271. An errant spirit studies the various conditions of a physical life that will lead it to progress. However, how can it think that it will make progress by being born, for example, among cannibals?
“Those who are born among cannibals are not advanced spirits. They are spirits who are still at the cannibal level, or possibly even lower.”
We know that cannibals are not at the bottom of the scale and that there are worlds in which degrees of cruelty are found that have no equivalent on Earth. The spirits of those worlds are, therefore, lower than the lowest of our world, and being a savage is a step up for them. It would be the same situation if our cannibals had to carry out some profession obliging them to shed blood in a civilized community. If they have no higher goal, it is because their moral inferiority does not allow them to grasp any higher degree of progress. A spirit can only advance gradually; it cannot clear the distance that separates barbarism from civilization in a single bound. Because of this inability, we see one of the reasons why reincarnation is necessary. Reincarnation is a product of God’s justice because otherwise what would become of the millions of human beings who die every day in the lowest depths of squalor if they had no means of arriving at higher states? Why would God deny them the favors granted to other human beings?
