These painful alternatives cease their troubling, however, and all perplexities gradually disappear as the mind of man grows into a clear apprehension of evolution in its full significance. The basic law of evolution is that all existence proceeds in cycles, each having its objective and subjective arc. In other words, there is a constant flow of motion and consciousness from without within and from within without. On the lowlier levels of life, this law is observed and science based upon it. In the vegetable kingdom, the leaves, stalk and flower of a specific plant perish as completely as though they had never existed; but the subjective entity remains, and in due course it reappears, clothed in a different vestment of cells, the same in all the details of its intricate form.

In the insect kingdom, all the wonderful changes that transform a crawling slimy caterpillar into a glorious vision of beauty and grace takes place in silence and darkness—from within without. Here the law of evolution takes a wider range than in the vegetable kingdom. Form, function, habit, all are changed, yet we know by actual observation that the soaring butterfly and crawling caterpillar are intrinsically one and the same. Moreover, the whole process of change is accomplished in the pupa stage independently of that food supply which—to the scientific conception—seems indispensable in the generation and continuation of vital force. (I must here refer my reader to the full discussion of this subject in chapters v. and vi. of Dr. Jerome A. Anderson’s Re-incarnation—A Study of the Human Soul.)

Now in our habit of regarding humanity in its higher aspect as the acme or crown of terrestrial life, we are apt to forget the potent connexions that link it with life in general. But re-incarnation, if we would judge it philosophically, must not be wrenched from its place in the order of nature and studied as an isolated fragment.

“All evolution consists,” says Mrs. Besant, “of an evolving life passing from form to form as it evolves, and storing up the experience gained through the forms; the re-incarnation of the human soul is not the introduction of a new principle into evolution, but the adaptation of the universal principle to meet conditions rendered necessary by the individualization of the continually evolving life.” (The Ancient Wisdom, p. 234.) The doctrine of human evolution summed up in the term re-incarnation cannot be proved in the same sense as a new discovery in physics can be proved—that goes without saying. But we may claim that it can be so nearly proved by reasoning that no intelligent being who correctly apprehends the idea and applies it with patience to the experience of existence, whether in or out of the body, can fail to believe it as fully, for example, as the modern scientific world believes in the electro-magnetic theory of light. That theory is no longer argued about. It is the only theory that will explain all the facts. And of re-incarnation in a higher domain we may equally affirm it is the only theory that explains the facts and is consonant with all the known laws of nature. It is luminous with a truly scientific aspect. It satisfactorily accounts for the inherent differences in character that heredity leaves unexplained, and it renews our faith in love and wisdom as underlying the phenomena of earthly existence, notwithstanding present appearances.

But add to this the fact that every great religion of the world, except modern Christianity, holds it more or less completely, whilst Christianity also originally held it; and if a spiritual and ethical theory of the universe be tenable, then cultured minds rejecting re-incarnation must either have failed to study the subject in its antecedents and bearings, or they must be by constitution profoundly unphilosophical. (I refer my reader here to chap. iii. of Mr. A. P. Sinnett’s Growth of the Soul.)

After all, it is a comparatively few men and women who seek intellectual clearness of vision, and are restless of soul till they grasp a theory of the universe and an interpretation of life that alike may satisfy head and heart—the mass of mankind is unthinking. And as we contemplate the stupendous task of evolution in developing each individual soul out of the embryonic condition of the savage to a conscious control and exercise of all the divine potencies of a perfected spiritual man, we feel no surprise that the major part of humanity stands yet in its childhood. Unequal development is the natural corollary of general evolution. The heart of modern man, however, is for the most part in advance of his head, and it is here, viz. on the emotional side of human nature, that religion—no matter what the specific form may have been—has ministered to man’s needs and proved an all-important factor of evolution.

Revelation, as Lessing (who believed in re-incarnation) declares, has been the education of the human race. “It did not,” he says, “give anything that human reason left to itself would not arrive at, but it gave the most important of these things earlier”—that is, before the reasoning faculties were fully developed in man. (Lessing’s Treatise: The Education of the Human Race, translated by the Rev. F. W. Robertson.)

The founders of every religion—the great and wise ones of the earth—have guided the race in its slow and gradual ascent from infancy to manhood, and even through the degeneration to which every religion has been subjected from human ignorance and selfishness.

Section 2

We have now to turn from racial religions to personal religion, and as the springs of individual conduct lie earlier in the heart than in the head, spiritual developments begin there. It is in accordance with natural order that the right conduct and simple devotion of millions of human beings, intellectually blind, should yet aid the steady advance of evolution towards its highest goal.