The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life

by William Rounseville Alger

It is a precious boon to be rid of such an unnatural and ominous belief as that in the final disemboguing of the dead by sea and land, the tumbling of the rocks, the falling of the stars, and the everlasting torture of the condemned in a prison of fire. Far better than any such doctrine is a calm confronting of the mystery of the future in its confessed secrecy as it is, and a peaceful resignation to the will of God in conscious ignorance and trust. And yet the believer in this scheme of colossal and ghastly necromancy, when confronted with the unanswerable arguments against it, is sometimes found clinging to it with willful tenacity, and bitterly complaining of those who refute it, that they would rob him of his faith and give him nothing in exchange. Suppose a man to believe that in the year nineteen hundred the earth will be exploded, and that all men, except himself and the little clique of his friends, will be strung for eternity on a red hot iron wire in empty space. Suppose that this horrid notion is clearly proved to him to be an error. Then, because he is not taught exactly what will happen in the year nineteen hundred, he, the unhappy man, assails his enlightener for having robbed him of his faith and given him nothing in exchange! Is not the truth of ignorance better than the falsity of superstition? Modest faith in front of the shrouded unknown can well stand comparison with the arrogant and incompetent exultation of fanaticism. In regard to that belated relic of the belief in magic, the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the dead in their fleshy bodies, let us gratefully wipe it all out and draw a long breath of relief. Let us rejoice to know that the will of God will be done in the fulfilling order of the universe, although we may now be ignorant of precisely what that will is. Believing the will of God to be good, whether revealed or concealed, we can afford to wait in peace, trying in the meantime to carry our individual character and our social state and experience here steadily toward perfection. Surely, that is the best way to prepare ourselves for whatever lies beyond.

And yet we are not wholly shut up to mere blind faith. There is always some ground of moral truth in every widely extended dogmatic belief. In casting off the dogma we should carefully extract its moral purport and try to give it a more authentic setting. It will not be hard to do this with reference to the doctrine now under consideration.

Obscure and complicated and baffling as the problem of our future destiny is, we can already trace many a line of light, many a prophetic signal and hint suggestive of what is ordained to happen to the individual and the race.

Unquestionably, the genuine moral reason why the belief in the fleshly resurrection has been so general and tenacious is the two fold consideration: first; that we desire our future life to be an incarnate life because our experience makes that form of being realizable and precious to our imagination, while a disembodied ghostliness is, perforce, repulsively vacant and abstract; and, secondly because our affection and our imagination and our conscience profoundly crave the complete fulfillment of the scheme of the historic career of collective humanity in this world in some such manner, that here, on this dear old earth, the experience of our whole race may be brought to a clear epical unity, and may close with an illuminating justification of providence in the sight of all men, who shall then read the interpretation of their entire past, and see together eye to eye. Now we believe that the essence of this natural desire and this sublime hope is a divine prophecy which shall be fulfilled. We believe that in the very falsity of the doctrine of a carnal resurrection and judgment there lurks a truth yet to break out in overwhelming refulgence and perfectly satisfy every soul of man. But it will be brought about by the gradual culmination of the means and processes which God is now visibly carrying forward, and not by any sudden convulsion of miracle.

The faculties of human consciousness in the individual and the race are in process of development. Also the transmissible sum of knowledge, on which those faculties employ themselves, is in process of rapid increase. The faculties of knowledge possessed by an accomplished master of literature and science now, contrasted with those of a cannibal savage of the pre glacial epoch, reveal an advance which hardly needs to be repeated in order to give us a comprehension of the whole experience of our kind on earth, quite ample to explain the facts of the case and solve the problem of our destiny. The grasp of our intelligence and the richness of our sensibility increase along the ages. The generalizations of our philosophy grow wider, the gropings of our sympathetic faith become vaster, the retrospection and the prevision of our science keener and longer and more inclusive, every generation. It is very significant that the further away we get from the prehistoric times the more we learn about them. Archaology is one of the latest and most swiftly enlarging branches of knowledge. Let the processes thus indicated go on, as they have gone on and are with accelerated pace going on, and the date is not beyond prophecy when all earthly and human secrets will be solved, and their mysteries be revealed, and the autobiographic book and volume of the world be opened, and the universal tribunal be set in the light of every life, and the irreversible judgment be declared, by the simple revelation of the truth of history in the web of its relations. For as every atom of matter is conjoined by all the laws of nature with all other atoms of matter, and the history of all their adventures is registered by their own indestructible vibrations in the elemental spaces of the universe where they run their career, so every identity of spirit is conjoined by all the laws of spirit with all other spirits, and all their deeds and sufferings are ineffaceably self registered in their reactions upon the authors, in the pictures they shed upon space, and the influences they set rolling through the eternity of successive souls and lives. All, then, that is needed for a perfectly vindicating judgment is the awakening of consciousness to the full view of the facts. And the tendencies are powerfully moving in that direction. What was the illumination of Swedenborg but the taking possession by his consciousness of the unconscious lower nervous system, with all its impacted ancestral experiences and wondrous relations with the visible and invisible worlds? And this may be repeated, by and by, and be perfected, and become common. What may result is as yet almost inconceivable. Let us trace a little, in this regard, the connections of the individual and the face, and follow out some of their implications.

