Part 7 (1/2)
It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated, based on a.n.a.logies not parallel. So far as it a.s.sumes to rest on revelation it will be examined in another place.
Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as a reply to the inquiry, What is to become of the soul? a dogma is next encountered which we shall style that of a local and irrevocable conveyance. The disembodied spirit is conveyed to some fixed region,7 a penal or a blissful abode, where it is to tarry unalterably. This idea of the banishment or admission of souls, according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace, into an anch.o.r.ed location called h.e.l.l or heaven, a retributive or rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pa.s.s by with few words, because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In the first place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn from occurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the fortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. The figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and repulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends the noiseless continuity of G.o.d's self executing laws. It is a jarring mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual destinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that the planets are swung around the sun by material chains compares with the law of gravitation.
Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedom in separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by the fatal working of their interior forces of character, and their relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting habitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, as dissipated visions, from their a.s.sumed lat.i.tudes and longitudes, one after another, by progressive discovery, until now the intelligent mind knows of no a.s.signable spot for them. Since we are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the supposition of such places and of the transferrence of the departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the a.s.sociated belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not that different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to two immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pa.s.s into one immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriate attractions, to a.s.similate a strictly discriminative experience.
But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion.
The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the theory of recurrence.8 When man dies, his surviving spirit is immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, a.s.signed in a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied, ”I was born murdered;” that is, the soul of a man who had been shot
7 Lange, Das Land der Herrlichkelt.
8 Schmidius, Diss. de Multiplici Animarum Reditu in Corpora.
pa.s.sed into his body at the moment of his birth.9 The young mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was s.n.a.t.c.hed out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of connecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule, in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those pa.s.ses which the conductors of railroad trains give their pa.s.sengers, ”good for this trip only.” The notion of an endless succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world, commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some minds a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pa.s.s on their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment ”to fresh fields and pastures new,” in unknown immensity, to a renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and experiences drained before.
Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to his idea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being, comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Their connection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune, from cripplehood and beggary to paragons.h.i.+p and the throne. The invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the other life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the Great Soul, which is as unhappy as seven eighths of the incarnated souls; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human souls taken collectively. Coming into this outward scene at birth, we lose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in the Great Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous lives both in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternating pa.s.sages between the two states will continue until the final swooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search of a better abode.10
The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means of meeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tucker in his ”Light of Nature Pursued.” ”The numbers of souls daily pouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require a proportionable drain from it somewhere or other; for else the country might be overstocked.” The objection urged against such a belief from the fact that we do not remember having lived before is reb.u.t.ted by the a.s.sertion that
”Some draught of Lethe doth await, As old mythologies relate, The slipping through from state to state.”
The theory a.s.sociated with this Lethean draught is confirmed by its responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences, vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seems as if occasionally the poppied drug or other oblivious antidote
9 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. ii. ch. 12.
10 Fourier, Pa.s.sions of the Human Soul, (Morell's translation,) Introduction, vol. i. pp. 14-18; also pp. 233-236.
administered by nature had been so much diluted that reason, only half baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges of a foregone state;
”And ever something is or seems That touches us with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.”
In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream, which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought, this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought to light, it has much to interest and to please; but it is too dest.i.tute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained against a.s.sault.11
There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated, perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, by successive deaths and births, traverses the universe, an everlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worlds of s.p.a.ce, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each.12 All reality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreating G.o.dhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these to men. Blind but yearning matter aspires to spirit, intelligent spirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army of future generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towards his conscious estate, ”the trees being imperfect men, that seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground,” so man himself shall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star.
The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whose development begins with those substances with the production of which the life of an ordinary vegetable ends.13 The fact, too, that embryonic man pa.s.ses through ascending stages undistinguishable from those of lower creatures, is full of meaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the long history of slowly rising existence? What unplummeted abysses of time and distance intervene from the primary rock to the Victoria Regia! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterless mind of a Sch.e.l.ling! But, snail pace by snail pace, those immeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so every thing that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reach the transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theological prejudice to this developing succession of ascents that it is degrading is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallen to our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And in one respect it is better for man to be an advanced oyster than a degraded G.o.d; for in the former case the path is upwards, in the latter it is downwards. ”We wake,” observes a profound thinker, ”and find ourselves on a stair: there are other stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.” Such was plainly the trust of the author of the following exhortation:
”Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnation of thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be more pure and high.”
11 Bertram, Prufung der Meinung von der Praexistenz der menechlichen Seele.
12 Nurnberger, Still Leben, oder uber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele.
13 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, ch. ix.
Bulwer likewise has said, ”Eternity may be but an endless series of those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home after home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after age, the spirit that glorious nomad may s.h.i.+ft its tent, fated not to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it evermore its twin elements, activity and desire.”
But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And, besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other, and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower together by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood, once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow far below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell from above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one.
Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest human desire,