This system embraces a twofold metempsychosis—that of formation and that of reformation. The first is the process by which the impersonal psychic element is gradually prepared for individualization or the attainment of conscious personality by being transfused progressively through the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds—the same process, but with a different final cause, it would seem, as that described by the poet:
"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus,
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet."
The psychic element is presented, not as feeding, but as feeding on successive worlds, like a silk-worm on mulberry-leaves, leaving geological strata behind it, for instance, as the refuse of its mineral sojourn.
Souls are first individualized in the fluidic or atmospheric world; and if they are docile to the instruction of that world, they never "incur the penalty of incarceration in bodies of planetary matter, and consequently never become men," but remain in this or that fluidic world until ripe for the highest or "sidereal order." On the other hand, the spirits who are indocile enter upon the second series of metempsychosis, "having brought upon themselves the penalty of exile in a planet corresponding, in the compactness or comparative fluidity of its material constituents, to the degree of their culpability."
(P. 309) "The moral and intellectual state of the soul decides the corresponding magnetic action of the perisprit, and thereby decides the nature of the body which is formed by that action."
(319) "While accomplishing the new series of incorporations in progressively nobler forms, in higher and higher planets, the spirit goes back, at each disaggregation of its material envelope, into the fluidic sphere of the planet in which its last material embodiment has been accomplished."
(322) "The fluidic world being the normal world of souls, we remain in intimate (though usually unconscious) connection with the fluidic sphere of the planet, while incarnated on its surface. We return to it during sleep, when, through the elasticity of the perisprit (which has been seen by clairvoyants elongated into a sort of luminous cord connecting the soul with the sleeping body), we are enabled to visit our friends in the other life."
(326) "The more extended vision of the fluidic sphere shows (its inhabitants) a wide range of human actions and intentions, and thus enables them to forecast with more or less correctness, and, when permitted to do so, to predict the same with more or less exactness, according to the flexibility of the medium."
S. Augustine has a fine passage in his De Divinatione Dæmonum, cap. iii., comparing the keenness and swiftness (acrimonia sensûs et celeritas motûs) which the devils possess in virtue of their fluidic state (aerium corpus) to the vulture's knowledge, who, "when the carcase is thrown out, flies up from an unseen distance; and to the osprey's, who, floating aloft, is said at that vast height to see the fish swimming beneath the waves, and fiercely smiting the water with outstretched legs and talons, to ravish it."