s in
the astral world, has its human faculties, but it cannot control the
brute body with which it is connected, nor express itself through
that body on the physical plane. The animal organisation does not
possess the mechanism needed by the human Ego for self-expression; it
can serve as a jailor, not as a vehicle. Further, the "animal soul" is
not ejected, but is the proper tenant and controller of its own body.
S'ri Shankaracharya hints very clearly at the difference between this
penal imprisonment and becoming a stone, a tree, or an animal. Such an
imprisonment is not "reincarnation," ... the human Ego "cannot
reincarnate as an animal," cannot "become an animal."

"In cases where the Ego is not degraded enough for absolute
imprisonment, but in which the astral body has become very animal, it
may pass on normally to human re-birth, but the animal characteristic
will be largely reproduced in the physical body--as witness the
"monsters" who in face are sometimes repulsively animal, pig-faced,
dog-faced, &c. Men, by yielding to the most bestial vices, entail on
themselves penalties more terrible than they, for the most part,
realise; for Nature's laws work on unbrokenly and bring to every man
the harvest of the seed he sows. The suffering entailed on the
conscious human entity, thus cut off from progress and from
self-expression, is very great, and is, of course, reformatory in its
action; it is somewhat similar to that endured by other Egos, who are
linked to bodies human in form, but without normal brains--those we
call idiots, lunatics, &c. Idiocy and lunacy are the results of vices
different in kind from those that bring about the animal servitude
above explained, but the Ego in these cases also is attached to a form
through which he cannot express himself."

"True reason," says Proclus,[191] "affirms that the human soul may at
times find lodgment in brutes, but that it is possible for it to live
its own life and rise above the lower nature whilst bound to it by the
similarity of its tendencies and desires. We have never meant anything
else, as has often been proved by the reasoning in our commentaries on
_Phaedrus_."

There is a note in the _Vahan_[192] on a passage from _Phaedrus_ which
sheds all the light that can be shed on the question of
metempsychosis; in the space of a few lines everything is said that
may be publicly revealed, without trespassing on forbidden ground.

After stating that, on returning fr