The Spirits and the coat of arms.

— Among the arguments that certain persons set against the doctrine of reincarnation, there is one that deserves to be examined, because, at first sight, it seems quite specious. They say that it would tend to break the bonds of family by multiplying them; that the one who concentrated his affection upon his father would have to share it with as many fathers as there had been incarnations. How, then, once in the world of the Spirits, is one to recognize oneself in the midst of that progeny? On the other hand, what becomes of the filiation of ancestors, if the one who believes he descends in direct line from Hugh Capet or from Godfrey of Bouillon has lived several times? if, after having been a great lord, he can become a commoner? Behold, then, a whole lineage overturned! To this we shall reply, to begin with, that it is one of two things: either it is so, or it is not. If it is so, all personal recriminations will not prevent it from being so, since God, in order to regulate the order of things, asks no one's counsel, for otherwise everyone would want the world to be governed according to his fancy. As to the multiplicity of family bonds, we shall say that certain fathers have but one child, while others have twelve or more. Has anyone ever thought of accusing God of obliging them to divide their affection into several parts? And those children, who in their turn have children, does all this not form a numerous family, of which the grandfather and great-grandfather boast, instead of lamenting? You who trace your genealogy back five or six centuries, would you not, once in the world of the Spirits, have to share your affection among all your forebears? If you attribute to yourself a dozen grandparents, very well! you will have twice or three times as many — that is all. You have, then, a very narrow idea of your affectionate sentiments, since you fear that they will not be sufficient to love several persons! But take comfort. I am going to prove that with reincarnation your affection will be less divided than if it did not exist. Indeed, let us suppose that in your genealogy you counted fifty grandparents, an equal number of direct and collateral ancestors, which is few if you go back to the Crusades. By reincarnation, it is possible that several among them have come several times and, thus, instead of the fifty Spirits you counted on Earth, you would find only half of them in the other world. Let us pass on to the question of filiation. With your system you arrive at a result entirely different from the one you expect. If there is no pre-existence, no anteriority of the soul, the soul has not yet lived; therefore, your soul was created at the same time as your body; in this state of things, it has no relation with any of your ancestors. Let us suppose that you descend in direct line from Charlemagne; what is there in common between you and him? What did he transmit to you intellectually and morally? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Why do you cling to him? Through a series of bodies that have all rotted away, destroyed and dispersed, there is no reason to feel proud. With the pre-existence of the soul, on the contrary, you may have had with your ancestors real, serious relations, more flattering to self-love. Therefore, without reincarnation there is only a corporeal kinship, through the transmission of organic molecules of the same nature as that of thoroughbred horses. With reincarnation there is a spiritual kinship. Which of the two systems is the better? Doubtless you will object that with reincarnation a stranger Spirit may introduce himself into your lineage and that, instead of counting only gentlemen in it, one may find shoemakers. That is perfectly true; but this means nothing. Saint Peter was but a poor fisherman. Would he not be of a house worthy enough that we need not blush to have him in our family?

And, moreover, among those ancestors of famous names, will all have had an edifying conduct, in our view the only thing of which, up to a certain point, we could honor ourselves, although their merit has nothing to do with our own? Let one scrutinize the private life of those paladins, of those great barons, who robbed passers-by without scruple and who, in our days, would purely and simply be brought to the bar of the tribunals for their great exploits; of certain great lords, for whom the life of a villein was not worth a piece of game, since they would have a man hanged on account of a rabbit? All this was peccadilloes, which did not stain coats of arms. But to marry a person of inferior condition, to introduce plebeian blood into the family, was an unforgivable crime. Ah! whatever one may do, when the hour of departure sounds — and it sounds for the great as for the small — they will have to leave on Earth the embroidered garments, and the parchments will be of no use before the supreme judge, who pronounces this terrible sentence: He who exalts himself shall be humbled! If it were enough to descend from some great man in order to have one's place marked out in advance in heaven, one would buy it cheap, since at the cost of another's merit. Reincarnation gives a more meritorious nobility, the only one accepted by God, namely that of having animated a series of upright men. Happy are those who can lay at the feet of the Eternal the tribute of services rendered to Humanity in each of their existences, for the sum of merits will be proportional to the number of their existences. But to the one who avails himself only of the glory of his ancestors, God will say: Why did you not yourselves become illustrious?

