PDF version - Geae

CHAPTER XIII
THE LAW OF REINCARNATION
After a time of sojourning in peace, the soul is reborn into human conditions, and carries with it the
heritage, good or bad, of its past. It is born an infant, and reappears on the earthly scene to play a new act of
the drama of life; to acquit old debts and to conquer new powers which will facilitate its ascension and
accentuate its forward march.
The law of rebirth explains and completes the principle of immortality. The evolution of being
indicates a plan and aim; this aim, which is perfection, could not be realised in a single life, no matter how
long and fruitful it might be. We must see in the plurality of lives the necessary conditions of education and
progress. It is by its own efforts, sufferings, and strife that it redeems itself degree by degree, first on the earth,
and then on innumerable dwelling-places in the starry heavens. Reincarnation, affirmed by the voices from
Beyond, is the only rational form under which we can admit the reparation of faults and the gradual evolution
of being. Without it, there is no conception possible of a great Being governing the universe; nor can we feel a
satisfying moral sanction of existing conditions.
If we declare that man lives actually for the first and last time here, that one existence only is
experienced by us, we must then recognise the incoherence and the partiality shown in the distribution of good
and evil conditions - of talents and faculties - of native qualities and original vices. Why to some lives constant
good fortune and happiness, to others misery and inevitable misfortune? To one beauty, health, strength, to
another weakness, deformity, and sickness? Why intellect, genius, and imbecility? Why so many admirable
qualities, side by side with vice? Why the diverse races - some so near to animality, others favoured with
powers which assure their supremacy? Why the blind, the idiots, the deformed who fill our hospitals? Heredity
does not explain all that, nor can they all be considered as the result of natural causes. It is the same with those
endowed with favors. Often the worthy seem crushed under trials while the wicked prosper. Why are these
children born to suffer from the cradle, and why do some finish the earth life in youth, and others live a
century? From whence come the infant prodigies, musicians, poets, painters, showing extraordinary talents for
the arts and sciences, while others labour all their lives and remain mediocre? And how explain the inborn
sentiments of dignity, or of evil, strangely exhibiting themselves in contrast with their environment?
If individual life commences on earth, if nothing anterior existed for us, we must seek vainly to
explain these frightful anomalies, these painful contrasts, and to conciliate them with the idea of a wise, just,
all-seeing Power. All the religions and the philosophies have run against this problem; no one has solved it.
From their point of view, destiny rests incomprehensible and the plan of the universe is obscured, evolution is
arrested, and suffering is inexplicable. Man, forced to believe in a blind force and fatality, and in the absence
of all justice, is pushed toward pessimism and atheism. On the contrary, all is explained by the doctrine of
successive lives; the law of justice reveals itself in the smallest details of life. The inequalities which shock us
result from the different situations occupied by souls in their infinite degrees of evolution. The destiny of a
being is but the development through the ages of a long series of cause and effect engendered by his acts.
Nothing is lost; the effects good and bad accumulate and germinate in us up to favorable moments of their
opening, sometimes after a long lapse of time, and many existences; but they never disappear until reparation
has been made by the soul. Each one brings its seed of the past from beyond the tomb to the new-born soul.
That seed, according to its nature for our happiness or misery, will spread its fruits upon the new life as well as
upon those to come, if the one life does not suffice to exhaust the evil of past existences. At the same time, our
daily acts, sources of new effects, come to add their causes to the old, to alleviate or aggravate them. They
form a chain of good or evil altogether which composes the woof of our destiny.
Moral sanction, so insufficient when we study life from the point of view of one existence, finds itself
absolute and perfect in the succession of lives. There is a complete correlation between our acts and our
destiny; we find in the events of our lives the rebound of our former acts. Our activities under all forms are
creative of good or bad elements, from far and near, which fall on us in tempests or joyous rays. Man
constructs his own future. Until now, in his ignorance and incertitude, he has constructed it while blindly
groping his way, submitting to his fate without the power to explain it. Soon with better light, penetrated by
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