chapter v.), as to call this lowest phase of the philosophy the real

belief of those who shaped it.

And yet there is a sense in which the most intelligent orientals adhere to this, and in which western science endorses it,—namely in the axiomatic truth that human atoms and emanations traverse the entire round of lower natures. When the Laws of Manu speak of the transmigration of men through all animal stages, these eastern authorities say that they mean not souls, but men’s physical selves. When the Laws assert that “a Brahman killer enters the body of a dog, bear, ass, etc.,” they do not mean that the murderer of a priest becomes a dog, bear, ass, etc. The inner meaning of the Law is that he who kills and extinguishes the Brahman or divine nature, condemns his soul to lower human circumstances, and the downward affinity of his passions carries every particle of his body by magnetic relations into more degraded ranks of existence. The Brahmans have distorted the inward purpose of this Law in their own interest by insisting upon its outward meaning. So the various accounts of the descent of human into animal or vegetative nature, whether given by Hindu, Pythagorean, Platonist, Egyptian, Norse, or Barbarian, are actual facts as far as the migration of the composing atoms and emanations of the outer individual are concerned. For these atoms obey the directing impulses of degrading passion or ascending principle. The imponderable force of these atomic changes is proven by the psychometric evidence of sensitives, who perceive the various unexpressed moods of a person by the kinds of lambent particles flowing from him, and trace the permanent course of these particles after they have lodged on objects widely separated from him. The tell-tale characteristics of these scattered atoms remain a long while as stamped by their source, and guide them to what is most congenial. This scientific fact, confirmed by many experiments,[52] but generally ignored, shaped the old atomic hypotheses in which Pythagoras, Epicurus, Zeno, and all the old philosophers down to Plato found delight, and Plato himself simply spiritualized it into a more enduring form.

The attitude of the dominant disciples of reincarnation upon this point may be gathered from the following statement of a Brahman to the writer: “The whole question of re-births rests upon the right understanding of what it is that is born again. Obviously not the body, nor is it the ego, which is the same whether in a man or in a worm. The ego is colorless of all attributes of which we have any knowledge in practice. The only thing that can be said to be re-born is the character of a being, through spiritual blindness confounded with the ego, in the same way as light is commonly confounded with the objects illuminated and said to be red, blue, or any other color. The essential characteristic of humanity cannot possibly exist in an animal form, for otherwise it cannot be essential to humanity. Whenever in a human being the ego is identified in the above manner with what is essentially human, birth in an animal form is as certain as any relative truth can be not to take place.”

“Atoms enter into organic combinations according to their affinities, and when released from one individual system they retain a tendency to be attracted by other systems, not necessarily human, with similar characteristics. The assimilation of atoms by organisms takes place in accordance with the law of affinities. It may be hastily contended that the relation between the mental characteristics of an individual and the atoms of his body ceases when the atoms no longer constitute the body. But the fact that certain atoms are drawn into a man’s body shows that there was some affinity between the atoms and the body before they were so drawn together. Consequently there is no reason to suppose that the affinity ceases at parting. And it is well known that psychometers can detect the antecedent life history of any substance by being brought into contact with it. It must be insisted that the true human ego in no sense migrates from a human body to an animal body, although those principles which lie below the plane of self-consciousness may do so. And in this sense alone is transmigration accepted by Esoteric Science.”

XIII. WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

When we die, we shall find that we have not lost our dreams; but that we have only lost our sleep.—RICHTER.

Life is a kind of sleep. Old men sleep longest. They never begin to wake but when they are to die.—DE LA BRUYERE.

There is no death: what seems so is transition. This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, Whose portal we call Death. LONGFELLOW.

We can hardly do otherwise than assume that the future being must be so involved in our present constitution as to be therein discernible.

ISAAC TAYLOR.

When I leave this rabble rout and defilement of the world, I leave it as an inn, and not as a place of abode. For nature has given us our bodies as an inn, and not to dwell in.—CATO.

He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting.

ST. PAUL.

But all lost things are in the angels’ keeping, Love. No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love. The years of heaven will all earth’s little pain make good. Together there we can begin again in babyhood. HELEN HUNT.

Death is another life. We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight Another chamber of the king’s, Larger than this we leave and lovelier. BAILEY.

The deep conviction of the indestructibleness of our nature through death, which everyone carries at the bottom of his heart, depends altogether upon the consciousness of the original and eternal nature of our being.—SCHOPENHAUER.

XIII. WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

The latest developments of science agree with the occultists and poets that there is no death, and that nothing is dead. What seems to be extinction is only a change of existence. What appears to have no vitality has only a lower order of the life principle. Everything is pulsing with energy, stones and dirt as well as animals and trees. The same force which animates the human body, the beasts, birds, and reptiles in their brief periods, also vitalizes the oaks and vines in a smaller degree with longer lives, and individualizes the mineral world into crystals on a still lower plane but with lifetimes reckoned by thousands of years. And below crystal-life, in the constituent atoms of shapeless matter, is a tremendous thrill of undiminished activity. Life, the occultists say, is the eternal uncreated energy. The physicists grasp at the same thing in their Law of Continuity, and modern science concedes that “energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective reality as matter itself.”[53] This life is the one essential energy acting under protean forms. It always inheres in every particle of matter, and makes no distinction between organic and inorganic, except one of grade, the former containing life-energy actively and the latter in dormant form. Because the scientist is unable to awaken into activity the latent life of inorganic matter, he insists, by the law of biogenesis, that life can only come from life. But that only marks the limit of his knowledge. The world’s development has bridged all the gaps now yawning between the different kingdoms of nature, though nothing remains now to show how it was done, and science has to confess its ignorance. There is nothing to contradict and much to enforce the occult axiom that the same life animates man, plant, and rock simply in different states of the one indestructible force,—the Universal Soul,—making all nature what Goethe terms “the living visible garment of God.”

It is impossible for a person to cease to exist. When the tenant of the body moves out, the forces binding together the dwelling scatter to the nearest uses awaiting them. The positivists would have it that the individual soul also dissolves into an impersonal fund of being—a sort of immediate chilling Nirvana, out-freezing any eastern conception of remotest destiny. This melancholy result of western materialism is boldly confronted by reincarnation with a proven hypothesis, which illuminates the mystery of death and the future, and shows the unimpeachable reality of immortality. Reincarnation demonstrates that the personal ego, which permanently maintains its identity amid the constant changes of the bodily casement and the mental consciousness, must continue its individuality. In addition to the evidences already adduced for the genuineness of this truth, there stands the honest reliable testimony of spiritualism (a small core of veritable fact around which is gathered an enormous concretion of deceptions, mischievously intentional or pathetically unconscious), and the actual experience of some orientals whose intense devotion to pure invisible realities has pushed them into the perception of ultra-mortal things.

It is the strong attachment to physical existence which makes death the king of terrors. Those who have learned the lesson of life find him the blessed angel who ushers them through the golden gates. There shall at length come to every ascending soul the experience of those whose departure from this life cannot be called death, as Jesus, Elijah, or Enoch, who “walked with God and he was not, for God took him.” They became so buoyed with spiritual forces that a slight touch shifted the equipoise and translated them into the invisible. The clarified spirit greets death with a welcome, and sings his praise as did Paul Hamilton Hayne in his dying song:—

Sad mortal! couldst thou but know What truly it means to die, The wings of thy soul would glow, And the hopes of thy heart beat high; Thou wouldst turn from the Pyrrhonist schools, And laugh their jargon to scorn, As the babbling of midnight fools Ere the morning of Truth be born: But I, earth’s madness above, In a kingdom of stormless breath,— I gaze on the glory of love In the unveiled face of Death.

