TRANSMIGRATION.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—There appears to many people, neither Hindoos nor Buddhists, to be a good deal more to be said for the proba- bility of the truth of the doctrine of pre-existence or rein- -carnation than you have allowed for in your article on the subject. The sensation to which you allude as supporting it -does not seem to me to have anything to do with it, but to be rather referable to half-remembered stages of dream con- sciousness, which, like hypnotic states, have a separate memory of their own. Here are, however, one or two of the considerations bearing upon it.
(1.) There is an extraordinary variation in quality, apart from either mental or moral attainments, in the minds of
-different human beings, which seems as if it could only be -explained by their being at different stages of evolution. 'There are thoroughly good and clever people who somehow do not seem so far evolved in quality of mind, as others who are less good and clever, but seem to have what we might -describe as older and more experienced souls. This "age" of soul is sometimes perceptible in quite little children and people -otherwise uncultured, and very much wanting in elder people who nevertheless are capable of filling responsible posts with worthiness and credit. It shows itself strongly in capacity or
incapacity to recognise the more advanced spiritual ideas, quite apart from the stage of moral goodness actually -attained by the
person. Take, for example, Lord Macaulay and Coleridge. It -was neither moral superiority nor intellectual power that dif- ferentiated the one mind from the other; but we cannot help feeling that Coleridge's soul was at the higher stage of -evolution.
(2). It is the experience of most people that when new spiritual truths, hitherto unapprehended, are grasped and -consciously accepted, they feel that they have known them always. Plato applied this fact to the recognition of mathe- matical truth, and it may be the case with those who recognise what Pere Gratry calls the spiritual side of mathematical or scientific truth. But to the ordinary person who accepts a fact as a fact merely, this feeling is quite unknown. No one, feels that he always knew Grimm's Law.
These two facts seem to me to make the theory of pre- -mistence more probable than improbable : and though Pre-qdstence does not necessarily involve pre-incarnation, yet that evolution should be produced by means of repeated in- carnations seems by no means unlikely, since our experience of progress is limited to life in a body. May I suggest also that when the Apostles, in St. John ix., asked whether this theory was applicable to the blind man, "Master, did this man sin, or his parents, that he was born blind ? " the answer, though it denied the applicability of the theory, did not in any way deny the theory itself P—I am, Sir, &c.,
TRANSMIGRATIONIST.
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