Review of the Press: Reincarnation – Preexistence.

— In a communication entitled: Spiritism and contemporary literature, published in the latest issue of the Spiritist Review, the Spirit of Mr. Allan Kardec rejoiced at seeing literature and Science enter more openly into the paths of philosophical Spiritism. Indeed, some authors accept a certain number of our convictions and popularize them in their writings; others make use of our teachings as of a fertile source for new situations, for scenes capable of interesting their readers. Some, finally, entirely convinced, do not fear to consecrate to the popularization of our principles their profound erudition and their remarkable talent as writers. Among these last, we shall cite Mr. Victor Tournier, already known to the Spiritist world through the publication of a pamphlet entitled: Spiritism before reason, [1] whose object is to demonstrate, by the sole power of reasoning, the reality of our teachings. – Pursuing his work with an indefatigable activity, Mr. Victor Tournier publishes a series of articles in the newspaper Fraternité, of Carcassonne, in which the philosophical question is treated from the Spiritist point of view with a clarity of conception and a lucidity of expression beyond all praise. Several of these articles have already appeared, and Mr. Tournier has been so kind as to have some of them reach our hands. When the entire series has been published, the author intends to coordinate it and to compose from it a pamphlet which will certainly find its place in the library of all Spiritists desirous of possessing truly serious works, where the Doctrine is submitted to the irrefutable control of logic and reason. We take today from the Fraternité one of these articles which, under the title: Preexistence – Reincarnation, gathers in a few interesting pages the opinions expressed in favor of this principle by philosophers and men of letters whose authority could not be contested. We cite textually the first part of this work, the end of which we shall publish in the next issue:

— “It is a very ancient opinion that souls, on leaving this world, go to the nether regions, and that from there they return to Earth, coming back to life after having passed through death. – …It seems to me, too, Cebes, that nothing can be opposed to these truths, and that we are not mistaken when we receive them; for it is certain that there is a return to life; that the living are born from the dead; that the souls of the dead exist, and that virtuous souls are better and the wicked ones worse.” (Socrates, in the Phaedo). It is worthy of note that almost all the ancient peoples believed in the preexistence of the soul and in its reincarnation. The spiritualist philosophers regarded rebirth as a consequence of immortality; for them, these two truths were interdependent, the one not being able to be denied without denying the other. It is not known for certain whether Pythagoras received this doctrine from the Egyptians, the Hindus, or the Gauls, our fathers. If he traveled among all these peoples, he found it there equally, since it was common to them. “This very soil that we inhabit today, says Jean Reynaud, was peopled before us by a community of heroes, all accustomed to regard themselves as having traversed the Universe from a remote time, before their present incarnation, thus founding the hope of their immortality upon the conviction of their preexistence.”

“And the poet Lucan: “According to the druids, the shades do not descend into the silent dwellings of Erebus, into the pale realms of the god of the abyss. The same Spirit animates a new body in another sphere. Death (if your hymns are true) is the midpoint of a long life”.

“This belief was so strongly rooted among our fathers that they would lend one another sums payable in another world, certain as they were of meeting and recognizing each other there.

“If the Hebrews never adopted it in so general and so complete a manner, they nevertheless did not remain strangers to it. It is known that the Pharisees, the sect that boasted of being the most orthodox, believed in an eternal damnation for the wicked and in a return to life for the good. This was the opposite of the religion of Shinto, the most ancient of Japan, which, according to Kempfer, cited by Boulanger, teaches that only the wicked return to life to expiate their crimes. “Certain passages of the Bible justify the doctrine of the Pharisees and express in a very clear manner the belief in reincarnation. I could cite some of them, but I content myself with the two following ones:

“– It is the Lord who takes away and who gives life; who leads to the nether regions and who draws back from them.” (I Kings, chapter II, v. 6.) [2] That is, who makes one die and makes one live again.

“It is known that one of the devices of Hebrew poetry was to repeat, in different terms, in the second part of the strophe, the thought already expressed in the first part. Here, to take away life corresponds, evidently, to leading to the nether regions, and to give life to drawing back from them. Moreover, in the Bible, as in Plato and among all the ancients, the nether regions are synonymous with the tomb, with death; to draw back from the nether regions signifies to make one live again in this world, to make one be reborn. “Those of your people who were put to death shall live again, those who were slain in the midst of me shall rise.” (Isaiah, chapter XXVI, v. 19.)