Suppose that in turn every child born begets or bears two children. Then in the thirtieth generation the transmitted qualities of spirit, nerve and blood, of the single original pair of parents will be represented in upwards of one thousand millions of descendants. It is clear from this law, allowing for all deviations from its numerical progression on account of inter marriages and of failures of offspring, how powerfully and swiftly the ever multiplying streams of consanguinity are spreading in every direction, affiliating and fraternizing the whole human race literally into one family, the innumerable rills of separate descent intermingling as they flow on, and finally diffusing over the earth in that oceanic unity of humanity, which, when full, will beat with the tidal pulse of a single sympathy. It is believed by many that no experience of any living creature is ever lost, but is by its own spontaneous and exact reflex vibrations either registered in the conscious memory or deposited in the unconscious organism in latent perfection of vestige and tendency. Memory is a faithful treasurer of all the stores of events. Suppose now that each parent bequeaths in the dynamic germ of his progeny the possibility of reviving into consciousness, when the proper conditions shall be furnished, the accumulated sum of all that has happened throughout the entire line of his ancestry. And again, imagine that all the souls composing the human race each of which is a substantial and indestructible entity, living incarnated over and over, and not a mere phenomenal process that vanishes into nothing with the dissolution of the body are so limited in number that they may be embodied on the earth in one generation, whose members shall be so conjoined in knowledge and fellowship that the life of the whole is concentrated in every one, and the life of every one mirrored in the whole. Now, finally, let it be conceived that this latest generation, including all who have ever inhabited the world, at last attain a development which enables them to grasp in distinct consciousness the collective sum of the organic heritage of the race, each one reading with perfect clearness in every particular the complete history of humanity from the beginning to the end, understanding all its causes, courses and consequences, and beholding with unspeakable delight the justification of the ways of God, the whole universe opening into free intercommunication, as if time and space were either no more or else their measures were of boundless subjective elasticity, every creature found in peace and rapture at the goal of his destiny. That, indeed, would be a realization of the day of judgment and the resurrection of the dead, but without a shock or a jar in the course of things which science reveals. The process of development now going on, if carried far enough, will naturally result in this or in something equivalent to it; while the notion of the vomiting forth of the accumulated dead from land and sea, at the blast of a trumpet, is a wild piece of imagery, borrowed from startling political phenomena, and applied with absurd incongruity to the chronic providence of God. The former view contains all the moral significance of the latter, but without its violation of probability. Nor is it all necessary that the climax shall be brought about of a simultaneous universal judgment, or of the appearance of our whole race on the earth at one time. The giving of the vision to souls subjectively, one after another, in the order of their attainment of the conditions, would meet every requirement of the case. To each one in turn, wherever he was, as the result broke on him in the ecstatic glory of all it means, the essence of the so long cherished faith of Christendom would be justified, and the providential theater and scenery of human experience would appear under its illumination as a dazzling vision of poetic justice perfect at every point.

Marvelous and almost incredible as this scheme of thought may seem, it is not more mysterious in itself, or more staggering in its demand on our faith, than many things successively were which are now established beyond a doubt such as the telegraphic conversation of men through the ocean and around the globe; the seven hundred and thirty three thousand millions of ethereal vibrations in a second, which cause the report of the violet ray in consciousness; the transcendent disclosures of the spectrum analysis; the conception of gravitation as a force which holds all matter in unbroken union, and acts throughout the stellar universe with timeless simultaneity. It is in entire keeping with everything else in the workings of God, as demonstrated by science, on every hand, both in nature and history. The atomic theory and the nebular hypothesis, the chemical crucible and the mathematical calculus, the microscope and the telescope discover to our senses and our reason, wherever we look, facts as mysterious to the understanding, and as baffling to the imagination as any of the foregoing implications; showing us, in every department of nature and experience, the bewildering miracles of the infinitely little and the infinitely great exactly balanced and perpetually passing into one another.