I tell thee his face is fair As the moon-bow’s amber rings, And the gleam in his unbound hair Like the flash of a thousand springs; His smile is the fathomless beam Of the star-shine’s sacred light, When the summers of Southland dream In the lap of the holy Night: For I, earth’s blindness above, In a kingdom of halcyon breath,— I gaze on the marvel of love In the unveiled face of Death.

When death severs the soul from its mortal shell, the ruling tendencies of the soul carry it to its strongest affinities. If these still dwell on earth, the soul hovers affectionately among the old scenes and insensibly mingles with its heart-friends, ministering and being ministered to, with no essential difference from the former condition.[54] Many veritable experiences, apart from all possibility of delusion, confirm this, although the darkness of matter blinds most of us to the psychic life. At length, as shifting time unties the bonds of earth, the soul moves on with its strongest allies to the realms of its choice. There the soul lives out an era of its true life, an expression of its deepest nature, as much more full and more real than the late physical life, as the waking state exceeds the dreaming. For the escape from material confinement allows the freest activity, in which the dominant desires, unconsciously nourished in the spirit, have the mastery. This liberty rouses the spirit from the earthly lethargy into its permanent individuality. The startling bound of the spirit into its own sphere must transfer the self-consciousness from its terrestrial form to a far higher vividness; but, as the wakefulness of day includes the somnambulence of night and knows itself superior to that dumb life, so the burst of unconstrained spiritual existence does not annul, but transcends the material phase.

The condition of the period intervening between death and birth, like all other epochs, is framed by the individual. The inner character makes a Paradise, a Purgatory, or an Inferno of any place. As Jesus said he was in heaven while talking with his followers, as Dante found all the material for hell in what his eyes witnessed, so in the environments beyond death, where the subjective states of the soul are supreme, the appearance of the universe and the feelings of self are created, well or ill, by the central individual. There must be as many heavens and hells as there are good and bad beings. All the attempts to describe the future are inadequate and erroneous, and must necessarily be so. Plato, in the last book of the Republic, quotes the narrative of the Pamphylian Er, who had been killed in battle but came to life again on his funeral pyre, and declared that he was returned to earth to disclose the nature of the coming life. He found things about as Plato’s allegory pictures them: the good and the wicked who had just died being assigned their places in heaven or under the earth. A number of souls whose thousand years of one or the other experience had expired were made to cast lots for a choice out of a large number of human and animal lives, and to drink of the River of Indifference, and to traverse the Plain of Forgetfulness before entering the world again. As with all the visions of after death, this simply reflected the opinions of the Platonic thinker. St. John’s Revelation paints the scene by colors obtained from his Jewish training, on the canvas of his Patmos imprisonment. Bunyan’s description shows a simple imagination saturated with the Apocalypse. Protestant visionaries always discover a Protestant heaven and hell. Catholic ecstatics always add purgatory. Swedenborg found the gardens of heaven laid out in the Dutch fashion of his time. English clairvoyants and mediums are properly orthodox and evangelical. American spirits talk broad theology with ridiculous details. The divergence in all these alleged liftings of the veil betrays their subjectiveness.

It is impossible in the nature of things that one should permanently leave the physical condition until the business of that existence is accomplished in transferring the affections from material to spiritual things. While the ruling attraction to a soul remains in this world, all the forces of the universe conspire to continue the association of the two in repeated lives. On the other hand, a person dominated by spiritual proclivities finds infinite magnetisms drawing him away from temporal surroundings to the inscrutable glories of the eternal. In Swedenborg’s phrase, “a man’s loves make his home.” The residual impulses coming from the momentums of past lives determine what and when shall be the next embodiment. The time and manner of reincarnation vary with each individual according to the impetus engendered by his lives. Between these lives the spiritual effect of the earth life is absorbed from the personal soul manifested on earth into the immortal and unmanifested ego. This process may require days, years, centuries, or millenniums, depending upon the intensity of the mundane aspirations which draw the spirit to earth and hinder its liberation into pure spiritual life. But as in dreams a whole life’s history is sometimes condensed into a few seconds, time has no existence to the disembodied spirit. Whether the interval be long or short, the entire spiritual effect of the last life must be assimilated and shaped into a form that will spring up in coming lives. The instances of alternate consciousness indicate that some such marked difference from the previous incarnation appears in each earthly life, losing all remembrance of the previous chapter, and working out the tendencies which embodied that particular life in a career that will achieve redemption or condemnation.

At the first thought reincarnation carries the unwelcome inference that death and re-births separate us from the dearest present ties and introduce us as strangers into new phases of activity where everything—friends, knowledge, and occupations—must be found afresh. This is a mistake. The unnoticed habits of thought and action derived from the alliance of cherished comrades strengthen into ungovernable steeds whose course directs the soul on every journey toward those favorite companions. Among the thousands of acquaintances made in a lifetime, the rare friends whose intimacy strikes down into the inmost depths of the soul must continue as irresistible attractions in the next life. Orpheus could not fail to discover Eurydice in the spirit realm. In this earthly existence, which is the Heaven, or Purgatory, or Hell of the last one, we go straying among unfamiliar forms, frequently mistaking them for true friends, until suddenly we meet a soul with which there comes so intense and permanent an affection that every other person is forgotten. Such a fusion of spirits must hail from the shores of long distant loves, and its new unrecognized mastery develops a mightier union than would be possible in one uninterrupted flow. The poets like to symbolize this as the blending of two hemispheres long since separated into their original perfect whole. The most probable explanation of such intimacies rests in the idea that they are repetitions of previous attachments. A sense of ancient familiarity grows upon these closest ties, notwithstanding the absence of memory’s confirmation. The powerful attractions residing in families and kinships may well be the result of ancestral affinities which have bound together in many earlier combinations, like a turning kaleidoscope, the same individuals.

XIV. KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION.

We are our own children.—PYTHAGORAS.

Nothing can work me damage but myself.—ST. BERNARD.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill Our fatal shadows that walk with us still. BEAUMONT & FLETCHER.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.—JESUS.

We make our fortunes and we call them fate.—B. DISRAELI.

Men must reap the things they sow. Force from force must ever flow. SHELLEY.

The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall it, or the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts.—EMERSON.

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such pain; I never saw a brute I hated so. He must be wicked to deserve such pain. BROWNING.

Not from birth does one become a slave; not from birth does one become a saint; but by conduct alone.—GAUTAMA.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow.—BEECHER.

Then spake he of that answer all must give For all things done amiss or wrongfully, Alone, each for himself, reckoning with that The fixed arithmetic of the universe, Which meteth good for good, ill for ill, Measure for measure unto deeds, words, thoughts, Making all futures fruits of all the pasts. THE LIGHT OF ASIA.

XIV. KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION.

Karma is the eastern word for what the West knows as the Law of Causation, applied to personal experience. In Christendom the full recognition of this great principle, like that of its mate, reincarnation, lies dormant; but it is merely an extension into the spiritual domain of the fundamental premise of all science, the substratum of common sense, the cardinal axiom of every philosophy,—that each effect has an adequate cause, and each cause works infinite consequences. Briefly, the doctrine of karma is that we have made ourselves what we are by former actions, and are building our future eternity by present actions. There is no destiny but what we ourselves determine. There is no salvation or condemnation except what we ourselves bring about. God places all the powers of the universe at our disposal, and the handle by which we use them to construct our fate has been and is and always shall be our own individual will. Action (karma) of the spirit, whether in the inner consciousness alone, or by vocal expression, or in outward act, is the secret force which directs our journeys through infinity, driving us down into the gloomy regions of evil, of matter, and of selfishness, or up toward the luminous fields of good, of spirit, and of love.

