"Transmigration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dempster. "Now, eternal existence without complete identity is not to me desirable. That our beloved ones no longer have the warm personal interest in us which they felt in life—that they are perhaps merged in the perfection of God, or undergoing transmigration out of one form of intelligence to another, without any recollection of what happened in a former state, is not consoling to the yearning human heart that never can forget, and with all the sufferings which memory may bring, would ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love a bright, fierce adversary, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the older naturalists supposed, diffused throughout the universe in molecules, which are indestructible and unchangeable in themselves; but, in endless transmigration, unite in innumerable permutations, into the diversified forms of life we know? Or, is the matter of life composed of ordinary matter, differing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated? Is it built up of ordinary matter, and again resolved into ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and then said lightly: "Do you suppose, Doc, that woman's mummy is in existence? I should like to find it. I've an idea she left some hieroglyphic message for me on her mummy-case, and doesn't propose to let me rest easy until I find and translate it. Now, if I believed in transmigration of souls—do you see any mark of Antony about me? Say, though, just imagine the spirit of Marcus Antonius in a rubber apron, making an analysis of oleomargarine! But here we are; good-bye," and he ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... that," he continued. "It is a pity he should be a priest of so absurd a faith. Do you know anything about Buddhism? The Buddhists believe in the transmigration of souls (the doctrine of the metempsychosis, as it is called). In that respect they are like the followers of Brahma. It is doubtful, indeed, which is the older faith of the two—whether Brahminism is a corruption of Buddhism, or whether Buddhism is an attempt to restore Brahminism to its original ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... and Buddhism; not only with meditative Buddhism (Dhyana) as at the beginning of the T'ang epoch and earlier, but with the main branch of Buddhism, monastery Buddhism (Vinaya). From now onward the Buddhist doctrines of transmigration and retribution, which had been really directed against the gentry and in favour of the common people, were turned into an instrument serving the gentry: everyone who was unfortunate in this life must show such amenability to the government and ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... happiness and content prevailed; but they afterwards revolted, and many gave up their allegiance. The rebels were cast down from on high into the pit of darkness. Hereupon succeeded the transmigration of souls; every animal and every plant was animated by one of the fallen angels, and the remarkable amiability of the Hindoos towards animals is owing to this belief. They look upon them as their fellow-creatures, and will not put ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... 13. In some former life committed. The soul, in its transmigration, expiates the sins committed in a former state of being. This necessary corollary from the doctrine of the metempsychosis appear to have prevailed among the pharisaic Jews in the time of our Saviour: "Master, who did ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... Postexistence, if I may so call it; and that as Simonides describes Brutes entering into the Composition of Women, others have represented human Souls as entering into Brutes. This is commonly termed the Doctrine of Transmigration, which supposes that human Souls, upon their leaving the Body, become the Souls of such Kinds of Brutes as they most resemble in their Manners; or to give an Account of it as Mr. Dryden has described it in his Translation of Pythagoras his Speech ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; which Pythagoras taught as an allegory, and those who came after him received literally. Plato, like him, drew his doctrines from the East and the Mysteries, and undertook to translate the language of the symbols used there, into that of Philosophy; and to prove ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a facetious lawyer conversing on the subject of the transmigration of souls, the judge said, "If you and I were turned into a horse and an ass, which of them would you prefer to be?"—"The ass, to be sure," replied the lawyer.—"Why?"—"Because," replied the lawyer, "I have heard of an ass being a judge, but ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... are forerunners of its ruin, we never were in a more flourishing situation. My Lord Rockingham and my nephew Lord Orford have made a match of five hundred pounds, between five turkeys and five geese, to run from Norwich to London. Don't you believe in the transmigration of souls? And are you not convinced that this race is between Marquis Sardanapalus and Earl Heliogabalus? And don't you pity the poor Asiatics and Italians who comforted themselves, on their resurrection, with ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... warms to the Indians," said Pownal, in a low tone, "whenever I hear them spoken of. It appears to me, sometimes," continued he, smiling, "as if I were a sort of relation. Were I a believer in the transmigration of souls, I should think I had been, in some previous existence, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Had atomic transmigration attempted to draw the shells back into the Time sphere to which they really belonged? Sutter was a logical man, and even as this thought came his mind rejected it. It must be Travail. He had taken a sample ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... mystic, who reads Schubert's History of the Soul, and lives, for the most part, in the clouds of the Middle Ages. To him the spirit-world is still open. He believes in the transmigration of souls; and I dare say is now followingthe spirit of some departed friend, who has taken the ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... all the Japonians, excepting some few who make profession of atheism, and believe the soul mortal, are idolaters, and hold the transmigration of souls, after the doctrine of Pythagoras. Some of them pay divine worship to the sun and moon; others to the Camis, those ancient kings of whom we have made mention; and to the Potoques, the gods of China. There ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... who now holds the place was known originally as Lavita, the son of Sami. But what is more curious still, the islanders always treat the new god as if he were precisely the self-same person as the old one. So far as I have been able to understand their theology, they believe in a sort of transmigration of souls. The soul of the Tu-Kila-Kila who is just dead passes into and animates the