From Witness Testimony to the Case Against Reincarnation

Paul Edwards

A few words in support of Voltaire's remark that many "excellent persons think they have seen what they have not seen and heard what was never said to them." For a number of years I was teaching a course in which the topic of capital punishment was discussed. In this connection, I had occasion to read what criminologists had discovered about the unreliability of eyewitnesses. The following is quoted form the fifth edition of E. Roy Calvert's Capital Punishment in the Twentieth Century.

Adolf Beek was sentenced in 1896 to seven years penal servitude for a series of robberies from women, and in 1904 was again convicted for similar offenses. On the first occasion he was identified by no less than ten women, and the second trial by five women, each of whom swore to his identity as the man who had swindled her; a handwriting expert testified on oath that the letters written by the real culprit were in Beek's handwriting; two prison officials wrongly identified Beck as a previously convicted man-Smith-who was afterwards proved to be the real perpetrator of the crimes for which Beek was found guilty. Rarely has evidence been so overwhelming as it was in this case, yet Beck was subsequently discovered to be absolutely innocent.

There is no shadow of foundation: stated the official report, "for any of the charges made against Beck," and the Home Office awarded him E5,000 compensation. Yet it took Adolf Beck nine years to establish his innocence.

The Beck case is an extreme illustration of the fallibility of eyewitnesses, but it is by no means unique. In 1979, Father Bernard Pagano, a Catholic priest, was tried in Wilmington, Delaware, for holding up a number of stores. He was identified as the "gentleman robber" by a string of eyewitnesses and he was certain to be found guilty when the real culprit came forward and confessed. The culprit was a Catholic and could not bear to see the innocent priest punished.

It should be emphasized that in the Beck and Pagano cases and in those reported by Mfinsterberg and later criminologists, the eyewitnesses had no motive for lying. They were not out to get an enemy and they were not attempting to back up a religious or political cause. In the reincarnation cases based on the memories of young children, in the great majority of cases, the eyewitnesses did not write down immediately what they had heard and even in the few cases in which they did, the were trying to back up a cherished religious belief. Their reports, to use Voltaire's phrase, are "worth nothing."

As for objections against the case for reincarnation, here to begin with Five.

1) Evolution

Confining ourselves for the moment to the version that maintains that human beings can be incarnated only in human bodies, it seems clear that such a theory is inconsistent with evolution. In the first place, evolution teaches that the human race descends from nonhuman species and that there was a time when human bodies did not exist. The reincarnationist, however, is committed to an infinite series of past incarnations in human bodies. Furthermore, as we observed a little while ago, whatever believers in reincarnation may say in their more theoretical moments, in practice they refer to the empirical ego when they use the word "soul," and the empirical ego is the most highly developed form of consciousness. Now, evolution teaches that our consciousness developed gradually along with the development of the brain and the nervous system. The reincarnationist is committed to holding that no such development occurred since it is the same soul that migrated from body to body. He may indeed concede that there has been some development, that some souls have gradually grown kinder and wiser and better informed. However, this is not the kind of development postulated by evolutionary theory. It may be thought that the wilder form of reincarnation which holds that human souls may have been incarnated in animal bodies escapes this objection. This is not so. Reincarnationists defending this version do not teach that the sequence of bodies in which a soul is incarnated is in any way parallel to the sequence postulated by evolutionists. A human being, as we saw, can become a dog or a gnat and, at the other end, the soul may most recently have been in the body of a nightingale or a beaver.

It should be pointed out that in reincarnationist publications of the twentieth century, especially those by theosophists, the word "evolution" is constantly used in a highly eulogistic fashion. It is suggested that reincarnation is not only consistent with evolution but that it is in fact its completion and logical extension into the spiritual realm. In every reincarnation we are slightly better and wiser than in the one before and eventually we will attain perfection. Whatever may be thought about such a view, it clearly has nothing to do with evolution as this term is understood in biology. Let us grant for the sake of argument that the human race will develop into a "higher" species, whatever that may mean, and this higher species into a still higher one, and so on. Such a development in no way implies that the bodies of the members of those higher species are inhabited by souls that once lived in human bodies.

2.) Old Tertullian Objection

This objection is a very simple one. It has been stated concisely by the early Church Father Tertullian (c. 160-220), in his Treatise On The Soul. "How happens it," he asks there, "that a man who dies in old age returns to as an infant?" Whoever continues life in a new body might be expected to "return with the age he had attained at his death, that he might resume the precise life which he had relinquished."

