TRANS MIG RATION. T HERE must be something in the doctrine
of metempsy- chosis, ancient and widespread as it is, which makes it specially alien to the modern Western mind. Englishmen in particular, though they, of all European mankind, have most to do with it, seem never quite to comprehend its meaning, or to recognise that it is the fundamental belief that regulates the lives, and even the thoughts, of a hundred and fifty millions of their fellow-subjects. They rarely allude to it in books e:cept as something comic, and seem utterly unaware that to thousands of the subtlest brains in the world, brains, too, specially capable of philosophic speculation, transmigration seems to be, of all philosophies, the one which best explains the great riddle of human destiny. Indeed, we are not quite sure whether the system does not escape a majority of English observers, just as the cry of the grasshopper or some high notes on the fiddle escape a majority of listening ears. At least, we can vouch for it that a majority of Anglo- Indians, familiar enough with the ritual of Hindooism, and able to discuss its mythology, forget altogether this
far more influential doctrine ; while of a hundred books upon India, not five will contain more than the barest reference to its existence. Some, even of those who are aware of its enormous importance in Hindoo life, seem unable to catch its true meaning, and fall into errors which must seem to educated Hindoos—by which we mean, not whitewashed Hindoos, but Hindoos acquainted with their own learning—singularly grotesque. The clever author, for instance—or is it, as we should rather imagine, authoress P—of "The Rajah's Heir," a novel just issued by Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co., has endeavoured to use the doctrine in order to infuse into his book a flavour of the supernatural. The hero, born and bred an Englishman, is really the son and becomes the successor of the Hindoo Rajah of a Central Indian State, a man of the highest character and attainments in philosophy, who has made of his principality a model kingdom. So good and pure has been his life, that he has attained to " freedom " in its Hindoo theological sense,—that is, to the condition in which spirit completely dominates matter, and is therefore conscious of its own history, its continuousness, and its approaching absorption into the self-existent and omnipresent spirit which is "All." The Rajah is ready to be absorbed, or rather, reabsorbed into the Divine, and is accepted as ready, when, under an impulse of supreme benevolence towards his subjects, for which we desire to render to the author much intellectual credit, he elects for their sake to be once more " conditioned " in a human body, and accordingly enters that of his own son, the Englishman. The consequent struggle in this Englishman's mind between the two natures, that of the ordinary Western gentleman of our idea, and that of the great Hindoo, is powerfully though intermittently and, so to speak, jerkingly described, and gives to a story otherwise only clever, an original and striking interest ; but if the author conceives that he is adhering to the Hindoo doctrine of metempsychosis, he is, so far as we know, utterly mis- taken. The Rajah, by the might of self-sacrifice, which, as it were, coerces Fate, and because it melts the chain of matter secures to the soul something of the freedom inherent in pure spirit, might obtain from the divine All the right to be born an infidel—though the doom would seem to a Hindoo so awful as to impugn the justice of Fate itself— but he could not, in his new birth, expel an existing soul. Two souls cannot, in the Hindoo variety of the theory of transmigration, coexist in the same shroud of matter ; and consequently under no circumstances could the father be soul to his own son. The true theory is, that one and but one particle of the Divine Spirit is imprisoned in each material form, giving it sentience ; that the particle struggles always to regain its source, and will attain its end whenever it has dominated the evil impulses inherent in matter, and has become, by continued purity alike of life and ceremonial—for somehow life is linked with the blood, and whatever pollutes the blood pollutes also the life—so perfect as to be identical in essential character with the original All It is a long and painful process, involving many lives and many ups and downs in the great journey ; and though success is inevitable in the end, for spirit must eternally conquer matter, which is, indeed, a mere precipitate of spirit, the misery and degradation of many of the lives may be almost unendurable, and are dreaded by the convinced Hindoo as few among modern Christians, even of the Catholic faith, are found to dread the Christian hell.
There is not one particle of evidence for it all, except f indeed, that curious fancy, which we have all felt, that we have passed through a scene or a situation once before, and which is plausibly explained by modern science as the result of the momentarily unequal action of the two lobes of the brain; but we cannot see that transmigration is in itself an ignoble faith, and it does explain some of the otherwise inexplicable pheno- mena of human life. It supplies a reason for the struggle upwards which man instinctively recognises as right, and which is, we think, apart from revelation, the source of that faith in a future state which cannot have been born of a non- existent experience. Transmigration gets rid of that notion of the ultimate defeat, whether of God or Good, which is inherent in the notion of Hell, and it disposes at once of the apparent injustice inflicted on us by unearned mis- fortune or non-educative pain. The man may not have earned pain or misfortune in this life, but he did in some other previous one, and as the essential self is continuous, all
suffering is but just retribution, and therefore—mark that consequence when you next discuss the callousness of the gentle Hindoo—is not deserving of pity, though pity is in itself, as one victory of spirit over matter, a virtue in the pitying one. The doctrine, however false, is certainly undeserving of the absurd ridicule poured on it because one of the punitive, or rather purifying, conditions may be life fettered in an animal—whose strangely limited con- sciousness and unproductive suffering, take note, are thus accounted for—and as certainly it does in some Hindoos, more perhaps than is supposed, produce a purity of life, an ecstasy of self-renunciation, a power of dominating the flesh even to extremities of self-torture, to which the Western world affords few parallels.
It is a pity, we think, that the genesis of this philosophy, which is to external Hindooism what the dogma of the Incarnation is to the Catholicism, say, of a Neapolitan lazzarone, is not more studied ; and we have often wondered what the effect of its reception would be upon a Northern mind. Halhed, the Governor of Bengal, who did, it is believed, receive it, left no record of his thoughts, nor have we any accurate accounts of the few modern Europeans who, from time to time, have been reported, truly or falsely, to hold the opinions of Pythagoras. We have a notion, for which we shall be censured, that, working on brains of harder fibre, such a faith might yield better results as regards the actual conduct cif life than it has done in India. The Hindoo is too submissive, endures too readily, and flies too quickly from exertion to his belief that all is Destiny, no doubt just Destiny, which punishes him only for sin done consciously at some time or other, but still Destiny, as utterly beyond his control, or even comprehension, as the blowing of the wind. The descendant of the Norseman would, we think, struggle fiercely, and end his straggle against the force punishing him for he knew not what, either by open rebellion, the "curse God and die" of Job's wife—which to Christian as to Hindoo is blasphemy —or by a fierce resolve absolutely to dominate matter, and so win his way rapidly out of it all back to the Divine. The conquest of self is possible to the European, or we should have no Trappists ; and it was a European, not an Asiatic, who stood on a pillar through a life- time worshipping. We should, indeed, feel certain of these results but for one inner doubt, the mere existence of which in the brain at once marks the essential difference between the Western and Eastern mind. Would the descendant of the Norseman, with his instinct for struggling, his intense individuality, his fierce desire for an ever higher existence, care for the end promised ? Would he even wish for that reposeful absorption into the All, so the All be but divine, which seems to the Asiatic such ecstasy of bliss ? No one can tell for certain without breaking through the impal- pable but impassable cloud which veils us all from each other ; but we have a little difficulty in conceiving, say, of a really good Yankee who would accept Nirvana, even in its highest sense, as a heaven that he would make any effort to reach. He might, for, as we said, what mortal knows another ?—but at least it is not among the antecedent probabilities.
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