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

"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.

This system may be erroneous, and another, more logical and more learned, may be substituted for it. But there will remain, we may hope, the synthesis which we have established from all the facts of the physical and moral order which we have collected together, the links by which we attach all the beings of creation one to another, which comprehends both the moral and organic attributes of these beings;—a vast ladder of nature, on whose steps we place everything that has life; the endless circle, in which we link all the rings of the chain of living beings. The theoretic explanation of all these facts, thus grouped, may not perhaps be accepted, but we believe that they are correctly placed in juxtaposition, and that any theory which pretends to explain the universe must be established upon the basis of that grouping. If our explanation be contested, we hope that our synthesis of facts will remain.

Besides it is only thus, i.e., by creating a system, that the sciences, exact as well as moral, are made to progress. Chemistry was not, as some have pretended, created by Lavoisier; it was founded by Stahl, it was not the pneumatic theory of Lavoisier, but really the system of phlogiston devised by Stahl, which instituted chemistry in the last century. Stahl, it is well known, had the immense merit of collecting all the facts known up to his time, into a general theoretical explanation of composing a summary of them, and of creating the system of phlogiston. This system was, undeniably, incorrect, but the facts which had been collected towards its construction had been perfectly well selected, and included every useful element of information or research. Thus, when ten years later than Stahl, came Lavoisier, he had only, so to speak, to turn the system of his predecessor inside out, as one turns a coat. For phlogiston Lavoisier substituted oxygen; he preserved all the facts, and changed only the explanation. Thus chemistry was founded.

A well constructed synthesis must necessarily precede every theory of nature. Descartes, when working out his system of whirlwinds, formulated a conception which was certainly very inexact; but the facts upon which this theory rested were so well selected, they responded so exactly to the requirements of science, that when Newton came, with his system of attraction, it only remained to apply the new hypothesis to the facts collected by Descartes for his whirlwinds, and there was real astronomy, the true physics. When Linnæus created his system of botany, he made an undeniably artificial distribution of the vegetables, and Linnæus himself perfectly understood the defects of his system. But, owing to this artificial method, he succeeded in grouping all the plants into a methodical catalogue. If the principle of classification was bad, the service rendered to botany by this catalogue was immense. It was not, in fact, until after Linnæus' time that the immense mass of facts which he collected could be put in order, and the study of the vegetable world made to progress from those data. Botany dates from the publication of the systema naturæ of the immortal botanist of Upsal.

We do not pretend to put forward an irreproachable theory of the universe in this work, but simply to collect together and methodically group the facts upon which such a theory ought to rest, facts physical, metaphysical, and moral.

CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH

SEQUEL TO OBJECTIONS.—IT IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE HOW THE RAYS OF THE SUN, BEING MATERIAL SUBSTANCES, CAN BE THE GERMS OF SOULS, WHICH ARE IMMATERIAL SUBSTANCES

OUR system of nature may be met with the following final objection. It will be said, how can the rays of the sun, being material bodies, convey animated germs which are immaterial substances? These terms exclude each other.

We find, in the Scriptures, a magnificent comparison, of which we shall avail ourselves in order to answer this objection, or rather, this question.

Saint Matthew speaks of a grain of mustard seed, that is to say, of a tree germ, which, cast into the earth, produces a herbaceous plant, then a tree with majestic branches, and he is astonished to behold the imposing lord of the forests, which, laden with flowers and fruit, towers aloft in majestic beauty, and gives shelter under its shadow to the weary birds, springing from a humble little seed. Not only, says the evangelist, is there no resemblance between the tree and its original seed, but there does not exist in the tree a single atom of the matter of which the seed was primarily composed.

To our mind, this grain of mustard-seed is an image of the sun, which, falling upon the earth, sows animated germs in its bosom, which produce plants that afterwards give birth to animals, and later still to man, and thus to the entire series of creatures, invisible to us, which succeed him in the domain of the heavens.

