Reincarnation: A Study in Human Evolution

THE SOUL AND THE BODIES.

I

n a book dealing with the resurrection of bodies and the reincarnations of

the Soul, a chapter must be devoted to the fundamental elements of the

question.

We will give the name of Soul to abstract Being, to the Unknown, that un-

manifested Principle which cannot be defined, for it is above all definition.

It is the Absolute of Western philosophers, the Parabrahm of the Hindus,

the Tao of the ancient sages of China, the causeless Cause of all that has been

or ever will be manifested in concrete time and space.

Some feeble idea of it may perhaps be obtained by comparing it with elec-

tricity, which, though the cause of various phenomena: heat, movement,

chemical action, light, is not, per se, any one of these phenomena, undergoes

no modification from their existence, and survives them when the apparatus

through which they manifest disappears.

We shall set up no distinction between this Soul, which may be called the

universal Soul, and the individual soul, which has often been defined as a

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ray, a particle of the total Soul, for logically one cannot imply parts to the

Absolute; it is illusion, limitation on our part, which shows us souls in the

Soul.

Bodies are "aspects" of the Soul, results of its activity-if, indeed, the Infinite

can be said to be either active or passive; words fail when we attempt to ex-

press the Inexpressible. These bodies, or, more precisely, the varied forms

assumed by force-matter[2] are aspects of the Soul, just as light or chemical

action are aspects of electricity, for one cannot suppose anything outside of

infinite Being, nor can anything be imagined which is not a manifestation

of the abstract Whole.

Let us also define Consciousness.

Taken absolutely, it is Being, the Soul, God; the uncaused Cause of all the

states which, in beings, we call states of consciousness.

This limited consciousness may be defined as the faculty a "centre of life"

possesses of receiving vibrations from its surroundings. When, in the course

of evolution, a being is sufficiently developed to become conscious of a sepa-

ration between its "I" and the objectwhich sends it vibrations, consciousness

becomes self-consciousness. This self -consciousness constitutes the human

stage; it appears in the higher animals, but as it descends the scale of being,

gradually disappears in non-individualised consciousness.

In a word, absolute Consciousness is one, though, as in the above example,

it is manifested differently, according to the differences in the vehicles which

express it in the concrete world in which we live.

The Soul, per se, is beyond the reach of beings who have not finished the

pilgrimage of evolution. To know it, one must have attained to the eternal

Centre, the unmanifested Logos. Up to that point, one can only, in pro-

portion as one ascends, feel it in oneself, or acknowledge it by means of the

logic which perceives it through all its manifestations as the universal