at least submit to accept as reasonable in the domain of spirit
what seems to us to be right in the domain of nature. Is the perfect
spirit to have the same antecedents as the imperfect one? Does a
Goethe have the same antecedents as any Hottentot? The antecedents of
an ape are as unlike those of a fish as are the antecedents of
Goethe's mind unlike those of a savage. The spiritual ancestry of
Goethe's soul is a different one from that of the savage soul. The
soul has grown as well as the body. The daimon in Goethe has more
progenitors than the one in a savage. Let us take the doctrine of
reincarnation in this sense, and we shall no longer find it
unscientific. We shall be able to explain in the right way what we
find in our souls, and we shall not take what we find as if created by
a miracle. If I can write, it is owing to the fact that I learned to
write. No one who has a pen in his hand for the first time can sit
down and write offhand. But one who has come into the world with "the
stamp of genius," must he owe it to a miracle? No, even the "stamp of
genius" must be acquired. It must have been learned. And when it
appears in a person, we call it a daimon. This daimon too must have
been to school; it acquired in a former life what it puts into force
in a later one.

In this form, and this form only, did the thought of eternity pass
before the mind of Heraclitus and other Greek sages. There was no
question with them of a continuance of the immediate personality after
death. Compare some verses of Empedocles (B.C. 490-430). He says of
those who accept the data of experience as miracles:

Foolish and ignorant they, and do not reach
far with their thinking,
Who suppose that what has not existed can
come into being,
Or that something may die away wholly and
vanish completely;
Impossible is it that any beginning can come
from Not-Being,
Quite impossible also that being can fade into
nothing;
For wherever a being is driven, there will it
continue to be.
Never will any believe, who has been in these
matters instructed,
That spirits of men only live while what is
called life here endures,
That only so long do they live, receiving their
joys and their sorrows,
But that ere they were born here and when they
are dead, they are nothing.

The Greek sage did not even raise the question whether there was an
eternal part in