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THE MERE fact that the reincarnation hypothesis, in one form or another, has
been treated with respect by some thinkers of high eminence, and even has been
accepted by some of them, does not prove that reincarnation is a fact. Moreover,
critics of the doctrine have advanced various objections to it, purporting to
show that it can not possibly be true. We must now consider them and decide
whether they do or do not establish the impossibility. And, if we find that they
do not really do so, we shall then have to ask whether any empirical evidence at
all exists that shows or tends to show that reincarnation occurs.
1. The materialistic objection to any form of life after death
The first
objection likely to suggest itself to the contemporary Western educated mind
would be that a mind cannot exist without a living body, nor therefore pass from
a dying body to a living one born later. This objection, if sound, would rule
out not only metempsychosis, but also the possibility of any form of survival.
But it need not detain us here since, as we saw in Part Ill, the basis of it
consists not of established facts, but only of one or another of the
materialistic interpretations of the facts. And, as we took pains to make clear,
these interpretations are in no way authoritative but amount only to this: that
in them, a legitimate program - that of searching for material causes - is
illegitimately erected unawares into the metaphysical dogma that none but
material causes can exist at all. Moreover in Part IV, various facts were cited
which lend some empirical support to the hypothesis that the mind survives the
body's death.
The question before us in the present chapter is therefore only whether, if
survival is indeed a fact, any good reasons exist for believing that it cannot
take the form which the reincarnation hypothesis describes; namely, in its most
plausible version, that, following the body's death, there is first a period of
discarnate existence whether short or long; and then rebirth, in an infant body,
of such of the capacities of the mind of the deceased person as had constituted
the basis for acquisition by it of the other capacities it did acquire - and
indeed also for acquisition of various others which it did not in fact acquire
because external circumstances presented no need for them, or no opportunity to
acquire them.
2. The objection that we have no memory of having lived before
A
prima facie
plausible objection to the reincarnation hypothesis is that we have no memory
whatever of having lived before our birth. But if this objection has any force
at all, then it has far too much; for, since we have also no memory of the first
few years of our present life, it would then follow equally that we did not then
exist. Indeed, the case is really worse than this, for we have also no memories
at all of the great majority of the days of our life. My own belief, for example
that I was alive and conscious on say, the third of December, 1930 is not based
on my memory of that day, for I recall nothing whatever in connection with it;
and probably nobody else recalls having observed me on that particular day. That
belief of mine is in fact only an inference, based on the vacuous premise that
human consciousness is continuous - except for periods of unconsciousness in
dreamless sleep, in anesthesia, in coma, or otherwise!
It may be said, of course, that although we have no conscious memories of our
days of early childhood, or of most of our days since then, yet memories of them
persist subconsciously and can be made manifest by automatic writing as induced
in her patients by, for example, the late Dr. Anita Muhl, or by the techniques
of psychoanalysis; or by suggestions of age-regression, given under hypnosis.
But then we naturally find ourselves led to ask how far back such revival of
memories can be made to go. Memories of the intra-uterine experiences of the
foetus have apparently been obtained; and in some cases, purported memories
pertaining to past incarnations. If the latter are dismissed as mere inventions
of the mythopoeic faculty, induced by the suggestions of age-regression, then,
on the very same ground, it will be necessary to dismiss also alleged memories
of intra-uterine experiences; and indeed, also abnormally obtained memories of
the years of infancy and even of subsequent years, except where the reality of
the events purportedly remembered happens to be in some way independently
verifiable. But then, what shall we say about the few reported cases where it is
claimed that verification was made also of facts purportedly remembered from an
earlier incarnation? We shall return to this claim farther on, when we come to
ask whether any positive empirical evidence exists in support of the
reincarnation hypothesis. At this point, however, we are concerned only with the
allegations that absence of memory of earlier lives is empirical evidence that
we had no such lives; and the outcome of the preceding remarks is that absence
of memory of an event, and especially of a long past event, never proves that
one did not experience the event. Positive memories can be evidence concerning
one's past, but absence of memories of it proves nothing at all about it.
