d, whether the former self from whom we receive this heritage
bore the same name with our present self, or bore a different
name...."

Professor F. H. Hedge, in _Ways of the Spirit, and other Essays_, p.
359, maintains that:

"Whatever had a beginning in time, it should seem, must end in time.
The eternal destination which faith ascribes to the soul presupposes
an eternal origin.... An obvious objection, and one often urged
against this hypothesis, is the absence of any recollection of a
previous life.... The new organisation with its new entries must
necessarily efface the record of the old. For memory depends on
continuity of association. When the thread of that continuity is
broken, the knowledge of the past is gone....

"And a happy thing, if the soul pre-existed, it is for us that we
remember nothing of its former life.... Of all the theories respecting
the origin of the soul this seems to me the most plausible, and
therefore the one most likely to throw light on the question of a life
to come."

The Spiritualists of Europe--those belonging to the school of Allan
Kardec, at all events--place reincarnation in the very forefront of
their teaching. We may add that those of America do not acknowledge
that the soul has more than one existence on earth, driven, however,
by the logic of things, which insists on progress, they state that
there are a series of lives passed in subtler bodies on invisible
planets and worlds.

All true philosophers have been attracted by the mystery of
palingenesis, and have found that its acceptance has thrown a flood of
light on the questions that perplexed them.

In Asia there are 400 millions of believers in reincarnation,
including the Chinese, Tartars, Thibetans, Hindus, Siamese,
Mongolians, Burmese, Cambodians, Koreans, and the people of Japan.

Tradition has handed down this teaching even to the most savage
tribes. In Madagascar, when a man is on the point of death, a hole is
made in the roof of his straw hut, through which his soul may pass out
and enter the body of a woman in labour. This may be looked upon as a
stupid superstition, still it is one which, in spite of its degenerate
form, sets forth the doctrine of the return of souls back to evolution
through earthly experiences. The Sontals, Somalis, and Zulus, the
Dyaks of Borneo and Sumatra, and the Powhatans of Mexico have similar
traditions. In Central Africa, slaves who are hunchbacked or maimed
forestall the hour of