Some people appear to accept evolution as a matter of course, in a general way, but they appear unwilling to admit that the race has really made any evolutionary progress. Even scientific men have sometimes expressed doubt whether the world is growing better. In a newspaper interview an English scientist was quoted as saying a few years ago that the race is just as wicked today as at any time within recorded history. But if he was correctly reported it must have been a hasty expression of opinion which a little deliberation would have led him to revise. It is true that things are still bad enough but they are certainly enormously better than they were some centuries ago. To say that the world is full of crime and violence proves nothing; nor does even the fact that a civilized nation has reverted to the wartime practices of savage life furnish real ground for a pessimistic view. What we have to do in determining whether there has been any racial progress in morality is to take as our standard of measurement something that tests the collective conscience. How does the world of today view war and how did the world in the day of Caesar regard it? There is plenty to shock us now but the very fact that it does shock us is the best evidence of moral progress. Atrocities were expected and taken as a matter of course some centuries ago. They are not the rule now but the rare exception and those guilty of them are likely to make their name a by-word among nations. Well within the era of recorded history the usages of nations' condemned prisoners of war to become slaves for life. Now the rule is to feed and clothe them and at the close of the conflict to send them home. A simple thing like public sports may be used as a measure of public morals. They show what the collective conscience approves. In these days there is very little of brutality in public sports. Professional pugilism still lingers, but barely lingers, in the most enlightened nations. In less progressive countries like Spain and Mexico bull fighting is popular. That is about all we can say against modern popular entertainment. But if we look backward to the Roman period we find a cruelty in public sports that is comparatively shocking. Gladiators were compelled to fight to the death and offenders were devoured by starving wild beasts and it all made a Roman holiday. Such "sports" would, of course, be utterly impossible anywhere in the world today. But at that time they were matters of course in the life of the world's greatest empire. The fact that the race has evolved morally and that the collective conscience marks a higher point on the ethical thermometer than in the past is too obvious for argument.
Now, how is that evolutionary progress to be accounted for? It will not do to say that the Christian religion has wrought the change because, splendid as are the teachings of the Christ, the world has not accepted them and shaped its civilization by them. If it had done so the world war would have been impossible. Not only have the so-called Christian nations wrangled and fought over commercial spoils through all their history but class has been arrayed against class and every gain in either personal liberty or economic improvement has been wrested by force from those who profited by the misfortunes of others. In other words, the particular improvements that should have been brought about by religion were compelled, not freely volunteered. All religious teaching helps but, allowing all we reasonably may for the influence of Christianity, we are still unable to account for the change in the common conscience of the race, an evolutionary gain that has been going steadily on since long, long before the coming of the Christ. How then shall we account for it?
If the hypothesis of reincarnation is sound the progress of the race in morality becomes simple. The majority of the great groups of souls that constituted the civilized nations in the time when Rome was mistress of the world have had several incarnations in that time and in each sojourn on the astral plane have had the severe lesson of the painful reaction from cruelty to others. Thus does nature gradually change the cruel man to the merciful man. In every incarnation the soul grows more humane as well as more intelligent. All of the lessons learned in any incarnation are carried forward into the next life, and thus compassion grows until there is ultimately perfect sympathy with all suffering. Both the progress of the soul and of the race are comprehensible from the viewpoint of reincarnation.
Except by that hypothesis how is it possible to explain such evolutionary progress? Those who do not believe in the pre-existence of the soul and hold that it is in some way brought into being at the time of conception or birth, are put in the very illogical position of saying that the reason why the world is better now than it was in the Roman period is because it pleases God to create a better kind of souls now than he created then!
The tendency of large groups of people, tribes or nations, to act in a way that imitates, or nearly duplicates, what has been done centuries before by other tribes or nations, is such a common phenomenon that it has given rise to the declaration that history repeats itself. The fact of reincarnation shows why it repeats itself. A nation like the Romans, or the Carthaginians, are bound together in the subtle ties that are formed by the intimate relationships of constant association. The group tends to persist and the members of it are largely drawn together and regrouped in the following incarnations. All have evolved beyond the level of the previous centuries but the general traits and tendencies remain and the same general policies are likely to shape the national affairs. There comes a time in the existence of the great group, or nation, when the old environment will no longer serve for its further collective evolution as well as some other country. The majority then reincarnate elsewhere and the old country comes gradually to be inhabited by a different great group of souls. Hence the remarkable difference in the people of a given nation in different periods. Compare Rome in the time of Caesar to Rome late in the Middle Ages, or compare the mighty civilization of ancient Egypt with modern Egypt. It is high-class egos that make a great nation and when a country has no more lessons to teach them, or rather when another country will serve as a better environment for their further progress, they return in rebirth to the more advantageous spot on the earth, and a different set of souls come into possession of the abandoned environment. The valley of the Nile, that was once the home of an energetic people with a flourishing civilization would not now serve such a purpose. The center of virile civilization has shifted to central and northern Europe because only that environment, in full touch with the great commercial stream of the economic world, can serve the purpose. As the world is today what could a pushing, energetic, up-to-date group of souls do if born into Egypt? Nothing but leave it. So they are not reincarnated there, but other souls that are at the point in evolution where the primitive life of an isolated country will give the simpler lessons they must acquire, inherit the abandoned environment. As an individual moves continually onward in each return to incarnation to professional and business environments that will enable him to put into effect all the new skill and wisdom he has gained, so a nation goes on to greater and greater opportunities. Souls that made the greatness of Greece and Carthage and Rome are now making the greatness of Europe and America. Such facts explain many things that have seemed puzzling. How, for example, was it possible for the world's greatest civilization to spring up suddenly in Europe from barbarous peoples? When Rome declined—declined because her people largely reincarnated elsewhere—Europe was inhabited by slightly civilized hordes. To assume that since then, in a few centuries—a mere passing moment in the great lapse of time required for race evolution—the civilization today could arise, would be to ignore the fundamentals of evolution. But when we understand that great groups of old souls incarnate in the strong physical bodies which the more primitive peoples could bring into the world, the mystery of the rapid rise of a great civilization in Europe is solved.
