8
Lastly, how shall we explain that, in that consciousness which ought to survive us, the infinity that precedes our birth has left no trace? Had we no consciousness in that infinity, or did we perchance lose it on coming into the world and did the catastrophe that produces the whole terror of death take place at the moment of our birth? None can deny that this infinity has the same rights over us as that which follows our decease. We are as much the children of the first as of the second; and we must of necessity have a part in both. If you maintain that you will always exist, you are bound to admit that you have always existed; we cannot imagine the one without having to imagine the other. If nothing ends, nothing begins, for any such beginning would be the end of something. Now, although I have existed since all time, I have no consciousness whatever of my previous existence, whereas I shall have to carry to the boundless horizon of the endless ages the tiny consciousness acquired during the instant that elapses between my birth and my death. Can my true ego, then, which is about to become eternal, date only from my short sojourn on this earth? And all the preceding eternity, which is of exactly the same value as that which follows, since it is the same, shall it not count? Will it be flung into nihility? Why is a strange privilege accorded to a few meaningless days spent on an unimportant planet? Is it because in that previous eternity we had no consciousness? What do we know about it? It seems very unlikely. Why should the acquisition of consciousness be a phenomenon unrepeated in an eternity that had at its disposal innumerable billions of chances, among which—unless we set a limit to the infinity of the ages—it is impossible to conceive that the thousands of coincidences which went to form my present consciousness did not occur over and over again? The moment we turn our gaze upon the mysteries of that eternity wherein all that happens must already have happened, it seems much more credible, on the contrary, that we have had consciousness upon consciousness which our life of to-day hides from our view. If they have existed and if, at our death, one consciousness must survive, the others must survive as well, for there is no reason to bestow so disproportionate a favour upon that consciousness which we have acquired here below. And, if all of them survive and awaken at the same time, what will become of the petty consciousness of a few terrestrial moments, when it is submerged in those eternal existences? Besides, even if it were to forget all its previous existences, what would become of it amid the perpetual buffeting, the endless wash of its posthumous eternity? For it is but as a poor sand-drift of an island in the unrelenting jaws of two boundless oceans. It would hold its own there, puny and so precarious, only on condition that it acquired nothing more, that it remained for ever closed, isolated and confined, impenetrable and insensible to all things, in the midst of the astounding mysteries, the fabulous treasures and visions which it would have eternally to pass through without ever seeing or hearing anything; and that surely would be the worst death and the worst destiny that could befall us. We are, therefore, driven on all sides towards the theories of an universal consciousness or of a modified consciousness, both of which we shall examine presently.
CHAPTER IV
THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS
1
But, before broaching those questions, it were perhaps well to study two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival, solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement, of some magnitude in certain countries, has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence. It cannot be denied that of all the religious theories, reincarnation is the most plausible and the least repellent to our reason. Nor must we overlook that it has on its side the authority of the most ancient and widespread religions, those which have incontestably furnished humanity with the greatest aggregate of wisdom and which we have not yet exhausted of their truths and mysteries. In reality, the whole of Asia, whence we derive almost everything which we know, has always believed and still believes in the transmigration of souls.
As Mrs. Annie Besant, the remarkable apostle of the new theosophy, very rightly says:
“There is no philosophical doctrine which has behind it so magnificent an intellectual ancestry as the doctrine of reincarnation; none for which there is such a weight of the opinion of the wisest of men; none, as Max Müller declared, on which the greatest philosophers of humanity have been so thoroughly in accord.”
This is all quite true. But it would need other proofs to win our distrustful faith to-day. I have sought in vain for a single one in the leading works of our modern theosophists. They confine themselves to a mere reiteration of dogmatic statements, which are of the vaguest. Their great argument—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument which they adduce—is but a sentimental argument. Their doctrine that the soul, in its successive existences, is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right; and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric Heaven and the monstrous Hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are for ever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has but an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.
2
We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possible that we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagines. As Sir William Crookes so well puts it, in a remarkable passage: