Part 19 (1/2)
”We have opposed error, and proclaimed truth, and we firmly believe that the dogmas of pre-existence and the plurality of lives are true.”
Thomas Browne, in _Religio Medici_, section 6, hints at Reincarnation:
”Heresies perish not with their authors, but, like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another ... revolution of time will restore it, when it will flourish till it be condemned again. For as though there were a Metempsychosis, and the soul of one man pa.s.sed into another, opinions do find, after certain Revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them.... Each man is not only himself, there hath been many Diogenes and as many Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over again, the world is now as it was in ages past; there was none then but there hath been someone since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.”
Lessing, in _The Divine Education of the Human Race_, vigorously opposes a Lutheran divine who rejects reincarnation:
”The very same way by which the race reaches its perfection must every individual man--one sooner, another later--have travelled over. Have travelled over in one and the same life? Can he have been in one and the self-same life a sensual Jew and a spiritual Christian?
”Surely not that! But why should not every individual man have existed more than once in this world?
”Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest?
Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had disciplined and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once? Why may not even I have already performed those steps of my perfecting which bring to men only temporal punishments and rewards? And once more, why not another time all those steps, to perform which the views of Eternal Rewards so powerfully a.s.sist us? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge, fresh expertness?
Do I bring away so much from once that there is nothing to repay the trouble of coming back?
”Is this a reason against it? Or because I forget that I have been here already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection of my former condition would permit me to make only a bad use of the present. And that which even I must forget _now_, is that necessarily forgotten for ever?”
Schlosser gives expression to similar thoughts in a fine work of his: _uber die Seelenwanderung_.
Lichtemberg says in his _Seibstcharacteristik_:
”I cannot get rid of the thought that I died before I was born, and that by this death I was led to this rebirth. I feel so many things that, were I to write them down, the world would regard me as a madman. Consequently, I prefer to hold my peace.”
Charles Bonnet is the author of a splendid work, full of n.o.ble and lofty thoughts, on this subject. It is ent.i.tled _Philosophic Palingenesis_.
Emmanuel Kant believes that our souls start imperfect from the sun, and travel through planetary stages farther and farther away to a paradise in the coldest and remotest star in our system. (_General History of Nature_.)
In _The Destiny of Man_, J. G. Fichte says:
”These two systems, the purely spiritual and the sensuous--which last may consist of an immeasurable series of particular lives--exist in me from the moment when my active reason is developed and pursue their parallel course....
”All death in nature is birth.... There is no death-bringing principle in nature, for nature is only life throughout.... Even because Nature puts me to death, she must quicken me anew....”
Herder, in his _Dialogues on Metempsychosis_, deals with this subject more fully:
”Do you not know great and rare men who cannot have been what they are in a single human existence; who must have often existed before in order to have attained that purity of feeling, that instinctive impulse for all that is true, beautiful, and good?... Have you never had remembrances of a former state?... Pythagoras, Iarchas, Apollonius, and others remembered distinctly what and how many times they had been in the world before. If we are blind or can see but two steps before our noses, ought we, therefore, to deny that others may see a hundred or a thousand degrees farther, even to the bottom of time ...?”
”He who has not become ripe in one form of humanity is put into the experience again, and, some time or other, must be perfected.”
”I am not ashamed of my half-brothers the brutes; on the contrary, so far as I am concerned, I am a great advocate of metempsychosis. I believe for a certainty that they will ascend to a higher grade of being, and am unable to understand how anyone can object to this hypothesis, which seems to have the a.n.a.logy of the whole creation in its favour.”
Sir Walter Scott had such vivid memories of his past lives that they compelled a belief in pre-existence. Instances of this belief may be found in _The Life of Scott_, by Lockhart (vol. 7, p. 114, first edition).
According to Schlegel:
”Nature is nothing less than the ladder of resurrection, which, step by step, leads upward, or rather is carried from the abyss of eternal death up to the apex of life.” (_aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works_; and, _The Philosophy of History_.)
Sh.e.l.ley held a firm belief in Reincarnation:
”It is not the less certain, notwithstanding the cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence. The doctrine is far more ancient than the times of Plato,” (Dowden's _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_, vol. 1, p. 82.)