"Transmigration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Such a complex elaboration takes time, since it involves a previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the heavens and all parts of the world. Hence arose the belief in transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation, which was ultimately constituted by fetishism. The comparative study of languages shows that including the Aryan and Semitic races, the belief in spirits was developed ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... went through the judgment of the soul before Osiris: "The resurrection of the dead to a second life had been a deep-rooted religious opinion among the Egyptians from the earliest times" ("Egyptian Mythology," Sharpe, p. 52), and they appear to have believed in a transmigration of souls through the lower animals, and an ultimate return to the original body; to this end they preserved the body as a mummy, so that the soul, on its return, might find its original habitation still in existence: ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... 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
... 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 as orator, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... have faintly indicated the woman's armpit as a centre of sexual attraction, it is among Eastern poets that we may find the idea more directly and naturally expressed. Thus, in a Chinese drama ("The Transmigration of Yo-Chow," Mercure de France, No. 8, 1901) we find a learned young doctor addressing the following ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ultimate form, must rather be termed a Cosmodicy. For, although Buddhism recognizes gods many and lords many, they are products of the cosmic process; and transitory, however long enduring, manifestations of its eternal activity. In the doctrine of transmigration, whatever its origin, Brahminical and Buddhist speculation found, ready to hand[Note 4] the means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man. If this world is full of pain and sorrow; ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... and Indian the conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature. Instead of bringing in a verdict of guilty, they attempted reconciliation in various ways. Indian speculation invented or elaborated the theory of transmigration, in which the Karma or soul-character passed from individual to individual, the algebraic sums of happiness in the whole chain being proportional to merit. The Stoics were metaphysicians and imagined an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... physical impossibilities, too. A sub-commissary of the Intendence, an agreeable and cultivated bachelor in kerseymere breeches, Hessian boots, and a blue coat embroidered with silver lace, who affected to believe in the transmigration of souls, suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence. The feud was in the forgotten past. It might have been something quite inconceivable in the present state of their being; but their souls remembered the animosity, and manifested an ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... 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, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... first place, so far from being based on exact thought, Buddhism takes for its very foundation four great mysteries, that are explicitly beyond the reach either of proof or reason; and of these the foremost and most intelligible is the transmigration and renewal of the existence of the individual. It is by this mystical doctrine, and by this alone, that Buddhism gains a hold on the common heart of man. This is the great fulcrum of its lever. Then further—and this is more important ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... generous Passion brings to those, whose Hearts are capable of receiving its soft Impressions; for 'tis not every one that can be sensible of its tender Touches. How many Examples, from History and Observation, could I give of its wondrous Power; nay, even to a Degree of Transmigration! How many Idiots has it made wise! How many Fools eloquent! How many home-bred Squires accomplish'd! How many Cowards brave! And there is no sort of Species of Mankind on whom it cannot work some Change and Miracle, if it be a noble well-grounded ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... truth of the doctrine of transmigration occurred recently in Chaotong and is worth recording. A cow was killed near the south gate on whose intestine—and this fact can be attested by all who saw it—was written plainly and unmistakably the character "Wong," which proved, they told me, that the ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... all systems of religion which held the doctrine of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, should be considered as believing in a middle state of purgation, since they maintained the necessity of the soul's further purification, after death, before it was permitted to ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... partial extinction by being merged in the Supreme, not to be confounded with Pari-nirwna or absolute annihilation. In the former also, dying gives birth to a new being, the embodiment of karma (deeds), good and evil, done in the countless ages of transmigration. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... transmigration of souls was still the basic fact but methods of obtaining release were now much clearer. A man was born, died and then was born again. If he acted well, did his duty and worked ceaselessly for good, he followed what was known as the ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... private rights —those of traffic and barter as well as those of inheritance.