1. The Theory of Preëxistence

This view was held by Plato, Philo, and Origen; by the first, in order to explain the soul’s possession of ideas not derived from sense; by the second, to account for its imprisonment in the body; by the third, to justify the disparity of conditions in which men enter the world. We concern ourselves, however, only with the forms which the view has assumed in modern times. Kant and Julius Müller in Germany, and Edward Beecher in America, have advocated it, upon the ground that the inborn depravity of the human will can be explained only by supposing a personal act of self-determination in a previous, or timeless, state of being.

The truth at the basis of the theory of preëxistence is simply the ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of God—that is, God’s foreknowledge of it. The intuitive ideas of which the soul finds itself in possession, such as space, time, cause, substance, right, God, are evolved from itself; in other words, man is so constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper occasions or conditions. The apparent recollection that we have seen at some past time a landscape which we know to be now for the first time before us, is an illusory putting together of fragmentary concepts or a mistaking of a part for the whole; we have seen something like a part of the landscape,—we fancy that we have seen this landscape, and the whole of it. Our recollection of a past event or scene is one whole, but this one idea may have an indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within it. The sight of something which is similar to one of these parts suggests the past whole. Coleridge: “The great law of the imagination that likeness in part tends to become likeness of the whole.” Augustine hinted that this illusion of memory may have played an important part in developing the belief in metempsychosis.

Other explanations are those of William James, in his Psychology: The brain tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are different; Baldwin, Psychology, 263, 264: We may remember what we have seen in a dream, or there may be a revival of ancestral or race experiences. Still others suggest that the two hemispheres of the brain act asynchronously; self-consciousness or apperception is distinguished from perception; divorce, from fatigue, of the processes of sensation and perception, causes paramnesia. Sully, Illusions, 280, speaks of an organic or atavistic memory: “May it not happen that by the law of hereditary transmission … ancient experiences will now and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise to apparentlypersonal recollections?” Letson, The Crowd, believes that the mob is atavistic and that it bases its action upon inherited impulses: “The inherited reflexes are atavistic memories” (quotedin Colegrove, Memory, 204).

Plato held that intuitive ideas are reminiscences of things learned in a previous state of being; he regarded the body as the grave of the soul; and urged the fact that the soul had knowledge before it entered the body, as proof that the soul would have knowledge after it left the body, that is, would be immortal. See Plato, Meno, 82–85, Phædo, 72–75, Phædrus, 245–250, Republic, 5:460 and 10:614. Alexander, Theories of the Will, 36, 37—“Plato represents preëxistent souls as having set before them a choice of virtue. The choice is free, but it will determine the destiny of each soul. Not God, but he who chooses, is responsible for his choice. After making their choice, the souls go to the fates, who spin the threads of their destiny, and it is thenceforth irreversible. As Christian theology teaches that man was free but lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the preëxistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life.” See Introductions to the above mentioned works of Plato in Jowett’s translation. Philo held that all souls are emanations from God, and that those who allowed themselves, unlike the angels, to be attracted by matter, are punished for this fall by imprisonment in the body, which corrupts them, and from which they must break loose. See Philo, De Gigantibus, Pfeiffer’s ed., 2:360–364. Origen accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God’s justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here corresponds to the degree of previous guilt; Mat. 20:3—“others standing in the market place idle” = souls not yet brought into the world. The Talmudists regarded all souls as created at once in the beginning, and as kept like grains of corn in God’s granary, until the time should come for joining each to its appointed body. See Origen, De Anima, 7; περὶ ἀρχῶν, ii:9:6; cf. 1:2, 1:4, 1:18; 4:36. Origen’s view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople, 538. Many of the preceding facts and references are taken from Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681–733.

For modern advocates of the theory, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, sec. 15; Religion in. d. Grenzen d. bl. Vernunft, 26, 27; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:357–401; Edward Beecher, Conflict of Ages. The idea of preëxistence has appeared to a notable extent in modern poetry. See Vaughan, The Retreate (1621); Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood; Tennyson, Two Voices, stanzas 105–119, and Early Sonnets, 25—“As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former life, or seem Tolapse far back in some confused dream To states of mystical similitude; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say ‘All this hath been before, All this bath been, I know not when or where.’ So, friend, when first I looked upon your face, Our thought gave answer each to each, sotrue—Opposed mirrors each reflecting each—That though I knew not in what time or place, Methought that I had often met with you, And either lived in either’s heart and speech.” Robert Browning, La Saisiaz, and Christina: “Ages past the soul existed; Here anage ’t is resting merely, And hence fleets again for ages.” Rossetti, House of Life: “I have been here before, But whenor how I cannot tell; I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights along the shore. You have been mine before, How long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow’s soar, Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore”; quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 103–106, who holds the phenomenon due to false induction and interpretation.

