observe how earnestly Lessing defends it in the last seven paragraphs of his "Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts." Lichtenberg also says in his "Selbstcharacteristik:" "I cannot get rid of the thought that I died before I was born." Even the excessively empirical Hume says in his sceptical essay on immortality, p. 23: "The metempsychosis is therefore the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to."[1] What resists this belief, which is spread over the whole human race and commends itself alike to the wise and to the vulgar, is Judaism, together with the two religions which have sprung from it, because they teach the creation of man out of nothing, and he has then the hard task of linking on to this the belief in an endless existence a parte post. They certainly have succeeded, with fire and sword in driving out of Europe and part of Asia that consoling primitive belief of mankind; it is still doubtful for how long. Yet how difficult this was is shown by the oldest Church histories. Most of the heretics were attached to this primitive belief; for example, Simonists, Basilidians Valentinians, Marcionists, Gnostics, and Manichæans! The Jews themselves have in part fallen into it, as Tertullian and Justinus (in his dialogues) inform us. In the Talmud it is related that Abel's soul passed into the body of Seth, and then into that of Moses. Even the passage of the Bible, Matt. xvi. 13-15, only obtains a rational meaning if we understand it as spoken under the assumption of the dogma of metempsychosis. Luke, it is true who also has the passage (ix. 18-20), adds the words (
Greek characters), and thus attributes to
- ↑ This posthumous essay is to be found in the "Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" by the late David Hume, Basil, 1799, sold by James Decker. By this reprint at Bâle these two works of one of the greatest thinkers and writers of England were rescued from destruction, when in their own land, in consequence of the stupid and utterly contemptible bigotry which prevailed, they had been suppressed through the influence of a powerful and insolent priesthood, to the lasting shame of England. They are entirely passionless, coldly rational investigations of the two subjects named.
