FOOTNOTES:
[17] Milton, in his Paradise Lost, says that before the fall of our first parents, perpetual spring reigned upon the Earth, but that as soon as Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, angels, with flaming swords, were sent from Heaven to incline the poles of the Earth more than 20 degrees. It is well for us that the angels did not cause them to incline farther, or our seasons would have been still shorter and more defective. Fourier pretends that it would be possible for humanity to produce an effect sufficiently great to set the globe straight upon its axis, and thus restore the equality of the seasons, and perpetual spring. This philosopher forgot to indicate one thing only, the mechanical means by which man is to produce this effect. This theory reminds us of the drowning man who fancied he could save himself by catching hold of his own hair, while he was struggling in the water.
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH.
THAT WHICH HAS TAKEN PLACE UPON THE EARTH WITH REGARD TO THE CREATION OF ORGANIZED BEINGS HAS PROBABLY ALSO TAKEN PLACE IN THE OTHER PLANETS.—THE SUCCESSIVE ORDER OF THE APPEARANCE OF LIVING BEINGS ON OUR GLOBE.—THIS SAME SUCCESSION HAS PROBABLY TAKEN PLACE IN EACH OF THE PLANETS.—PLANETARY MAN.—THE PLANETARY, LIKE THE TERRESTRIAL MAN, IS TRANSFORMED, AFTER DEATH, INTO A SUPERHUMAN BEING, AND PASSES INTO THE ETHER.
WE believe, with M. Camille Flammarion, that organized beings exist in all the planets. But are these beings who live in the distant worlds accompanied, like terrestrial man, by a superior type? This is the subject which we now propose to examine. In the absence of observation analogy is our only means of investigation, and, guided by analogy, we must admit that the processes which have taken place upon the earth, since the epoch of its formation, must have similarly taken place upon all the other planets, the earth's congeners.
We are now perfectly acquainted with the manner in which the vegetable and animal creations have appeared, and succeeded each other upon our globe since its origin. At first the earth was simply a collection of gas, and burning vapour which revolved round the sun. This mass of gas and vapour grew cold by degrees in its passage through space, and first becoming liquid, afterwards assumed the consistency of paste, and ultimately became solid, by a gradual process of refrigeration. Consolidation began on the surface, because the circumference of a sphere is more exposed than the remainder of the mass to refrigerating influences. Then the water and the vapours which still flowed upon the consolidated globe became condensed, and, falling in burning showers upon the hard soil, they formed the first seas.
The proof that the earth's primitive condition was like to a liquid or half paste, is, that if we take a plastic sphere, for instance a slightly fluid ball of quicksilver, and make it turn rapidly upon its axis, we observe that it swells out in the middle, and becomes flat at the two poles, or the extremities of the axis; this is the effect of the centrifugal force engendered by the rotatory motion. Now the earth is depressed at the poles, and slightly swelled out at the equator.
The other planets must have been formed by the same process as the earth. They were, no doubt, composed of a collection of gas and vapours, which became liquid, pasty, and eventually solid, by a process of refrigeration. This process, taking effect especially upon their surface, they began to put forth a skin, or exterior and solid covering, which was the soil of the planet. On this resisting soil fell the liquids resulting from the condensation of the water vapour, and thus the first seas of the planets were formed.
We would remind those who doubt the correctness of this theory that the poles of the globe of Saturn and that of Jupiter are much more flat than those of the Earth; which is explained by the greater velocity of the rotation of each upon its axis. Our days are 24 hours long, whereas those of Jupiter and Saturn are only 10 hours. Greater rapidity of rotation produces a correspondingly increased depression at the extremities of the axis. This geometrical result demonstrates the justice of the assimilation in their respective origin which we maintain between the Earth and the other planets.
In the warm waters of the basin of the seas the first living beings which existed upon our globe appeared. Animal life commenced in the waters, in the primitive forms of zoophytes and mollusca, as we know, because zoophytes and mollusca, with the addition of a few articulates, composed the animal remains found in the transition strata which come after the primary formations. The first vegetables are found in the same transition strata, they are mosses, algæ, and ferns.
When the earth had become somewhat cooler, phanerogamous vegetables appeared upon the continents. Numerous vegetable species were simultaneously created, for the flora of the secondary formations is extremely rich and varied.
It was the same in the case of animals. So the zoophytes, mollusca, and fish which existed in the transition period succeeded reptiles, in the secondary formation, which inhabited both land and sea. At this period appeared those monstrous saurian reptiles, whose formidable shapes, and colossal dimensions fill us with surprise and almost with dismay. Then the gigantic mosasaurus ravaged the seas, the terrible ichthyosaurus spread terror among the inhabitants of the waters, and the gigantic iguanodon laid waste the forests. The secondary formation, which is filled with their remains, shows us that at that period reptiles held the first rank in creation.
At a later date, the atmosphere having become purer, birds began to traverse the air. In the tertiary deposit we find the remains of several kinds of birds, and these remains, which do not exist in the earlier formations, sufficiently prove that it was in the tertiary period that birds made their first appearance upon the terrestrial globe.
Still later, at a more advanced period of the tertiary epoch, mammifers appear upon the scene. We must observe that these animal species do not replace each other, that the one does not exclude the other. Several of the ancient animal species continue to exist after the appearance of entirely novel kinds. We might quote as instances whole groups of animals, such as the lingulæ (mollusca), the coral (zoophyte) among animals, and among vegetables, the algæ, ferns, and lycopodes, which appeared on our globe in the earliest period of the reign of organization, and have never ceased to exist. It was not until the last epoch in the history of the Earth, during the quaternary epoch, that man appeared, the highest product of living creation, the ultimate term of organic, intellectual, and moral progress, the crowning upon our earth of the visible edifice of nature.
At present, man lives together with the animals which began to exist during the quaternary epoch, and a great number of other kinds of mammifers which were created during the tertiary epoch.
The various phases of the development of the animal and vegetable kingdoms on our globe, these perfected organized species each succeeding the other, and finally reaching the superior type which we call man, must, in our opinion, have been produced in the selfsame order, upon the other planets of our solar world. M. Flammarion proves, in the work which we have already quoted, that the physical and climatological constitution of the planets is similar to that of our globe. There is therefore no reason why things should have taken place otherwise in Mercury, Jupiter, or Venus, than in the Earth, in respect to the successive order of the creation and appearance of living beings, and, in our belief a precisely similar successive appearance of vegetables and animals, has taken place in these planets. The plants and animals of Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, &c., were certainly not identical with those species which have had existence on the Earth, and perhaps no resemblance could be traced between them, but all, in their successive appearance, obeyed the principle of progress and perfecting. Life, commencing in the burning waves of the primitive seas, subsequently manifested itself upon the continents. Animals of aërial organization have lived upon these continents, their species have by degrees reached the perfection of their type, at length, and finally, a creature appeared in these planets more complete, superior in organization, intelligence, and sensibility to all the animal creation which formed the population of each particular globe.
This superior being, this last step of the ascending scale of living creation proper to the planetary worlds, the corresponding analogous creature to terrestrial man, we shall take leave to call planetary man.
In all the planets, then, there exist men, as on the earth, just as there exist animals which are inferior to that noble and privileged type.
According to the views which we have explained at the commencement of this work, terrestrial man undergoes, after his death, a glorious metamorphosis. Leaving his miserable material covering here below, his soul springs upward into space, and becomes incarnate in a new being, whose type is infinitely superior, by reason of its moral perfection, to that of our poor humanity. He becomes that which we have called the superhuman being. If this be true of the terrestrial man, it must be equally true of the planetary man. So that the superhuman being must proceed, not only from the earth, but from all the other planets.