The most adamantine of facts is that of an infinite all-comprehending power of which nature is the pulsing body, an eternal reality shaping the shadowy appearances of time, and variously named Force, Fate, Justice, Righteousness, Love, Mind, The Over-Soul, God. The most essential attribute of this unfathomable Being is that of Almighty Equity. Confronting this fact is the puzzling fact of our spiritual personality enveloped in matter. The thought always associated with this, never practically forsaken, though sometimes theoretically denied, is individual responsibility. “Two things fill me with wonder,” said Kant, “the starry heavens and the sense of moral responsibility in man.” When Daniel Webster was asked what was the greatest thought that ever stirred his soul, he replied, “The thought of my personal accountability to God.” Every balanced mind agrees with these intellectual giants on this point. The inevitable outcome of grouping these two actualities (God and responsibility) is the conception that the Universal Sustainer is giving every creature the best thing for it, and that each soul is in some way accountable for its condition. Single observations seem to contradict this idea, but the long trend of life’s experience verifies it. Because it offers no shelter for culpable actions and necessitates a sterling manliness, it is less welcome to weak natures than the easy religious tenets of vicarious atonement, intercession, forgiveness, and death-bed conversions. But it rings through the inner soul-world as the fundamental harmonic tone, setting the key for all wholesome poetry, philosophy, religion, and art, and inspiring the magnificent sweep of progress which is rationalizing modern Christendom. For it is identical with the essence of Bible truth, as these representative sentences will suggest:—

“Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” (Solomon.)

“Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee.” (Jesus.)

“Work out your own salvation. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (St. Paul.)

The embryos of all animals are at the earliest stage indistinguishable from one another. The biologist who has lost his labels cannot tell which would become a fish, which a cat, and which a man; but nature knows the past records and therefore the future possibility of each. So within souls apparently similar there hide unsuspected germs of vast difference, resulting from the forgotten pasts, which may develop into corresponding divergent futures. The ancient behaviors of every soul have accumulated a grand heritage of influences from which our present bequest is derived. Using another figure, as each piece of “new” soil contains through all its depth a multitude of various seeds sown in past ages, which patiently bide their time to be brought to light and bear fruit, so the kernels of remote conducts shall eventually all have their unfoldment in the revolution of our lives, until at last, if we refuse weeds and harbor only worthy germs, we shall bear a continual harvest of good.

The “bonds of action” include the whole range of material for character,—not only the recognized habits of the soul, but, of more consequence still, the unconscious inner thought whence the outward manifestations spring. Whatever impulses are secretly cherished, these feed the acts of life, and mould all our environments to fit them. The nurtured thought of killing produces a thousand unseen murders and must continue wreaking crimes in immensely larger degree than hangable horrors. Our favorite inclinations show what we have been doing in ancient ages. Within the germ of to-day’s conduct are coiled interminable consequences of good and evil.

The relentless hand which metes out our fortunes with the stern justice most vividly portrayed by the Greek dramatists in their Nemesis, Fates, and Furies, takes from our own savings the gifts bestowed on us. “Alas! we sow what we reap; the hand that smites us is our own.” In the domain of eternal justice, the offense and the punishment are inseparably connected as the same event, because there is no real distinction between the action and its outcome. He who injures another in fact only wrongs himself. To adopt Schopenhauer’s figure, he is a wild beast who fastens his fangs in his own flesh. But linked with the awful fact of our undivided responsibility for what we now are, goes the inspiring assurance that we have in our control the remedy of evil and the increase of good. We can, and we alone can, extricate ourselves from the existing limitations, by the all-curing powers of purity, love, spirituality. In eastern phraseology, the purpose of life is to work out our bad karma (action) and to stow away good karma. As surely as the harvest of to-day grows from the seed-time of yesterday, so shall every kernel of thought and feeling, speech and performance, bring its crop of reward or rebuke. The inherent result of every quiver of the human will continually tolls the Day of Judgment, and affords immeasurable opportunities for amelioration.

The worthy soul straitened with misfortune is shifting off the chains of old wrong-doing. The vicious soul enjoying comforts is reaping the benefits of old virtues. So intricately are all situations connected with untraceable lineages that only the Omniscient can penetrate below appearances in the real natures of men. The world is like a garden in which is newly planted a huge assortment of unknown plants. To the common observer the fresh sprouts are only deceptive, for the most promising stalk may prove to be a weak, fragile thing, and the uninviting leaflets may introduce a sturdy growth. But the all-wise Gardener knows each seed, and that it will ultimately show its ancestry. The stupendous issues of conduct endure through all changes. After one has climbed to high summits of character the surprising reappearance of some forgotten sin may stay his progress and require all his forces to conquer the viper whose egg he long ago nested in his bosom. The man plunged into the abyss of degradation may be a saint much farther advanced than those exalted persons who despise him.

It is karma, or our old acts, that draws us back into earthly life. The spirit’s abode changes according to its karma, and this karma forbids any long continuance in one condition, because _it_ is always changing. So long as action is governed by material and selfish motives, just so long must the effect of that action be manifested in physical re-births. Only the perfectly selfless man can elude the gravitation of material life. Few have attained this; but it is the goal of mankind. Some have reached it and have voluntarily returned as saviors of the race.

An illustrious explanation of karma appears at the close of “The Light of Asia”:

KARMA—all that total of a soul Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had, The “self” it wove with woof of viewless time Crossed on the warp invisible of acts.

· · · · ·

What hath been bringeth what shall be, and is, Worse—better—last for first and first for last; The angels in the heavens of gladness reap Fruits of a holy past.

The devils in the underworlds wear out Deeds that were wicked in an age gone by. Nothing endures: fair virtues waste with time, Foul sins grow purged thereby.

Who toiled a slave may come anew a prince For gentle worthiness and merit won; Who ruled a king may wander earth in rags For things done and undone.

Before beginning, and without an end, As space eternal and as surety sure, Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good, Only its laws endure.

It will not be contemned of any one: Who thwarts it loses, and who serves it gains; The hidden good it pays with peace and bliss, The hidden ill with pains.

It seeth everywhere and marketh all: Do right—it recompenseth! do one wrong— The equal retribution must be made, Though DHARMA[55] tarry long.

It knows not wrath nor pardon; utter-true Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs; Times are as naught, to-morrow it will judge, Or after many days.

By this the slayer’s knife did stab himself; The unjust judge hath lost his own defender; The false tongue dooms its lie; the creeping thief And spoiler rob, to render.

Such is the law which moves to righteousness, Which none at last can turn aside or stay; The heart of it is love, the end of it Is peace and consummation sweet. Obey!

· · · · ·

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.

That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields! The sesamum was sesamum, the corn Was corn. The silence and the darkness knew; So is a man’s fate born.

He cometh, reaper of the things he sowed, Sesamum, corn, so much cast in past birth; And so much weed and poison-stuff, which mar Him and the aching earth.

If he shall labor rightly, rooting these, And planting wholesome seedlings where they grew, Fruitful and fair and clean the ground shall be, And rich the harvest due.

If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs, Endureth patiently, striving to pay His utmost debt for ancient evils done In love and truth alway;

If making none to lack, he throughly purge The lie and lust of self forth from his blood; Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence Nothing but grace and good:

If he shall day by day dwell merciful, Holy and just and kind and true; and rend Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots, Till love of life have end:

He—dying—leaveth as the sum of him A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit, Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near, So that fruits follow it.

No need hath such to live as ye name life; That which began in him when he began Is finished: he hath wrought the purpose through Of what did make him man.

Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes Invade his safe eternal peace; nor deaths And lives recur. He goes

Unto NIRVÂNA. He is one with Life Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be. OM, MANI PADME, OM! the dewdrop slips Into the shining sea!

· · · · ·

This is the doctrine of the KARMA. Learn! Only when all the dross of sin is quit, Only when life dies like a white flame spent, Death dies along with it.

