the body of a
stag, or the soul of a man into the body of a horse, we should see
a stag with the courage of a lion, a horse with the intelligence
of a man. But of course the manifestations of soul depend on the
organs of manifestation. Secondly, the singular psychological
experiences referred to are explicable so far as we can expect
with our present limited data and powers to solve the dense
mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the
doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen
in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated
by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense
of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have
thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is
explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure
mixture of associations, some discordant stroke on the keys of
recollection, jumbling together echoes of bygone scenes, snatches
of unremembered dreams, and other hints and colors in a weird and
uncommanded manner. The phenomenon is accounted for still more
decisively by Dr. Wigand's theory of the "Duality of the Mind."
The mental organs are double, one on each side of the brain. They
usually act with perfect simultaneity. When one gets a slight
start of the other, as the thought reaches the slow side a
bewildered sense of a previous apprehension of it arises in the
soul. And then, the fact that the supposition of a great system of
adjusting transmigrations justifies the ways of Providence is no
proof that the supposition is a true one. The difficulty is, that
there is no evidence of the objective truth of the assumption,
however well the theory applies; and the justice and goodness of
God may as well be defended on the ground of a single life here
and a discriminating retribution hereafter, as on the ground of an
unlimited series of earthly births.

The doctrine evidently possesses two points of moral truth and
power, and, if not tenable as strict science, is yet instructive
as symbolic poetry. First, it embodies, in concrete shapes the
most vivid and unmistakable, the fact that beastly and demoniac
qualities of character lead men down towards the brutes and
fiends. Rage makes man a tiger; low cunning, a fox; coarseness and
ferocity, a bear; selfish envy and malice, a devil. On the
contrary, the attainment of better degrees of intellectual and
ethical qualities elevates man to