10 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 286.
Finally, this doctrine, having been suggested by the various foregoing considerations, and having been developed into a practical system of conceptions and motives by certain leading thinkers, was adopted by the principal philosophers and priesthoods of antiquity, and taught to the common people with authority. The popular beliefs of four thousand years ago depended for their prevalence, not so much on cogent arguments or intrinsic probability, as upon the sanctions thrown around them by renowned teachers, priests, and mystagogues. Now, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls was inculcated by the ancient teachers, not as a mere hypothesis resting on loose surmises, but as an unquestionable fact supported by the experimental knowledge of many individuals and by infallible revelation from God. The sacred books of the Hindus abound in detailed histories of transmigrations. Kapila is said to have written out the Vedas from his remembrance of them in a former state of being.
The Vishnu Purana gives some very entertaining examples of the retention of memory through several successive lives.11 Pythagoras pretended to recollect his adventures in previous lives; and on one occasion, as we read in Ovid, going into the temple of Juno, he recognised the shield he had worn as Euphorbus at the siege of Troy.
Diogenes Laertius also relates of him, that one day meeting a man who was cruelly beating a dog, the Samian sage instantly detected in the piteous howls of the poor beast the cries of a dear friend of his long since deceased, and earnestly and successfully interceded for his rescue.
In the life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, numerous extraordinary instances are told of his recognitions of persons he had known in preceding lives. Such examples as these exactly met the weakest point in the metempsychosis theory, and must have had vast influence in fostering the common faith. Plotinus said, "Body is the true river of Lethe; for souls plunged in it forget all." Pierre Leroux, an enthusiastic living defender of the idea of repeated births, attempts to reply to the objection drawn from the absence of memory; but his reply is an appeal rather to authority and fancy than to reason, and leaves the doubts unsolved.12 His supposition is that in each spirit life we remember all the bygone lives, both spiritual and earthly, but in each earth life we forget all that has gone before; just as, here, every night we lose in sleep all memory of the past, but recover it each day again as we awake. Throughout the East this general doctrine is no mere superstition of the masses of ignorant people: it is the main principle of all Hindu metaphysics, the foundation of all their philosophy, and inwrought with the intellectual texture of their inspired books. It is upheld by the venerable authority of ages, by an intense general conviction of it, and by multitudes of subtle conceits and apparent arguments. It was also impressed upon the initiates in the old Mysteries, by being there dramatically shadowed forth through masks, and quaint symbolic ceremonies enacted at the time of initiation.13
This, then, is what we must say of the ancient and widely spread doctrine of transmigration. As a suggestion or theory naturally arising from empirical observation and confirmed by a variety of phenomena, it is plausible, attractive, and, in some stages of
11 Professor Wilson's translation, p. 343.
12 De l'Humanite, livre v. chap. xlii.
13 Porphyry, De Abstinentis, lib. iv. sect. 16. Davies, Rites of the Druids.
knowledge, not only easy to be believed, but hard to be resisted. As an ethical scheme clearing up on principles of poetic justice the most perplexed and awful problems in the world, it throws streams of light through the abysses of evil, gives dramatic solution to many a puzzle, and, abstractly considered, charms the understanding and the conscience. As a philosophical dogma answering to some strange, vague passages in human nature and experience, it echoes with dreamy sweetness through the deep mystic chambers of our being. As the undisputed creed which has inspired and spell bound hundreds of millions of our race for perhaps over a hundred and fifty generations, it commands deference and deserves study. But, viewing it as a thesis in the light of to day, challenging intelligent scrutiny and sober belief, we scarcely need to say that, based on shadows and on arbitrary interpretations of superficial appearances, built of reveries and occult experiences, fortified by unreliable inferences, destitute of any substantial evidence, it is unable to face the severity of science.