The Day After Death (New Edition). Our Future Life According to Science

To this it will be objected that there is destruction of identity where memory does not exist, and that expiation, in order to be profitable to the guilty soul, must co-exist with the remembrance of faults committed in the previous existence, for the man is not punished who does not know that he is punished. We may remark here that we do not use the word "expiation" precisely as theologians employ it, but rather as a new dwelling conferred on the soul, in order that it may resume the interrupted course of its advance towards perfection. We believe that the remembrance of our previous life, forbidden to us during our terrestrial sojourn, will come back when we shall have attained the happy realms of ether, in which we shall pass through the existences which are to succeed our life on earth. Among the number of the perfections and moral faculties forming the attributes of the superhuman being, the memory of his anterior lives will be included. Identity will be born again for him. Having suffered a momentary collapse, his individuality will be restored to him, with his conscience and his liberty.

Let us hearken awhile to Jean Reynaud, as he tells us in his fine book, Terre et Ciel, the marvels of that memory which shall be restored to man after his being shall have undergone a series of changes.

"The integral restitution of our recollections," says Jean Reynaud, "seems to us one of the inherent principal conditions of our future happiness. We cannot fully enjoy life, until we become, like Janus, kings of time, until we know how to concentrate in us, not only the sentiment of the present, but that of the future and the past. Then, if perfect life be one day given to us, perfect memory must also be given to us. And now, let us try to think of the infinite treasures of a mind enriched by the recollections of an innumerable series of existences, entirely different from each other, and yet admirably linked together by a continual dependence. To this marvellous garland of metempsychoses, encircling the universe, let us add, if the perspective seem worthy of our ambition, a clear perception of the particular influence of our life upon the ulterior changes of each of the worlds which we shall have successively inhabited; let us aggrandize our life in immortalizing it, and wed our history grandly with the history of the heavens. Let us confidently collect together every material of happiness, since thus the all-powerful bounty of the Creator wills it, and let us construct the existence which the future reserves for virtuous souls; let us plunge into the past by our faith, while we are waiting for more light, even as by our faith we plunge into the future. Let us banish the idea of disorder from the earth, by opening the gates of time beyond our birth, as we have banished the idea of injustice by opening other gates beyond the tomb; let us stretch duration in every direction, and, notwithstanding the obscurity which rests upon our two horizons, let us glorify the Creator in glorifying ourselves, who are God's ministers on earth, let us remember, with pious pride, that we are the younger brethren of the angels."

Under what condition does the soul regain the remembrance of its entire past? Jean Reynaud specifies two periods. 1. That which is fulfilled, as the Druids hold, in the world of journeys and trials, of which the earth forms a part. 2. The period during which the soul, set free from the miseries and vicissitudes of the terrestrial life, pursues its destinies in the ever widening and progressive circle of happiness; a period which passes outside of the earth. In the first period there is an eclipse of the memory at each passage into a new sphere; in the second period, whatever may be the displacements and transfigurations of the person, the memory is preserved full and entire. This theory of Reynaud's is admitted by M. Pezzani.

With the exception of that eclipse of the memory at each passage into a new sphere, which seems to us incomprehensible and useless, we think, with Jean Reynaud, that the complete remembrance of our previous existences will return to the soul when it shall inhabit the ethereal regions, the sojourn of the superhuman being. In this manner only, in our opinion, can the defect of man's memory, concerning his previous existences, be explained. Thus, the argument from that defect of memory does not remain without reply. Writers who have preceded us, and have meditated on this question, had already found the solution which we offer. This objection is not, then, of a nature to throw doubt on the doctrine of plurality of existences. Let us conclude, with M. Pezzani, that it is by a design of nature, that man, during this life, loses the remembrance of what he formerly was. If we retained the recollection of our anterior existences, if we had before our eyes, as if seen in a mirror, all that we had done during our former lives, we should be much troubled by the remembrance, which would harass the greater part of our actions, and deprive us of our complete free will.

