o this outward scene at birth, we
lose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in the
Great Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous lives
both in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternating
passages between the two states will continue until the final
swooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search of
a better abode.10

The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means of
meeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tucker
in his "Light of Nature Pursued." "The numbers of souls daily
pouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require a
proportionable drain from it somewhere or other; for else the
country might be overstocked." The objection urged against such a
belief from the fact that we do not remember having lived before
is rebutted by the assertion that

"Some draught of Lethe doth await, As old mythologies relate, The
slipping through from state to state."

The theory associated with this Lethean draught is confirmed by
its responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences,
vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seems
as if occasionally the poppied drug or other oblivious antidote

9 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. ii. ch. 12.

10 Fourier, Passions of the Human Soul, (Morell's translation,)
Introduction, vol. i. pp. 14-18; also pp. 233-236.

administered by nature had been so much diluted that reason, only
half baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges of
a foregone state;

"And ever something is or seems That touches us with mystic
gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams."

In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream,
which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought,
this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought
to light, it has much to interest and to please; but it is too
destitute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained against
assault.11

There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated,
perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, by
successive deaths and births, traverses the universe, an
everlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worlds
of space, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each.12 All
reality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreating
Godhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these to
men. Blind but yearning matter aspires