Rabbinical
school, its vessel, or boat. When a man had conducted
himself well in this world, his whole soul, that is its
chariot and ether, ascended to the moon, where a separation
took place: the chariot lived in the lunar Elysium, and the
ether returned to the fixed sphere, that is, to God: for the
fixed heaven, says Macrobius, was by many called by the name
of God (c. 14). If a man had not lived virtuously, the soul
remained on earth to undergo purification, and was to wander
to and fro, like the ghosts of Homer, to whom this doctrine
must have been known, since he wrote after the time of
Pherecydes and Pythagoras, who were its promulgators in
Greece. Herodotus upon this occasion says, that the whole
romance of the soul and its transmigrations was invented by
the Egyptians, and propagated in Greece by men, who
pretended to be its authors. I know their names, adds he,
but shall not mention them (lib. 2). Cicero, however, has
positively informed us, that it was Pherecydes, master of
Pythagoras. Tuscul. lib. 1, sect. 16. Now admitting that
this system was at that period a novelty, it accounts for
Solomon's treating it as a fable, who lived 130 years before
Pherecydes. 'Who knoweth,' said he, 'the spirit of a man
that it goeth upwards? I said in my heart concerning the
estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them and
that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For
that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even
one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the
other; yea they have all one breath, so that a man hath no
pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity.'" Eccles. c.
iii: v. 18.

And such had been the opinion of Moses, as a translator of
Herodotus (M. Archer of the Academy of Inscriptions) justly
observes in note 389 of the second book; where he says also
that the immortality of the soul was not introduced among
the Hebrews till their intercourse with the Assyrians. In
other respects, the whole Pythagorean system, properly
analysed, appears to be merely a system of physics badly
understood.

"Hence, also its transmigrations, known by the name of metempsychosis,
that is, the passage of the vital principle from one body to another; an
idea which arose from the real transmigrati