182 THE CKEED OF SCIENCE, EELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



instead of me ; and none can pretend for a moment to 

 affirm that the same strange mystery of awaking from 

 unconsciousness into conscious being, which has already 

 once happened in my case, may not happen once again. 

 The questions clustering round the fact of my present 

 self-consciousness are the most insoluble mysteries ; but, 

 nevertheless, they all relate to a fact realized in each 

 and all of us; and since I am a conscious individual 

 now, without my knowing how I am so or how I became 

 so, why, it may be asked, may the like not have place 

 once again ? or, indeed, more than once ? 



But is not all this mysticism, or the old unintelligible 

 and vicious metaphysics ? Mysticism, metaphysics, it 

 may be ; but, nevertheless, it also expresses a fact that 

 has been, that is ; and it only asks us to conceive the 

 possibility of the like occurring again. Nay, even though 

 it should be pronounced mysticism, it is the belief of 

 the mightiest philosophers, poets, and religious founders. 

 For the greatest of these, though they announced and 

 taught a future existence, still did not make it merely a 

 continuation of our present one, a sort of second volume 

 of our earth history, with a recollection of the first; 

 they at least the greatest of them regarded a future 

 life as certain and natural, even without memory ; the 

 insoluble question not being at all raised how we could 

 awake to conscious life again in the absence of it. They 

 cut the knot of this metaphysical entanglement in the 

 Pythagorean and Buddhist doctrine of transmigration, in 

 the Platonic doctrine of pre-existence, and in most of the 

 great religious systems that have obtained sway over 

 men. That we shall have many future existences before 

 final extinction is, indeed, the great grief of the Buddhist, 

 as that we shall have only one, be it of happiness or 

 misery, is the belief of the Christian, though a memory 



