Chapter the Fifteenth Proofs of the Plurality of Human Existences, and of Re-Incarnations — Apart From This Doctrine It Is Impossible to Explain the Presence of Man Upon the Earth, the Sad and Unequal Conditions of Human Life, and the Fate of Children Who die in Infancy
T the doctrine of the plurality of existences, and of re-incarnations, which bind together, like so many links of the same chain, all living creatures, from the most minute animal, even to those blessed beings to whom it is given to behold God in His glory; which gives brethren in the different planets to terrestrial humanity; which makes of the inhabitants of our globe a nation of the universe; which sees but one family in all the population of the worlds—a planetary family—whose every member may raise himself by his merits and his struggles, in the hierarchy of happiness, is supported by so many proofs. So many, indeed, that we are puzzled to choose among all the methods of demonstration which offer themselves in aid of it. To enumerate them all would unduly enlarge the dimensions of this work, so that we shall content ourselves with bringing forward the most striking.
Why are we on the earth? We did not ask to be placed there, we did not express a wish to be born. If we had been consulted, we should probably have objected to coming into this world at all, or at least we should have wished to appear there at some other epoch. We should probably have asked to be permitted to sojourn in some other planet than the Earth. Our globe is, indeed, a very disagreeable habitation. In consequence of its inclination on its axis, climate is very unpleasantly distributed. Either we must succumb to cold, if we are not artificially protected against it, or we must be terribly incommoded with heat. Regarded from the moral point of view, the conditions of humanity are very sad. Evil predominates in the world; vice is held almost everywhere in honour, and virtue is so ill-treated, that to be honest is, in this life, to be tolerably certain of evil fortune. Our affections are causes of anguish and tears. If, for a while, we enjoy the happiness of paternity, of love, of friendship, it is only to see the objects of our love torn from us by death, or separated from us by the accidents of a miserable life. The organs given us to be exercised in this life are heavy, coarse, subject to maladies. We are nailed to the earth, and our heavy mass can be moved only by fatiguing exertion. If there are men of powerful organization, gifted with a good constitution and robust health, how many are there who are infirm, idiots, deaf and dumb, blind from their birth, ricketty, and mad! My brother is handsome and well made, and I am ugly, feeble, ricketty, and hump-backed; nevertheless, we are both sons of the same mother. Some are born in opulence, others in the most hideous destitution. Why am I not a prince and a great lord, instead of being a poor toiler of the rebellious and ungrateful earth? Why was I born in Europe and in France, where, by means of art and civilization, life is rendered easy and endurable, instead of being born under the burning skies of the tropics, where, with a bestial snout, a black and oily skin, and woolly hair, I should have been exposed to the double torments of a deadly climate and social barbarism? Why is not one of the unfortunate African negroes in my place, comfortable and well off? We have done nothing, he and I, that our respective places on the earth should have been assigned to us. I have not merited the favour, he has not incurred the disgrace. What is the cause of this unequal division of frightful evils which fall heavily upon certain persons, and spare others? How have they who live in happy countries deserved this partiality of fate, while so many of their brethren are suffering and weeping in other regions of the world?
Certain men are endowed with all the gifts of the intellect; others, on the contrary, are devoid of intelligence, penetration, and memory. They stumble at every step in the difficult journey of life. Their narrow minds, their incomplete faculties, expose them to every kind of failure and misfortune. They cannot succeed in anything, and destiny seems to select them for the chosen victims of its most fatal blows. There are beings whose whole life, from their birth to their death, is a prolonged cry of suffering and despair. What crime have they committed? Why are they upon the earth? They have not asked to be born, and if they had been free, they would have entreated that this bitter cup might be removed from their lips. They are here below in spite of themselves, against their will. This is so true that some, in an excess of despair, sever the thread of their own life. They tear themselves away with their own hands from an existence which terrible suffering has rendered insupportable to them.
