ez Pasqualis, Claude Saint-Martin, and their
followers.

Saint-Martin lived in times that were too troubled for him to speak
freely. In his works, however, not a few passages are found in which
there can be no doubt that reincarnation is hinted at, to anyone able
to read between the lines. (_Tableau nat._, vol. I, p. 136; _L'homme
de Desir_, p. 312.)

In his _Oeuvres Posthumes_ (vol. I, p. 286) appears this remarkable
passage:

"Death ought to be looked upon only as one stage in our journey. We
reach this stage with tired, worn-out horses, and we start again with
horses that are fresh and able to take us farther on our road; all the
same, we must pay what we owe for the portion of the journey that has
been traversed, and until the account is settled, we are not allowed
to continue our way."

Goethe writes as follows to his friend Madame von Stein:

"Tell me what destiny has in store for us? Wherefore has it bound us
so closely to each other? Ah! in bygone times, thou must have been my
sister or my wife ... and there remains, from the whole of those past
ages, only one memory, hovering like a doubt above my heart, a memory
of that truth of old that is ever present in me."

Ballanche, an orthodox Christian mystic, says:

"Each one of us is a reincarnating being, ignorant both of his present
and of his former transformations." (_Pal. Sociale_, book III., p.
154.)

"Man is brought to perfection only by becoming a more perfect order of
things, and even then he does nothing more than bring back, as Plato
said, a confused memory of the state that preceded his fall." (_Essai
sur les Instit. Sociales_, vol. ii., p. 170.)

"This life we spend on earth, shut in between an apparent birth and an
equally apparent death, is, in reality, only a portion of our
existence, one manifestation of man in time." (_Orphee_, vol. iv., p.
424.)

"Our former lives belong to astronomical cycles lost in the mighty
bosom of previous ages; not yet has it been given to us to know them."
(_Orphee_, vol. iv., p. 432.)

Balzac's _Seraphita_ abounds with references to the idea of successive
lives:

"All human beings spend their first life in the sphere of instincts,
in which they endeavour to discover how useless are the treasures of
earth."

".... How often we live in this first world...."

"Then we have other existences to wear out before we reach the path on
which the light shines. Death is one stage on this journey."

Constant Sav