3. The objection that memory is indispensable to identity of person
Another
objection to the transmigration hypothesis is that personal identity is wholly
dependent on memory; and hence that, without memories of earlier lives, there is
no difference at all between rebirth of "one" person, and death of one person
followed by birth of a different person(1). This objection, however, would be
easily disposed of by the supposition that, although memory of earlier lives is
absent during any one life, such memory is periodically regained at some point
during the interval between consecutive lives; or, possibly, is regained at the
end of the series of earthly incarnations if the series does have an end. The
supposition that, at some time, memory of earlier lives is recovered suffices to
make rebirth of one person mean something different from death of one person
followed by birth of another person. Absence now of such memory entails only
that we cannot tell now which of those two possibilities is the fact.
(1) Leibniz; Philosophische Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, IV. 300.
4. The objection that, without memory of one's acts, nothing is learned from
their consequences
An objection which has been made to the transmigration
hypothesis - or at least to the assumption usually coupled with it that wisdom is
gained and moral lessons learned gradually from the consequences brought about
by right and wrong acts - is that, without memory of the act, or thought or
feeling or attitude, which brought about a given consequence, the relation of
cause and effect between them is not perceived; and hence that no moral lesson
is learned or any wisdom gained from such features of our lot in the present
life as are consequences of right or wrong conduct in preceding lives.
A sufficient answer to this objection is that perception of the consequences of
our conduct is one way, but not the only way, in which growth in wisdom, virtue,
or ability, can be brought about by those consequences. An act of which we
retain no memory may nevertheless have the remote effect of placing us
eventually in a situation conducive to the acquiring of the wisdom, virtue, or
ability, lack of which made us act as we did in the forgotten past. If, as the
Karma doctrine of the Hindus asserts, our conduct in one incarnation
automatically tends to have this very sort of consequence in one or another of
our later lives, then lack of memory of those past lives does not prevent our
growing morally and spiritually, in this indirect manner, owing to the nature of
our conduct in unremembered earlier lives. Moreover if, as already suggested may
be the case, memory of preceding lives is regained in the discarnate interval
between incarnations, this would make growth in wisdom possible not only in the
manner just described, but also by discernment of some of the consequences of
certain of one's acts in earlier lives.
5. The objection that wisdom, virtue, knowledge, and skills are not innate, but
are gradually acquired after birth
It may be objected, however, that whatever
such growth we achieve in a given incarnation, whether in the indirect manner
described, or directly out of perception of the consequences of acts done in the
present or in a previous incarnation, that growth anyway does not carry over
from past lives to the present one. For children are not born with knowledge
that fire burns, but have to learn it again in this life no matter how many
times in past lives they may have touched fire and got burnt. Similarly,
children have to be taught not to lie and not to take the property of others;
they are not born with ready-made mathematical or musical or other skills, any
more than with a ready-made moral conscience, but acquire all these by processes
open to observation. No matter what they may have learned in past lives, their
education - moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and of other sorts - certainly seems
to have to start from scratch in the present life.
Reflection, however, makes evident that what has just been said is not quite the
whole story. Skills, habits, knowledge, and other varieties of what
psychologists call "conditionings" indeed have to be painstakingly acquired
during the years of life. But what we come equipped with at birth is not these
things; it is only certain instincts and certain aptitudes - an aptitude being a
capacity to acquire, when subjected to the relevant stimuli, certain more
determinate capacities of the kinds mentioned above. In these native aptitudes,
human beings differ considerably one from another. One person will learn quickly
and easily what another, even with great effort, is able to learn but slowly and
imperfectly.
In this connection, it is useful to dwell on the fact that if any one of us, had
been taken away in early childhood from the family where in fact he grew up, and
had been placed instead among the Pygmies of Africa, or among the Eskimos, or
among the Chinese; or indeed, in his native country, in a family markedly
different in economic, cultural and social respects from that in which he was
born; then he would, on the basis of his very same stock of native aptitudes,
certainly have developed a personality vastly different from his present one.
