in the variety of worlds an everlasting series of
adventures, in appropriate organisms; there being, as Paul said,
one kind of flesh of birds, another kind of flesh of beasts,
another of men, another of angels, and so on. Our present lack of
recollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality.
Every night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day we
reawaken to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. So in
one life we may forget or dream, and in another recover the whole
thread of experience from the beginning.

In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtful
and refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had so
extensive and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote of
the majority, having for ages on ages been held by half of the
human race with an intensity of conviction almost without a
parallel. Indeed the most striking fact, at first sight, about the
doctrine of the repeated existences of the soul incarnated in
different organisms, its form and experience in each successive
embodiment being determined by its merits and demerits in the
preceding ones, is the constant reappearance of the faith in it in
all parts of the world, and its permanent hold on certain great
nations. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose contrasted
splendors and horrors awaken astonishment more and more with each
step in the progressive decipherment of its mysterious record,
seems largely to have grown out of this faith. The swarming
millions of India also, through the chief periods of their
history, have lain under its spell, suffered their lives, wrought
their great works of government, architecture, philosophy, and
poetry, and in its belief meditated, aspired, and exhaled their
souls. Ruder forms of it are reported among innumerable barbaric
tribes. It played an important part in the speculations of the
early Fathers of the Christian Church, and has often cropped out
in the works of later theologians. Men of the profoundest
metaphysical genius, like Scotus Erigena and Leibnitz, have
affirmed it, and sought to give it a logical or scientific basis.
And even amidst the predominance of skeptical and materialistic
influences in Europe and America, at the present time, we
constantly meet individuals with independent minds who earnestly
believe the alluring dogma. For, to a large and varied class of
minds, the doctrine holds a transcendent attraction as well as a
manifold plausibil