There is a third way, in addition to the ghost world of the primitive faith of barbarians, and the resurrection climax of the Christian and Parsee and Hebrew and Moslem creeds, in which the imagination of man, moved by his instinct and reason, has concreted the idea of a future life; namely, by the doctrine of transmigration. A striking feature and no slight recommendation of the foregoing view of the true meaning of the dogma of the resurrection is that it reconciles these two chief forms of the belief in immortal life. For resurrection and transmigration agree in the central point of a restoration of the disembodied soul to a new bodily existence, only the former represents this as a single collective miracle wrought by an arbitrary stroke of God at the close of the earthly drama, the latter depicts it as constantly taking place in the regular fulfillment of the divine plan in the creation. This difference is certainly, to a scientific and philosophical thinker, who reasons on the data of nature and experience and not on the dicta of theologians, strongly in favor of the Oriental theory. We have no experience whatever of any general resurrection, but all experience is full of the constant appearances of souls in freshly created bodies throughout the scale of sentient being. If our final future life is to be a bodily one there surely is a world of presumptive evidence, therefore, in behalf of transmigration as opposed to resurrection. Besides the various distinctive arguments of its own, every reason for the resurrection holds with at least equal force for transmigration. The argument from analogy is especially strong. It is natural to argue from the universal spectacle of incarnated life that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety of souls finding in the variety of worlds an everlasting series of adventures, in appropriate organisms; there being, as Paul said, one kind of flesh of birds, another kind of flesh of beasts, another of men, another of angels, and so on. Our present lack of recollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality. Every night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day we reawaken to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. So in one life we may forget or dream, and in another recover the whole thread of experience from the beginning.

In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtful and refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had so extensive and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote of the majority, having for ages on ages been held by half of the human race with an intensity of conviction almost without a parallel. Indeed the most striking fact, at first sight, about the doctrine of the repeated existences of the soul incarnated in different organisms, its form and experience in each successive embodiment being determined by its merits and demerits in the preceding ones, is the constant reappearance of the faith in it in all parts of the world, and its permanent hold on certain great nations. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose contrasted splendors and horrors awaken astonishment more and more with each step in the progressive decipherment of its mysterious record, seems largely to have grown out of this faith. The swarming millions of India also, through the chief periods of their history, have lain under its spell, suffered their lives, wrought their great works of government, architecture, philosophy, and poetry, and in its belief meditated, aspired, and exhaled their souls. Ruder forms of it are reported among innumerable barbaric tribes. It played an important part in the speculations of the early Fathers of the Christian Church, and has often cropped out in the works of later theologians. Men of the profoundest metaphysical genius, like Scotus Erigena and Leibnitz, have affirmed it, and sought to give it a logical or scientific basis. And even amidst the predominance of skeptical and materialistic influences in Europe and America, at the present time, we constantly meet individuals with independent minds who earnestly believe the alluring dogma. For, to a large and varied class of minds, the doctrine holds a transcendent attraction as well as a manifold plausibility.

Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that it seems to be a native and ineradicable growth of the Oriental world; but appears in the Western world only in scattered instances, and rather as an exotic form of thought. In the growing freedom and liberality of thought, which no less than its doubt and denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if the full time had come for a greater mental and asthetic hospitality on the part of Christians towards Hindus. The advocates of the resurrection should not confine their attention to the repellent or the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to its claim and its charm. The Pantheistic tendency which possessed and overwhelmed the Brahminic mind, shaping and tinging its views opened the whole range of sentient existences to an indiscriminate sympathy, and made the idea of transmigration natural, and more pleasing than repugnant. Furthermore, the Brahminic thinkers and sages were a distinct class of men whose whole lives were absorbed in introspective reveries and metaphysical broodings calculated to stimulate the imagination and arouse to the keenest consciousness all the latent marvels and possibilities of human experience, thus furnishing the most favorable conditions for exactly such a belief as that of transmigration, an endless series of ever varying adventures for the imperishable soul. And the vast swarms of the common people in the East are the passive followers of this high caste of thinkers, abjectly accepting what they teach. Accordingly, the mysterious doctrine of the metempsychosis has held the entire mind, sentiment and civilization of the East, through every period of its history, as with an irreversible spell.