We may award to Brâhmanism the supremacy in metaphysics, and to Buddhism the carrying out of the ethical tendency, but the Egyptian religion appears throughout rotten and overgrown with magic.

The idea of the wandering of the soul was connected by the Egyptians with the worship of animals; but the venerated sacred animals were not considered as an incarnation of the god, but only as his. manifestation. The divinity was as little identified with the particular animal as with the idol. The sun-god and the moon-god tower majestically over all the lower gods, and in their worship a mythology has arisen a thousandfold restricted, dense, and involved. What we are in a position to understand and to follow is the distinction between the morning, mid-day, and evening sun as different gods, and even if it be admissible to accept for these one original identity, yet the threads remain phantom-like which knit these mythological representations with our doctrine. The myth of Osiris, the evening sun, through the rites and magic formulas with which his descent was solemnised, led to mysteries in which at first certainly very little metaphysical signification was hidden, and in which the ethical element was wholly wanting. This statement may also be applied to those mysteries which arose from the worship of other gods.

The Egyptian representation of the ka as immaterial being, having its seat in man and like him in form, appears as understood originally, to be tolerably expressed by our idea of soul, although Edward Meyer of Breslau may be right when he asserts that in the received texts it should mostly be translated by "ghost" (Gespenst). Next to ka, ba is given, which Meyer translates as soul, without misunderstanding the material representation connected with it, and which has led to the supposition that at the death of a man ba fluttered forth in the form of a bird.

The great care with which the Egyptians, in contrast to the Hindus, endeavoured to preserve the body, the eagerness with which they bestowed food and raiment on the dead, shows conclusively that they mistook the appearance for the reality, and inquired not of its substance; or where a timid attempt in reference to the transcendental being of man showed itself, as in the doctrine of the ka, it quickly disappeared and was again hidden in the darkness of ignorant superstition.

What Herodotus communicates on the religion of Egypt has to be taken with the greatest precaution. Egyptology has nothing to produce to sanction his statements on metempsychosis. According to Herodotus (ii. 123), the Egyptians were the first to arrive at the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, and to proclaim the opinion, "That when the body decays the soul always enters into another creature coming into life; and having performed during 3000 years a kind of pilgrimage through all the forms of being, of earth and air and sea, enters at last the body of a new-born man". I consider the information just as untrustworthy which is offered in a fragment of old hermetical writing by Stobias. According to this, the priests taught that the individual souls proceeded from one soul, that of the All. In any case, such a belief is only to be found in isolated instances, and can only have occurred through Indian influence, while the idea that after death the soul is for ever united with the goddess "Nut", the unlimited divine primitive matter, has been traced in the oldest inscriptions in the time of the pyramid kings, yet without the slightest explanation that such union should be preceded by individual continuity of life in Elysian fields or a Re-birth upon earth. The conclusions are quite arbitrary which have been drawn in favour of metempsychosis from the mythos that relates how Osiris in the kingdom of death, Amentes or Amenti, holds judgment over those sent thither, weighing their deeds. The ceremony also of judging the dead immediately after death, and, on proved accusation of an evil course of life, the denial of burial even to the king, had nothing to do with this doctrine. I entertain the conviction that the deeper investigation penetrates into the Egyptian religion, the more evident it becomes that the doctrine of metempsychosis was foreign to the religion of the Egyptian people, and that what some of the mysteries possess of it could not have been peculiar to the Osiris doctrine, but proceeded from Indian sources. There is, however, but little to be learned on this point. The writings relative to the secret doctrine of the Egyptians, of Hekatäos of Abdera, of Manethos, of the stoic Chaeremon, of Apollonius, Horapides, and others have all been lost. That which Herodotus, Diodorus, Plutarch, Clemens of Alexandria, and Eusebius offer is not of importance. Perhaps they help to show how the doctrine of the metempsychosis came from India to Egypt, in further evidence of which the passages in the life of Apollonius of Thyana mentioned by Schopenhauer should be considered. There is no doubt that the doctrine came to the Hebrews exclusively through the Egyptians, while it still remains to be settled whether Pythagoras obtained the treasure of his metaphysical knowledge solely in Egypt or also in India.

