Trailed noiseless at my side.
So, too, the recurrence of the seasons, the ebb and flow and re-ebb of the tides, the cycles of day and night, the phenomenon of genius, and countless other things, suggest that the old is continually reborn. Yet classing all these together they amount merely to presumptive evidence, hints at possibilities, but not proof.
We are born with a sense of Justice, a sense which extends at least as far as our private rights. Further, justice is so valued that we regard Deity as perfectly just. The kernel of justice is: "As a man sows so shall he reap." The effect must be equal to the cause. To talk of the justice of a god who creates Souls is to babble nonsense. Personal responsibility is an indispensable requirement for the maintenance of justice, and personal responsibility can exist only if souls are the creators of their own destinies. Otherwise "Justice" is a mockery and a delusion. Therefore, if we are to believe that the Universe is ruled justly, eternal pre-existence of soul must be a fact.
The books say well, my brothers, each man's life
The outcome of his former living is:
The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes,
The bygone right breeds bliss.
So is a man's fate born.
Ex nihilo nihil fit—from nothing nothing is made. Nineteenth century science has succeeded in proving what the world's thinkers have long believed. Matter and energy are indestructible. "Creation" in the sense of manufacture out of nothing is unthinkable. If the soul is one with the Universal Energy, "it is not a thing of which a man may say, 'It hath been, it is about to be, or is to be hereafter,' for it is without birth and meeteth not death." "Nature is nothing less than the ladder of resurrection, which step by step leads upward." The eternal Soul, now linked to a mortal body, has lived before and will live hereafter.
The last and most important of the logical imperatives demanding a belief in reincarnation is the thesis: Immortality of soul demands complete eternity of soul. That which has a beginning, of necessity has an end. The child is born, grows into youth and manhood, lives its life, but it dies. Death's fingers clutch at birth. That which is born is mortal. Thus the soul must be birthless if it is to be deathless. It must have lived before its present body and it will outlive any body which it may hereafter enliven. Reincarnation is merely the natural corollary to eternity.