Pre-existence

“ A real and actual pre-existence, however, of the human soul, as it does not admit of any historical proof, so is it not easily reconcilable with our own feelings, nor with our general sentiments on the relation we stand in to God, and the divine economy in the government of the world. ”

“ This is an important question and in my estimation there is nothing absurd or unreasonable in the least degree, in believing that that personage that we call the intelligent spirit, which can exist between death and the resurrection, separate and distinct from the body, could also have had an existence before the body was formed, that is, a pre-existence. This is a Scriptural doctrine, for there are many passages in Scripture which, in my estimation, prove that man had a pre-existence. ”

“ On the other hand, the doctrine of pre-existence does not compel us to deny all influence on a man’s character of the character of his ancestors. The character which a man has at any time is modified by any circumstances which happen to him at that time, and may well be modified by the fact that his re-birth is in a body descended from ancestors of a particular character.”—Prof. ”

“ Pre-existence, although perhaps it is nowhere in the New Testament explicitly enforced, yet throughout the whole tenour of these writings is everywhere implied; in them, mankind is constantly represented as coming into the world under a load of guilt ”

“ How different was the second or temporal work, that existed in the beginning of the great work of creation, from the present order of things! Now we see, and according to history we learn, that all creation are at enmity one with another in their natural state. ”

“ Does it reason, imagine, apprehend, without those ideas which sensation alone can communicate? If we have not existed before birth; if, at the period when the parts of our nature on which thought and life depend, seem to be woven together; if there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no grounds for supposition that we shall continue to exist after our existence has apparently ceased. ”

“ If the mind, or that part of our individuality which we call the soul, is in its origin and nature nothing but what the evolution theory supposes, what was there to be informed of immortality, or of anything else? The possibility and certainty of an existence after the death of the body is a conviction that must exercise great influence over the conduct of men in this life. ”

“ By thus studying the past we learn that man is divine in origin and that he has a long evolution behind him—a double evolution, that of the life or soul within, and that of the outer form. We learn, too, that the life of man as a soul is of, what to us seems, enormous length, and that what we have been in the habit of calling his life is in reality only one day of his real existence. ”

“ Add to this, that in tracing an eternal succession of objects, it seems absurd to inquire for a general cause or first author. How can any thing, that exists from eternity, have a cause, since that relation implies a priority in time, and a beginning of existence? ”

“ The genesis of every soul lies back in the eternity past, beyond the horizon of our full comprehension, and what we call a beginning is as truly a consummation and an ending, just as mortal birth is at once the commencement of earth life and the termination of the stage of antemortal existence. ”

“ The conceived relations of Past, Present, and Future in the real world of common-sense metaphysics, appear indeed, at first sight, vastly to transcend anything that we ourselves have ever observed in our inner experience. The infinite and irrevocable past that no longer is, the expected infinite future that has as yet no existence, how remote these ideal constructions, supposed to be valid for all gods and men and things, seem at first sight from the brief and significant series of successive events that occur within the brief span of our actual human consciousness. ”

“ After arriving at a precarious conclusion about existence the ancients were not satisfied. They had to say, 'If I am I must have been created!' Then they go on and say, 'If I was created there must be a Creator!' And thus they soar from their precarious perch in existence, soar on nonexistent wings, and perch on the essence of evanescence! ”

“ Dirai-je, ô mon Dieu, que vous aviez déjà une éternité d'existence en vous-même avant que vous m'eussiez créé, et qu'il vous reste encore une autre éternité, après ma création, où vous existez toujours? ”

“ Here, too, roots the philosophy of eternal recurrence. The present generation in its inner metaphysical nature, that is, in its will, is identical with every generation that has preceded, but we do not recognize either our previous form of existence or the friends we once knew in a former state because the intellect, with its memory and perceptions, is only phenomenal and individual. ”

“ While assuming that it is the nature of life to evolve, he admits that there is no evidence accessible to the senses or discerned as yet by the most delicate instruments for the existence of these countless beginnings of life. The real question then concerns not this kind of life, which eye hath not seen, but the origin of the life which we know, and whose marvellous development evolution traces. ”

“ If worlds have, as the astronomers tell us, their periods of embryo, infancy, adolescence, maturity, decadence, and death, may they not, like man, have their continued existence in a sublimated, ethereal, or spiritual form? ”

“ Even as out of the Unknown was born the immeasurable pain of the Past, so into the Unknown must expire the immeasurable pain of the Future. What, therefore, the worth of our evolution? what, therefore, the meaning of life—of this phantom-flash between darknesses? Is your evolution only a passing out of absolute mystery into universal death? In the hour when that man in the hat of straw shall have crumbled back, for the last mundane time, into the clay he tills, of what avail shall have been all the labor of a million years? ”

“ What is the limit of my existence? Is there any other being in the universe between whom and myself there exists the relation of Creator and creature?
The whole history of the human mind, so far as we have any reliable history, is marked by this perpetual effort to find a First Cause. ”

