Chapter XIV.
Though, as I have said, the Vril-ya discourage all speculations on thenature of the Supreme Being, they appear to concur in a belief by whichthey think to solve that great problem of the existence of evil whichhas so perplexed the philosophy of the upper world. They hold thatwherever He has once given life, with the perceptions of that life,however faint it be, as in a plant, the life is never destroyed; itpasses into new and improved forms, though not in this planet (differingtherein from the ordinary doctrine of metempsychosis), and that theliving thing retains the sense of identity, so that it connects its pastlife with its future, and is 'conscious' of its progressive improvementin the scale of joy. For they say that, without this assumption, theycannot, according to the lights of human reason vouchsafed to them,discover the perfect justice which must be a constituent quality of theAll-Wise and the All-Good. Injustice, they say, can only emanatefrom three causes: want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want ofbenevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that each ofthese three wants is incompatible in the All-Wise, the All-Good,the All-Powerful. But that, while even in this life, the wisdom,the benevolence, and the power of the Supreme Being are sufficientlyapparent to compel our recognition, the justice necessarily resultingfrom those attributes, absolutely requires another life, not for manonly, but for every living thing of the inferior orders. That, alike inthe animal and the vegetable world, we see one individual rendered, bycircumstances beyond its control, exceedingly wretched compared to itsneighbours--one only exists as the prey of another--even a plant suffersfrom disease till it perishes prematurely, while the plant next to itrejoices in its vitality and lives out its happy life free from a pang.That it is an erroneous analogy from human infirmities to reply bysaying that the Supreme Being only acts by general laws, thereby makinghis own secondary causes so potent as to mar the essential kindness ofthe First Cause; and a still meaner and more ignorant conception of theAll-Good, to dismiss with a brief contempt all consideration of justicefor the myriad forms into which He has infused life, and assume thatjustice is only due to the single product of the An. There is no smalland no great in the eyes of the divine Life-Giver. But once grant thatnothing, however humble, which feels that it lives and suffers, canperish through the series of ages, that all its suffering here, ifcontinuous from the moment of its birth to that of its transfer toanother form of being, would be more brief compared with eternity thanthe cry of the new-born is compared to the whole life of a man; and oncesuppose that this living thing retains its sense of identity when sotransformed (for without that sense it could be aware of no futurebeing), and though, indeed, the fulfilment of divine justice is removedfrom the scope of our ken, yet we have a right to assume it to beuniform and universal, and not varying and partial, as it would beif acting only upon general and secondary laws; because such perfectjustice flows of necessity from perfectness of knowledge to conceive,perfectness of love to will, and perfectness of power to complete it.
However fantastic this belief of the Vril-ya may be, it tends perhaps toconfirm politically the systems of government which, admitting differentdegrees of wealth, yet establishes perfect equality in rank, exquisitemildness in all relations and intercourse, and tenderness to all createdthings which the good of the community does not require them to destroy.And though their notion of compensation to a tortured insect or acankered flower may seem to some of us a very wild crotchet, yet,at least, is not a mischievous one; and it may furnish matter for nounpleasing reflection to think that within the abysses of earth, neverlit by a ray from the material heavens, there should have penetrated soluminous a conviction of the ineffable goodness of the Creator--sofixed an idea that the general laws by which He acts cannot admit of anypartial injustice or evil, and therefore cannot be comprehended withoutreference to their action over all space and throughout all time. Andsince, as I shall have occasion to observe later, the intellectualconditions and social systems of this subterranean race comprise andharmonise great, and apparently antagonistic, varieties in philosophicaldoctrine and speculation which have from time to time been started,discussed, dismissed, and have re-appeared amongst thinkers or dreamersin the upper world,--so I may perhaps appropriately conclude thisreference to the belief of the Vril-ya, that self-conscious or sentientlife once given is indestructible among inferior creatures as well asin man, by an eloquent passage from the work of that eminent zoologist,Louis Agassiz, which I have only just met with, many years after I hadcommitted to paper these recollections of the life of the Vril-ya whichI now reduce into something like arrangement and form: "The relationswhich individual animals bear to one another are of such a characterthat they ought long ago to have been considered as sufficient proofthat no organised being could ever have been called into existence byother agency than by the direct intervention of a reflective mind.This argues strongly in favour of the existence in every animal ofan immaterial principle similar to that which by its excellence andsuperior endowments places man so much above the animals; yet theprinciple unquestionably exists, and whether it be called sense, reason,or instinct, it presents in the whole range of organised beings a seriesof phenomena closely linked together, and upon it are based not onlythe higher manifestations of the mind, but the very permanence of thespecific differences which characterise every organism. Most of thearguments in favour of the immortality of man apply equally to thepermanency of this principle in other living beings. May I not add thata future life in which man would be deprived of that great source ofenjoyment and intellectual and moral improvement which results fromthe contemplation of the harmonies of an organic world would involvea lamentable loss? And may we not look to a spiritual concert of thecombined worlds and ALL their inhabitants in the presence oftheir Creator as the highest conception of paradise?"--'Essay onClassification,' sect. xvii. p. 97-99.