body of the Tu-Kila-Kila who succeeds to the office. Thus they speak as though Tu-Kila-Kila were a continuous existence; and the god of the moment, himself, will even often refer ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... thou wert formed, heaven did a man begin; But the brute soul, by chance, was shuffled in. In woods and wilds thy monarchy maintain, Where valiant beasts, by force and rapine, reign. In life's next scene, if transmigration be, Some bear, or lion, is ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... raciness to rustic oratory. Not long ago a member for a rural constituency, who had always professed the most democratic sentiments, suddenly astonished his constituents by taking a peerage. During the election caused by his transmigration, one of his former supporters said at a public meeting, "Mr. —— says as how he's going to the House of Lords to leaven it. I tell you, you can't no more leaven the House of Lords by putting Mr. —— into it than you can sweeten a cart-load of muck with a ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... peculiar to his nation, that the immediate descendants of Noah peopled this quarter of the globe, and that the old patriarch himself, who still retained a passion for the seafaring life, superintended the transmigration. The pious and enlightened father, Charlevoix, a French Jesuit, remarkable for his aversion to the marvelous, common to all great travelers, is conclusively of the same opinion; nay, he goes still farther, and decides upon the manner in which the discovery was effected, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Society believes in the Transmigration of Souls. As I am not a member myself I'm afraid that that is all I can tell you about it. It is a little difficult at first sight, perhaps, to see the connection between Transmigration and rubber tyres, but if you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... accused of giving license to what a palled public and dyspeptical reviewers will call for the thousandth time a cacoethes; word of cabalistic look, unknown to Dr. Dilworth. Truly, my masters, though disciple I be of venerable Martinus the Scribbler; though, for aught I know, himself in progress of transmigration; still, I submit, my cornucopia is not crammed with leaves and chopped straw; and if, in utter carelessness, the fruit is poured out pell-mell after this desultory fashion, yet, I wot, it is fruit, though whether ripe or crude, or rotten, my ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... tell you that there is in the Veda no trace of metempsychosis or that transmigration of souls from human to animal bodies which is generally supposed to be a distinguishing feature of Indian religion. Instead of this, we find what is really the sine qua non of all real religion, a belief in immortality, and in personal immortality. Without a belief in personal immortality, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... go as far as you like on it,' says the Colonel to Peets, 'I'm plumb wise an' full concernin' the transmigration of souls. I gives it my hearty beliefs. I can count a gent up the moment I looks at him; also I knows exactly what he is ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... debt, or to ventilate old velvets, or to apricate and refresh old gouty systems and old traditions of feudal ostentation, which both alike suffered and grew smoke-dried under too rigorous a seclusion. By a great transmigration, festal assemblages had assumed their proper station, and had unfolded their capacities, as true auxiliaries to the same general functions of intellect—otherwise expressing themselves and feeding themselves through literature, through ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after. So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreigners it proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom you have not met for some ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... the Druidical groves is again alluded to in Book III., lines 462-489. Dean Merivale remarks (chapter li.) on this passage, that in the despair of another life which pervaded Paganism at the time, the Roman was exasperated at the Druids' assertion of the transmigration of souls. But the passage seems also to betray a lingering suspicion that the doctrine may in some shape be true, however horrible were the rites and sacrifices. The reality of a future life was a part ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... above all the philosophic lawgivers of antiquity for their care in impressing the doctrine of the soul's immortality on the minds of their people, as an operative and leading principle. This doctrine was inculcated on the scheme of Transmigration, which some imagine them to have derived from Pythagoras. But it is by no means necessary to resort to any particular teacher for an opinion which owes its birth to the weak struggles of unenlightened reason, and to mistakes natural to the human mind. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... this statement, questioned other Bacchantes about these things, and heard the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul confirmed. Hence, during many a solitary ride, while the cart rolled slowly along, she pondered over the thought that Juliane's soul had lived again in foolish Julie. How? Why? She did ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... proportion cremated their dead and worshipped Agni, the fire god. At the close of the Vedic period there were fresh invasions into middle India, and the "late comers" introduced new beliefs, including the doctrines of the Transmigration of Souls and of the Ages of the Universe. Goddesses also rose into prominence, and the Vedic gods became minor deities, and subject to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. These "late comers" had undoubtedly been influenced by Babylonian ideas before ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... found in the Old Testament. Totemism is a kind of worship rendered to animals and vegetables considered as allied and related to man. The worship of animals and plants is found as a survival in all ancient societies and is the origin of the belief in the transmigration of souls. Totemism seems to have been as widespread as the animism from which it is derived, and has been closely intertwined in the development of religious beliefs. Totemism in a modified form is found in the Old Testament where animals speak on occasion, as the serpent in ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... transmuting and assimilating, instead of abolishing, the elementary instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher significance, attracting and stimulating devotion by impressive rites and ceremonies, impressing upon the people the dogma of the soul's transmigration and its escape from the miseries of sentient existence by the operation of merits. And of all great religions it is the least political, for the practice of asceticism and quietism, of monastic seclusion from the working world, is necessarily ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... with a melody which would irradiate his soul throughout life and reproduce itself in the music-tones of his gently cadenced verse. There the ill-fated Adrienne Lecouvreur lived and died again in her wondrous transmigration into the ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... transmigration of souls—a doctrine to which the foregoing considerations are for the most part easy corollaries—crops up no matter in what direction we allow our thoughts to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of soul. