28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Whether the cosmic process looks any more moral than at first, 

 after such a vindication, may perhaps be questioned. Yet this 

 plea of justification is not less plausible than others; and none 

 but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent 

 absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmi- 

 gration has its roots in the world of reality ; and it may claim 

 such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of 

 supplying. 



Every-day experience familiarizes us with the facts which are 

 grouped under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears 

 upon him obvious marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter 

 relationships. More particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in 

 a certain way, which we call " character/' is often to be traced 

 through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may 

 justly say that this "character" this moral and intellectual 

 essence of a man does veritably pass over from one fleshly taber- 

 nacle to another and does really transmigrate from generation to 

 generation. In the newborn infant, the character of the stock 

 lies latent and the Ego is little more than a bundle of potential- 

 ities. Bui?, very early, these become actualities ; from childhood 

 to age they manifest themselves in dullness or brightness, weak- 

 ness or strength, viciousness or uprightness ; and with each fea- 

 ture modified by confluence with another character, if by nothing 

 else, the character passes on to its incarnation in new bodies. 



The Indian philosophers called character, as thus defined, 

 " karma." * It is this karma which passed from life to life and 



never be modified or prevented, for it depends on a cause already completed, that is now 

 forever beyond the soul's control. There is even no continuing consciousness, no memory 

 of the past that could guide the soul to any knowledge of its fate. The only advantage 

 open to it is to add in this life to the sum of its good actions, that it may bear fruit with the 

 rest. And even this can only happen in some future life under essentially the same condi- 

 tions as the present one ; subject, like the present one, to old age, decay, and death ; and 

 affording opportunity, like the present one, for the commission of errors, ignorances, or 

 sins, which in their turn must inevitably produce their due effect of sickness, disability, or 

 woe. Thus is the soul tossed about from life to life, from billow to billow, in the great ocean 

 of transmigration. And there is no escape save for the very few who, during their birth as 

 men, attain to a right knowledge of the Great Spirit : and thus enter into immortality, or, 

 as the later philosophers taught, are absorbed into the Divine Essence." (Rhys Davids, 

 Hibbert Lectures, pp. 85, 86.) 



The state after death, thus imagined by the Hindu philosophers, has a certain analogy to 

 the purgatory of the Roman Church ; except that escape from it is dependent not on a 

 divine decree modified, it may be, by sacerdotal or saintly intercession, but by the acts of 

 the individual himself ; and that while ultimate emergence into heavenly bliss of the good, 

 or well-prayed for, Catholic is professedly assurred, the chances in favor of the attainment 

 of absorption, or of Nirvana, by any individual Hindu are extremely small. 



* "That part of the then prevalent transmigration theory which could not be proved 

 false seemed to meet a deeply felt necessity, seemed to supply a moral cause which would 

 explain the unequal distribution here of happiness or woe, so utterly inconsistent with the 



