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

by William Rounseville Alger

The persistent practice of various modes of profound and rhythmical breathing by which the Brahmins perfect their respiration, and the keen and sustained concentration of their attention on their inner states, tend at the same time to heighten the richness and intensity of the cerebral nerves, to unify the connections of the lower nerve centres with them, and to fuse the unconscious physiological processes with the conscious psychological processes. Then the persevering disuse and suppression of the action of their outer senses cause the objects of the material world around them to seem more vague and dreamy than the impressions of the ideal world within. And so the earth with all its affairs seems an illusion, while their own unsought trains of thought, feeling and imagery the rich mental panorama of pictures and events, are taken for a series of substantial revelations of the universe of being. An irresistible belief in preexistence, immortality and transmigration, results.

On the contrary, in the Western world, the characteristic tendencies are all different. Pantheistic theories are rarely held, and the dreams and emotions which those theories are fitted to feed are foreign and repulsive. An impassible barrier is imagined separating humanity from every other form of being. Speculative reason, imagination and affection, are chiefly employed in scientific studies and social pursuits, or personal schemes, external rather than internal. This absorption in material things and evanescent affairs engenders in the spirit an arid atmosphere of doubt and denial, in which no efflorescence of poetic and mystic faiths can flourish. Thus, while the outward utilities abound, hard negations spread abroad; and living, personal apprehension of God, of an all pervasive Providence, and of the immortality of the soul in any form, dies out either in open infidelity or in a mere verbal acceptance of the established creed of society. Consequently, to the average mind of the modern Western world, the doctrine of transmigration remains a mere fancy, although, as we shall immediately see, it has a strange poetic charm, a deep metaphysical basis, and a high ethical and religious quality.

The first ground on which the belief rests is the various strong resemblances, both physical and psychical, connecting human beings with the whole family of lower creatures. They have all the senses in common with us, together with the rudiments of intelligence and will. They all seem created after one plan, as if their varieties were the gradulations of a single original type. We recognize kindred forms of experience and modes of expression in ourselves and in them. Now the man seems a travesty of the hog, the parrot, the ape, the hawk, or the shark; now they seem travesties of him. As we gaze at the ruminating ox, couched on the summer grass, notice the slow rhythm of his jaw, and the wondering dreaminess of his eyes, it is not difficult to fancy him some ancient Brahmin transmigrated to this, and patiently awaiting his release. Nor is it incongruous with our reason or moral feeling to suppose that the cruel monsters of humanity may in a succeeding birth find the fit penalty for their degradation and crime, in the horrid life of a crocodile or a boa constrictor.

The conception of a series of connected lives also furnishes a plausible explanation for many mysteries in our present experience. Reference is made to all that class of phenomena covered by the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. Faces previously unseen, and localities unvisited, awaken in us a vivid feeling of a long familiarity with them. Thoughts and emotions, not hitherto entertained, come to us as if we had welcomed and dismissed them a thousand times in periods long gone by. Many an experience, apparently novel and untried, makes us start as at the shadowy reminder of something often known before. The supposition of forgotten lives preceding the present, portions of whose consciousness reverberate and gleam through the veils of thought and sense, seems to throw satisfactory light on this strange department of experience.

Much more weighty and penetrative, however, than the foregoing considerations is the philosophical argument in behalf of transmigration, drawn from the nature of the soul. Consciousness being in its very essence the feeling of itself, the conscious soul can never feel itself annihilated, even in thought it only loses the knowledge of its being when it lapses into unconsciousness, as in sleep or trance. The soul may indeed think of its own annihilation but cannot realize the thought in feeling, since the fainter emotional reflex upon the idea of its destruction is instantly contradicted and over borne by the more massive and vivid sense of its persistent being in immediate consciousness. This incessant self assertion of consciousness at once suggests the idea of its being independent of the changing and vanishing body in which it is temporarily shrined. Then the conception naturally follows that the soul, as it has once appeared in human form, so it may reappear indefinitely in any of the higher or lower forms of being which compose the hierarchy of the universe. The eternity of the soul, past and future, once accepted by the mind, leads directly to the construction of the whole scheme of metempsychosis an everlasting succession of births and deaths, disembodiments and reembodiments, with their laws of personality and fortunes of time and space weaving the boundless web of destiny and playing the endless drama of providence.

But the strongest support of the theory of transmigration is the happy moral solution it seems to give to the problem of the dark and distressing inequality and injustice which otherwise appear so predominant in the experience of the world. To the superficial observer of human life the whole scene of struggle, sin and sorrow, nobleness and joy, triumph and defeat, is a tangled maze of inconsistencies, a painful combination of violent discords. But if we believe that every soul, from that of the lowest insect to that of the greatest archangel, forms an affiliated member of the infinite family of God, and is eternal in its conscious essence, perishable only as to its evanescent disguises of unconscious incarnation; that every act of every creature is followed by its legitimate reactions; that these actions and reactions constitute a law of retribution absolutely perfect; that these souls, with all their doings and sufferings are interconnected with one another, and with the whole, all whose relationships copenetrate and cooperate with mutual influences whose reports are infallible and with lines of sequence that never break, then the bewildering maze becomes a vindicated plan, the horrible discord a divine harmony. What an explication it gives of those mysteries of evil, pain, sorrow and retribution, which often wrap the innocent and the wicked in one sad fate, if we but see that no individual stands alone, but trails along with him the unfinished sequels of all ancestral experience, and, furthermore, is so bound up with his simultaneous race that each is responsible for all and all for each, and that no one can be wholly saved or safe until all are redeemed and perfected! Then every suffering we endure for faults not our own, the consequence of the deeds of others, assumes a holy light and a sublime dignity, associating us with that great sacrament of atoning pain whereof the crucified Christ is not the exclusive instance but the representative head.