“The modern Jews, among whom this belief has been preserved, called gilgul, rolling, the passage of the soul from one body to another.

“If Christ, who doubtless foresaw all the divisions that would give rise to the imposed dogmas and all the blood they would cause to be shed, gave to his disciples no law other than the love of God and of one's neighbor, he nonetheless manifested no less, on many occasions, his belief in reincarnation. – “13. For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John; – 14. and if you are willing to understand what I tell you, he is himself the Elijah who was to come. – 15. – Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” (Saint Matthew, chapter XI.) “Here, it is not a question of Elijah descended from heaven – for we know that John the Baptist was the son of Zacharias and Elizabeth, cousin of Mary – but of Elijah reincarnated.

“1. As Jesus was passing by, he saw a man blind from birth. – 2. And his disciples asked: Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (Saint John, chapter IX.)

“Why do the disciples ask Jesus, as a very natural thing, whether it is because of his sin that this man is blind? – It is because the disciples and Jesus were convinced that the man could have sinned before being born and, consequently, that he had already lived. Is it possible to give another explanation?

“How can one be astonished, since the erudite writers assure us that the belief in the plurality of existences was, generally speaking, widespread among the Christians of the first centuries? – Besides, there always have been and there will still be among them, as among the Jews, men who profess it without thereby abandoning their orthodoxy.

“While this line of conduct prevailed in the Church and ended with the condemnation of Origen, whose providential aptness we have seen, those who were placed in the number of the saints did not fail to uphold the plurality of existences and the unreality of eternal damnation. It is Saint Clement of Alexandria who teaches the universal redemption of all men through Christ the Savior; he is indignant against the opinion that benefits with this redemption none but the privileged; and he says that, in creating men, God arranged everything, as a whole and in the details, with a view to the general salvation. (Stromat., book VII. Oxford, 1715.) Then, it is Saint Gregory of Nyssa who tells us that there is a necessity of nature for the immortal soul to be healed and purified, and when it was not so in its terrestrial life, the cure is effected in the future and subsequent lives. Here is the plurality of existences taught clearly and in formal terms. Even in our own days, we rediscover preexistence and, therefore, reincarnation, approved in the pastoral letter of a bishop of France, Monseigneur de Montal, bishop of Chartres, concerning the deniers of original sin, to whom he opposes the permitted belief in the prior lives of the soul. This pastoral letter is from the year 1843. (A. Pezzani, Plurality of the existences of the soul.) “Here are the very words of bishop Montal. I take them from the issue of October 27, 1864 of the newspaper Avenir. “Since the Church does not forbid us to believe in the preexistence of souls, who can know what may have taken place in the most remote ages, among the intelligences?”

“In a letter to Mr. Balathier, published in the newspaper Petite Presse of September 20, 1868, of which I shall speak again, Mr. Ponson du Terrail relates that at his estate of the Charmettes, where he resides, he had as a guest the curate of his village. The latter showed himself much surprised to hear his host affirm to him that he remembered having lived in the time of Henri IV and having known that king particularly; that he believed that we had already lived and that we would live again. But, in the end, says the author, he confessed to me that the Christian beliefs do not exclude this opinion, and he let me go on my way.” “Even during the shadows of the Middle Ages, an epoch in which, according to the expression of Michelet, Satan grew to such a degree that he darkened the world, the belief in reincarnation was not completely stifled. I find a proof of this in the Divine Comedy, where Dante, who then shared this opinion of the people, places the emperor Trajan in paradise. The latter, after having spent five hundred years in hell, came out of it through the virtue of the prayers of Saint Gregory the Great. But, a thing worthy of attention, he did not go directly to heaven; he took up again a body on Earth – torno all'ossa – and only after having tarried some time in that body – in che fu poco – was he admitted into the number of the elect. “Among the philosophers and the wise men this idea never ceased to have representatives. The illustrious Franklin, one of the men who most honored Humanity by genius and by wisdom, composed, himself, the following epitaph, which bears witness to his faith in reincarnation:

“Here lies, given over to the worms, the body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book whose leaves have been torn out, and whose title and gilding have faded. But the work will not be lost on this account, for, as I believe, it will reappear in a new and better edition, revised and corrected by the author.” [v. Epitaph of Benjamin Franklin]

“In a letter to Mrs. von Stein, Goethe exclaims: “Why has destiny bound us so closely? Ah! in times past you were my sister or my wife!”

