Kitabı oku: «The Day After Death (New Edition). Our Future Life According to Science», sayfa 12

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

FACULTIES PECULIAR TO CERTAIN CHILDREN, APTITUDES AND VOCATIONS AMONG MEN, ARE ADDITIONAL PROOFS OF RE-INCARNATIONS.—EXPLANATION OF PHRENOLOGY.—DESCARTES' INNATE IDEAS, AND DUGALD STEWART'S PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY CAN ONLY BE EXPLAINED BY THE PLURALITY OF LIVES.—VAGUE RECOLLECTIONS OF OUR ANTERIOR EXISTENCES

IF there are no re-incarnations, if our actual existence is, as modern philosophy and the ordinary creeds maintain it to be, a solitary fact, not to be repeated, it follows that the soul must be formed at the same time as the body, and that at each birth of a human being, a new soul must be created, to animate this body. We would ask, then, why are not all these souls of the same type? Why, when all human bodies are alike, is there so great a diversity in souls, that is to say, in the intellectual and moral faculties which constitute them? We would ask why natural tendencies are so diverse and so strongly marked, that they frequently resist all the efforts of education to reform, or repress them, or to direct them into any other line? Whence come those instincts of vice and virtue which are to be observed in children, those instincts of pride or of baseness, which are often seen in such striking contrast with the social position of their families? Why do some children delight in the contemplation of pain, and take pleasure in torturing animals, while others are vehemently moved, turn pale, and tremble at the sight or even the thought of a living creature's pain? Why, if the soul in all men be cast in the same mould, does not education produce an identical effect upon young people? Two brothers follow the same classes at the same school, they have the same masters, and the same examples are before their eyes. Nevertheless, the one profits to the utmost by the lessons which he receives, and in manners, education, and conduct, he is irreproachable. His brother, on the contrary, remains ignorant and uncouth. If the same seed sown in these two soils has produced such different fruit, must it not be that the soil which has received the seed, i.e., the soul, is different in the case of each?

Natural dispositions, vocations, manifest themselves from the earliest period of life. This extreme diversity in natural aptitudes would not exist if souls were all created of the same type. The bodies of animals, the human body, the leaves of trees, are fabricated after the same type, because we can observe but few and slight differences among them. The skeleton of one man is always like the skeleton of another man; the heart, the stomach, the ribs, the intestines are formed alike in every man. It is otherwise with souls; they differ considerably in individuals. We hear it said every day that such an one's child has a taste for arithmetic, a second for music, a third for drawing. In the case of others evil, violent, even criminal instincts are remarked, and these dispositions break out in the earliest years of life.

That these natural aptitudes are carried to a very high degree and unusual extent, we have celebrated examples recorded in history, and frequently cited. We have Pascal, at twelve years old, discovering the greater portion of plane geometry, and without having been taught anything whatever of arithmetic, drawing all the figures of the first book of Euclid's geometry on the floor of his room, exactly estimating the mathematical relations of all these figures to each other; that is to say, constructing descriptive geometry for himself. We have the shepherd, Mangiamelo, calculating as an arithmetical machine, at five years old. We have Mozart executing a sonata with his four-years-old fingers, and composing an opera at eight. We have Theresa Milanollo playing the violin with such art and skill, at four years old, that Baillot said she must have played the violin before she was born. We have Rembrandt drawing like a master of the art, before he could read. Etc., etc.

Every one remembers these examples, but it must be borne in mind that they do not constitute exceptions. They only represent a general fact, which in these particular cases was so prominent as to attract public attention. They are valuable as exponents to the public of a fundamental law of nature, the diversity of natural faculties and aptitudes, and the predominance of particular faculties among certain children. Children endowed with these extraordinary and precocious vocations are called little prodigies. This qualification is sometimes used in a depreciatory sense, for the little prodigies are accused of failing to carry out the promises of their childhood; it is observed that the brilliant abilities of their early years have not been guarantees of extraordinary success in their careers as grown men. A child, whose drawings were wonderful at four years old, has become a wretched dauber, as an established artist. A musician, who enchanted his audience at eight years old, has grown up a very mediocre performer.