If "souls depart at different ages of human life," Tertullian continues, "is it that they come back again at one uniform age?" John Hick, who endorses this objection, points out that babies are not born with adult egos "as they would be if they were direct continuations of egos which had died at the end of a normal lifespan."

It is little less than scandalous that no reincarnationist has ever attempted to reply to this argument. It is as if Christian theologians had never attempted to face the problem of evil. We may not be greatly impressed by their answers, but at least they did not simply ignore the problem. John Hick, who is not a reincamationist, suggests that it might be possible to build an answer on the distinction between the empirical ego and the metaphysical soul. The empirical ego is what Kant called the "phenomenal" self. It is, in Hick's words, "the conscious, remembering, anticipating, choosing, acting self." The metaphysical soul on the other hand is an entity "lying behind or beneath or above the conscious self." Once we make the distinction between the empirical ego and the metaphysical soul the defender of reincarnation could meet Tertullian's objection by maintaining that what survives in a new body is not the empirical ego, which perishes with the death of the old body, but the metaphysical soul that is manifested in successive empirical egos each of which has to begin as a baby. To make this rejoinder more convincing a reincarnationist could refer to the difference between the age of an actor in a play and his age in real fife. In a play an actor may age from eighteen to eighty, but although he himself ages between performances, every time he plays the same part he starts once again at the age of eighteen. In much the same way the metaphysical soul grows older with every incarnation although it starts as a baby in all its empirical manifestations. It should be pointed out that this answer to Tertullian is open to Hinduists and other "metaphysical" supporters of reincarnation who believe that what survives is "Atman," a transcendent principle, but that it is not available to Buddhists or Western sympathizers with Buddhism whose "Anatta" is in effect the empirical ego.

Everything in this reply hinges on the plausibility and relevance of the distinction between the empirical ego and the metaphysical soul. If the notion of the metaphysical soul is unintelligible, as many philosophers hold, or if it is not unintelligible but if there is no reason to suppose that there are such metaphysical souls, or if there are such souls but if they are not what we refer to by the word 1, the rejoinder collapses.

Quite plainly we do not mean anything as abstruse as the metaphysical soul when we use the word 'T" What we refer to is the empirical ego; and it is this empirical ego that reincamationists like other believers in immortality would like to survive. This is as true of Hindus as it is of Buddhists, whatever they say in their more "philosophical" moments. As for the analogy with the actor and the part he portrays, it should be remembered that a part or character in a play is not a human being living in the actual world. If it were then it would be older at every new performance. The analogy also breaks down at the other end. We have ways of determining the age of an actor, but since it is a transcendent principle that is not accessible to any kind of observation, we have no means of determining the age of the metaphysical soul. In fairness I want to stress that reincarnationists are not responsible for this analogy. It is my work-I introduced it in order to give some semblance of content to the otherwise totally obscure assertion that the metaphysical soul ages from life to life although the empirical ego always starts as a baby.

3) The Recency of Life

In any event, both versions are defeated by what science has discovered about the relative recency of life. It is now generally accepted that for many billions of years after the Big Bang the universe contained no life at all. Reincarnation in all forms postulates a series of incarnations stretching back into the past without limit; and this is clearly inconsistent with the facts. This objection would not apply to somebody who is prepared to say that there was a first soul or a first generation of souls which were created with the earliest men. This however raises the question of why a natural explanation of the "soul," i.e., the consciousness of the earliest men, is not sufficient and the more basic problem of what is meant by a soul-creation which I will discuss later. Even if we postulate a cyclical universe with an infinite number of big bangs, cosmic expansions followed by cosmic contractions, this would not affect the issue since in each cycle there would be a long initial period without life.

Pythagoras and the founders of Eastern religions can hardly be blamed for not knowing the facts of evolution or modem cosmology, but this does not make the objection any less cogent. As for contemporary Western believers, I have already noted that they usually are not the least bit interested in the findings of science.

4) The Population Problem

The reactions of reincarnationists to it are highly imaginative if nothing else and show to what length "true" believers will go to defend a cherished theory. The argument seems to me quite conclusive against the major form of reincamationism, but, as I explain in detail at the end of this section, there are ways of escaping it. The escape is, however, achieved at the cost of being exposed to a new set of serious and indeed quite unanswerable objections.

