THE LACK OF COMPELLING PROOF IN THE THEORY

BUT let us return to reincarnation, and recognize, in passing, that it is very regrettable that the arguments of the theosophists and neospiritualists are not compelling; for there never was a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful, and consoling, or, to a certain point, a more probable creed than theirs. But the quality of a creed is no evidence of its truth. Even though it is the religion of six hundred millions of mankind, the nearest to the mysterious origins, the only one that is not odious, and the least absurd of all, it will have to do what the others have not done—bring unimpeachable testimony; and what it has given us hitherto is only the first shadow of a proof begun.

Indeed, even that would not put an end to the riddle. In principle, reincarnation sooner or later is inevitable, since nothing can be lost or remain stationary. What has not been demonstrated in any way, and will perhaps remain indemonstrable, is the reincarnation of the whole, identical person, notwithstanding the abolition of memory. But what matters that reincarnation to him, if he be unaware that he is still himself? All the problems of the conscious survival of man start up anew, and we have to begin all over again. Even if scientifically established, the doctrine of reincarnation, just like that of a survival, would not set a term to our questions. It replies to neither the first nor the last, those of the beginning and the end, the only ones that are essential. It simply shifts them, pushes them a few hundreds, a few thousands, of years back, in the hope, perhaps, of losing or forgetting them in silence and space. But they have come from the depths of the most prodigious infinities, and are not content with a tardy solution. I am most certainly interested in learning what is in store for me, what will happen to me immediately after my death. You tell me:

“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering, will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”

I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old religions; I am willing to believe it; but even then? What matters to me is not what will be for some time, but for always; and your divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help. Now, even if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my conscience. Your infinity or our God, without being even more unintelligible than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is hardly likely that the idea came to me only yesterday. All the chances of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer to these interrogations, which spring up everywhence the moment our thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I had rather keep to an infinity the incomprehensibility of which has no bounds than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be superior to the silence which they break.

It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as this God; but, then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as inexhaustible as the universe itself. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations. At best, it is only a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life here. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because at the moment when they can speak to us they have nothing to tell us, or because at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever, and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.

[1] Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and copyright U. S. A., 1913, by Eugène Fasquelle.

[2] “The Survival of Man,” Chap. XXV, p. 325.

[3] In this connection, however, we find two or three rather perturbing facts, a remarkable one being that at a spiritualistic meeting held by the late W. T. Stead the prediction of the murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga was described with the most circumstantial details. A verbatim report was drawn up of this prediction and signed by thirty witnesses; and Stead went next day to beg the Servian minister in London to warn the king of the danger that threatened him. The event took place, as announced, a few months later. But “precognition” does not necessarily require the intervention of the dead; moreover, every case of this kind, before being definitely accepted, would call for prolonged study in every particular.

[4] In order to exhaust this question of survival and of communications with the dead, I ought to speak of Dr. Hyslop’s recent investigations, made with the assistance of the mediums Smead and Chenoweth (communications with William James). I ought also to mention Julia’s famous “bureau” and, above all, the extraordinary séances of Mrs. Wriedt, the trumpet medium, who not only obtains communications in which the dead speak languages of which she herself is completely ignorant, but raises apparitions said to be extremely disturbing. I ought lastly, to examine the facts set forth by Professor Porro, Dr. Venzano, and M. Rozanne, and many other things besides, for spiritualistic investigation and literature are already piling volume upon volume. But it was not my intention or my pretension to make a complete study of scientific spiritualism. I wished merely to omit no essential point and to give a general but accurate idea of this posthumous atmosphere which no really new and decisive fact has come to unsettle since the manifestations of which we have spoken.

[5] In order to hide nothing and to bring all the documents into court, we may point out that Colonel de Rochas ascertained upon inquiry that the subjects’ revelations concerning their former existences were inaccurate in several particulars.

“Their narratives were also full of anachronisms, which disclosed the presence of normal recollections among the suggestions that came from an unknown source. Nevertheless, one perfectly indubitable fact remains, which is that of the existence of certain visions recurring with the same characteristics in the case of a considerable number of persons unknown to one another.”

[6] In this connection, may I be permitted to quote a personal experience? One evening at the Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille, where I am wont to spend my summers, some newly arrived guests were amusing themselves by making a small table spin on its foot. I was quietly smoking in a corner of the drawing-room, at some distance from the little table, taking no interest in what was happening around it and thinking of something quite different. After due entreaty, the table replied that it held the spirit of a seventeenth-century monk who was buried in the east gallery of the cloisters under a flagstone dated 1693. After the departure of the monk, who suddenly, for no apparent reason, refused to continue the interview, we thought that we would go with a lamp and look for the grave. We ended by discovering in the far cloister, on the eastern side, a tombstone in very bad condition, broken, worn down, trodden into the ground, and crumbling, on which, by examining it very closely, we were able with great difficulty to decipher the inscription, “A.D. 1693.” Now, at the moment of the monk’s reply there was no one in the drawing-room except my guests and myself. None of them knew the abbey; they had arrived that very evening a few minutes before dinner, after which, as it was quite dark, they had put off their visit to the cloisters and the ruins until the following day. Therefore, short of a belief in the “shells” or the “elementals” of the theosophists, the revelation could have come only from me. Nevertheless, I believed myself to be absolutely ignorant of the existence of that particular tombstone, one of the least legible among a score of others, all belonging to the seventeenth century, which pave this part of the cloisters.

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