This remark is just, and the fact is explicable thus: If the little prodigies have not become great men, it is because they have not cultivated their faculties; because they have allowed sloth and disuse to extinguish their talents. It does not suffice to possess natural abilities for a science, or an art, work and study must strengthen and develop them. Little prodigies are outstripped in their career by hard workers, as is natural. They have come upon earth with remarkable faculties which they had acquired during a previous life, but they have done nothing to develop those faculties, which have remained as they were at the moment of terrestrial birth. The man of genius is the man who unceasingly cultivates and perfects such great natural aptitudes and faculties as he has been endowed with at his birth.

The predominance of particular faculties in certain children is not to be explained according to the common philosophy which discerns the creation of a new soul in the birth of every infant. They are, on the contrary, easily explicable according to the doctrine of re-incarnations, indeed they are no more than a corollary of that doctrine. Everything is comprehensible if a life, anterior to the present, be admitted. The individual brings to his life here, the intuition which is the result of the knowledge he has acquired during his first existence. Men are of more or less advanced intelligence and morality, according to the life which they have led before they come into this world to play the parts which we can see. This is self-evident in the case of a man who recommences his life. This man had acquired certain faculties during his first, which are profitable to him in his second existence. Perhaps he does not possess all the faculties with which his first life was endowed, in their full and perfect integrity, but he has what mathematicians call the resultant of those faculties, and this resultant is a special aptitude, it is vocation. He is a calculator, a painter, or a musician by vocation, because, in his former human career he has had the faculty of calculation, drawing, or music. We believe that it is impossible to find any other explanation of our natural aptitudes. It will be objected to this, that it is strange that aptitude and faculties should be the resultant of a prior existence, of which we have, nevertheless, no recollection. We reply to this objection that it is quite possible to lose all remembrance of events which have happened, and yet to preserve certain faculties of the soul which are independent of particular and concrete facts, especially when those faculties are powerful. We constantly see old men who have lost all recollection of the events of their life, who no longer know anything of the history of their time, nor indeed, of their own history, but who, nevertheless, have not lost their faculties, or aptitudes. Linnæus, in his old age, took pleasure in reading his own works, but forgot that he was their author, and frequently exclaimed: "How interesting! How beautiful! I wish I had written that!"

There is no reason to doubt that a child, after its re-incarnation, may preserve the aptitudes of its previous existence, though it has entirely lost the remembrance of the facts which took place and which it witnessed during that period. These faculties reappear and become active in the child, just as the half-extinguished flame of a fire is rekindled by the breath of the wind. The breath which fans the smouldering flame of human faculties is that of a second existence.

The absence of memory may be urged as an objection to re-incarnations in the body of a child, but this argument does not apply to the incarnation of the soul of an animal in a human body. The animal, being almost without the faculty of memory, it is easy to understand that its aptitudes only pass into the condition of man. The good or evil, gentle or fierce instincts which human souls manifest so early, are explained by the species of the animal through which the soul has been transmitted. A child who has a faculty for music may have received the soul of a nightingale, the sweet songster of our woods. A child who is an architect by vocation may have inherited the soul of a beaver, the architect of the woods and waters.

In short, the various aptitudes, the natural faculties, the vocations of human beings, are easily explained by the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. If we reject this system, we must charge God with injustice, because we must believe that He has granted to certain men useful faculties which He has refused to others, and made an unequal distribution of intelligence and morality, these foundations of the conduct and direction of life.

This reasoning appears to us to be beyond attack, for it does not rest upon an hypothesis, but upon a fact: namely, the inequality of the faculties among men, and of their intelligence and morality. This fact, inexplicable by any theory of any received philosophy, is only to be explained by the doctrine of re-incarnations, and forms the basis of our reasoning.

Discussion for and against phrenology has been plentiful, and has ended in the abandonment of the inquiry, because the ideas of ordinary philosophy do not supply a sound theory on the subject. It has been found more convenient to ignore the labours of Gall than to endeavour to explain them. The truth is, that Gall has committed some errors of detail, which is always the case with every founder of a new doctrine, who cannot bring an unprecedented work to perfection by himself alone; but his successors have rectified the errors of the system, and we are now obliged to acknowledge that Gall's theory is correct. It is indeed simply composed of observations which everyone may repeat for himself.

