WHAT ARE THE BASES OF AN INTELLIGENT BELIEF IN REINCARNATION? by F. S. Darrow, A. M., Ph. D. (Harv.)
Reading edition
REFLECTION inevitably reveals the limitations of the actual, the confines of the present. So narrow is the sphere within which our daily life revolves that even the man who most prides himself on his avoidance of philosophy is forced, perhaps unconsciously, to construct a theory of metaphysics. How is it possible to do our daily duties without forming a working hypothesis as to the nature of the world within which those duties lie? Inarticulate and crude as the theory may be, each and every man is forced to adopt a life-hypothesis and by it, as best he can, to mold his actions. No specious reasoning can free us from speculation. Therefore it is a solemn duty which we owe to ourselves to choose intelligently our hypothesis as to life and its meaning. This duty can be trusted neither to chance nor to tradition. To shirk a moral responsibility incurs grave consequences.
It is necessary that our life-hypothesis shall fulfil two conditions: it must be thinkable and it must be livable. Life leads to thought about life; but our judgment must concern itself with life. Therefore what we believe must be both logical and practical. Logical because fact makes the appeal to logic, and practical because logic must answer fact. Our life-hypothesis, since its subject-matter is the Self and the World in which the Self lives, must be both universal and particular.
In answering the query, What are the bases of an intelligent belief in Reincarnation? we are primarily concerned with the Self. Without considering the nature of the Self in detail, let me postulate that by the Self I mean the Real You and the Real I, the Individual Life, which expresses itself through your physical nature and through mine, the Individuality at the basis of the Personality, the Character underlying the physical man.
The conception of reincarnation or rebirth of soul, I grant, is speculative, since it ranges far beyond the cramped present. So, if it is to become part of our life-hypothesis it must be both logical and practically imperative. If logic and practical requirements combine in their demands, then we must conclude that reincarnation has been demonstrated to be true in so far as any hypothesis can be. The most probable is and must be accepted actually as the true.
Many circumstances suggest that the Self existed previously to its birth in the present body. Poetry voices the thought as follows:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.
Children frequently instinctively believe that they have lived before. The poets do not monopolize those tantalizingly vague sensations of familiarity, which sometimes accompany strange and apparently novel experiences.
Sometimes a breath floats by me, An odor from Dreamland sent, Which makes the ghost seem nigh me Of a something that came and went Of a life lived somewhere, I know not In what diviner sphere: Of mem'ries that come not and go not: Like music once heard by an ear That cannot forget or reclaim it— A something so shy, it would shame it To make it a show: A something too vague, could I name it For others to know: As though I had lived it and dreamed it, As though I had acted and schemed it Long ago.
Whittier voices the impression of many when he says:
A presence strange at once and known Walked with me as my guide: The skirts of some forgotten life Trailed noiseless at my side.
So, too, the recurrence of the seasons, the ebb and flow and re-ebb of the tides, the cycles of day and night, the phenomenon of genius, and countless other things, suggest that the old is continually reborn. Yet classing all these together they amount merely to presumptive evidence, hints at possibilities, but not proof.
We are born with a sense of Justice, a sense which extends at least as far as our private rights. Further, justice is so valued that we regard Deity as perfectly just. The kernel of justice is: "As a man sows so shall he reap." The effect must be equal to the cause. To talk of the justice of a god who creates Souls is to babble nonsense. Personal responsibility is an indispensable requirement for the maintenance of justice, and personal responsibility can exist only if souls are the creators of their own destinies. Otherwise "Justice" is a mockery and a delusion. Therefore, if we are to believe that the Universe is ruled justly, eternal pre-existence of soul must be a fact.
The books say well, my brothers, each man's life The outcome of his former living is: The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes, The bygone right breeds bliss. So is a man's fate born.
Ex nihilo nihil fit—from nothing nothing is made. Nineteenth century science has succeeded in proving what the world's thinkers have long believed. Matter and energy are indestructible. "Creation" in the sense of manufacture out of nothing is unthinkable. If the soul is one with the Universal Energy, "it is not a thing of which a man may say, 'It hath been, it is about to be, or is to be hereafter,' for it is without birth and meeteth not death." "Nature is nothing less than the ladder of resurrection, which step by step leads upward." The eternal Soul, now linked to a mortal body, has lived before and will live hereafter.
The last and most important of the logical imperatives demanding a belief in reincarnation is the thesis: Immortality of soul demands complete eternity of soul. That which has a beginning, of necessity has an end. The child is born, grows into youth and manhood, lives its life, but it dies. Death's fingers clutch at birth. That which is born is mortal. Thus the soul must be birthless if it is to be deathless. It must have lived before its present body and it will outlive any body which it may hereafter enliven. Reincarnation is merely the natural corollary to eternity.
Let us now turn to the practical considerations reinforcing our belief. Even when discouraged we feel that life has a purpose and a meaning. This is, to keep adding to experience and to knowledge. The amount actually experienced and learned within the limits of a single life is so small in comparison with the possibilities of experience and knowledge that it can only serve as an introduction into deeper mysteries. The scholar does not graduate until he has fulfilled the requirements of a definite standard. The knowledge and experience of one life is surely too low a standard to admit of graduation from earth. Our globe is a school and the souls are the scholars. What is once gained is never lost. "Be ye perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." Think of the hope! An infinite future with the possibility of an infinite progress in knowledge and attainment!
Ambition, zeal, and love, demand an infinity to express themselves. Love of work, love of learning, love of loved ones, presuppose by their existence the complete eternity of the Soul. So, too, all our impulses which tend toward expansion and increase, all those which break loose from the present into the expanse of the future, require that the soul be immortal and consequently eternal.
Notice, aside from logic, what a belief in rebirth and in the eternity of the Soul, means. It gives hope in the perfectibility of man, inspiration in his divinity, and comfort in the trials of life, trials that are just and capable of teaching greater knowledge. There is no inspiration which in the future cannot be attained by honest effort. These are a few of the blessings which the philosophy of Theosophy has to offer to you and to me, a philosophy of soul-evolution that is an ever-present help in trouble, one that is both logical and practical, a "religious science, and a scientific religion." Search within yourself and listen to the message of Theosophy: Truth
takes no rise From outward things, whate'er you may believe; There is an inmost center in us all, Where truth abides in fulness.