Reflection on this indubitable fact is likely to make the personality he now
calls his Self appear to him analogous rather to some particular one of the
various roles which a given actor is capable of playing. And this reflection is
then likely to lead a person to identify his true Self with his native set of
basic aptitudes, rather than with the accidental particular personality - i.e.,
the particular memories, skills, habits, and so on-generated through the
interaction between those aptitudes and the particular environment in which his
body happens to have lived.
It is true that, when discussing reincarnation, Professor James H. Hyslop
writes: "It is personality that we want, if survival is to be in any way
interesting to us, and not only personality, but we want a personal
consciousness of this personal identity"(2). But in the light of the remarks
just made this demand, though natural enough, appears rather naively wilful.
(2) Borderland of Psychical Research, Turner & Co. Boston, 1906, p. 368.
The supposition just considered, that if reincarnation is a fact then what a man
brings to a new birth is not a developed mind or personality but only certain
aptitudes, has commended itself also to some other writers who, however, have
worded it somewhat differently. Professor Broad, for example, suggests that what
transmigrates, if anything does, might not be a mind but only something which he
calls a "psychogenic factor," the nature of which, however, he does not describe
beyond saying that, from combination of it with a brain, a mind emerges-somewhat
as common salt emerges out of the combination of sodium and chlorine, neither of
which by itself has the properties of salt(3) .Again, Professor Francis Bowen,
in an article in the Princeton Review for May, 1881, quoted at considerable
length by E. D. Walker(4), offered a similar hypothesis, wording it, however, in
terms of Kant's distinction between man's Intelligible Character, which is
noumenal, and his Empirical Character, which is phenomenal - a distinction only
alluded to in the particular passage of Kant's Critique we cited earlier, but
which Kant formulates explicitly elsewhere in a different connection.
(3) The Mind and its Place in Nature, Harcourt Brace & Co. New York, 1929, p.
535
(4) Reincarnation, A Study of Forgotten Truth, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1888,
pp. 102 ff.
But if transmigration is to be conceived as a process of growth, it is necessary
to assume that the activities and experiences of each incarnation result not
only in the acquisition of particular skills, tastes, habits, knowledge, etc.,
on the basis of the aptitudes (or "psychogenic factor," or "Intelligible
Character") brought from past lives; but in addition result in some alteration
of that stock of aptitudes itself-enhancement of some of them, deterioration of
others, perhaps acquisition of new ones, and possibly loss altogether of certain
others. And Broad indeed postulates for the psychogenic factor capacity to be
modified to some extent by the experiences and activities of the mind which has
resulted from the combination of the psychogenic and the bodily factors.
6. Native aptitudes, heredity, and growth of the self. It may be contended,
however, that a person's native aptitudes or anyway some of them are a matter of
heredity; and that if they are derived thus from his ancestors then they are not
derived from strivings or experiences of his own past lives. But McTaggart,
whose favorable opinion of the transmigration hypothesis was cited earlier,
argues that the facts of heredity are at least not incompatible with
transmigration. "There is no impossibility," he writes, "in supposing that the
characteristics in which we resemble the ancestors of our bodies may be to some
degree characteristics due to our previous lives." He points out that "hats in
general fit their wearers with far greater accuracy than they would if each
man's hat were assigned to him by lot. And yet there is very seldom any causal
connection between the shape of the head and the shape of the hat. A man's head
is never made to fit his hat, and, in the great majority of cases, his hat is
not made to fit his head. The adaptation comes about by each man selecting, from
hats made without any special reference to his particular head, the hat which
will suit his particular head best." And McTaggart goes on to say: "This may
help us to see that it would be possible to hold that a man whose nature had
certain characteristics when he was about to be reborn, would be reborn in a
body descended from ancestors of a similar character. His character when reborn
would, in this case, be decided, as far as the points in question went, by his
character in his previous life, and not by the character of the ancestors of his
new body. But ... the character of the ancestors of the new body, and its
similarity to his character." would be what "determined the fact that he was
reborn in that body rather than another."(5) And in
answer to the question as to how each person finds the body most appropriate to
him, McTaggart refers to the analogy of chemical affinities.
