The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul / The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies in Psychology

by J. D. Buck

Modern physical science deduces this belief from the phenomena of daily life and the analogies of individual experience, thus giving precedence to material causes for mental concepts, or universal ideas. This view is, I think, entitled to the most careful consideration, but it cannot once for all be admitted, nor is it consistent with the general theory and progress of evolution that the phenomenal stands to the noumenal, the actual to the ideal, as cause to effect. These two groups of experiences are alternate and coincident; and, as to priority, it is only the old question in a new form, as to which was first, the bird that laid the egg, or the egg that hatched the bird.

This distinction is particularly pertinent to the present subject, for the reason that by the method of modern physical science, in dealing with the belief in the existence of the soul, the whole of this universal belief is swept away. Its origin is found in the ignorance, superstition, and false analogies of barbarous races, and the inference is that the belief can only linger as a remnant of superstition among civilized men. This method prejudges the whole question, and (while it must readily be admitted that the opposite method equally prejudges it), my contention is for neither the one nor the other, but for the careful consideration and final blending of both. If at first sight these two theories, which form the basis of the working hypothesis of the materialist and the spiritist, seem paradoxical and wholly irreconcilable, with careful consideration and unbiased investigation of both sides of the problem the paradox will disappear.

With both the lowest and the highest races not only do we find the existence of belief in the existence of a separable soul in man, but of ghosts, gods, genii, a spirit of the air, and hierarchies of celestial and infernal beings.

In this regard, philosophers like Plato and Pythagoras, the intellectual giants of the human race, may be said to have elaborated and specialized the rude conceptions of the Fiji Islander, and to vie with him in peopling space with invisible entities and potencies. In spite of the dictum of science, the world, intelligent and ignorant alike, believes, and will continue to believe, in the reality of the unseen universe, and the Platonic doctrine of “emanation” and the “world of divine ideas” not only begin where modern physical science leaves off, but at this very point science either begs the question, or ignores it entirely.

How things come to be what they are, and to evolve as they do, science nowhere declares. It simply takes things as it finds them, and dubs the ultimate and antecedent causation the Unknowable. The philosophy of Plato, it is true, reaches at last the unknowable and the incomprehensible, but only after revealing another universe, the metaphysical and spiritual, entirely unknown to, or ignored or derided by the materialist.

It is, however, from this invisible realm that all visible things have come forth, the two being not only under absolute and universal law, but bearing everywhere definite analogies to each other. Hence Plato says, “God geometrizes.” Absolute mathematics determines the relations of atoms to suns, and the circulation of the blood in man to the revolutions of suns and solar systems.

A further general consideration remains to be noted before taking up the evidence of belief in the separable soul, and that is, the evolutionary life-wave of humanity on our earth.

The progress of man for some millions of years past has by no means been a straightforward climbing from barbarism to civilization. The wave of evolution has ebbed and flowed. While at one place man has slowly emerged from savagery, at another he has as surely sunk to it. Continents and islands have risen from and again sunk to the bottom of the sea, bearing the races of men in their upheavals or descent, and cataclysmic and seismic or volcanic upheavals have blotted out in a day the accumulated progress of centuries. The poles of the earth have shifted with results to the life of the globe more awful than the imagination can portray. Bodies of people like our North American Indians represent the remains of many peoples, as in Russia or India to-day, fragments of many nationalities are being absorbed in one.

Bearing in mind, therefore, that owing to many causes a nation may descend to barbarism or disappear entirely, we shall find everywhere the fragments and decay of the old belief no less than the dawn of the new. A noble creed, or a philosophical concept of a highly advanced race, may exist as a transformed and degrading superstition with a race, or a fragment of a people, undergoing degeneracy.

Every religion known to man has gone through just this transformation. The tendency is innate and inevitable and no civilization or religion has ever yet been able long to resist it. If we bear this in mind we shall be less surprised at anthropogeneses, cosmogeneses or psychologies found sometimes among otherwise rude or savage peoples, and be better able to understand the incongruities and lack of symmetry in their evolution. It would be easy to cite instances and draw comparisons at this point.