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But, before broaching those questions, it were perhaps well to study two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival, solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement, of some magnitude in certain countries, has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence. It cannot be denied that of all the religious theories, reincarnation is the most plausible and the least repellent to our reason. Nor must we overlook that it has on its side the authority of the most ancient and widespread religions, those which have incontestably furnished humanity with the greatest aggregate of wisdom and which we have not yet exhausted of their truths and mysteries. In reality, the whole of Asia, whence we derive almost everything which we know, has always believed and still believes in the transmigration of souls.
As Mrs. Annie Besant, the remarkable apostle of the new theosophy, very rightly says:
“There is no philosophical doctrine which has behind it so magnificent an intellectual ancestry as the doctrine of reincarnation; none for which there is such a weight of the opinion of the wisest of men; none, as Max Müller declared, on which the greatest philosophers of humanity have been so thoroughly in accord.”
This is all quite true. But it would need other proofs to win our distrustful faith to-day. I have sought in vain for a single one in the leading works of our modern theosophists. They confine themselves to a mere reiteration of dogmatic statements, which are of the vaguest. Their great argument—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument which they adduce—is but a sentimental argument. Their doctrine that the soul, in its successive existences, is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right; and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric Heaven and the monstrous Hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are for ever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has but an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.