The earliest statement of the argument is found in Tertullian's Treatise on the Soul in which he speaks of the "luxuriant growth of the human race," observing that this cannot be reconciled with the notion of the stationary population to which reincarnationists are committed. Tertullian did not have any figures, but we do, and the argument is becoming ever more impressive. In an article published in the July-August 1981 issue of BioScience, Professor Arthur H. Westing of Amherst summarized the best available information about the number of human beings alive at various times. At the time at which he wrote, the population was estimated at 4.4 billion.

In 1945 it had been 2.3 billion, in 1850 1 billion, in 1650 500 million, at the time of Christ 200 million, and in 8000 B.C.E., approximately 5 million. Among other interesting calculations Professor Westing estimated that the 1981 population of 4.4 billion amounted to 9 percent of all human beings who ever lived and that it was greater than the number of people who lived through the entire Paleolithic age, a period accounting for 86 percent of the duration of human life. It should be added that in spite of famines and wars the same trend has continued since 1981. According to figures supplied by the United Nations the earth's population reached 4.8 billion at the end of 1985, and in June of 1986 it passed the 5 billion mark. At the time of writing these lines (July 1995) the figure is 5,716,000,000. If current trends continue the total human population will be 10 billion by the year 2016.

These facts are incompatible with the less fanciful version of the reincarnation theory according to which human souls can occupy only human bodies. As we saw earlier, reincarnationism is opposed to any doctrine of "special creation" of souls. It denies that "new souls" are ever added to the world. All souls have always existed. Every birth is a rebirth, the rebirth of a soul that has already existed. All this clearly rules out any population increase. Reincamationists who maintain that some souls are eventually allowed to give up their earthly existence and merge into the Absolute or Nirvana are committed to the view that in the long run the population must decrease. Other reincarnationists imply that the total human population is stationary. In either case, whether committed to a stationary or decreasing population, reincarnationism appears to be refuted by the population statistics.

It is noteworthy that this argument has hardly ever been explicitly discussed by any of the academically respectable reincarnationists. I suspect that the reason for this is the great difficulty of finding an answer that would strike a sober person as even remotely credible. The less inhibited reincarnationists, however, have attacked the population argument with relish. Morey Bernstein, the author of The Search for Bridey Murphy, has an easy answer. We can dispose of the objection by bringing in the population of the astral world.

The total number of entities both in this and the afterworld can remain the same while the balance shifts between the number of entities on earth and the number in the unseen world. 

If we refer to the human population on earth by the letter e and to the population of the astral or unseen world by the letter u we can answer the objection by maintaining that, although neither e nor u are constant, the total of e + u never varies.

Substantially the same answer is offered by numerous theosophists who usually add that the population of the astral world vastly exceeds that of the earth. Thus Annie Besant was certain that the number of "unbodily egos" is always "enormously greater" than those who are incarnate, adding:

The globe is as a small hall in a large town, drawing the audiences that enter it from the total population. It may be at one time half empty, at another crowded, without any change in the total population of the town. 

Irving C. Cooper, my favorite theosophist, some of whose fascinating ideas I mentioned earlier, takes note of the fear in some quarters that the constant increase in the earth's population will eventually deplete the astral plane. He therefore assures his readers that no such dire fate is in store for the astral world. It can absorb mass emigrations without serious damage, much as a giant corporation can easily absorb losses by a subsidiary here and there. Cooper's reassurance is welcome, but I wish that the astral world were a little less profligate in supplying egos to our world, especially since so many of them are sent to the poorest and most undeveloped countries.

V. H. Gunaratna, a Buddhist philosopher whose slender volume Rebirth Explained (1971) comes recommended by the Venerable Narada Mahathera as the "profound treatise" of a "learned writer," fully endorses the Bernstein-Cooper view that we must not focus our attention exclusively on the earth and should remember that there are "countless other world systems of which the Buddhist texts speak." We must also remember that, just as human beings may turn into animals or gods, so earlier incarnations of a human being may well have been on a nonhuman plane. "An animal or a celestial being," Gunaratna observes, "can be reborn as a human being."

If, as before, we represent the human population on the earth as e and if we refer to the animal population by the letter a and to the totality of gods by g, reincamationism is not committed to the view that e is unchanging. It is committed to the very different proposition that e + a + g is the same at all times. The facts of population growth do not in any way conflict with this broader view.