(34) Presumably about the same time the full right of free migration allowed to the Latin communities hitherto established—the title of every one of their burgesses to gain by transmigration to Rome full burgess-rights there—was, for the Latin colonies of later erection, restricted to those persons who had attained to the highest office of the community in their native home; these alone ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... redemption into that wondrous realm from which we wander farthest when we try to take it by force." For this realm he chooses death and night as symbols, but what he means to imply is the nirvana of Buddhistic philosophy, the final deliverance of the soul from transmigration. Such love as that of Tristan and Isolde presented itself to Wagner as ceaseless struggle and endless contradiction, and for this problem nirvana alone offers a happy outcome; it means ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 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
... is a disposition in certain minds to associate lycanthropy with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. A brief examination of the latter will, however, suffice to show there is very ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... looking up a quotation for Felix in Southey's Doctor, lit on his quaint theory of the human soul having previously migrated through successive stages of vegetable and animal life, and still retaining something characteristic from each transmigration. Her brothers were a good deal tickled with the idea; and Lance exclaimed, 'I know who must have been rhubarb, queen-wasp, and ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... these 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
... Burmese are celebrated. Great rivalry arises as to which village shall be fortunate enough, through its representative, to set the gorgeous canopy on fire, and thereby release the good man's departed spirit and send it straight to heaven without any further transmigration or trouble. This happy consummation is supposed to occur directly the large funeral pile, which is always of highly inflammable materials, takes fire. The result is that many accidents occur, besides a great deal of heart-burning ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... mad Fellows appear 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Basilides taught the transmigration of souls as an explanation of human suffering. Cf. Origen in Ep. ad Rom., V: "I [Paul], he says, died [Rom. 7:9], for now sin began to be reckoned unto me. But Basilides, not noticing that these things ought to be understood of the natural law, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Buddha—the one eternal and universal soul—the principle and end of all things, and of whom all things are the partial and temporary manifestations. All animated beings are divided into classes, that have each of them in their power the means of sanctification, so as to obtain, after death, transmigration into a higher class, until, at last, they enjoy plenitude of being by absorption into the eternal soul of Buddha. This doctrine, simple enough when explained by the superior class of Buddhists, is overlaid with superstitions for ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— An Extract out of Josephus's Discourse to The Greeks Concerning Hades • Flavius Josephus
... person who has emanated from the Godhead, Brahma. Br[a]hmas or theists, believers in Brahma, are a religious body that originated in Bengal in the nineteenth century. Repudiating caste, idolatry, and transmigration, they are necessarily cut off from Hinduism. The body is called the Br[a]hma Sam[a]j, that is, the Theistic Association. Enough for the present; in their respective places these distinctions can be more ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... echoed through the whole country, and the transmigration of the Pandour Trenck, from earth to heaven, by St. Francis, proclaimed. The clue to this labyrinth of miracles, known only to me, is truly as follows:—He possessed the secret of what is called the aqua tofana, and had determined ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... 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 of manners had grown to ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... 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 before he's a ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Domitian, had insulted, with impunity, the Majesty of Rome. [14] To the strength and fierceness of barbarians they added a contempt for life, which was derived from a warm persuasion of the immortality and transmigration of the soul. [15] Decebalus, the Dacian king, approved himself a rival not unworthy of Trajan; nor did he despair of his own and the public fortune, till, by the confession of his enemies, he had exhausted every ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment as to which it shall be. If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach; but for souls there is no transmigration out of fables. Once a soul, forever a soul,—mean or mighty, shrivelled or full, it is for you to say. Money, land, luxury, so far as they are money, land, and luxury, are worthless. It is only as fast and as far ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... that such heroical souls, who have wanted but little of true greatness, are hereafter by some strait discipline brought to a better mind; perhaps, as many ancients have held with the Indian Gymnosophists, by transmigration into the bodies of those animals whom they have resembled in their passions; and indeed, if Sir Thomas Stukely's soul should now animate the body of a lion, all I can say is that he would be a very valiant and royal lion; and also doubtless become in due time heartily ashamed ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... castle-like edifices, from which the smoke of burning 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 ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... 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