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... discourse concerning Hades, wherein the souls of all men are confined until a proper season, which God hath determined, when he will make a resurrection of all men from the dead, not procuring a transmigration of souls from one body to another, but raising again those very bodies, which you Greeks, seeing to be dissolved, do not believe [their resurrection]. But learn not to disbelieve it; for while you believe that the soul is created, and yet is made immortal by God, according to the doctrine ...
— An Extract out of Josephus's Discourse to The Greeks Concerning Hades • Flavius Josephus
... mistake our dogmas, Sir John. We do not believe in transmigration in the individual at all, but in the transmigration of classes. Thus, we hold that whenever a given generation of men, in a peculiar state of society, attain, in the aggregate, a certain degree of moral improvement, or mentality, as we term it in the schools, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... NF.25: Who were a Mule)—Ver. 7. She would seem here to allude to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. It may possibly have been a notion, that as the human soul took the form of a Butterfly, the souls of animals appeared in the ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... died February 20th, 1414, lingering for a few days after a paralytic stroke, as stated in the story. His age was 61. The mantle of this cleverest man of his day—clever for evil—descended, a hundred years later, upon Stephen Gardiner. Any believer in transmigration could feel no doubt that the soul of the one man ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... the distinction of caste between the hereditary gentry and all other persons as then drawn in France was the distinction between the heavens above and the earth beneath; the distance between was considered simply immeasurable and impassable except by the transmigration of souls. We cannot understand the extent of it in our day. No aristocrat is now so blind, no plebeian so humble, as to sincerely believe the doctrine. But in that age France was steeped in it. High refinement ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... female sex in various particulars, nevertheless judged them to be destitute of that principle which constituted the essence of the gods; and therefore unfit for their society. Possibly they might in consequence imagine them to be incapable of immortality and transmigration, a belief which they so firmly maintained, as to be led to specify the various changes which the soul underwent for the space of three thousand years, when it re-assumed the human body. Now, if the Colchians credited ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... beginning of the present century. After the introduction and triumph of Christianity in Britain, for several centuries the two systems of thought and ritual mutually influenced each other, corrupting and corrupted.4 A striking example in point is this. The notion of a punitive and remedial transmigration belonged to Druidism. Now, Taliesin, a famous Welsh bard of the sixth century, locates this purifying metempsychosis in the Hell of Christianity, whence the soul gradually rises again to felicity, the way for it having been opened by Christ! Cautiously ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... not press him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in ignorance of the workings of his own mind, deliberately introduced him to Mortimer Collins's "Transmigration," and gave him a sketch of the plot before he opened ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... opened with the assistance of many people united, and they carried in the corpse and the chest of food. A priest came up to me, and began to console me, saying, "Man is born one day, and one day dies; such is the [mode of] transmigration in this world; now these, thy wife, thy son, thy wealth, and forty days' food are placed here; take them, and remain here until the great idol is favourable to thee." In my wrath I wished to curse the idol, the inhabitants of that place, and their manners and customs, and to inflict blows ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source. Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their museum of fables. The process is industrious, it is fascinating, and ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... though their distinct and successive dominions were severally swept from the earth, yet their lives,—the diabolical principles by which they had been actuated survived; and these passed, by a kind of transmigration, into the body of the fourth beast. This transition of animating principles or imperial policy of inveterate hostility to the kingdom of God, we think, is plainly indicated by the three features of this ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... fear; 60 Of that great portraiture so true A copy pencil never drew. My Muse her song had ended here, But both their Genii straight appear, Joy and amazement her did strike: Two twins she never saw so like. 'Twas taught by wise Pythagoras, One soul might through more bodies pass. Seeing such transmigration there, She thought it not a fable here. 70 Such a resemblance of all parts, Life, death, age, fortune, nature, arts; Then lights her torch at theirs, to tell, And show the world this parallel: Fix'd and ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... of hastening him out of it;—so that no one was able to set out with so full a sail, and in so swelling a tide of heroic loftiness upon the occasion, as my father was. Not a period in Socrates's oration, which closed with a shorter word than transmigration, or annihilation,—or a worse thought in the middle of it than to be—or not to be,—the entering upon a new and untried state of things,—or, upon a long, a profound and peaceful sleep, without dreams, without disturbance?—That we and our children were born to die,—but ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... tried its qualities, from whom to inform myself. Such as fear it, presuppose they know it; as for my part, I neither know what it is, nor what they do in the other world. Death is, peradventure, an indifferent thing; peradventure, a thing to be desired. 