It might be mentioned in passing that population transfers between different realms have also occasionally received the attention of Christian theologians. In their case, however, the transfer is usually only from this world to the Beyond and not also the other way around. In the course of a sermon in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City during the Korean War, Monsignor William T. Greene assured "sorrowing parents" that "death in battle was part of God's plan for populating the kingdom of heaven." Not to be outdone, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, denied that the hydrogen bomb was the greatest danger of our time. "After all," he reasoned, "the most it could do would be to transfer vast numbers of human beings simultaneously from this world to another and more vital one into which they would someday go anyhow.

Since the transfer is to a "more vital world," it is perhaps regrettable that the H-bomb has not yet been used. I suppose that Hitler and Stalin were really great benefactors of the human race in hastening the migration of vast numbers to a better life. One is reminded of the nuns in St. Augustine's day who committed suicide in order to reach paradise without delay. I have always thought that the nuns were far more logical than Augustine who "refuted" them by means of wretched arguments.

Let us, however, return to the population problem as discussed by defenders of reincarnation. Another Buddhist writer who has dealt with the population argument is K. N. Jayatilleke, who until his death in 1970 was professor of philosophy at the University of Ceylon. Jayatilleke held an M.A. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the  and that its purpose was to "save" the Newtonian theory, i.e., to retain it in spite of observations that seemed to contradict it. In 1846 LeverTier requested the Berlin astronomer Johann Galle to carry out the appropriate telescopic observations, and the result was the discovery of Neptune, one of the so-called giant planets with a mean diameter of approximately 28,000 miles and a mass of 17.2 times that of Earth. The Adams-Levenier hypothesis of a new planet was not "noxiously" ad hoc for two reasons: the theory that it was meant to save was itself powerfully supported by a vast array of observations and, although ad hoc, it was independently testable.

By contrast, the various rejoinders to the population argument are "noxiously" ad hoc because reincarnationism, unlike Newtonian mechanics, is not a theory for which there is powerful observational evidence-in fact of course there is none-and because the assumptions that are introduced are either, like mass immigrations from the astral world or from "other planes," not even in principle testable or, as in the case of population reductions on other planets, so vague as not to be testable in practice. It is perhaps of some interest to note that Leverrier later postulated the existence of a further planet he called Vulcan to explain the perturbations in the orbit of Mercury. However, astronomers have never been able to observe such a planet and the Vulcan hypothesis is now discredited. In the sense in which I am using the word here, the Vulcan hypothesis, although it turned out to be false, was not noxious because, like the Neptune hypothesis, its purpose was to save an empirically well-supported theory and because it was independently testable. The irregularities in the orbit of Mercury, incidentally, were not explained until E. Findley Freundlich's telescopic studies (in 1911 and 1913) which confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. 

I have left for separate consideration one of Dr. Bruce Goldberg's contributions to human knowledge. Dr. Goldberg, it will be remembered, is the inspired futurologist who discovered the giant fruits and the information pill that will be in use in 2562.

To answer the population problem he offers a theory that is as bold as it is ingenious. There is no reason to suppose that the same soul cannot occupy "more than one body at a time" If we modestly assume that one soul occupies three bodies, the population problem can be easily disposed of.

If one soul occupied three bodies in the year 300 B.C., for example, and if each of these sub-souls occupied three additional bodies each, it would not be difficult to see how one soul could occupy one and a half million bodies in a matter of thirteen lifetimes. 

It may be of interest to note that Ian Stevenson has recently endorsed this remarkable theory as a possible way of saving reincarnation. "Human minds may split or duplicate," he writes, "so that one mind can reincarnate in two or more bodies," adding that this view is accepted by Eskimos, the Igbo of Nigeria, and numerous other groups believing in reincarnation.