God would be unjust and wicked to impose so miserable a life upon beings who have done nothing to incur it, and who have not solicited it. But God is neither unjust nor wicked; the opposite qualities are the attribute of His perfect essence. Consequently, the presence of man on certain portions of the earth, and the unequal distribution of evil over our globe, are not to be explained. If any of my readers can show me a doctrine, a philosophy, a religion by which these difficulties can be resolved, I will tear up this book, and confess myself vanquished.
If, on the contrary, you admit the plurality of human existences and re-incarnations, that is to say the passage of the same soul into several different bodies, everything is wonderfully easily explained. Our presence in certain portions of the globe is no longer the effect of a caprice of fate, or the result of chance; it is simply a station of the long journey which we are taking throughout the worlds. Previous to our birth in this world we have lived either in the condition of superior animals, or that of man. Our actual existence is only the consequence of another, whether it be that we bear within ourselves the soul of a superior animal, which we must purify, perfect, and ennoble, during our sojourn on earth; or that, having already fulfilled an imperfect and evil existence, we are condemned to re-commence it under new obligations. In the latter case, the career of the man re-commences, because his soul is not yet sufficiently pure to rise to the rank of a superhuman being.
Our sojourn upon earth is then only a kind of trial, imposed upon us by nature, during which we must refine our souls, free them from earthly bonds, rid them of the defects which weigh them down, and hinder them from rising, in radiance, towards the ethereal spheres. Every ill-fulfilled human existence has to be recommenced. Thus, the school-boy who has worked hard, who has studied well, goes into a higher class at the end of the year; but if he has made no progress in his studies, he must go through his class again. Perverse men are, in our opinion, vicious beings who have had a previous life, and are obliged to live it over again. They must go through it again and again, until the day comes when their souls shall be fit to take higher rank in the hierarchy of creatures, that is to say, until they shall be fit to pass, after their death, into the condition of superhuman beings.
In proportion as the cause of our existence here below is obscure and even inexplicable according to ordinary ideas, it is simple and luminous in the light of the doctrine of the plurality of existences. We must add that this doctrine is conformable to the justice of God. In making earthly life a trial for man, God is equitable and good, like an earthly father. Is it not better to subject a soul to a trial which may begin over again if it have an unfortunate result, than to bind it to one condition, failure in which must involve the condemnation of the guilty person? It is better to offer the possibility of rehabilitation by his own efforts, by his personal struggles, to a fallen creature, than to utterly crush him, stained by his crimes and imperfections. The justice and the goodness of God are manifest in this paternal arrangement, much more than in the severe jurisdiction which would irretrievably condemn a soul after one single trial had resulted unfavourably.
If human life be a trial, if it be a period during which we are preparing for a new and happier existence, there is no need to look beyond that truth for an explanation of why we are on the earth, why we are living to-day rather than to-morrow, and in one latitude of our globe rather than in another; there is no need to ask why we are born in the earth, and not in Mercury, Saturn, or Mars. Whether we are living now, or are to live later, whether we have been born in the earth, in Mercury, or in Mars, whether we inhabit Europe or Africa,—all these things are utterly unimportant to our destiny. We are undergoing a period of preparation indispensably necessary to be accomplished before we pass into the superhuman condition; and the place, the moment of our transit, the country in which we sojourn, the planet which is assigned to us as the scene of this trial, are without any importance in the part which we have to play in accordance with the intentions of nature. We are making an immense journey through the worlds, and a short sojourn on the Earth makes a part of our vast itinerary. Whatever may be the corner of the universe in which we find ourselves we cannot escape the trial imposed upon us by God, a trial by strife and suffering, a period of moral and physical pain to which we must submit before we can be promoted in the hierarchy of creatures. The time, the place, the good or evil moral conditions ought therefore to be indifferent to us. What is needful for us is a brief sojourn on a planet in which this trial may be accomplished, and it may be accomplished on the Earth, or in Mars, or in Mercury, and on any spot of the Earth’s surface one chooses to think of.