'Tis nevertheless to be believed, if it be a transmigration from one place to another, that it is a bettering of one's condition to go and live with so many great persons deceased, and to be exempt from having any more to do with unjust and corrupt judges; if it be an annihilation of our being, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of school boys the last day of the term. The joy of landing will not be unmingled with regrets in parting from our fellow-passengers, with whom we have become fast friends; and we are inclined mutually to believe in transmigration of souls, and that we must have known each other in some prior state. Some are going into Minnesota, three of them having bought 13,000 acres in the Red River valley, which they are going to farm on a large scale, and hope ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... that the road to it is the milky way—a notion, by the way, which Beausobre and others have traced in the remains of the Manicheans, and other Eastern philosophers. The Americans believe in the existence of souls distinct from bodies, and many of them in the transmigration of souls. According to Loskiel, they declare, 'that Indians cannot die eternally; for even Indian corn is vivified, and rises again.' The general opinion among them is, that the souls of the good alone go to a place abounding in all earthly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the "small vehicle, or conveyance." There are in Buddhism the triyana, or "three different means of salvation, i.e. of conveyance across the samsara, or sea of transmigration, to the shores of nirvana. Afterwards the term was used to designate the different phases of development through which the Buddhist dogma passed, known as the mahayana, hinayana, and madhyamayana." "The hinayana is the simplest vehicle of salvation, corresponding to the first of the three ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... among us every Day in the critical Juncture of their Transmigration, just when they have so much of the Man left as to be known by their Names, and enough of the Devil taken up to settle their Characters? This Easiness of the Devil's access to these People, and the great Convenience it is to him in his general Business, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... and cheer hidden in a simple little story? Was it, as I like to think, God-given, a treasure sent from above? Or would you rather think it an inheritance from some ancestor, a writer, a teller of tales? Or perhaps you believe in the transmigration of souls, and think that the spirit of some AEsop of old, who spoke in parables, had entered the frail crippled body of our little Lib, and spoke through her pinched pale lips. I leave you your ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... superstition was ever more terrible than that of the Druids. Besides the severe penalties, which it was in the power of the ecclesiastics to inflict in this world, they inculcated the eternal transmigration of souls; and thereby extended their authority as far as the fears of their timorous votaries. They practised their rites in dark groves or other secret recesses [g]; and in order to throw a greater mystery over their religion, they communicated their doctrines only ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... not possible that Jesus could have meant that John was the same individual as Elijah; nor could the people have so understood His words, since the false doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of spirits was repudiated by the Jews.[790] The seeming difficulty is removed when we consider that, as the name appears in the New Testament, "Elias" is used for "Elijah,"[791] with no attempt at distinction between Elijah the Tishbite, and any other person known as Elias. Gabriel's ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley. A vahine of another clan had been overcome by the eel's sorcery, as Mother Eve ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of playing on the piano which was correct and hard. Her spiritualism (Madame Dambreuse believed in the transmigration of souls into the stars) did not prevent her from taking the utmost care of her cash-box. She was haughty towards her servants; her eyes remained dry at the sight of the rags of the poor. In the expressions of which she habitually made use a candid egoism manifested itself: ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... ungrateful and rebellious organ then that it is now. Nature was the same strict accountant then that she is now, and balanced her debit and credit columns with the same relentless accuracy. The "liver" of the last century has become, we are told, the "nerves" of to-day; which transmigration should be a bond of sympathy between the new woman and that unchangeable article, man. We have warmer spirits and a higher vitality than our home-keeping great-grandmothers ever had. We are seldom hysterical, and we never faint. If we are gay, our gayeties involve less exposure and fatigue. ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... My transmigration from London to Lausanne could not be effected without interrupting the course of my historical labours, and a full twelvemonth was lost before I could resume the thread of regular and daily industry. In the fifth and sixth volumes the revolutions ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... shaft-like passages and mortuary chambers. Through this belief, the priests, who, as judges of the dead, possessed the power of giving up the bodies of the sinful to corruption, and by this means occasioning the transmigration of their souls into the bodies of animals, obtained immense authority. Notwithstanding the magnificence of their architectural productions, and the vast technical skill and dexterity in sculpture and mechanical appliances which they ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... the righteous, or those who had lived what they called "the contemplative life," would be permitted to enter immediately after death. But, for the souls of sinners, they invented a system of expiatory punishments which, known as the Metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, taught that they would be compelled to successively animate the bodies of beasts, birds, fishes, etc., for a thousand years before being permitted ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... sixty years; and their prince, or Imam, established his lieutenant to lead and govern the colony of Mount Libanus, so famous and formidable in the history of the crusades. [25] With the fanaticism of the Koran the Ismaelians had blended the Indian transmigration, and the visions of their own prophets; and it was their first duty to devote their souls and bodies in blind obedience to the vicar of God. The daggers of his missionaries were felt both in the East and West: the Christians and the Moslems enumerate, and persons multiply, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... personality will be entirely absorbed in his essence, the human being lost in the Deity. Five laws of virtue must be observed, ten kinds of sin avoided; and the Buddhist expects that