Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): T G Kalghatgi
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 59

T. G. Kalghatgi
stated it in a modified form. Hume and Schopenhauer mentioned it with respect and among contemporary philosophers there are some who are inclined to accept it for want of inadequate evidence and proof. In general the Western philosophers did not persue the problem seriously. The Christian theologians talked of immortality in the sense of continuance of soul after death and not in the sense of rebirth and transmigration. Some sections of modern Philosophy were influenced by the sudden encroachment of science in other fields of enquiry and discredited the belief in immortality and survival of the life after death because consciousness and mental states, they say, are only products of the brain function. They are epiphenomena. The question of survival of the soul after the destruction of the body does not arise.
III
In the modern western philosophy, Dr. Mc-Taggart leaps on the problem of immortality of the soul involving pre-existence and continuance of soul after the destruction of the body. The present attitude of most Western thinkers, he says, to the doctrine of pre-existence is curious. Of the many who regard our life after death of our bodies as certain or probable, scarcely one regards our life before the birth of those bodies as a possibility which deserves discussion. Yet it was taught by the Buddha and by Plato, and it is usually associated with the belief in immortality in the far East. In modern Western thought the great support of the belief in immortality has been the Christian religion, and a form of belief which was never supported by the religion was not likely to be considered of any importance. And, for some reason, Christians have almost unanimously rejected those theories which placed pre-existence by the side of immortality.19 Dr. McTaggart accepts both pre-existence and recurrent earthly embodiment of the spirit. He believes that any evidence that proves immortality will also prove pre-existence. The most effective way of proving that the doctrine of pre-existence is bound up with the doctrine of immortality would be to prove directly that the nature of man was such that it involved a life both before and after the present life.20 Dr. McTaggart points out that the usual ethical arguments to prove immortality are not adequate to explain the belief in pre-existence. He says that modero demonstration of immortality has largely been ethical in character and not purely metaphysical "and this explains why it has often been held in modern times that immortality was proved, although pre-existence has almost always been disbelieved on the basis of purely metaphysical arguments.” Dr. McTaggart says that any demonstration of immortality
19. McTaggart (J. M.): Some Dogmas of Religion. (Edward Arnold, 1930),
pp. 112-13. 20. Ibid.