Already in the writings of the Old Testament before the banishment, the Hebrews distinguished one of the various life principles of the body, which they sometimes designated as Nephesch, sometimes as Ruach, sometimes as Neschama; but all these names correspond much more to the idea of breath than to spirit or soul.[According to some interpreters of the Kabala, these terms refer to that part of man which survives the death of the body, and are aspects of being or spirit. Neschama is the spiritual soul, the highest in man and the direct vehicle of spirit; it is that which passes from birth to birth , and which finally becomes one with Divine Being. In its lowest aspect it is the same as the ba of the Egyptians. Ruarch is the animal soul, or soul of desire, volition, and feeling. Nephesch is the lowest, the counterpart of the body, the shade or "Gespenst", the ka of the Egyptians . TRANSLATOR] Thus in the writings of the Palestine Jews after the exile, there is never any question of an actual, individual, and immortal soul, but only of a breath of life proceeding from God, which at the decay of the body into dust again resolves into the divine Ruach. We find quite another representation of the soul in the Syncretic philosophy of the Alexandrian Jews, who recognised the soul as individual. To the influence of this conception, which is of Egyptian origin, must be principally ascribed the belief among the Pharisees at the time of Jesus, not only in a personally constituted soul, but also in the wandering of the soul in various bodies, which is proved by the idea that the prophet Elias again appeared as Christ.

The Jew Manasse Ben Israel defended the doctrine in his "De Immortalitate Animae". By the Rabbins we find the supposition that God only created a certain number of Jew souls, who therefore always return so long as there are Jews. This hypothesis was not at variance with the idea of gradual advancement, which view is also supported by the circumstance that the descent into the bodies of animals was considered as expiation.

In any case, it was from Alexandrian conceptions that the words of Solomon must have proceeded (Book of Wisdom, viii. 19): "I was a child of good nature, and a good soul came to me, or rather because I was good I came into an undefiled body". It is but of little use to heap up similar examples, as they can only supply the proof of foreign influence, which fact, however, hardly needs further proof. Yet it must not be ignored that these and similar passages certainly show that the doctrine was eagerly accepted, though the metaphysical meaning was so densely hidden that ignorance and unbridled phantasy clothed it in the wildest forms; as, for example, with the Kabalists and the Rabbins. In the Talmud there is no direct reference to the doctrine of the metempsychosis; the Sohar first speaks of it, and it only remains further to refer to Matt. xi. 14, xiv. i, xvi. 14, xvii. 12; Luke ix. 7, 19; John i. 21.

There can be no doubt that the doctrine was never peculiar to the Jews.

That the same statement can be maintained concerning the Greeks does not appear so indisputable, for it is doubtful whether the doctrine arrived in Greece first through Pherecydes or through Pythagoras, penetrating into the Orphic mysteries only through the latter. As far as our knowledge goes, there is no proof that it evolved in an independent way from the Greek religion, but it rather appears to have been brought by Pythagoras from Egypt or India. In an excellent treatise on Pythagoras, Edward Baltzer writes: "When the old Hellenes whom we honor as ' classic' devoted themselves to study, they turned to their ancients, to the sages of India and Egypt. For it was from these cradle-lands of human culture that the stream of higher civilisation truly came to the Mediterranean peoples".

Pythagoras was induced to go to Egypt by Thales, whose intuition, even as with Pherecydes and Anaximander, caused him to recognise Egyptian influence. But Pythagoras was the first Greek who succeeded in penetrating into the Egyptian mysteries. After long efforts he obtained consecration as priest in the temple of Ammon Knuphos. Later he cultivated intercourse with Zoroaster in Babylon, and only returned to Greece after thirty-eight years. According to Apuleius, he may also have gone to India, and have been instructed by the Brâhmans. The seminary established by him in Sybaris was formed after Egyptian models, and politics were rigidly excluded. There, and later in Tarent, he taught, "There is a power, a spirit, the powerful primeval cause of the whole world, but this hidden god (Amoun, Ammon) is revealed as the eternal square" (Tetraktis). By this is meant space, time, and matter (the latter divided as mind and stuff). Here again but in an Egyptian garment, we recognise the Indian doctrine of the All-One, the myth of Brahm presenting himself to the cognising intellect in plurality. For Pythagoras (taking the words of Baltzar), "The All was an harmonious whole, an ever-living life, a continuing Palingenesis. All has soul; All is soul wandering in the organic world, and obeying eternal will or law, the recognition and accomplishment of which is the salvation and blessedness of man". The ethical character of the teaching of Pythagoras is very evident, but it is also unjust to deny its metaphysical signification. If it is impossible to clearly recognise the aims and results of the esoteric doctrine, what we do know may win from us the conviction that the efforts of Pythagoras extend not only in educational results, but that through a life consecrated to the highest he penetrated to the deepest knowledge in his discriminating examination of the basis of all things. The doctrine of Palingenesis, drawn from his investigations into organic nature, forms a strong supporting pillar to his doctrine, not an arbitrarily introduced Eastern ornament; for his intuition of the body as the prison of the soul descending from the supernal spheres, the teaching that an impure unholy life leads to the wandering of the soul in the bodies of animals, as also the admonition to abstain from animal food, proceeded directly from his conception of nature "as a sanctuary in which all investigation is equal to inquiry of God".

