Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
they lived. These are the unwieldy parents of our present races of animals. The spirit of a mammoth living countless ages ago may now exist in the elephant, deer, or wild horse. It is the refined spirit, using a body lesser in size, finer in quality, more graceful, and more agile. It is the result of the unconscious tendency in all forms of life to the finer and better. When the spirit of the clumsy, wallowing, sluggish reptile or mammoth was using its body, it had always the desire for an organization or instrument which it could move about with greater freedom. It felt its tons of flesh and bones as an incumbrance. When that spirit had worn-out one body and had found another, this desire still remained. Desire or demand will always shape the body in accordance with the ruling wish of the spirit. Such shaping is of course very slow, as we compute time. But time is as nothing in the growth of a planet and the growths on a planet.
Re embodiment makes every animal trained by man more intelligent and better adapted to the use he wishes to put it. The spirit of the dog trained to the water, being given a new body, retains the skill and training it received from its master in the old one. If the desire of the dog was for fleetness, its body is shaped more and more through such desire for swift running.
The process of re-embodiment for the animal is the same as that for man. The spirit passed from one body is attracted to another organization in which a new body of like character is forming, and when that body becomes a distinct organization from that of the parent, the animal spirit comes in possession of it,—such possession becoming more and more complete as the body grows to maturity, and lessening after the maturity of the organization is passed.
The play and sportiveness of infancy and youth are due to the lightness and exhilaration coming of the spirit’s having a new body. It is for the same reason that you feel better in a new suit of clothes than an old one. The old suit is filled with your old thought, for thought is a substance which attaches itself to and permeates whatever is nearest he who thinks. Your old suit is filled more or less with the depressed evil or immature states of mind you have experienced in wearing it. When you put it on, you are putting on more or less of such low or despondent thought.
The animal passes from re・embodiment to re-embodiment, through periods compared to which that embraced in man’s known history is but a mere drop in the ocean. At last it reaches a point where the re-embodiment of its own species ceases. Its spirit is attracted to a finer and more complex organization. It is incorporated with, and becomes a part of it. That spirit organization is man.
In ages far remote from any known historical record, man’s savage instincts were but little above those of the savage animal. He was in reality but an animal, with more skill and ingenuity in the art of killing. His intellect had grown to that extent as to realize that a stick, a stone, or a sharp point on a stick or stone, could be used to let the life out of other animals. In this state the mother might attract to her the spirit of some more intelligent or highly developed savage animal. That spirit would then lose its identity as a quadruped, and re-appear in the body of a man or woman child. It might not be the only spirit re-embodied in the new being. The chief spirit might be that of some man or woman whose old body had died.
The supposed fables in the ancient mythologies concerning beings half men, half beasts,—such as centaurs, half man, half horse, or mermaids,—have their origin in these spiritual truths. Our race has been so developed out of the animal or coarser forms of life. Countless ages ago all forms of life were coarser than now. As these grew finer, man attracted and absorbed the spirit of the finer.
The spirit of an animal can actually be re-embodied in a man or woman, and its prominent characteristics will appear in that man or woman. Remember that, as to size and shape, the spirit of a horse need not be like the horse materialized in flesh and blood. Spirit takes hold of a mass of matter, and moulds that matter in accordance with its ruling desire, and the amount of its intelligence. An anaconda is but the faint spark of intelligence only awakened into desire to swallow and digest. Such low forms of life as reptile or fish have not even awakened into affection for their young. The reptile, as to spirit or intellect, is but a remove from the vegetable. Because spirit belongs also to the vegetable kingdom. Trees have a life of their own: they are gregarious, and grow in communities. The spirit of the old tree re-animates the new one. There is in the vegetable kingdom the unconscious desire for refinement, for better forms of life. For this reason is the entire vegetable kingdom of a finer type than ages ago, when the world’s trees and plants, though immense in size, were coarse in fibre, and in correspondence with the animal life about them.
The true evolution, then, is that of spirit, taking on itself through successive ages many re-embodiments, and adding to itself some new quality with each re-embodiment.
The “survival of the fittest” implies that the best qualities so gathered do survive. The lower, coarser, and more savage are gradually sloughed off. The best qualities in all animal forms of life eventually are gathered in man. He has so gained or absorbed into himself courage from the lion, cunning from the fox, rapaciousness from vulture and eagle. You often see the eagle or vulture beak on one person’s face, the bull-dog on that of another, the wolf, the fox, and so on. Faces hang out no false signs of the character of the spirit. Man, unconsciously recognizing this, uses the terms “foxy,” “wolfish,” “snaky,” and even “hoggish,” in describing the character of certain individuals.
No animal taken from its wild or natural condition, and trained by man through successive generations for man’s use, is really improved as an animal. It is only improved for man’s use or pleasure. An animal overloaded with fat, such as may be seen at an agricultural show, is deprived of agility and strength. The development of fat to such an excess is an injury to the animal. Man’s domestication of fowl or animal is artificial; it makes that fowl or animal entirely dependent on him for its support; it is then unable to sustain itself as in its wild or natural state. The domesticated duck or goose is a helpless waddler, almost unable to fly: its power of flight has been lost through generations of captivity. The bird or animal has a right to all the powers nature has given it. We rob it of those powers for the sake of its flesh, its eggs, or such use as we can make of it.
The spirit of the domesticated animal is absorbed into that of man. With it he absorbs the spirit of slavery, of dependence, of helplessness. He absorbs an unnatural, forced, and artificial product of spirit. This tinges his own spirit with that of slavery, dependence, and a certain helplessness. So the wrong he does the animal returns again to him.
Nature refuses at last to perpetuate forced or artificial conditions in any sort of life. The higher or finer the breeding, the greater the care required to sustain bird, animal, or vegetable, the more liable are they to disease. Our highly bred cattle must have warmer housing, and food requiring more care in its preparation, than the so-called inferior type. A Californian mustang, which is a near approach to the wild horse, will sustain itself and do hard work where the highly bred animal would starve. Eventually, a point is reached where artificial breeding can go no farther. The artificialized type grows more and more delicate, and requires more and more care. If that care be removed, and the animal can survive, it returns in a few generations to the original wild type, as is seen in the rabbit; which, if left alone, will in three or four generations revert to gray, the color of the wild species, and when it is gray is a hardier animal than when white or “pied.” Nature, after all, knows best what to do with her own. Man makes no real improvements on nature. Let the spirit alone to its own impulses, let the spirit alone to its own direction, and it will do all things well. When we meddle with it, we bungle.
All grains, fruits, and vegetables cultivated by man are natural types captured and enslaved by him. They are bred to forced conditions. They are dependent on man’s care. Remove that care and they cannot sustain themselves, as do the wild growths, or as did the parents of our present wheat, potato, apple, cherry, or other vegetable in their natural states. In consuming these artificial growths, man absorbs also their spirit of dependence, of slavery, and unnatural condition. All this tends to cripple and retard the growth of his spiritual powers.
All cultivated vegetable growths, like all artificially raised animals, are more subject to disease than the same species in their wild state. If neglected by man, they either disappear altogether or revert to the original type.
You may ask how could man have lived without