Every one knows that among our own ancestors, and the Druids or high-priests of the Gauls, the metempsychosis was held almost in the same sense as among the Egyptians and the Greeks. It is, so to speak, a national faith to us, for it has been held in honour, its dogmas have flourished, in the same countries in which we now dwell. We have recalled these facts, and collected these passages from ancient writers, only in order to define the manner in which the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks, and, in later times, the Gauls, understood the metempsychosis. Our system differs from the old oriental conception, which was embraced by the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Druids, in our denial that the human soul can ever return to the body of an animal. We believe that the human soul has already passed through this probation, and that it never can be renewed. In nature, in fact, the animal has a part inferior to that of man; it is below our species in its degree of intelligence, and it cannot have either merit or demerit. Its faculties do not invest it with the entire responsibility of its actions. It is but an intermediate link between the plant and man; it has certain faculties, but we cannot pretend that those faculties assimilate it to moral man.
Thus, we reject this doctrine of the return of the human soul to conditions through which it has already passed. Retrogression has no place in our system. The soul, in its progressive march, may pause for an instant, but it never turns back. We admit that man is condemned to re-commence an ill-fulfilled existence, but this new experience is made in a human body, in a new covering of the same living type, and not in the form of an inferior being. The oriental dogma of the metempsychosis misapprehended the great law of progress, which is, on the contrary, the foundation of our doctrine.
Fourth objection. It will be said to us: You maintain that our souls have already existed in the bodies of animals; do you, then, share the belief of those naturalists who derive man from the monkey?
No, certainly not. The French and German naturalists, who, applying Darwin's theory of the transformation of species to man, have declared man to be derived from the monkey, rely entirely on anatomical considerations. Vogt, Bruchner, Huxley, and Broca compare the skeleton of the monkey with that of primitive man; they study the form of the skull of each respectively, they measure the width and the prominence of the jaws, &c., &c. From the results, they draw the conclusion that man is anatomically derived from a species of quadrumane. The soul is not taken into any consideration by these men of science, who argue precisely as if nothing of the thinking kind existed in the anatomical cavities which they explore and measure. It is, on the contrary, by comparing the faculties of the human soul with the faculties of animals that we arrive at our conclusion. The animal forms signify nothing to us; the spirit, in its various manifestations, is our chief object. Why, indeed, should we seek to derive man from the monkey, rather than from any other mammiferous animal, rather than from the wolf, or the fox? Is there much difference between the skeleton of the monkey and that of the wolf, the fox, or any other carnivorous beast? Put three or four of those skeletons together, and you will not find it easy to distinguish one from the other, if, instead of selecting a monkey of a superior species, you take an inferior quadrumane, a striated monkey, a lemur, or a macao.
Interrogate the physiological functions of the monkey. You will find them, and the organs which serve those functions, perfectly similar in all animals, and those organs identical in their structure. Why, then, should you derive man from the monkey, rather than from the wolf or the fox? Is it because the monkeys in our menageries have a distant resemblance to man, in their occasional vertical attitude, and in certain features which are caricatures of those of the human face? How many of the species among the immense simial family of the two hemispheres present this resemblance? Hardly five or six. All the others have the bestial snout in its fullest development, and are very inferior in intelligence to most of the other mammifers. If it be from the organic point of view that you derive man from the monkey, because certain species of quadrumanes are caricatures of men in their physiognomy, why may he not be derived as reasonably from the parrot, which emits articulate sounds, the caricature of the human voice, or even the nightingale, because that melodious songster of the woods modulates his notes like our singers?
The consideration of animal forms is of very little importance in our estimation, when the matter in hand is to determine the place occupied by a living being in the scale of creation, for these forms are similar in type among all the superior animals, the body varying very slightly in structure in all the great class of mammifers; and also because the physiological functions are discharged in a similar manner by all. The basis on which we ground our researches is quite different, it is the spiritual basis; we ask the faculties of the mind to supply our materials of comparison.
It must not be supposed, therefore, that we espouse the doctrines of Darwin and those who agree with him, because we hold that the soul has a previous dwelling in the bodies of several animals, before it reaches the human body; because we admit that the spiritual principle begins in the germ of plants, and that this germ grows and develops itself in passing through the bodies of a progressive series of animal species, to issue at length in man, the end of its elaboration and perfection. The Darwinists take into consideration only the anatomical structure, and put aside the soul. We consider its faculties only. We are guided, not by the materialistic idea which directs and inspires these men of science, but on the contrary, on a reasoned-out spiritualism.
Our system of nature may be criticised, or rejected. We offer it merely as a personal view, and would not impose it on any reader. The merit of this philosophical and scientific conception, if it has any, consists in the vast synthesis by which it binds together all the living creatures which people the solar world, from the minute plant in which the germ of organization first appears, to the animal; from the animal to the man; and from the man to the series of superhuman and archhuman beings who inhabit the ethereal spheres; and finally, from them to the radiant dwellers in the solar star. In collecting together, on the one hand, all that modern chemistry has learned of the composition of plants, and the physical phenomena of their respiration, and on the other hand, everything which is known of the physical and chemical properties of solar light, the idea struck us that the rays of the sun form the vehicle by whose means the animated germs are placed in the plants. While meditating upon what has been written by the philosophers Charles Bonnet, Dupont de Nemours, and Jean Reynaud, upon the physical condition of resuscitated human beings, and dwelling upon the destiny of men beyond the formidable barrier of the tomb, in short, while drinking at the most various springs of philosophical and scientific knowledge, we have composed this attempt at a new philosophy of the universe.
This system may be erroneous, and another, more logical and more learned, may be substituted for it. But there will remain, we may hope, the synthesis which we have established from all the facts of the physical and moral order which we have collected together, the links by which we attach all the beings of creation one to another, which comprehends both the moral and organic attributes of these beings;—a vast ladder of nature, on whose steps we place everything that has life; the endless circle, in which we link all the rings of the chain of living beings. The theoretic explanation of all these facts, thus grouped, may not perhaps be accepted, but we believe that they are correctly placed in juxtaposition, and that any theory which pretends to explain the universe must be established upon the basis of that grouping. If our explanation be contested, we hope that our synthesis of facts will remain.
Besides it is only thus, i.e., by creating a system, that the sciences, exact as well as moral, are made to progress. Chemistry was not, as some have pretended, created by Lavoisier; it was founded by Stahl, it was not the pneumatic theory of Lavoisier, but really the system of phlogiston devised by Stahl, which instituted chemistry in the last century. Stahl, it is well known, had the immense merit of collecting all the facts known up to his time, into a general theoretical explanation of composing a summary of them, and of creating the system of phlogiston. This system was, undeniably, incorrect, but the facts which had been collected towards its construction had been perfectly well selected, and included every useful element of information or research. Thus, when ten years later than Stahl, came Lavoisier, he had only, so to speak, to turn the system of his predecessor inside out, as one turns a coat. For phlogiston Lavoisier substituted oxygen; he preserved all the facts, and changed only the explanation. Thus chemistry was founded.