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in any of their forms and modifications, can have any portion, 

 however vague, of sensation and consciousness? 



Can a human being, according to the brahminical ideas, ac- 

 cumulate within himself, or cause to have influence on his nature 

 the essence of the Deity surrounding him, by any operation of 

 thought, self-government, or amelioration of conduct? and, can 

 he lose, by a contrary conduct, or by any encouragement of vi- 

 cious passion within him a portion of the Deity he may be in pos- 

 session of, and be thus influenced the less by its proximity ?" 



From my own knowledge 1 cannot explicitly answer these 

 questions ; many passages in Craufurd's sketches of the Hindoos, 

 elucidate them in a certain degree. " Pythagoras, returning from 

 his eastern travels to Greece, taught the doctrine of the metempsy- 

 chosis, and the existence of a Supreme Being, by whom the uni- 

 verse was created, and by whose providence it is preserved. That 

 the souls of mankind are emanations of that Being. Socrates, 

 the wisest of the ancient philosophers, seems to have believed that 

 the soul existed before the body; and that death relieves it from 

 those seeming contrarieties to which it is subject, by its union 

 with our materia] part. Plato (in conformity to the opinions of 

 the learned Hindoos) asserted, that God infused into matter a 

 portion of his divine spirit, which animates and moves it: that 

 mankind have two souls, of separate and different natures; the one 

 corruptible, the other immortal: that the latter is a portion of 

 the divine spirit ; that the mortal soul ceases to exist with the life 

 of the body; but the divine soul, no longer clogged by its union 

 with matter, continues its existence, either in a state of happiness 