The above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the resurrection into a form scientifically credible, and reconciled with the immemorial tenet of transmigration, may seem to some a very fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy. Perhaps it is so. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic animus. It is advanced solely as an illustration of what may possibly be true, as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of history and the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are so wonderful, the method of it is so rational, the region of contemplation into which it lifts the mind is so grand, the prospects it opens are of such universal reach and import, that the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublime scope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindication of providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of the littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes it easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny to seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty of the powers of the mind which can conceive such things. After traversing the grounds here set forth we feel that if the view based on them be not the truth, it must be because God has in reserve for us a sequel greater and lovelier, not meaner than our brightest dream hitherto. The worthiest theory of the fate of man which the spirit of man can construct must either be a revelatory divination of the truth, or an inadequate attempt to grasp the design of the Creator in its true glory. It is impious and absurd to hold that man can think out a scheme superior to the one God has decreed. And it seems equally unreasonable to suppose that the scheme of God for the future stages of our career is one which has no hints in our present experience. Certainly it appears more likely that the sequel will be discovered by the logical completion of the inwrought order which has been slowly unfolding from the first. And what do history and prophecy show more plainly than the tendency to a convergence of all humanity in every man? Spreading consanguinity in descent and growth of sympathetic knowledge both point to this. Perfect this in each man, and illuminate his whole organism and its relations with adequate intelligence, and we have a true resurrection, not indeed of decayed bodies from the grave, but of historic states of consciousness from their latent embedment in the nervous system, and their undulatory record in the dynamic medium of the creation. Our senses now convert certain sets of undulations of the ethereal medium into perceptions of light, heat, sound, and so interpret their contents and extract their tidings. It is not impossible that in a coming stage of development we may obtain additional senses; our spirits may command the means of translating into correspondent states of consciousness all the other modes of vibration of the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimited knowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The whole universe may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of all deeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power to recover and read its own.

As each generation is the inheritor of the preceding ones, all of which from the first prolong their existence into the last in unbroken continuity of historic conduct and responsibility, justice may at the ripened period be naturally summed up without any miracle. We all are projections of our ancestors. They properly in us suffer and enjoy in accordance with what has flowed from their lives. The whole of this, lighted up with consciousness at last, may be the real meaning of the burden of the spirit given to the apostle Paul, but misinterpreted by him into the mechanico scenic scheme of the Judaized Christian Church. For when the mighty influx struck the brain of the persecuting zealot, revolutionizing his life, it came into connection with all the inflamed theories and convictions so deeply drilled therein by his Pharisaic education. These convictions, partly of a mere local and transient character, associated with legends of Adam and Abraham and the under world and Christ and the sky, mixed with the true and universal import of the higher inspiration now given him, caused his misconstrual of its message, and stamped the purely human and providential meaning of the doctrine of the resurrection with the rabbinical die of a politico mythological dogma. If this were so, it is not the only instance in which the preexistent discolorations in the mind of an inspired prophet have refracted the truth of his burden into distorted error and bequeathed the task of a future rectification when more light shall have come.

In the next place, we come to the fourth reason for the growing doubts and disbelief of our day in immortality. It is the remarkable diffusion of the habits of thought engendered by the study of materialistic science. The authority of physical science has been rapidly encroaching on and displacing the authority of the church theology and sectarian creeds. Belief in invariable laws has undermined belief in miracle and supernatural revelation. Those who had been taught that the resurrection of Christ was the only adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, learning to deny the former, have naturally proceeded to question the latter. For in such matters the real implications of logic are little noticed. The religious skepticism nourished by physical science is in all respects really as irrational and baseless as it is actual. For example, the resurrection of Christ, admitting it to be a fact, did not create the immortality it was considered to illustrate. If he rose, it was because men are immortal, and men are not immortal because he rose. If he did not rise, men are immortal all the same, provided human immortality be a truth; if it be not a truth, the resurrection of Christ would be an isolated abnormal event without any logical validity on the question. The truth or falsity of human immortality, therefore, is a question of the creative plan of God and the essential nature of man, to be decided on the intrinsic evidences, and cannot logically be affected one way or the other by any individual historic occurrence limited to a certain time and place. Yet it is a practical necessity that any great popular faith, if it rests on authority, will be shocked and weakened by everything which shocks and weakens that authority, no matter how adventitious it is. If one cannot believe in the preternatural resurrection of Christ, that surely is no valid reason for denying the natural immortality of the soul, but only a good reason for seeking to learn if there be not adequate grounds for this faith quite independent of scripture text and priestly assertion.

Precisely the same reasoning holds in relation to the doubts about spiritual realities bred in the minds of those whose studies are conversant exclusively with material realities. The professors of physical science, thoroughly familiarized with things which combine and dissolve, often come to fancy that everything is phenomenal and evanescent, that there is no immaterial substance, that spirit is not entity but process, that thought and feeling and will are mere transient functions of transient matter. Thus all faith in the individuality of mind is pulverized at the fountain head. There can be no question but that such is the common influence of a constant contemplation of the physical aspects alone of physical things. Mentality, consciousness, is regarded as the prismatic bow in the cloud, a spectral show that appears and vanishes, with no permanent substance. At the present time, in Christendom, the one conquering power in literature, the one fascinating absorption of thought in society, is that connected with the cultivation of physical science. Its prestige is overwhelming. Its prevalent methods and results give a materialistic turn of interpretation to the popular mind upon all subjects. The direct consequence, among that class of minds who put physical science above theology, is the spreading disavowal of all belief in the immortality of the soul. The fallacy is obvious, and the remedy is simple, if there be at hand but enough of modest candor and patience fairly to weigh the facts of the case in the scales of a sound logic.