IV. WESTERN PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. (continued 2)

“But according to the theory which we are now considering, a still larger deduction must be made from the amount of apparent evil at any one time visible in the world. All the inequalities in the lot of mankind, which have prompted what are perhaps the bitterest of all complaints, and have served skeptics like Hume and J. S. Mill as a reason for the darkest imputations upon divine justice in the government of the world, 119disappear from the picture altogether. Excepting only what we have just considered, the retributive consequences of more or less sin, there are no inequalities. All start from the same point, and journey through the same vicissitudes of existence, exhausting sooner or later all varieties of condition. Prince and peasant, bond and free, barbarian and cultured, all share alike whatever weal or woe there is in the world, because all must at some future time change places with each other. But after these two large deductions from the amount complained of, what remains? Very little, certainly, which we cannot even now see through; that is, which we cannot assign an adequate reason for; and to the eye of faith nothing remains. The world becomes a mirror which reflects without blot or shadow the infinite goodness of its Creator and Governor. Death remains; but that is no evil, for what we call death is only the introduction to another life on earth, and if this be not a higher and better life than the one just ended, it is our own fault. Our life is really continuous, and the fact that the subsequent stages of it lie beyond our present range of immediate vision is of no more importance, and no more an evil, than the corresponding fact that we do not now remember our previous existence in antecedent ages. Death alone, or in itself considered, apart from the antecedent dread of it which is irrational, and apart from the injury to the feelings of the survivors, which is a necessary consequence of that attachment to each other from which, so much of our happiness springs, is not even an apparent evil; it is mere change and development, like the passage from the embryonic to the adult condition, from the blossom to the fruit.”

12022. In “Ways of the Spirit, and other Essays,” by Professor Frederick Henry Hedge, the twelfth chapter, upon “The Human Soul,” strongly advocates reincarnation. By the publishers’ consent we reprint the pages referring to it:—

“We reach back with our recollection and find no beginning of existence. Who of us knows anything except by report of the first two years of earthly life? No one remembers the time when he first said ‘I,’ or thought ‘I.’ We began to exist for others before we began to exist for ourselves. Our experience is not co-extensive with our being, and memory does not comprehend it. We bear not the root, but the root us.

“What is the root? We call it soul. Our soul, we call it; properly speaking, it is not ours, but we are its. It is not a part of us, but we are a part of it. It is not one article in an inventory of articles which together make up our individuality, but the root of that individuality. It is larger than we are, and other than we are—that is, than our conscious self. The conscious self does not begin until some time after the birth of the individual. It is not aboriginal, but a product,—as it were, the blossoming of an individuality. We may suppose countless souls which never bear this product, which never blossom into self. And the soul which does so blossom exists before that blossom unfolds.

“How long before, it is impossible to say; whether the birth, for example, of a human individual is the soul’s beginning to be; whether a new soul is furnished to each new body, or the body given to a preexisting soul. It is a question on which theology throws no light, and which psychology but faintly illustrates. But so far as that faint illustration reaches 121it favors the supposition of preëxistence. That supposition seems best to match the supposed continued existence of the soul hereafter. Whatever had a beginning in time, it should seem must end in time. The eternal destination which faith ascribes to the soul presupposes an eternal origin. On the other hand, if the preëxistence of the soul were assured it would carry the assurance of immortality.

An obvious objection, and one often urged against this hypothesis, is the absence of any recollection of a previous life. If the soul existed before its union with this present organization, why does it never recall any circumstance, scene, or experience of its former state? There have been those who professed to remember a past existence; but without regarding those pretended reminiscences, or regarding them only as illusions, I answer that the previous existence may not have been a conscious existence. In that case there would have been no recorded experience, and consequently nothing to recall. But suppose a conscious existence antecedent to the present, the soul could not preserve the record of a former organization. The new organization with its new entries must necessarily efface the record of the old. For memory depends on the continuity of association. When the thread of that continuity is broken, the knowledge of the past is gone. If, in a state of unconsciousness, one were taken entirely out of his present surroundings; if falling asleep in one set of circumstances, like Christopher Sly in that play, he were to wake in another, were to wake to entirely new conditions; especially if during that sleep his body were to undergo a change,—he would lose on waking all knowledge of the former life for want of a connecting link between it 122and the new. And this, according to the supposition, is precisely what has happened to the soul at birth. The birth into the present was the death of the old,—‘a sleep and a forgetting.’ The soul went to sleep in one body, it woke in a new. The sleep is a gulf of oblivion between the two.

And a happy thing, if the soul preëxisted, it is for us that we remember nothing of its former life. The memory of a past existence would be a drag on the present, engrossing our attention much to the prejudice of this life’s interests and claims. The backward-looking soul would dwell in the past instead of the present, and miss the best uses of life.

But though on the supposition of a former existence the soul would not be likely to preserve the record of that existence, it would nevertheless retain the effect. It would not, on assuming its present conditions, be as though it had never before been. Its past experience would essentially modify it; it would take a character from its former state. If a moral and intellectual being, it would bring into the world of its present destination certain tendencies and dispositions, the growth of a previous life. And thus the moral law and the moral nature of the soul would assert themselves with retributions transcending the limits of a single existence, and reaching on from life to life of the pilgrim soul.

It is commonly conceded that there are native differences of character in men,—different propensities, tempers, not wholly explained by difference of circumstances or education. They show themselves where circumstances and education have been the same; they seem to be innate. These are sometimes ascribed to organization. But organization is not 123final. That, again, requires to be explained. According to my thinking, it is the soul that makes organization, not organization the soul. The supposition of a previous existence would best explain these differences as something carried over from life to life,—the harvest of seed that was sown in other states, and whose fruit remains, although the sowing is remembered no more.

“This was the theory of the most learned and acute of the Christian Fathers (Origen), and though never adopted and sanctioned by the church, has been occasionally revived in later time. Of all the theories respecting the origin of the soul it seems to me the most plausible, and therefore the one most likely to throw light on the question of a life to come.”

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