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Updated: May 2, 2025
This, of course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India, fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux, Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has his fancies on the subject.
If the attributes are not identical with the Essence, there must also be a multiplicity of preexistences, and differences between the attributes and the Essence must also exist; and as Preexistence is necessary, therefore, the sequence of preexistences would become infinite. This is an evident error.
Now, if the question stands related in any way to such themes as these, the immortality of man, the preëxistence and divinity of Christ, and the personality and spirituality of God, it must be confessed to have at least a very high relative importance, as it bears on some of the most momentous articles of our religious faith; and the question naturally arises, What relation it bears to the fundamental principles of Theism, and how far it comports with right views of God, as the Creator and Governor of the world?
When He stands before His guilty judges and their suborned witnesses and while they mock and deride Him He breaks His hitherto amazing silence not to demonstrate to them the truth of His incarnation nor the proof of His preexistence, but in calm and measured utterance to tell them that after they shall have put Him to death He will come the Second time; and they shall see Him descending from heaven seated upon the cloud of shekinal glory and with the power of God.
Thus caught between two mysteries equally baffling to our intelligence, whether we deny or admit the preexistence of the future, we are really only wrangling over words: in the one case, we give the name of "present," from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, to that which to us is the future; in the other, we give the name of "future" to that which, from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, is the present.
But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers' attention to his wonderful tenth chapter, "De la Preexistence des Germes et de l'Epigenese," which opens thus: "Spontaneous generation is only a chimaera. This point established, two hypotheses remain: that of pre-existence and that of epigenesis. The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as the other."
To solve this great difficulty, or at least to mitigate the stupendous darkness in which it seems enveloped, various theories have been employed. The most celebrated of these are the following: 1. The hypothesis of the soul’s preëxistence; 2. The hypothesis of the Manicheans; and, 3. The hypothesis of optimism. It may not be improper to bestow a few brief remarks on these different schemes.
Are we to believe in a sort of autosuggestion that induces us to realize things which we have been foretold or of which we have had presentiments? This is not the place to examine so complex a problem, which brings us into contact with all the mysteries of subconsciousness and the preexistence of the future.
I am not sure if it is really necessary, before closing this chapter, to follow in the wake of many others and broach the problem of the preexistence of the future, which includes those of fatality, of free will, of time and of space, that is to say, all the points that touch the essential sources of the great mystery of the universe.
What most interest us is far less the paths or intermediaries by which prophetic warnings reach us than the actual existence of the future in the present. It is true to do complete justice to neospiritualism that its position offers certain advantages from the point of view of the almost inconceivable problem of the preexistence of the future.
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