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Christian doctrine of Predestination and Grace as formulated by
Augustine and adopted from him by Luther, according to which one man
is endowed with grace and another is not. Grace thus comes to be a
privilege received at birth and brought ready into the world.... What
is obnoxious and absurd in this doctrine may be traced to the idea
contained in the _Old Testament_, that man is the creation of an
external will which called him into existence out of nothing. It is
quite true that genuine moral excellence is really innate; but the
meaning of the Christian doctrine is expressed in another and more
rational way by the theory of Metempsychosis, common to Brahmans and
Buddhists. According to this theory, the qualities which distinguish
one man from another are received at birth, _i.e._, are brought from
another world and a former life; these qualities are not an external
gift of grace, but are the fruits of the acts committed in that other
world....

"What is absurd and revolting in this dogma is, in the main, as I
said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism with its 'creation out of
nothing,' and the really foolish and paradoxical denial of the
doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine
which is natural to a certain extent, self-evident, and, with the
exception of the Jews, accepted by nearly the whole human race at all
times.... Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I
should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is
haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of
nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life."

In _The World as Will and Idea_, he also says:

"What sleep is for the individual, death is for the Will (character).

"It flings off memory and individuality, and this is Lethe; and
through this sleep of death it reappears refreshed and fitted out with
another intellect, as a new being."

In _Parerga and Paralipomena_, vol. 2, chap. 10, he adds:

"Did we clearly understand the real nature of our inmost being, we
should see how absurd it is to desire that individuality should exist
eternally. This wish implies that we confuse real Being with one of
its innumerable manifestations. The individuality disappears at death,
but we lose nothing thereby, for it is only the manifestation of quite
a different Being--a Being ignorant of time, and, consequently,
knowing neither life nor death. The loss of intellect is th