Metempsychosis [Reincarnation]

Besides, it must not be neglected that even empirical grounds support a palingenesis of this kind. As a matter of fact there does exist a connection between the birth of the newly appearing beings and the death of those that are worn out. It shows itself in the great fruitfulness of the human race which appears as a consequence of devastating diseases. When in the fourteenth century the black death had for the most part depopulated the old world, a quite abnormal fruitfulness appeared among the human race, and twin-births were very frequent. The circum- stance was also very remarkable that none of the children born at this time obtained their full number of teeth; thus nature, exerting itself to the utmost, was niggardly in details.

This is related by F. Schnurrer, “Chronik der Seuchen,” 1825. Casper also, “Ueber die wahrscheinliche Lebensdauer des Menschen,” 1835, confirms the principle that the number of births in a given population has the most decided influence upon the length of life and mortality in it, as this always keeps pace with the mortality: so that always and everywhere the deaths and the births increase and decrease in like proportion; which he places beyond doubt by an accumulation of evidence collected from many lands and their various provinces. And yet it is impossible that there can [302] be a physical causal connection between my early death and the fruitfulness of a marriage with which I have nothing to do, or conversely. Thus here the metaphysical appears undeniably and in a stupendous manner as the immediate ground of explanation of the physical. Every new-born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. Its fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn-out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which this new existence has arisen: they are one being. To show the bridge between the two would certainly be the solution of a great riddle.

The great truth which is expressed here has never been en- tirely unacknowledged, although it could not be reduced to its exact and correct meaning, which is only possible through the doctrine of the primacy and metaphysical nature of the will and the secondary, merely organic nature of the intellect. We find the doctrine of metempsychosis, springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always spread abroad in the earth as the belief of the great majority of mankind, nay, really as the teaching of all religions, with the exception of that of the Jews and the two which have proceeded from it: in the most subtle form, however, and coming nearest to the truth, as has already been mentioned, in Buddhism. Accordingly, while Christians console themselves with the thought of meeting again in another world, in which one regains one’s complete personality and knows oneself at once, in those other religions the meeting again is already going on now, only incognito. In the succession of births, and by virtue of metempsychosis or palingenesis, the persons who now stand in close connection or contact with us will also be born along with us at the next birth, and will have the same or analogous relations and sentiments towards us as now, whether these are of a friendly or a hostile description. (Cf.,[303] for example, Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism,” p. 162.) Recognition is certainly here limited to an obscure intimation, a reminiscence which cannot be brought to distinct consciousness, and refers to an infinitely distant time;—with the exception, how- ever, of Buddha himself, who has the prerogative of distinctly knowing his own earlier births and those of others;—as this is described in the “Jâtaka.”

But, in fact, if at favourable moment one contemplates, in a purely objective manner, the action of men in reality; the intuitive conviction is forced upon one that it not only is and remains constantly the same, according to the (Platonic) Idea, but also that the present generation, in its true inner nature, is precisely and substantially identical with every generation that has been before it. The question simply is in what this true being consists. The answer which my doctrine gives to this question is well known. The intuitive conviction referred to may be conceived as arising from the fact that the multiplying- glasses, time and space, lose for a moment their effect. With reference to the universality of the belief in metempsychosis, Obry says rightly, in his excellent book, “Du Nirvana Indien,” p. 13: “Cette vieille croyance a fait le tour du monde, et était tellement répandue dans la haute antiquité, qu’un docte Anglican l’avait jugée sans père, sans mère, et sans généalogie” (Ths. Burnet, dans Beausobre, Hist. du Manichéisme, ii. p. 391).

Taught already in the “Vedas,” metempsychosis is the kernel of Brahmanism and Buddhism.

It was also the belief of the Egyptians (Herod., ii. 123), from whom it was received with enthusiasm by Orpheus.

Pythagoras, and Plato: the Pythagoreans, however, specially retained it.

The “Edda” also, especially in the “Völuspá,” teaches s. Not less was it the foundation of the religion of the Druids (Cæs. de bello Gall., vi.; A. Pictet, Le mystère des Bardes de l’ile de Bretagne, 1856).

Even a Mohammedan sect in Hindostan, the Bohrahs, of which Colebrooke gives a full account in the “Asiatic Researches,” vol. vii. p. 336 sqq., believes in metempsychosis, and accordingly refrains from all animal food.

American Indians, negro tribes, and the natives of Australia have traces of this belief.

Kant falsely asserts of his 3 pretended Ideas of the reason, a philosopheme natural to human reason, which proceeds from its forms.

When it is not found it must have been displaced by positive religious doctrines coming from a different source. I have also remarked that it is at once obvious to every one who hears of it for the first time.

Even Hume says in his sceptical essay on immortality, p. 23: “The metempsychosis is therefore the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to.”31

Most of the heretics were attached to this primitive belief; for example, Simonists, Basilidians, Valentinians, Marcionists, Gnostics, and Manichæans.

The Jews themselves have in part fallen into it, as Tertullian and Justinus (in his dialogues) inform us.

In the Talmud it is related that Abel’s soul passed into the body of Seth, and then into that of Moses. Even the passage of the Bible, Matt. xvi. 13-15, only obtains a rational meaning if we understand it as spoken under the assumption of the dogma of metempsychosis.