Superhuman beings come from the human souls who have lived either upon the Earth, or upon Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, &c. And precisely as the superhuman being, who comes from the Earth passes into the surrounding ether, so the planetary man, leaving Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, &c., passes into the ether, which surrounds his own planet, becomes incarnate in a superhuman being, and lives in the ethereal plains adjoining the planet which he has quitted.
All these superhuman beings float in the clouds of ether which, in the case of every planet, succeed to its atmosphere.
Thus, the principles upon which we have based terrestrial humanity, are general, and apply to all planetary humanity. Not from the Earth only do those souls proceed who are incarnate in new creatures in the bosom of the ethereal spaces, these souls proceed from all the globes which, together with the Earth, form the attendant court of the royal Sun.
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH.
PROOFS OF THE PLURALITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCES, AND OF RE-INCARNATIONS.—APART FROM THIS DOCTRINE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO EXPLAIN THE PRESENCE OF MAN UPON THE EARTH, THE SAD AND UNEQUAL CONDITIONS OF HUMAN LIFE, AND THE FATE OF CHILDREN WHO DIE IN INFANCY.
THE doctrine of the plurality of existences, and of re-incarnations, which bind together, like so many links of the same chain, all living creatures, from the most minute animal, even to those blessed beings to whom it is given to behold God in His glory; which gives brethren in the different planets to terrestrial humanity; which makes of the inhabitants of our globe a nation of the universe; which sees but one family in all the population of the worlds—a planetary family—whose every member may raise himself by his merits and his struggles, in the hierarchy of happiness, is supported by so many proofs. So many, indeed, that we are puzzled to choose among all the methods of demonstration which offer themselves in aid of it. To enumerate them all would unduly enlarge the dimensions of this work, so that we shall content ourselves with bringing forward the most striking.
Why are we on the earth? We did not ask to be placed there, we did not express a wish to be born. If we had been consulted, we should probably have objected to coming into this world at all, or at least we should have wished to appear there at some other epoch. We should probably have asked to be permitted to sojourn in some other planet than the Earth. Our globe is, indeed, a very disagreeable habitation. In consequence of its inclination on its axis, climate is very unpleasantly distributed. Either we must succumb to cold, if we are not artificially protected against it, or we must be terribly incommoded with heat. Regarded from the moral point of view, the conditions of humanity are very sad. Evil predominates in the world; vice is held almost everywhere in honour, and virtue is so ill-treated, that to be honest is, in this life, to be tolerably certain of evil fortune. Our affections are causes of anguish and tears. If, for a while, we enjoy the happiness of paternity, of love, of friendship, it is only to see the objects of our love torn from us by death, or separated from us by the accidents of a miserable life. The organs given us to be exercised in this life are heavy, coarse, subject to maladies. We are nailed to the earth, and our heavy mass can be moved only by fatiguing exertion. If there are men of powerful organization, gifted with a good constitution and robust health, how many are there who are infirm, idiots, deaf and dumb, blind from their birth, ricketty, and mad! My brother is handsome and well made, and I am ugly, feeble, ricketty, and hump-backed; nevertheless, we are both sons of the same mother. Some are born in opulence, others in the most hideous destitution. Why am I not a prince and a great lord, instead of being a poor toiler of the rebellious and ungrateful earth? Why was I born in Europe and in France, where, by means of art and civilization, life is rendered easy and endurable, instead of being born under the burning skies of the tropics, where, with a bestial snout, a black and oily skin, and woolly hair, I should have been exposed to the double torments of a deadly climate and social barbarism? Why is not one of the unfortunate African negroes in my place, comfortable and well off? We have done nothing, he and I, that our respective places on the earth should have been assigned to us. I have not merited the favour, he has not incurred the disgrace. What is the cause of this unequal division of frightful evils which fall heavily upon certain persons, and spare others? How have they who live in happy countries deserved this partiality of fate, while so many of their brethren are suffering and weeping in other regions of the world?
Certain men are endowed with all the gifts of the intellect; others, on the contrary, are devoid of intelligence, penetration, and memory. They stumble at every step in the difficult journey of life. Their narrow minds, their incomplete faculties, expose them to every kind of failure and misfortune. They cannot succeed in anything, and destiny seems to select them for the chosen victims of its most fatal blows. There are beings whose whole life, from their birth to their death, is a prolonged cry of suffering and despair. What crime have they committed? Why are they upon the earth? They have not asked to be born, and if they had been free, they would have entreated that this bitter cup might be removed from their lips. They are here below in spite of themselves, against their will. This is so true that some, in an excess of despair, sever the thread of their own life. They tear themselves away with their own hands from an existence which terrible suffering has rendered insupportable to them.
God would be unjust and wicked to impose so miserable a life upon beings who have done nothing to incur it, and who have not solicited it. But God is neither unjust nor wicked; the opposite qualities are the attribute of His perfect essence. Consequently, the presence of man on certain portions of the earth, and the unequal distribution of evil over our globe, are not to be explained. If any of my readers can show me a doctrine, a philosophy, a religion by which these difficulties can be resolved, I will tear up this book, and confess myself vanquished.
If, on the contrary, you admit the plurality of human existences and re-incarnations, that is to say the passage of the same soul into several different bodies, everything is wonderfully easily explained. Our presence in certain portions of the globe is no longer the effect of a caprice of fate, or the result of chance; it is simply a station of the long journey which we are taking throughout the worlds. Previous to our birth in this world we have lived either in the condition of superior animals, or that of man. Our actual existence is only the consequence of another, whether it be that we bear within ourselves the soul of a superior animal, which we must purify, perfect, and ennoble, during our sojourn on earth; or that, having already fulfilled an imperfect and evil existence, we are condemned to re-commence it under new obligations. In the latter case, the career of the man re-commences, because his soul is not yet sufficiently pure to rise to the rank of a superhuman being.
Our sojourn upon earth is then only a kind of trial, imposed upon us by nature, during which we must refine our souls, free them from earthly bonds, rid them of the defects which weigh them down, and hinder them from rising, in radiance, towards the ethereal spheres. Every ill-fulfilled human existence has to be recommenced. Thus, the school-boy who has worked hard, who has studied well, goes into a higher class at the end of the year; but if he has made no progress in his studies, he must go through his class again. Perverse men are, in our opinion, vicious beings who have had a previous life, and are obliged to live it over again. They must go through it again and again, until the day comes when their souls shall be fit to take higher rank in the hierarchy of creatures, that is to say, until they shall be fit to pass, after their death, into the condition of superhuman beings.
In proportion as the cause of our existence here below is obscure and even inexplicable according to ordinary ideas, it is simple and luminous in the light of the doctrine of the plurality of existences. We must add that this doctrine is conformable to the justice of God. In making earthly life a trial for man, God is equitable and good, like an earthly father. Is it not better to subject a soul to a trial which may begin over again if it have an unfortunate result, than to bind it to one condition, failure in which must involve the condemnation of the guilty person? It is better to offer the possibility of rehabilitation by his own efforts, by his personal struggles, to a fallen creature, than to utterly crush him, stained by his crimes and imperfections. The justice and the goodness of God are manifest in this paternal arrangement, much more than in the severe jurisdiction which would irretrievably condemn a soul after one single trial had resulted unfavourably.
