PRE-EXISTENCE AND TRANSMIGRATION. 4 II 



would in fact, as we saw In § 4, be hard to defend 

 the only alternative theories of Traduclanism and 

 Creatlonism without a high degree of either moral 

 obliquity or Intellectual obtuseness. 



And in addition to the somewhat negative merit 

 of being the only possible theory, it is one which 

 has been becoming progressively more credible. In 

 early times, while our earth was regarded as the 

 centre of the universe and the only abode of in- 

 telligent beings, the theory of pre-existence and 

 transmigration was liable to be discredited by very 

 homely objections. The limitation of the total 

 number of available souls would either limit, or be 

 refuted by, the Increase of population, while their 

 confinement to a single w^orld precluded the idea of 

 anything like a real progress of the individual souls. 

 They had to be reincarnated in our world, until, as 

 the history of the Hindus and Buddhism showed, 

 the doctrine of transmigration,, with its endless 

 round of purposeless re-births, became a terror such 

 that men eagerly grasped at the idea of annihilation 

 as a release from the vicissitudes of life. But now 

 the knowledge of the plurality of worlds has relieved 

 the doctrine of the first difficulty, while the theory of 

 the ascent which <is strangely nick-named that of the 

 descent of man, and of the transformations of animals 

 into men, shows that the process of transmigration 

 is not devoid of the elements of progress. Is it not 

 curious, again, that whereas nothing has brought 

 more ridicule upon the belief In metempsychosis 

 than its inference that the souls of men had pre- 

 viously animated the bodies of animals, this very 

 pedigree of the human soul should have been 

 rendered credible and probable by the discoveries 

 of modern science ? If the Darwinian theory of 