transgressions will be punished by the transmigration of his soul into some inferior creature, whence he will rise by successive stages into another trial as a man, and gradually improving by the help of contemplation, and of a sublime state of annihilation ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... visited the wise man every day and listened to his teachings about the world and life, and also about eternal life. The hermit spoke of the transmigration of souls, how in the course of ages souls must pass through all beings, live through all the circles of existence, according as their conduct led them upwards to the gods, or downwards to the worms in the mud. Therefore we should love the animals which the souls of men may inhabit. He spoke ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... horrors. Finally, they reach Elysium and gain entrance (645-757). The search among the shades of the Blessed for Anchises, and the meeting between father and son (758-828). Anchises explains the mystery of the Transmigration of Souls, and the book closes with the revelation to AEneas of the future greatness of Rome, whose heroes, from the days of the kings to the times of Augustus, pass in procession before him (829-1071). He is then dismissed through the Ivory Gate, and sails ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... Jainas and the Buddhists believe in no Creator of the Universe, but teach only the existence of Swabhawati, a plastic, infinite, self-created principle in Nature. Still they firmly believe, as do all Indian sects, in the transmigration of souls. Their fear, lest, by killing an animal or an insect, they may, perchance, destroy the life of an ancestor, develops their love and care for every living creature to an almost incredible extent. Not only is there a hospital for invalid ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... repeated, for man is either risen too high or too far fallen to live well in the sole company of animals and flowers. What sociologists call the consciousness of kind is as vital to man as the consciousness of self; and to pine for adoption into an alien kind is vain on this side transmigration. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... objective facts. For example, with respect to the Gadarene miracle, it is one question whether, at a certain time and place, a raving madman became sane, and a herd of swine rushed into the lake of Tiberias; and quite another, whether the cause of these occurrences was the transmigration of certain devils from the man into the pigs. And again, it is one question whether Jesus made a long oration on a certain occasion, mentioned in the first Gospel; altogether another, whether more or fewer of the propositions ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... lark, hovering over the fields that lie at the foot of our dear castle at Heidelberg, or nestling among its towers, wherein I have passed so many joyous hours. Now, if I were a Hindoo, I would look forward with pleasure to the day of my transmigration; for as a lark, I would fly to my dear native home, and sing the old air of which my father was ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,—a good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others, rather ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... their deeds would look no better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my beanfield—effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say—and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but tho it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good practise, however it might seem to have ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... cause of the material existence of things." The movement which he spread by means of a vast, secret confraternity ended, however, in a barren symbolism, and it is impossible to trace what relation his strange theories of the transmigration of souls and the music of the spheres have to his general ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... idol contrived to preserve its outlines and to glow without pulverising. A ceremony of an impressive nature occurred in this apartment; a wild cat, which strayed in through an open window, was regarded as the appearance of a soul in transmigration, and, in spite of its piteous protests, was passed through ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... comes to the city of Crotona, and teaches the principles of his philosophy. His reputation draws Numa Pompilius to hear his discourses; on which he expounds his principles, and, more especially, enlarges on the transmigration of the soul, and the practice of eating ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the power of discerning the things which abide. And ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... greatest genius would not have been so solicitous about, and would not have guarded from any injury by such severe laws, but from a firm persuasion that death was not so entire a destruction as wholly to abolish and destroy everything, but rather a kind of transmigration, as it were, and change of life, which was, in the case of illustrious men and women, usually a guide to heaven, while in that of others it was still confined to the earth, but in such a manner as still to exist. From this, and ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... with a stooping back and protruded chin, as if he were perpetually on the watch for fish, flesh, and fowl, vermin and Christian. The friendship between himself and the Scotch terrier at his heels would have been easily explained by Lessing, for in the transmigration of souls the spirit of Harry Verney had evidently once animated a dog of that breed. He was dressed in a huge thick fustian jacket, scratched, stained, and patched, with bulging, greasy pockets; a cast of flies round a battered hat, riddled with shot-holes, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... her innocent eyes demurely to his face. "You are so kind. I am deeply interested just now In the Japanese conception of the transmigration ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... larger brain and a much finer cerebral organization throughout than a bird of prey, or any of the Picus family even. Does it signify nothing? I gaze into the eyes of the Gazelle,—eyes that will admit of no epithet or comparison,—and the old question of preexistence and transmigration rises afresh in my mind, and something like a dim recognition of kinship passes. I turn this Thrush in my hand,—I remember its strange ways, the curious look it gave me, its ineffable music, its freedom, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... he said, and stepped between. "What right has he to walk the earth like a man! He is but fit to go on all fours—Ha! ha!" he went on, laughing wildly, "I begin to believe in the transmigration of souls! I shall one day see that son of yours running about the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field—effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say—and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... of