The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries Part 68

[622] Cf. Freud, op. cit., p. 192.

[623] Freud, _Die Traumdeutung_, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1906); cf. S.

Ferenczi, _The Psychological a.n.a.lysis of Dreams_, in _Amer. Journ.

Psych._ (April 1910), xxi, No. 2, p. 326.

[624] A similar state of high development is to be a.s.sumed for a great Celtic hero like Arthur, who were he to be re-born would (as is said to have been the case with King Mongan, the reincarnation of Finn) bring with him memory of his past: unlike the consciousness of the normal man, the consciousness of one of the Divine Ones is normally the subconsciousness, the consciousness of the individuality; and not the personal consciousness, which, like the personality, is non-permanent _in itself_. This further ill.u.s.trates the Celtic theory of non-personal immortality.

[625] Ribot, op. cit., p. 100 ff.

[626] Cf. Lang, _c.o.c.k Lane and Common Sense_, pp. 217 ff. _Blackwood's Magazine_, cxxix (January 1881), contains a remarkable account of a child who remembered previous lives. Lord Lindsay, in his _Letters_ (ed.

of 1847, p. 351), refers to a feeling when he beheld the river Kadisha descending from Lebanon, of having in a previous life seen the same scene. d.i.c.kens in his _Pictures from Italy_ testifies to a parallel experience. E. D. Walker, in his interesting work on _Reincarnation_ (pp. 42-5) has brought together many other well-attested cases of people who likewise have thought they could remember fragments of a former state of conscious existence. In his diary, under date of February 17, 1828, Sir Walter Scott wrote as follows:--'I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth marking down, that yesterday, at dinner-time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of pre-existence, viz.

a confused idea that nothing that pa.s.sed was said for the first time.'

Lockhart, _Life of Scott_ (first ed.), vii. 114. Bulwer Lytton in _G.o.dolphin_ (chapter xv), and Edgar Allen Poe in _Eureka_, record similar experiences. Mr. H. Fielding Hall, in _The Soul of a People_{4} (London, 1902), pp. 290-308, reports several very remarkable cases of responsible natives of Burma who stated that they could recall former lives pa.s.sed by them as men and women. Mr. Hall has carefully investigated these cases, and gives us the impression that they are worthy of scientific consideration.

[627] Cf. Ferenczi, op. cit., p. 316, &c. Professor Freud's theory of dreams supports entirely, but does not imply our hypothesis that some (and probably many) abnormal dreams of a rare kind, whether good or bad in tendency, may be due to the latent content of subconsciousness, out of which they undoubtedly arise, having been collected and carried over from a previous state of consciousness parallel to our present one. In respect to our present life Professor Freud holds, as a result of psycho-a.n.a.lysis of thousands of dream subjects, that the latent content of every dream in the adult is directly dependent upon mental processes which frequently reach back to the earliest childhood; and he gives detailed cases in ill.u.s.tration. In other words, there is always a latent dream-material behind the conscious dream-content, and probably a part of it was innate in the child at birth, and hence, according to our view, was pre-existent. (Cf. Ernest Jones, _Freud's Theory of Dreams_, in _Amer. Journ. Psych._, April 1910, xxi, No. 2, pp. 301 ff.)

[628] Cf. Du Prel, _Philosophy of Mysticism_, ii. 25 ff., 34 ff.

[629] _The Dream of Ravan_, in _Dublin Univ. Mag._, xliii. 468.

[630] Myers, in _Proc. S. P. R._, vii. 305.

[631] James, _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 483.

[632] The esoteric teaching in many of the mystic schools of antiquity was that the atoms of each human body transmigrate through all lower forms of life during the long period supposed to intervene between death and re-birth of the individuality. This doctrine seems to be one of the main sources of the corruption which crept into the ancient re-birth doctrines and transformed many of them into doctrines of transmigration of the human soul into animal and plant bodies; and some unscrupulous priesthoods openly taught such corrupted doctrines as a means of making the ignorant populace submissive to ecclesiastical rule, the theological theory expounded by such priesthoods being that the evil-doer, but not the keeper of the letter of the canonical law, is condemned to expiate his sins through birth in brute bodies. The pure form of the mystic doctrine was that after the lapse of the long period of disembodiment the individuality reconstructs its human body anew by drawing to itself the identical atoms which const.i.tuted its previous human body--these atoms, and not the individuality, having transmigrated through all the lower kingdoms. Such an esoteric doctrine probably lies behind the exoteric Egyptian teaching that the human soul after the death of its body pa.s.ses through all plant and animal bodies during a period of three thousand years, after which it returns to human embodiment. Some scholars have held that the exoteric interpretation of this theory and its consequent literal interpretation as a transmigration doctrine led the Egyptians to mummify the bodies of their dead. Cf. Lucretius, _De Rerum Natura_, Book III, ll. 843-61; and Herodotus, Book II, on Egypt.

[633] Cf. Dr. L. S. Fugairon's _La Survivance de l'ame, ou la Mort et la Renaissance chez les etres vivants; etudes de physiologie et d'embryologie philosophiques_ (Paris, 1907); cf. Revel, _Le Hasard_, p.

457.

[634] Darwin never considered or attempted to suggest what it is that of itself really evolves, for it cannot be the physical body which only _grows_ from immaturity to maturity and then dissolves. Darwin thus overlooked the essential factor in his whole doctrine; while the Druids and other ancients, wiser than we have been willing to admit, seem not only to have antic.i.p.ated Darwin by thousands of years, but also to have quite surpa.s.sed him in setting up their doctrine of re-birth, which explains both the physical and psychical evolution of man.