... day before yesterday he'd be here to-day. I haven't been very polite to Mr. Fielding, but he has no reason to expect me to be polite. I've told him I would never marry him and there wasn't the slightest use in coming here, but I might as well talk to the wind. If for him there's to be transmigration, he'll be a rubber ball next time. He's as persistent as John—that is, as John used to be. For nearly six months John has forgotten he ever wanted to marry me. I understand he and Lily Deford have become great friends. Mrs. Deford never loses an opportunity of telling ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... possibilities of recognition in heaven," said Mr. 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 not lose the saddest memory of love for worlds. This assurance of ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... electric force within himself to such an extent that he was able to use it as a healing power. There seemed to me to be really nothing extraordinary in it. The only part of Cellini's narration I did not credit was the soul-transmigration he professed to have experienced; and I put that down to the over-excitement of his imagination at the time of his first interview with Heliobas. But I kept this thought to myself. In any case, I resolved to go to Paris. The great desire ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... modern doctrine of the Correlation and Homogenity of all Forces clearly proves that they are not many, but one—"a dynamic self-identity masked by transmigration."—Martineau's "Essays," pp. 134-144.] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... genius, and a genealogy may be traced among their races. Men of genius in their different classes, living at distinct periods, or in remote countries, seem to reappear under another name; and in this manner there exists in the literary character an eternal transmigration. In the great march of the human intellect the same individual spirit seems still occupying the same place, and is still carrying on, with the same powers, his great work through a line of centuries. It was on this principle that one great poet has ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... sent him on his journey. To him the gulf between then and now was so wide and blank that it might have been twelve weeks, or twelve months, or twelve years. It had been the night of the birth of a new creature, of the transmigration of a soul; it had no measurement in time, and threw all that preceded it into the mists of ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... bonds of society loosened. The old frontiers of states and lands passed away. As a whole city is turned into a ruinous heap by an earthquake, so the whole political system of previous times was overthrown by this massive transmigration. A new order of things had to be formed corresponding to the wholly ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... 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
... the just or the steps of the throne of God, but it is as if you were walking in the bazaars of Paradise—one of those Buddhist Paradises where the souls of the moderately pure find temporary rest from the whirl of transmigration, where the very lotus flowers are golden and the leaves of the trees are golden bells that tinkle in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... excitement, indigestion or other causes, the Bororos had visions, which they attributed to the Aroe Taurari. In a certain way they were believers in the transmigration of the soul—not generally, ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... "beet-masters to the new," and was far advanced in the history of a velvet cloak belonging to the late Milnwood, which had first been converted to a velvet doublet, and then into a pair of breeches, and appeared each time as good as new, when Morton interrupted her account of its transmigration to bid ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the same as those of the community. There were still, however, about a dozen free republics, most of them with aristocratic government, and it was in these that reforming movements met with most approval and support. A convenient belief in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls satisfied the unfortunate that their woes were the natural result of their own deeds in a former birth, and, though unavoidable now, might be escaped in a future state of existence by present good conduct. While hoping for a better fate in their next birth, the poor turned for succour ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... original body; but on my mentioning the circumstance to my father, 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, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... the real necessity of forming to ourselves a concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to ignore them and not ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... his mind, Hygiene and Luxury combined. He was, if I may put it so, A Saurian Abednigo. He loved to climb with nimble ease The branches of the Gas-log Trees Where oft on chilly winter nights He rose to dizzy Fahrenheits. Believers in Soul Transmigration See in him the Re-incarnation Of those Sad Plagues of summer, who Ask, "Is it hot ...
