Virginia said she believed in transmigration. I think it possible, as I told her; it is in every way consistent with progress and all things in life, but I have no reason for feeling sure of it. She said: “It must be true, for if there is just so much spirit in the world, forever and ever, and if it must express itself through matter, how can there be anything but transmigration? Some time we may all live again on some other planet, in some other shape.” I said it might be so.
The children asked me whether I believed animals were immortal. I answered that as much life and self as is in them must be immortal. I observed that this idea of animal-immortality was consistent with Virginia’s belief in transmigration, that so each least creature might rise through successive stages toward its complete self.
Then I said to the children that, of course, if we believed we had been nothing before we were born, we could easily believe in extinction. But I, for one, believed, yes, knew, that I had been forever, that I was not “made” in these few years.
“Yes,” said Marian, “I could not have grown to be what I am, just since I was born.”
Henry said: “We are not concerned with the past, but with the future.”
Virginia, and the others, brought up instances of seeming to remember things from a former life, of feeling as if they had done some particular thing before, in the dim past.
Alfred had not spoken at all during this time. He now said he very much wished he could believe in immortality, but could not see any reason for doing so. I said we should have to spend the next meeting in convincing Alfred. I went on: “If we believe in the vast Self of life, and if we are a part of that awakening Self, how can we die?”
Then I read aloud Emily Brontë’s “Last Lines.”
I was glad to leave the subject open in this fashion, to give them a week for thought, and I said little more.