Why is an invincible dread of death common to all men? Death is not, in reality, very dreadful, since it is not a termination, but a simple change of condition. If man feels terror of death to such an extent, we may be sure that nature imposes that sentiment upon him, in the interests of the preservation of his species. Thus, in our belief, the fear of death and the absence of memory of our former lives are referable to the same cause. The first is a salutary illusion imposed by God upon the weakness of humanity; the second is a means of securing to man full liberty of action.

Another objection will be made to our doctrine. It will be said: The re-incarnation of souls is not a new idea; it is, on the contrary, an idea as old as humanity itself. It is the metempsychosis, which from the Indians passed to the Egyptians, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, and which was afterwards professed by the Druids.

The metempsychosis is, in fact, the most ancient of philosophical conceptions; it is the first theory imagined by men, in order to explain the origin and the destiny of our race. We do not recognize an argument against our system of nature in this remark, but rather indeed a confirmation of it. An idea does not pass down from age to age, and find acceptance during five or six centuries, by the picked men of successive generations, unless it rests upon some serious foundation. We are not called upon to defend ourselves because our opinions harmonize with the philosophical ideas which date from the most distant time in the history of the peoples. The first observers, and the oriental philosophers in particular, who are the most ancient thinkers of all whose writings we possess, had not, like us, their minds warped, prejudiced, turned aside by routine, or trammelled by the words of teachers. They were placed very close to nature, and they beheld its realities, without any preconceived ideas, derived from education in particular schools. We cannot, therefore, but applaud ourselves when we find that the logical deduction of our ideas has led us back to the antique conception of Indian wisdom.

There is, however, a profound difference between our system of the plurality of lives, and the oriental dogma of the metempsychosis. The Indian philosophers, the Egyptians, and the Greeks, who inherited the maxims of Pythagoras, admitted that the soul, on leaving a human body, enters into that of an animal, to undergo punishment. We entirely reject this useless step backward. Our metempsychosis is upward and onward, it never steps down, or back.

A brief sketch of the dogma of the animal metempsychosis, such as it was professed by the different philosophical sects of antiquity will not be out of place here. We shall explain in what particulars the oriental dogma differs from our system, and show, at the same time, how popular the metempsychosis was among the peoples of antiquity, in Europe as well as in Asia.

The most ancient known book is that of the Védas, which contains the religious principles of the Indians or Hindoos. In this code of the primary religions of Asia is found the general dogma of the final absorption of souls in God. But, before it reaches its final fusion with the great All, it is necessary that the human soul should have traversed all the active orders of life. The soul, therefore, performed a series of transmigrations and journeys, in various places, in different worlds, and passed through the bodies of several different animals. Men who had not done good works went into the moon or the sun; or else they came back to the earth, and assumed the bodies of certain animals, such as dogs, butterflies, adders, &c. There were also intermediary places between the earth and the sun, whither souls who had only been partly faulty, went to pass a period of expiation. We find the following in the Védas:—

"If a man has done works which lead to the world of the sun, his soul repairs to the world of the sun; if he has done works which lead to the world of the Creator, his soul goes to the world of the Creator."

The book of the Védas says, very distinctly, that the animal, as well as the man, has the right of passing to other worlds, as a recompense for his good works. The oriental wisdom felt none of that uncalled-for contempt for animals which is characteristic of modern philosophy and religion.

"All animals, according to the degree of knowledge and intelligence which they have had in this world, go into other worlds. The man whose object was the recompense of his good works, being dead, goes into the world of the moon. There he is at the service of the overseers of the half of the moon in its crescent. They welcome him joyfully, but he is not tranquil, he is not happy; all his recompense is to have attained for a while to the world of the moon. On the expiration of this time, the servant of the overseers of the moon descends again into hell; and is born as a worm, a butterfly, lion, fish, dog, or under any other form (even under a human form)."19

"At the last stages of his descent, if one asks, who are you? he replies: I come from the world of the moon, the wages of the deeds done during my life merely for the sake of reward. I am again invested with a body; I have suffered in the womb of my mother, and in leaving it; I hope finally to acquire the knowledge of Him who is all things, to enter into the right way of worship and of meditation without any consideration of reward.

