9 Scholz, Beweis, dass es eine Seelenwanderung bei den Thieren giebt.
forces, whether those were a leonine magnanimity of courage, a vulpine subtlety of cunning, or a pavonine strut of vanity. The spirit, freed from its fallen cell, "Fills with fresh energy another form, And towers an elephant, or glides a worm, Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon, Or wails, a screech owl, to the deaf, cold moon, Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare, Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air."
The hypothesis is equally forced on our thoughts by regarding the human attributes of some brutes and the brutal attributes of some men. Thus Gratiano, enraged at the obstinate malignity of Shylock, cries to the hyena hearted Jew, "Thou almost mak'st me waver in my faith, To hold opinion, with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay'st in thine unhallow'd dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous."
Thirdly, there is a figurative metempsychosis, which may sometimes the history of mythology abounds in examples of the same sort of thing have been turned from an abstract metaphor into a concrete belief, or from a fanciful supposition have hardened into a received fact. There is a poetic animation of objects whereby the imaginative person puts himself into other persons, into trees, clouds, whirlwinds, or what not, and works them for the time in ideal realization. The same result is put in speech sometimes as humorous play: for example, a celebrated English author says, "Nature meant me for a salamander, and that is the reason I have always been discontented as a man: I shall be a salamander in the next world!" Such imagery stated to a mind of a literal order solidifies into a meaning of prosaic fact. It is a common mode of speech to say of an enthusiastic disciple that the spirit of his master possesses him. A receptive student enters into the soul of Plato, or is full of Goethe. We say that Apelles lived again in Titian. Augustine reappeared in Calvin, and Pelagius in Arminius, to fight over the old battle of election and freedom. Luther rose in Ronge. Take these figures literally, construct what they imply into a dogma, and the product is the transmigration of souls. The result thus arrived at finds effective support in the striking physical resemblance, spiritual likeness, and similarity of mission frequently seen between persons in one age and those in a former age. Columbus was the modern Jason sailing after the Golden Fleece of a New World. Glancing along the portrait gallery of some ancient family, one is sometimes startled to observe a face, extinct for several generations, suddenly confronting him again with all its features in some distant descendant. A peculiarity of conformation, a remarkable trait of character, suppressed for a century, all at once starts into vivid prominence in a remote branch of the lineage, and men say, pointing back to the ancestor, "He has revived once more." Seeing Elisha do the same things that his departed master had done before him, the people exclaimed, "The spirit of Elijah is upon him." Beholding in John the Baptist one going before him in the spirit of that expected prophet, Jesus said, "If ye are able to receive it, this is he." Some of the later Rabbins assert many entertaining things concerning the repeated births of the most distinguished personages in their national history. Abel was born again in Seth; Cain, in that Egyptian whom Moses slew; Abiram, in Ahithophel; and Adam, having already reappeared once in David, will live again in the Messiah. The performance by an eminent man of some great labor which had been done in an earlier age in like manner by a kindred spirit evokes in the imagination an apparition of the return of the dead to repeat his old work.
Fourthly, there are certain familiar psychological experiences which serve to suggest and to support the theory of transmigration, and which are themselves in return explained by such a surmise.
Thinking upon some unwonted subject, often a dim impression arises in the mind, fastens upon us, and we cannot help feeling, that somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflections before. Learning a fact, meeting a face, for the first time, we are puzzled with an obscure assurance that it is not the first time. Travelling in foreign lands, we are ever and anon haunted by a sense of familiarity with the views, urging us to conclude that surely we have more than once trodden those fields and gazed on those scenes; and from hoary mountain, trickling rill, and vesper bell, meanwhile, mystic tones of strange memorial music seem to sigh, in remembered accents, through the soul's plaintive echoing halls, "'Twas auld lang syne, my dear, 'Twas auld lang syne."
Plato's doctrine of reminiscence here finds its basis. We have lived before, perchance many times, and through the clouds of sense and imagination now and then float the veiled visions of things that were. Efforts of thought reveal the half effaced inscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. Snatches of dialogues once held are recalled, faint recollections of old friendships return, and fragments of landscapes beheld and deeds performed long ago pass in weird procession before the mind's half opened eye. We know a professional gentleman of unimpeachable veracity, of distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firm believer in his own existence on the earth previously to his present life. He testifies that on innumerable occasions he has experienced remembrances of events and recognitions of places, accompanied by a flash of irresistible conviction that he had known them in a former state. Nearly every one has felt instances of this, more or less numerous and vivid. The doctrine at which such things hint that "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness," but trailing vague traces and enigmas from a bygone history, "do we come" yields the secret of many a mood and dream, the spell of inexplicable hours, the key and clew to baffling labyrinths of mystery. The belief in the doctrine of the metempsychosis, among a fanciful people and in an unscientific age, need be no wonder to any cultivated man acquainted with the marvels of experience and aware that every one may say,
"Full oft my feelings make me start,
Like footprints on some desert shore,
As if the chambers of my heart
Had heard their shadowy step before."
Fifthly, the theory of the transmigration of souls is marvellously adapted to explain the seeming chaos of moral inequality, injustice, and manifold evil presented in the world of human life. No other conceivable view so admirably accounts for the heterogeneousness of our present existence, refutes the charge of a groundless favoritism urged against Providence, and completely justifies the ways of God to man. The loss of remembrance between the states is no valid objection to the theory; because such a loss is the necessary condition of a fresh and fair probation. Besides, there is a parallel fact of deep significance in our unquestionable experience; "For is not our first year forgot? The haunts of memory echo not."
Once admit the theory to be true, and all difficulties in regard to moral justice vanish. If a man be born blind, deaf, a cripple, a slave, an idiot, it is because in a previous life he abused his privileges and heaped on his soul a load of guilt which he is now expiating. If a sudden calamity overwhelm a good man with unmerited ruin and anguish, it is the penalty of some crime committed in a state of responsible being beyond the confines of his present memory. Does a surprising piece of good fortune accrue to any one, splendid riches, a commanding position, a peerless friendship? It is the reward of virtuous deeds done in an earlier life. Every flower blighted or diseased, every shrub gnarled, awry, and blasted, every brute ugly and maimed, every man deformed, wretched, or despised, is reaping in these hard conditions of being, as contrasted with the fate of the favored and perfect specimens of the kind, the fruit of sin in a foregone existence. When the Hindu looks on a man beautiful, learned, noble, fortunate, and happy, he exclaims, "How wise and good must this man have been in his former lives!" In his philosophy, or religion, the proof of the necessary consequences of virtue and vice is deduced from the metempsychosis, every particular of the outward man being a result of some corresponding quality of his soul, and every event of his experience depending as effect on his previous merit as cause.10 Thus the principal physical and moral phenomena of life are strikingly explained; and, as we gaze around the world, its material conditions and spiritual elements combine in one vast scheme of unrivalled order, and the total experience of humanity forms a magnificent picture of perfect poetic justice. We may easily account for the rise and spread of a theory whose sole difficulty is a lack of positive proof, but whose applications are so consistent and fascinating alike to imagination and to conscience. Hierocles said, and distinguished philosophers both before and since have said, "Without the doctrine of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the ways of Providence."