is only life throughout.... Even because Nature
puts me to death, she must quicken me anew...."

Herder, in his _Dialogues on Metempsychosis_, deals with this subject
more fully:

"Do you not know great and rare men who cannot have been what they are
in a single human existence; who must have often existed before in
order to have attained that purity of feeling, that instinctive
impulse for all that is true, beautiful, and good?... Have you never
had remembrances of a former state?... Pythagoras, Iarchas,
Apollonius, and others remembered distinctly what and how many times
they had been in the world before. If we are blind or can see but two
steps before our noses, ought we, therefore, to deny that others may
see a hundred or a thousand degrees farther, even to the bottom of
time ...?"

"He who has not become ripe in one form of humanity is put into the
experience again, and, some time or other, must be perfected."

"I am not ashamed of my half-brothers the brutes; on the contrary, so
far as I am concerned, I am a great advocate of metempsychosis. I
believe for a certainty that they will ascend to a higher grade of
being, and am unable to understand how anyone can object to this
hypothesis, which seems to have the analogy of the whole creation in
its favour."

Sir Walter Scott had such vivid memories of his past lives that they
compelled a belief in pre-existence. Instances of this belief may be
found in _The Life of Scott_, by Lockhart (vol. 7, p. 114, first
edition).

According to Schlegel:

"Nature is nothing less than the ladder of resurrection, which, step
by step, leads upward, or rather is carried from the abyss of eternal
death up to the apex of life." (_AEsthetic and Miscellaneous Works_;
and, _The Philosophy of History_.)

Shelley held a firm belief in Reincarnation:

"It is not the less certain, notwithstanding the cunning attempts to
conceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence. The doctrine is
far more ancient than the times of Plato," (Dowden's _Life of
Shelley_, vol. 1, p. 82.)

Schopenhauer adopted the idea of Reincarnation which he had found in
the _Upanishads_; regarding this portion of his teaching, his
contemporaries and followers set up a kind of conspiracy of silence.
In _Parerga and Paralipomena_, vol. 2, chap. 15, _Essay on Religions_,
he says:

"I have said that the combination of the _Old Testament_ with the
_New_ gives rise to absurdities. As an example, I may cite th