"In the world of the moon, one receives the reward of good works which are done without renunciation of their fruits, of their merits; but this reward has only a fixed time, after which one is born again in an inferior world, a wicked world, a world which is the recompense of evil.

"By the renunciation of all pleasure, and of all reward by seeking God only, with unshaken faith, we reach the sun which has no end, the great world, whence we return no more to a world which is the recompense of evil."20

The Egyptians, having borrowed this doctrine from the Hindoos, made it the basis of their religious worship. Herodotus informs us,21 that, according to the Egyptians, the human soul, on issuing from a completely decomposed body, enters into that of some animal. The soul takes three thousand years to pass from this body through a series of others, and at the conclusion of this interval, the same soul returns to the human species, entering the form of a newly-born infant.

The Egyptians employed excessive caution in the preservation of human bodies. They embalmed the corpses of their relatives or of personages of importance to the state, and thus prepared the mummies which are to be seen in all our museums. The universal practice of embalming was not intended, as has been supposed, to keep the human body ready to receive the soul, returning at the end of three thousand years, to seek its primitive abode. It had another object. It was supposed that the soul did not commence its migrations after the death of the human body, while any portion of the corpse remained entire. Hence the efforts made by the Egyptians, to retard the moment of separation by the preservation of the corpse as long as possible. Servius says:

"The Egyptians, renowned for their wisdom, prolonged the duration of corpses, that the existence of the soul, attached to that of the body, might be preserved, and might not pass away quickly to others. The Romans, on the contrary, burn corpses, so that the soul, resuming its liberty, might immediately re-enter nature."

The most ancient and remarkable of the Greek philosophers, Pythagoras, found out the doctrine of the metempsychosis, in his travels in Egypt. He adopted it in his school, and the whole of the Greek philosophy held, with Pythagoras, that the souls of the wicked pass into the bodies of animals. Hence the abstinence from flesh meat, prescribed by Pythagoras to his disciples, a precept which he also derived from Egypt, where respect for animals was due to the general persuasion that the bodies of beasts were tenanted by human souls, and, consequently, that by ill-treating animals, one ran the risk of injuring one's own ancestors. Empedocles, the philosopher, adopted the Pythagorean system. He says, in lines quoted by Clement of Alexandria:—

"I, too, have been a young maiden,A tree, a bird, a mute fish in the seas."

Plato, the most illustrious of the philosophers of Greece, accords a large place to the views of Pythagoras, even amid his most sublime conceptions of the soul, and of immortality. He held that the human soul passes into the body of animals, in expiation of its crimes. Plato said that on earth we remember what we have done during our previous existences, and that to learn is to remember one's self.

"Cowards," he says, "are changed into women, vain and frivolous men into birds, the ignorant into wild beasts, lower in kind and crawling upon the earth, in proportion as their idleness has been more degrading; stained and corrupt souls animate fishes and aquatic reptiles." Again, he says: "Those who have abandoned themselves to intemperance and gluttony enter into the bodies of animals with like propensities. They who have loved injustice, cruelty, and rapine assume the bodies of wolves, hawks, and falcons. The destiny of souls has relation to the lives which they have led."

Plato held that the soul took only one thousand years to complete its journey through the bodies of animals; but he believed that this journey repeated itself ten times over, which gives a total of 10,000 years for the completion of the entire circle of existences. Between each of these periods the soul made a brief sojourn in Hades. During this sojourn it drank of the waters of the river Lethe, in order to lose the recollection of its previous existence, before re-commencing its new life.

Plato exalted the dogma of the animal metempsychosis by his grand views upon spiritual immortality and the liberty of man, ideas which even at the present time are quoted with admiration, but for whose recapitulation we have not space.