the bloodshed to follow, and hesitated to advance. Krishna insisted that it was unnecessary for him to lament, setting forth his reasons in what is known as the Bhagavat-gita, the divine song, in which he said it was no sin to slay a foe, since death is but a transmigration from one form to another. The soul can never cease to be; who then can destroy it? Therefore, when Arjuna slew his cousins he would merely remove their offensive bodies; their souls, unable to be destroyed, would seek other habitations. To further impress Arjuna, Krishna ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of one of its ancient inhabitants, yet wandering upon this earth, may through transmigration have become in part your own, and you, in reverie at odd hours and in company with it, live again a few scenes of ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... against several Roman generals in the decline of that empire, and against the Alans, Vandals, Goths, and other barbarians. Des Fontaines, (Diss. p. 118,) and after him Dom Morice. demonstrates that Brittany was an independent state before the year 421. The third transmigration of Britons hither was completed at several intervals while the Saxons invaded and conquered Britain, where Hengist first landed in 470. Brittany was subjected to the Romans during four centuries: an independent state successively under the title of a kingdom, county, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... scriptures encourage pride, impurity, falsehood, revenge, and murder; whose worship is connected with indescribable abominations, and whose heaven is a brothel? As might be expected, they found that men died here without indulging the smallest vestige of hope, except what can arise from transmigration, the hope, instead of plunging into some place of misery, of passing into the body of some reptile. To carry to such a people the divine word, to call them together for sacred instruction, to introduce amongst them ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... the correspondence with which I am now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about the period of Hand and Soul. It was to be entitled St. Agnes of Intercession, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition it was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as much more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... flesh ascends continually. Cremation, with the Hindu, takes the place of burial. The ashes are collected and are preserved in a tomb. To die in Benares, and to have a temple for a tomb, is the surest passport to happiness in a future state, since the transmigration of souls into higher or lower forms is an essential doctrine of ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... the Self, which is an existing thing not comprehended from other sources, is of the same nature (as the information about other existent things); for by the comprehension of the Self a stop is put to all false knowledge, which is the cause of transmigration, and thus a purpose is established which renders the passages relative to Brahman equal to those passages which give information about things instrumental to actions. Moreover, there are found (even in that part of the Veda which treats of actions) ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... changes one's sky but not one's soul.], is an old observation; I passed this afternoon in confirming the truth of it among the English traders settled here: whose conversation, manners, ideas, and language, were so truly Londonish, so little changed by transmigration, that I thought some enchantment had suddenly operated, and carried me to drink tea in the regions ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Buddhism symbolized these notions in the somewhat gross but only intelligible form in which the mind can readily grasp them, viz., in the dogma of the transmigration of souls, according to which a man's good deeds and bad follow him like his shadow from one existence to another, and in this life he expiates the sins or enjoys the fruits ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... therefore he could not have been a prophet sent by God. Akbar disbelieved the story of his night-journey to heaven. Meantime Akbar was eagerly learning the mysteries of other religions. He entertained Brahmans, Sufis, Parsis, and Christian fathers. He believed in the transmigration of the soul, in the supreme spirit, in the ecstatic reunion of the soul with God, in the deity of fire and the sun. He leaned toward Christianity; he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... (the Chepewyans) have some faint notion of transmigration of the soul; so that if a child be born with teeth, they instantly imagine, from its premature appearance, that it bears a resemblance to some person who had lived to an advanced age, and that he has assumed a renovated life, with these ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... great debt we have been under to you for the loan of many of your most accomplished speakers: of Curtis, whose diction is chaste as the snows of his own New England, while his zeal for justice is as fervid as her July sun; of Depew, who, as I listen to him, makes me believe that the doctrine of transmigration is true, and that in a former day his soul occupied the body of one of the Puritan fathers, and that for some lapse he was compelled to spend a period of time in the body of a Hollander [laughter]; of Beaman,[9] one of the lights of your bar; of Evarts, who, whether as statesman or ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Tribes, The Story of, Thunder, bird, described, brings the rain, steals women, Tobacco, Indians', songs, Tobacco thief punished, Tongues for Medicine Lodge, Touchwood Hills, Training of children, Transmigration of souls, Trapping wolves, Treachery, penalty for, Treatment of dead enemies, of women, Trial by jumping, Trivett, Rev. S., Tsin-ik-tsis'-tso-yiks, Ts[)i]-st[i]ks, T[)u]is-kis't[i]ks, Turtles, Two Medicine (Lodge Creek), ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... Egyptians, Greeks—sought a solution of this august mystery in the doctrines of Transmigration and Anamnesis or Reminiscence. Nothing is whereto man is not kin. He knows all worlds and histories by virtue of having himself travelled the mystic spiral descent. Awaking through memory, the processes of his mind repeat the processes of the visible Kosmos. His unfolding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... he informed me, to my astonishment and delight, that if the head of the mongrel Fiddle had been placed on the Stradivari, date 1710, from the Goding collection, it was now, as the effect of recent transmigration, on its own ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... leaving, as it were, a stream of song behind him as he rose, lifted my fancy with him. He hovered in the air just above the place where the towers of Warwick Castle marked the