would no longer be our life, it would no longer have anything in common with the life of the day before; nevertheless we should not believe that we were losing it and we should retain a vague hope of recovering or recognizing something of ourselves in the existence before us. We should take pains to prepare for this existence, to insure it against misfortune and distress, to make it, in advance, as pleasant and as happy as possible. It might and ought to be so, not only if we believe in reincarnation, because the case would be almost identical, but also if we do not believe in it, since a survival of some sort is almost certain and absolute annihilation is actually inconceivable.
7
Perhaps with a little courage and goodwill it would be possible for us, even in this life, to look higher and farther, to shed for an instant that narrow and dismal egoism which refers all things to self, to tell ourselves that the intelligence or the good which our thoughts and efforts diffuse in the spiritual spheres are not wholly lost, even when it is not certain that the little nucleus of trivial habits and commonplace recollections that we are possesses them exclusively. If the good actions which we have performed, the noble or merely honest intentions or thoughts which we have experienced attach themselves and give value to a life in which we shall not recognize our own, this is not a sufficient reason to regard them as useless or to deny them all merit. It is well to remind ourselves at times that we are nothing if we are not everything and to learn from now onwards to interest ourselves in something that is not solely ourselves and already to live the ampler, less personal, less egotistical life which presently, without any doubt, whatever may be our creed, will be our eternal life, the only life that matters and the only life for which it is wise to prepare ourselves.
8
If we do not accept reincarnation, Karma none the less exists: a mutilated Karma, it is true; a diminished Karma, devoid of spaciousness, with an horizon limited by death, beginning its work and doing its best in the brief spell of time which it has before it, but less negligible, less impotent, less inactive and ineffective than is supposed. Acting within its narrow sphere, it gives us a fairly accurate albeit very incomplete idea of what it would accomplish in the wider sphere which we deny it. But this would lead us back to the highly debatable question of mundane justice. It is almost insoluble, because its decisive operations, being inward and secret, escape observation. Following many others, who, for the rest, have explained it better than I, I have spoken of it elsewhere, particularly in _Wisdom and Destiny_ and in _The Mystery of Justice_;[3] but, as Queen Scheherazade might say, it would serve no useful purpose to repeat it.
9
Let us then return to Karma properly so-called, the ideal Karma. It rewards goodness and punishes evil in the infinite sequence of our lives. But first of all, some will ask, what is this goodness, what is this evil, what is the best or the worst of our petty thoughts, our petty intentions, our petty ephemeral actions, compared with the boundless immensity of time and space? Is there not an absurd disproportion between the hugeness of the reward or punishment and the pettiness of the fault or merit? Why mix the worlds, the eternities and the gods with things which, however monstrous or admirable at first, are not slow, even within the trivial limits of our life, to lose gradually all the importance which we ascribed to them, to vanish, to fade into oblivion? That is true; but we must needs speak of human things in terms of human beings and on the human scale. What we call good or evil is that which works us good or evil, that which benefits or harms ourselves or others; and, so long as we live upon this earth and have not disappeared, we must needs attach to good and evil an importance which in themselves they do not possess. The noblest religions, the proudest metaphysical speculations, so soon as they involve human morality, human evolution and the human future, have always been obliged to reduce themselves to human proportions, to become anthropomorphous. This is an invincible necessity, by virtue of which, despite the horizons that tempt us on every hand, it behoves us to limit our ideas and our outlook.
10
Let us then limit them and once more ask ourselves, this time remaining within our sphere, what, after all, is this evil which Karma punishes? If we go to the very root of the matter, evil always arises from a lack of intelligence, from an erroneous and incomplete judgment, obscured or restricted by our egoism, which allows us to perceive only the proximate or immediate advantages of an action harmful to ourselves or others, while concealing the remote but inevitable consequences which such an action always ends by begetting. The whole science of ethics, after all, is based only upon intelligence; and what we call heart, sentiments, character is in fact nothing but accumulated and crystallized intelligence, inherited or acquired, which has become more or less unconscious and is transformed into habits or instincts. The evil which we do we do only because of a mistaken egoism, which sees the limits of its being too near at hand. As soon as intelligence raises the point of view of this egoism, the limits extend, widen and end by disappearing. The terrible and insatiable ego loses its centre of attraction and avidity and knows itself, finds itself and loves itself in all things. Let us not believe blindly in the intelligence of the wicked who succeed, or in the happiness of the criminal. We ought rather to see the converse, that is to say, the often hideous reality of the success; moreover, this intelligence, in the shape of skill, cunning or disloyalty, is a specialized intelligence, confined within a narrow circuit and, like a constricted jet of water, very effective when directed at a single point; but it is not a true and general, spacious and generous intelligence. Wherever the latter reveals itself, we necessarily find honesty, justice, forbearance, love and kindness, because there is a lofty and full horizon and because there is an instinctive or conscious knowledge of human proportions, of the eternity of existence and the brevity of life, of man’s position in the universe, of the mysteries that compass him about and the secret bonds that unite him to all things that we see as well as to all things that we do not see upon earth and in the heavens.
