It is necessary that our life-hypothesis shall fulfil two conditions: it must be thinkable and it must be livable. Life leads to thought about life; but our judgment must concern itself with life. Therefore what we believe must be both logical and practical. Logical because fact makes the appeal to logic, and practical because logic must answer fact. Our life-hypothesis, since its subject-matter is the Self and the World in which the Self lives, must be both universal and particular.
In answering the query, What are the bases of an intelligent belief in Reincarnation? we are primarily concerned with the Self. Without considering the nature of the Self in detail, let me postulate that by the Self I mean the Real You and the Real I, the Individual Life, which expresses itself through your physical nature and through mine, the Individuality at the basis of the Personality, the Character underlying the physical man.
The conception of reincarnation or rebirth of soul, I grant, is speculative, since it ranges far beyond the cramped present. So, if it is to become part of our life-hypothesis it must be both logical and practically imperative. If logic and practical requirements combine in their demands, then we must conclude that reincarnation has been demonstrated to be true in so far as any hypothesis can be. The most probable is and must be accepted actually as the true.
Many circumstances suggest that the Self existed previously to its birth in the present body. Poetry voices the thought as follows:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Children frequently instinctively believe that they have lived before. The poets do not monopolize those tantalizingly vague sensations of familiarity, which sometimes accompany strange and apparently novel experiences.