STILL ANOTHER DISPOSITION OF THE SOUL.

Colonist, Volume XV, Issue 1532, 31 May 1872, Page 4

STILL ANOTHER DISPOSITION OF THE SOUL.

(From the San Francisco Neios Letter?) Some cynic has remarked, and with a show of reason, that Frenchmen never get drunk because they are naturally inloxicated. Aud the field of "metaphysics, be it known, is to the intellectual frenchman the fruitful source whence in perennial plenty he draws the inspiration of his methodical madness Metaphysics, in a word, is to the cultivated Gaul what we may suppose an unrippled stream to be to a discriminating duck. The powerful originality developed by the now renowned Augusta Comte in his metaphysical researches, startled and arrested the profoundest intellects and the brightest brains of the world. The theory that humanity waa Grod, boldly enunciated and logically maintained, brushed away at one swoop the tangled web with which theology has invested religious faith. There have been other as profound thinkers as Cornte, men as gifted with utterance as he, but he differs from them in that he is no iconoclast, but for the patchwork theology which his logic brushes away, he gives us in exchange a purer and sweeter substitute, and one more

in harmony alike with the teachings of plain sense and the yearnings of the human heart. Not so M. Louis Figuier, the latest delver ia the metaphysical mine, and the author of a startling volume bearing the gloomy and significant title of" Tne to-morrow of Death." Like his prototype, the great positiviafc, this more receut writer treads not in " the \ primrose paths of dalliance," but following the bent of his saturine inclination, plunges ! recklessly into the pangs of metaphysical conception, and with that elan of intellectual intoxication peculiar to the Gaul, at which we have hinted, plants himself before an amazed world—the father of a theory. But let ua inspect this theory, at whose amazing composition we have launched our adjectives, though from want of space or whatever else we deny ourselves more than the briefest glimpse at a skeleton of its outlines. To begin with, M. Figuier believes that the germ from which a human soul is evolved is contained first by a plant and a zoophyte, and afterwards by one of the inferior animals ; that finally it enters the body of an infant and, if the infant lives, attains full growth as a human soul. Proceeding upon this basis, he maintains that if the child die before reaching the age of twelve, the soul does either of two things ; or ascends to the ether of space beyond the atmosphere of our earth, and becomes what M. Figuier terms a " Super-human," or enters the body of an embryo and begins life anew. This alternative —and here lurks the dainty theological discrimination—is decided by the measure of the integrity or wickedness of the soul's career on earth. At the first death, good men become Super-humans, while wicked men, by the process iudicated, are obliged to live over their lives on earth an indefinite number of times, according as they may have been only bad or superlatively wicked in their existence in the flesh, until their spirits are sufficiently purified for ethereal bliss. The theory, it will be observed, though assimilating in some details with theories that are older, yet maintains its c-laiin to originality by the striking peculiarity of the whole. Proceeding, M. Figuier proclaims that the planets, which we have been accustomed to regard only with reference to their importance in the economy of astronomical science, are not only inhabited, but inhabited by beings analogous to man in their physical conditions, and who pass through the same career after death. I'his being the premises of M. Figuier's theory, the logical consequence is that the ether of space is tenanted by Super-humans —which is about what the modern Spiritualists hold—who remain there until their spiritual cleansing is perfected, and, being invested with purer spiritual garments, they rise to higher phases of existence. We had almost been guilty of the unpardonable oversight of concludiug with M. Figuier himself, that the purified Super-humans finally reach the sun, where they remain to all eternity, and whence they fructify the earth and all the other planets with their radient emanations. We have thus given this new theory at such length, merely to show the direction of modern thought as it treads into religious investigation and, aided by pitiless Science, beats down theological hedges with which Custom and Faith, those twin hand-maidens of the Church, have so long surrounded the unhappy sinner.