Part 8
The law of heredity which insists that the descendants shall suffer by the faults and profit by the virtues of their ancestors comprises truths that are no longer disputed. They shine forth, visible to the eyes of all. The child of a drunkard will bear the burden of his father’s vice all his life long, from the day of his birth to that of his death, in body and in mind. One might say that by this irrefutable example nature had intended ostentatiously to affirm and manifest the implacable character of her law, as though to make us understand that she takes no account whatever of our conceptions of justice and injustice and that she acts on an unvarying principle in all the obscure circumstances in which we cannot follow the inextricable windings of her will. This example, if we had no other, would be enough to brand that inhuman will with infamy. There is no law more repugnant to our reason, to our sense of responsibility, nor one which does a deeper injury to our trust in the universe and the unknown spirit that rules it. Of all life’s injustices, this is the most glaring and the least comprehensible. For most of the others we find excuses or explanations; but, when we remember that a new-born child, a child which did not ask to be born, is, from the moment of inhaling its first breath of air, smitten with irremediable insolvency, with a ferocious, irrevocable sentence and with evils which it will drag to the grave, it seems to us that not one of the most hateful tyrants that history has cursed would have dared to do what nature does quietly every day.
But do we really bear the burden of the errors of the dead? In the first place, is it quite certain that the dead are really dead and no longer dwell within us? It is a fact that we continue them, that we are the durable part of what they were. We cannot deny that we are still subject to their influence, that we reproduce their features and their characters, that we represent them almost entirely, that they continue to live and to act in us; it is therefore very natural that they also should continue to bear the consequences of an action or a way of living which their departure has not interrupted.
“But,” you may say, “I had no part in this action, this habit, this vice for which I am paying to-day. I was not consulted; I had no opportunity of uttering a protest, of checking my father, or my grandfather, as he went to his ruin down the fatal precipice. I was not born; I did not yet exist!”
How do you know? May there not be a fundamental mistake in the idea of heredity as we conceive it? At one end of the beam of those scales which we accuse of injustice hangs heredity, but the other is borne down by something different, which we have never taken into account, for it has not yet a name, something which is the antithesis of heredity, which cleaves into the future instead of emerging from the past and which we might call preexistence or prenatality.
Even as our dead still live in us, so we have already lived in them. There is no reason to believe that the future, which is full of life, is less active and less potent than the past, which is full of the dead. Instead of descending, should we not rather ascend the course of the years to discover the source of our actions?
We know not in what fashion those already dwell in us who shall be born of us, down to the last generation; but that they do dwell in us is certain. Whatever the number of our descendants, in the sequence of the ages, whatever the transformations which the elements, climates, countries and centuries may cause them to undergo, they will keep intact, through all vicissitudes, the principle of life which they have derived from us. They have not obtained it elsewhere or they could not be what they are. They have really issued from us; and, if they have issued from us, it is because they were in us from the first. What were they doing within us, all these innumerable, accumulated lives? Is it permissible to suppose that they were absolutely inactive? Then what were their functions, what their power? What divided them from us? When did we begin, where did they end? At what point did their thoughts and their desires mingle with ours?
“How could they think and act in us,” you ask, “having as yet no brain?”
True; but they had ours. The dead too are without a brain; nevertheless no one will deny that they continue to think and act in us. This brain of which we are so proud is not the source but the condenser of thought and will. Like the Leyden jar or the Ruhmkorff coil, it exists, it is animated only so long as the electric fluid of life passes through it or resides in it. It does not produce this fluid, it collects it; what matters is not its convolutions, which may be compared with the windings of an induction-coil, but the life that flows through it; and what can this life be, if it be not the sum of all the existences which are accumulated within us, which are not extinguished at our death, which begin before our birth and which continue us, forwards, and backwards, into the infinity of time?
2
Writers of essays and novels have at times endeavoured to represent these diverse lives which we harbour within us; and each of us, if he question himself sincerely and profoundly, will discover in himself two or three clearly-defined types, which have nothing in common but the body in which they reside, which rarely agree among themselves, which are incessantly striving to gain the upper hand and which put up with one another as best they can, in order to go through an existence whose aggregate forms our ego. This ego will be good or bad, remarkable or insignificant, more or less generous or selfish, calm or uneasy, pacific or pugnacious, heroic or pusillanimous, hesitating or decided and enterprising, brutal or refined, crafty or loyal, active or idle, chaste or lascivious, modest or vainglorious, proud or obsequious, unreliable or steadfast, according to the authority which the type that captures the best positions of the heart or brain is able to assume over the others. But, even in the life that appears the most stable, the most homogeneous, the best-balanced, this authority will never be final or undisputed. The dominant type will find itself for ever disputed, attacked, thwarted, disturbed, circumvented, harassed, tempted, deceived, betrayed and sometimes cunningly dethroned by one of the rival or subordinate types which it failed to distrust or which it did not watch narrowly enough. We behold unexpected coalitions, fantastic compromises, regrettable defections, fierce competitions, incessant intrigues and positive revolutions, especially at the critical periods and at each moment of important happenings; and all this prodigious inward tragedy does not cease for an instant until the hour of death.
