society and to seek society of the lowest grade; to wander in woods and wild places (wandering melancholia); to live as hermits in caves, unwashed and unkempt; to follow savage impulses, as cannibalism and sanguinary mania; to imitate ferocious instincts, as lycanthropia, vampyrism, and the practices of men like the Agharee caste of Hindoos, who are said to go naked, eat filth, and pick the flesh from a human skull.

This class of reversions bears closely upon a social problem of great difficulty and importance, viz., that of the dangerous classes of great cities. That many, if not the majority of these criminals are moral imbeciles is certain, but besides these there is a mass of degenerate beings in civilized communities, who, without being criminal ex confesso, are savages in all but speech, dress, and name. In these similar causes

are at work, as in individuals, so as to arrest on the one hand the higher evolution, and on the other develop reversion, but they are, perhaps, more physical-drunkenness and starvation being more common as causes, combined with the absence of stimuli to activity of the higher sentiments.

The permanence of the substrata of savage life is well illustrated by the ready return to savage life of men who have been educated from infancy in all the habits and requirements of civilization. I formerly gave an illustration of this in the case of an educated Indian missionary when witnessing an Indian war dance. The like has been experienced in cases of educated Africans and Australians. M. Huct remarks that the Lamas or Buddhist monks drawn from the Tartar Mongols, whenever set free from the constraint and confinement of the Lamanesque life revelled in the independent life of nomads in their tents. So strongly were the nomadic impulses excited in many of these Tartar monks, that even fixity of tent was insupportable, and they would take it down, and set it up again many times in a day. In these examples we have an illustration of the frolicsome vivacity of healthy young persons when, away from civil life and work, they come into contact and converse with nature. It is the incidence of nature's external conditions, which revives the ancestral relations to nature. In this respect-i.e., as to the presence of excitants of the reflex acts, the cases differ from those in which the desire arises internally for the performance of the acts or impulses. It is to the latter that the rule

*See appendix to my Essay on the Reflex Function of the Brain for this and other illustrations.

+ Travels in Tartary, Thibet, &c., vol. ii, p. 88.

of culture applies more especially-culture standing for higher development.

VIII. As to all the preceding phenomena we can observe, record, compare, and deduce from facts within the reach of observation. The laws which determine the evolution and culture of a plant and its reversion to its wild or uncultivated state, apply to the lower animals and to mankind. It is clear, too, that certain states of feeling, as of pleasure and pain, antipathies and sympathies, prejudices and prepossessions, occur in consequence of the reproduction of ancestral substrata, but without that knowledge of pre-existence upon. which reminiscence depends. The question arises, however, whether there can be reproduction with such a feeling of ancestral personal existence as will give rise to the notion of a continued pre-existence, or, in other words, that notion which constitutes personal identity or "the ego."

In seeking for, and classifying suitable facts, it is necessary to bear in mind that the brain-tissue involved is that upon which not only consciousness, as the ego of the metaphysician, but all true thought depends. Such thought deals with generalisations, which are abstract ideas, and quâ the individual thinker have no existence except in his consciousness. Time and space, and matter and force may exist as apart from the thinker, but to him as ideas they can only exist as he thinks by his brain. Consequently, it is evolution of the hemispheres, in regard to abstract ideas of time past and time future, of person, number, events, and causes, that we have to consider if we would solve the problem of reversion to ancestral modes of thought. The facts have, therefore, to be sought-not in definite ideas, but in obscure feelings and intuitions as to some distant existence mentally in the past, which can serve to the evolution of ideas, and of philosophical systems as to the origin and existence of the individual and his surroundings in the past. Dr. J. D. Morell has illustrated how this may happen in his chapter on "Preconscious Mental Activity," in which he considers facts and doctrines like those stated ante as proving preconscious mental activities, and concludes that they are due to an "unconscious soul," which comes into existence as a "distinct individuality at the moment of conception (p. 53). There is no reason à priori against the conclusion that definite notions derived from

"An Introduction to Mental Philosophy on the Inductive Method," 1862,

ancestral substrata may arise; the recurrence of habitual acts, and of forebodings like that of Sir D. Brewster, are not less improbable. The difficulty is to prove the recurrence as a fact by tracing their origin back to ancestors.

The occurrence of vague notions of a past mental existence is very common, and the majority have probably their origin in dreams or in forgotten thoughts, but not being traceable to the present life they are referred to some state of mental life passed through by "the soul" before birth. This, indeed, is so common a conclusion, and has been so often thought out, that numerous and widespread systems of religion and philosophy, and especially the doctrine of the pre-existence of the human soul, has been evolved in all ages. It is still current in India, where it pervades the popular belief, and it obviously gave rise to the question put to Christ when he was asked, "Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" For the man could only have sinned in a previous state of existence. Mr. Dallas, who adopts the doctrine, observes* that he who in modern times has most emphatically expressed this idea is Wordsworth, who not only held to the pre-existence of the human soul, but to its origin from God. He remarks in the finest of his poems

