Part 1 (2/2)
Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'd from the foam of ages: while the graves Of empires heave but like some pa.s.sing waves.”
Widely regarding the history of human life from the beginning, what a visionary spectacle it is! How miraculously permanent in the whole! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What pathetic sentiments it awakens! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs! The subject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously discussed by hundreds of philosophers, physicians, and poets, from Vyasa to Des Cartes, from Galen to Ennemoser, from Orpheus to Henry More, from Aristotle to Frohschammer. German literature during the last hundred years has teemed with works treating of this question from various points of view. The present chapter will present a sketch of these various speculations concerning the commencement and fortunes of man ere his appearance on the stage of this world.
The first theory to account for the origin of souls is that of emanation. This is the a.n.a.logical theory, constructed from the results of sensible observation. There is, it says, one infinite Being, and all finite spirits are portions of his substance, existing a while as separate individuals, and then rea.s.similated into the general soul. This form of faith, a.s.serting the efflux of all subordinate existence out of one Supreme Being, seems sometimes to rest on an intuitive idea. It is spontaneously suggested whenever man confronts the phenomena of creation with reflective observation, and ponders the eternal round of birth and death. Accordingly, we find traces of this belief all over the world; from the ancient Hindu metaphysics whose fundamental postulate is that the necessary life of G.o.d is one constant process of radiation and resorption, ”letting out and drawing in,”
to that modern English poetry which apostrophizes the glad and winsome child as
”A silver stream Breaking with laughter from the lake Divine Whence all things flow.”
The conception that souls are emanations from G.o.d is the most obvious way of accounting for the prominent facts that salute our inquiries. It plausibly answers some natural questions, and boldly eludes others. For instance, to the early student demanding the cause of the mysterious distinctions between mind and body, it says, the one belongs to the system of pa.s.sive matter, the other comes from the living Fas.h.i.+oner of the Universe. Again: this theory relieves us from the burden that perplexes the finite mind when it seeks to understand how the course of nature, the succession of lives, can be absolutely eternal without involving an alternating or circular movement. The doctrine of emanation has, moreover, been supported by the supposed a.n.a.lytic similarity of the soul to G.o.d. Its freedom, consciousness, intelligence, love, correspond with what we regard as the attributes and essence of Deity. The inference, however unsound, is immediate, that souls are consubstantial with G.o.d, dissevered fragments of Him, sent into bodies. But, in actual effect, the chief recommendation of this view has probably been the variety of a.n.a.logies and images under which it admits of presentation. The annual developments of vegetable life from the bosom of the earth, drops taken from a fountain and retaining its properties in their removal, the separation of the air into distinct breaths, the soil into individual atoms, the utterance of a tone gradually dying away in reverberated echoes, the radiation of beams from a central light, the exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, the evolution of numbers out of an original unity, these are among the ill.u.s.trations by which an exhaustless ingenuity has supported the notion of the emanation of souls from G.o.d. That ”something cannot come out of nothing” is an axiom resting on the ground of our rational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehension held in the chain of causes and effects, one thing always evolving from another, we leap to the conclusion that it is precisely the same with things beyond our comprehension, and that G.o.d is the aboriginal reservoir of being from which all the rills of finite existence are emitted.
Against this doctrine the current objections are these two. First, the a.n.a.logies adduced are not applicable. The things of spirit and those of matter have two distinct sets of predicates and categories. It is, for example, wholly illogical to argue that because the circuit of the waters is from the sea, through the clouds, over the land, back to the sea again, therefore the derivation and course of souls from G.o.d, through life, back to G.o.d, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with the soul that baffle the most lynx eyed investigation, and on which no known facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, the scheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the infancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some necessary truths. It implies that G.o.d is separable into parts, and therefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is incompatible with the first predicates of Deity, namely, immateriality and infinity. Before the conception of the illimitable, spiritual unity of G.o.d, the doctrine of the emanation of souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a dreaming mind brooding over the suggestions of phenomena and apparent correspondences.
The second explanation of the origin of souls is that which says they come from a previous existence. This is the theory of imagination, framed in the free and seductive realm of poetic thought. It is evident that this idea does not propose any solution of the absolute origination of the soul, but only offers to account for its appearance on earth. The pre existence of souls has been most widely affirmed. Nearly the whole world of Oriental thinkers have always taught it. Many of the Greek philosophers held it. No small proportion of the early Church Fathers believed it.1 And it is not without able advocates among the scholars and thinkers
1 Keil, Opuscula; Be Pre existentia Animarum. Beausobre, Hist. du Manicheisme, lib. vii. cap. iv.
of our own age. There are two princ.i.p.al forms of this doctrine; one a.s.serting an ascent of souls from a previous existence below the rank of man, the other a descent of souls from a higher sphere. Generation is the true Jacob's ladder, on which souls are ever ascending or descending. The former statement is virtually that of the modern theory of development, which argues that the souls known to us, obtaining their first organic being out of the ground life of nature, have climbed up through a graduated series of births, from the merest elementary existence, to the plane of human nature. A gifted author, Dr. Hedge, has said concerning pre existence in these two methods of conceiving it, writing in a half humorous, half serious, vein, ”It is to be considered as expressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If here and there some pure liver, or n.o.ble doer, or prophet voice, suggests the idea of a revenant who, moved with pity for human kind, and charged with celestial ministries, has condescended to
'Soil his pure ambrosial weeds With the rank vapors of this sin worn mould,'
or if, on the other hand, the 'superfluity of naughtiness'
displayed by some abnormal felon seems to warrant the supposition of a visit from the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, we submit, are much too green for any plausible a.s.sumption of a foregone training in good or evil. This planet is not their missionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but their native soil.