The metempsychosis holds less rank in the Platonic doctrine than in the Pythagorean and Egyptian systems. All its importance was resumed among the philosophers of the Alexandrian school, who continued, in Egypt, the traditions of the Platonic philosophy, and revived the days of the schools of Athens on the soil of the Pharaohs. Plotinus, the commentator of Plato, says, concerning the doctrine of the transmigration of souls:

"It is a dogma recognized from the utmost antiquity, that if the soul commits errors, it is condemned to expiate them by undergoing punishment in the Shades, and then it passes into new bodies to begin its trials over again."

This passage proves that the ancients held the sojourn of the soul in hell to be only temporary, and that it was always followed by fresh trials, terrible and painful in proportion to the errors which were to be repaired.

"When," says Plotinus, "we have gone astray in the multiplicity of our corporal passions, we are punished, first by the straying itself, and afterwards, when we resume a body, by finding ourselves in worse conditions. The soul, on leaving the body, becomes that power which it has most developed. Let us, then, fly from base things here below, and raise ourselves to the intelligent world, so that we may not fall into the purely sensational life, by following images which are merely of the senses, or into the vegetative life, by indulging in mere physical pleasure and gluttony; let us raise ourselves to the intelligent world, to intelligence, to God.

"Those who have exercised human faculties are born again as men. Those who have used their senses only pass into the bodies of brutes, and especially into the bodies of wild beasts, if they have been accustomed to yield to violent impulses of anger; so that the different bodies which they animate are conformable to their various propensities. Those who have done nothing but indulge their appetites pass into the bodies of luxurious and gluttonous animals. Others, who, instead of indulging concupiscence or anger, have degraded their senses by sloth, are reduced to vegetate in the plants, because in their previous existences they have exercised nothing but vegetative power, and have only worked to become trees. Those who have loved the enjoyment of music over much, but have led lives otherwise pure, pass into the bodies of melodious birds. Those who have governed tyrannically, but have no other vice, become eagles. Those who have spoken lightly of celestial things are changed into birds which fly towards the higher regions of the air. He who has acquired civil virtues becomes a man again, but if he does not possess these virtues to a sufficient extent, he is transformed into a sociable creature, such as the bee, or some other being of that species."

Every one knows that among our own ancestors, and the Druids or high-priests of the Gauls, the metempsychosis was held almost in the same sense as among the Egyptians and the Greeks. It is, so to speak, a national faith to us, for it has been held in honour, its dogmas have flourished, in the same countries in which we now dwell. We have recalled these facts, and collected these passages from ancient writers, only in order to define the manner in which the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks, and, in later times, the Gauls, understood the metempsychosis. Our system differs from the old oriental conception, which was embraced by the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Druids, in our denial that the human soul can ever return to the body of an animal. We believe that the human soul has already passed through this probation, and that it never can be renewed. In nature, in fact, the animal has a part inferior to that of man; it is below our species in its degree of intelligence, and it cannot have either merit or demerit. Its faculties do not invest it with the entire responsibility of its actions. It is but an intermediate link between the plant and man; it has certain faculties, but we cannot pretend that those faculties assimilate it to moral man.

Thus, we reject this doctrine of the return of the human soul to conditions through which it has already passed. Retrogression has no place in our system. The soul, in its progressive march, may pause for an instant, but it never turns back. We admit that man is condemned to re-commence an ill-fulfilled existence, but this new experience is made in a human body, in a new covering of the same living type, and not in the form of an inferior being. The oriental dogma of the metempsychosis misapprehended the great law of progress, which is, on the contrary, the foundation of our doctrine.

Fourth objection. It will be said to us: You maintain that our souls have already existed in the bodies of animals; do you, then, share the belief of those naturalists who derive man from the monkey?

