To habit in, and is more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For of the soul the body form doth take,

For soul is form, and doth the body make."

The doctrine of metempsychosis is a fundamental part of Hinduism. The circle of the soul's pilgrimage is supposed, by the Vedanta philosophy, to embrace all organized nature. How to escape from this circle of sorrow was the question to which the different systems addressed themselves, for any union of the soul with matter was thought to be essentially an evil. This liberation was to be attained by the soul's stripping itself of everything earthly, and even of its own will and personality, and elevating itself by divine knowledge till it returns to the bosom of Brahma, from whom the spark originally went forth.

Such being the views of the soul's origin and destiny held by the people of ancient times, it is not surprising that they continually assimilated the brute creation to man in mental endowments and moral qualities. The mind of man was supposed to differ from that of other animals only in degree, not in kind. Plato saw in the brute creation a dim and partial manifestation of the same essence that in man shines forth in the brilliant and full-orbed light of reason. So thought Pythagoras, and so thought Anaxagoras also and they, as well as Plato, supposed the inferiority of brute animals to be chiefly due to their want of speech and of well-proportioned organs. But the Neo-Platonist, Porphyry, went further than this, and allowed them a language intelligible to man, whom he thought superior to them only in the quality of his more refined reason. Plutarch wrote a treatise to prove that animals possess reason, inasmuch as man, with all his boasted understanding, is more liable to error than they are. And so from that day down to the present there has been a long line of philosophers and writers who have contended that there is no specific difference between the souls of men and those of brutes.

It will be noticed that the doctrine of transmigration is built upon the assumption that the immaterial principle of the brute mind is the same in kind with that of the mind of man. Philosophy has been very slow in arriving at the true nature VOL. LXXIV. — 5TH S. VOL. XII. NO. II.

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of the distinction between them, and the old idea that the difference is one only of degree has been adhered to down to the present time. According to Bayle, this view of the subject necessarily and inevitably flows from what the schools have taught about animals, and he himself adopts this way of thinking, although he confesses that it leads him into a very sad dilemma. "It follows from thence," and he shudders a little at the thought, "that, if their souls are material and mortal, the souls of men are so likewise; and that, if the soul of man is a substance spiritual and immortal, the soul of beasts is so too. Horrible consequence! turn which way you will. For if, to avoid the immortality of the souls of beasts, you suppose that the soul of man dies with the body, you overthrow the doctrine of another life and sap the foundation of religion. If to preserve to ourselves the privilege of immortality we extend it to those of beasts, into what an abyss do we fall! What shall we do with so many immortal souls? Will there be for them also a heaven and a hell? Will they go from one body to another? Will they be annihilated as the beasts die? Will God create continually an infinite number of spirits, to plunge them again so soon into nothing? How many insects are there which only live a few days? Let us not imagine that it is sufficient to create souls for the beasts which we do know; those that we do not know are far the greater number." And so Hume, declaring that animals undoubtedly think, love, hate, will, and even reason, though in a more imperfect manner than man, asks whether their souls are also immaterial and immortal; and in the admission that they are mortal, he sees the stamp of mortality placed upon the more perfect mind of man.

To avoid such conclusions as these, Descartes, Pereira, and others put forward the absurd idea that brutes have not an immaterial principle of life and action, but are like machines, which, though made of insensible materials, can nevertheless perform their functions even more accurately than man. Descartes, in a letter to Henry More, gives " among the many and strong reasons" for his theory, that it seems not so probable that "worms and fleas should be endowed with immortal minds as that they are mere machines"; and again, in reply to the

suggestion that brutes may have an imperfect kind of thought, he says that, "if they think as we do, they must have immortal souls as we have "; and many of them, "as oysters," for example, seem to him far too imperfect for this distinction. The honor of originating this hypothesis of the animal machine is thought by some to belong to Pereira, a Spanish physician of the sixteenth century, who maintained it in a book called Antoniana Margarita, from the names of his father and mother; and, moreover, it is said that this doctrine was debated by very learned men in St. Augustine's time, as a thing which might be defended, notwithstanding the apparent absurdity which the vulgar find in it. It was Descartes, however, who developed this theory, and gave it celebrity. He allows that these machines possess life, yet they suffer not; for though they utter cries when beaten, they do not feel any pain; and though they eat and drink, they are really neither hungry nor thirsty. They are living puppets, which act simply from external influences upon their own organizations. "The Being who made them," says Malebranche, " in order to preserve them, endowed brutes with an organization which mechanically avoids destruction and danger; but in reality they fear nothing and desire nothing."