horizon; and seemed as if fluttering with delight at his own melody. "Surely," thought I, "if there were such a thing as transmigration of souls, this might be taken for some poet, let loose from earth, but still revelling in song, and carolling about fair fields ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... ancient nations the bean was regarded as a type of death, and the priests of Jupiter were forbidden to eat it, touch it, or even pronounce its name. The believer in the doctrine of transmigration of souls carefully avoided this article of food, in the fear of submitting beloved friends ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... say that he had received as a gift from Mercury the perpetual transmigration of his soul, so that it was constantly transmigrating and passing into all ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Purgatory is a consoling doctrine. I am surprised that the Reformers gave it up, or that they did not at least substitute for it something equally consoling." "It is," he remarked to Shelley, "a refinement of the doctrine of transmigration taught ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... she had her confidante: Mother Stuart. Stuart, as the lady would point out, is the name of a Royal house; but what that signified, and what her business way, no one knew; only that Mrs. Stuart got postal orders every Monday morning, kept a parrot, believed in the transmigration of souls, and could read the future in tea leaves. Dirty lodging-house wallpaper she was behind the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... circumstances of the parents, strangle the child without the knowledge of the mother, telling her that the infant was still-born. Others have ascribed the practice to a belief in the metempsycosis, or transmigration of souls into other bodies, that the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it is better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum, than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness. No degree of superstition, one would imagine, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... melodious, even when the animal's throat is well moistened. When it is parched and dusty the sound becomes unusually hoarse. Each hour added to the noise as the thirst of the musicians increased. Mr. Fayel provoked a discussion concerning the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; and thought, in the event of its truth, that the wretch was to be pitied who should pass into a mule in ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... more splendid than that of Buddhism, and an eloquence that captivated the imaginations of the Japanese. Instead of the long series of miseries of Buddhist transmigration, it offered admission to the glories of heaven after death, a doctrine sure to be highly attractive to those who had little to hope for but misery during life. The story of the life and death of Christ strongly impressed the minds of the people, as compared with the colder story of Buddha's ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... many of the corruptions of later times were unknown. There was no distinct doctrine of caste, no transmigration, no mist of pantheism, no idol-worship, no widow-burning, and no authorized infanticide. The abominable tyranny which was subsequently imposed upon woman was unknown; the low superstitions of the aboriginal tribes had not been adopted; nor, on the other hand, had philosophy and speculation ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... stole that and all his other opinions from Asia and Egypt. The transmigration of the soul and the vegetable diet are derived from India. I met ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ask politely How a friend I know so slightly Can be more to me than others I have liked a year or so; But they've never heard the history Of our transmigration's mystery, And they've no idea I loved ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... inflict that left mere cruelty far behind. If I were making an automaton king, I would model my machine on the lines of Hammerfeldt. He had no belief in a future life, but would sometimes trifle whimsically with the theory of a transmigration of souls; he traced all beliefs in immortality to the longing of those who were unfortunate here (and who did not think himself so?) for a recompense (a revenge he called it) hereafter, and declared transmigration to be at once ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... unagreeable, to found a path Over this Maine from Hell to that new World Where Satan now prevailes, a Monument Of merit high to all th' infernal Host, Easing thir passage hence, for intercourse, 260 Or transmigration, as thir lot shall lead. Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn By this new felt attraction and instinct. Whom thus the meager Shadow answerd soon. Goe whither Fate and inclination strong Leads thee, I shall not lag behinde, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... heaven, after Proverbs xx. 27, and immortality as a return to the celestial world of pure light. But the belief in the pre-existence of the soul led the mystics to the adoption, with all its weird notions and superstitions, of the Pythagorean system of the transmigration of the soul.' Moses Mendelssohn revived the Platonic form of the doctrine of immortality. Thenceforth the dogma of the Resurrection was gradually discarded until it was eliminated from the Prayer Book of the Reform congregations. Man's future was thought of ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... knit wool, now sat beneath the parental roof again; and at night, when the brother and sister were asleep in the garret, each one of them would wake the other when they heard Black Marianne down stairs, running to and fro and muttering to herself. But Damie's transmigration to Black Marianne's was the cause of new trouble. Damie was exceedingly discontented at having been compelled to learn a miserable trade that was fit only for a cripple. He wanted to be a mason, and although Amrei was very much opposed to it, for she predicted ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... effectually washed away by the waters of Lethe. Some, however, there still are, so thoroughly corrupted, that they are not fit to be intrusted with human bodies, and these are made into brute animals, lions, tigers, cats, dogs, monkeys, etc. This is what the ancients called Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls; a doctrine which is still held by the natives of India, who scruple to destroy the life even of the most insignificant animal, not knowing but it may be one of their relations ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Pythagoras, That juggler divine, as hereafter shall follow; Which soul, fast and loose, sir, came first from Apollo, And was breath'd into Aethalides; Mercurius his son, Where it had the gift to remember all that ever was done. From thence it fled forth, and made quick transmigration To goldy-lock'd Euphorbus, who was killed in good fashion, At the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta. Hermotimus was next (I find it in my charta) To whom it did pass, where no sooner it was missing ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... heart cold and paralysing like a dagger. And with every advancing minute of the night I became broader awake, more tense, fairly sweating with nervousness. One night—good God, was it only last week? ... it seems ages ago, another existence ... a state cut off from this by the wonder of a transmigration, at ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... highest Self the nature of the meditating subject has to be ascertained no less than the nature of the object of meditation and of the mode of meditation. The question then arises whether the meditating Self is to be viewed as the knowing, doing, and enjoying Self, subject to transmigration; or as that Self which Prajapati describes (Ch. Up. VIII, 1), viz. a Self free from all sin and imperfection.