If human life be a trial, if it be a period during which we are preparing for a new and happier existence, there is no need to look beyond that truth for an explanation of why we are on the earth, why we are living to-day rather than to-morrow, and in one latitude of our globe rather than in another; there is no need to ask why we are born in the earth, and not in Mercury, Saturn, or Mars. Whether we are living now, or are to live later, whether we have been born in the earth, in Mercury, or in Mars, whether we inhabit Europe or Africa,—all these things are utterly unimportant to our destiny. We are undergoing a period of preparation indispensably necessary to be accomplished before we pass into the superhuman condition; and the place, the moment of our transit, the country in which we sojourn, the planet which is assigned to us as the scene of this trial, are without any importance in the part which we have to play in accordance with the intentions of nature. We are making an immense journey through the worlds, and a short sojourn on the Earth makes a part of our vast itinerary. Whatever may be the corner of the universe in which we find ourselves we cannot escape the trial imposed upon us by God, a trial by strife and suffering, a period of moral and physical pain to which we must submit before we can be promoted in the hierarchy of creatures. The time, the place, the good or evil moral conditions ought therefore to be indifferent to us. What is needful for us is a brief sojourn on a planet in which this trial may be accomplished, and it may be accomplished on the Earth, or in Mars, or in Mercury, and on any spot of the Earth's surface one chooses to think of.
If, during the course of this trial, we meet with moral evil, if we see vice triumphant and virtue persecuted, if we see the innocent victims of the injustice, the cruelty, or the ignorance of man, we have no right to murmur against Providence, we have no right to utter maledictions against pain, to deplore the scandal of successful and triumphant crime, and of suffering and weeping virtue. We have no right to regret our bodily infirmities, the diseases which lay hold upon us on the Earth, and which afflict us all our lives, or to complain of the weakness of our minds, the decay of our faculties. All these conditions, which are inimical to earthly happiness, are a portion of the series of trials which we have to undergo here below. We ought to bless those evils, and be grateful to those sufferings, for they are the instruments of our eternal redemption, and the more piercing and bitter they are the sooner will come the hour of our deliverance, the happy moment when we shall leave this impure and filthy world which our feet have trodden for a while. Besides, justice will speedily be done. With brief delay the wicked shall be punished for his evil deeds by having to recommence a new existence here, while the good shall be elevated to the upper world, where a new, wide-ranging life awaits him, far more happy and more wise, in truer harmony with the aspirations of our nature than his previous and miserable existence here. Then we shall be born again, radiant and strong, with our memory, our feelings, and our liberty complete.
Thus difficulties vanish, and problems are solved: thus uncertainty vanishes away, and mysteries which no doctrine, no religion, no philosophy, could dissipate, and which almost made us doubt the justice of God, are cleared up. The doctrine of re-incarnations and prior existences explains everything, answers everything.
We pass on to one of the most interesting questions of the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, the question of children who have died in infancy. What becomes of children who die at a few days old, or at the age of eight or ten months, or at their birth? Until after all these periods the human soul remains quite undeveloped; it is in almost the same rudimentary state as at the hour of its birth. What, then, is the fate of young children after their death? The doctrine of the plurality of existences simplifies this question. It admits that when an infant dies before it has lived one year (the period of dentition), its soul remains upon the earth, and does not pass, like that of a grown man, into the state of a superhuman being. The soul of an infant a year old is still in a rudimentary condition, almost as much so as at the moment of its birth. The soul of a child who dies at that age has to begin life over again, disengaging itself from the little corpse, it incarnates itself in another newly-born body, and after this fresh incarnation, it begins a second life.
If the new incarnation does not last more than a year, there is no reason why the soul should not undergo a third incarnation in the body of a child, and so on until it shall have accomplished the period of admission to the conditions common to all.
It is impossible that the soul of a child, which is as yet undeveloped, which has added nothing to that which it has received, should be treated as perfected souls, purified by the experience of life, by physical and moral sufferings, who have used their sojourn upon earth as a period of preparation and training. An infant child cannot therefore be admitted to the super-terrestrial dwellings, he simply recommences an interrupted trial. The mortality of children between the day of their birth and the age of one year is so considerable, that nature must have reserved to herself the means of annulling this cause of disarrangement in the sequence and order of her operations.
This explanation of the destiny of young children is conformable to the economy which is observed in the operations of nature. Nature wills that nothing which is created should be lost. The soul of a criminal is evil, but it is a soul, it exists, and it is eternal: it must not be lost. But it must be corrected and perfected, which is done by means of the new existences to which nature consigns that imperfect soul, in order that it may enjoy the means of restoration. Thus the principle of the soul is preserved, and nothing is lost of that which was created. The soul of the child dying in infancy must not be lost either. A second incarnation in another child will permit it to resume the course of its evolution, accidentally interrupted by death. Thus the soul will be preserved, and nothing will be lost.
Chemistry, since Lavoisier's time, has brought to light a great truth: it is, that nothing of the elements of matter is lost; bodies change their form, but the material element, the simple body, is imperishable, indestructible, and always to be found intact, notwithstanding its numerous transformations. If it is true that in the material world nothing is lost, it is equally certain that neither is anything lost in the spiritual world; that only transformation takes place. Thus, nothing is lost, either of immaterial or material beings, and we may lay down this new principle of moral philosophy by the side of the principle of chemical philosophy established by the genius of Lavoisier.
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.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH.
A SUMMARY OF THE SYSTEM OF THE PLURALITY OF LIVES.
WE propose now to collect, within a few summary propositions, the principal features of the system of nature which we have defined.
1. The sun is the primary agent of life and organization.
2. In the primitive time of our globe, life began to appear in aquatic and aërial plants, as well as in zoophytes. The same order reproduces itself at present, in the point of departure, and in the development of life and of souls. The solar rays, falling on the earth, and into the waters, produce the formation of plants and that of zoophytes. The rays of the sun by depositing in the waters and on the earth, animated germs, emanating from the spiritualized beings who inhabit the sun, bring about the birth of plants and zoophytes.
3. Plants and zoophytes are endowed with sensation. They enclose an animal germ, just as a seed encloses an embryo.
4. The animal germ contained in the plant and in the zoophyte, passes, at the death of each animal, into the body of the animal which comes next to it in the ascending scale of organic perfection. From the zoophyte the animated germ passes into the mollusc, from thence into the articulated animal, the fish, or the reptile. From the body of the reptile, it passes into that of the bird, and then into the mammifers.
In the inferior beings, for instance zoophytes, several animated germs may be united to form the soul of a single being of a superior order.
5. In passing through the entire series of animals, this rudimentary soul becomes perfected and acquires the beginnings of faculties. Conscience, will, and judgment succeed to sensation. When the soul has attained the body of a mammifer, it has acquired a certain number of faculties. In addition to feeling, it has the basis of reason, i.e., the principle of causation. From the body of a mammiferous animal belonging to the superior species, the soul passes into the body of a newly-born infant.
6. The child is born without memory, like the superior animal whence it has proceeded. At a year old it acquires this faculty, and gradually obtains others; imagination and thought develop themselves, reason grows strong, memory becomes firm and extensive.
7. If the child dies before the age of twelve months, his soul, still very imperfect, and devoid of active faculties, passes into the body of another newly-born child, and recommences a new existence.
8. When a man dies, his body remains upon the earth, his soul rises through the atmosphere to the ether which surrounds all the planets, and enters into the body of the angel, or superhuman being.
9. If, during its sojourn upon the earth, the soul has not undergone a sufficient amount of purification and ennobling, it recommences a second existence, passing into the body of a newly-born child, and losing the remembrance of its first life. Only when the soul has attained the suitable degree of perfection, and, after having been re-incarnate once, or many times, is empowered to leave our globe, to assume a new body in the bosom of the ethereal plains, and thus become a superhuman being, can it recover the recollection of its past existences.
