Matter does not perish; observation and science prove that material bodies are never annihilated, that they merely change their condition, their form, and their place; but are always to be found somewhere intact as to their substance. Our bodies decompose, and are dissolved, but the matter of which they were formed is never destroyed, it is dispersed in the air, the fire, and the water, in which it produces new material combinations, but it is not destroyed for all that. Now, if matter does not perish, but only becomes transformed, all the more certainly must the soul be indestructible and imperishable. Like matter, it must be transformed, without being destroyed.
Descartes has said, _I think, therefore I am_. This reasoning, so much admired in the schools, has always appeared to us rather weak. To give force to the syllogism, he should have said, _I think, therefore I am immortal_. My soul is immortal, because it exists, and it does exist since I think. Thus the fact of the immortality of the spiritual principle which we bear within us is self-evident, and we do not need any of the demonstrations which abound in philosophical works, and have been put forth from antiquity until our own time; we need no _Treatises on the Soul_ to establish its existence.
The difficulty does not consist in proving that a spiritual principle exists within us, that is to say, a principle which resists death, because, in order to contest the existence of this principle, it would be necessary to contest thought. The real problem is to find out whether this spiritual and immortal principle which we bear within us, is to live again, after our death, in ourselves or in others. The question is, whether the immortal soul will be born again in the same individual, physically transformed, in the same person, in the _ego_, or whether it will pass into the possession of a being strange to that person.
We may remark here that on this all the interest of the question for us turns. It would be of very little importance to us, in reality, whether the soul were immortal or not, if the soul of each of us, being really indestructible and immortal, should pass to another than ourselves, or if, reviving in us, it did not possess the memory of our past existence. The resurrection of the soul without the memory of the past would be a real annihilation, this would be the nothingness of the materialists. It must be, then, that the soul lives again after our death, in ourselves, and that this soul, then, has clear remembrance of all the actions which took place in its previous existences. It behoves us, in short, to know, not whether our souls are immortal--that fact is self-evident--but whether they will belong to us in the other life, whether, after our death, we shall have identity, individuality, _personality_. It is to the study of this question that the present work is devoted. We are endeavouring to prove that the soul of the man remains always the same, in spite of its numerous peregrinations, notwithstanding the variety of form of the bodies in which it is successively lodged, when it passes from the animal to the man, from the man to the superhuman being, and from the superhuman being, after other celestial transmigrations, to the spiritualized being who inhabits the sun. We are endeavouring to establish that the soul, notwithstanding all its journeys, in the midst of its incarnations and various metamorphoses, remains always identical with itself, doing nothing more in each metempsychosis, in each metamorphosis of the exterior being, than perfect and purify itself, growing in power and in intellectual grasp. We are endeavouring to prove, that, notwithstanding the shadows of death, our individuality is never destroyed, and that we shall be born again in the heavens, with the same moral personality which was ours here below; in other words, that the human _person_ is imperishable. It is for the reader to say whether we have attained our object, whether we have established the truth of this doctrine conformably with the laws of reasoning and the facts of science.