Walker on Reincarnation, a Forgotten Truth (1888)

E.D. Walker · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 381 pages

*A complete scanned book of 381 pages — much the largest file in this section — reproducing E.D. Walker's Reincarnation: A Study of Forgotten Truth, published in Boston and New York by Houghton, Mifflin in 1888. Because it is a photographic scan of a Victorian printing rather than a modern typesetting, the text is uneven in places, and the file is about 17 MB*, so it will take a moment to open.

Walker's book is a survey rather than an argument from authority, and its table of contents shows how it is built. After an introduction and a chapter asking simply what reincarnation is, the second part gathers the Western evidences under seven numbered heads — that immortality demands it, that analogy suggests it, that science confirms it, that the nature of the soul requires it, that it answers the theological questions of original sin and future punishment, that many strange experiences are explained by it, and that the problems of life and of Nemesis are best solved by it. The third part is the one that gives the book its fairness, because it states the Western objections at length and in their own terms: that we have no memory of past lives; that it is unjust to receive the results of forgotten deeds; that heredity opposes it; and that it is an uncongenial doctrine. Only then does the fourth part assemble extracts from Western authors on the subject, beginning with Schopenhauer. The book opens with a page of verse epigraphs — Quarles on the weary pilgrim who seeks to know how far he has come and how far he has to go, Carlyle on the near thousand million ghosts walking the earth openly at noontide, and Whittier's lines asking whence came I and whither do I go. It is quoted in this series and in The Secret Doctrine literature generally, which is why it is held here whole rather than in extract.

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