The principle of rebirth holds also with the animal kingdom at a high level in it. The last phase of evolution in the animal kingdom is the individualizing of the consciousness. A particularly intelligent cat or dog, for example, may be just finishing animal evolution and will be reborn at the lowest human level. Previous to its individualization it evolves in a group with others of its kind, animated by a common ensoulment that has not reached the level of complete self-consciousness. At that group-soul stage the experience of each animal in the group adds to the knowledge of all. This theosophical teaching on one of nature's most interesting facts enables us to understand many things that would otherwise remain mysterious. Instinct has never been explained by science. Some of its best known expressions are altogether mysterious. Why does a young wild animal hide from the enemies of its kind but not from friends, when it has never seen either? A quail a day old will fall upon its side with a chip or small stone or bit of grass firmly clutched in its tiny claws to hide its body, and remain perfectly motionless at the approach of a human being, but will take no alarm at the passing of a squirrel or a rabbit. How does a young chick know the difference between a crow and a hawk? And why, in remote places like the antarctic regions, are both young and old birds and animals unafraid of man? The group-soul is a clear and simple explanation of all such phenomena. The youngest have the knowledge of the oldest because they are attached to the same group-soul, or source of consciousness. The young quails of this season come back to rebirth from the group-soul that is the storehouse of the experiences of the quails that were killed by men in past seasons, and thus all young things know the common enemy. In the remote regions referred to the killing proclivities of the human being have not become known and there is no "instinct" to warn.
An excellent bit of evidence on the subject of the group-soul is the fact, often chronicled but not explained, that when telephone or telegraph lines are built in new countries the birds fly against the wires and are killed by thousands, the first season. But when the next season's birds are hatched they are wise and avoid the wires! If the group-soul were not a fact in nature it would naturally require a long time for wire education. No such sudden adjustment would be possible.
Reincarnation represents continuous evolution with no waste of time or loss of energy. Death is not the sudden break in the life program that the popular belief pictures it. The common view of death is as erroneous as the common view of birth. If death were what most people believe it to be it would constitute a blunder of nature—an irrational interruption of orderly development. In nature's economy there is conservation of energy and no loss can arise through the change called death. If the popular belief that at death we go far away to a totally different kind of existence were sound then death would usually mean an enormous waste. A young man is educated for some particular work, engineering, architecture or statecraft, and graduates only perhaps to die soon afterward. All that time and energy spent in getting such an education would be largely lost either if death ends all, or is the last he will know of the material world. But nature does not thus blunder. Her law of conservation is always operative. All the skill and wisdom acquired will be brought back in rebirth and will be used in the future incarnations.
A child in school is a fair analogy for a soul in evolution. The child cannot get an education in a term nor in a year. He must return often to the same school, after the rest of regular vacations. He may use new books with higher lessons but he returns periodically to the same environment. Continuous attendance would be as unthinkable as finishing his education in a single term. In evolution the soul returns periodically to the physical world, or plane, for the same reasons. Continuous life here until all material experience is gained would be impossible. Aside from the need of the double process of acquiring and digesting experience the physical body would become a hindrance to evolution. Within certain limits the physical brain can respond to the requirements of the growing soul, but a new body is in time an absolute necessity to further evolution.
If we give a little thought to the evolutionary progress the ordinary person must make to raise him to mental and moral perfection, the absurdity of a single lifetime becomes apparent. Consider, a moment, intellectual perfection. It would mean a development of the mind to the point of genius in many directions. If we combine into one mind the attainments of the mathematical genius, the musical genius, the inventive genius, the statecraft genius, and so on until every line of intellectual activity is included, we then have only the perfect mental man. On the moral side we must add to that the combined qualities of the saints. Then we have the perfected human being, with nothing more to be learned from incarnation here. His further evolution belongs to superphysical realms.