Briggs, School, College and Character, 95—“Some of us remember the days when we were on earth for the firsttime;”—which reminds us of the boy who remembered sitting in a corner before he was born and crying for fear he would be a girl. A more notable illustration is that found in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by Lockhart, his son-in-law, 8:274—“Yesterday, at dinner time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of preëxistence—viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time—that the same topics had been discussed and the same persons had started the same opinions on them. It is true there might have been some ground for recollections, considering that three at least of the company were old friends and had kept much company together.… But the sensation was so strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert and sylvan landscapes in the sea. It was very distressing yesterday and brought to mindthe fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in all I did and said.… I drank several glasses of wine, but these only aggravated the disorder. I did not find the in vino veritas of the philosophers.”

To the theory of preëxistence we urge the following objections:

(a) It is not only wholly without support from Scripture, but it directly contradicts the Mosaic account of man’s creation in the image of God, and Paul’s description of all evil and death in the human race as the result of Adam’s sin.

Gen. 1:27—“And God created man in hisown image, in the image of God created he him”; 31—“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Rom. 5:12—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned.” The theory of preëxistence would still leave it doubtful whether all men are sinners, or whether God assembles only sinners upon the earth.

(b) If the soul in this preëxistent state was conscious and personal, it is inexplicable that we should have no remembrance of such preëxistence, and of so important a decision in that previous condition of being;—if the soul was yet unconscious and impersonal, the theory fails to show how a moral act involving consequences so vast could have been performed at all.

Christ remembered his preëxistent state; why should not we? There is every reason to believe that in the future state we shall remember our present existence; why should we not now remember the past state from which we came? It may be objected that Augustinians hold to a sin of the race in Adam—a sin which none of Adam’s descendants can remember. But we reply that no Augustinian holds to a personal existence of each member of the race in Adam, and therefore no Augustinian needs to account for lack of memory of Adam’s sin. The advocate of preëxistence, however, does hold to a personal existence of each soul in a previous state, and therefore needs to account for our lack of memory of it.

(c) The view sheds no light either upon the origin of sin, or upon God’s justice in dealing with it, since it throws back the first transgression to a state of being in which there was no flesh to tempt, and then represents God as putting the fallen into sensuous conditions in the highest degree unfavorable to their restoration.

This theory only increases the difficulty of explaining the origin of sin, by pushing back its beginning to a state of which we know less than we do of the present. To say that the soul in that previous state was only potentially conscious and personal, is to deny any real probation, and to throw the blame of sin on God the Creator. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:228—“In modern times, the philosophers Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer have explained the bad from as intelligible act of freedom, which (according to Schelling and Schopenhauer) also at the same time effectuates the temporal existence and condition of the individual soul. But what are we to think of as meant by such a mystical deed or act through which the subject of it first comes into existence? Is it not this, that perhaps under this singular disguise there is concealed the simple thought that the origin of the bad lies not so much in a doing of the individual freedom as rather in the rise of it,—that is to say, in the process of development through which the natural man becomes a moral man, and the merely potentially rational man becomes an actually rational man?”

(d) While this theory accounts for inborn spiritual sin, such as pride and enmity to God, it gives no explanation of inherited sensual sin, which it holds to have come from Adam, and the guilt of which must logically be denied.

While certain forms of the preëxistence theory are exposed to the last objection indicated in the text, Julius Müller claims that his own view escapes it; see Doctrine of Sin, 2:393. His theory, he says, “would contradict holy Scripture if it derived inborn sinfulness solely from this extra-temporalact of the individual, without recognizing in this sinfulness the element of hereditary depravity in the sphere of the natural life, and its connection with the sin of our first parents.” Müller, whose trichotomy here determines his whole subsequent scheme, holds only the πνεῦμα to have thus fallen in a preëxistentstate. The ψυχή comes, with the body, from Adam. The tempter only brought man’s latent perversity of will into open transgression. Sinfulness, as hereditary, does not involve guilt, but the hereditary principle is the “medium through which the transcendent self-perversion of the spiritual nature of man is transmitted to his whole temporal mode of being.” While man is born guilty as to his πνεῦμα, for the reason that this πνεῦμα sinned in a preëxistent state, he is also born guilty as to his ψυχή, because this was one with the first man in his transgression.

Even upon the most favorable statement of Müller’s view, we fail to see how it can consist with the organic unity of the race; for in that which chiefly constitutes us men—the πνεῦμα—we are as distinct and separate creations as are the angels. We also fail to see how, upon this view, Christ can be said to take our nature; or, if he takes it, how it can be without sin. See Ernesti, Ursprung der Sünde, 2:1–247; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 11–17: Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:92–122; Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681–733. Also Bib. Sac., 11:186–191; 12:156; 17:419–427; 20:447: Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:250—“This doctrine is inconsistent with the indisputable fact that the souls of children are like those of the parents; and it ignores the connection of the individual with the race.”