Huc venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus
Spiritus, eque feris, humana in corpora transit,
Inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo.
Utque novis facilis signatur cera figuris,
Nec manet ut fuerat, nec formas servat easdem,
Sed tamen ipsa eadem est: animam sic semper eandem
Esse.”
This description is as accurate as it is elegant; but it remains a question whether Ovid had anything deeper than a folk-lorist’s interest in transmigration joined to a certain sympathy which it often inspires in those who are fond of animals. The enthusiastic folk-lorist finds himself believing in all sorts of things at odd times. Lucian’s admirers at Rome doubtless enjoyed his ridiculous story of a Pythagorean cock which had been a man, a woman, a prince, a subject, a fish, a horse and a frog, and which summed up its varied experience in the judgment that man was the most wretched and deplorable of all creatures, all others patiently grazing within the enclosures of Nature while man alone breaks out and strays beyond those safe limits. This story was retold with great gusto by Erasmus. The Romans were a people with inclusive prejudices, and they were not likely to welcome a narrowing of the gulf between themselves and the beasts of the field. Cicero’s dictum that, while man looks before and after, analysing the past and forecasting the future, animals have only the perception of the present, does not go to the excess of those later theorists who, like Descartes, reduced animals to automata, but it goes farther than scientific writers on the subject would now allow to be justified.
It is worth while asking, what was it that so powerfully attracted Plato in the theory of transmigration? I think that Plato, who made a science of the moral training of the mind, was attracted by soul-wandering as a scheme of soul-evolution. Instead of looking at it as a matter of fact which presupposed an ethical root (which is the Indian view), he looked upon it as an ethical root which presupposed a matter of fact. He was influenced a little, no doubt, by the desire to get rid of Hades, “an unpleasant place,” as he says, “and not true,” for which he felt a peculiar antipathy, but he was influenced far more by seeing in soul-wandering a rational theory of the ascent of the soul, a Darwinism of the spirit. “We are plants,” he said, “not of earth but of heaven,” but it takes the plants of heaven a long time to grow.
We ought to admire the Indian mind, which first seized the idea of time in relation to development and soared out of the cage of history (veritable or imaginary) into liberal æons to account for one perfect soul, one plant that had accomplished its heavenly destiny. But though the Indian seer argues with Plato that virtue has its own reward (not so much an outward reward of improved environment as an inward reward of approximation to perfection), he disagrees with the Greek philosopher with regard to the practical result of all this as it affects any of us personally. Plato found the theory of transmigration entirely consoling; the Indian finds it entirely the reverse. Can the reason be that Plato took the theory as a beautiful symbol while the Indian takes it as a dire reality?