3
But, once again, why seek only in the past and among our ancestors for the actors in this drama which is the essential drama of humanity? What justification have we for supposing that the dead alone play all the parts? Why should those from whom we have issued possess more influence than those who will issue from us? The first are remote from our bodily selves, they are separated from us by unfathomable mysteries and their survival may perhaps be called in question; the others inhabit our flesh and their existence is incontestable. We have just seen that the argument deduced from the absence of any brain is not invincible.
“But,” you will perhaps go on to say, “how do you suppose that, when they have not yet lived, they can possess habits, virtues and vices, preferences and experience, in a word, all that constitutes a character and cannot be acquired save by contact with life?”
But the same objection could be raised, in most cases, with regard to our ancestors. Generally speaking, when we issued from them, they were still young; they were not yet what they became and what we shall become after them. They had not yet adopted the habits, the ways of thinking or feeling, or cultivated the virtues or the vices which are reproduced in us. The stubborn little mediocrity whom we all feel within us, frugal, cautious and shabby in his dealings, was still perhaps a prodigal, high-spirited and reckless youth; the rake was still perhaps chaste, the thief had never stolen and the murderer may have had a horror of bloodshed. All this is almost equally immaterial and equally potential in both cases; the only present points at issue are the amorphous tendencies and forces whereon the brain which we receive from these and pass on to those bestows a form.
It is therefore very possible that the little mediocrity, the rake, the thief or the murderer, far from being dead, are not yet born and are taking as active a part as our ancestors in the agitations and sometimes in the conduct of our existence. This is what the most ancient and the most venerable religions of humanity always foresaw or revealed, receiving it perhaps on the authority of an unknown and loftier source; and of these religions Christianity, with its dogma of original sin, is but an imperfect echo. Even to-day, more than six hundred millions of human beings believe in the preexistence of the soul, in successive lives and in reincarnation. In the eyes of these religions, the little mediocrity who begot us several centuries ago is the same who, a little less paltry, a little less narrow, improved by his previous life and his passage through the mysteries of death, is awaiting within us the moment of rebirth and who, while waiting, shares our instincts, our feelings and our thoughts. He does not wait in solitude; he is but one life in the host of lives which have preceded us and which come back to live in us again; and all these past and future lives form the sum total of our own.
4
We will not here discuss this doctrine of successive lives and of the expiatory and purifying reincarnation, which is the noblest and, up to now, the only acceptable explanation of nature’s injustices that has been discovered. In the present state of our knowledge, it can be only a magnificent theory or a statement impossible of proof. Let us not forsake the indisputable ground on which heredity and preexistence have their being. Heredity is an acquired fact, an experimental truth; preexistence is a logical necessity. It is not indeed possible to conceive that what will be born of us does not already exist within us in fact, in principle, in the germ, in essence or in potentiality; and, from the moment of its existence in a fashion probably more spiritual than material, it is far less surprising that it should be more or less responsible for thoughts and actions to which it could not be wholly a stranger.
In any case, heredity, which is incontestable, and preexistence, which is necessary, remind us yet once again that each of us is not a single being, isolated, permanent, hermetically sealed, independent of others and separated from all things in time and space, but a porous vase dipping into the infinite; a sort of cross-roads, where all the paths of the past, the present and the future meet; an inn beside the eternal highways, where all the lives which make up our own foregather for a few days’ sojourn. We believe ourselves dead when they leave the inn; and we fancy that they too have perished. It is more likely that this is not so at all. They are merely quitting the ruined hostel to install themselves in a new and more habitable house. They carry with them their debts and their obligations; they remove to their new abode their instincts, their habits, their ideals, their passions also, their merits and their faults, their acquisitions and their memories. The house is different, but the guests are the same; and the old life will resume its course in the new dwelling and will be perhaps a little nobler, perhaps a little fairer, perhaps filled with a little brighter light.