XV. CONCLUSION.

The glories of the Possible are ours.—BAYARD TAYLOR.

The majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world.—WALT WHITMAN.

There is no life of a man, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.—Would’st thou plant for eternity: then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man.—CARLYLE.

Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, Science, Philosophy, though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim.—MAZZINI.

A sacred burden is this life ye bear. Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly; Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly; Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin; But onward, upward, till the goal ye win. FRANCES A. KEMBLE.

Know that this world is one stage of eternity. For those who are journeying in the right way, it is the road of religion. It is a market opened in the wilderness where those who are travelling on their way to God may collect and prepare provisions for their journey.

AL GAZZALI.

Life is but a means unto an end—that end, Beginning, mean, and end of all things—God. We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. BAILEY.

XV. CONCLUSION.

We are lotus-eaters, so engrossed with the ignoble attractions around us as to have forgotten the places through which we have long strayed away from home, and to heed not the necessity of many more perilous journeys before we can reach our glorious destination. It is only by rousing ourselves to the important fact of the past pilgrimage by which we have traveled hither, and to the still more vital reality of the incalculable sequences of our present route, that we can attain the best progress. Our repugnance to the idea of a cycle of lives, with myriad meanderings through varied forms, is the cry of Tennyson’s Lotus-Eaters:

While all things else have rest from weariness, All things have rest, why should we toil alone?

· · · · ·

Nor ever fold our wings And cease our wanderings. Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

This is virtually the longing for Nirvâna, and the cause of the irrational belief in an eternal Heaven immediately following this life. But it is neither wise nor religious to ignore the necessity of continuing our ascent at the present pace, until we have journeyed all the way to that distant goal. The restlessness of our nature comes from the established habit of straying about in temporal realms, and has developed a love of adventure in which the occidental world finds profounder delight than in the oriental yearning for inactivity, and which shall have abundant exercise before it disappears. The only path to that perfect satisfaction which is found in complete oneness with the Supreme winds through the ascending planes of material embodiment.

Still must I climb if I would rest: The bird soars upward to his nest; The young leaf on the tree-top high Cradles itself within the sky.

I cannot in the valley stay; The great horizons stretch away! The very cliffs that wall me round Are ladders into higher ground.

And heaven draws near as I ascend; The breeze invites, the stars befriend. All things are beckoning to the Best; I climb to Thee, my God, for rest![56]

In which one of its various guises we shall receive reincarnation depends upon the individual. Whether it shall be in the crude form of transmigration through animals as received by most of the world; or in the Persian and Sufi faith as the unjust banishment from our proper home by the powers of evil; or, following Egypt, Pythagoras, Plato, Origen, and the Druids, as a purgatorial punishment for pre-natal sins; or, in the form of some Christian teaching, as a probationary stage testing our right to higher existence and ushering us into a permanent spiritual condition; or, as maintained alike by the acutest Eastern philosophy and the soundest Western thought, as a wholesome development of germinal soul-forces;—through all these phrasings the same central truth abides, furnishing what Henry More called “the golden key” for the problem of life, and explaining the plot of this “drama whose prologue and catastrophe are both alike wanting.” But the broadest intelligence leads us directly into the evolutionary aspect of reincarnation, and finds the others inadequate to the full measure of human nature. In this view the present life is one grade of a stupendous school, in which we are being educated for a destiny so far beyond our comprehension that some call it a kind of deity. The experiences through which we have come were needful for our strengthening. Even though we have descended below former altitudes, the only path to the absolute lies through the sensuous earthly vale. Sin itself, after we have escaped it, will lead to a mightier result than would be possible without it, or it would not be permitted. The richest trees of all the forest world spring from the unclean miasmic fens. The severest present disciplines, coming from our earlier errors, are training us for a loftier growth than we ever knew. Our physical schooling, through all the grades necessary to our best unfoldment, will build a character as much sublimer than our primitive condition as virtue overtowers innocence, and when the race finally emerges from the jangling turmoil of self-will into complete harmony with the Perfect One, as it must at last, the multitudes of our lives will not seem too enormous a course of experience for the establishment of that consummation. The victorious march of Evolution through all the provinces of thought will at length be followed by the triumphal procession of Reincarnation.

There is a spirit in all things that live Which hints of patient change from kind to kind; And yet no words its mystic sense can give, Strange as a dream of radiance to the blind.

And as in time unspeakably remote Vague frenzies in inferior brains set free Presaged a power no language could denote, So dreams the mortal of the God to be.[57]

The Father’s purpose with us seems to be to educate us as His children so that we shall be in complete sympathy with the divine mind. The only method of accomplishing this glorious result is for us to enter with Him into all the phases of His being. Our long series of physical lives will finally give us a thorough knowledge of the grosser nature with which He cloaks Himself. We penetrate the animal existence in human form more successfully than would be possible if we transmigrated into all the species of zoölogy; for here we carry sufficient intelligence, along with the material condition, to comprehend these creatures around us which cannot understand themselves. We cannot expect to permanently leave this department of God’s house until we have essentially grasped the secret of all earthly life. The highest individuals of mankind, the saviors of the race, the true prophets and poets, attain this intimate communion with nature, this mastery over the lower creation, which demonstrates their fitness for introduction to a higher stage.

It is difficult to account for the great geniuses except by the consideration that they are the result of many noble lives. Emerson arrives at this conclusion in his essay on Swedenborg. “In common parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Scena, the philosopher, conferred together; and on parting the philosopher said, ‘All that he sees, I know;’ and the mystic said, ‘All that he knows, I see.’ If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as reminiscence, and which is implied by the Brahmans in the tenet of transmigration. The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, ‘traveling the path of existence through thousands of births,’ having beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to one thing, what formerly she knew. For all things in nature being linked and related, and the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage, and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all. How much more, if he that inquires be a holy, godlike soul! For by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom, and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with their structure and law.”

A recent instance of the glaring facts inexplicable by any other theory than reincarnation appears in the little musical prodigy Josef Hofmann, whose phenomenal genius holds complete mastery of the piano, and charms vast audiences with his exquisite rendering of most difficult concertos, and particularly with his marvelous improvisations upon themes suggested at a moment’s notice. He presents the uncanny phenomenon of a child of ten who has little more to learn in the most difficult of arts. The natural explanation occurring to any candid mind is thus suggested by the _Boston Herald_ in its report of a Hofmann concert: “It almost seems as if the spirit of some great composer had been put into this boy by nature, waiting to be developed in accordance with our modern art to shine forth again in all its glory in his work.” What if he actually were the reappearance of Mozart hastening to fill out the life that was cut sadly short? There may be means of verifying such a presumption by the character of his later compositions, when he gets the full expression of his natural bent. An art so independent of time and place, as music, might fairly be traced through two historic individuals, when literature and painting would not permit it. At any rate it is significant that the young prodigies in any particular kind of skill do not come until that skill has been well established on the earth. Guido followed generations of great painters, Pascal was preceded by a long course of mathematicians. Pope “lisped in numbers” after a vast procession of poets. And Mozart waited until the new era of musical harmony had been well inaugurated. The colossal characters who stand out from the race, with no predecessors equal to them, like Homer, Plato, Jesus, Raphael, Shakespeare, Beethoven, all reach their maturity later than other prodigies, after infancy and youth have fastened the Lethean gates upon the prehistoric scenes from which they seem to hail. But the unfathomable vagaries of the soul, as it works out successively its dominant impulses, easily disguise the individual in different personalities, so long as the physical realm is most attractive to it. Yet it is noticeable that the great minds of history come together in galaxies, when the fullness of time for their capacities draws them together. Witness the Sanskrit sages, the Greek poets and philosophers, the Augustan writers and generals, the Italian artists of the Renaissance, the German masters of music, the Elizabethan authors, the nineteenth-century scientists. The traits of the commonest child, however, as much as the miracles of a genius, have no satisfactory explanation outside of the philosophy of re-births.