10. That which occurs upon the Earth also takes place in the other planets of our solar system. In these planets vegetables, or beings analogous to vegetables are produced by the action of the sun. By means of his rays animated germs are carried into these globes, and plants and inferior animals are produced. Then these animated germs contained in the plants and inferior animals, passing successively through the whole series of animals, end by producing a being, superior, in intelligence and sensibility, to all the other living creatures. This superior being, the analogue of the human being, we call planetary man.
11. The planetary man, who inhabits Mercury, Mars, Venus, &c., being dead, his material form remains upon the planetary globe, and his soul, provided it has acquired the necessary degree of purity, passes into the surrounding ether, is incarnate in a new body, and produces a superhuman being.
12. Phalanxes of these superhuman beings float in the planetary ether. It witnesses the reunion of all the purified souls, which have come from our globe and from the other planets. The organic types of these beings is the same, whatever may be their planetary abode.
13. The superhuman being is provided with special attributes, he is endowed with mighty faculties which raise him to a height infinitely above terrestrial or planetary humanity. In this being, matter, in comparison with the spiritual principle, is reduced to a much smaller proportion than in man. His body is light and vaporous. He possesses senses which are unknown to us, and the senses which he possesses in common with us, are prodigiously intensified, subtilised, and perfected. He can transport himself, in a short space of time, to any distance, he can travel, without fatigue, from one point in space to another. His vision is of immeasurable extent. He has intuitive knowledge of many facts of nature which are hidden by an impenetrable veil from feeble human perception.
14. The superhuman being who comes from the earth can place himself in communication with men who are worthy of the privilege. He directs their conduct, watches over their actions, enlightens their understanding, inspires their hearts. When, in their turn, they too reach the celestial dwellings, he receives them on the threshold of their new abode, and initiates them into the life of blessedness beyond the tomb.
15. The superhuman being is mortal. When he has terminated the normal course of his existence in the ethereal spaces, he dies, and his spiritual principle enters into a new body, that of the archangel, or arch-human being, in whom the proportion of spiritual principle predominates still more strongly, in proportion to matter.
16. These re-incarnations, in the depths of the ethereal spaces, are reproduced more frequently than can be defined, and give us a series of creatures of ever-increasing activity and power of thought and action. At each promotion in the hierarchy of space these sublime beings find the energy of their moral and intellectual faculties, their power of feeling, and of loving, and their induction into the most profound mysteries of the Universe, undergoing augmentation.
17. When he has arrived at the highest degree of the celestial hierarchy, the spiritualized being is absolutely perfect; in strength and in intelligence. He is entirely freed from all material alloy, he has no longer a body, he is a pure spirit. In this condition he passes into the sun.
18. The sun, the king-star, is then the final and common sojourn of all the spiritualized beings who have come from the other planets, after having passed through the long series of existences which have rolled away in the plains of ether.
19. The spiritualized beings gathered together in the sun, send down upon the earth and upon the planets emanations from their essence, that is to say, animated germs. These animated germs are carried by the sunbeams, which distribute organization, feeling, and life over all the planets, at the same time that they preside at all the great physical and mechanical operations which take place on the earth, and on the other planets of our solar world.
20. The formation of the aërial and aquatic plants, and the birth of inferior animals or zoophytes, are, as we have said, the result of the action of the sun's rays on our globe. Then commences the series of the transmigrations of souls through the bodies of various animals, which results in man, in the superhuman being, and in all the succession of celestial metempsychoses, whose ultimate term is the spiritualized being or the dweller in the sun.
Thus does the great chain of nature close and complete itself;—that uninterrupted chain of vital activity, which has neither beginning nor end, and which links all created beings into one family, the universal family of the worlds.
Nature is not a straight line, but a circle, and we cannot say where this wonderful circle begins or ends. The wisdom of the Egyptians, which represented the world as a serpent coiled around itself, was the symbol of a great truth which the science of our time has once more brought to light.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH.
REPLIES TO SOME OBJECTIONS.—FIRST: THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL, WHICH IS THE BASIS OF THIS SYSTEM, IS NOT DEMONSTRATED.—SECOND: WE HAVE NOT ANY RECOLLECTION OF ANTERIOR EXISTENCES.—THIRD: THIS SYSTEM IS NO OTHER THAN THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF THE ANCIENTS.—FOURTH: THIS SYSTEM IS CONFOUNDED WITH DARWINISM.
HAVING brought into relief, by the preceding summary, the entire doctrine of successive lives and of re-incarnations, we must now meet some objections which will have been provoked by these propositions, and reply to them in a way which has the advantage of still more distinctly explaining our ideas on several points.
First objection. It will be said: The existence of an immortal soul in man forms the basis of all this reasoning. Now, the fact of the existence of an immortal soul is not demonstrated in the course of this work, and, besides, it could not be demonstrated.
The following is our reply to this first objection.
We are composed of two elements, or of two substances; one which thinks—the soul, or the immaterial substance; the other, which does not think—the body, or the material substance. This truth is self-evident. Thought is a fact, certain in itself; and it is another fact, equally certain, that my arms, my nails or beard, do not think. Here, then, is the proof of the immortality of the soul, or thinking principle.
Matter does not perish; observation and science prove that material bodies are never annihilated, that they merely change their condition, their form, and their place; but are always to be found somewhere intact as to their substance. Our bodies decompose, and are dissolved, but the matter of which they were formed is never destroyed, it is dispersed in the air, the fire, and the water, in which it produces new material combinations, but it is not destroyed for all that. Now, if matter does not perish, but only becomes transformed, all the more certainly must the soul be indestructible and imperishable. Like matter, it must be transformed, without being destroyed.
Descartes has said, I think, therefore I am. This reasoning, so much admired in the schools, has always appeared to us rather weak. To give force to the syllogism, he should have said, I think, therefore I am immortal. My soul is immortal, because it exists, and it does exist since I think. Thus the fact of the immortality of the spiritual principle which we bear within us is self-evident, and we do not need any of the demonstrations which abound in philosophical works, and have been put forth from antiquity until our own time; we need no Treatises on the Soul to establish its existence.
The difficulty does not consist in proving that a spiritual principle exists within us, that is to say, a principle which resists death, because, in order to contest the existence of this principle, it would be necessary to contest thought. The real problem is to find out whether this spiritual and immortal principle which we bear within us, is to live again, after our death, in ourselves or in others. The question is, whether the immortal soul will be born again in the same individual, physically transformed, in the same person, in the ego, or whether it will pass into the possession of a being strange to that person.
We may remark here that on this all the interest of the question for us turns. It would be of very little importance to us, in reality, whether the soul were immortal or not, if the soul of each of us, being really indestructible and immortal, should pass to another than ourselves, or if, reviving in us, it did not possess the memory of our past existence. The resurrection of the soul without the memory of the past would be a real annihilation, this would be the nothingness of the materialists. It must be, then, that the soul lives again after our death, in ourselves, and that this soul, then, has clear remembrance of all the actions which took place in its previous existences. It behoves us, in short, to know, not whether our souls are immortal—that fact is self-evident—but whether they will belong to us in the other life, whether, after our death, we shall have identity, individuality, personality. It is to the study of this question that the present work is devoted. We are endeavouring to prove that the soul of the man remains always the same, in spite of its numerous peregrinations, notwithstanding the variety of form of the bodies in which it is successively lodged, when it passes from the animal to the man, from the man to the superhuman being, and from the superhuman being, after other celestial transmigrations, to the spiritualized being who inhabits the sun. We are endeavouring to establish that the soul, notwithstanding all its journeys, in the midst of its incarnations and various metamorphoses, remains always identical with itself, doing nothing more in each metempsychosis, in each metamorphosis of the exterior being, than perfect and purify itself, growing in power and in intellectual grasp. We are endeavouring to prove, that, notwithstanding the shadows of death, our individuality is never destroyed, and that we shall be born again in the heavens, with the same moral personality which was ours here below; in other words, that the human person is imperishable. It is for the reader to say whether we have attained our object, whether we have established the truth of this doctrine conformably with the laws of reasoning and the facts of science.
