a word of Greek origin signifying the passage or transmigration of souls, is applied to a peculiar system of doctrine, of high antiquity, respecting the destiny of the human soul. According to the more general forms of this system, the souls of men after death are supposed to enter successively into various bodies, and to animate various existences, which differ only in their external forms. It is equally difficult for man to believe in the ultimate annihilation of his spirit and to conceive of a future state of existence totally different from the present, independent alike of sense and of the laws of organized life. Accordingly, the mind seeks naturally for some mode of reconciling these two antagonistic conceptions—some system of faith, no matter how obscure, whereby "the longing after immortality" may be gratified, and the instinctive shrinking from annihilation find itself respected. And hence the origin of metempsychosis: the first form in which the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is presented to the human mind. Metempsychosis was maintained by the Egyptians, the Hindus, and the Greeks. Herodotus informs us (lib. ii., sec. 123), that the Egyptians were the first to adopt the doctrine of the soul's immortality; and it is generally to them that the invention of the metempsychosis is attributed. They held that the human soul immediately after death entered into some animal, called into existence at the same instant, and that after having successively assumed the forms of all the animals which inhabit the land, the water, and the air, it returned, after completing a cycle of 3000 years, into the body of a man, to recommence eternally the same endless pilgrimage. With the Hindus, again, the idea of metempsychosis is more metaphysical, more universal, than that of the Egyptians, and is closely allied to the idea of emanation maintained by that highly speculative race. As matter is the last degree of the emanations of Brahma, it follows that life, which is the union of the soul with matter, is essentially an evil. This being the case, all the developments of life, such as actions, sensations, pleasure, pain, &c., must of necessity share in the same degradation. Accordingly, the proper business of the soul is to die to everything earthly—to elevate itself by contemplation to that absolute repose in the bosom of the Deity from which it originally came forth. The soul must expiate in this world the sins of its previous life; and in order to purification, the impenitent are at death condemned to pass from one body into another of a more or less perfect form, according to the upward or downward tendency of their nature. Such is the doctrine taught in the philosophy of Vaiseshika. According to the Vedanta system, again, the soul is not an emanation but a part of Brahma; a spark from an eternal fire. It knows neither birth nor death; it endures itself only for a time in a corporeal envelope, where it is afflicted by the darkness of ignorance, and subjected to the sufferings attendant upon evil. It visits various bodies in succession, and the circle of its metamorphoses embraces all organized nature, from a plant up to a man. Divine knowledge alone can extricate it from this circle of sorrow and humiliation; and this knowledge can only be attained by the soul stripping itself of all personality both of feeling and will; after which it precipitates itself into the bosom of the Deity, as a river discharges its waters into the sea.

It is a current belief that the idea of metempsychosis passed from Egypt into Greece; but this opinion is not well founded. For not only are traces of this doctrine to be found in the latter country, as the name of Orpheus will suggest, long previous to any authentic intercourse between those two nations, but Herodotus himself expressly distinguishes between the ancient and the modern partizans of metempsychosis in Greece; between the doctrine current in the country before the time of Pythagoras and the form of it introduced by that philosopher, who was the first Greek speculator initiated in the religious science of the Egyptian priests. But whether original or borrowed, the doctrine as found in Greece was in complete harmony with the genius of the Greek people. It was removed alike from the cloudy mysticism of India and from the miraculous naturalism of Egypt. It was Pythagoras who gave the doctrine its most precise form. He limited the metamorphoses of the soul to animal life, and, instead of a fortuitous entrance, he maintained that each individual soul passed into that particular form of organized animal existence which was most in harmony with its own faculties and condition.

Plato, in adopting this Pythagorean doctrine, attempts in the *Phaedo* to establish it from two sources, and thus elevates it into the class of philosophical ideas. His first proof is drawn from the general order of nature, and the other from the human consciousness. Nature, says Plato, is governed by the law of contraries; death succeeds life, and life must succeed death. Again, we find evidence of the same state of pre-existence in the fact of reminiscence. That intellectual suggestiveness and inventive power so frequently noticeable in the subtler workings of the understanding, by which the mind makes such swift conquest of whole territories of the realm of knowledge, are only to be attributed to the fact that all this knowledge was once fully comprehended in a previous state of existence. But how far Plato insisted on this doctrine, or whether it was ought more than a piece of suggestive hypothesis, it is difficult to determine. We find the idea of metempsychosis assuming new developments during the later stages of Greek speculation. We encounter it subsequently in the school of Alexandria, in the bosom of Judaism, and in a father of the church. The hypothesis of a pre-existent state was, with Origen, a favourite mode of explaining certain biblical difficulties; and the same argument, particularly in its bearings on original sin, has been recently revived by an eminent American divine.