The little cold, colourless, scentless seed is nothing to look at, nothing distinguishes it apparently from the neighbouring dust. Nevertheless, it contains that mysterious leaven, that sacred being, so to speak, which we call a germ. And what wonderful things are to be born from that sacred being! In the obscurity of the cold, damp earth the germ transforms itself, it becomes a new body without any resemblance to the seed which contained it. It produces a plantlet, a subterranean, but perfectly organized creature, possessing a root which fastens itself into the soil, and a stalk which takes the opposite direction. Between the two portions lies the seed, split, gutted, having allowed the germ to escape, its part in the matter ended.

The subterranean plantlet is a new being; it has no longer anything in common with the seed from whence it came. The plantlet is dull and colourless, but it breathes, it has channels, in which liquids and gases are circulating.

In a little while the plantlet comes up above the earth, it greets the daylight, it appears to our eyes, and then it is a very different being from the subterranean creature. The new-born vegetable is no longer as it was when in the bosom of the earth, dull and grey; it is green, it breathes like other vegetables, producing oxygen under the influence of life, whereas in the bosom of the earth it gave out carbonic acid. Instead of the dull and sombre subterranean plantlet, you have a green and tender shoot, provided with special organs. Where is the grain of mustard seed?

Presently our shoot grows, and becomes a young plant. It is still weak and hidden under the grass, but nevertheless the young plant has its complete individuality. It resembles neither the shoot nor the plantlet, its subterranean ancestor.

The shoot grows, and becomes a twig, that is to say, the adolescent of the vegetable kingdom, with the ardour and the energy of the young among herbaceous creatures.

In this state the plant has already renewed its substance several times, and nothing remains of the organic and mineral elements which existed in the different beings that have preceded it on the same little corner of the earth which have witnessed the changing phases of its curious metamorphoses. Wait a while, and you will see the twig growing long and large. Its respiration becomes active, its leaves spread out, and vigorously exhale the carbonic acid gas of the air. The exhalation of watery vapour over all the surface takes place, and a young and vigorous tree is there, which day by day grows more robust and more beautiful.

During this growth, during this transition from the shrub to the young tree, with a separate and upright stem, a new being has been formed. Organs which it had not have come to it, and have made it a separate individual. It has flowers, it has branches, it has new vessels for the circulation of the sap, and the juices which were not previously elaborated. The structure of the surface of its leaves has been changed, so that absorption may be more successfully accomplished.

Where is the shoot, from which our vigorous young shrub sprung? What relation, what resemblance is there between these two beings? We can only discern differences. One individual has succeeded to another individual. The vegetable has been renewed, not only in matter, which is changed, but in the form of its organs. A series of new forms have succeeded each other in the shrub, since it was a simple shoot, just peeping above the soil.

It is still the history of change, when the young tree has become adult, when, in the progress of years, its trunk has grown hard, and become incrusted with layers of accumulated bark, when its branches have multiplied, and flowering and fruitage have modified all its internal and external parts. It is then a grand cedar tree, whose majestic and imposing shade covers a considerable extent of the soil; or a superb oak, whose robust and gnarled branches spread far and wide; or a flexible chestnut, which flings about its polished and shining arms. The organs of these luxuriant vegetables, the pride of our forests, have no relation to those which belonged to them in the first years of their life. Their flowery crowns in spring-tide, the fruits which succeed to them, the seeds shut up in the protecting shelter of those fruits, these are all peculiarities of organization, belonging to these noble trees, without any analogy in nature.

Where is the grain of mustard seed which formerly sucked the juice of the earth in darkness? Everything is changed; the place of habitation, which is no longer the earth, but the air; the form, and the physiological functions. Not only has all this changed, but it has changed a great number of times. Not only does nothing remain of the matter of which the tree was composed in the earlier stages of its life, but nothing has been retained of the organic forms which were proper to the infancy of the vegetable.

Nevertheless, O great mystery of Nature, in the midst of all these changes, notwithstanding this continual succession of beings, which mutually replace each other, there is something which remains immovable, which has never changed, which has preserved a constant individuality,—it is the secret force which produced all these changes, which presided over all these organic mutations. In our belief, this force is the animated germ which the young plant has received from the seed, whence it has proceeded. In the midst of all the transformations which the vegetable creature has undergone, in spite of the numerous phases through which it has passed, and which have produced a series of different beings succeeding each other in its material substance, the spiritual principle, cause and agent of all this long activity, has remained the same. This animated germ which now exists in the adult vegetable is the same which was there during its growth, the same which was there when it was a shoot, the same which slept in the seed which was thrown into the bosom of the cold and humid earth. In that majestic tree which, coming forth from an imperceptibly minute seed, has had a whole genealogy of successive beings, replacing each other, differing in form and size, and has preserved, throughout its incessant development, the sole and immutable principle of its activity, we behold the faithful image of the persistent, indestructible soul, in the midst of the beings or different bodies which it has animated in succession. Issuing from a germ, it has never ceased to grow, to develop, to become amplified, still remaining itself.