Not by Pythagoras, but by others far removed from his doctrine it might be said that the wise Greeks have been Thallus before the Trojan war, during it Euphorbius, then Hermotimus, Samius, Pyrrho, Delius, and at last Pythagoras. Much that is unauthenticated has been written about Empedocles, who likewise owed his knowledge to long sojourn with the Egyptian Magi. Whether his practices as doctor or his profession of the doctrine of metempsychosis gave occasion for his being called a sorcerer who could raise the dead, has not been determined; but the circumstance that he was also considered to possess the gift of prophecy shows that his philosophical doctrines, although unintentionally, worked for the establishment of such a report. It suffices to say that, as far as concerns Empedocles and his attitude towards the doctrine of metempsychosis, he further accepted the idea of the wandering of the soul in the bodies of plants. It would be unjust to be led away by any negative statements to conclude that Empedocles had but an arbitrary and external touch with this blossom of Indian wisdom, for he accepted seriously the doctrine of metempsychosis and Palingenesis. He it was, before Plato, that put forward the comparison of the world to a dark cave in which we are confined, and consequently called the human body the prison of the soul. He spoke of an anterior happy condition of the soul which had been lost through sin, and taught that through desire and sinful conduct the soul is kept in the round of metempsychosis, but can free itself by renunciation, and thereby obtain return to its former condition. He described the recognised changes in the phenomenal world as the combination and separation of the four elements, and supplemented this doctrine by the acceptance of two causal principles. Truly, if by these is to be understood nothing more than attraction and repulsion we may be content to designate Empedocles as the forerunner of the Atomists.

But those causal principles, taken as hate and love, bring us to the consideration of the sphere of immanence, and remind us of the splitting up of the transcendental unity into the plurality of the world, giving the impression that this plurality owes its existence to the hate and war of disunion, as well as that the desire for emancipation or the return to unity may be understood as love or the suppression of opposition. What Empedocles relates of the "Sphairos", and the way in which he represents the origin of the world, agrees throughout with this conception. He possessed a marvellous knowledge of natural science, and the wise insight that physics can only deal with appearances, and needs metaphysics to supplement it. In this sense must be understood the following often-cited quotation: --

        "Fools think that that can become which never yet had an existing,
        Or that that which is can fade away and wholly disappear;
        But now to you yet further the truth will I declare. By nature
        Is no birth, of that which dies, no complete destruction,
        Nothing but mingling of parts, and again separation of mingled,
        And this is the birth and the death, so called, of the ignorant mortals".

It appears to me much more likely that Empedocles first became acquainted with the doctrine of metempsychosis through Pythagoras, and not in Egypt, while Plato can hardly have been introduced to it directly through him, but rather through the Orphic mysteries. If I should undertake to examine how the Greeks, especially Plato, were induced to accept the Indian doctrine of the metempsychosis, I would adopt the following words of Heinrich von Stein as a motto. What he causes Solon to say in the dialogue of "Heroes and the World" appears to me masterly, as showing the standpoint of the sages among the Greeks, which they took in opposition to the insufficiency of the childish ideas and opinions on the subject of the eternal justice governing the world. He says: "We must decidedly consider the gods as fools if we believe that they reward virtue with enjoyments in another existence, so that today it is fit and proper for us to renounce what in the future we are to enjoy, and that in the end they requite us for our docility with those very benefits which we here learn to despise and reject".

