DURATION OF THE SOUL. 



S7S 



general idea has for the most part descended in the same country to the 

 present day ; for the Alcoran, which is perpetually appealing to the latter 

 fact, leaves the former almost untouched, and altogether in a state of in- 

 decision, whence the expounders of the Eslam scriptures, both Sonnites 

 and Motazzalites, or orthodox and heterodox, are divided upon the sub- 

 ject, some embracing and others rejecting it. And it is hence curious to 

 observe the different grounds appealed to in favour of a future existence, 

 in the most learned regions of the east : the Hindu philosophers totally 

 and universally denying a resurrection of the body, and supporting the 

 doctrine alone upon the natural immortaHty of the soul, and the Arabian 

 philosophers passing over the immortality of the soul, and resting it alone 

 upon a resurrection of the body. 



The schools of Greece, as I have already observed, derived their earhest 

 metaphysics from the gymnosophists of India ; and hence, like the latter, 

 while for the most part they contended for the immortal and incorruptible 

 nature of the soul, they in like manner overlooked or reprobated the doc- 

 trine of a resurrection of the body. On which account, when St. Paul, 

 with an equal degree of address and eloquence, introduced this subject 

 into his discourse in the Agora or great square of Athens, the philoso- 

 phers that listened to it carried him to Areopagus, and inquired what the 

 new doctrine was of which he had been speaking to the people. 



The earliest Greek schools, therefore, having derived this tenet from an 

 Indian source, beheved it, for the most part, after the Indian manner. 

 And hence, though they admitted the immortality of the soul, they had 

 very confused ideas of its mode of existence ; and the greater number of 

 them beheved it, hke the Hindus, to be resorbed, after the present life, 

 into the great soul of the world, or the creative spirit, and consequently to 

 have no individual being whatsoever. 



Such, more especially, was the doctrine of Orpheus and of the Stoics ; 

 and such, in its ultimate tendency, that of the Pythagoreans, who, though 

 they conceived that the soul had, for a certain period, an individual being, 

 sometimes involved in a cloudy vehicle, and sleeping in the regions of the 

 dead, and sometimes sent back to inhabit some other body, either brutal 

 or human, conceived also that at length it would return to the eternal 

 source from which it had issued, and for ever lose all personal existence in 

 its essential fruition ; a doctrine, under every variety, derived from the 

 colleges of the East. 



I have said that this principle was imported by the Pythagorists, and 

 the Greek schools in general, from the philosophy of India. The slightest 

 dip into the Vedas will be a sufficient proof of this. Let us take the fol- 

 lowing splendid verse as an example, upon which the Vedantis peculiarly 

 pride themselves, and which they have, not without reason, denominated 

 the Gayatri, or most holy verse. 



" Let us adore the supremacy of that divine sun the Bhargas, or god- 

 head, who illuminates all, who recreates all, from whom all have pro- 

 ceeded, TO WHOM ALL MUST RETURN, whom wc invokc to dircct our un- 

 derstandings aright in our progress towards his holy seat."* 



The doctrine of the later Platonists was precisely of the same kind, and 

 it was very extensively imbibed, with the general principles of the Platonic 

 theory, by the poets and philosophers who flourished at the period of the 

 revival of hterature. Lorenzo de Medici is well known to have been 

 warmly attached to this sublime mysticism ; yet he has made it a founda- 



♦ Sir Wm. Jones, vi. p. 417 