If an absolute demonstration of the existence of an immaterial principle in us be insisted upon, we must reply, that philosophy, like geometry, has its axioms, that is to say, its self-evident truths, which need not, or, if we choose to say so, which cannot be mathematically demonstrated. The existence of the soul is one of those axioms of philosophy. Diogenes answered a rhetorician who denied movement by walking in his presence. By expressing any thought, by saying "yes," or "no," we may prove the existence of the immortal soul to the sophists who would attempt to contest it.
We have just said that geometry has its axioms. Let us remember that an entire school of geometricians amused themselves by disputing the axioms, under the pretext that it was impossible to demonstrate them. We were present, in December, 1866, at a curious sitting of the Institute, during which M. Lionville, a celebrated mathematician, and professor at the Sorbonne, explained this strange polemic with great skill.
In attempting to demonstrate the propositions of geometry, certain axioms, i.e., self-evident truths, must be admitted in the first place. Otherwise, the primary reasoning will have no basis. But, among the numerous propositions of this kind which present themselves to the mind, and which result from the admission of one of their number, which is the most evident? That depends on the nature of the mind of each of us, and therefore it is that there is not, and that there never will be, an argument on this question.
There is a school of geometry which pretends to demonstrate everything. There is another, the true and good school, which, recognizing that the human mind has limits, and that everything is not accessible by our thoughts, lays down, under the name of axioms, certain truths which do not require proof, or, which is often the same thing, are incapable of proof.
Among the number of self-evident truths, or truths difficult of demonstration, we find the question of parallel lines. What are two parallels? Two lines which never meet each other. But how can we prove this property of two lines by reasoning? That is not, exactly speaking, possible, since the notion of the infinite is not admitted, or not understood by everybody, and cannot, therefore, serve as the basis of an absolutely rigorous argument.
It was for this reason that Euclid, the founder of geometry in ancient times, laid down this truth as a simple axiom, requiring (hence the postulates of Euclid, from the Latin verb postulare, to demand), that the truth of this principle, which he acknowledged himself unable to prove by logical demonstration, should be granted.
A hundred geometricians, since Euclid, who renounced the attempt to demonstrate it, have tried to prove this theory of parallels, but not one has succeeded. It was on the occasion of a fresh attempt at demonstration by a mathematician in the provinces, that M. Lionville spoke before the Academy, to recall the principles almost unanimously professed by geometricians on this subject.
The question is, in reality, thoroughly understood; it is treated on all works on geometry, and has been for a long time a settled matter. But certain minds are tempted by the subtlety of certain subjects, and the question of the postulatum turns up periodically before the learned societies, as it does in the conversations between the teachers of mathematics.
M. Lionville reminded his audience that many demonstrations of this celebrated proposition had been attempted, but had not succeeded, because there are limits within which human reason ceases to be accepted by all. M. Lionville even proposed that the question of the postulatum should be classed among those whose examination is interdicted by the Academy, such as the quadrature of the circle, and the trisection of the angle. On this point M. Lionville quoted an anecdote relative to Lagrange. That great mathematician, believing that he had found an absolute solution of the postulatum, went to the Academy to read his demonstration, but on reflection, he changed his mind, and decided that it would be better not to publish it. He put his manuscript in his pocket, and it never came out.
Several geometricians spoke on this occasion, and confirmed the views of M. Lionville; and when the demonstration submitted by the professor was examined, it was found to be false. We must therefore recognize and proclaim that, in geometry, the axioms cannot be demonstrated.
Many people endeavour to derive an argument from that discussion against the certainty of geometry. Among them is M. Bouillaud, a learned physician and member of the Institute, who declared that he could not get over his astonishment at hearing it said that there were several geometries, and that even the bases of that science were doubtful. Reassure yourself, great and good physician, geometry has nothing to lose and nothing to hide, and the certainty of its methods is not imperilled in this question. That which really was at stake was the methodical, classical teaching of geometry. That which was discussed was the best means of instilling the principles of science into the mind. But, as to the truths of geometry, as to the facts themselves, they are secure from all uncertainty, all these disputes upon the truth which must be recognized as axioms, or demonstrated as theorems, are only fancies of the rhetoricians, as vain as they are subtle. No trace of them remains when they are transported into the practice of facts and of mathematical deductions. Ask the astronomers who calculate the orbit of the stars, who fix the moment of an eclipse with unerring precision, ask those who have calculated the parallaxes, whether they trouble themselves by inquiring how it may be demonstrated that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. All the scholastic subtleties are gotten rid of in the course of practical work.
If we may lay aside, without occupying ourselves with them, the mathematicians who amuse themselves by disputing the axioms of geometry, we may do the same with the few sophists who desire to dispute the axioms of philosophy and reason, and especially the principle of the existence of an immortal soul in man. Let us leave them to their disputations, and go on our way.
Second objection:—We have no recollection of having existed prior to our entrance into this world.
This is, we acknowledge the greatest and most serious argument against our system. But we must hasten to add, that if this difficulty did not exist, if the remembrance of a life anterior to our present existence were always before us, the doctrine of plurality of lives would need no reinforcement from the proofs for which we appeal to argument, to the facts of observation, and to logical induction. It would be plain before our eyes, it would be self-evident. All our merit, all our task in this work, is to endeavour to procure admission of the plurality of existences, though we have no remembrance of our past lives.
We have already treated this question incidentally, and we will now summarize all that has been advanced in former chapters to explain the absence of recollection of our past existences.
The soul in its first human incarnation, if it proceeds from a superior animal, could not possess memory, because in animals that faculty has a small range, and brief duration. If a second or third human incarnation is in question, the difficulty is serious, because it implies that the man who has lived and who is born again, has forgotten his previous life.
But, in the first place, this forgetfulness is not absolute. We have remarked before that in the human soul certain results of impressions received prior to the terrestrial life always linger. Natural aptitudes, special faculties, vocations, are the traces of impressions formerly received, of knowledge already acquired, and, being revealed from the cradle, cannot be explained otherwise than by a life gone by. We have lost the remembrance of the facts, but there remains the moral consequence, the resultant, the philosophy, so to speak, and thus the innate ideas indicated by Descartes, which exist in the soul from its birth, and also the principle of causality, which teaches us that every effect has a cause, are explained. This principle can only be derived from facts, because an abstraction can only be based upon concrete facts, upon accomplished events, and this abstraction, or this metaphysical idea, which we have from our birth, implies anterior facts, which must belong to a past life.
We have already said that when the soul gives free course to reverie, it beholds mysterious and undefined spectacles, which seem to belong to worlds which are not quite unknown to us, but in no wise resembling this earth. In this vague contemplation there is something like a confused remembrance of an anterior life. The love which we bear to flowers, plants, and all vegetation, may be as we have already pointed out, a grateful recollection of our first origin.
