incarnate. Normally, however, rebirth is of the lower or ordinary sort, unendowed—because of the lack of enlightenment of the one undergoing it—with consciousness of the process. Even as a child knowing not the higher mathematics cannot measure the velocity of light, so the animal-man cannot profit by the higher law governing the rebirth of the divine-man; and, drinking of the River of Forgetfulness, he enters the door of the womb and is reborn, direct from the desire-world called the Bardo. This lower rebirth, almost brutish in many instances, because controlled chiefly by animal propensities such as sub-human and human creatures have in common, differs, however, from that of brutes in virtue of the functional activity of the purely human element of the consciousness, which in all sub-human creatures is latent and not active; and for this element, even in the lowest of mankind, to become latent instead of active requires approximately as long a period of cyclic time as it does for the sub-human consciousnesss to evolve its latent human element into full human activity. The popular misunderstanding of this aspect of the higher or esoteric Doctrine of Rebirth thus appears to have assisted in no small measure to give rise to the obviously irrational belief, found almost everywhere throughout the Scriptures of both Buddhism and Hinduism, that the brute principle of consciousness in its entirety and the human principle of consciousness in its entirety are capable of alternately exchanging places with one another.
It was the late Dr. E. B. Tylor, father of the modern science of Anthropology, who after a very careful examination of the data pronounced the higher doctrine of rebirth to be the more reasonable:
‘So it may seem that the original idea of transmigration was the straightforward and reasonable one of human souls being reborn in new human bodies. … The beast is the very incarnation of familiar qualities of man; and such names as lion, bear, fox, owl, parrot, viper, worm, when we apply them as epithets to men, condense into a word some leading feature of a human life.’[1]
- ↑ E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1891), ii. 17.