11
Is Karma, then, supposed to punish lack of intelligence? And, in the first place, why not? It is the only real evil upon this earth; and, if all men were superlatively intelligent, none would be unhappy. But where would the justice of it be? We possess the intelligence which nature has bestowed upon us; it is she, not we, that should be held responsible. Let us understand one another. Karma does not inflict punishment, properly speaking; it simply places us, after our successive existences and slumbers, on the plane on which our intelligence left us, surrounded by our actions and our thoughts. It keeps a check and a record. It takes us such as we have made ourselves and gives us the opportunity to make ourselves anew, to acquire what we lack and to raise ourselves to the level of the highest. We are bound to raise ourselves, but the slowness or rapidity of our ascent depends only upon ourselves. When all is said, the apparent injustice which grants more intelligence to some than to others is but a question of date, a law of growth, of evolution, which is the fundamental law of all the lives that we know, from the infusoria to the stars. We could at most complain of coming later than the rest; but the rest, in their turn, might with more reason complain of being called too soon, of being unable to profit at once by all that has been acquired since their birth. To avoid recrimination, therefore, we should all have been on the same plane from the outset; we should all have been born at the same time. But then the world would have been complete, perfect, immutable, immobile, from the first moment of its existence and ours. This would perhaps have been preferable; but it is not so and it is, no doubt, impossible that it should be so; in any case, no system of metaphysics, no religion, not even the first, the greatest, the loftiest, the mother of all the rest, ever thought of rejecting the indisputable and indubitable law of endless movement, of the eternal Becoming; and it must be admitted that everything appears to justify it. It is probable that there would be nothing if it were otherwise and that there can only be something on condition that it becomes better or worse, that it rises or falls, that it constitutes itself in order to deconstitute and reconstitute itself and that movement is more essential than being or substance. It is so because it is so. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be said; we can but state the fact. We are in a world in which matter would perish and disappear sooner than movement, or rather in which matter, time, space, duration, existence and movement are but one and the same thing.
12
But we also live in a world in which our reason encounters only the impossible, the insoluble and the incomprehensible. The supreme interpretations do no more than shift the riddle, to permit us to obtain glimpses from a higher standpoint of the boundless immensity in which we are striving. Therefore, apart from the puerile explanations which, after successive changes of form, all the religions have drawn from the original religion, three hypotheses and no more offer themselves for our choice: on the one hand, nothingness, inertia and absolute death, which are inconceivable; on the other hand, chance and its eternal renewals, which are without change, hope, object or end, or which, if they led to anything, would lead either to an inconceivable annihilation or to the third hypothesis, according to which the best becomes infinite, even to total absorption in the imperfectible, the immutable, the immovable, which, as I have said elsewhere,[4] must have occurred already in the eternity that precedes us, since there is no reason why that which could not take place in this eternity should take place in the eternity to come, which is no more infinite, is no more extensive and offers no more chances than the past eternity and which is not of a different nature.
The mother religion itself, the only one which is still acceptable, which takes account of everything and which has foreseen everything, does not escape this last dilemma by extending to thousands of millions of years the duration of a year of Brahma, that is to say, the period of evolution, of expiration, of externalization and activity, and to an equal number of thousands of millions of years the duration of a night of this god, that is to say, the period of involution, of inspiration, of internalization, of slumber or inertia, during which all is reabsorbed into the divinity or the sole absolute. It does not escape it either by next multiplying these days and nights by a hundred years which form one life and this life by a hundred lives which lead to figures that defy expression, after which another universe begins.
Here, too, there would be either an eternal recommencement without hope or object, or, if there be progression, final perfection and immobility which ought already to be attained. Let each draw from all this such conclusions as he please or can, or bow once more, in silence, before the Unknowable.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The English translation of Fabre’s works, by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, is issued in America by the publishers of the present volume.
[2] In the volume, published in 1904, entitled _The Double Garden_.--A. T. de M.
[3] The first essay in _The Buried Temple_.--A. T. de M.
[4] In _Our Eternity_.--A. T. de M.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.