Reincarnation

by: James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D

THE doctrine of reincarnation is one form of belief in survival after death. We meet with it in early Buddhism, in early Greek philosophy, among the physicists or so-called materialists of the Pre-Socratic period and again in Plato. The early materialists are represented as believers in survival in any form only by the more exhaustive historians of the period; and even they mention the belief merely for the sake of completeness, as if it were an irrelevant detail of the system. But it was too important an element in the philosophy of Plato to be ignored. He seems to have been the only prominent philosopher of Greece in the intellectual period who had the hardihood to defend it. The theosophists of modern times have advocated it; most of them derive their belief from Buddhism. The idea prevailed in other religious and philosophic sects of India, either growing out of Buddhism or out of the systems that preceded Buddhism.

I do not intend here to go into the history of the doctrine. I mention its antiquity primarily to show that it is not the result of modern scientific progress. But its value must rest on facts and not on antiquity or authority. I have discussed it in another work, "The Borderland of Psychic Research." I shall here take up only additional matters, which have become important through the revival of interest in the doctrine by the theosophists.

In general, reincarnation means that the soul after death comes back again to the earthly life in another physical body. It assumes that the materialistic theory of consciousness is not true; either taking the existence of a soul for granted, or adducing the facts of normal consciousness and experience as sufficient to justify the belief in the existence of a soul. Its doctrine of re-embodiment or transmigration as a form of survival, differs in certain details from the Christian and other similar views. It does not accept the bodily resurrection; perhaps advanced Christianity does not do so any longer, though many Christians still cling to it. This theory implies that the soul retains its identity when it re-occupies a body, either the old one resurrected or a new one created for the purpose. But reincarnation does not assume any resurrection. It assumes that the soul, without memory of the past, comes back and occupies a body created by ordinary sexual union. This denial of memory is the fundamental characteristic of the doctrine, as held by most theosophists to-day and in the past. If faced with the disadvantages of the loss of memory, theosophists maintain that after various reincarnations this memory of all past experiences is recovered. It is lost as a consequence of the individual's mistake and sins, and is restored when his "karma" or probationary discipline is complete; after his various transmigrations.

Now it must be said that this belief rests on metaphysics alone. It has no scientific foundation whatever. Some venture to adduce facts to support it, but these will not bear the slightest examination as evidence. For instance, some will tell us that they can remember a previous existence. But they do not reckon with illusions of memory. We sometimes recall something which we locate in a certain time and place, but find later that this location was wrong. When the total experience is recalled we find that we are dealing with two events connected only by similarity. We confused them because of the imperfection of the recall. This imperfect recall will explain most of the alleged instances of recollection of a prenatal past.

Other facts adduced in support of reincarnation can be explained as mediumistic phenomena. That is, discarnate personalities may produce in the minds of psychics the feeling of long past time or of previous existence by the transmission, telepathically perhaps, of their own feelings and states of mind. These would naturally enough be interpreted as evidence of reincarnation. But when we find that they are memories transmitted from the discarnate to the living mind, their claims as evidence are nullified. The sense of recognizing a place which we are seeing for the first time is another type of fact like the one just considered, except that it involves space instead of time. It too can be explained either as an illusion of memory or as clairvoyance. Either hypothesis nullifies the value of the facts as evidence for reincarnation.

I allude thus briefly to the alleged evidence for transmigration, in order to show that it has no scientific standing. Its metaphysical character is another matter; I have eliminated its scientific claims in order to show that it is only a metaphysical theory. It may be true or false, but it cannot be assumed to be true without evidence: for metaphysical theories are to-day discredited unless they can produce evidence in their support. They are legitimate enough as imaginary possibilities, but woe unto the man who asserts them to be facts. What it is that can recommend the doctrine of reincarnation to its believers is difficult to understand. It contains nothing desirable and nothing ethical. To be sure, its desirability or undesirability has nothing to do with its truth or falsity. It might be true, though very undesirable, and it might be false, though very desirable. But as it is a metaphysical theory, we have a right to test its relation to practical life and the native instincts of man, when we cannot find scientific evidence to prove it.

Reincarnation is not desirable, because it does not satisfy the only instinct that makes survival of any kind interesting, namely, the instinct to preserve the consciousness of personal identity. This is denied to the process until its end and that is never in sight! Moreover, assertion of even this return of memory is purely arbitrary. Man's only interest in survival is for the persistence of his personal identity. It is a form of the impulse towards self-preservation, which is fundamental to all the acquisitions of experience and character in this life. A future life must be the continuity of this consciousness or it is not a life to us at all.

