Chapter XIV.
Though, as I have said, the Vril-ya discourage all speculations
on the nature of the Supreme Being, they appear to concur in a
belief by which they think to solve that great problem of the
existence of evil which has so perplexed the philosophy of the
upper world. They hold that wherever He has once given life,
with the perceptions of that life, however faint it be, as in a
plant, the life is never destroyed; it passes into new and
improved forms, though not in this planet (differing therein
from the ordinary doctrine of metempsychosis), and that the
living thing retains the sense of identity, so that it connects
its past life with its future, and is 'conscious' of its
progressive improvement in the scale of joy. For they say
that, without this assumption, they cannot, according to the
lights of human reason vouchsafed to them, discover the perfect
justice which must be a constituent quality of the All-Wise and
the All-Good. Injustice, they say, can only emanate from three
causes: want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of
benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that
each of these three wants is incompatible in the All-Wise, the
57All-Good, the All-Powerful. But that, while even in this life,
the wisdom, the benevolence, and the power of the Supreme Being
are sufficiently apparent to compel our recognition, the
justice necessarily resulting from those attributes, absolutely
requires another life, not for man only, but for every living
thing of the inferior orders. That, alike in the animal and
the vegetable world, we see one individual rendered, by
circumstances beyond its control, exceedingly wretched compared
to its neighbours- one only exists as the prey of another- even
a plant suffers from disease till it perishes prematurely,
while the plant next to it rejoices in its vitality and lives
out its happy life free from a pang. That it is an erroneous
analogy from human infirmities to reply by saying that the
Supreme Being only acts by general laws, thereby making his own
secondary causes so potent as to mar the essential kindness of
the First Cause; and a still meaner and more ignorant
conception of the All-Good, to dismiss with a brief contempt
all consideration of justice for the myriad forms into which He
has infused life, and assume that justice is only due to the
single product of the An. There is no small and no great in
the eyes of the divine Life-Giver. But once grant that
nothing, however humble, which feels that it lives and suffers,
can perish through the series of ages, that all its suffering
here, if continuous from the moment of its birth to that of its
transfer to another form of being, would be more brief compared
with eternity than the cry of the new-born is compared to the
whole life of a man; and once suppose that this living thing
retains its sense of identity when so transformed (for without
that sense it could be aware of no future being), and though,
indeed, the fulfilment of divine justice is removed from the
scope of our ken, yet we have a right to assume it to be
uniform and universal, and not varying and partial, as it would
be if acting only upon general and secondary laws; because such
perfect justice flows of necessity from perfectness of
knowledge to conceive, perfectness of love to will, and
perfectness of power to complete it.
58
However fantastic this belief of the Vril-ya may be, it tends
perhaps to confirm politically the systems of government which,
admitting different degrees of wealth, yet establishes perfect
equality in rank, exquisite mildness in all relations and
intercourse, and tenderness to all created things which the good
of the community does not require them to destroy. And though
their notion of compensation to a tortured insect or a cankered
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
no unpleasing reflection to think that within the abysses of
earth, never lit by a ray from the material heavens, there
should have penetrated so luminous a conviction of the ineffable
goodness of the Creator- so fixed an idea that the general laws
by which He acts cannot admit of any partial injustice or evil,
and therefore cannot be comprehended without reference to their
action over all space and throughout all time. And since, as I
shall have occasion to observe later, the intellectual
conditions and social systems of this subterranean race comprise
and harmonise great, and apparently antagonistic, varieties in
philosophical doctrine and speculation which have from time to
time been started, discussed, dismissed, and have re-appeared
amongst thinkers or dreamers in the upper world,- so I may
perhaps appropriately conclude this reference to the belief of
the Vril-ya, that self-conscious or sentient life once given is
indestructible among inferior creatures as well as in 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 had
committed to paper these recollections of the life of the
Vril-ya which I now reduce into something like arrangement and
form: "The relations which individual animals bear to one
another are of such a character that they ought long ago to have
been considered as sufficient proof that no organised being
could ever have been called into existence by other agency than
59by the direct intervention of a reflective mind. This argues
strongly in favour of the existence in every animal of an
immaterial principle similar to that which by its excellence and
superior endowments places man so much above the animals; yet
the principle unquestionably exists, and whether it be called
sense, reason, or instinct, it presents in the whole range of
organised beings a series of phenomena closely linked together,
and upon it are based not only the higher manifestations of the
mind, but the very permanence of the specific differences which
characterise every organism. Most of the arguments in favour of
the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this
principle in other living beings. May I not add that a future
life in which man would be deprived of that great source of
enjoyment and intellectual and moral improvement which results
from the contemplation of the harmonies of an organic world
would involve a lamentable loss? And may we not look to a
spiritual concert of the combined worlds and ALL their
inhabitants in the presence of their Creator as the highest
conception of paradise?"- 'Essay on Classification,' sect.
xvii. p. 97-99.
