Innate ideas and the principle of causality are explained very simply by the doctrine of the plurality of existences; they are, indeed, merely deductions from that doctrine. A man's soul, having already existed, either in the body of an animal or that of another man, has preserved the trace of the impressions received during that existence. It has lost, it is true, the recollection of actions performed during its first incarnation; but the abstract principle of causality, being independent of the particular facts, being only the general result of the practice of life, must remain in the soul at its second incarnation.
Thus, the principle of causality, of which French philosophy cannot offer any satisfactory theory, is explained in the simplest possible manner, by the hypothesis of re-incarnations and of the plurality of existences.
We have previously alluded to memory, and explained its relation to re-incarnations, and the reasons why we are born without any consciousness of a previous life. We have said, that if we come from an animal, we have no memory, because the animal has none, or has very little. We must now add, that if we come from a human soul, reopening to the light of life, we are destitute of memory, because it would disturb the trial of our terrestrial life, and even render it impossible, as it is the intention of nature that we should recommence the experience of existence without any trace, present to our minds, of previous actions which might limit or embarrass our free will.
We cannot pass from this portion of our subject without calling attention to the fact that the remembrance of a previous existence is not always absolutely wanting to us. Who is there, who, in his hours of solitary contemplation, has not seen a hidden world come forth before his eyes from the far distance of a mysterious past? When, wrapped in profound reverie, we let ourselves float on the stream of imagination, into the ocean of the vague, and the infinite, do we not see magic pictures which are not absolutely unknown to our eyes? do we not hear celestial harmonies which have already enchanted our ears? These secret imaginings, these involuntary contemplations, to which each of us can testify, are they not the real recollections of an existence anterior to our life here below?
Might we not also attribute to a vague remembrance, to an unconscious sympathy, the real and profound pleasure which we derive from the mere sight of plants, flowers, and vegetation? The aspect of a forest, of a beautiful meadow, of green hills, touches us, moves us, sometimes even to tears. Great masses of verdure, and the humble field daisy, alike speak to our hearts. Each of us has a favourite plant, the flower whose perfume he loves to inhale, or the tree whose shade he prefers. Rousseau was moved by the sight of a yew tree, and Alfred de Musset loved the willows so much, that he expressed a wish, piously fulfilled, that a willow might over-shadow his grave.
This love of the vegetable world has a mysterious root in our hearts. May we not recognize in so natural a sentiment, a sort of vague remembrance of our original country, a secret and involuntary evocation of the scene in which the germ of our soul was first loosed to the light of the sun, the powerful promoter of life?
Besides the undecided and dim remembrance of pictures which seem to belong to our anterior existences upon the globe, we sometimes feel keen aspirations towards a kinder and calmer destiny than that which is allotted to us here below. No doubt coarse beings, entirely attached to material appetites and interests, do not feel these secret longings for an unknown and happier destiny, but poetical and tender souls, those who suffer from the wretched conditions of which human nature is the slave and the martyr, take a vague pleasure in such melancholy aspirations. In the radiant infinite they foresee celestial dwellings, where they shall one day reside, and they are impatient to break the ties which bind them to earth. Read the episode in Goethe's Mignon, in which Mignon, wandering and exiled, pours out her young soul in aspirations to heaven, in sublime longings for an unknown and blessed future, which she feels drawing her towards itself, and ask yourself whether the beautiful verses of the great poet, who was also a great naturalist, do not interpret a truth of nature, i.e., the new life which awaits us in the plains of ether. Why do all men, among all peoples, raise their eyes to heaven in solemn moments, in the impulses of passion, and the anguish of grief or pain? Does any one, under such circumstances, contemplate the earth on which he stands? Our eyes and our hearts turn towards the skies. The dying raise their fallen orbs to heaven, and we look towards the celestial spaces in those vague reveries which we have been describing. It is permitted to us to believe that this universal tendency is an intuition of that which awaits us after our terrestrial life, a natural revelation of the domain which shall be ours one day, and which extends over the celestial empyrean, to the bosom of ethereal space.
