2.11 Matter, Life, and Spirit
Minerals and Plants
Nature may be divided in different ways, and each division is valid from its own point of view.
From the material point of view, there are two great classes: organic beings and inorganic beings. From the moral point of view, four degrees may be distinguished.
These degrees are clearly marked, even though their boundaries seem to blend into one another.
Mineral matter is inert and possesses only mechanical force. Plants are formed from inert matter but are endowed with vitality. Animals, also formed from inert matter and possessing vitality, have in addition a kind of instinctive and limited intelligence, along with an awareness of their existence and individuality. Human beings possess all that exists in plants and animals, yet rise above the other degrees through a special and unlimited intelligence. This higher intelligence gives them awareness of the future, perception of what is beyond matter, and knowledge of God.
Plants and Consciousness
Plants do not have awareness of their existence. They do not think; they possess only organic life.
They receive physical impressions that act upon matter, but they do not perceive those impressions consciously. For that reason, they do not experience pain when mutilated.
The movements seen in plants are not produced by thought or will. When plants are drawn toward one another, the force involved is independent of any choice on their part. It is a mechanical action of matter upon matter, and they cannot resist it.
Apparent Sensitivity in Certain Plants
Some plants seem to display remarkable sensitivity. The mimosa folds in response to contact, and the dionea closes upon an insect in a way that can look intentional, almost as if it had laid a trap. Yet such movements do not imply thought or will.
All of nature is connected through continuous transitions. One being does not exactly resemble another, yet all are linked. Even so, plants do not think and therefore do not will.
Similar appearances are found in living organisms without any participation of conscious intention. In the human body, digestion and circulation proceed without an act of will. The pylorus closes itself in the presence of certain substances and refuses them passage. In the same way, the movements of the mimosa do not prove perception, much less deliberate choice.
Even creatures such as the oyster and other simple life forms do not possess thought. What they display is only a blind and natural instinct.
Self-Preservation in Plants
Plants may seem to seek what benefits them and avoid what harms them. If the word instinct is used here, it must be understood in a very limited sense.
What appears in plants is purely mechanical. It resembles the affinity by which two substances combine in a chemical reaction because they are suited to one another. Such harmony does not imply conscious instinct in the proper sense.
Plants on More Advanced Worlds
On more highly evolved worlds, plants are more perfect, just as other beings there are more perfect as well.
Yet each kingdom remains itself. Plants are always plants, animals always animals, and human beings always human beings.
Animals and Human Beings
Human beings and animals share important points of contact, yet they are not the same order of being.
In bodily life, humans resemble animals and are, in many respects, less naturally equipped than they are. Animals are often given by nature what human beings must discover, invent, and build through intelligence in order to survive and meet their needs. The human body perishes as the animal body does. But the human spirit has a destiny that human beings alone can fully understand, because they alone possess complete moral freedom.
The clearest distinction is not physical strength, skill, or even practical cleverness. Some animals surpass some humans in such things. What sets the human being apart is the capacity to rise beyond material life, to become conscious of God, to discern good and evil, and to direct life toward a moral end.
A person may sink very low, even below the conduct of wild animals, or rise very high. That possibility itself reveals a nature distinct from animal life.
Instinct and Intelligence in Animals
Animals are not governed by instinct alone in an absolute sense. Instinct predominates in them, but some also act with a limited form of will and intelligence. Their actions can show adaptation to circumstances and a determined pursuit of an end.
Still, animal intelligence remains closely tied to material life. It is directed toward physical needs, self-preservation, and the conditions of bodily existence. However admirable their industry may appear, animals do not produce the kind of cumulative improvement found in humanity. What they did yesterday, they do today in the same forms and proportions. Their works follow stable patterns. Even when separated from others of their species, offspring reproduce the same structures and behaviors without instruction.
Certain animals can be trained and can acquire new habits. Yet this development remains narrow, dependent on human influence, and purely individual. Left to themselves, they quickly return to the limits fixed by their nature. They do not transform their condition by free and self-directed progress in the way human beings can.
Animal Language
Animals do possess means of communication.
If language is taken to mean articulated speech formed by words and syllables, animals do not have it. But if language means any system by which living beings communicate sensations, warnings, intentions, and needs, then animals certainly do. In this respect, they communicate far more than people often suppose.
Their language is proportioned to their thoughts. Because their thoughts are limited to their needs and conditions of life, their communication is also limited. Human language, by contrast, is perfectible. It can expand with intelligence and become the vehicle of the most varied conceptions.
Even animals without voice are not deprived of communication. They understand one another by other means. Collective migration, coordinated movement, and shared activity all point to some mode of mutual warning and understanding. Fish, birds, and other animals that act together plainly possess ways of communicating suited to their nature.
Freedom of Action in Animals
Animals are not mere machines.