“The great English chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, in a work entitled: The last days of a philosopher, applies himself to demonstrating the plurality of the existences of the soul and its successive incarnations. “Human existence, he says, may be regarded as the type of an infinite and immortal life, and its successive composition of sleeps and of dreams could certainly offer us an approximate image of the succession of births and of deaths of which eternal life is composed.” “Charles Fourier was so convinced that we are reborn on Earth that one finds in his work the following sentence: “He who was a wicked rich man may return to beg at the gate of the castle of which he was the owner”.

“Today, the belief in the plurality of existences is almost general among the great writers. I think it superfluous to make citations that are found everywhere and that would make me exceed the frame within which I must confine myself. Mr. Chaseray said in his Conferences on the soul: [3] “I feel difficulty in the choice of citations to show that the faith in a series of existences, some prior, others posterior to the present life, grows and imposes itself each day more upon enlightened spirits”. “It was not only Proudhon who felt himself drawn toward this side. The following passage, from a letter addressed by the great demolisher to Mr. Villiaumé, on July 13, 1857, is a proof of this. He says: “Thinking of this, I ask myself whether I am not dragging the chain of some great culprit, condemned in a prior existence, as Jean Reynaud teaches!”

“As one sees, it is the old metempsychosis that reappears and tends to become the religion of Humanity. It has all the more chances of triumphing this time, in that it has divested itself of the filth that caused it to be abandoned: – Today one no longer believes that the human soul can retrograde and enter into the body of an animal. The ancients did not have the sentiment of the continual progress of the being and of the organization that presides over the work of God: this is why they fell into this gross error. “In a forthcoming article, we shall submit this doctrine to the control of reason.”

V. Tournier.

[Review of December.]

Review of the Press.

REINCARNATION – PREEXISTENCE.

(Second article. – See the Review of November 1869.)

The idea of reincarnation is so natural that, were it not for the tyranny exercised over us by the habit of the contrary ideas that education has imposed on us from infancy, we would accept it easily. “It is no more astonishing to be born twice than once; everything is resurrection in Nature.” These words which Voltaire, (See the Princess of Babylon,) puts into the mouth of the phoenix, at the moment when it is reborn from its own ashes, do they not seem to you, in their simplicity and in their energetic concision, the very expression of truth?

How many problems in our destiny, impossible to resolve in a satisfactory manner by any other doctrine, and to which this one gives us the rational solution! How many obscurities it clarifies! How many difficulties it removes!

“In truth, says Montaigne, I find that I am so far from Epaminondas that I would willingly surpass Plutarch; and I would say that there is no more distance from the latter to that man, than there is no distance from such a man to such an animal; and that there are as many degrees of spirits as the number of fathoms that exist from here up to the sky.”

In fact, what a distance between the stupid Hottentot and the intelligent European! between Dumolard and Socrates!

How to explain this inequality in intellectual and moral development, which in certain cases one would be tempted to call an inequality of Nature, if one does not admit between the inferior spirit and the superior spirit the same relation that exists between the child and the grown man, and at times between man and the angel? If one does not admit that the latter has lived longer than the former and was able to progress through a greater number of successive lives? Will they say that it is an effect of the difference of physical organization and of education? To this we would reply that these causes can explain, at most, the apparent superiorities, but not the real ones.