THE GREAT REVELATION
XVI
THE GREAT REVELATION
1
We despair of ever knowing the origin of the universe, its aim, its laws, or its intentions; and we end by doubting whether there be any. It were wiser very humbly to confess that we are not able to conceive them. It is probable that, if the universe to-morrow were to yield us the key of its riddle, we should be as incapable of understanding how to use it as is a dog to whom we show the key of a clock. In revealing its great secret to us, it would teach us hardly anything; or at least the revelation would have but an insignificant influence upon our life, our happiness, our ethics, our efforts, and our hopes. It would soar at such heights that no one would perceive it; at most it would disencumber the sky of our religious illusions, leaving only the infinite void of the ether in their place.
2
For that matter, there is no saying but that we once possessed this revelation. It is highly possible that the religions of nations which have disappeared, such as the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and many others, were aware of it and that we have discovered its remains in the esoteric traditions that have come down to us. It must not indeed be forgotten that there exists, side by side with the outward, scientific history, a secret history of mankind which derives its substance of legends, myths, hieroglyphics, strange monuments and mysterious writings from the hidden meaning of the primitive books. One thing is certain, that, though the imagination of those who interpret this occult history is often venturesome, all that they declare is not to be despised and deserves to be examined more seriously one day than has hitherto been done.
The essence of this esoteric revelation is very well summed up by M. Marc Saunier, a disciple of Fabre d’Olivet and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, in his book, _La Légende des symboles_.
“The Initiates,” he says, “have always regarded each continent as a being subject to the same laws as man. For them, the minerals constitute its skeleton, the flora its flesh, the fauna its nerve-cells and the human races the grey matter of its brain. This continent itself is but an organ of the earth, wherein each man is treated as a thinking cell and whereof the thought is represented by the sum of human thoughts. The earth itself is but an organ of the solar system, which in turn is considered as an individual; and our solar system thus becomes merely an organ of another being of the infinite, whose heart would appear in the star Alpha in Aries. And lastly, by a final synthesis, we come to the Cosmos, which expresses the general sum of all things, in a being whose body is the world and whose thought is the universal intelligence, exalted by the religions to the rank of a deity.”
The basis of their doctrine is plainly evolutionistic. Each continent has merely transformed, in its own time and according to its own ideal, the seeds which came from the Hyperborean tracts; and man is but the result of an animal evolution. For the rest, they borrow it in part from the Hindus, thus anticipating by many thousands of years the latest hypotheses of our modern science.
3
But, without loitering in these shifting sands, let us go direct to clear and reliable sources. We possess, in the sacred and secret books of India, of which we know only an infinitesimal part, a cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed. It would not be correct to say that it attained, at the first endeavour, the ultimate limits beyond which the mind of man could not venture without dissolving in the infinite, for it was the work of centuries of which we do not know the tale; but it indisputably preceded all the others, its birth was earlier than anything that we know and, at the beginning of all things, it exceeded in grandeur all that we have learnt and all that we can imagine.
It was the first, for instance, long before our historic periods, to give us a dizzy yet concrete idea of the infinity of time. The Book of Manu teaches us that twelve thousand years of mortals are but a day and a night to the gods; their year, therefore, consisting of three hundred and sixty days, numbers 4,320,000 years. A thousand years of the gods make but one of Brahma’s days, that is to say, 4,320,000,000 human years, representing the total life of our globe; and Brahma’s night is of equal duration. Three hundred and sixty of these days and nights make one of this god’s years; and a hundred of these years constitute one of his lives, that is to say, the duration of the universe, which is represented by the formidable figure of 311,090,000,000,000 years. After this he begins a new life. At present we have not yet attained the noon of Brahma’s actual day nor half the life-time of our terrestrial globe.
To complete this outline of the stupendous chronology of the Vedas, I continue to profit by some notes received from my war-time godson, who has a thorough knowledge of this unduly neglected science. For the rest, it will be seen that chronology and cosmogony are here in intimate connection:
“The day of Brahma (4,320,000,000 years) is divided into fourteen lives of Manu, consisting alternately of seven Manvantaras and seven Pralayas. The word Manvantara signifies the interval between two Manus: one of these appears in the dawn and the other in the twilight of this period of terrestrial activity. The morning Manu gives the Manvantara its name and the evening Manu presides over the Pralaya, that is to say, the period of dissolution, or negative _status quo_, death, sleep, or inertia, as the case may be, which divides two waves of life.