— Another system might, apparently, reconcile the demands of self-love with the principle of non-reincarnation: it is that by which the father transmits to the child not only the body, but also a portion of his soul. In this way, if you descended from Charlemagne, your soul might have its stock in his. Very well! Let us see, however, to what consequence we arrive. By virtue of such a system, the soul of Charlemagne would have its stock in that of his father and, thus, little by little we would arrive at Adam. If the soul of Adam is the stock of all the souls of the human race, which transmit to their successors some portions of itself, the present souls would result from a fractioning that would surpass all homeopathic subdivisions. From this it would result that the soul of the common father should be more complete and more entire than that of his descendants. It would result, further, that God would have created only one soul, which subdivided itself to infinity and; thus, each one of us would not be a direct creation of God. Moreover, this system would leave an immense problem to be solved: that of special aptitudes. If the father transmitted to the child the principles of his soul, he would necessarily transmit to him his virtues and vices, his talents and his ineptitude, as he transmits to him certain congenital infirmities. How, then, to explain why virtuous men or men of genius have wicked or idiot children and vice versa? Why would a lineage be mingled with the good and the bad? Say, on the contrary, that each soul is individual, that it has its own and independent existence, that it progresses, by virtue of its free will, through a series of corporeal existences, in each of which it acquires something good and leaves behind something bad, until it has attained perfection, and everything is explained, everything conforms to reason, to the justice of God, even to the profit of self-love.

— Mr. Salgues (of Angers), of whom we spoke in our previous issue, is not a partisan of reincarnation.

[see Letters of Mr. Salgues.] After the appearance of The Spirits'

Book he wrote us a long letter, in which he combated this doctrine with arguments based on its incompatibility with the bonds of family.

In this letter, dated September 18, 1857, he gives us his genealogy, which goes back, without interruption, to the Carolingians, and asks what will become of this glorious filiation with the mixture of Spirits through reincarnation.

From it we extract the following passage:

“But, then, what would genealogical tables serve for? I have mine, complete, regular, on one side, from the ancestors of Charlemagne and, on the other, from the daughter of the emir Muza, one of the Abbasid descendants of Muhammad, tenth generation, through her marriage with Garcia, prince of Navarre, father, with her, of Garcia Ximenes, king of Navarre; and, finally, this genealogy continued, by reason of alliances, through sovereigns of nearly all the courts of Europe, until the time of Alphonse VI, king of Castile, then into the houses of Comminges, of Lascaris Vintimille, of Montmorency, of Turenne and, finally, of the counts and lords Palhasse of Salgues, in Languedoc.

All this can be verified in the Art of Verifying Dates L’Art de vérifier les dates - Google Books, the Benedictines of Saint-Maur, in the Dictionary of the Nobility of France Dictionnaire de la noblesse de France - Google Books, in the Armorial - Google Books, in Father Anselme, Noreri, etc.

But if we are bound to our parents only by the carnal matter, which our Spirit received, are there not everywhere gaps and notable breaks of continuity? It is a path traced in the sand that loses itself in thousands of directions. Let it then be permitted us to believe that, if the Spirit is not transmitted, the soul is to man what the aroma is to the flower. Now, Swedenborg does he not say in the Arcana that nothing is lost in Nature? and that the aroma of flowers reproduces new flowers in other regions, beyond that from whence it came? It is, then, through the soul, which is not Spirit, that perhaps there existed a semi-spiritual chain of generations. If it had pleased my Spirit to skip eight or ten generations from time to time, where would I recognize my ancestors?”

As one sees, Mr. Salgues clings only to the provenance of the body. But how to reconcile the relations of Spirit to Spirit with the non-pre-existence of the soul? If, in this filiation, there were necessary relations between them, how would the descendant of so many sovereigns be today a simple Angevin landowner? In the eyes of the world would it not be a retrogradation? We do not call into doubt the authenticity of his genealogy, and we congratulate him upon it, since it gives him pleasure, but we shall say that we esteem him more for his personal virtues than for those of his ancestors. The authority of Swedenborg is here very contestable, when he attributes to the aroma the reproduction of flowers. This essential, volatile oil, which gives it the aroma, never had the reproductive faculty, which resides solely in the pollen. The comparison lacks exactness, because if the soul is only distinguished, by its perfume, over the soul that succeeds it, it does not create it; yet, it should transmit to it its own qualities and, on this hypothesis, we do not see why the descendant of Charlemagne would not have filled the world with the brilliance of his actions, while Napoleon would rest only upon a vulgar soul. That one should say that Napoleon descends from Charlemagne or, better still, that he was Charlemagne, who came in the nineteenth century to continue the work begun in the eighth, is understandable; but, with the principle of the uniqueness of existence nothing binds Charlemagne to his descendants, except this aroma, transmitted little by little over uncreated souls. And, then, how to explain why, among his descendants, there were so many null and unworthy men, and why Napoleon is a greater genius than his obscure ancestors? Let them do what they will: without reincarnation we collide at every step against insoluble difficulties, which only the pre-existence of the soul resolves, in a manner at once simple, logical and complete, since it gives the reason for everything. Another question is the known fact that families become debased and degenerate when alliances do not depart from the direct line. It happens with human races the same as with animal races. Why, then, the necessity of crossings?

What becomes of the unity of the stock? Is there not here a mixture of Spirits, an intrusion of Spirits foreign to the family? One day we shall treat this grave question with all the developments it admits of. [see Moral Heredity.]