—Some hold the former view, on the ground that the meditating Self is within a body. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... these, and there were many such, threw an air of mystery round the sweeps, and produced for them some of those good effects which animals derive from the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. No one (except the masters) thought of ill-treating a sweep, because no one knew who he might be, or what nobleman's or gentleman's son he might turn out. Chimney-sweeping was, by many believers in the marvellous, considered as a sort of probationary term, at an earlier or later ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Orphic Mysteries, where it was a secret doctrine ([Greek: aporretos logos], Plat. Phaedr. 62) that "we men are here in a kind of prison," or in a tomb ([Greek: sema tines to soma einai tes psyches, os tethammenes en to paronti], Plat. Crat. 400). They also believed in transmigration of souls, and in a [Greek: kuklos tes geneseos] (rota fati et generationis). The "Orphic life," or rules of conduct enjoined upon these mystics, comprised asceticism, and, in particular, abstinence from flesh; and laid great stress on "following of God" [Greek: ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... been from the south of China, probably." He seemed to be talking to himself. "There's a considerable sprinkling of the belief down there, I've heard. It's an uncanny business—this transmigration ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... not certain but that, as the Egyptians also, they were believers in transmigration; and that this belief exists yet among the aborigines. I have noticed that my Indians were unwilling to kill any animal whatever, even the most noxious and dangerous, that inhabits the ruined monuments. I have often told them to kill some venomous insect ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... is right in saying that they are all of Oriental origin. Pythagoras borrowed from thence his kindred theory of the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. But he was more consistent than modern philosophers; he recognised a downward development as well as an upward, and made morality and immorality the crisis and turning-point of change—a bold lion developed into a brave warrior, a ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... we think might have happened to us, and may yet. So as we read, we unconsciously slip into the life of the other man and confuse our identity with his. To put yourself in his place is the only way to understand and appreciate him. It is imagination that gives us this faculty of transmigration of souls; and to have imagination is to be universal; not to have it is to be provincial. Let me see—wouldn't you rather be a citizen of the Universe than a citizen of Peoria, Illinois, which modest town the actors always speak of as being one ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... twenty-eight parts, the zodiac of the moon, and to bless the constellations who refreshed, with salutary rains, the thirst of the desert. The reign of the heavenly orbs could not be extended beyond the visible sphere; and some metaphysical powers were necessary to sustain the transmigration of souls and the resurrection of bodies: a camel was left to perish on the grave, that he might serve his master in another life; and the invocation of departed spirits implies that they were still endowed with consciousness and power. I am ignorant, and I am careless, of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... heard of the Persian's Realm of Light, his Paradise across the bridge Chinevat, where only the good go, the thought haunted me; insomuch that in the day, as in the night, I brooded over the comparative ideas Eternal Transmigration and Eternal Life in Heaven. If, as my teacher taught, God was just, why was there no distinction between the good and the bad? At length it became clear to me, a certainty, a corollary of the law to which I reduced pure religion, that death was only the point ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... milk by the pectoral glands. Secondly, because from the analogy of all organic life, whatever has composed a part of a vegetable or animal may again after its chemical solution become a part of another vegetable or animal, such is the general transmigration of matter. And thirdly, because the great use of lime in agriculture on almost all kinds of soil and situation cannot be satisfactorily explained from its chemical properties alone. Though these may also in certain soils and situations have ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... all is that women can love such men instead of regarding them as spider-like monsters that, were the doctrine of transmigration true, would become spiders again as soon as compelled ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... anybody who could instruct him in them. 'Those who fear death, presuppose that they know it.... Perhaps death may be an indifferent thing; perhaps a desirable one. However, one may believe that, if it be a transmigration from one place to another, it will be an amelioration ... and free us from having any more to do with wicked and corrupt judges. If it be a consummation (aneantissement) [31] of our being, it is also an amelioration to enter into a ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... judges of the dead pronounce sentence on the worth of the soul after it has been weighed by the goddess of truth and Thoth, who holds the office of writer in heaven, she could hope to meet her dear ones again, but only in case her unjustified soul were not obliged to enter on the career of transmigration through the bodies of different animals, and her body, to whom the soul had been entrusted, remained in a state of preservation. This, "if" filled her with a feverish restlessness. The doctrine that the well-being of the soul depended on the preservation of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