Evolution of the physical nature and of material strength attaches our future to body and matter. But the attachment hastens toward a release by at length proving these to be low steps in the ascent of life. As in the geological programme of animal development each era carried its type to gigantic dimensions and then was surmounted by a higher order of creatures, which in turn grew monstrous as tyrants of their age and then succumbed to a still higher rank: so the soul’s progress from the earthly domain lies through the mastery of physical things to mental, thence to psychic, and at last to spiritual. And the passion for material achievement animating our side of the planet should not be underestimated, since it governs an important epoch in the world’s growth. But the danger lies in esteeming it a finality. It is chiefly valuable as the foundation upon which we may build skyward, in an evolution of character. When the structure is made high enough, the buoyancy of the upper stories will conquer the weight of the base and float away our abode to ethereal climes. Only the education of the spiritual in us, of sacrifice, nobility, and divinity, can divorce us from these uneasy earthly affinities to the permanent rest of union with God. While we must not abandon the glories of physical beauty, power and pleasure, we must not forget that the true business of life is to wean our affections from the visible to the invisible, to transfer the preponderance of our magnetisms from shadows to substances. For we bridge the two kingdoms of matter and spirit, and we have the choice between them more freely than we know.

The mechanical transmigration which was fancifully told in Grecian mythology, gathered and beautifully rendered by Ovid, which was taught in the Egyptian and Pythagorean dogmas and still floats broadcast throughout the vast realms of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and barbarism, which fascinates the thought of our poets, and which is daily enacted by a myriad object-lessons in nature, is merely the objective expression of a subjective truth, discerned by all the mystics, seers, and philosophers, and most elaborately stated by Swedenborg. It means that the infinite progress of the soul conveys it through countless epochs, moving in perfect succession by the dynamic laws of its own being. During this development, the universe arranges itself peculiarly to each individual according to his thought and character. We shape the outer world by our inner nature, and we say just how long our stay shall be among dust and mortality.

The true and wholesome aspect of the earthly life, under the religious philosophy of reincarnation, transforms the spectacle from a trivial show, or a gloomy arena of despair, to a majestic stage in the ascending series of human sojournings on the way to the Absolute. In the words of the old martyr-philosopher Giordano Bruno, the father of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, the cherisher of that thought, “being present in the body, is yet, as by an indissoluble oath, bound and united to divine things, so that he is not sensible either of love or hatred for mortal things, knowing he is greater than these, and that he must not be the slave of his body, which is to be regarded as no other than the prison of his liberty, a snare for his wings, a chain upon his limbs, and a veil impeding his sight.” His life flows beauteously in aspiration for the invisible kingdom of permanence, as this same Bruno, the Nolan, phrased it in verse:—

While that the sun upon his round doth burn And to their source the roving planets flee, Things of the earth do to the earth return And parted waters hasten to the sea: So shall my spirit to the high gods turn And heaven-born thought to Heaven shall carry me.

Instead of being a cold pagan philosophy as it is frequently considered, reincarnation throbs with the most vital spirit of Christianity. It is no more Buddhism, than kindliness is Christianity. It is the hidden core of the gospel of Jesus as of all other great religions and philosophies. This is what has preserved them in spite of their degrading excrescences. It is “the religion of all sensible men” who refuse the weak sentiment and bigoted dogmas that obscure the light of Christianity in the churches: for it clearly unfolds what they unconsciously believe, in the laws of cause and effect. It spurns the despairing doctrine of total depravity, but shows the cause of partial depravity. It teaches salvation as Jesus did, not by heaping our sins upon him, but by recognizing the Fatherhood of the Supreme, entering the new birth into spiritual life, and watchfully growing Godward. It revolts against the thought of everlasting punishment for brief errors, but provides infinite opportunities for restoration and advancement, while emphasizing most vigorously the unescapable results of all action. It is therefore a corrective of modern Christianity holding fast to the strength and beauty of what the Nazarene taught and lived, but including those very principles which breed religious skepticism in the extreme advocates of science and evolution. It enlarges Christianity to a grander capacity than it has hitherto known, and so furnishes at once an inspiring religion for the loftiest spiritual aspiration, a most satisfactory philosophy for the intellect, and the strongest basis for practical nobility of conduct. There is no reason why reincarnation and Christianity should not grasp hands and magnificently advance together, each keeping the other steadfastly true. Only in this union can Christianity escape its present downward sag. Since western religion fails to spiritually sustain us and has largely gone over to the enemy,—materialism, it is time for another oriental tide to sweep over the West. Having already a partial possession here, reincarnation promises to flow in freely to revitalize Christianity, to spiritualize science. As Christianity has degenerated in the West, so has reincarnation in the East, and the hope of the race lies in an exalted marriage of them. They need each other, as husband and wife, allied in purest devotion, supplementing the defects and strengths of each other, and regenerating their lower unassociated tendencies. The religion of Jesus tends to sink into an irrational sentimentality which is commonly relegated to women and effeminate men. The spiritual philosophy of India declines into passionless fatalism or an ungenerous self-absorption. Superstition darkens both alike. But reincarnation keeps Christianity thoroughly rational, and Christianity will sustain reincarnation in vigorous unselfishness. This alliance of the best truths of both hemispheres will teach a reverential submission to the divine will without its sequel of stagnation, a heroic self-reliance without its danger of atheism, a regenerative communion with the Highest without the sacrilegious folly of selfish prayer.

Reincarnation unites all the family of man into a universal brotherhood more effectively than the prevailing humanity. It promotes the solidarity of mankind by destroying the barriers that conceit and circumstances have raised between individuals, groups, nations, and races. All are alike favored with perfect poetic justice. The children of God are not ordained some to honor and others to abasement. There are no special gifts. Physical blessings, mental talents, and moral successes are the laborious result of long merit. Sorrows, defects, and failures proceed from negligence. The upward road to the glories of spiritual perfection is always at our feet, with perpetual invitations and aids to travel higher. The downward way into sensual wreckage is but the other direction of the same way. We cannot despise those who are tending down, for who knows but we have journeyed that way ourselves? It is impossible for us to scramble up alone, for our destiny is included in that of humanity, and only by helping others along can we ascend ourselves. The despondent sadness of the world which dims the lustre of every joy, chanting the minor key of nature, haunting us in unaccountable ways, cropping out in all literature and art, making the grandest of poetry tragic and the sublimest music sombre, is the unconscious voice of mankind, humming its keynote of life. While we continue to dwell in the murky realm of sense, that must prevail. But the bright rifts illuminating the advance guard herald the approach of day, and assure us that the trend of restless human gyrations is away from that condition.

Contrary to the common opinion of eastern thought, reincarnation is optimistic. The law of causation is not a blind meting of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. It opens out into a scheme of beneficent progress. Science recognizes this in the _vis medicatrix remedia naturæ_, the healing power of nature. What was once denied in the creed of the alchemists concerning the ascending impulse of all things is now preached by science, which declares in Tyndall’s words that “matter contains within it the promise and potency of all life.” All minerals have the rudimentary possibility of plants and animals. Crystals strive after a higher life by assuming arborescent and mossy shapes. Plants display the embryonic qualities of low animals. No naturalist can mark infallibly the boundaries of the three kingdoms, so closely are they interlinked. A zoölogist does not doubt the possibility of minerals becoming plants and these mounting into animals. The movement of vital energy is manward, and the cry of mankind is “excelsior,” towards God. Poetry cherishes the same conviction

that somehow good Shall be the final goal of ill, For pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroyed Or cast as useless to the void When God shall make this pile complete.