Unfortunately the soul-fission theory does not solve the problem. In the first place, the logic of personal identity makes it impossible for a person to occupy more than one body. Let us suppose that Ns soul does "split up" and at the same time incarnates in the bodies of both B and C. On the Goldberg-Stevenson view B would now be identical with A, and C would also be identical with A. It would follow that B is identical with C, but this is absurd. If two bodies, Bi and B2 were to behave in exceedingly similar ways and if we had reason to believe that their sensations, feelings, and thoughts were qualitatively similar in all respects, we would still not describe them as the bodies of the same person. If, for example, B i were Newt Gingrich'si 2 body, we would not say that Newt Gingrich also inhabited B2 but rather that the mind associated with B2 is Newt Gingrich's double. I do not wish to lay too much stress on this consideration here, because to defend it fully would require a long discussion and also because some competent philosophers would not agree that a person cannot be in several bodies at the same time. However, allowing such multiple occupations as logical possibilities, the actual facts clearly defeat Dr. Goldberg's rejoinder. "Goldberg's Law," as we may call his fission theory, is presumably not confined to the future but has always operated in the past. If this is so, we should not find five billion separate souls but a handful, perhaps a few hundred souls, each occupying millions of bodies. Yet that is not at all what we find. There are not, sad to say, millions of Newt Gingriches, George Bushes, William Relinquists, Pat Buchanans, or, for that matter, Bruce Goldbergs.

Stevenson's conversion to the fission theory must be relatively recent. In an article published in 1974 he conceded that if "the recent increase in the world's population" continued, it would "bring difficulties for the reincarnation hypothesis," adding that these difficulties "have not reached us yet." In this article Stevenson posed as a neutral observer with a sympathetic interest in reincarnation. Since 1974 the population increases have continued at an enormously accelerated pace and yet, so far from abandoning his flirtation with reincarnation, Stevenson has become an ever more convinced and forthright supporter. In Children Who Remember Previous Lives which was published in 1987 he has a section on "Reincarnation and the Population Explosion." He states the issue obscurely and misleadingly. The increase in the world's population, he writes, "has made some persons otherwise interested in reincarnation doubt whether there could be enough minds to animate all the human bodies that may soon exist." This, it should be noted, is not the problem. It is rather that the population increase seems incompatible with the stationary or decreasing population implied by the major form of reincarnationism. Stevenson does not now think the problem serious at all. He lists numerous "assumptions" any one of which would take care of it and he suggests that none of them is unreasonable. I have already mentioned the fission theory. Another is the assumption that "new individual human minds are created as needed and attached to human bodies." All the other assumptions are identical with those favored by Bernstein, Gunaratna, and various tabloid philosophers. It may be that "minds presently incarnated in human bodies have been promoted from incarnation in nonhuman bodies." The assumption Stevenson discusses most fully and which he seems to favor is that the interval between death and rebirth is not fixed but, on the contrary, "fluctuates from time to time." There may have been a period "when few minds were incarnated and many more were existing in the discarnate state, waiting for terrestrial incarnation, or perhaps hoping to avoid one." During a period when the interval is very great, "many discarnate minds may be awaiting reincarnation and could thus contribute to an even greater increase in the world's population than we have seen during the last two centuries."

I have already discussed the fission theory and the various tabloid "assumptions," but a few words are in order about the claim that "new individual human minds" may be "created as needed and attached to human bodies, " Has anybody ever witnessed such creations and attachments? If not, what would it be like to witness them? Further, do these minds come into being without a cause or are they created by some intelligent being? If so, by whom? I know what is meant by saying that a painter or a composer created a certain work of art or that a chef created a new dish, but I have no idea what is meant by creating a mind. Equally, I understand what is meant by saying that a label has been attached to a suitcase or that an artificial leg has been attached to a person who has lost his leg in an accident, but I draw a blank when told that a mind has been attached to a body. Unless the questions I have raised here are satisfactorily answered we do not have a coherent theory but mere verbiage, accompanied by certain very vague pictures. The attachment portion of this "theory" is particularly objectionable. How is a purely nonphysical entity attached to a human body? By bandaids, by scotch tape, or glue, or perhaps by means of a rope? These are not purely facetious questions: they help us see that a certain word which has a clear meaning in one familiar context has been transferred to a new context where it has none. It should be noted that Stevenson here takes seriously the "special creation" theory of conservative Christians which was ridiculed by Ducasse and other reincarnationists.

What is more, reincarnationists are worse off than the Christians since, as believers in God, the latter have at least an answer to the question of who is creating the minds. Not that the theory becomes more intelligible by bringing in God.

