Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 68

Rebirth-A Philosophical Study
63
Again unless we are possessed by the idea that the number of souls pouring in from this world to the next world would seem to require a proportionate drain, for else the country might be overstocked, we need not be driven to the theory of reincarnation to obviate this lamentable result. Such Malthusian anxieties about the overpopulation in the spiritual world would appear to be ludicrous. 44
Apparently profound criticism indeed! But this criticism has been based on the wrong foundations. Western thinkers have been particular about justifying the belief in human immortality without accepting pre-existence or future life. We find only a few philosophers like Dr. McTaggart who have accepted Immortality with pre-existence and a succession of lives. There is here a shifting of emphasis in the concept of substance and attributes.
Dr. Martineau studies the problem in light of the psychological and metaphysical analysis of death and presents a case for immortality, without however, accepting pre-existence or future life. In its physical aspect death presents simply a case of transformation of energy; the organic compounds of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon losing their precarious equation and resolving themselves into more stable inorganic combinations themse. Ives destroyed hereafter, to be partially taken up into new living form. But we should mix in it any element answering to thought; affections and volitions. They are the concomitant of the living man. These mental energies continue to exist as the law of conservation of energy. In the physical phenomena of death there is nothing to prejudge the question of life beyond. They amount to only vanishing of the evidence of life and leave it there.
But even if all life were drawn from an eternal given stock, the same and its continuity would belong to the whole and it would not imply unbroken identity between that which was quenched and the succeeding elements. The lion in which, according to Plato's myth the soul of Ajax was reborn, would not remember his defeat about the armour of Achilles; or the swan, tenanted by Orpheus, look back upon his visit to the shades, and the joy and despair of the won and lost Eurydice. The plain of Lethe that had to be crossed, and the waters of its river 'Careless' that had to be tasted before the second birth, effectually served the unity between life and life. "And we must acknowledge the justice of Lucretius' criticism.''45 On similar ground Fiske merely presents the belief in the immortality of the soul 'not in the sense' in which I accept the demonstrable truth of
44. Ibid. 45. Dr. Martineau, ., Study of Religion, Vol. 2. Clarendon Press, 1926, p. 320