“Universal evolution is a chain without beginning or end, each link of which in turn appears and disappears in our field of consciousness. Brahma himself dies only to be reborn. But for the sovereign of the worlds, as for a random star or the least of organized creatures, there is death and dissolution only from the individual point of view. Darkness is the ransom to be paid for light, the evening balances the morning, age is the price of youth and death the reverse of life. In reality, however, all evolution is at the same time continuous and discontinuous; the Manvantaras and Pralayas are at once simultaneous and successive; each individual life is engendered by its elemental double and engenders its residual double. Every decline of life in a given place coincides with an increase of being in a corresponding place and proceeds by means of a rebirth in a fresh place. Fundamentally, there is no individual life. We are at once ourselves and another, ourselves and several others, ourselves and all others, ourselves and the Universe, ourselves and infinity.
“The evolution of our terrestrial globe is an infinitesimal cycle of this universal evolution, corresponding merely with a day and a night of Brahma, and is divided into fourteen cycles, each consisting of a Manvantara and a Pralaya. The cycle of organic evolution upon our solidified globe represents only one of these subdivisions, that is to say, the radius of the organic sphere is only a fourteenth part of the radius of the mineral sphere. Mineral evolution is manifestly continuous from the formation of the globe to its dissolution. If, between the periods of geological activity, there exists a Pralaya of any kind, this latter, despite the etymology of the word, must be not a dissolution, which would be perfectly inconceivable from the logical and scientific point of view, but a period of inertia or abatement, of which the hypothesis is readily admissible and of which the glacial periods, occurring in the very course of the present Manvantara, afford us an example. In the earlier cycles of Manu, the earth passed in succession through the various stages of condensation which science regards as igneous and which correspond with the ethereal, gaseous and liquid evolution of the elements. During these long periods, the life of the present existed potentially in the soul of the earth and actually on other globes than ours.”
4
But we will proceed no further with this outline, which would become so complicated as to be inextricable. Let us remember simply the magnificent doctrine of the reincarnation, which is the most ancient reply, the only decisive and, no doubt, the most plausible reply, to all the problems of justice and injustice, the immortal torture of mortals, and its corollary, the law of Karma, which, as my godson so truly says, “is the most wonderful of ethical discoveries: it represents abstract liberty and is enough to enfranchise the human will from any superior or even infinite being. We are our own creators and the sole captains of our fate; no other than ourselves rewards or punishes us; there is no sin, but only consequences; there is no morality, but only responsibilities. Now Buddha taught that, merely by virtue of this sovran law, the individual must be reborn to reap what he has sowed; and this certainty of rebirth was enough to neutralize the horror of death.”
* * * * *
Is all this nothing more than imagination, than the dreams of brains more ardent than our own, the hallucinations of ascetics which amaze the young and the immobility or the echo of immemorial traditions bequeathed by other races, or by races anterior to man and more spiritual? It is impossible to decide; but, whatever its origin, it is certain that the monument whereof we have seen but a corner of the pedestal is prodigious and that it has not a human aspect. All that we can say is that our modern sciences, notably archæology, geology and biology, confirm rather than invalidate either of these revelations.
5
But this is not the question for the moment. Let us suppose that one of these revelations, for instance, that of the sacred books of India, were true, incontestable and scientifically proved by our researches; or that an interplanetary communication or a declaration of some superhuman being no longer permitted us to doubt its authenticity: what influence would such a revelation have upon our life? What would it transform in our life, what novel element would it add to our morality or our happiness? No doubt it would work but a very slight change. It would pass too high above us; it would not descend to our level; it would not touch us; we should lose ourselves in its immensity; and upon the whole, knowing everything, we should be neither happier nor wiser than when we knew nothing.
Not to know what he has come upon this earth to do: that is man’s great and everlasting torment. Now we must perforce admit that the actual truth of the universe, if some day we learn it, will probably be very similar to one or other of those revelations which, while appearing to teach us everything, teach us nothing at all. It will at least possess the same inhuman character. It will necessarily be as unlimited in both space and time, as abysmal, as foreign to our senses and our brain. The more tremendous, the more majestic the revelation, the greater chance will it have of being true; but also, the more remote from us it is, the less will it interest us. We can hardly hope to escape from this discouraging dilemma: those revelations, explanations or interpretations which are too petty will not satisfy us, because we shall instinctively feel them to be insufficient; while those which are too great will pass us by too far to affect us.
6
It nevertheless seems desirable that this revelation of the sacred books of India should be authentic and that our knowledge, still so slight, so unimportant, so timid and so incoherent, should gradually confirm, as indeed it unwittingly does daily, certain points scattered through the boundless immensity of this immemorial truth.