Or, if we suppose they pre existed at all, we must rather believe they pre existed as brutes, and have travelled into humanity by the fish fowl quadruped road with a good deal of the habitudes and dust of that tramp still sticking to them.” The theory of development, deriving human souls by an ascension from the lower stages of rudimentary being, considered as a fanciful hypothesis or speculative toy, is interesting, and not dest.i.tute of plausible aspects. But, when investigated as a severe thesis, it is found devoid of proof. It is enough here to say that the most authoritative voices in science reject it, declaring that, though there is a development of progress in the plan of nature, from the more general to the more specific, yet there is no advance from one type or race to another, no hint that the same individual ever crosses the guarded boundaries of genus from one rank and kingdom to another. Whatever progress there may be in the upward process of natural creation or the stages of life, yet to suppose that the life powers of insects and brutes survive the dissolution of their bodies, and, in successive crossings of the death gulf, ascend to humanity, is a bare a.s.sumption. It befits the delirious lips of Beddoes, who says,
”Had I been born a four legg'd child, methinks I might have found the steps from dog to man And crept into his nature. Are there not Those that fall down out of humanity Into the story where the four legg'd dwell?”
The doctrine that souls have descended from an anterior life on high may be exhibited in three forms, each animated by a different motive. The first is the view of some of the Manichean teachers, that spirits were embodied by a hostile violence and cunning, the force and fraud of the apostatized Devil. Adam and Eve were angels sent to observe the doings of Lucifer, the rebel king of matter.
He seized these heavenly spies and encased them in fleshly prisons. And then, in order to preserve a permanent union of these celestial natures with matter, he contrived that their race should be propagated by the s.e.xes. Whenever by the procreative act the germ body is prepared, a fiend hies from bale, or an angel stoops from bliss, or a demon darts from his hovering in the air, to inhabit and rule his growing clay house for a term of earthly life. The spasm of impregnation thrills in fatal summons to h.e.l.l or heaven, and resistlessly drags a spirit into the appointed receptacle. Shakspeare, whose genius seems to have touched every shape of thought with adorning phrase, makes Juliet, distracted with the momentary fancy that Romeo is a murderous villain, cry,
”O Nature! what hadst thou to do in h.e.l.l When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?”
The second method of explaining the descent of souls into this life is by the supposition that the stable bliss, the uncontrasted peace and sameness, of the heavenly experience, at last wearies the people of Paradise, until they seek relief in a fall. The perfect sweetness of heaven cloys, the utter routine and safety tire, the salient spirits, till they long for the edge and hazard of earthly exposure, and wander down to dwell in fleshly bodies and breast the tempest of sin, strife, and sorrow, so as to give a fresh charm once more to the repose and exempted joys of the celestial realm. In this way, by a series of recurring lives below and above, novelty and change with larger experience and more vivid contentment are secured, the tedium and satiety of fixed happiness and protection are modified by the relis.h.i.+ng opposition of varied trials of hards.h.i.+p and pain, the insufferable monotony of immortality broken up and interpolated by epochs of surprise and tingling dangers of probation.
”Mortals, behold! the very angels quit Their mansions unsusceptible of change, Amid your dangerous bowers to sit And through your sharp vicissitudes to range!”
Thus round and round we run through an eternity of lives and deaths. Surfeited with the unqualified pleasures of heaven, we ”straggle down to this terrene nativity:” When, amid the sour exposures and cruel storms of the world, we have renewed our appet.i.te for the divine ambrosia of peace and sweetness, we forsake the body and ascend to heaven; this constant recurrence ill.u.s.trating the great truths, that alternation is the law of destiny, and that variety is the spice of life.
But the most common derivation of the present from a previous life is that which explains the descent as a punishment for sin. In that earlier and loftier state, souls abused their freedom, and were doomed to expiate their offences by a banished, imprisoned, and burdensome life on the earth. ”The soul,” Plutarch writes, ”has removed, not from Athens to Sardis, or from Corinth to Lemnos, but from heaven to earth; and here, ill at ease, and troubled in this new and strange place, she hangs her head like a decaying plant.”
Hundreds of pa.s.sages to the same purport might easily be cited from as many ancient writers. Sometimes this fall of souls from their original estate was represented as a simultaneous event: a part of the heavenly army, under an apostate leader, having rebelled, were defeated, and sentenced to a chained bodily life.
Our whole race were transported at once from their native sh.o.r.es in the sky to the convict land of this world. Sometimes the descent was attributed to the fresh fault of each individual, and was thought to be constantly happening. A soul tainted with impure desire, drawn downwards by corrupt material gravitation, hovering over the fumes of matter, inhaling the effluvia of vice, grew infected with carnal longings and contagions, became fouled and clogged with gross vapors and steams, and finally fell into a body and pursued the life fitted to it below. A clear human child is a s.h.i.+ning seraph from heaven sunk thus low. Men are degraded cherubim.
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