m or part of the goddess, so that her land should only be
tilled by the descendants of the cultivators who were in communion
with her. The severe caste penalties attached to getting vermin in
a wound, involving a long period of complete ostracism and the most
elaborate ceremonies of purification, may perhaps be explained by the
idea that the man so afflicted has in his body an alien and hostile
life which is incompatible with his forming part of the common life
of the caste or subcaste. The leading feature of the doctrines of
the Hindu reformers has been that there is only one kind of life,
which extends through the whole of creation and is all equally
precious. Everything that lives has a spark of the divine life and
hence should not be destroyed. The belief did not extend to vegetable
life, perhaps because the true nature of the latter was by then
partly realised, while if the consumption of vegetable life had been
prohibited the sect could not have existed. The above doctrine will
be recognised as a comparatively simple and natural expansion of the
beliefs that animals have self-conscious volitional life and that each
species of animals consists of one common life distributed through its
members. If the true nature of individual animals and plants had been
recognised from the beginning, it is difficult to see how the idea of
one universal life running through them all could have been conceived
and have obtained so large a degree of acceptance. As the effect of
such a doctrine was that all men were of the same blood and life,
its necessary consequence was the negation of caste distinctions. The
transmigration of souls followed as a moral rule apportioning reward
and punishment for the actions of men. The soul passed through a cycle
of lives, and the location or body of its next life, whether an animal
of varying importance or meanness, or a human being in different
classes of society, was determined by its good or evil actions in
previous lives. Finally, those souls which had been purified of all
the gross qualities appertaining to the body were released from the
cycle of existence and reabsorbed into the divine centre or focus of
life. In the case of the Buddhists and Jains the divine centre of life
seems to have been conceived of impersonally. The leading authorities
on Buddhism state that its founder's doctrine was pure atheism, but one
may suggest that the view seems somewhat improbable in the case of a
religion pr