Behold! we know not anything. We can but trust that good shall fall At last, far off, at last, to all, And every winter turn to spring.

And Tennyson’s uncertain faith is an undoubted verity in the Orient, thus phrased by Edwin Arnold:—

Ye are not bound! the soul of things is sweet, The heart of being is celestial rest; Stronger than woe is will: that which was good Doth pass to better—best.

Acknowledging that the forces of evil are terrific and multiply themselves prodigiously, there can be no question that the predominant powers are infinitely good. And the supremacy of good in the universe diminishes the full force of evil, makes the higher attractions outvie the lower, and hastens the final disappearance of darkness. This insures the amelioration of all life by the benign process of re-birth; for

The Heart of all is a boundless Love Pulsing through every part In streams that thrill the hosts above And make the atoms dart.

The strongest objection to reincarnation, our ignorance of past lives, is met by the fact permeating all nature and experience, that progress depends upon forgetfulness. Every great stage of advancement is accompanied by the mental loss of earlier epochs. One of Montaigne’s best essays shows the blessedness of defective memory. All deep philosophy agrees that after an experience is absorbed into the soul, its purpose is accomplished, and the only chance of improvement consists in “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before.” It would be intellectually impossible for the memory to grasp anything new, if it clung to all it had known. One of the grandest discourses of that greatest English preacher of the last generation, Frederick W. Robertson, is upon the theme of “Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past.” The experience of the race affords no sufficient endorsement of the continuation of our mortal memories. It is impossible to escape the liberal scientific teaching that the mind is only an instrument of the soul, and when it decays with the body, the soul retains of its earthly possessions only what has sunk down into the character. The logician of the Scriptures expresses this in saying, “Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away.” But the everlastingness of character insures the permanence of our identity and of our dearest ties. And as the scale of being on earth shows a gradual development of memory from the lowest protozoön to man, so in man the unconscious memory shall become more and more conspicuous, until it reveals the course of our complete career.

The glorious unfoldment of our dormant powers in repeated lives presents a spectacle magnificent beyond appreciation, and approaches more grandly than any other conception to the sublimity of human development. Addison wrote: “There is not, in my opinion, a more pleasing consideration than that of the perpetual progress which the soul makes towards the perfection of its nature, without ever arriving at a period in it. To look upon the soul as going on from strength to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions of glory and brighten to all eternity; that she will be still adding virtue to virtue and knowledge to knowledge, carries in it something wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of man. Nay, it must be a prospect pleasing to God himself, to see his creatures forever beautifying in his eyes, and drawing nearer to Him by greater degrees of resemblance.” Reincarnation shows the programme by which this stupendous scheme is being worked out, step by step, in the gradual method of all God’s doings, and glorifies the present cycle as a specimen of eternity which shall ever grow brighter until the full brilliancy of the Highest shall radiate from every life.

The practical application of this truth not only dispels the haunting enigmas of life, but incites us to the strongest habits of virtuous conduct in ourselves, and of generous helpfulness toward others. It inspires us to nurture all the means of developing noble traits, since the promise of all good, and the only highway out of the bogs of physical life into the mountain heights of spirituality, is character. It reminds us most forcibly that

Every thought of purity, Every deed of right, Conquers sin’s obscurity, Speeds the reign of light; Moves with might supernal Toward rest and home, Leads to life eternal, Prays, “Thy kingdom come.”

It is not strange, therefore, that one of the leading writers of Great Britain says of reincarnation: “The ethical leverage of the doctrine is immense. Its motive power is great. It reveals as magnificent a background to the present life, with its contradictions and disasters, as the prospect of immortality opens up an illimitable foreground, lengthening out the horizon of hope. It binds together the past and the present and the future in one ethical series of causes and effects, the inner thread of which is both personal to the individual and impersonal, connecting him with two eternities, one behind and the other before. With peculiar emphasis it proclaims the survival of moral individuality and personal identity along with the final adjustment of external conditions to the internal state of the agent.”[58]

Alongside of the Scotch professor’s words we place these sentences from an eastern teacher, that the wisdom of the antipodes may grasp hands in one common brotherhood for the instruction of the world:—

“There is in each incarnation but one birth, one life, one death. It is folly to duplicate these by persistent regrets for the past, by present cowardice, or fear of the future. There is no Time. It is Eternity’s now that man mistakes for past, present, and future.

“The forging of earthly chains is the occupation of the indifferent; the awful duty of unloosing them through the sorrows of the heart is also their occupation.

“Liberate thyself from evil actions by good actions.”[59]

Emerson, who unites in one personality the sublimest intuitions of the Orient with the broadest observations of the West, may well represent a noble harmony of these distant kinships when he says: “We must infer our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to hive innumerable experiences which are of no visible value, and we may revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust them. Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in steady and supported advances.... If there is the desire to live, and in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is because life and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural depositaries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate a conviction of immense resources and possibilities proper to us, on which we have never drawn. All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have less in times and places than I do not yet know.”

We conclude, therefore, with the conviction that all the best teachers of mankind—religion, philosophy, science, and poetry—urge the soul to

Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnation of thy soul In varied realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be more pure and high.

APPENDIX.

Where a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by: it is good and made by a good workman.—DE LA BRUYÈRE.

* * * * *

You despise books: you whose whole lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.—VOLTAIRE.

* * * * *

Within their silent chambers treasures lie Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which for a day of need The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs; These hoards of truth you can unlock at will. WORDSWORTH.

* * * * *

I not only commend the study of this literature (the eastern), but wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly enlarged. American students may well derive from all former lands—all the older literatures and all the newer ones—bearing ourselves always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the motherworld, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living.

WALT WHITMAN.

* * * * *

In books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time—the articulate, audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. No magic _Rune_ is stranger than a book. All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been, is lying in magic preservation in the pages of books. Do not books still accomplish _miracles_ as _Runes_ were fabled to do? They persuade men.—CARLYLE.

APPENDIX.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF REINCARNATION.

I. LATIN.

Schilling, Wolfg. Heinrich. De Metempsychosi Dissertatio. Lipsiæ, 1679.

Henrici, Heinrich. De Animarum Transmigratione. 1699.

Haffner, Gotthard. Dissertatio de Transmigratione Animarum, quatenus ex Lumine Rationis cognosci potest. 1746.

Osiander, Johann Adam. Dissertatio de Transmigratione Animarum Humanarum ex suis Corporibus in alia Corpora. Tubingae, 1749.

Heusse, M. De Metempsychosi sive Animarum per plura Corpora Revolutione. 1757.

Haeggroth, Nic. De Metempsychosi. London, 1793.

Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van. Seder Olam sive Ordo Seculorum. Holland, 1693.

Keil. De Pre-existentia Animarum. (In _Opuscula_.)

Huygens, Christian. Cosmotheoros, sive de Terris Celestibus earumque Ornatu Conjecturæ. Paris, 1698.

Iamblichus. De Pythagorica Vita. Didot, 1862.

Porphyrius. De Vita Pythagoræ. Didot, 1862.

Barrow, Isaac. Animæ Humanæ Corporibus non præexistunt. (In opposition to Henry More.) (In his _Opuscula_, vol. iv. of his works.) London, 1687.

Sibbern, Fred. C. De Præexistentia, Genesi et Immortalitate Animæ. Havniæ, 1823.

Doppert, Joh. De vetusto Metempsycheos Commento. Schneebergæ, 1716.

Irhove, Willem. De Palingenesia Veterum seu Metempsychosi sic dicta Pythagorica Libri III. Amstelodami, 1733.

Wernsdorf, Gottlieb. Disputatio de Metempsychosi Veterum non figurate sed proprie intelligenda. Vitembergæ, 1741.