The population difficulties can be avoided by somebody who is prepared to offer a drastically modified version of reincarnationism. Professor Ducasse never discusses the population objection, but at the end of his article "Life After Death Conceived As Reincarnation" he refers to such a revised position. Speaking of the Bridey Murphy case (of which he was a vigorous champion) and the spontaneous recollections of earlier lives by certain children, he observes that, if these cases are as strong as their supporters maintain, they are evidence for the view that "reincarnation, whether general or not, occurs at least sometimes. " Ducasse leaves this question open; but, according to Stevenson, some Turkish believers are quite definite that only those who die a violent death are rebom. Somebody who holds the view that reincamation occurs but that it is not universal could quite consistently admit the population growth without invoking any of the noxious ad hoc assumptions. He would maintain that, while the origin of some human beings has to be explained in terms of the transmigration of souls, the origin of many (perhaps most) human beings is of a natural kind. By this I mean that the latter subclass of the human race is entirely the result of biological reproduction. Such a position could then also explain population growth in the usual way, by references to biological and social factors.

There is something appealing about the modesty of this revised position, but it is easy to see why it has not commended itself to most believers in reincarnation. It does seem more than an a priori prejudice to hold that all human beings have the same kind of origin: they are either all the result of a divine infusion of a soul into an embryo or they are all the result of transmigration or they are all produced in a purely biological fashion. Furthermore, many of the arguments for reincarnation, if they were valid, would show that all human beings are the reincarnation of previously existing souls. Finally, somebody taking this position is faced with the unenviable task of supplying criteria allowing us to tell who among human beings is naturally produced and who is the result of reincarnation. It occurs to me that those reincarnationists who also believe in the law of Karma, which in effect means most of them, would no longer be able to offer Karmic explanations for the apparently unjust suffering of human beings who did not have previous lives. Without criteria to tell who did and who did not have a previous life, this, in effect, would mean that such Karmic explanations would not be available for anybody. Considering the Buddhist pastor's "reassurance" to the mother whose child had been born crippled, this might be all to the good.

5) The Absence of Memories

This is surely the first consideration that occurs to almost anybody in the West when hearing about reincarnation: if reincarnation were a fact we ought to be able to remember our past lives, but we do not. A famous statement of this objection occurs in the de Rerum Natura of Lucretius:

If the nature of the soul is immortal and makes its way into our body at the time of birth, why are we unable to remember besides the time already gone, and why do we retain no traces of past actions? If the power of the mind has been so completely changed, that all remembrance of past things is lost, that, methinks, differs not widely from death; therefore you must admit that the soul which was before has perished and that which now is has now been formed. 

In reply, some reincarnationists have denied the premise of the argument. They have pointed to memories during hypnotic regressions and also to spontaneous memories like those of Edward Ryall or Stevenson's children. We have already shown that the former of these are illusions. The case of Ryall and various earlier "memorizers".

There is a second reply to the argument. Now, the premise is not questioned but it is said that the conclusion does not follow. The mere fact that we cannot remember something does not prove that it did not occur. To quote C. J. Ducasse:

If absence of memory of having existed at a certain time proved that we did not exist at that time, it would then prove far too much; for it would prove that we did not exist during the first few years of the life of our present body, nor on most of the days since then, for we have no memories whatever of the great majority of them, nor of those first few years. Lack of memory of lives earlier than our present one is therefore no evidence at all that we did not live before. 

Ducasse does not address himself to the question of why we cannot remember our past lives, but various other reincarnationists have attributed it to the shock of death or the shock of rebirth or both. Thus Le6n Dennis, a leading French occultist of the early twentieth century who is described by Ellen Wheeler Wilcox, the book's translator, as a "great spiritual philosopher," offers the following explanation:

We have already given a summary of the cause of forgetfulness. It is the rebirth itself-the act of reclothing a new organism, a material envelope, which in its turn plays the part of an extinguisher. By the divination of its vibratory state the spirit, each time it takes possession of a new body, of a virgin brain devoid of all images, finds itself incapable of expressing the memories accumulated in anterious lives.

Ellen Wheeler Wilcox seems to be forgotten, but when I was an undergraduate she was frequently mentioned as the worst poet who ever lived. At the beginning of Life and Destiny she inserts one of her poetic productions which is unlikely to change her reputation. In the Introduction to the American edition of the book, Ms. Wilcox mentions that she was greatly helped in the translation by messages from her late husband. Her Introduction is a most enjoyable piece of writing containing many other jewels.

Great. Suppose we were asked why we deny that they were the same person. The answer seems clear: their bodies were different and, as far as we know, Queen Victoria did not have any memories of having lived before as Alfird the Great.