When Gall's theory, or phrenology, is applied to animals, the evidence in its favour is astonishing. In the case of man the facts are almost always confirmatory of the theory. It is certain that the skull of an assassin does exhibit the abnormal developments indicated by Gall, and that, according to the doctrine of the German anatomist, the sentiments of affection, love, cupidity, discernment, &c., may be recognised externally by the bumps in the human skull. It rarely happens that the phrenologist, on examining the skull of a Troppmann, or a Papavoine, fails to trace the hideous indications of evil passions and brutality.

Unfortunately, many of our moralists find themselves seriously embarrassed by philosophy, because their views are limited by the commonplace philosophy of the day. Classic moralists ask themselves whether a man with the bump of murder in his skull is responsible for his crime, whether he is a free agent, whether he is so guilty as he is held to be, when he yields to the cruel instincts with which nature, in his case a wicked step-mother, has endowed him. Is it just to be pitiless towards a man who has only obeyed his physical conformation, almost as a madman obeys the impulses of his diseased mind? It would seem that the punishment of assassination is an injustice, and men ask themselves whether the criminal courts and the scaffold ought not to be abolished, and whether the judge who condemns to death an individual, who is not responsible for his actions, is not the real criminal?

The same reasoning, the same uncertainty apply to virtuous deeds. Is much commendation due to the man who fulfils his duties exactly, to the conscientious and faithful citizen, the honest and kindly individual, if his wise and respectable conduct be simply obedience to the good impulses communicated to him by his physical organization?

These results of phrenology were, it is evident, very embarrassing, and almost immoral. Barbarity on the part of society which punishes the guilty;—absence of merit in the well-behaved man! these consequences were difficult and painful to admit, so the world got out of the difficulty by rejecting phrenology.

It is quite unnecessary to reject phrenology; we may retain it, and congratulate ourselves on a fresh conquest in the sphere of the sciences of observation, if we hold the doctrine of previous existences. Phrenology is most naturally explained, in fact, by that doctrine. When it enters on the occupation of a human body, the soul lends to the cerebral matter, which is the seat of thought, a certain modification, a predominance in harmony with the faculties which that soul possesses at the period of its birth, and which it has acquired in an anterior animal or human existence. The brain is moulded by the soul into conformity with its proper aptitudes, its acquired faculties; then the bony covering of the skull, which moulds itself upon the cerebral substance within its cavity, reproduces and gives expression to our predominant faculties. The ancients who said, Corpus cordis opus (the body is the work of the soul, or the soul makes its body), expressed this same idea with energetic conciseness.

There is, therefore, no need to excuse a murderer, there is no need to deny his free will, there is no need to spare him the just chastisement of his crime. It is not because there are certain protuberances on his skull that the murderer dips his hands in the blood of his victims. These protuberances are only the external indications of the evil and vicious propensities with which he was born, by which he might have been warned and corrected, and which he might have conquered by the strength of his will, by a real and ardent desire to restore his deformed and vicious soul to rectitude. It is always possible, by adequate effort, to surmount the evil inclinations of one's nature; every one of us can resist pride, idleness, and envy. The man who has not corrected these bad impulses is guilty, and nothing can render a crime committed in all the plenitude of his free will excusable. Thus, neither God nor society is implicated in this question, if we accept the doctrine of the plurality of existences.

Descartes and Leibnitz have demonstrated that the human understanding possesses ideas called innate, that is to say, ideas which we bring with us to our birth. This fact is certain. In our time, the Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, has put Descartes' theory into a more precise form, by proving that the only real innate idea, that which has universal existence in the human mind after birth, is the idea, or the principle of causality, a principle which makes us say and think that there is no effect without cause, which is the beginning of reason. In France, Laromiguière and Damiron have popularized this discovery of the Scotch philosopher. Thus the classics of philosophy record this proposition as a truth beyond the reach of doubt. We unreservedly admit the principle of causality as the innate idea par excellence, and we take account of the fact. But we ask the fashionable philosophy how it can explain it? In our minds there are innate ideas, as Descartes has said; and the principle of causality, which invincibly obliges us to refer from the effect to the cause, is the most evident of those ideas which seem to make a part of ourselves; but why have we innate ideas, where do they come from, and how did they get into our minds? The classical philosophy, the philosophy of Descartes, which reigns in France, at the Normal School, and among the professors of the University of Paris, cannot teach us that. It will be said, perhaps, to use the favourite argument of Descartes, that we have innate ideas because it is the will of God, who has created the soul. But such a reply is at once commonplace and arbitrary, it may be used on all occasions—it is so used in fact—and it is not a logical argument.

