e with
authority. The popular beliefs of four thousand years ago depended
for their prevalence, not so much on cogent arguments or intrinsic
probability, as upon the sanctions thrown around them by renowned
teachers, priests, and mystagogues. Now, the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls was inculcated by the ancient teachers,
not as a mere hypothesis resting on loose surmises, but as an
unquestionable fact supported by the experimental knowledge of
many individuals and by infallible revelation from God. The sacred
books of the Hindus abound in detailed histories of transmigrations.
Kapila is said to have written out the Vedas from his remembrance
of them in a former state of being.

The Vishnu Purana gives some very entertaining examples of
the retention of memory through several successive lives.11
Pythagoras pretended to recollect his adventures in previous lives;
and on one occasion, as we read in Ovid, going into the temple of
Juno, he recognised the shield he had worn as Euphorbus at the
siege of Troy.

Diogenes Laertius also relates of him, that one day meeting a man
who was cruelly beating a dog, the Samian sage instantly detected
in the piteous howls of the poor beast the cries of a dear friend
of his long since deceased, and earnestly and successfully
interceded for his rescue.

In the life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, numerous
extraordinary instances are told of his recognitions of
persons he had known in preceding lives. Such examples as these
exactly met the weakest point in the metempsychosis theory, and
must have had vast influence in fostering the common faith.
Plotinus said, "Body is the true river of Lethe; for souls plunged
in it forget all." Pierre Leroux, an enthusiastic living defender
of the idea of repeated births, attempts to reply to the objection
drawn from the absence of memory; but his reply is an appeal
rather to authority and fancy than to reason, and leaves the
doubts unsolved.12 His supposition is that in each spirit life we
remember all the bygone lives, both spiritual and earthly, but in
each earth life we forget all that has gone before; just as, here,
every night we lose in sleep all memory of the past, but recover
it each day again as we awake. Throughout the East this general
doctrine is no mere superstition of the masses of ignorant people:
it is the main principle of all Hindu metaphysics, the foundation
of all their philosophy, and inwrought with the intelle