usness, the
dissolution of memory, at the close of the present existence. In the
next existence there is no memory of the present.

"The draught of Lethe" does "await
The slipping through from state to state."

The present life is a member of a series of lives; there are said to be
8,400,000 of them, each member of which is as unconscious of the
preceding as you are of being I. As a seed develops into plant and
flower and seed again, so the soul in each new member of the series
develops a conscious life, lapses from consciousness, and hands on a
germinal soul for a new beginning again. As the seed transmits the type,
and also some variation from the type, so is the germinal soul
transmitted through unconsciousness, ennobled or degraded by each
conscious existence it has lived. At each stage the germinal soul
represents the totality, the net outcome of its existences, as in each
generation of a plant the seed may be said to do. So far, the doctrine
of transmigration is a doctrine of the evolution of a soul, a
declaration that in a sense we are all that we have been, that virtue
and vice will have their reward, that in a sense "men may rise on
stepping stones of their dead selves." It does not leave hard cases of
heathen or of reprobates to the discernment and mercy of God; it offers
them, instead, other chances in subsequent lives. A not unattractive
doctrine it is, even although the attractive analogy of the evolution of
a plant breaks down. For in the scientific doctrine of evolution,
individuals have no immortality _at all_; it is only the species that
lives and moves on. But in Hinduism, as in Christianity, we are thinking
of the continuity of the _individual_ souls.

[Sidenote: The end of transmigration is absorption into Deity.]

[Sidenote: The saint Ramkrishna's obliviousness of self.]

To proceed with the statement of the doctrine of transmigration. The
climax of the transmigrations is Nirvana or extinction of the individual
soul, according to the Buddhist, and union with or absorption into
Deity, according to the Hindu.[111] Buddhism has gone from the land of
its birth, as Christianity and even Judaism from Palestine, and I pass
from the Buddhist doctrine. The Hindu climax, of absorption into Deity,
is reached when by self-mastery personal desire is gone, and by profound
contemplation upon Deity a pure-bred soul has lost the consciousness of
separation from Deity. The distinction between _I_ and the gre