it is
immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, assigned in
a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still
forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific
creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at
once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over
and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a
gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied,
"I was born murdered;" that is, the soul of a man who had been
shot

7 Lange, Das Land der Herrlichkelt.

8 Schmidius, Diss. de Multiplici Animarum Reditu in Corpora.

passed into his body at the moment of his birth.9 The young
mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was
snatched out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of
connecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule,
in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those
passes which the conductors of railroad trains give their
passengers, "good for this trip only." The notion of an endless
succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world,
commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some minds
a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pass on
their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment
"to fresh fields and pastures new," in unknown immensity, to a
renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and
experiences drained before.

Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to his
idea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being,
comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Their
connection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand
years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher
planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that
will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to
enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading
him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune,
from cripplehood and beggary to paragonship and the throne. The
invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this
globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the
other life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the Great
Soul, which is as unhappy as seven eighths of the incarnated
souls; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human souls
taken collectively. Coming int