No, certainly not. The French and German naturalists, who, applying Darwin's theory of the transformation of species to man, have declared man to be derived from the monkey, rely entirely on anatomical considerations. Vogt, Bruchner, Huxley, and Broca compare the skeleton of the monkey with that of primitive man; they study the form of the skull of each respectively, they measure the width and the prominence of the jaws, &c., &c. From the results, they draw the conclusion that man is anatomically derived from a species of quadrumane. The soul is not taken into any consideration by these men of science, who argue precisely as if nothing of the thinking kind existed in the anatomical cavities which they explore and measure. It is, on the contrary, by comparing the faculties of the human soul with the faculties of animals that we arrive at our conclusion. The animal forms signify nothing to us; the spirit, in its various manifestations, is our chief object. Why, indeed, should we seek to derive man from the monkey, rather than from any other mammiferous animal, rather than from the wolf, or the fox? Is there much difference between the skeleton of the monkey and that of the wolf, the fox, or any other carnivorous beast? Put three or four of those skeletons together, and you will not find it easy to distinguish one from the other, if, instead of selecting a monkey of a superior species, you take an inferior quadrumane, a striated monkey, a lemur, or a macao.

Interrogate the physiological functions of the monkey. You will find them, and the organs which serve those functions, perfectly similar in all animals, and those organs identical in their structure. Why, then, should you derive man from the monkey, rather than from the wolf or the fox? Is it because the monkeys in our menageries have a distant resemblance to man, in their occasional vertical attitude, and in certain features which are caricatures of those of the human face? How many of the species among the immense simial family of the two hemispheres present this resemblance? Hardly five or six. All the others have the bestial snout in its fullest development, and are very inferior in intelligence to most of the other mammifers. If it be from the organic point of view that you derive man from the monkey, because certain species of quadrumanes are caricatures of men in their physiognomy, why may he not be derived as reasonably from the parrot, which emits articulate sounds, the caricature of the human voice, or even the nightingale, because that melodious songster of the woods modulates his notes like our singers?

The consideration of animal forms is of very little importance in our estimation, when the matter in hand is to determine the place occupied by a living being in the scale of creation, for these forms are similar in type among all the superior animals, the body varying very slightly in structure in all the great class of mammifers; and also because the physiological functions are discharged in a similar manner by all. The basis on which we ground our researches is quite different, it is the spiritual basis; we ask the faculties of the mind to supply our materials of comparison.

It must not be supposed, therefore, that we espouse the doctrines of Darwin and those who agree with him, because we hold that the soul has a previous dwelling in the bodies of several animals, before it reaches the human body; because we admit that the spiritual principle begins in the germ of plants, and that this germ grows and develops itself in passing through the bodies of a progressive series of animal species, to issue at length in man, the end of its elaboration and perfection. The Darwinists take into consideration only the anatomical structure, and put aside the soul. We consider its faculties only. We are guided, not by the materialistic idea which directs and inspires these men of science, but on the contrary, on a reasoned-out spiritualism.

Our system of nature may be criticised, or rejected. We offer it merely as a personal view, and would not impose it on any reader. The merit of this philosophical and scientific conception, if it has any, consists in the vast synthesis by which it binds together all the living creatures which people the solar world, from the minute plant in which the germ of organization first appears, to the animal; from the animal to the man; and from the man to the series of superhuman and archhuman beings who inhabit the ethereal spheres; and finally, from them to the radiant dwellers in the solar star. In collecting together, on the one hand, all that modern chemistry has learned of the composition of plants, and the physical phenomena of their respiration, and on the other hand, everything which is known of the physical and chemical properties of solar light, the idea struck us that the rays of the sun form the vehicle by whose means the animated germs are placed in the plants. While meditating upon what has been written by the philosophers Charles Bonnet, Dupont de Nemours, and Jean Reynaud, upon the physical condition of resuscitated human beings, and dwelling upon the destiny of men beyond the formidable barrier of the tomb, in short, while drinking at the most various springs of philosophical and scientific knowledge, we have composed this attempt at a new philosophy of the universe.