Vangerow, W. G. von. Dissertatio historico-philosophica Metempsychosin veterum sistens. Halle, 1765.

Sedermark, Pet. De Metempsychosi Veterum. Pars I-III. Upsalæ, 1807.

Wendel, Joh. And. De Metempsychosi nuper Denuo defensa. Coburgi, 1828.

Sai an Sinsin sive Liber Metempsychosis veterum Ægyptiorum. E duabus Papyris funebribus hieraticis Signis exaratis nunc primum edidit Latine vertit Notas adjecit Henricus Brugsch. Berolini, 1851.

Haupt, Eberh. Dav. De Metempsychosi sive Pythagoræa Animarum Transmigratione brevis Disquisition. Ulmæ, 1724.

Bruno, Giordano. De Triplice minimo et mensura ad trium speculatinarum scientiarum et multarum actinarum artium principia. Francofurti, 1591.

II. GERMAN.

Bertram, J. F. Bescheidene Prüfung der Meynung von der Präexistenz, oder dem Vorherseyn menschlicher Seelen in organischen Leibern, sammt einer Historia Præexistentianorum. Bremen, 1741.

Schubert, Johann E. von. Wandelung der Seele nach dem Tode. Jena, 1746.

Trinius, Joh. Anton. Abhandlung von der Seelenwanderung. Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1760.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin, 1780. Translated by Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. “The Education of the Human Race.” London, 1855.

Schlosser, Joh. Georg. Ueber die Seelenwanderung. Basel, 1781.

Beiträge zur Lehre der Seelenwanderung. Leipzig, 1785.

Wasseljew, W. Der Buddhismus, seine Dogmen, Geschichte und Literatur. St. Petersburg, 1860.

Koeppen, Carl Friedrich. Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung. Berlin, 1857. Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche. Berlin, 1857.

Herder, Joh. Gottfried von. Das Land der Seelen—Palingenesis—Ueber die Seelenwanderung. (Three Dialogues.) 1785. (The Dialogue on Transmigration is translated by F. H. Hedge in his “Prose Writers of Germany.” Philadelphia, 1848.)

Bruch, J. Fr. Die Lehre von der Präexistenz der menschlichen Seelen historisch-kritisch dargestellt. Strassburg, 1859.

Conzius, C. P. Schicksale der Seelenwanderungshypothese under verschiedenen Völkern und in verschiedenen Zeiten. Königsberg, 1781.

Leibnitz, G. W. Monadologie.

Müller, Joh. T. Ueber die Seelenwanderung. Einige prüfende Gedanken. Friedrichsstadt, 1785.

Ungern-Sternberg, Chrn. F., Baron von. Blick auf die moralische und politische Welt, was sie war, was sie ist, was sie seyn wird. Bremen, 1785.

Grosse, Carl. Helim, oder über die Seelenwanderung. Zittau, 1789.

Wedekind, Georg, Baron von. Ueber die Bestimmung des Menschen und die Erziehung der Menschheit, oder: wer, wo, wozu, bin ich, war ich, und werde ich sein. Giessen, 1828.

Ritgen, Ferd. Aug. von. Die höchsten Angelegenheiten der Seele, nach dem Gesetze des Fortschrittes betrachtet. Darmstadt, 1835.

Krug, Wilhelm Traugott. Der neue Pythagoras, oder Geschichte eines dreimal gebornen Erdenbürgers. Leipzig, 1836.

Meyer, Jürgen Bona. Die Idee der Seelenwanderung. Hamburg, 1861. A French translation, “De la migration des âmes,” is in the Revue Germanique, Nov. 30, 1861, XVIII. 239–259.

Klewitz, A. W. von. Ueber Fortdauer und Præexistenz. Magdeburg, 1789.

Fichte, Joh. Gottlieb. Ideen über Gott und Unsterblichkeit, als Nachtrag zu seinen “Sämmtlichen Werken.” 1853.

Nürnberger, Jos. C. E. Still-Leben, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. Kempten, 1839.

Meyer, Joh. Friedrich von. Prüfung der Lehre von der Seelenwanderung. (In his Blätter für höhere Wahrheit. Neue Folge, 1830, I. 244–299.)

Fichte, Imman. Herm. Die Idee der Persönlichkeit und der individuellen Fortdauer. Leipzig, 1855.

Schubert, G. H. Die Geschichte der Seele. Stuttgart, 1833.

Bastian, Adolf. Der Mensch in der Geschichte. See Vol. II. Psychologie und Mythologie. Leipzig, 1860. Die Vorstellungen von der Seele. Berlin, 1875. Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 vols. Leipzig, 1866. Beiträge zur vergleichenden Psychologie. Berlin, 1868. Weltauffassung der Buddhisten. Berlin, 1870. Der Buddhismus in seiner Psychologie. Berlin, 1882.

Müller. Lehre von der Sünde. Augsburg, 1854. See Vol. II. 495 et seq.

Froschammer, J. Ueber den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen. München, 1854.

Marcus, Joh. Vorstellungen über den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen in den ersten Jahren der Kirche. 1854.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Sämmtliche Werke. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig, 1873.

Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Ueber die Seelenfrage; ein Gang durch die sichtbare Welt, um die unsichtbare zu finden. Leipzig, 1861.

Philo. Versuch eines systematischen Entwurfs des Lehrbegriffs Philo’s von Alexandrien. E. H. Stahl. Eichhorn’s Allgem. Bibl. 1792. (IV. 767–890.)

Seelenwanderung. Zeitschrift der Morgenländ. Gesellschaft. VI., IX., XXVII., XXIX.

Kern. Der Buddhismus. Leipzig, 1882.

Spiesz, E. Entwicklungsgeschichte der Vorstellungen vom Zustande nach dem Tode. Jena, 1877. (Contains a bibliography at the end of each chapter.)

Müller, J. G. Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligion. Basel, 1867.

Simrock, K. Handbuch der Deutschen Mythologie. Bonn, 1878.

Pfleiderer, O. Religions-Philosophie. Berlin, 1878.

Döllinger, J. J. I. Heidenthum und Judenthum. Regensburg, 1857.

Karsten, S. Verhandeling over Palingenesie en Metempsychosis. Amsterdam, 1846.

Weber. Indische Studien.

Twesten, C. Die religiösen, politischen und socialen Ideen der asiatischen Culturvölker. 2 vols. Berlin, 1872.

Vierteljahrschrift für die Seelenlehre.

Delitzsch, Franz. System der Biblischen Psychologie. Leipzig, 1855.

III. FRENCH.

Olivier, Jean. La Metempsychose, discours prononcé par Pythagore dans l’école de Crotone. Amsterdam et Paris, 1760.

Duguet, Charles. Pythagore, ou Precis de philosophie ancienne et moderne dans ses rapports avec les metamorphoses de la nature ou la metempsychose. Paris, 1841.

Reynaud, Jean. Philosophie Religieuse du Tierre et Ciel. Paris, 1854.

Bouchet, Père. Lettre sur la metempsychose. In Picart’s Ceremonies. Paris, 1867.

Erckmann-Chatrian. Le Docteur Malthéus. Paris, 1859.

Linner, Jean R. Essai sur les Dogmes de la Metempsychose et du Purgatoire enseigne par les Bramins de l’Indostan. Berne, 1771.

Leroux, Pierre. De l’Humanité. Paris. (See Fortnightly Review, V. 17, 1872, p. 324–333.)

Beausobre, Isaac de. Histoire du Manichéisme. Paris.

Bonnet, Charles. La Palingenesis Philosophique, ou Idées sur l’état passé et sur l’état futur des êtres vivans. Geneve, 1769.

Pezzani, André. La Pluralité des Existences de l’Âme. Paris, 1865.

