the
fit penalty for their degradation and crime, in the horrid life of
a crocodile or a boa constrictor.

The conception of a series of connected lives also furnishes a
plausible explanation for many mysteries in our present
experience. Reference is made to all that class of phenomena
covered by the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. Faces previously
unseen, and localities unvisited, awaken in us a vivid feeling of
a long familiarity with them. Thoughts and emotions, not hitherto
entertained, come to us as if we had welcomed and dismissed them a
thousand times in periods long gone by. Many an experience,
apparently novel and untried, makes us start as at the shadowy
reminder of something often known before. The supposition of
forgotten lives preceding the present, portions of whose
consciousness reverberate and gleam through the veils of thought
and sense, seems to throw satisfactory light on this strange
department of experience.

Much more weighty and penetrative, however, than the foregoing
considerations is the philosophical argument in behalf of
transmigration, drawn from the nature of the soul. Consciousness
being in its very essence the feeling of itself, the conscious
soul can never feel itself annihilated, even in thought it only
loses the knowledge of its being when it lapses into unconsciousness,
as in sleep or trance. The soul may indeed think of its own
annihilation but cannot realize the thought in feeling,
since the fainter emotional reflex upon the idea of its
destruction is instantly contradicted and over borne by the more
massive and vivid sense of its persistent being in immediate
consciousness. This incessant self assertion of consciousness at
once suggests the idea of its being independent of the changing
and vanishing body in which it is temporarily shrined. Then the
conception naturally follows that the soul, as it has once
appeared in human form, so it may reappear indefinitely in any of
the higher or lower forms of being which compose the hierarchy of
the universe. The eternity of the soul, past and future, once
accepted by the mind, leads directly to the construction of the
whole scheme of metempsychosis an everlasting succession of births
and deaths, disembodiments and reembodiments, with their laws of
personality and fortunes of time and space weaving the boundless
web of destiny and playing the endless drama of providence.

But the strongest support of the theory of transmigration is t