Pre-existence, DOCTRINE OF. The notion that human souls were in existence before the generation of the bodies with which they are united in this world was anciently, and is still, widely spread throughout the East. The Greek philosophers, too, especially those who held the doctrine of transmigration, as the Pythagoreans, Empedocles, and even Plato—if with him transmigration is not simply a symbolical myth—were familiar with the conception. Plato taught that all human souls had existed from the very beginning, still and silent, in the realm of potentiality, and Origen introduced the theory into Christian theology. The dogma of the assumption of the divine and human nature in Christ offers a grave difficulty in the relations between the two natures in pre-existence. Yet the belief continued to survive, and we find it in Scotus Erigena, in the younger Fichte, in Glanvil and Henry More, and in one of the profoundest works of modern theology—Müller's Christian Doctrine of Sin—where it forms a basis for the doctrine of hereditary sin. Among the early Christians the assumption of such pre-existence was connected with the belief that God had created the souls of men before the world, and that these were united with human bodies at generation or at birth. Another view long prevalent in the Western Church was that of Traducianism, according to which children received soul as well as body from their parents through natural generation. The third theory, which ultimately became that of the orthodox, was Creationism, according to which each soul is created successively. Direct intellectual interest in the doctrine of pre-existence has nearly altogether ceased in modern times, yet the dream has again and again haunted individual thinkers. Almost every one is familiar in dreams, and even in a waking state, with a haunting sense of a want of reality in the common objects around, and a vague consciousness that everything one sees or hears has happened before, when we seem, in the words of Tennyson,
To lapse far back in a confused dream
To states of mystical similitude.
There is a striking expression of this experience in Sir Walter Scott's Diary, under February 17, 1828, and there is an interesting allusion to the same subject in a well-known passage in Guy Manners. And Wordsworth has given supreme poetical expression to it in his famous ode—Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (the germ of which will be found in a less known poem of Vaughan the Silurist):
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
The soul that rises with us—our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.