of reward or punishment; but a confused jumble of them
all together, proceeding from no visible cause and tending to no
end....

"Pre-existence, although perhaps it is nowhere in the _New Testament_
explicitly enforced, yet throughout the whole tenour of these writings
is everywhere implied; in them, mankind is constantly represented as
coming into the world under a load of guilt; as condemned criminals,
the children of wrath and objects of divine indignation; placed in it
for a time by the mercies of God to give them an opportunity of
expiating this guilt by sufferings, and regaining, by a pious and
virtuous conduct, their lost state of happiness and innocence....

"Now if by all this a pre-existent state is not constantly supposed,
that is, that mankind has existed in some state previous to the
present, in which this guilt was incurred, and this depravity
contracted, there can be no meaning at all or such a meaning as
contradicts every principle of common sense, that guilt can be
contracted without acting, or that we can act without existing...."

The following is a quotation from Hume, the great positivist
philosopher:

"Reasoning from the common course of nature, what is incorruptible
must also be ingenerable. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed
before our birth, and if the former existence in noway concerned us,
neither will the latter.... Metempsychosis is, therefore, the only
system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to." (_The Immortality
of the Soul_.)

Young, in his _Night Thoughts_ (Night the Sixth), has the following
lines:

"Look nature through, 'tis revolution all;
All change, no death. Day follows night; and night
The dying day; stars rise, and set, and rise;
Earth takes th' example ...

... All, to reflourish, fades;
As in a wheel, all sinks, to re-ascend.
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires."

"It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in
Nature is resurrection," said Voltaire.

Delormel, Descartes, and Lavater were struck with the tremendous
importance of the doctrine of Palingenesis.

_The Philosophy of the Universe_, of Dupont de Nemours, is full of the
idea of successive lives, as a necessary corollary of the law of
progress; whilst Fontenelle strongly advocates it in his _Entretiens
sur la Pluralite des Mondes_.

It is needless to state that these ideas formed part of the esoteric
teachings of Martin