“ The Believers in Future Life 37. ‘There are, brethren, recluses and Brahmans who arrange the future, whose speculations are concerned with the future, and who on forty-four grounds put forward various assertions regarding the future. And on account of what, starting out from what, do they do so?
38. ‘There are, brethren, recluses and Brahmans who [31] hold the doctrine of a conscious existence after death [173] , and who maintain in sixteen ways that [\q 044/] the soul after death is conscious. ”

“ In accepting the challenge to employ these three facts—God, the soul, a future life—in a rational development of the present phase of existence, Reason would reply that deductions from experience suggest that the future life must necessarily prove an advance on the old. ”

“ But when we come to a progressive creature, whose condition implies a beginning, and therefore suggests an end, we form a peculiar judgment with respect to God's care of that creature, which we have not as yet seen the slightest grounds to extend to other possible fields of existence, where we discern no indication of progress, of beginning, or of end. ”

“ I. There are two possible conceptions as to life after death; that of eternal existence and that of immortality, properly so called, or continuation and evolution of life under a superior form. The first conception corresponds more particularly to the idealistic theories of the world, which we have analyzed above, which, regarding the basis of things as an eternal thought, a thought of thought, believe that by identifying itself with it mankind might pass out of time into eternity. ”

“ God is unbegotten. For, indeed, generation is such in consequence of conversion and mutation. But no substance, nor ingredients of substance, nor existence, nor qualities of existence, nor existing things, nor attributes of existing things, nor power, could there have been prior to God. ”

“ But this would be saying too much, for we must not forget that, just as evolution has continued in the past from eternity, so will it continue in the future to eternity; and who can tell to what heights the human mind may soar in the future? ”

“ Read literally the first half of this sentence is obviously untrue, but in the sense intended, and as a whole, the statement is true enough. There is no extinction, and the change called death is the entrance to a new condition of existence—what may be called a new life. ”

“ One of the first results of these discoveries will be to completely upset the theory as to the succession of ages, as I may call it, which is given and accepted at the present time, and also the estimation of the various civilizations that have passed from the earth and left no trace except in the inner constitution of ourselves—for it is held that we are those very persons, now in different bodies, who so long ago lived and loved and died upon the planet. ”

“ Here we are dealing with the finite, not with the infinite, and nothing that is [229] finite can lie beyond the boundaries of investigation, however long it may take to reach it. The question of the existence of spirits, for instance,—that much mooted problem of the immortality, or at least of the future existence, of man, which forms so prominent an element in modern religion,—dwells within the possible reach of science, and the attempt to deal with it by scientific evidence may reasonably be made. ”

“ Closely allied, like these doctrines, to the primitive notion of the apparitional soul, is the belief in the soul’s existence after death, which appears either as a doctrine of transmigration, describing the re-birth of souls in successive bodies, or in its more general and more important form as the doctrine of a future life. ”

“ I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy,
'The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. ”

“ This progression, by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit. ”

“ So arises in era after era an outward and mortal expression of the inward immortal life; and at once the old struggle begins to repeat itself between the flesh and the spirit, the form and the reality. ”

“ Accepting even the proposition of the spontaneous generation of the primordial form, whenever required—granting the possibility of the coming into existence of a body containing an inner principle of life, some mysterious force—that Mr. ”

“ Are we to start again in a new sphere, carrying with us what we have gained in the discipline of our earthly trials? Are we to become again as we were before we came into this world, when eternity had not yet splintered into time, or the universal being dissolved into individual existences? ”

“ In other words, the questions of birth and death, of extinction or immortality, are merely the incidental results of the peculiarity of our conceptions of time, the peculiarity that the time of our conceptions is irreversible, flows continuously at a uniform rate in the same direction from the past to the future. ”

“ And from the process of generation we may justly look for a new unit, according to the law of cause and effect. As a natural or 37automatic result of the process of generation we may look for a new unit of existence. ”

“ Surely it is a most pertinent inquiry, How does his theory of the advancement of man from some lower organized form bear on the immortality of the soul? and it is no answer to this inquiry to say that upon no hypothesis of man's origin can we determine at what precise period he becomes an immortal being. ”

“ Without further elaborating the argument, it seems a justifiable inference that the first conception primitive man would have of his own life would not include the thought of natural death, but would, conversely, connote the vague conception of endless life. Our own ancestors, a few generations removed, had not got rid of this conception, as the perpetual quest of the spring of eternal youth amply testifies. ”

“ But if you ask me, how it is possible that Nature, the Effect and Creature of God, can be Eternal without beginning? I will desire you to answer me first, how a Creature can be Eternal without end, as, for example. Supernatural Spirits are, and then I will answer you, how a Creature can be Eternal without beginning; For Eternity consists herein, that it has neither beginning nor end; and if it be easie for God to make a Being without end, it is not difficult for Him to make a Being without beginning. ”

“ Here, I say, and in these discourses only, shall this be so; for, strictly speaking, and in the higher flights of speculation, Human Life on Earth, and Earthly Time itself, are but necessary Epochs of the One Time and of the One Eternal Life;—and this Earthly Life with all its subordinate divisions may be deduced from the fundamental Idea of the Eternal Life already accessible to us here below. ”

“ The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. ”