chapter iv., and by other writers mentioned at the close of this book.
Julius Müller,[7] Lessing,[8] Edward Beecher,[9] Coleridge, and Kant[10] also sustain it from a religio-philosophical ground. It is the only rational explanation of the theological idea of sin.
The same is true regarding the church’s dogma of future punishments and rewards. A reasonable consideration fails to understand how the jump can be made from this condition of things to an eternity of either suffering or bliss—as ordinary theology demands. The Roman Catholics recognized this difficulty sufficiently to provide Purgatory, and in that tenet they meet the sense of humanity. Reincarnation simply says that there are many purgatories, and one is earth. The more rational Protestants get around the incongruity by permitting many grades of existence in heaven and hell, which approaches the same solution. Reincarnation says also, there are infinite degrees of heaven and hell, and many of them slope down through this life. It is inconceivable how earthly natures (and most of human souls are such) can find their penalties and their rewards elsewhere than on some kind of earth. The scheme of the universe presents everywhere a simple and sublime habit of keeping affinities together, and it certainly seems as if the same economy could apply to souls as to atoms. This idea meets better than any other the principles that punishment for sin cannot continue longer than the sin continues, and that the everlasting mercy of the Supreme will provide some final release for his erring children.
6. Reincarnation explains many curious experiences. Most of us have known the touches of feeling and thought that seem to be reminders of forgotten things. Sometimes as dim dreams of old scenes, sometimes as vivid lightning flashes in the darkness recalling distant occurrences, sometimes with unutterable depth of meaning. It appears as if nature’s opiate which ushered us here had been so diluted that it did not quite efface the old memories, and reason struggles to decipher the vestiges of a former state. Almost every one has felt the sense of great age. Thinking of some unwonted subject often an impression seizes us that somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflections before. Learning a fact, meeting a face for the first time, we are puzzled with an obscure sense that it is familiar. Traveling newly in strange places we are sometimes haunted with a consciousness of having been there already. Music is specially apt to guide us into mystic depths, where we are startled with the flashing reminiscences of unspeakable verities which we have felt or seen ages since. Efforts of thought reveal the half-obliterated inscriptions on the tablets of memory, passing before the vision in a weird procession. Every one has some such experiences. Most of them are blurred and obscure. But some are so remarkably distinct that those who undergo them are convinced that their sensations are actual recollections of events and places in former lives. It is even possible for certain persons to trace thus quite fully and clearly a part of their bygone history prior to this life.
Sir Walter Scott was so impressed by these experiences that they led him to a belief in preëxistence. In his diary was entered this circumstance, February 17, 1828: “I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth marking down, that yesterday, at dinner time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of preëxistence, viz. a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time; that the same topics had been discussed and the same persons had stated the same opinions on them.... The sensation was so strong as to resemble what is called a _mirage_ in the desert and a calenture on board ship.... It was very distressing yesterday, and brought to my mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal world. There was a vile sense of unreality in all I said or did.”[11] That this was not due to the strain upon his later years is evident from the fact that the same experience is referred to in one of his earliest novels, where this “sentiment of preëxistence” was first described. In “Guy Mannering,” Henry Bertram says: “Why is it that some scenes awaken thoughts which belong, as it were, to dreams of early and shadowy recollections, such as old Brahmin moonshine would have ascribed to a state of previous existence. How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness that neither the scene nor the speakers nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place.”
Bulwer-Lytton describes it as “that strange kind of inner and spiritual memory which often recalls to us places and persons we have never seen before, and which Platonists would resolve to be the unquenched and struggling consciousness of a former life.” Again, in “Godolphin” (chapter xv.), he writes: “How strange is it that at times a feeling comes over us as we gaze upon certain places, which associates the scene either with some dim-remembered and dreamlike images of the Past, or with a prophetic and fearful omen of the Future.... Every one has known a similar strange and indistinct feeling at certain times and places, and with a similar inability to trace the cause.”
Edgar A. Poe writes (in “Eureka”): “We walk about, amid the destinies of our world existence, accompanied by dim but ever present memories of a Destiny more vast—very distant in the bygone time and infinitely awful.... We live out a youth peculiarly haunted by such dreams, yet never mistaking them for dreams. As _memories_ we know them. During our youth the distinctness is too clear to deceive us even for a moment. But the doubt of manhood dispels these feelings as illusions.”
Explicit occurrences of this class are found in the narratives of Hawthorne, Willis, Coleridge, De Quincey, and many other writers. A striking instance appears in a little memoir of the late William Hone, the Parodist, upon whom the experience made such a profound effect that it roused him from thirty years of materialistic atheism to a conviction of the soul’s independence of matter. Being called in business to a house in a part of London entirely new to him, he kept noticing that he had never been that way before. “I was shown,” he says, “into a room to wait. On looking around, to my astonishment everything appeared perfectly familiar to me: I seemed to _recognize_ every object. I said to myself, what is this? I was never here before and yet I have seen all this, and if so, there is a very peculiar knot in the shutter.” He opened the shutter, and there was the knot.
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.)