The organ serves the faculty more or less well, but does not give it; we have demonstrated this countless times. In such wise that a very developed spirit, in a poorly conformed body, may make a very ordinary man, whereas a relatively less advanced spirit, served by good organs, will make a man who will be in appearance much superior to him. But this false superiority, which considers only the faculty of expression, and not the power of thinking, will deceive only the superficial observer, but will not deceive the penetrating mind. “There is no doubt, says J. Simon, that there exist choice spirits whose worth will always remain unknown, for want of the faculty of expression. One sees these souls full of ideas, whom the common crowd despises and who pass for inferior and devoid of reason, although the penetrating minds sometimes capture in their language the traits of an incomparable force. One asks oneself, thinking of them, whether one is not in the presence of a genius enchanted under a form that prevents it from manifesting itself in its plenitude and in its splendor.” Moreover, is it not known that Socrates had received from Nature a body whose impulses would have led him to debauchery, and that the son of Sophroniscus [4] made of him a wise man, a model for men, instead of the libertine that Nature seemed to wish to make?

As for education, do we not have daily before our eyes the proof that its influence is great? Nonetheless, it does not go so far as to change completely the nature of man, making of a scoundrel a Monthyon prize-winner and of an idiot a Newton.

How many honest persons who never received lessons from anyone! how many have found themselves obliged to combat pernicious teachings! and how many infamous knaves have been educated with all imaginable care! Was Commodus not the son and disciple of Marcus Aurelius? and ought we to credit to the lessons of the Jesuits, masters of Voltaire, the independence of the disciple's thought, his horror of intolerance and of religious fanaticism, and his contempt for superstitions? Who was the preceptor of the woodcutter Lincoln, of his successor, the tailor Johnson, and of his illustrious compatriot, the blacksmith Elihu Burrit, the promoter of the society of universal peace?

Are there not men of whom one can say that they remember, more than they learn? Mozart, for example, is born a great musician; Pascal, at nine years of age and without ever having read a book of mathematics, arrives, alone and without the aid of any master, at the thirty-second proposition of Euclid and invents geometry!

In 1868 the French newspapers diverted us, according to an English journal of Medicine – Quarterly – with a very strange phenomenon. It is a little girl whose history Dr. Hun made known. Until the age of three she was mute, not even managing to pronounce the words papa and mama. Then, from one hour to the next she began to speak with an extraordinary loquacity, but in an unknown tongue that bore no relation to English. And what is most surprising is that she refuses to speak this latter language, the only one, however, that is spoken to her, obliging those with whom she lives, her brother, for example, a little older than she, to learn hers, in which are found some words of French, although, according to the parents, no one had ever pronounced them before her [v. Phenomenon of linguistics]. How to explain this fact otherwise than by the remembrance of a language that this child would have spoken in a prior existence? – It is true that one can deny the case. But the little girl exists; it is a serious newspaper, a journal of Medicine that relates it, and denial is a very convenient means, to which, perhaps, one resorts too frequently. In many cases it is the equivalent of the devil, that Deus ex machina, which always arrives at the right moment to explain everything and to dispense with study. Moreover, there are men who affirm that they have preserved the remembrance of other existences. This is more surprising. The letter of Mr. Ponson du Terrail, of which I already spoke before, is a proof of this. One can also say that he meant to play a joke. But, what will they not say?

The poet Méry likewise affirmed that he remembered having lived successively in Rome, in the time of Augustus, and in India, where he had been a Brahmin priest [v. Death of Joseph Méry]. Would this too have been a joke?

But what cannot be an anecdote is the following fact, of which I was a witness. I was at Pau, in the house of a relative. In the same room where I was, there was one of the daughters of my kinswoman, two years old, and the little son of the neighbor, a journeyman bookbinder, who was no more than three years old. The children were playing and I was not concerning myself with them when, suddenly, my attention was drawn to a singular altercation that took place between them. The little one was maintaining, irritated and flushed, against the little girl, who refused to believe him, that he remembered having been a soldier and having been killed. He gave details and cited the places. I thought I ought to intervene. I asked him who his father was at the time to which he referred. He answered that then his father was not his father: it was he who was the father. And as I insisted that he explain to me why, having been killed, he was alive again, and little, after having been big, he answered: “I know nothing about this; I was a soldier and they killed me; I was big and now I am little. It was God who willed it.” And he stamped his foot, enraged, because we refused to believe his words. The next day I wanted to take up with him the same conversation. He looked at me with an astonished air and understood nothing, as if I had spoken Greek to him.

How to suppose that a child of that age would wish to amuse himself on such a subject? Is it not more reasonable to think that the veil which conceals the past from us had been lifted for a few instants for him?

