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vol. title: Miscellaneous Scraps from January 1st 1878 vol. period: 1875-1878 pages in vol.: 153 |
< The Spiritualist Movement as it Presents itself To-Day in its Various Aspects (continued from page 5-147) >
end, do we not compass one-half of eternity? Surely to overcome all this requires nothing short of the intervention of a miracle. Natural law is out of the question. The Christian is consistent in that he grants the miracle, calling life the breath of God that is breathed into the body by God himself. The materialist is also consistent in that he utterly denies the existence of any such thing as soul, and therefore need be to no pains to account for it, either before or after earth existence. The anti-reincarnation Spiritualist alone is inconsistent in that he holds that souls are born in time, according to a natural law, and will thereafter abide throughout all eternity, thereby clearly giving eternity a beginning.
Prof. William Knight, of St. Andrew’s, in a paper recently read before the New Speculative Society of Scotland, and republished in The Fortnightly Review, thus speaks of reëmbodiment under another name: “The doctrine of metempsychosis is theoretically extremely simple. Its root is the indestructibility of the vital principle. Let a belief in preëxistence be joined to that of posthumous existence, and the dogma is complete. It is thus at one and the same time a theory of the soul’s origin and of its destination, and its unparalleled hold upon the human race may be explained in part by the fact of its combining both in a single doctrine. . . . It is probably the most wide-spread and permanently influential of all speculative theories as to the origin and destiny of the soul. . . . It has lain at the heart of all Indian speculation on the subject, time out of mind. It is one of the cardinal doctrines of the Vedas, one of the roots of Buddhist belief. The ancient Egyptians held it. In Persia it colored the whole stream of Zoroastrian thought. The magi taught it. The Jews brought it with them from the captivity in Babylon. Many of the Essenes and Pharisees held it. . . . The Apocrypha sanctions it, and it is to be found scattered throughout the Talmud. In Greece, Pythagoras proclaimed it; Empedocles taught it; Plato worked it elaborately out, not as a mythical doctrine embodying a moral truth, but as a philosophical theory or conviction. It passed over into the Neo-Platonic school at Alexandria. Philo held it. Plotinus and Porphyry in the third century, Jamblichus in the fourth, Hierocles and Proclus in the fifth, all advocated it in various ways, and an important modification of the Platonic doctrine took place amongst these Alexandrians, when Porphyry limited the range of the metempsychosis, denying that the souls of men ever passed downward to a lower than the human state. Many of the fathers of the Christian Church espoused it, notably Origen. It was one of the Gnostic doctrines. The Manicheans received it, with much else, from their Zoroastrian predecessors. It was held by Nemesius, who emphatically declares that all the Greeks who believe in immortality believe also in metempsychosis. There are hints of it in Boethius. Though condemned in its Origenistic form by the council of Constantinople, in 551, it passed along the stream of Christian theology, and reäppeared among the scholastics in Erigena and Bonaventura. It was defended with much learning and acuteness by several of the Cambridge Platonists, especially by Henry More. Glanvill devotes a curious treatise to it, the Lux Orientalis; English clergy and Irish bishops were found ready to espouse it. Poets, from Henry Vaughn to Wordsworth, praise it. It won the passing suffrage of Hume, as more rational than the rival theories of Creation and Traduction. It was held by Swedenborg, and it has points of contact with the anthropology of Kant and Schilling. It found an earnest advocate in Lessing. Herder also maintained it, while it fascinated the minds of Fourier and Leroux. Soame Jenyus, the Chevalier Ramsey and Mr. Edward Cox have written in its defence.”
After speaking of the argument for metempsychosis that arises from certain resemblances to animals and the like, the author remarks that he will pass to a much higher consideration. “It arises out of certain psychological facts which have seemed to warrant the inference of the soul’s preëxistence. Quite suddenly a thought is darted into the mind which cannot be traced back to any source in past experience; or we hear a sound, see an object or experience a sensation which seems to take us directly out of the circle of sense-perception that has been possible to us in the present life.
“Full oft my feelings make me start, |
“This is one of the arguments of the Phœdo, and it is the central thought of Wordsworth’s magnificent ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood.’ The ‘splendor in the grass,’ the ‘glory in the flower,’ which Wordsworth saw and felt in childhood, he explains by their being the dim memory of a brighter experience that was past, a recovered fragment of ante-natal life.
“Not in entire forgetfulness, |
“On the one hand, the halo with which memory surrounds our childhood, and, on the other, the melancholy awakened by a sense of its being irrevocably gone, have suggested the idea that we look back through the golden gateway of childhood to the glory of a dawn preceding it.
“The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, |
“. . . The theory arises out of a demand for equity in the adjustment of the external and internal conditions of existence. On no moral theory can the present unequal adjustment be considered both equitable and final. . . . The ethical leverage of the doctrine is immense. Its motive power as compared with the notion of posthumous influence after the individual has perished—the substitute for immortality offered by La Lettrie and his colleagues, with all the positivists—is great. It reveals as magnificent a background to the present life, with its contradictions and disasters, as the prospect of immortality opens up on illimitable foreground, lengthening on the horizon of hope. It brings together the past, 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, the one behind and the other before. With peculiar emphasis it proclaims the survival of moral individuality and personal entity, along with the final adjustment of external conditions to the internal state of the agent.