If, during the course of this trial, we meet with moral evil, if we see vice triumphant and virtue persecuted, if we see the innocent victims of the injustice, the cruelty, or the ignorance of man, we have no right to murmur against Providence, we have no right to utter maledictions against pain, to deplore the scandal of successful and triumphant crime, and of suffering and weeping virtue. We have no right to regret our bodily infirmities, the diseases which lay hold upon us on the Earth, and which afflict us all our lives, or to complain of the weakness of our minds, the decay of our faculties. All these conditions, which are inimical to earthly happiness, are a portion of the series of trials which we have to undergo here below. We ought to bless those evils, and be grateful to those sufferings, for they are the instruments of our eternal redemption, and the more piercing and bitter they are the sooner will come the hour of our deliverance, the happy moment when we shall leave this impure and filthy world which our feet have trodden for a while. Besides, justice will speedily be done. With brief delay the wicked shall be punished for his evil deeds by having to recommence a new existence here, while the good shall be elevated to the upper world, where a new, wide-ranging life awaits him, far more happy and more wise, in truer harmony with the aspirations of our nature than his previous and miserable existence here. Then we shall be born again, radiant and strong, with our memory, our feelings, and our liberty complete.
Thus difficulties vanish, and problems are solved: thus uncertainty vanishes away, and mysteries which no doctrine, no religion, no philosophy, could dissipate, and which almost made us doubt the justice of God, are cleared up. The doctrine of re-incarnations and prior existences explains everything, answers everything.
We pass on to one of the most interesting questions of the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, the question of children who have died in infancy. What becomes of children who die at a few days old, or at the age of eight or ten months, or at their birth? Until after all these periods the human soul remains quite undeveloped; it is in almost the same rudimentary state as at the hour of its birth. What, then, is the fate of young children after their death? The doctrine of the plurality of existences simplifies this question. It admits that when an infant dies before it has lived one year (the period of dentition), its soul remains upon the earth, and does not pass, like that of a grown man, into the state of a superhuman being. The soul of an infant a year old is still in a rudimentary condition, almost as much so as at the moment of its birth. The soul of a child who dies at that age has to begin life over again, disengaging itself from the little corpse, it incarnates itself in another newly-born body, and after this fresh incarnation, it begins a second life.
If the new incarnation does not last more than a year, there is no reason why the soul should not undergo a third incarnation in the body of a child, and so on until it shall have accomplished the period of admission to the conditions common to all.
It is impossible that the soul of a child, which is as yet undeveloped, which has added nothing to that which it has received, should be treated as perfected souls, purified by the experience of life, by physical and moral sufferings, who have used their sojourn upon earth as a period of preparation and training. An infant child cannot therefore be admitted to the super-terrestrial dwellings, he simply recommences an interrupted trial. The mortality of children between the day of their birth and the age of one year is so considerable, that nature must have reserved to herself the means of annulling this cause of disarrangement in the sequence and order of her operations.
This explanation of the destiny of young children is conformable to the economy which is observed in the operations of nature. Nature wills that nothing which is created should be lost. The soul of a criminal is evil, but it is a soul, it exists, and it is eternal: it must not be lost. But it must be corrected and perfected, which is done by means of the new existences to which nature consigns that imperfect soul, in order that it may enjoy the means of restoration. Thus the principle of the soul is preserved, and nothing is lost of that which was created. The soul of the child dying in infancy must not be lost either. A second incarnation in another child will permit it to resume the course of its evolution, accidentally interrupted by death. Thus the soul will be preserved, and nothing will be lost.
Chemistry, since Lavoisier’s time, has brought to light a great truth: it is, that nothing of the elements of matter is lost; bodies change their form, but the material element, the simple body, is imperishable, indestructible, and always to be found intact, notwithstanding its numerous transformations. If it is true that in the material world nothing is lost, it is equally certain that neither is anything lost in the spiritual world; that only transformation takes place. Thus, nothing is lost, either of immaterial or material beings, and we may lay down this new principle of moral philosophy by the side of the principle of chemical philosophy established by the genius of Lavoisier.