Innate ideas and the principle of causality are explained very simply by the doctrine of the plurality of existences; they are, indeed, merely deductions from that doctrine. A man's soul, having already existed, either in the body of an animal or that of another man, has preserved the trace of the impressions received during that existence. It has lost, it is true, the recollection of actions performed during its first incarnation; but the abstract principle of causality, being independent of the particular facts, being only the general result of the practice of life, must remain in the soul at its second incarnation.

Thus, the principle of causality, of which French philosophy cannot offer any satisfactory theory, is explained in the simplest possible manner, by the hypothesis of re-incarnations and of the plurality of existences.

We have previously alluded to memory, and explained its relation to re-incarnations, and the reasons why we are born without any consciousness of a previous life. We have said, that if we come from an animal, we have no memory, because the animal has none, or has very little. We must now add, that if we come from a human soul, reopening to the light of life, we are destitute of memory, because it would disturb the trial of our terrestrial life, and even render it impossible, as it is the intention of nature that we should recommence the experience of existence without any trace, present to our minds, of previous actions which might limit or embarrass our free will.

We cannot pass from this portion of our subject without calling attention to the fact that the remembrance of a previous existence is not always absolutely wanting to us. Who is there, who, in his hours of solitary contemplation, has not seen a hidden world come forth before his eyes from the far distance of a mysterious past? When, wrapped in profound reverie, we let ourselves float on the stream of imagination, into the ocean of the vague, and the infinite, do we not see magic pictures which are not absolutely unknown to our eyes? do we not hear celestial harmonies which have already enchanted our ears? These secret imaginings, these involuntary contemplations, to which each of us can testify, are they not the real recollections of an existence anterior to our life here below?

Might we not also attribute to a vague remembrance, to an unconscious sympathy, the real and profound pleasure which we derive from the mere sight of plants, flowers, and vegetation? The aspect of a forest, of a beautiful meadow, of green hills, touches us, moves us, sometimes even to tears. Great masses of verdure, and the humble field daisy, alike speak to our hearts. Each of us has a favourite plant, the flower whose perfume he loves to inhale, or the tree whose shade he prefers. Rousseau was moved by the sight of a yew tree, and Alfred de Musset loved the willows so much, that he expressed a wish, piously fulfilled, that a willow might over-shadow his grave.

This love of the vegetable world has a mysterious root in our hearts. May we not recognize in so natural a sentiment, a sort of vague remembrance of our original country, a secret and involuntary evocation of the scene in which the germ of our soul was first loosed to the light of the sun, the powerful promoter of life?

Besides the undecided and dim remembrance of pictures which seem to belong to our anterior existences upon the globe, we sometimes feel keen aspirations towards a kinder and calmer destiny than that which is allotted to us here below. No doubt coarse beings, entirely attached to material appetites and interests, do not feel these secret longings for an unknown and happier destiny, but poetical and tender souls, those who suffer from the wretched conditions of which human nature is the slave and the martyr, take a vague pleasure in such melancholy aspirations. In the radiant infinite they foresee celestial dwellings, where they shall one day reside, and they are impatient to break the ties which bind them to earth. Read the episode in Goethe's Mignon, in which Mignon, wandering and exiled, pours out her young soul in aspirations to heaven, in sublime longings for an unknown and blessed future, which she feels drawing her towards itself, and ask yourself whether the beautiful verses of the great poet, who was also a great naturalist, do not interpret a truth of nature, i.e., the new life which awaits us in the plains of ether. Why do all men, among all peoples, raise their eyes to heaven in solemn moments, in the impulses of passion, and the anguish of grief or pain? Does any one, under such circumstances, contemplate the earth on which he stands? Our eyes and our hearts turn towards the skies. The dying raise their fallen orbs to heaven, and we look towards the celestial spaces in those vague reveries which we have been describing. It is permitted to us to believe that this universal tendency is an intuition of that which awaits us after our terrestrial life, a natural revelation of the domain which shall be ours one day, and which extends over the celestial empyrean, to the bosom of ethereal space.