Moreover, there is nothing ethical in the doctrine. The absolutely fundamental condition of all ethics is memory and the retention of personal identity, and memory and personal identity are excluded from the process of reincarnation. That you cannot maintain a theory of responsibility in any existence without memory is a truism in ethics and even in our civil courts. If our personal identity were changed, we could not be held responsible for anything we did. If we lost our memory every five minutes we should be regarded as insane, and crime could not be ascribed to us. In cases of alternating personality, punishment might be meted out to the personality performing the act, but this restraint could not apply to the other personality. The result is that cases of dissociation and change of personality are subjects for the physician and not the police.

The doctrine of reincarnation has to face this large question. We cannot apply to any future life the categories of the present, unless personal identity be assumed. Memory from one stage to another is necessary to the continuance of existence. "Karma" without memory is retribution minus all grounds for it, abstracting everything that makes it rational.

How then did such a doctrine originate? What could have given rise to such a theory? Plato may be forgiven because we know his poetic and literary instincts. But there was some reason for the maintenance of the belief, and we may well ask what this reason was. Even fantastic views, when persistently and seriously held, have some reason for their existence; and the doctrine of reincarnation is too old and too insistent not to have had some reason for its origin.

If the doctrine could be defined as meaning the survival of consciousness in the spiritual body, it would be consistent not only with some forms of spiritualism, but also with Christianity. But usually its advocates deny this view. Some of them are as much opposed to spiritistic theories as are the skeptics, though many regard psychic research as a stepping stone to their own philosophy. They often admit the existence of a spiritual body, but do not conceive the relation of personality or consciousness to it as one of transmigration. If they could conceive that relation as the transfer of the present consciousness to a spiritual body there would be no logical, no ethical, and no scientific difficulties in the way of that conception. But this would be giving up their denial that memory endures throughout the process of reincarnation; and few, if any, theosophists will admit the conception just defined.

It was this idea with which Professor James was playing when he tried to defend the possibility of immortality by the doctrine of transmissive functions of the brain. He did not call his theory reincarnation, for to do so would at once have discredited his view in the minds of scientists, if only because of associations and implications which he did not admit and which the theosophists hold. Professor James, instead of using the results of psychic research to prove survival after death, confined himself to physiological and psychological arguments, maintaining the materialistic view of the nature of consciousness. He admitted, with the materialist, that consciousness is a function of the brain. But, in order to avoid the materialist's conclusion he tried to distinguish between what he called transmissive and productive functions of the brain. He did not make the distinction very clear or tenable in relation to facts, but he used the idea consistently enough. By productive functions of the brain he meant such as are so organically connected with it that they perish when the body dies. He imagined that consciousness, however, might be a function that could be transmitted from the brain to some other structure, whether the transmission be conceived as reincarnation with or without the retention of personal identity. He said nothing about transmigration of the soul to other human bodies, and he probably would not have tolerated the idea. Neither did he say anything about the question whether any "spiritual," "astral," or ethereal organisms existed without any connection with a body. He left us to infer that they might be formed or created for the transmitted consciousness after death. But the notion of transmission is not necessary to spiritism. Consciousness either is now a function of the "spiritual body," whether spatial or spaceless, or is so closely associated with such an organism that it goes with it at death, without the need of "transmission." But to assume "transmission," as Professor James did, is to assume that the "ethereal organism" is not now associated with consciousness, but awaits the reception of it when it has left the brain.

This view has the merit of forcing the materialist to argue the case from his own premises, but it is totally without evidence. It is quite as a priori as any mediaeval theology, and therefore is inconsistent with the "radical empiricism" which was the fundamental belief of Professor James.

When, in the light of psychic research, we examine the early theories of animism and the doctrine of reincarnation as held among the early Greek philosophers, even the materialists Empedocles and Democritus, we may discover how the theory of reincarnation originated. Primitive animism was bound up with the belief in reincarnation, but it was not clearly worked out into a logical and consistent philosophy. We find in animism only the seeds of the doctrine, in the naive ideas of ignorant people with a penchant for explaining things. But when we recognize undeveloped spiritualism in this primitive animism, we find a clue to the origin of the theory of reincarnation.

