In the Mosaic system God is represented as jealous and visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children even to future generations. The Indian philosopher feels that this belief is derogatory to God, and holds that the state of the soul after the death of the body depends on its acts (called Karma) while contained in the body. These acts attach to the soul, follow it, and determine its next abode.

Hindus, and all who have sprung from them, have never entertained any doubt as to the possibility of the wanderings of the soul in the bodies of all created animals. And not only Hindus, but some Europeans of exquisite intellectual fibre have accepted or coquetted with this belief, as if the

[1. Virgil, Aeneid vi. 7 45.

2. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero quotes a paragraph he had written in a work on Consolation, in which he appears to treat soul and mind as identical. After referring to the soul as that which possesses feeling, understanding life, and vigour ('quicquid est illud, quod sentit, quod sapit, quod vivit, quod viget'), he states that the human mind is of the same kind and nature ('Hoc e genere atque eadem e natura, est humana mens'), Tusc. Disp. i. 27.]

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minds of men of vivid imagination were of necessity recalling from the misty past--gathering from the fount of original knowledge-ideas evolved by primitive man long anterior, not only to European civilization, but to all Semitic history. Many persons have thought on beholding for the first time, in this life at any rate, scenes in foreign lands, that they had been previously familiar with their beauties and derived no new gratification from them. The tenacity with which the Greek philosopher Pythagoras held this doctrine, which he called metempsychosis, is well known. Well known, too, is the success with which he and his followers for a long time imparted their views to the Dorian aristocracy on this and kindred subjects, such as, for instance, the non-destruction of life. And according to the Phaedo of Plato, Sokrates appears to have proved the doctrine of Pythagoras to his own satisfaction.

To some of our English poets the belief has been one of curious interest and satisfaction. Thus Wordsworth:--

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;

Thus, too, Browning:--

At times I almost dream

I too have spent a life the sages' way,

And tread once more familiar paths.

And also Rossetti:--

I have been here before,

But how or when I cannot tell.