A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"Die106 REINCARNATION.annihilated, to recognise that the soul must have existedprior to its becoming visible in a physical t^ody."Schopenhauer, in his book, Welt als Wille a*idVorstellung," speaking about palingenesis says :"What sleep is for the individual, death is for the will.*It would not endure to continue the same actions andsufferings throughout an eternity without true gain, ifmemory and individuality remained to it. It flings themand off, this is Lethe, and through this sleep of deathit reappears fitted out with another intellect as a newbeing ; a new day tempts to new shores. These constantnew births, then, constitute the succession of the lifedreamsof a will which in itself is indestructible, until,instructed and improved by so much and such various successive knowledge in a constantly new form it abolishes andabrogates itself It must not be neglected thateven empirical grounds support a palingenesis of thiskind. As a matter of fact, there does exist a connectionbetween the birth of the newly appearing beings andthe death of those that are worn out. It shows itselfin the great fruitfulness of the human race, which appearsas a consequence of devastatingdiseases. When in thefourteenth century the Black Death had for the most partdepopulated the Old world, a quite abnormal fruitfulnessappeared among the human race, and twinbirths were veryfrequent. The circumstance was also remarkable thatnone of the children born at this time obtained their fullnumber of teeth ;thus nature, exerting itself to theutmost, was niggardly in details." This is related byF. Schnurrer, in his Chronik der Scuchen/ 1825. Casperthat the numberalso, in his Ueber die Wahrscheinliche Lebensdauer des-Menschen, 1835, confirms the principleof births in a given population has the most decided influ-