Note 14 — III. OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION.

Leibnitz first directed attention to these singular phenomena. Sir William Hamilton has collected a number of instances of such wonderful revival of memory. Carpenter’s Mental Physiology, pp. 430 et seq., and Brodie’s Psychological Inquiries, Second Series, p. 55, mention several cases. Coleridge cited from the German a remarkable illustration, and commented upon it in his Biographia Literaria, chapter vi.:—

“This fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make it even probable that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and that, if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned organization, the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial, to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this—this, perchance, is the dread Book of Judgment, in whose mysterious hieroglyphics every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes to all whose links, conscious or unconscious, the free will, our only absolute Self, is co-extensive and co-present.”