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How little insight he had into it on any scientific or clearly defined principle, is obvious from the fact, that he took shelter from its difficulties in the wild hypothesis of the preëxistence of souls.
Here is another which evidently belongs to the same class, though at first sight it seems to postulate the preexistence of a fatal event and a vision of the future corresponding exactly with a vision of the past.
But, after all, it is incontestable in both cases that, at least from our point of view, the future preexists, since preexistence is the only name by which we can describe and the only form under which we can conceive that which we do not yet see in the present. Attempts have been made to shed light on the riddle by transferring it to space.
Since the introduction of the Greek or Chaldean philosophy, the Jews were persuaded of the preexistence, transmigration, and immortality of souls; and providence was justified by a supposition, that they were confined in their earthly prisons to expiate the stains which they had contracted in a former state. But the degrees of purity and corruption are almost immeasurable.
I have said he was sick as if for home: the figure halts. He was like some one lying in twilit, formless preexistence, and stretching out his hands lovingly towards many- coloured, many-sounding life.
All concepts of life implied by the idea of preexistence, all those beliefs which, however sympathetically studied, must at first have seemed more than strange to you, finally lose that curious or fantastic character with which novelty once invested them, and present themselves under a perfectly normal aspect.
So the preexistence of the specification and of the individualization of beings which are the things known of God the Most High does not exist; and these divine and perfect attributes are not so understood by the intelligence that we can decide if the Divine Knowledge has need of things known or not.
Had the sensation of a night slipped through our brains in the momentary winking of the eyes? Or was the old routine of consciousness so firmly stereotyped in our natures, that the view of a morning was sufficient proof to them of the preëxistence of a night?
Section I. The hypothesis of the soul’s preëxistence. This was a favourite opinion with many of the ancient philosophers. In the Phædon of Plato, Socrates is introduced as maintaining it; and he ascribes it to Orpheus as its original author.
Having no key in Christ to the unity of Scripture, he becomes a critic of what he is pleased to call its fragments, that is, the dissector of a cadaver. Ask him if he believes in the preexistence, deity, virgin birth, miracles, atoning death, physical resurrection, omnipresence, and omnipotence of Christ, and he denies your right to require of him any statement of his own beliefs.
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