If, however, these considerations be not accepted as valid, there is another, which, to our mind, perfectly explains the absence of a remembrance of our former existences. It is, we believe, by a premeditated decree of nature, that the memory of our past lives is denied to us while we are on the earth. M. André Pezzani, the author of an excellent book called "Pluralité des existences de l'âme," replies to the argument of oblivion, thus:
"Our terrestrial sojourn is only a new trial, as Dupont de Nemours, that wonderful writer of the eighteenth century, who outstripped all modern beliefs, has said. If this be so, can we not perceive that the remembrance of past lives would embarrass these trials by removing the greater part of their difficulties, and, in proportion, of their merit, and destroying their spontaneity? We live in a world in which free-will is all powerful, the inviolable law of the advancement and the progressive initiation of men. If past existences were known, the soul would know the meaning and the bearing of the trials reserved for it here below; indolent and idle, it would harden itself against the designs of Providence, and would be either paralyzed by its despair of overcoming them, or, if better disposed and more virile, it would accept and accomplish them unfailingly. But neither one nor the other of these positions is fitting. Our efforts must be free, voluntary, sheltered from the influences of the past; the field of strife must be seemingly untrodden, so that the athlete shall show and exercise his virtue. Previously gained experience, the energies which he has acquired, help him in the new strife, but in a latent way of which he is unconscious, for the imperfect soul undergoes these re-incarnations, in order to develop its previously manifested qualities, and to strip itself of those vices and defects which oppose themselves to the law of its ascension. What would happen if all men remembered their previous lives? The order of the earth would be overturned, or at least, it would not remain in its present condition. Léthé, like free-will, is a law of the world as it is."[18]
To this it will be objected that there is destruction of identity where memory does not exist, and that expiation, in order to be profitable to the guilty soul, must co-exist with the remembrance of faults committed in the previous existence, for the man is not punished who does not know that he is punished. We may remark here that we do not use the word "expiation" precisely as theologians employ it, but rather as a new dwelling conferred on the soul, in order that it may resume the interrupted course of its advance towards perfection. We believe that the remembrance of our previous life, forbidden to us during our terrestrial sojourn, will come back when we shall have attained the happy realms of ether, in which we shall pass through the existences which are to succeed our life on earth. Among the number of the perfections and moral faculties forming the attributes of the superhuman being, the memory of his anterior lives will be included. Identity will be born again for him. Having suffered a momentary collapse, his individuality will be restored to him, with his conscience and his liberty.
Let us hearken awhile to Jean Reynaud, as he tells us in his fine book, Terre et Ciel, the marvels of that memory which shall be restored to man after his being shall have undergone a series of changes.
"The integral restitution of our recollections," says Jean Reynaud, "seems to us one of the inherent principal conditions of our future happiness. We cannot fully enjoy life, until we become, like Janus, kings of time, until we know how to concentrate in us, not only the sentiment of the present, but that of the future and the past. Then, if perfect life be one day given to us, perfect memory must also be given to us. And now, let us try to think of the infinite treasures of a mind enriched by the recollections of an innumerable series of existences, entirely different from each other, and yet admirably linked together by a continual dependence. To this marvellous garland of metempsychoses, encircling the universe, let us add, if the perspective seem worthy of our ambition, a clear perception of the particular influence of our life upon the ulterior changes of each of the worlds which we shall have successively inhabited; let us aggrandize our life in immortalizing it, and wed our history grandly with the history of the heavens. Let us confidently collect together every material of happiness, since thus the all-powerful bounty of the Creator wills it, and let us construct the existence which the future reserves for virtuous souls; let us plunge into the past by our faith, while we are waiting for more light, even as by our faith we plunge into the future. Let us banish the idea of disorder from the earth, by opening the gates of time beyond our birth, as we have banished the idea of injustice by opening other gates beyond the tomb; let us stretch duration in every direction, and, notwithstanding the obscurity which rests upon our two horizons, let us glorify the Creator in glorifying ourselves, who are God's ministers on earth, let us remember, with pious pride, that we are the younger brethren of the angels."
Under what condition does the soul regain the remembrance of its entire past? Jean Reynaud specifies two periods. 1. That which is fulfilled, as the Druids hold, in the world of journeys and trials, of which the earth forms a part. 2. The period during which the soul, set free from the miseries and vicissitudes of the terrestrial life, pursues its destinies in the ever widening and progressive circle of happiness; a period which passes outside of the earth. In the first period there is an eclipse of the memory at each passage into a new sphere; in the second period, whatever may be the displacements and transfigurations of the person, the memory is preserved full and entire. This theory of Reynaud's is admitted by M. Pezzani.
With the exception of that eclipse of the memory at each passage into a new sphere, which seems to us incomprehensible and useless, we think, with Jean Reynaud, that the complete remembrance of our previous existences will return to the soul when it shall inhabit the ethereal regions, the sojourn of the superhuman being. In this manner only, in our opinion, can the defect of man's memory, concerning his previous existences, be explained. Thus, the argument from that defect of memory does not remain without reply. Writers who have preceded us, and have meditated on this question, had already found the solution which we offer. This objection is not, then, of a nature to throw doubt on the doctrine of plurality of existences. Let us conclude, with M. Pezzani, that it is by a design of nature, that man, during this life, loses the remembrance of what he formerly was. If we retained the recollection of our anterior existences, if we had before our eyes, as if seen in a mirror, all that we had done during our former lives, we should be much troubled by the remembrance, which would harass the greater part of our actions, and deprive us of our complete free will.
Why is an invincible dread of death common to all men? Death is not, in reality, very dreadful, since it is not a termination, but a simple change of condition. If man feels terror of death to such an extent, we may be sure that nature imposes that sentiment upon him, in the interests of the preservation of his species. Thus, in our belief, the fear of death and the absence of memory of our former lives are referable to the same cause. The first is a salutary illusion imposed by God upon the weakness of humanity; the second is a means of securing to man full liberty of action.
Another objection will be made to our doctrine. It will be said: The re-incarnation of souls is not a new idea; it is, on the contrary, an idea as old as humanity itself. It is the metempsychosis, which from the Indians passed to the Egyptians, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, and which was afterwards professed by the Druids.
The metempsychosis is, in fact, the most ancient of philosophical conceptions; it is the first theory imagined by men, in order to explain the origin and the destiny of our race. We do not recognize an argument against our system of nature in this remark, but rather indeed a confirmation of it. An idea does not pass down from age to age, and find acceptance during five or six centuries, by the picked men of successive generations, unless it rests upon some serious foundation. We are not called upon to defend ourselves because our opinions harmonize with the philosophical ideas which date from the most distant time in the history of the peoples. The first observers, and the oriental philosophers in particular, who are the most ancient thinkers of all whose writings we possess, had not, like us, their minds warped, prejudiced, turned aside by routine, or trammelled by the words of teachers. They were placed very close to nature, and they beheld its realities, without any preconceived ideas, derived from education in particular schools. We cannot, therefore, but applaud ourselves when we find that the logical deduction of our ideas has led us back to the antique conception of Indian wisdom.
There is, however, a profound difference between our system of the plurality of lives, and the oriental dogma of the metempsychosis. The Indian philosophers, the Egyptians, and the Greeks, who inherited the maxims of Pythagoras, admitted that the soul, on leaving a human body, enters into that of an animal, to undergo punishment. We entirely reject this useless step backward. Our metempsychosis is upward and onward, it never steps down, or back.
A brief sketch of the dogma of the animal metempsychosis, such as it was professed by the different philosophical sects of antiquity will not be out of place here. We shall explain in what particulars the oriental dogma differs from our system, and show, at the same time, how popular the metempsychosis was among the peoples of antiquity, in Europe as well as in Asia.
The most ancient known book is that of the Védas, which contains the religious principles of the Indians or Hindoos. In this code of the primary religions of Asia is found the general dogma of the final absorption of souls in God. But, before it reaches its final fusion with the great All, it is necessary that the human soul should have traversed all the active orders of life. The soul, therefore, performed a series of transmigrations and journeys, in various places, in different worlds, and passed through the bodies of several different animals. Men who had not done good works went into the moon or the sun; or else they came back to the earth, and assumed the bodies of certain animals, such as dogs, butterflies, adders, &c. There were also intermediary places between the earth and the sun, whither souls who had only been partly faulty, went to pass a period of expiation. We find the following in the Védas:—
"If a man has done works which lead to the world of the sun, his soul repairs to the world of the sun; if he has done works which lead to the world of the Creator, his soul goes to the world of the Creator."