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

In thinking out these various problems man seems to have concluded, at a very early period of philosophy, that a continuous future life must necessarily be connected naturally and not supernaturally with past terrestrial life. Two systems of religious philosophy arose out of this fundamental principle, which (it is plain) is soundly logical; one which, taking into consideration the obvious similarities between mankind and brute-kind, reincarnated the departing souls in the bodies of animals, thus establishing the hypothesis of transmigration; whereas, the other, restricting the re-incarnation to mankind exclusively, adopted the hypothesis that the soul at death passed into the bodies of infants. The former dogma implied that animals are endowed with souls. I have referred to that doctrine elsewhere. It was by the converse of this doctrine, viz., that animals had not souls-a soul being held to be the exclusive endowment of man-that Descartes

* The "Gay Science," vol. i., p. 220. + Mind and Brain, vol. i. p. 68.

explained the automatic action of the brain. What Dr. Carpenter attributes to a "self-determining power," named the will, Descartes attributed to "the soul."

It is a fact of singular psychological interest that there is at the present time in France a reversion to the ancient doctrines of metempsychosis, and of the evolution and transmigration of souls. They are propagated by a school of theologians sufficiently important to be denounced in 1857 to the Papal chair by a council of French prelates; previously to which date a priest named Jean Reynaud, in a work entitled "Terre et Ciel," eloquently developed a system of religious philosophy, which is avowedly a reproduction of Druidical metaphysics. Like others who have speculated on these questions, aud whose knowledge is more astronomical or cosmological than biological, he mingles his speculations with the hypothesis of a plurality of inhabited worlds. Camille Flammarion is, perhaps, the most popular writer of this astral or universe-school. His treatise, "La Pluralité des Mondes habités," is now (1872) in its seventeenth edition, and his "Les Mondes Imaginaires et les Mondes réels" is in its tenth edition. The most concise, learned, and readable book on the whole subject is that of a French advocate of Lyons, named André Pezzani, entitled "La Pluralité des Existences de l'Ame, conforme à la doctrine de la Pluralité des Mondes; Opinions des Philosophes anciens et modernes, sacres et profanes, depuis les Origines de la Philosophie jusqu'a nos Jours." Fifth Ed. 1872.

When the facts of biology more predominantly occupy the thoughts of the speculator, the law of vital continuity evolves and the doctrine is developed that a future life is of necessity continuous with terrestrial life. Monads, germs, and other things capable of evolution are the continuing means of one class of biological pre-existences. St. Paul, an eminent philosopher of his day, explains the resurrection as the continuance of terrestrial life through a germ, out of which the new body will evolve. Amongst modern philosophers of this school may be named Charles Bonnet, one of the most penetrating and sagacious intellects of his age, who promulgated a modified biological doctrine of Palingenesis. According to the ancient doctrine, if the ashes of a plant or an animal be treated according to certain rules, there will be seen in the smoke its soul, produced as the colour and form of the

"La Palingenesie philosophique: ou, Idées sur l'Etat passé et sur l'Etat futur des Etres vivans." 2 Tom., 8vo. 1769.

plant or the animal. Again, if the ashes of a plant be frozen, the soul-form of the plant will be exactly represented in the ice. This was termed a re-birth or re-generation of the plant or animal-palin, again; genesis, birth. In his " Palingenesie philosophique," Bonnet, setting aside these fables, gives the notion a biological basis by assuming that in every animal there is a microscopic indestructible germ to which its soul is united, and which contains and maintains the personality of the animal, just as the egg or seed contains the future body, and which enables it to enjoy a future life-a view obviously and intended to be applicable to the philosophy of the resurrection of mankind, as taught by St. Paul. The future body of the animal will be wholly different from its past and grosser body, being a superior mechanism, and requiring less repair. This improvement will take place according to a law of evolution to greater perfection; so that in the "restitution" of animals, as Bonnet terms it, man, having attained to a higher perfection, elephants and apes with their Newtons and Leibnitzs will take his place; beavers with their Perraults and Vaubans, &c. The germs might also undergo a sort of transmigration; for Bonnet says that they may enter into a body and remain there until the moment of decomposition, then pass without the least change into another body, from this into a third, &c. "I can very readily conceive," he says, "that the soul-germ of an elephant may first be lodged in a particle of earth, thence it may pass into a bud of fruit, thence into the thigh of a mite," &c. Bonnet also held most clearly the doctrine of soul-evolution and development, and of plurality of existence to their utmost limits. There were many worlds, and in each world scales of existences. But each existence was in itself a scale of existence, "et toutes ne composent qu'une seul suite qui a pour premier terme, l'atôme, et pour dernier terme, le plus élevé des chérubims."*

k

This hypothesis of evolution from germ-atoms through terrestrial life into a celestial and invisible sphere of existence ("the unseen universe," as it has lately been termed in a remarkably speculative book, in which the idea of the evolution and conservation of energy is the starting-point),† has had its fullest development in Louis Figuer's book, "The Day after Death." Figuer advocates the doctrine of the re-incarnation 'Contemplation de la Nature," vol. i., p. 29.

*

"The Unseen Universe; or Physical Speculations on a Future State." 1875. "Le Lendemain de la Mort: ou, la Vie futur selon le Science. Ouvrage accompagné de 10 Figures d'Astronomie." 2nd Ed. 1872.