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 tiiue' 7.:.0 held the doctrine of transmigration (q.v.), as the Pythagoreans, Empedocles. and even Plato—if with him pre-existence is not simply a symbolical myth were familiar with the conception. 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. Subsequently, the followers of this 'opinion were termed pre-existencists, to dis tinguish them from the traducianiets, who held that children received soul as well as body from their parents. Direct intellectual interest in this doctrine has nearly altogether ceased in modern times, yet the dream—for whether true or false, it is and can be nothing but a dream in our present state, and with our present capabilities of knowledge—has again and again haunted individual thinkers. Wordsworth has given
poetical expression to it in his fatuous ode—Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood: Our birth is but a steep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us—our life's star, Bath 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.
1Cor must we overlook the fact, that the latest philosophy of Germany—that of the younger Fichte, has revived the doctrine; while it forms the basis of one of the deepest works in modern theology, that of Julius Milner, Die eltn:gliche Lehre von der Siinde (The Christian Doctrine of Sin. English, Edin. 185G).