The remembrance of past existences, although very rare, is less so than one thinks; History furnishes us with several examples, and it is not impossible that, like me, some of my readers may already have had occasion to observe it.

I ask, now, after all these considerations and all these facts gathered together, to which we could add many others, whether they are not the legitimate and irresistible consequence of the reality of reincarnation, and whether it is not unsurprising that in all the epochs of History there have been elevated spirits who believed in it?

Moreover, when one reflects seriously, one becomes convinced not only that this belief is true, but that it is impossible for it to be otherwise.

If it is false, how to understand the justice of God? We recognize the absurdity of eternal penalties; but, even with temporary penalties and rewards, in order that they might be applied with precision, would it not be necessary – since there is not a single trial undergone by all under the same conditions of duration, with the same obstacles to overcome and difficulties to surmount – that each one should enter the lists armed with the same faculties and carrying the same weight? – Well then, we all know that it is not so. Need we demonstrate it? Thus, the only means of escaping the difficulty is to recognize the veracity of this idea so natural and so just, that of the trials being multiple; that those whom we see enter the lists with greater faculties are old wrestlers who acquired them through prior efforts, while those who enter them with lesser faculties are debutants who have no right to envy the riches of their elder brothers, since their acquisition depends only on themselves, provided they follow their example. As for the various social positions, they are nothing but diverse trials to which the spirit is submitted, according to need, and through which we pass alternately, now as poor, now as rich, now powerful, now weak, now masters, now slaves, now endowed with a physical organization which, leaving to our faculties all their impulse, permits us to play a brilliant role on the stage of the world; or, on the contrary, constrained by rebellious organs and condemned to an impotence and to an inferiority all the more painful in that we can, sometimes, have the sentiment of our real superiority. Moreover, heaven cannot be a closed place, which God opens or closes to us at his good pleasure; we cannot conceive of it except as a superior state of the soul, which it depends on us to attain, by purifying ourselves of our stains, arriving at that intellectual and moral level which is above human nature and which we designate under the name of angelic nature.

Yes, we are, to make use of an expression of Dante, the caterpillar destined to form the angelic butterfly in its flight toward justice, without anything being able to oppose obstacles to it!

However, if we wish to reflect on the efforts that this requires, I shall not say the annihilation, but only the diminution of the least of our defects, and the growth, not the acquisition, of the least of our qualities, we shall be able to understand how many existences are necessary to fill the distance that separates the Hottentot, a spirit perhaps at the beginning of Humanity, from Socrates, an angel doubtless descended from the heavens to serve us as a model and guide. Effort, this is the law, is the indispensable condition of the progress of the Spirit; and, in the inferior phases of its existence, this necessary effort could not be produced without reincarnations. I shall demonstrate it in the following article, in treating of the nature of the future penalties and rewards.

In the meantime, I believe I may close this article by saying that the only thing that ought to occupy us on this Earth, since it is a place of trial, is to make the best possible use of the position in which we have been placed by him who, better than we, knows what we have need of and can have no preferences for any of us. “Remember, says the slave Epictetus, to perform with care the role that the sovereign master has imposed: short, if it is short, long, if it is long. If he has given you the personality of a beggar, see to discharging it well; be lame [crippled], prince or plebeian, if he so willed it. Your business is to play your role well, and his to choose it.” Victor Tournier.

[1]

Pamphlet in-12, price: 1 fr. – Spiritist Bookshop, 7, rue de Lille, Paris. [Le spiritisme devant la raison - Google Books.] (See the Spiritist Review of March 1868.)

[2]

[In some older versions of the Bible the books 1 and 2 of Samuel are called 1 and 2 Kings, and 3 and 4 correspond to 1 Kings and 2 Kings; therefore, the citation refers to the 1st Book of Samuel, chapter 2, v. 6.]

[3] Conferences on the soul, [Conférences sur l'âme - Google Books] by Mr. Chaseray, 1868. Pamphlet in-12; price: 1 fr. 50, postpaid 1 fr.

Spiritist Bookshop, 7, rue de Lille.

[4] [Sophroniscus, the father of Socrates, a character in the dialogues of Plato.]