The Destiny of the Soul | Page 6

course of
nature, the succession of lives, can be absolutely eternal without
involving an alternating or circular movement. The doctrine of
emanation has, moreover, been supported by the supposed analytic
similarity of the soul to God. Its freedom, consciousness, intelligence,
love, correspond with what we regard as the attributes and essence of
Deity. The inference, however unsound, is immediate, that souls are
consubstantial with God, dissevered fragments of Him, sent into bodies.
But, in actual effect, the chief recommendation of this view has
probably been the variety of analogies and images under which it
admits of presentation. The annual developments of vegetable life from
the bosom of the earth, drops taken from a fountain and retaining its
properties in their removal, the separation of the air into distinct breaths,
the soil into individual atoms, the utterance of a tone gradually dying
away in reverberated echoes, the radiation of beams from a central light,
the exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, the evolution of
numbers out of an original unity, these are among the illustrations by
which an exhaustless ingenuity has supported the notion of the
emanation of souls from God. That "something cannot come out of
nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of our rational instincts.
And seeing all things within our comprehension held in the chain of
causes and effects, one thing always evolving from another, we leap to
the conclusion that it is precisely the same with things beyond our
comprehension, and that God is the aboriginal reservoir of being from
which all the rills of finite existence are emitted.
Against this doctrine the current objections are these two. First, the
analogies adduced are not applicable. The things of spirit and those of
matter have two distinct sets of predicates and categories. It is, for
example, wholly illogical to argue that because the circuit of the waters
is from the sea, through the clouds, over the land, back to the sea again,
therefore the derivation and course of souls from God, through life,
back to God, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with

the soul that baffle the most lynx eyed investigation, and on which no
known facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, the
scheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the
infancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some necessary
truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, and therefore both
corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is incompatible with the first
predicates of Deity, namely, immateriality and infinity. Before the
conception of the illimitable, spiritual unity of God, the doctrine of the
emanation of souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a
dreaming mind brooding over the suggestions of phenomena and
apparent correspondences.
The second explanation of the origin of souls is that which says they
come from a previous existence. This is the theory of imagination,
framed in the free and seductive realm of poetic thought. It is evident
that this idea does not propose any solution of the absolute origination
of the soul, but only offers to account for its appearance on earth. The
pre existence of souls has been most widely affirmed. Nearly the whole
world of Oriental thinkers have always taught it. Many of the Greek
philosophers held it. No small proportion of the early Church Fathers
believed it.1 And it is not without able advocates among the scholars
and thinkers
1 Keil, Opuscula; Be Pre existentia Animarum. Beausobre, Hist. du
Manicheisme, lib. vii. cap. iv.
of our own age. There are two principal forms of this doctrine; one
asserting an ascent of souls from a previous existence below the rank of
man, the other a descent of souls from a higher sphere. Generation is
the true Jacob's ladder, on which souls are ever ascending or
descending. The former statement is virtually that of the modern theory
of development, which argues that the souls known to us, obtaining
their first organic being out of the ground life of nature, have climbed
up through a graduated series of births, from the merest elementary
existence, to the plane of human nature. A gifted author, Dr. Hedge, has
said concerning pre existence in these two methods of conceiving it,
writing in a half humorous, half serious, vein, "It is to be considered as

expressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If here and there
some pure liver, or noble doer, or prophet voice, suggests the idea of a
revenant who, moved with pity for human kind, and charged with
celestial ministries, has condescended to
'Soil his pure ambrosial weeds With the rank vapors of this sin worn
mould,'
or if, on the other hand, the 'superfluity of naughtiness' displayed by
some abnormal felon seems to warrant the supposition of a visit