What Plato writes in the "Timaeus" on reminiscence and the pre-existence of the immortal soul, and also in many passages in the "Republic", in the "Phaedrus", and especially in the "Phaedo", is in close relation to the metempsychosis as taught by Pythagoras. At the end of the "Republic" Plato describes how every soul fixes, or rather chooses, his own personality and fate in Re-birth. In the "Phaedo" he appeals to the doctrine in order to prove the immortality of the soul. He says: "Let us consider whether the souls of men who have died are in the nether world or not. An old saying truly, which I remember, says that when they go from here they are there, and return again here, and are again born from among the dead. And if this be so, that the living arise again from the dead, then certainly must our souls be there. For they could not return from there if they were not there".

On this somewhat doubtfully expressed passage Plato follows in an argument for the doctrine of metempsychosis which has very little signification.At the conclusion he says: "It thus appears to us that the living proceed from the dead no less than the dead from the living". Altogether, the doctrine, as expressed by Empedocles, decidedly deserves the preference to that given by Plato, for Plato was not, like him, in agreement with the esoteric Buddhism, but with the exoteric. With Plato mind (Geist) ought to be substituted for soul, and with Empedocles it should be will, Plato shows all learning as reminiscence, and concludes that we must therefore have learnt in some former time that which we now remember, and that this would be impossible if the soul had not already existed before it came into this present human form. He supports the admonition to restrain every sensuous desire by the explanation that if the soul has already in life set itself free from the service of the body, then in death it carries nothing with it from the body, and is able to attain to the formless similar to itself, to the gods, to the immortals, to the "rational", in order for "remaining time" to live freed from all evils, happy with God. To these, "the good", are contrasted "the bad", those who do not understand that that is to be preferred to the pleasures of the body which, though dark and formless to the eye, is comprehensible to the reason, and obtainable through the love of wisdom. Plato supposes that the souls of the bad are steeped in matter, which makes them heavy and draws them back to the visible world. Such souls may be seen in the vicinity of graves and tombs. They wander round until, through their desire for the corporeal, they become again united to a body, "and naturally become bound to a body of similar moral qualities as those which they had acquired during life".

It is stated as an example that those who lived as drunkards might be re-born as asses, the unjust, the domineering, and rapacious, as wolves, hawks, and vultures, while those who were really without any philosophical knowledge, but who by practice and custom lived as virtuous citizens, would be re-born as domestic animals or as honourable men; only philosophers reached bodiless to the gods, having abstained from all desires proceeding from the body. In the part of the "Phaedo" called the death-sayings or Nekyia, like the eleventh book of the "Odyssey", Plato relates that each one has his daemon, who has already followed him in life, and who leads him to the nether world, where judgment takes place. Most souls go to the sea of Acheron, "After remaining there a certain appointed time, some shorter, some longer, they are again sent forth for the production of living beings. Inexpiable sin throws many into Tartarus. Such as, through the love of wisdom, have already purified themselves, live for all future time without bodies. Those who are condemned for venial sin must obtain the pardon of those they have injured before they can return to the world". This fate, suggested by the belief in eternal justice, agrees with similar examples in exoteric Buddhism. Dr. A. Pfizmaier cites in the original text, and also in the German translation, "Eine Seelen-wanderung in Japan", a history of two families who quarrelled about a certain deed, and whose descendants would only become reconciled on the giving back of the deed, from the motive that, "If this were given back, there would not remain the slightest grudge in the soul of the dead father".

In explanation of the theory of "reminiscence", it must be stated that Plato adopted it in close connection with the doctrine of "Innate Ideas". God created all souls at the same time, and showed them the All in His Being. The reattainment of this transcendental knowledge is the learning which, therefore, as reminiscence, becomes the highest work of the soul. When this aim is achieved, the soul ends its wandering, for it has then again become what it was before, pure intelligence, which perceives and knows, not by the organ of the mind, but directly.

