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Updated: May 25, 2025
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 chimera. 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."
I always feel that the instinct for beauty is perhaps the surest indication of some essence of immortality in the soul; and indeed there are moments when it gives one the sense of pre-existence, the feeling that one has loved these fair things in a region that is further back even than the beginnings of consciousness.
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."
We failed to recognise joy as a proof of our survival after death, but we cannot reject the teaching of sorrow." "Love and friendship, of course, are proofs not only of immortality, but of pre-existence and the survival of the individual." "And can you make the disciples of the clap-trap which passes for religion believe this, Mr. Mario?" "I propose to try. But the task is hard.
The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations ." Thus we have solid physiological ground for the idea of pre-existence and the idea of a multiple Ego.
Were I to ask any reflecting Occidental, who had passed some years in the real living atmosphere of Buddhism, what fundamental idea especially differentiates Oriental modes of thinking from our own, I am sure he would answer: "The Idea of Pre-existence." It is this idea, more than any other, which permeates the whole mental being of the Far East.
It is shown in my Physiology how the phenomena of the sentiment of pre-existence may, upon these principles, be explained, each hemisphere of the brain thinking for itself, and the mind deluded as respects the lapse of time, mistaking these simultaneous actions for successive ones, and referring one of the two impressions to an indistinct and misty past.
Others, like the Platonists, the Dualists and the Pantheists, who believe in the pre-existence of the soul either as a separate entity or as a part of God, hold that after the death of the body the soul returns to its original condition.
I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth marking down, that yesterday at dinner-time I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of pre-existence, videlicet, a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time, that the same topics had been discussed, and the same persons had stated the same opinions on the same subjects.
Origen and other Church Fathers accepted it until the time of Justinian, who anathematized all those who believed in Reincarnation or the pre-existence of the soul. Among the Jews we find that in the Cabala this idea of transmigration plays the most important part. In fact the Cabalists accepted this theory to explain all the difficulties that could not be explained by any other theory.
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