ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXXIII 
germs were derived from Egypt, or from India, or from Pheenicia, 
or whether it was an original birth of the Hellenic mind, is a mat- 
ter of curious historic interest which hardly admits, perhaps, of 
precise and positive determination, though certain it is that India 
had an Atomic Philosophy before the Greeks. However possible or 
probable it may be that the early Greek philosophers borrowed 
some of their lore under this head, as we know they did under 
others, from the Egyptian priests; or whatever truth there may be 
in the tradition, reported by Posidonius,* (Cicero’s teacher in phi- 
losophy,) that one Moschus, a Phcenician, imparted the doctrine to 
Pythagoras, it is very certain that the Greek philosophers have 
made the doctrine their own by the logical development they gave 
to it, and by the hereditament in it which they have bequeathed to © 
the subsequent generations of men moving along the lines of human 
progress. It has been more than suspected that the doctrine dates 
in Greece from the age of Pythagoras, by reason of certain spe- 
cific ideas, which we can read in the spectrum analysis of the most 
distant times by the light of modern anthropological science. Cer- 
tain definite lines of thought are to be found in the psychology of 
every epoch, and these lines betray the mental constitution of the 
epoch as surely as the vapors of the elements absorb rays of the 
same refrangibilities that they radiate. In the days of Pythago- 
ras we discover certain psychical ideas which are seen to have 
been the natural reflex of the great fundamental dogma out of 
which the Atomic Philosophy sprang. I refer to the doctrine of 
metempsychosis and of its correlate, the pre-existence of souls. 
If it be assumed that the human soul is something generically 
different from the body, and is not generated by it, then it necessa- 
rily follows, according to the maxim De nihilo nihil fit, that the 
- soul pre-existed somewhere before the atoms of the body were put 
together, and from the other branch of the maxim, that it must 
continue to exist somewhere after the body is dissolved. The doc- 
trine of the transmigration of souls is not, therefore, a mere vagary 
of the ethnical imagination, but the natural offspring of that form 
of Pythagorean dualism which distinguished the soul, as not only 
generically, but genetically distinct from the body. Hence, the 
*Strabo: Geog., Lib. xv1. Cf. Sextus Empiricus: Adversus Mathematicos, 
Lib. 9, 
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