imperfect symmetries and segments are harmoniously filled out by
the adjusting complement of a future state.2

The next representation of the fate of the soul disposes of it by
re absorption into the essence from which it emanated. There is an
eternal fountain of unmade life, from which all individual,
transient lives flow, and into which they return. This conception
arose in the outset from a superficial analogy which must have
obtruded itself upon primitive notice and speculation; for man is
led to his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplation
of outward phenomena. Now, in the material world, when individual
forms perish, each sensible component relapses into its original
element and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Our
exhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it:
the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground and
vegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, the
souls of men, when they disappear from us, are remerged in the
native spirit whence they came. The essential longing of every
part for union with its whole is revealed and vocal throughout all
nature. Water is sullen in stillness, murmurs in motion, and never
ceases its gloom or its complaining until it sleeps in the sea.
Like spray on the rock, the stranding generations strike the
sepulchre and are dissipated into universal vapor. As lightnings
slink back into the charged bosom of the thunder cloud, as eager
waves, spent, subside in the deep, as furious gusts die away in
the great atmosphere, so the gleaming ranks of genius, the
struggling masses of toil, the pompous hosts of war, fade and
dissolve away into the peaceful bosom of the all engulfing SOUL.
This simplest, earliest philosophy of mankind has had most
extensive and permanent prevalence.3 For immemorial centuries it
has possessed the mind of the countless millions of India. Baur
thinks the Egyptian identification of each deceased person with
Osiris and the burial of him under that name, were meant to denote
the reception of the individual human life into the universal
nature life. The doctrine has been implicitly held wherever
pantheism has found a votary, from Anaximander, to whom finite
creatures were "disintegrations or decompositions from the
Infinite," to Alexander Pope, affirming that

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is,
and God the soul."

The first reasoners, who gave such an ineradi