Mr. Sweeting's turtles, I had
better leave them to complete their education at some one else's expense
rather than mine, so I walked on towards the Bank. As I did so it struck
me how continually we are met by this melting of one existence into
another. The limits of the body seem well defined enough as definitions
go, but definitions seldom go far. What, for example, can seem more
distinct from a man than his banker or his solicitor? Yet these are
commonly so much parts of him that he can no more cut them off and grow
new ones, than he can grow new legs or arms; neither must he wound his
solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his
bank--failure of his bank's action may be as fatal to a man as failure of
his heart. I have said nothing about the medical or spiritual adviser,
but most men grow into the society that surrounds them by the help of
these four main tap-roots, and not only into the world of humanity, but
into the universe at large. We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and
greengrocers, almost _ad libitum_, but these are low developments, and
correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails. Those of us again who are not
highly enough organised to have grown a solicitor or banker can generally
repair the loss of whatever social organisation they may possess as
freely as lizards are said to grow new tails; but this with the higher
social, as well as organic, developments is only possible to a very
limited extent.

The doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls--a doctrine to
which the foregoing considerations are for the most part easy
corollaries--crops up no matter in what direction we allow our thoughts
to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of
soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have transmigrated together,
far from it; but that, as we can often recognise a transmigrated mind in
an alien body, so we not less often see a body that is clearly only a
transmigration, linked on to some one else's new and alien soul. We meet
people every day whose bodies are evidently those of men and women long
dead, but whose appearance we know through their portraits. We see them
going about in omnibuses, railway carriages, and in all public places.
The cards have been shuffled, and they have drawn fresh lots in life and
nationalities, but any one fairly well up in mediaeval and last century
portraiture knows them at a glance.

Going down once