"Death ought to be looked upon only as one stage in our journey. We reach this stage with tired, worn-out horses, and we start again with horses that are fresh and able to take us farther on our road; all the same, we must pay what we owe for the portion of the journey that has been traversed, and until the account is settled, we are not allowed to continue our way."
Goethe writes as follows to his friend Madame von Stein:
"Tell me what destiny has in store for us? Wherefore has it bound us so closely to each other? Ah! in bygone times, thou must have been my sister or my wife ... and there remains, from the whole of those past ages, only one memory, hovering like a doubt above my heart, a memory of that truth of old that is ever present in me."
Ballanche, an orthodox Christian mystic, says:
"Each one of us is a reincarnating being, ignorant both of his present and of his former transformations." (Pal. Sociale, book III., p. 154.)
"Man is brought to perfection only by becoming a more perfect order of things, and even then he does nothing more than bring back, as Plato said, a confused memory of the state that preceded his fall." (Essai sur les Instit. Sociales, vol. ii., p. 170.)
"This life we spend on earth, shut in between an apparent birth and an equally apparent death, is, in reality, only a portion of our existence, one manifestation of man in time." (Orphée, vol. iv., p. 424.)
"Our former lives belong to astronomical cycles lost in the mighty bosom of previous ages; not yet has it been given to us to know them." (Orphée, vol. iv., p. 432.)
Balzac's Seraphita abounds with references to the idea of successive lives:
"All human beings spend their first life in the sphere of instincts, in which they endeavour to discover how useless are the treasures of earth."