Luke also has the passage (ix. 18-20), adds the words Aƒπ ¿¡ø∆∑ƒ∑¬ ƒπ¬ ƒ…Ω ±¡«±π…Ω ±Ωμ√ƒ√, and thus attributes to the Jews the assumption that such an ancient prophet can rise again body and all, which, since they know that he has already lain between six and seven hundred years in his grave, and consequently has long since turned to dust, would be a palpable absurdity.

In Christianity, however, the doctrine of original sin, i.e., the doctrine of punishment for the sins of another individual, has taken the place of the transmigration of souls and the expiation in this way of all the sins committed in an earlier life.

Both identify, and that with a moral tendency, the existing man with one who has existed before; the transmigration of souls does so directly, original sin indirectly.

Death is the great reprimand which the will to live, or more especially the egoism, which is essential to this, receives through the course of nature; and it may be conceived as a punishment coldly rational investigations of the two subjects named.

for our existence.32 It is the painful loosing of the knot which the act of generation had tied with sensual pleasure, the violent destruction coming from without of the fundamental error of our nature: the great disillusion.

We are at bottom something that ought not to be: therefore we cease to be. Egoism consists really in the fact that man limits all reality to his own person, in that he imagines that he lives in this alone and not in others. Death teaches him better, for it destroys this person, so that the true nature of man, which is his will, will henceforth live only in other individuals; while his intellect, which itself belonged only to the phenomenon, i.e., to the world as idea, and was merely the form of the external world, also continues to exist in the condition of being idea, i.e., in the objective being of things as such, thus also only in the existence of what was hitherto the external world. His whole ego thus lives from this time forth only in that which he had hitherto regarded as non-ego: for the difference between external and internal ceases. We call to mind here that the better man is[307] he who makes the least difference between himself and others, does not regard them as absolute non-ego, while for the bad man this difference is great, nay, absolute.

I have worked this out in my prize essay on the foundation of morals. According to what was said above, the degree in which death can be regarded as the annihilation of the man is in proportion to this difference. But if we start from the fact that the distinction of outside me and in me, as a spatial distinction, is only founded in the phenomenon, not in the thing in itself, thus is no absolutely real distinction, then we shall see in the losing of our own individuality only the loss of a phenomenon, thus only an apparent loss. However much reality that distinction has in the empirical consciousness, yet from the metaphysical standpoint the propositions, “I perish, but the world endures,” and “The world perishes but I endure,” are at bottom not really different.

32 Death says: Thou art the product of an act which should not have been; therefore to expiate it thou must die.

But, besides all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I;—to him who uses it. During life the will of man is without freedom: his action takes place with necessity upon the basis of his unalterable character in the chain of motives. But every one remembers much that he has done, and on account of which he is by no means satisfied with himself. If now he were to go on living, he would go on acting in the same way, on account of the unalterable nature of his character. Accordingly he must cease to be what he is in order to be able to arise out of the germ of his nature as a new and different being. Therefore death looses these bonds; the will again becomes free; for freedom lies in the Esse, not in the Operari. “Finditur nodus cordis, dissolvuntur omnes dubitationes, ejusque opera evanescunt,” is a very celebrated saying of the Vedas, which all Vedantic writers frequently repeat.33

Death is the moment of that deliverance from the one-sidedness of an individuality which does not constitute the inmost kernel of our being, but is rather to be thought of as a kind of aberration of it. The true original freedom re-enters at this moment, which, in the sense indicated, may be regarded as a restitutio in integrum.

The peace and quietness upon the countenance of most dead persons seems to have its origin in this.

Quiet and easy is, as a rule, the death of every good man: but to die willingly, to die gladly, to die joyfully, is the prerogative of the resigned, of him who surrenders and denies the will to live. For only he wills to die really, and not merely apparently, and consequently he needs and desires no continuance of his person. The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, i.e., extinction.

According to Colebrooke (“Transact. of the Royal Asiat. Soc.,” vol. i. p. 566) it comes from va, “to blow,” like the wind, and the prefixed negative nir, and thus signifies a calm, but as an adjective “extinguished.” Obry, also, Du Nirvana Indien, p. 3, says: “Nirvanam en sanscrit signifie à la lettre extinction, telle que celle d’un feu.”

According to the “Asiatic Journal,” vol. xxiv. p. 735, the word is really Neravana, from nera, “without,” and vana, “life,” and the meaning would be annihilatio. In “Eastern Monachism,” by Spence Hardy, p. 295, Nirvana is derived from vana, “sinful desires,” with the negative nir. J. J. Schmidt, in his translation of the history of the Eastern Mongolians, says that the Sanscrit word Nirvana is translated into Mongolian by a phrase which signifies “departed from misery,” “escaped from misery.”

According to him, Nirvana is the opposite of Sanfara, which is the world of constant re-birth, of longings and desires, of illusion of the senses and changing forms, of being born, growing old, becoming sick, and dying.

In the Burmese language the word Nirvana, according to the analogy of other Sanscrit words, becomes transformed into Nieban, and is translated by “complete vanishing.” See Sangermano’s “Description of the Burmese Empire,” translated by Tandy, Rome, 1833, § 27. In the first edition of 1819 I also wrote Nieban, because we then knew Buddhism only from meagre accounts of the Burmese.