Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/513

No. 5.] Knight, of St. Andrews, says: "It has lain at the heart of all Indian speculation on the subject, time out of mind. It is one of the cardinal doctrines of the Vedas, and one of the roots of Buddhist belief. The ancient Egyptians held it. It is prominent in their great classic, the Book of the Dead. In Persia, it colored the whole stream of Zoroastrian thought. The Magi taught it. The Jews brought it with them from the captivity in Babylon. Many of the Essenes and Pharisees held it. Though foreign to the genius both of Judaism and Christianity, it has had its advocates (as Delitzsch puts it) as well in the synagogue as in the church. The Cabbala teaches it emphatically. The Apocrypha sanctions it, and it is to be found scattered throughout the Talmud. In Greece, Pythagoras proclaimed it, receiving the hint probably both from Egypt and the East; Empedocles taught it; Plato worked it out elaborately, not as a mythical doctrine embodying a moral truth, but as a philosophical theory or conviction. It passed over into the Neo-Platonic School at Alexandria. Philo held it. Plotinus and Porphyry in the third century, Jamblicus in the fourth, Hierocles and Proclus in the fifth, all advocated it in various ways; and an important modification of the Platonic doctrine took place amongst the Alexandrians, when Porphyry limited the range of metempsychosis, denying that the souls of men ever passed downwards to a lower than the human state. Many of the fathers of the Christian Church espoused it; notably Origen. It was one of the Gnostic doctrines. The Manichaeans received it, with much else, from their Zoroastrian predecessors. It was held by Nemesius, who emphatically declares that all the Greeks who believed in immortality believed also in metempsychosis. There are hints of it in Boethius. Though condemned, in its Origenistic form, by the Council of Constantinople in 551, it passed along the stream of Christian theology, and reappeared amongst the Scholastics in Erigena and Bonaventura. It was defended with much learning and acuteness by several of the Cambridge Platonists, especially by Henry More. Glanvill devotes a curious treatise to it, the Lux Orientalis. English clergy and Irish bishops were found ready to espouse it. Many English poets,