The book of the Védas says, very distinctly, that the animal, as well as the man, has the right of passing to other worlds, as a recompense for his good works. The oriental wisdom felt none of that uncalled-for contempt for animals which is characteristic of modern philosophy and religion.
"All animals, according to the degree of knowledge and intelligence which they have had in this world, go into other worlds. The man whose object was the recompense of his good works, being dead, goes into the world of the moon. There he is at the service of the overseers of the half of the moon in its crescent. They welcome him joyfully, but he is not tranquil, he is not happy; all his recompense is to have attained for a while to the world of the moon. On the expiration of this time, the servant of the overseers of the moon descends again into hell; and is born as a worm, a butterfly, lion, fish, dog, or under any other form (even under a human form)."[19]
"At the last stages of his descent, if one asks, who are you? he replies: I come from the world of the moon, the wages of the deeds done during my life merely for the sake of reward. I am again invested with a body; I have suffered in the womb of my mother, and in leaving it; I hope finally to acquire the knowledge of Him who is all things, to enter into the right way of worship and of meditation without any consideration of reward.
"In the world of the moon, one receives the reward of good works which are done without renunciation of their fruits, of their merits; but this reward has only a fixed time, after which one is born again in an inferior world, a wicked world, a world which is the recompense of evil.
"By the renunciation of all pleasure, and of all reward by seeking God only, with unshaken faith, we reach the sun which has no end, the great world, whence we return no more to a world which is the recompense of evil."[20]
The Egyptians, having borrowed this doctrine from the Hindoos, made it the basis of their religious worship. Herodotus informs us,[21] that, according to the Egyptians, the human soul, on issuing from a completely decomposed body, enters into that of some animal. The soul takes three thousand years to pass from this body through a series of others, and at the conclusion of this interval, the same soul returns to the human species, entering the form of a newly-born infant.
The Egyptians employed excessive caution in the preservation of human bodies. They embalmed the corpses of their relatives or of personages of importance to the state, and thus prepared the mummies which are to be seen in all our museums. The universal practice of embalming was not intended, as has been supposed, to keep the human body ready to receive the soul, returning at the end of three thousand years, to seek its primitive abode. It had another object. It was supposed that the soul did not commence its migrations after the death of the human body, while any portion of the corpse remained entire. Hence the efforts made by the Egyptians, to retard the moment of separation by the preservation of the corpse as long as possible. Servius says:
"The Egyptians, renowned for their wisdom, prolonged the duration of corpses, that the existence of the soul, attached to that of the body, might be preserved, and might not pass away quickly to others. The Romans, on the contrary, burn corpses, so that the soul, resuming its liberty, might immediately re-enter nature."
The most ancient and remarkable of the Greek philosophers, Pythagoras, found out the doctrine of the metempsychosis, in his travels in Egypt. He adopted it in his school, and the whole of the Greek philosophy held, with Pythagoras, that the souls of the wicked pass into the bodies of animals. Hence the abstinence from flesh meat, prescribed by Pythagoras to his disciples, a precept which he also derived from Egypt, where respect for animals was due to the general persuasion that the bodies of beasts were tenanted by human souls, and, consequently, that by ill-treating animals, one ran the risk of injuring one's own ancestors. Empedocles, the philosopher, adopted the Pythagorean system. He says, in lines quoted by Clement of Alexandria:—
"I, too, have been a young maiden,
A tree, a bird, a mute fish in the seas."
Plato, the most illustrious of the philosophers of Greece, accords a large place to the views of Pythagoras, even amid his most sublime conceptions of the soul, and of immortality. He held that the human soul passes into the body of animals, in expiation of its crimes. Plato said that on earth we remember what we have done during our previous existences, and that to learn is to remember one's self.
"Cowards," he says, "are changed into women, vain and frivolous men into birds, the ignorant into wild beasts, lower in kind and crawling upon the earth, in proportion as their idleness has been more degrading; stained and corrupt souls animate fishes and aquatic reptiles." Again, he says: "Those who have abandoned themselves to intemperance and gluttony enter into the bodies of animals with like propensities. They who have loved injustice, cruelty, and rapine assume the bodies of wolves, hawks, and falcons. The destiny of souls has relation to the lives which they have led."
Plato held that the soul took only one thousand years to complete its journey through the bodies of animals; but he believed that this journey repeated itself ten times over, which gives a total of 10,000 years for the completion of the entire circle of existences. Between each of these periods the soul made a brief sojourn in Hades. During this sojourn it drank of the waters of the river Lethe, in order to lose the recollection of its previous existence, before re-commencing its new life.
Plato exalted the dogma of the animal metempsychosis by his grand views upon spiritual immortality and the liberty of man, ideas which even at the present time are quoted with admiration, but for whose recapitulation we have not space.
The metempsychosis holds less rank in the Platonic doctrine than in the Pythagorean and Egyptian systems. All its importance was resumed among the philosophers of the Alexandrian school, who continued, in Egypt, the traditions of the Platonic philosophy, and revived the days of the schools of Athens on the soil of the Pharaohs. Plotinus, the commentator of Plato, says, concerning the doctrine of the transmigration of souls:
"It is a dogma recognized from the utmost antiquity, that if the soul commits errors, it is condemned to expiate them by undergoing punishment in the Shades, and then it passes into new bodies to begin its trials over again."
This passage proves that the ancients held the sojourn of the soul in hell to be only temporary, and that it was always followed by fresh trials, terrible and painful in proportion to the errors which were to be repaired.
"When," says Plotinus, "we have gone astray in the multiplicity of our corporal passions, we are punished, first by the straying itself, and afterwards, when we resume a body, by finding ourselves in worse conditions. The soul, on leaving the body, becomes that power which it has most developed. Let us, then, fly from base things here below, and raise ourselves to the intelligent world, so that we may not fall into the purely sensational life, by following images which are merely of the senses, or into the vegetative life, by indulging in mere physical pleasure and gluttony; let us raise ourselves to the intelligent world, to intelligence, to God.
"Those who have exercised human faculties are born again as men. Those who have used their senses only pass into the bodies of brutes, and especially into the bodies of wild beasts, if they have been accustomed to yield to violent impulses of anger; so that the different bodies which they animate are conformable to their various propensities. Those who have done nothing but indulge their appetites pass into the bodies of luxurious and gluttonous animals. Others, who, instead of indulging concupiscence or anger, have degraded their senses by sloth, are reduced to vegetate in the plants, because in their previous existences they have exercised nothing but vegetative power, and have only worked to become trees. Those who have loved the enjoyment of music over much, but have led lives otherwise pure, pass into the bodies of melodious birds. Those who have governed tyrannically, but have no other vice, become eagles. Those who have spoken lightly of celestial things are changed into birds which fly towards the higher regions of the air. He who has acquired civil virtues becomes a man again, but if he does not possess these virtues to a sufficient extent, he is transformed into a sociable creature, such as the bee, or some other being of that species."