They possess a certain freedom of action, but it is restricted. Their freedom is limited to the needs and acts of material life. It cannot be compared with human freedom, because they are less advanced and do not bear the same responsibilities.
Some animals imitate human speech, especially certain birds. This ability comes from the special conformation of their vocal organs, together with an instinct for imitation. In other species, imitation expresses itself differently. Apes, for example, imitate gestures more readily than voice.
The Soul of Animals
Animals possess a principle independent of matter, and this principle survives the death of the body.
It may be called a soul, provided the word is understood in a broad sense. Yet the animal soul is much less developed than the human soul. The distance between them is immense. Animal life contains intelligence, but not the fully awakened self-awareness that belongs to the human spirit.
After death, the animal soul retains its individuality, but not conscious awareness of itself. Its intelligent life enters a latent condition. It does not choose the species in which it will incarnate, because it does not possess free will in that sense.
Nor does it remain in an errant state like the human spirit. It is not a free, self-directing being able to think and act independently after death. It remains for a time separated from a body, but it does not enter into the same kind of spiritual existence as a human soul. It is soon directed and assigned by higher intelligences, without the interval of free relational life that belongs to human spirits.
The Progress of Animals
Animals do follow a law of progress, but not in the same way as human beings.
On more advanced worlds, animals are themselves more advanced. Their means of communication are more developed, and their condition corresponds to the greater advancement of those worlds. Yet they remain below the human level and are subordinate to humanity.
Their progress does not arise from free moral choice. It occurs by necessity, not by personal will. For that reason, there is no expiation for animals. Their development belongs to a different order from the moral trials and responsibilities of human spirits.
Even on highly evolved worlds, animals do not know God. Humanity stands above them in a way that early peoples once imagined spirits standing above themselves.
Intelligence as a Common Principle
There is a bond between animal life and human life.
In both, intelligence comes from a single universal intelligent principle. This shared origin is one of the points of contact between animals and human beings. But in animals, intelligence remains tied to material life. In human beings, intelligence gives rise to moral life.
Nature is linked together in ways not yet fully understood. Things that seem most distant may be connected by hidden continuity. Nothing in creation is isolated or purposeless. The apparent inferiority of animals does not imply disorder or contradiction. All things are held together within a larger harmony governed by universal laws.
Human Nature and Animal Nature
Human beings do not have two souls.
The human being possesses one soul, but a dual nature. Through the body, a person shares in animal life and its instincts. Through the soul, a person shares in the nature of spirits.
The instincts of the body arise from the sensations and needs of the organism. There is no separate animal soul within the human being competing with a spiritual soul. The passions that lower a person do not come from a second soul, but from the body's instincts and from the impurities of the incarnate spirit, which may still sympathize with lower appetites.
The less evolved the spirit, the more tightly it is bound to matter. As the spirit purifies itself, it gradually frees itself from material influence. Under the domination of matter, it approaches the level of animality. As it rises above that influence, it advances toward its true destiny.
A human body, considered in itself, is living but not intelligent. The incarnating spirit communicates to it the intellectual and moral principle that places human life above animal life.
The Origin of the Human Spirit
The intelligent principle in animals comes from the universal intelligent principle. In humanity, that same principle undergoes a development that elevates it beyond the animal condition.
Before the period called humanity, the intelligent principle passes through a series of existences in lower beings. There it is developed, individualized little by little, and prepared for a new mode of life. This is a work of preparation, comparable to germination. At a certain point, a transformation occurs: the intelligent principle becomes spirit.
Then the human period begins.
With that beginning come self-awareness, consciousness of the future, knowledge of good and evil, and responsibility for one's acts. The movement is analogous to the stages of bodily life: childhood before adolescence, adolescence before maturity. There is no abrupt break in nature. Transition is gradual, and links connect every stage.
Nothing degrading lies in such an origin. Just as the mature human being once passed through the helpless stages of infancy and gestation, so the spirit passes through preparatory conditions before reaching human self-consciousness. What would truly diminish human beings is not their humble beginnings, but their pride in the face of a wisdom they do not yet comprehend.
The Beginning of Humanity
Earth is not necessarily the starting point of human existence.
The first human incarnations usually begin on worlds less advanced than this one, though this is not an absolute rule. In exceptional cases, a spirit newly entered into the human period may be suited to earthly life.
After entering the human state, the spirit no longer remembers the existences that preceded it. Human spiritual life properly begins only from that period onward. Even the earliest human existences are often difficult to recall, just as people do not remember the earliest days of childhood, much less life in the womb.
For some generations of development, a spirit may retain traces of the state that preceded its full humanity. These traces may appear as a lingering reflection of the primitive condition. But they fade as free will and self-awareness grow stronger. The first advances are slow, because they are not yet aided by developed will. Progress becomes more rapid as the spirit acquires a clearer awareness of itself.
Human Beings as Beings Apart
Human beings are indeed beings apart within creation.