“The last ground on which metempsychosis may be advocated belongs to the metaphysic of physics. As an argument it has often been implied when it has not been expressly affirmed. Even the imagination guesses, and surmisings of the primitive tribes may have grown unconsciously out of a speculative root which their authors were incompetent to grasp. That philosophical root is the uniformity in the amount of spiritual existence; the conviction that, since the quantity of matter is neither increased nor diminished, it is the same with the quantity of spirit; that it is neither added to, nor taken from, at any moment of time. It is a doctrine of modern science that there is a uniform stock of energy within the universe which neither increases nor decreases, but which incessantly changes its form and manifestations; dissolving, retiring, reëmerging; appearing, disappearing and returning—the Proteus of the physical world.
“Is there a Phoenix in the spiritual realm corresponding to this Proteus in the material sphere? It is affirmed that while the amount of material existence remains stationary, if the quantity of spiritual existence was swiftly to increase at one end, with no corresponding diminution at the other, i. e., if the birth of the spirit of the human race was a new creation—multitudes every instant of time darting out of nonentity into manifested being—and their death a simple transference to some new abode, this incessant and rapid increase would overstock the universe. . . . Now, since no physical power is ever lost, all force being simply transformed, if the doctrine of the conservation of energy be applied to the sphere of moral and spiritual life, two alternative theories alone are possible—either preëxistence and immortality combined, or emanation and absorption. Whether the latter is materialistic or pantheistic matters not, except for the name we choose to adopt; the essence of the doctrine is the same. It is self-evident that if the amount of spiritual existence is not increased every moment, the preëxistence of all souls that are born, before their incarnation in the flesh, is as certain as their immortality. The one carries the other with it, or is carried by it; they are, indeed, not two doctrines, but two sides of the same doctrine. Thus the number of souls in the universe will be a fixed and constant quantity. If the conservation of energy be true of spiritual existence, and the soul is to survive the death of the body, then it lived before the body was vitalized. If it is never to be extinguished, it never was produced. It was probably the force of this consideration that led the acute mind of David Hume to affirm that ‘metempsychosis is the only system of this kind, (i. e., of immortality) that philosophy can hearken to.’ He says: ‘What is incorruptible must also be ingenerable.’ ‘The soul, if immortal, existed before our birth.’ In the same connection he acutely suggests, ‘how to dispose of the infinite number of posthumous existences sought to embarrass the religious theory.’ With this we may associate a remark of Shelley: ‘If there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no grounds for supposing that we shall continue to exist after our existence has apparently ceased.’ The ‘continual influx of beings, without a corresponding egress, is a difficulty which will seem insuperable to many minds. There is a growing consensus of opinion amongst Spiritualists and Materialists alike, that the quantity both of matter and of force within the universe suffers no diminution and no enlargement—loss in one direction being invariably and necessarily balanced by gain in another, and all the phenomenal changes in nature being simply a matter of exchange, a transposition of elements, the sum of which is constant. If this be so, it has an important bearing both on the survival of the soul after death, and on its preëxistence; the two doctrines standing and falling together.”
The thesis from which the above quotations are made is probably the ablest on that subject ever published. Prof. Knight evidently does not use the word “Spiritualist” in the text where it is employed as meaning the sect known by that name, but all believers in the immortality of the soul as distinguished from materialists. Immured in St. Andrew’s College, in the heart of Presbyterianism, he is probably not in the least aware that the doctrine he so ably sets forth, from a purely philosophical standpoint, has taken powerful root, as a matter of faith, in the most modern of all religions. Solomon was indeed right. There is nothing new under the sun. The oldest of faiths and the newest shake hands across the abyss of cycles. The doctrine has been held somewhat in the background in the English speaking countries, in the past, but is now pushing rapidly to the front in that it is being taught by nearly all the leading mediums, and notably by Mrs. Richmond, Mrs. Hollis-Billings and Mr. Colville.
Within the last year or so Spiritualism has for the first time taken root in Germany. Societies are now organized in Leipzic, Berlin and several other points, and investigations are going forward at a vigorous pace. In Leipzic three or four of the professors of its famous university are interested in the phenomena, notably Prof. Zöllner, the noted astronomer, and several works have recently issued from that source.
In this country the latest acquisition of note is Rev. Charles Beecher, though it is no secret that the entire family have a strong leaning in that direction, including Henry Ward, Edward K. and Harriet.
The tendency of the movement is more and more toward decentralization. Of late an effort has been making to control it with regard to its supposed scientific aspects, but the effort has never gone beyond the influence of the few who are at the bottom of it. Time was when Andrew Jackson Davis cut some sort of figure in the movement, but the strange psychological influences that manifested themselves when he was an ignorant boy, having become eliminated from his work, his writings—which were never any too crisp or logical, though remarkable, owing to the conditions under which they are given to the world—have become sadly attenuated of late, furnishing, as some think, the best proofs that his earlier writings were “inspired.”
The society in this city is one of the most prosperous. This is chiefly due to the fact that Mrs. Richmond is the permanent speaker. Thus far in the movement none equal her in power and influence, and wherever she is stationed a strong nucleus is formed, which generally dissolves the moment the interest that drew it together is removed in the person of the speaker.
The Paisley Highlanders have come to the highly Christian resolution to prosecute their wretched ecclesiastical squabble “to the bitter end.” The Bailie can but congratulate them on so edifying a determination, and express a hope that the “end” may be as bitter as they can desire.—The Bailie (Glasgow, Scotland).
The Great Jewels of the World
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Editor's notes
- ↑ The Great Jewels of the World by unknown author