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer de. Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes. Paris, 1686. Bibliothèque National. Paris, 1871.

Flammarion, Camille. La Pluralité des Mondes Habitués. Paris, 1864. Histoires d’Infinité. Paris, 1867. Les Mondes Imaginaires, et les Mondes Réel. Paris, 1865. (Contains a list and analysis of all the works on the plurality of worlds.)

Fourier, F. Charles Marie. La Fausse Industrie Morcelée, et l’Antidote, l’Industrie Naturelle, combinée. Paris, 1835–36.

Picart, Bernard. Céremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde: 12 tom. Paris, 1807.

Franck, Ad. Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques. Paris, 1875. See the article “Metempsychose.”

Bibliothèque Orientale. Chef-d’œuvre Littéraires de l’Inde, de la Perse, de l’Égypte et de la Chine. Tomes 4. Paris, 1872–78. Vol. I. Rig Veda. II. Hymnes Sanscrit, Persans, Egyptiens, Assyriens et Chinois. III. Burnouf, E. Introduction à l’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien. IV. Le Koran Analysé.

Bibliothèque Orientale Elzévirienne. Tomes 30. Paris, 1873–1880. (A vast collection of valuable works upon the religions, literatures, and peoples of the East.)

Plotinus. Les Ennéades de Plotin. Traduits pour la première fois en français, accompagnée de sommaires, de notes—par M. N. Bouillet. Tomes 3. Paris, 1858–61. (With fragments from Porphyry, Iamblichus, and other Neo-Platonists.)

Regnaud, P. Materiaux pour servir à l’histoire de la philosophie de l’Inde. Paris, 1876.

Draward, L. La Science Occulte. Paris.

Burnouf, E. Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme Indien. Paris, 1844. Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi. Traduit du Sanscrit, accompagnée d’un Commentaire. Paris, 1852.

IV. ENGLISH.

Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London, 1678. (“A storehouse of learning on the ancient opinions of the nature, origin, pre-existence, transmigration, and future of the soul.”)

More, Henry. Philosophical Poems. “A Platonick Song of the Soul; treating of the Life of the Soul, her Immortality, the Sleep of the Soul, the Unitie of Souls, and Memorie after Death.” Cambridge, 1647. (See page 18, above.)

More, Henry. The Immortality of the Soul, so farre as it is demonstrable from the knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason. London, 1659. (See Book II, chapter xvi.)

Glanvil, Joseph (Rector of Bath). Lux Orientalis; or an Inquiry into the opinions of the Eastern sages concerning the Præ-existence of Souls. Being a key to unlock the Grand Mysteries of Providence in Relation to man’s sin and misery. London, 1662. Republished with annotations by Dr. Henry More. 1682.

Dunton, John. The Visions of the Soul before it comes into the Body. In several Dialogues. London, 1692. (Satirical.)

Helmont, F. M. Two Hundred Queries moderately Propounded concerning the Doctrine of the Revolution of Human Souls. London, 1684.

Parker, Samuel (Bishop). A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie; with an account of the Origenian Hypothesis, concerning the Pre-existence of Souls. London, 1666.

Evidence (An) for Immortality, and for Transmigration. To which is added a Treatise concerning those who sleep in the Dust of the Earth. London, 1732.

Mede. The Mystery of Godliness. London, 1708. (Chapter III upholds “the reasonable doctrine” of pre-existence as “a key for some of the main mysteries of Providence, which no other can so handsomely unlock.”)

Warren, Edward. No Pre-Existence; or a brief Dissertation against the Hypothesis of Humane Souls living in a state antecedaneous to this. London, 1667.

Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. London. See Nos. 211 and 343.

Newcomb, Thomas. Pre-existence and Transmigration. A Poem. London, 1743.

Pre-existence. A Poem. Bath, 1763. (In Dodsley’s Collection, I. pp. 158–172.) (See pp. 181–187, above.)

Berrow, Capel, Rector of Rossington. A Lapse of Human Souls in a State of Pre-existence, the only Original Sin, and the Groundwork of the Gospel Dispensation. London, 1766.

(He considers that men are apostate angels, and that the brute creation labors under a severer stroke of divine justice than the human race because it was guiltier than mankind in æons past.)

Jenyns, Soame. Disquisitions on Several Subjects. London, 1782. Disq. III, pp. 27–46. (See page 88, above.)

Preëxistence of Souls and Universal Restoration. From the Minutes and Correspondence of the Burnam Society. Taunton, 1798.

Ramsay, Chevalier. Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion unfolded in a Geometrical Order. Edinburgh, 1748.

Brocklesby, Richard. An Explication of Gospel Theism and the Divinity of the Christian Religion, containing the true account of the System of the Universe. 1706.

(Maintains preëxistence.)

Goodwin, John. Works. London, 1652.

(Defends preëxistence.)

Bulstrode, Whitelocke. An Essay on Transmigration, in Defence of Pythagoras. London, 1692.

Wheeler, J. T. History of India. London, 1874. (For Hindu Transmigration, see pp. 72–76.)

Garrett, J. Classical Dictionary of India. 1871. (See “Transmigration,” on pp. 637–642.)

Tulloch, John, D.D. Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th Century. Edinburgh and London, 1872. (Vol. II: The Cambridge Platonists.)

Wilkinson, Sir John Gardiner. A second series of the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, including their Religion, etc. 3 vols. London, 1878. (Vol. II. chap, xvi., pp. 440–451, relate to transmigration.)

Bunsen, Christian Carl J. Egypt’s Place in Universal History. 5 vols. London, 1848–1860. (Vol. IV. pp. 638–653, treat of animal worship and metempsychosis.)

Ginsburg, Dr. The Kabbala: its Doctrines, Development and Literature. London.

Taylor, Isaac. Physical Theory of Another Life. London and New York, 1836.

Hume, David. Essay on Immortality. In his Essays, moral, political and literary. Edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Gosse. London, 1875. (See p. 94, above.)

Cox, Edward W. What am I? A Popular Introduction to Mental Philosophy and Psychology. 2 vols. London, 1871. Vol. I., chap. 42, “Pre-existence.”

Hudson, C. F. Debt and Grace, as related to the Doctrine of a Future Life. Boston, 1858. (See p. 111.)

Timbs, John. The Mysteries of Life, Death and Futurity. London, 1880. (See the chapters on Pre-existence of Souls, pp. 43 and 262.)

Butler, Wm. Archer. Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy, edited by William Hepworth Thompson. London, 1856. (See Vol. II., Lecture IV., pp. 240–264, Psychology of Plato.)

Mozley, J. B., D.D. (Canon of Christ Church). Essays, Historical and Theological. London, 1878. (Vol. II. pp. 317 sq., “Indian Conversion,” severely attacks the Brahmanical doctrine.)

Liddon, H. P., D.D. (Canon of St. Paul’s). Some Elements of Religion. Lent Lectures. London, 1870. (Lecture II. pp. 95–106, is devoted to a refutation of Preëxistence.)

Jennings, H. The Rosecrucians. Their Rites and Mysteries. London, 1870. (References to transmigration occur on pages 94, 97, 101, 106.)

Davies, Edward. Mythology and Rites of the British Druids. London, 1809.

Mosheim, Joh. L. von. Commentaries on the Affairs of the Christians in the First Three Centuries. London and New York. (See Sections 27–29 for Origen.)

Beecher, Edward. The Conflict of Ages; or the Great Debate on the Moral Relations of God and Man. Boston, 1853. The Concord of Ages. New York, 1860.

Alger, Wm. R. A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life. Philadelphia, 1860. (See p. 100, above.)

Clarke, James Freeman. Ten Great Religions. Boston, 1871. (Vol. I.