This separateness does not mean absolute isolation from the rest of nature. On the contrary, humanity is connected to all that precedes it. But human beings are distinct because they possess faculties not found elsewhere in the same way: moral freedom, self-awareness, knowledge of good and evil, responsibility, and the capacity to know God.
That destiny marks the human species as the order of embodied life chosen for the incarnation of spirits capable of conscious relation to the divine.
Metempsychosis
The common origin of living beings in the intelligent principle does not establish the doctrine of metempsychosis in the ordinary sense.
Two things may share the same origin and yet become entirely different. A tree, its leaves, its flowers, and its fruit cannot be confused with the shapeless germ hidden in the seed from which they came. In the same way, once the intelligent principle has reached the degree necessary to become a spirit and to enter the human period, it no longer remains what it was in its primitive state. It is no longer the soul of the animal, just as the tree is no longer the seed.
In human beings, what remains linked to the animal condition belongs to the body: the passions arising from bodily influence and the instinct of self-preservation inherent in matter. For that reason, it cannot be said that a particular person is the reincarnation of a particular animal. Metempsychosis, understood as the direct passage of the same individual soul from animal to human, is therefore mistaken.
A spirit that has animated a human body cannot incarnate in an animal body. Such a return would be a regression, and spirit does not regress. The river does not flow back to its source.
Yet the persistence of this belief is not meaningless. Like many widespread intuitions, it seems to preserve a fragment of truth while distorting its proper sense. If metempsychosis were understood only as the progression of the soul from a lower state to a higher one, as a development that transforms its nature, then the idea would contain something valid. What is false is the notion of direct transmigration from animal to human and from human back to animal, for that would imply either regression or fusion between beings of different orders.
Such fusion is impossible. Corporeal beings of different species do not assimilate into one another, and the same distinction applies to the spirits that animate them. If the same spirit could alternately animate very different species, there would have to be an identity of nature between them, and that would imply a possibility of material reproduction across those species. Nature shows the contrary.
Reincarnation rests on a different principle: the progressive movement of creation and the advancement of the human being within the human species. This does nothing to diminish human dignity. What lowers human beings is not their place in the order of nature, but the misuse of the faculties given to them for their improvement.
The antiquity and universality of the doctrine of metempsychosis, and the number of eminent minds who have accepted it, show at least that the principle of successive lives is deeply rooted in human intuition. In that respect, the persistence of the belief supports the broader truth of reincarnation, even when the doctrine itself takes an erroneous form.
What Can and Cannot Be Known
The point of departure of the spirit belongs to the origin of things, and that remains among the secrets of God. Human beings have not been given full knowledge of such matters. At most, they may form hypotheses and build theories that are more or less probable.
Spirits themselves do not know everything. On questions beyond their knowledge, they too may hold opinions that vary in soundness. For that reason, agreement does not always exist regarding the relation between the human being and the animal.
According to one view, the spirit reaches the human period only after having been prepared and individualized through the different degrees of the lower orders of creation. According to another, the human spirit has always belonged to the human race and has never passed through the animal experience.
The first theory offers an attractive idea: it gives animals a future as the first links in the chain of thinking beings. The second is more in harmony with the distinct dignity of the human being.
Humans and Animals
The different animal species do not proceed intellectually from one another by gradual transformation. The spirit of the oyster does not become that of the fish, then the bird, then the quadruped, and finally the biped. Each species is an absolute type in itself, physically and mentally.
Each individual within a species draws from the universal source the quantity of intelligent principle needed for the perfection of its organs and for the work it must accomplish in the phenomena of nature. At death, that principle returns to the general mass.
The same pattern applies on worlds more advanced than Earth. Those worlds also possess distinct species of animals suited to their own conditions and to the degree of advancement of the human beings whom they serve. But these species do not proceed spiritually from those of Earth.
With human beings, the matter is different. Physically, the human being is plainly one link in the chain of living creatures. Morally, there is a break in continuity between the human being and the animal. The human being alone possesses a soul or spirit, a divine spark that gives moral sense and intellectual reach beyond what animals possess. This spirit is the principal being: it exists before the body, survives the body, and preserves individuality.
Its exact origin remains hidden. Whether it is formed from the individualized intelligent principle is a question that belongs to mystery. On such matters, theory is possible, certainty is not.
What Matters for Human Advancement
What remains firm, and what reason and experience alike support, is the survival of the spirit, the preservation of individuality after death, the capacity for progress, and the happy or unhappy condition of each spirit according to its advancement in goodness.
From these truths flow the essential moral consequences.
By contrast, the obscure relations between human beings and animals belong to questions whose full explanation is not necessary for moral progress. They remain part of the hidden order of things. It is enough to know that the spirit survives, advances, and reaps the consequences of its own development.
That knowledge has real value for life. Speculation about what God has chosen not yet to reveal does not.