The grain of mustard seed, or the seed of the tree, is according to us, the plant or inferior animal into which the sun has thrown the animated germ. The subterranean plantlet corresponds to the animal whose mission it is to perfect the germ transmitted by the plant, and which develops and amplifies this germ; for example, to the fish or the reptile, perfecting the spiritual principle which they have received from the zoophyte or the mollusc. The shoot which, having burst out of the earth, grows in the shade of the grass, and tries its air organs, corresponds to the animal somewhat more elevated in the organic scale, such as the bird, in which the animating principle—derived from the reptile or the fish—increases in intellectual power. The young vegetable, arrived at the condition of the twig, which lives a completely aërial life, corresponds to the mammifer. The tree, grown tall, and pushing out its young boughs, corresponds to man, perfecting the soul which he has received from a mammifer. Finally, the powerful and vigorous forest lord, over-topping all the neighbouring trees in size and majesty, with mighty girth of stem, and noble crest, with wide-spreading branches and splendid flowers, this grand creature corresponds to the superhuman being who lives in the bosom of the ethereal fluid, and who is himself destined to be replaced by a series of superior creatures, who shall climb from stage to stage, from height to height, even to the radiant kingdom of the sun, where those absolutely spiritual beings, whose essence is entire and perfect immateriality are enthroned.

Thus, the animating principle remains immutable and identical with itself, during all the transformations undergone by the beings who are successively charged to receive this precious deposit. From the vegetable, in which it had its first domicile as a germ, and through the whole series of living creatures, from the plant and the zoophyte to the man and the superhuman being, the same spiritual principle is preserved in its identity, perfecting and amplifying itself without cessation.

Let us complete the comparison. When the forest tree has ripened its fruits, the fruits burst open, the seeds escape from it, and fall into the soil, or are dispersed by the caprice of the winds. If the seeds fall into damp earth, they germinate, and, according to the laws of nature, young vegetables are produced, as we have previously explained. Multitudes of similar vegetables are produced by a single oak, a single cedar, a single chestnut tree. Just as the majestic adult tree lets fall from its thousand branches upon the soil the countless seeds which are to germinate there, so the spiritualized beings who dwell in the sun shed their emanations, their animated germs, upon all the planets. These germs, carried to the earth by the sunbeams, and falling upon our globe, produce the vegetables which afterwards give birth to the various animals, by the effect of the successive transmigrations of the same soul into the bodies of these creatures.

We can now reply to the objection which we have placed at the beginning of this chapter: "How can the solar rays, being material substances, convey animated germs, which are immaterial substances?"

When the physicists professed Newton's theory of the nature of light, in the theory of emission, it was necessary to regard light, and, consequently the solar rays, which produce it, as material bodies.

But science has now rejected this theory, and replaced it by the theory of undulation, founded by Malus, Fresnel, Ampère, and all the constellation of great physicists and mathematicians of the commencement of this century. Facts, collected on every side, prove that the solar rays are not matter which transports itself from the sun to the earth, but that light, like heat, results from a primitive disturbance produced by the sun upon the ether, which is spread over all space. This disturbance communicates itself from molecule to molecule, from the planetary ether down to us, and produces the phenomena of light and heat. We cannot here develop at greater length, or explain more scientifically, the theory of undulations, which will be found sufficiently demonstrated in works on physics. We merely desire to prove that, according to the principles of modern science, the solar rays are not material bodies, but that they result from a simple vibration of the planetary ether. If, then, the rays of the sun are not material substances, there can be no difficulty in admitting that these rays (immaterial substance) are the bearers of the animated germs, which are immaterial substance.