A definition of that which the Greeks understood by God offers some difficulty. The divine is meant, and as such is comparable to Brahm, not the god Brahmâ. In every case it is always considered as impersonal, with which conception agreed the Alexandrian Jew Philo, the well-known forerunner of Neo-Platonic philosophy, and the eloquent commentator of the five Mosaic books. God was to him what Brahm is to the Hindus, the All-One, namely, the transcendental source of All-Being. He taught, therefore, that souls go forth from God like rays of light from the sun, and are yet only in Him, even as light in the sun. Every living body is a prison for a soul, into which it must enter because it has not kept itself in original purity. To reattain this purity is its work; only then will it no longer be attracted by matter, and able to return to God. Philo also taught that many souls allowed themselves to fall into matter through the mere desire for knowledge, and only became bound with it in consequence. There could hardly be a deeper meaning than in this last-mentioned hypothesis. Every attempt at explanation, however, is wanting with Philo as to how the conjunction of the soul with matter took place.

It is partly proved and partly not improbable that Malabaren, Chalaidium, Plutarch, Mercurius Trismegistus, Apollonius of Tyana,[It may as well be mentioned here that also the old Italians, the Celtic Druids, the Scythians, the Hyperboreans, and still more distant peoples without religious systems in America, and the African Negroes, etc, show traces of a belief in the wandering of the soul] believed in the doctrine of metempsychosis. With respect to Apollonius of Tyana, and especially the new Pythagoreans, it appears probable that many of their excellent writings on this subject have been lost.

Of the Neo-Platonists, to whose doctrine of Emanation I can only slightly refer, we must first mention Plotinus. It is essential to notice that the soul no longer appears, as with Plato, predominating as intellect, but as the perfect union of spirit and will. It is on this account that Plotinus places ecstasy above logical thought. Further, it is to be considered as a simplification of the theory of Plato that Plotinus does not state that the soul at the end of her wanderings attains perfect remembrance and looks back with consciousness upon the route passed over, but teaches the oblivion of all that refers to the earth, seeking for happiness in unconscious mergence in God. That Plotinus should allow that the soul has also sojourn in plants agrees with his conception of Nature. In order to appreciate the depth of the ideas of Plotinus further explanation would be necessary, which, however, cannot be given here.

As far as concerns the doctrine of metempsychosis, Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus, follows closely in his theories. The following passage appears to me well worthy of consideration: "Each one becomes what he really already is, and has to become consciously identified, not with that which is strange, but only with himself". He taught, namely, that the soul in itself remains free from all sensuousness, but becomes entangled with the sensuous in consequence of the imperfect union of our being with the eternal reason, through the power which draws us to our present position. The pure being of the soul is not destroyed through birth, but becomes bound up with the mortal, and drawn down to the antithesis of itself. Good seed in bad ground. Porphyry does not so much accept the purification of our inmost being as its liberation from the power of the body. Yet he himself opposes the idea of the blameless condition of the inner being, with the reminder that in life one must not only renounce the thing itself, but also the inclination and desire for it, and at the same time speaks emphatically of the passions of the soul. "The slavery of the soul proceeds from two sources, drinking from which, she sucks in death and the forgetfulness of her own being" (by death is here meant death in the phenomenal world), "two sources, that is to say, pleasure and pain". To fly from temptation, urged by Plato with insistence, was also repeatedly recommended by Porphyry. He rigorously rejected the eating of slaughtered animals, "as enjoyment for a being with a soul" (beseelter Wesen). His remarks on renunciation are worthy of the greatest consideration. They take the highest form in that passage in which he says that the return to divinity can only be obtained when each, in all points and relations, shall sanctify himself according to his real nature. "And truly this must begin with the physical, and complete itself with the inner life". Porphyry's further theories on the metempsychosis are to be found in the Eclogae of Stobaeus, 1. i. c. 52, 54. For what Jamblichus has written on the same theme, we must refer the reader to "De Mysteriis", sect. iv. c. 4 et 5 ; and further to sect. v. c. 6. In the dissertation of Jamblichus on an Egyptian symbol, whose Indian source is not to be mistaken, as also in Porphyry's remark that the cow is holy and should not be slaughtered, Schopenhauer sees the Hindu origin of the Egyptian religion. Truly this can hardly be placed in doubt, nor further that all references to metempsychosis in the theories of the philosophers, from Pythagoras to Porphyry and Jamblichus, are to be traced back more or less directly to the Indian wisdom.