(5) Some Dogmas of Religion, Edward Arnold, London, 1906, p. 125.
McTaggart, it must be emphasized, is not contending that some of the
characteristics - or let us say more specifically, aptitudes - which a person
possesses were gained in an earlier life and brought over to the present one at
birth. He is contending only that this supposition is not incompatible with the
inheritance of aptitudes from one's ancestors.
But the compatibility of the two, or not, turns on whether heredity accounts for
every aptitude a person is born with. If it does, then the supposition that any
aptitudes at all are brought from a past incarnation becomes wholly idle.
Indeed, no room at all is left for it, since if something did have a certain
origin, then it did not have a different one!
The assumption. however, that heredity does account for all of a person's native
aptitudes is a good deal more sweeping than present-day knowledge of heredity
warrants. Hence, if a given aptitude a man has does not happen to be traceable
to his parents or known ancestors, his having brought it over from an earlier
life remains conceivable.
But just what, in McTaggart's simile. the "hat" and the "head" may respectively
consist in literally, can become clear only in the light of analysis of the
notions of an "aptitude" and of the corresponding "skill."
An aptitude, it will be recalled, is the capacity to acquire a specific capacity
under given circumstances; and the specific capacity concerned is a skill in so
far as it is voluntary. Moreover, that a given person did possess aptitude for
acquisition of a given skill is shown by his having in fact acquired it. But the
factors on which his having acquired it depended are several.
One was possession by him of such bodily organs of sensation or of action as may
be necessary for exercise of the skill concerned. For example, no matter how
musically gifted otherwise a man may be, he cannot acquire high skill as a
violinist if his fingers are short, thick, and stiff.
A second factor consists in possession of psychological aptitude for acquisition
of the skill concerned, in addition to such bodily aptitude as the skill may
require.
The third factor consists of the external opportunities or/and stimuli which the
person in view has had for acquisition of that skill. A man's capacity to
acquire ability to swim, for instance, would have no opportunity to realize
itself if he were to spend his whole life in the desert.
And a fourth factor is interest in acquisition of the skill concerned. Aptitude
and opportunity for acquisition of the skill might exist, yet interest in
acquiring it might be lacking. Or the interest might exist but remain latent in
the absence of external circumstances that would arouse it. Or the interest
might exist and be patent, but the person might have no aptitude for acquisition
of the particular skill. The interest is therefore a factor additional to the
other three.
Which of the four factors, we may now ask, would constitute the "hat" in
McTaggart's simile, and which of them the "head"?
The first factor - bodily aptitude - is plausibly a matter of biological
heredity and would therefore be part of the "hat." Whether or how far the second
factor - psychological aptitude - is also purely a matter of biological heredity
is dubious. So when, as often is the case, a given aptitude is not traceable to
the parents or the known ancestors, the supposition that it has been brought
over from an earlier life remains possible. The aptitude concerned would then be
part of the "head."
The third factor - the external circumstances which permitted acquisition of the
skill for which aptitude existed - would evidently be another part of the "hat."
And the fourth factor - existence of latent interest in acquisition of the skill
concerned - can, like the aptitude for that skill, be supposed to be a carryover
from an earlier life and thus to be part of the "head." Indeed, that interest,
which amounts to a craving to acquire that skill, can be supposed to operate as
the quasi "chemical affinity" McTaggart invokes, by which the aptitude to
acquire that skill is brought to incarnation in a family that provides not only
the appropriate bodily heredity, but also eventually the kind of external
circumstances necessary for development of the particular skill concerned.
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