Every one knows that among our own ancestors, and the Druids or high-priests of the Gauls, the metempsychosis was held almost in the same sense as among the Egyptians and the Greeks. It is, so to speak, a national faith to us, for it has been held in honour, its dogmas have flourished, in the same countries in which we now dwell. We have recalled these facts, and collected these passages from ancient writers, only in order to define the manner in which the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks, and, in later times, the Gauls, understood the metempsychosis. Our system differs from the old oriental conception, which was embraced by the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Druids, in our denial that the human soul can ever return to the body of an animal. We believe that the human soul has already passed through this probation, and that it never can be renewed. In nature, in fact, the animal has a part inferior to that of man; it is below our species in its degree of intelligence, and it cannot have either merit or demerit. Its faculties do not invest it with the entire responsibility of its actions. It is but an intermediate link between the plant and man; it has certain faculties, but we cannot pretend that those faculties assimilate it to moral man.
Thus, we reject this doctrine of the return of the human soul to conditions through which it has already passed. Retrogression has no place in our system. The soul, in its progressive march, may pause for an instant, but it never turns back. We admit that man is condemned to re-commence an ill-fulfilled existence, but this new experience is made in a human body, in a new covering of the same living type, and not in the form of an inferior being. The oriental dogma of the metempsychosis misapprehended the great law of progress, which is, on the contrary, the foundation of our doctrine.
Fourth objection. It will be said to us: You maintain that our souls have already existed in the bodies of animals; do you, then, share the belief of those naturalists who derive man from the monkey?
No, certainly not. The French and German naturalists, who, applying Darwin's theory of the transformation of species to man, have declared man to be derived from the monkey, rely entirely on anatomical considerations. Vogt, Bruchner, Huxley, and Broca compare the skeleton of the monkey with that of primitive man; they study the form of the skull of each respectively, they measure the width and the prominence of the jaws, &c., &c. From the results, they draw the conclusion that man is anatomically derived from a species of quadrumane. The soul is not taken into any consideration by these men of science, who argue precisely as if nothing of the thinking kind existed in the anatomical cavities which they explore and measure. It is, on the contrary, by comparing the faculties of the human soul with the faculties of animals that we arrive at our conclusion. The animal forms signify nothing to us; the spirit, in its various manifestations, is our chief object. Why, indeed, should we seek to derive man from the monkey, rather than from any other mammiferous animal, rather than from the wolf, or the fox? Is there much difference between the skeleton of the monkey and that of the wolf, the fox, or any other carnivorous beast? Put three or four of those skeletons together, and you will not find it easy to distinguish one from the other, if, instead of selecting a monkey of a superior species, you take an inferior quadrumane, a striated monkey, a lemur, or a macao.
Interrogate the physiological functions of the monkey. You will find them, and the organs which serve those functions, perfectly similar in all animals, and those organs identical in their structure. Why, then, should you derive man from the monkey, rather than from the wolf or the fox? Is it because the monkeys in our menageries have a distant resemblance to man, in their occasional vertical attitude, and in certain features which are caricatures of those of the human face? How many of the species among the immense simial family of the two hemispheres present this resemblance? Hardly five or six. All the others have the bestial snout in its fullest development, and are very inferior in intelligence to most of the other mammifers. If it be from the organic point of view that you derive man from the monkey, because certain species of quadrumanes are caricatures of men in their physiognomy, why may he not be derived as reasonably from the parrot, which emits articulate sounds, the caricature of the human voice, or even the nightingale, because that melodious songster of the woods modulates his notes like our singers?
The consideration of animal forms is of very little importance in our estimation, when the matter in hand is to determine the place occupied by a living being in the scale of creation, for these forms are similar in type among all the superior animals, the body varying very slightly in structure in all the great class of mammifers; and also because the physiological functions are discharged in a similar manner by all. The basis on which we ground our researches is quite different, it is the spiritual basis; we ask the faculties of the mind to supply our materials of comparison.
It must not be supposed, therefore, that we espouse the doctrines of Darwin and those who agree with him, because we hold that the soul has a previous dwelling in the bodies of several animals, before it reaches the human body; because we admit that the spiritual principle begins in the germ of plants, and that this germ grows and develops itself in passing through the bodies of a progressive series of animal species, to issue at length in man, the end of its elaboration and perfection. The Darwinists take into consideration only the anatomical structure, and put aside the soul. We consider its faculties only. We are guided, not by the materialistic idea which directs and inspires these men of science, but on the contrary, on a reasoned-out spiritualism.
Our system of nature may be criticised, or rejected. We offer it merely as a personal view, and would not impose it on any reader. The merit of this philosophical and scientific conception, if it has any, consists in the vast synthesis by which it binds together all the living creatures which people the solar world, from the minute plant in which the germ of organization first appears, to the animal; from the animal to the man; and from the man to the series of superhuman and archhuman beings who inhabit the ethereal spheres; and finally, from them to the radiant dwellers in the solar star. In collecting together, on the one hand, all that modern chemistry has learned of the composition of plants, and the physical phenomena of their respiration, and on the other hand, everything which is known of the physical and chemical properties of solar light, the idea struck us that the rays of the sun form the vehicle by whose means the animated germs are placed in the plants. While meditating upon what has been written by the philosophers Charles Bonnet, Dupont de Nemours, and Jean Reynaud, upon the physical condition of resuscitated human beings, and dwelling upon the destiny of men beyond the formidable barrier of the tomb, in short, while drinking at the most various springs of philosophical and scientific knowledge, we have composed this attempt at a new philosophy of the universe.
This system may be erroneous, and another, more logical and more learned, may be substituted for it. But there will remain, we may hope, the synthesis which we have established from all the facts of the physical and moral order which we have collected together, the links by which we attach all the beings of creation one to another, which comprehends both the moral and organic attributes of these beings;—a vast ladder of nature, on whose steps we place everything that has life; the endless circle, in which we link all the rings of the chain of living beings. The theoretic explanation of all these facts, thus grouped, may not perhaps be accepted, but we believe that they are correctly placed in juxtaposition, and that any theory which pretends to explain the universe must be established upon the basis of that grouping. If our explanation be contested, we hope that our synthesis of facts will remain.
Besides it is only thus, i.e., by creating a system, that the sciences, exact as well as moral, are made to progress. Chemistry was not, as some have pretended, created by Lavoisier; it was founded by Stahl, it was not the pneumatic theory of Lavoisier, but really the system of phlogiston devised by Stahl, which instituted chemistry in the last century. Stahl, it is well known, had the immense merit of collecting all the facts known up to his time, into a general theoretical explanation of composing a summary of them, and of creating the system of phlogiston. This system was, undeniably, incorrect, but the facts which had been collected towards its construction had been perfectly well selected, and included every useful element of information or research. Thus, when ten years later than Stahl, came Lavoisier, he had only, so to speak, to turn the system of his predecessor inside out, as one turns a coat. For phlogiston Lavoisier substituted oxygen; he preserved all the facts, and changed only the explanation. Thus chemistry was founded.
A well constructed synthesis must necessarily precede every theory of nature. Descartes, when working out his system of whirlwinds, formulated a conception which was certainly very inexact; but the facts upon which this theory rested were so well selected, they responded so exactly to the requirements of science, that when Newton came, with his system of attraction, it only remained to apply the new hypothesis to the facts collected by Descartes for his whirlwinds, and there was real astronomy, the true physics. When Linnæus created his system of botany, he made an undeniably artificial distribution of the vegetables, and Linnæus himself perfectly understood the defects of his system. But, owing to this artificial method, he succeeded in grouping all the plants into a methodical catalogue. If the principle of classification was bad, the service rendered to botany by this catalogue was immense. It was not, in fact, until after Linnæus' time that the immense mass of facts which he collected could be put in order, and the study of the vegetable world made to progress from those data. Botany dates from the publication of the systema naturæ of the immortal botanist of Upsal.
We do not pretend to put forward an irreproachable theory of the universe in this work, but simply to collect together and methodically group the facts upon which such a theory ought to rest, facts physical, metaphysical, and moral.