Spiritualism based upon communication with the dead assumes the return of the discarnate spirit to the earthly life; and its temporary occupation of a human body in order to effect the communication. This return might be called an incarnation. Communicators have often said that their return is like getting into the living body and living over again in that organism. Unphilosophic ages might develop this circumstance into a theory of reincarnation, after they had forgotten the, conditions which gave rise to the original meaning of the term. Such development is very frequent in the history of religious and philosophic beliefs. For instance., we cannot read the 'New Testament in the light of psychic research and the meaning of Greek and Hebrew words, without noting that the resurrection was originally only a theory of survival based upon apparitions. Long before Christianity arose, anastasis, the Greek word for resurrection, in one of its meanings, signified the appearance of apparitions.

The doctrine had been discussed between the Sadducees and the Pharisees before Christ was said to have risen. The Greeks had been long familiar with the idea, which developed into the doctrine of the bodily resurrection only after the facts on which it was based were discarded or forgotten, perhaps partly because of the confusion attending, on the one hand, the conceptions of matter and spirit, and, on the other, the real meaning of the "spiritual body" of St. Paul. A similar development is apparent in the doctrine of the Trinity. It meant something intelligible with reference to the Greek conception of personality as simply a representation of characteristics in a subject, not the subject itself. When this meaning was lost and the terminology retained as a dogma, philosophers and theologians felt the necessity of trying to explain it by concocting preposterous arguments to bolster up a phrase that had lost its primitive significance.

In some such way we can conceive the origin of the doctrine of reincarnation, without supposing that it was fabricated by the imagination without any facts whatever upon which to work. Both mediumistic phenomena and the statements of communicators suggest something like reincarnation, though they do not support the developed system. They show that returning to communicate involves something like the old relation of the soul to the body, which for them might be called "reincarnation," though not as a mode of "karma" or punishment.

This latter doctrine, a concomitant of reincarnation, may have arisen from certain phenomena associated with what are called earth-bound spirits. These are persons so obsessed with their earthly life that it is often difficult for them to get away from their former interests. It is represented in some communications that this condition may be remedied by bringing earth-bound spirits into contact with living organisms, especially psychics, in order to remove the fixed ideas and the attachment to earthly memories and experiences. In this way they work out their salvation, so to speak; and any mention of this state of affairs in communications would call to mind the doctrine of expiation and punishment.

But until reincarnation can adduce scientific facts in its support, it cannot rival psychic research. Scientific doctrines always produce evidence, and do not extend their theories or explanations beyond facts. Metaphysical speculations are possible; and are the delight of certain types of mind, but they are not substitutes for facts. All that scientific men ask of the reincarnationist is that he produce satisfactory evidence for transmigration; until he does so, the theory cannot claim to be based on fact. It is only fair to give it a hearing in this connection and to eliminate all suspicion of prejudice against it, I can only say that, if proper evidence be adduced for it, I shall admit it, though I should have to regard the cosmos as irrational. The probable origin of the theory of reincarnation explains the element of truth which it contains. But the survival of personal identity, adequately supported by facts, contradicts the main doctrine of the reincarnationist.

It is true that communications, or what purport to be communications, from the dead assert the doctrine of reincarnation. But we must remember that there is no agreement in communications of the dead about their life. The disagreement is as great as it is about philosophic views among the living. Perhaps there is no literature in which contradictory conceptions of spiritual existence are more numerous than in the real or alleged descriptions in spiritualistic records.

This inconsistency prevents our uncritical acceptance of these records as final on any point. It goes to prove that we are receiving only statements of opinion, not facts, from communicators, if we accept the statements as communications from a transcendental world. Some communicators deny the reincarnation. Consequently, when we consider that the retention of personal identity includes retention of the views that we held when living, especially if we remain earth-bound and unadjusted to the new environment for a time; when we consider subconscious distortion and coloring of messages by the medium, especially if he normally believes in reincarnation: when we allow for misinterpretation of both facts and messages, and when we recognize the fragmentary character of all messages and the limitations of the medium, we shall quite understand that communications from the dead, whether for or against reincarnation, are not to be accepted at their superficial value. The contradictions require us either to distrust all communications on this subject or to reconstruct the messages in the light of an extensive study of all the recorded statements.

About the Author

James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D
Contact with The Other World Copyright 1919