"The very same way by which the race reaches its perfection must every
individual man--one sooner, another later--have travelled over. Have
travelled over in one and the same life? Can he have been in one and
the self-same life a sensual Jew and a spiritual Christian?

"Surely not that! But why should not every individual man have existed
more than once in this world?

"Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest?
Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools
had disciplined and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once? Why may
not even I have already performed those steps of my perfecting which
bring to men only temporal punishments and rewards? And once more, why
not another time all those steps, to perform which the views of
Eternal Rewards so powerfully assist us? Why should I not come back as
often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge, fresh expertness?
Do I bring away so much from once that there is nothing to repay the
trouble of coming back?

"Is this a reason against it? Or because I forget that I have been
here already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection of
my former condition would permit me to make only a bad use of the
present. And that which even I must forget _now_, is that necessarily
forgotten for ever?"

Schlosser gives expression to similar thoughts in a fine work of his:
_Ueber die Seelenwanderung_.

Lichtemberg says in his _Seibstcharacteristik_:

"I cannot get rid of the thought that I died before I was born, and
that by this death I was led to this rebirth. I feel so many things
that, were I to write them down, the world would regard me as a
madman. Consequently, I prefer to hold my peace."

Charles Bonnet is the author of a splendid work, full of noble and
lofty thoughts, on this subject. It is entitled _Philosophic
Palingenesis_.

Emmanuel Kant believes that our souls start imperfect from the sun,
and travel through planetary stages farther and farther away to a
paradise in the coldest and remotest star in our system. (_General
History of Nature_.)

In _The Destiny of Man_, J. G. Fichte says:

"These two systems, the purely spiritual and the sensuous--which last
may consist of an immeasurable series of particular lives--exist in me
from the moment when my active reason is developed and pursue their
parallel course....

"All death in nature is birth.... There is no death-bringing principle
in nature, for nature