wards the angelic and the Divine.
There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kinds
of metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiring
life of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life of
routine in mechanical habits and indifference; the deteriorating
life of abandonment in ignorance and vice. Timaus the Locrian, and
some other ancient Pythagoreans, gave the whole doctrine a purely
symbolic meaning. Secondly, the theory of transmigrating souls
typifies the truth that, however it may fare with persons now,
however ill their fortunes may seem to accord with their deserts
here, justice reigns irresistibly in the universe, and sooner or
later every soul shall be strictly compensated for every tittle of
its merits in good or evil. There is no escaping the chain of acts
and consequences.

This entire scheme of thought has always allured the Mystics to
adopt it. In every age, from Indian Vyasa to Teutonic Boehme, we
find them contending for it. Boehme held that all material
existence was composed by King Satan out of the physical substance
of his fallen followers.

The conception of the metempsychosis is strikingly fitted for the
purposes of humor, satire, and ethical hortation; and literature
abounds with such applications of it. In Plutarch's account of
what Thespesius saw when his soul was ravished away into hell for
a time, we are told that he saw the soul of Nero dreadfully
tortured, transfixed with iron nails. The workmen forged it into
the form of a viper; when a voice was heard out of an exceeding
light ordering it to be transfigured into a milder being; and they
made it one of those creatures that sing and croak in the sides of
ponds and marshes.14 When Rosalind finds the verses with which her
enamored Orlando had hung the trees, she exclaimed, "I was never
so berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which
I can hardly remember." One of the earliest popular introductions
of this Oriental figment to the English public was by Addison,
whose Will Honeycomb tells an amusing story of his friend, Jack
Freelove, how that, finding his mistress's pet monkey alone one
day, he wrote an autobiography of his monkeyship's surprising
adventures in the course of his many transmigrations. Leaving this
precious document in the monkey's hands, his mistress found it on
her return, and was vastly bewildered by its pathetic and
laughable contents.15 The fifth number of the "Adve