A real investigation of its validity by the modern methods dissipates it as the sun scatters fog. First, the mutual correspondences between men and animals are explained by the fact that they are all living beings are the products of the same God and the same nature, and built according to one plan. They thus partake, in different degrees and on different planes, of many of the same elements and characteristics. Lucretius, with his usual mixture of acuteness and sophistry, objects to the doctrine that, if it were true, when the soul of a lion passed into the body of a stag, or the soul of a man into the body of a horse, we should see a stag with the courage of a lion, a horse with the intelligence of a man. But of course the manifestations of soul depend on the organs of manifestation. Secondly, the singular psychological experiences referred to are explicable so far as we can expect with our present limited data and powers to solve the dense mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure mixture of associations, some discordant stroke on the keys of recollection, jumbling together echoes of bygone scenes, snatches of unremembered dreams, and other hints and colors in a weird and uncommanded manner. The phenomenon is accounted for still more decisively by Dr. Wigand's theory of the "Duality of the Mind." The mental organs are double, one on each side of the brain. They usually act with perfect simultaneity. When one gets a slight start of the other, as the thought reaches the slow side a bewildered sense of a previous apprehension of it arises in the soul. And then, the fact that the supposition of a great system of adjusting transmigrations justifies the ways of Providence is no proof that the supposition is a true one. The difficulty is, that there is no evidence of the objective truth of the assumption, however well the theory applies; and the justice and goodness of God may as well be defended on the ground of a single life here and a discriminating retribution hereafter, as on the ground of an unlimited series of earthly births.
The doctrine evidently possesses two points of moral truth and power, and, if not tenable as strict science, is yet instructive as symbolic poetry. First, it embodies, in concrete shapes the most vivid and unmistakable, the fact that beastly and demoniac qualities of character lead men down towards the brutes and fiends. Rage makes man a tiger; low cunning, a fox; coarseness and ferocity, a bear; selfish envy and malice, a devil. On the contrary, the attainment of better degrees of intellectual and ethical qualities elevates man towards the angelic and the Divine. There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kinds of metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiring life of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life of routine in mechanical habits and indifference; the deteriorating life of abandonment in ignorance and vice. Timaus the Locrian, and some other ancient Pythagoreans, gave the whole doctrine a purely symbolic meaning. Secondly, the theory of transmigrating souls typifies the truth that, however it may fare with persons now, however ill their fortunes may seem to accord with their deserts here, justice reigns irresistibly in the universe, and sooner or later every soul shall be strictly compensated for every tittle of its merits in good or evil. There is no escaping the chain of acts and consequences.
This entire scheme of thought has always allured the Mystics to adopt it. In every age, from Indian Vyasa to Teutonic Boehme, we find them contending for it. Boehme held that all material existence was composed by King Satan out of the physical substance of his fallen followers.
The conception of the metempsychosis is strikingly fitted for the purposes of humor, satire, and ethical hortation; and literature abounds with such applications of it. In Plutarch's account of what Thespesius saw when his soul was ravished away into hell for a time, we are told that he saw the soul of Nero dreadfully tortured, transfixed with iron nails. The workmen forged it into the form of a viper; when a voice was heard out of an exceeding light ordering it to be transfigured into a milder being; and they made it one of those creatures that sing and croak in the sides of ponds and marshes.14 When Rosalind finds the verses with which her enamored Orlando had hung the trees, she exclaimed, "I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember." One of the earliest popular introductions of this Oriental figment to the English public was by Addison, whose Will Honeycomb tells an amusing story of his friend, Jack Freelove, how that, finding his mistress's pet monkey alone one day, he wrote an autobiography of his monkeyship's surprising adventures in the course of his many transmigrations. Leaving this precious document in the monkey's hands, his mistress found it on her return, and was vastly bewildered by its pathetic and laughable contents.15 The fifth number of the "Adventurer" gives a very entertaining account of the "Transmigrations of a Flea." There is also a poem on this subject by Dr. Donne, full of strength and wit. It traces a soul through ten or twelve births, giving the salient points of its history in each. First, the soul animates the apple our hapless mother Eve ate, bringing "death into the world and all our woe." Then it appeared
14 Sera Numinis Vindicta: near the close.
15 Spectator, No. 343.
successively as a mandrake, a cock, a herring, a whale, "Who spouted rivers up as if he meant o join our seas with seas above the firmament." Next, as a mouse, it crept up an elephant's sinewy proboscis to the soul's bedchamber, the brain, and, gnawing the life cords there, died, crushed in the ruins of the gigantic beast. Afterwards it became a wolf, a dog, an ape, and finally a woman, where the quaint tale closes. Fielding is the author of a racy literary performance called "A Journey from this World to the Next." The Emperor Julian is depicted in it, recounting in Elysium the adventures he had passed through, living successively in the character of a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, a beau, a monk, a fiddler, a wise man, a king, a fool, a beggar, a prince, a statesman, a soldier, a tailor, an alderman, a poet, a knight, a dancing master, and a bishop. Whoever would see how vividly, with what an honest and vigorous verisimilitude, the doctrine can be embodied, should read "The Modern Pythagorean," by Dr. Macnish. But perhaps the most humorous passage of this sort is the following description from a remarkable writer of the present day:
"In the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bull frogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake; who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr r r oonk, tr r r oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr r r conk! and each in his turn, down to the flabbiest paunched, repeats the same, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply." 16
The doctrine of the metempsychosis, which was the priest's threat against sin, was the poet's interpretation of life. The former gave by it a terrible emphasis to the moral law; the latter imparted by it an unequalled tenderness of interest to the contemplation of the world. To the believer in it in its fullest development, the mountains piled towering to the sky and the plains stretching into trackless distance were the conscious dust of souls; the ocean, heaving in tempest or sleeping in moonlight, was a sea of spirits, every drop once a man. Each animated form that caught his attention might be the dwelling of some ancestor, or of some once cherished companion of his own. Hence the Hindu's so sensitive kindness towards animals:
16 Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, p. 137.