However absurd this mechanical theory may appear to us now, it was at one time so far received that Bishop Burnet, in his "Exposition of the First Article of the Church of England," declares it to be the result of the thoughts of the learned, either that brutes are mere machines, or that they have reasonable souls; and as for himself, he thinks it certain, either that beasts have no thought or liberty at all, and are only pieces of finely organized matter, capable of many subtile motions that come to them from objects from without; or, as seems to him more reasonable, that there are spirits of a lower order in beasts, that have in them a capacity of thinking and choosing, yet are so entirely under the impression of matter as to be incapable of that largeness either of thought or liberty which would make them moral agents or subjects of rewards and punishments, and therefore may be perpetually roving about from one body to another. Dr. Isaac Watts, quoting this opinion, confesses it is impossible for us to determine with any certainty how far the power of mechanism

can go, when under the direction of Infinite Wisdom, in the original formation of these engines; though he does not seem at all inclined to adopt this hypothesis. "I confess also, on the other hand," he says, "I am not very fond of allowing to brutes such an immaterial soul, such a thinking and reasoning power, which in its own nature must carry immortality with it. Every emmet upon a mole-hill, and every bee in a swarm, lays as just a claim to such a spirit as an ox or an elephant. The amazing instances of appearing sagacity and reasoning, design and choice, which discover themselves in these little creatures, make as good pretence to such a sublime principle of consciousness, judgment, and liberty. And why may not the million of mites in a cheese, and the nations of other animalcules which swarm invisible to the naked eye, be entitled to the same reasoning powers, or spirits, since their motions, so far as glasses discover them, are as happily suited to the ends of animal life? "T is difficult to bring one's self to believe that an immaterial spirit is prepared for each of these minute creatures, so soon as their body is formed, and that at the death of the body it ceases to exist; or that it passes, by Divine appointment, from one animal to another by certain unknown laws of transmigration." But however it may be with brutes, Dr. Watts consoles himself that it can never be said that man may be an engine too, that man may be only a finer sort of machine, without a rational and immortal spirit; and the reason he gives is this, that we all of us feel, and are conscious within ourselves, that we think, that we reason, that we reflect, that we contrive and design, that we judge and choose with freedom, and determine our own actions.

The problem of the brute world has sometimes been discussed, it is thought, in the interest of scepticism, and for the purpose of showing the near likeness of man with the brute, and thence compelling the inference that the same thing befalleth the one as the other when this earthly life closes. This perhaps may have been a motive with Montaigne, and Charron, and Rosarius, and Bayle, who drew very slight distinctions between ourselves and the more intelligent orders of the brute creation, the advantage of superiority being often

placed on the animal side. Montaigne, not with entire seriousness, perhaps, says that when he meets with arguments that endeavor to demonstrate the near resemblance betwixt us and animals, how much they share in our greatest privileges, and with how great plausibility we are put into comparison with them, he abates a great deal of his presumption, and willingly resigns the title of that imaginary sovereignty which some attribute to us over other creatures. A somewhat different view of what constitutes superiority in the scale of being was taken by the author of a book published at Dublin, in 1751, entitled "The Grand Question Debated, or an Essay to prove that the Soul of Man is not, neither can it be, IMMORTAL." After speaking of the faculties of those animals which philosophers generally do not scruple to pronounce to be without any title to immortality, and of our relation to them, he goes on to say: "We must draw this conclusion, that men of science are of the highest order of animals, and that next to them all creatures, without distinction, must take their places, not according to the form of their bodies, but according to the native greatness of their souls. If we allow immortality to the soul of the philosopher, and every soul of the like kind, we must allow it to the meanest of all animals; whereby a mouse, a rat, a louse, and a flea will have immortal souls, an intolerable conclusion! or else we must allow immortality to the higher order only, and so fix a certain degree at which it must stop; and if we fix that so low as to take in all and every soul of an equal degree to the souls of the meanest of mankind, it is plain we must include some of the brutes in our system; or, by admitting none of the brutes, we must shut out some part of mankind with them." The force of these statements may be somewhat weakened by the fact, that the same author wrote " A Reply to The Grand Question Debated, fully proving that the Soul of Man is and must be IMMORTAL," which was published the same year and bound in the same volume, with a title-page bearing the imprint of London. In this latter essay he knocks over the arguments he had set up in the former. In another book published at London in the early part of the eighteenth century, entitled "The Just Scrutiny, or a Serious Enquiry into the Modern Notions