I am sure that some people will at least implicitly reject what I have just said. It was widely believed among the Jews that the prophet Elijah would have to return before the coming of the messiah and several contemporaries of Jesus (and perhaps Jesus Himself) were convinced that John the Baptist was the reincarnation of Elijah. John emphatically denied that he was Elijah but this did not shake the belief of his questioners. I do not of course know what went on in the minds of John's questioners, but if they were at all like contemporaries who believe in reincarnation they probably had a vague picture of a gaseous duplicate or something similar leaving the body of Elijah and invading that of John or, suitably compressed, that of his pregnant mother. 

The gaseous replica is the soul of the prophet Elijah and if it invades John's body he is Elijah even if he has no memories. The answer to this kind of picture is, of course, that there is no such replica and that, even if there were, it would not be Elijah.

Ducasse showed some awareness of this problem and in an article published in 1960 he attempted to meet it. The difficulty, he tells us, would be eliminated if memory of one's earlier lives should be regained in the intervals between incarnations; or at the end (if any) of the series of incarnations; or perhaps at some advanced stage in the series. For such regaining of memories would be sufficient to make "rebirth of one person" mean something different from "death of one person followed by birth of a different person"; although, of course, we now cannot tell which of these two is what really occurs. 

There are several things that are objectionable about this rejoinder. To begin with it is surely unwise to let the case for reincarnation rest on wild conjectures about memories during the interregnum or at the end of a series that may be going on for billions of years. However, there is also a more fundamental objection. At first it may seem plausible to maintain that we have two distinct and independent criteria of personal identity-bodily continuity and memory. This is suggested by the undeniable fact that in daily life we sometimes use the one and sometimes the other. However, reflection shows that the two criteria are not on par and that the memory criterion presupposes that of bodily continuity while the converse does not hold. We need a criterion for distinguishing between "false" and "true" memories. People often sincerely "remember" things which did not happen. They also of course remember things which did happen or, more specifically, they remember seeing, hearing, and doing things which they really saw, heard or did. These are "true" memories. It is evident that the memory criterion cannot help us to distinguish between such true and false memories. We have to fall back on another criterion and the only one that seems to be available is bodily continuity. When Goethe wrote his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, he "remembered" all kinds of things which, as independent evidence showed, happened to various friends. There was not here the required bodily continuity between the Goethe who wrote the autobiography and the young Goethe whose experiences were "remembered." He also remembered several conversations with Herder and these really took place. What this means is that there was the requisite bodily continuity between the later Goethe and the person whose conversations with Herder were remembered.

The following imaginary situation will bring out the priority of the bodily criterion with special force. Suppose that in 1993 we created an exact double of the great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (we will refer to this double as Fischer-Dieskau II). Fischer Dieskau H will have just as accurate memories about the life of Fischer-Dieskau I as Fischer-Dieskau I himself. Let us call them duplicate memories. It is, for example, a matter of record that Fischer-Dieskau sang the Brahms Requiem with Bruno Walter in Edinburgh in 1953. Fischer-Dieskau I will be able to give an accurate account of this event and so will Fischer-Dieskau II in the first person. A biographer of Fischer-Dieskau will get just as reliable information from interviews with Fischer-Dieskau II as he will from interviews with Fischer-Dieskau I. Nevertheless, all the statements of Fischer-Dieskau II are false since he did not have the experiences in question. They will be useful falsehoods corresponding to true recollections but they will not be true, for the experiences were those of Fischer-Dieskau I and not of Fischer-Dieskau II. Fischer-Dieskau II did not yet exist at the time when the event he "recollects" took place. It follows from the preceding considerations that even memories in the interregnurn or at the end of a series of lives could not supply the required personal identity. 

Stevenson will no doubt claim that he and some of his associates have much better cases now than when Ransom was working with him. Better, perhaps; but not good enough. They do not even begin to overthrow what I called the formidable initial presumption against reincarnation.

Ian Wilson ends his highly critical chapter of Stevenson with the remark that in spite of all the objections he has raised, "Stevenson may yet prove himself the Galileo of reincamation."I do not see any danger of that. What is unfortunately very likely is that for a long time to come ignorant and superstitious people all over the world will continue to refer to Stevenson as the man who has provided strong scientific evidence, if not indeed conclusive proof, of reincarnation.