— The Mythological Zoo • Oliver Herford
... shooting; and squinted, and sniffed, and peered, 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, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Souls 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 in the fifteenth Book of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... earth he would hang a bottle on the wall at night and jump into it, emerging on the following morning. He frequently returned to earth, and at times tried to bring about the transmigration of others. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... potency, to its superior faculty of 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... sovereign-kings! there is a transmigration of souls; in you, is a marvelous destiny. The eagle of Romara revives in your own mountain bird, and once more is plumed for her flight. Her screams are answered by the vauntful cries of a hawk; his ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... is another and much more effective way of transmigration by the kind assistance of the ant who colonizes the scalebug as well for its wax as it colonizes the Aphis for its honey. Birds on their feathers and the gardener himself on his dress ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... ears of maize in tombs, which, judging from their construction, belong to a period anterior to the dynasty of the Incas; and these were fragments of two kinds of maize which do not now grow in Peru. If I believed in the transmigration and settlement of Asiatic races on the west coast of America, I should consider it highly probable that maize, cotton, and the banana, had been brought from Asia to the great west coast. But the supposed epoch of this alleged immigration must carry us back to the earliest ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... to Egypt that Pythagoras owed his favourite doctrine of the Metempsychosis or transmigration of souls.(340) The Egyptians believed, that at the death of men their souls transmigrated into other human bodies; and that, if they had been vicious, they were imprisoned in the bodies of unclean or ill-conditioned beasts, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... 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
... 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 the sentiments ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... reminiscences. Rats were a favourite topic with him, and he would never allow one to be killed if he could help it, for he claimed for them that they were the souls of drowned sailors, hence their love of ships and their habit of leaving them when they became unseaworthy. He was a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, some idea of which he had, no doubt, picked up in Eastern ports, and gave his shivering auditors to understand that his arrangements for his own immediate ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... 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 ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... and dead and living were the same? And do you remember what Ayesha swore, that she would come again—yes, to this world; and how could that be except by re-birth, or, what is the same thing, by the transmigration of the spirit?" ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 theories, I keep ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... literature,[49] especially since the appearance of the important work of Von Schroeder.[50] Further fundamental mathematical notions such as the conception of irrationals and the use of gnomons, as well as the philosophical doctrine of the transmigration of souls,—all of these having long been attributed to the Greeks,—are shown in these works to be native to India. Although this discussion does not bear directly upon the {14} origin of our numerals, yet it is highly pertinent as showing the aptitude ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... dance, they all believe in the after life of the soul. This belief is as much a PART of any man, ever born in any location, as his hands and his feet. Whether he believes his soul enters a cat and works back to man again after long transmigration, or goes to a Happy Hunting Ground as our Indians, makes no difference with the fact that he enters this world with belief in after life of some kind. We see material evidence in increase that man is not defeated in his desire to reproduce himself; we have advanced to something better ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... 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 ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... heart desired, a life hereafter without any suffering. Through her life as a vegetarian she would be accumulating merit day by day, and would be able to lay up such a large store for herself that she would not have to pass through all the usual stages of transmigration in the next world, but would be able to go straight to the goal she had set before her, the "Western ...
— Everlasting Pearl - One of China's Women • Anna Magdalena Johannsen
... chance would ever bring them together. Unlikely. Because he had nothing else to do at the moment, he amused himself by a process of transposition, of transmigration. He imagined Clyde Burnaby in Sheila's place, riding Beaver Boy over the brown swells, along the narrow trails and abrupt rises of the foothills, raising several hundred chickens, helping with the housework, the mending—all the daily feminine chores that fell ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... are anything like as anxious to get into our old attic as we were. That is not likely. To us it meant romance, even a kind of sorcery—a bodily transmigration ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... 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 drunken sot developed into ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... whole edition to his memory? I think it would. The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive the dedication of my life's work. At the same time, it is very odd—it really looks like the transmigration of souls—I feel that I must do something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone. It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what condition the stone is. If it be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... belief in the transmigration of souls did not extend, I was glad to find, beyond the mothers, whom nothing could induce to think otherwise. When we were at Preservation Island, there was a young woman on her way, in company with her father, to Port Dalrymple, to be married to a European; and I afterwards learned from ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... living, but because of their past conduct while in the body.* It did not attempt to teach the higher doctrine of successive rebirths,—which the people could not possibly have understood,—but the merely symbolic doctrine of transmigration, which everybody could understand. To die was not to melt back into nature, but to be reincarnated; and the character of the new body, as well as the conditions of the new existence, would depend upon the quality of one's deeds and thoughts in the present body. All ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... conduct in the mortal life. When I 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 of separation at which the wicked are ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Australians they carefully refrain from mentioning the name of anyone who is dead, and like them, believe in the transmigration of souls—after death they become Malays (the first strangers they had come in contact with) in precisely the same way as in New South Wales, etc. "When black fellow die, he jump ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... gods, the souls of 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 to ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... senses, which is a common phenomenon of the simple forms of mesmerism. If it is credible that a person in a mesmeric sleep can taste the sourness of the vinegar on another person's palate, I am ready to go the whole length of the transmigration of senses. But after all, except from hearing so much, I am as ignorant as you are, in my own experience. One of my sisters was thrown into a sort of swoon, and could not open her eyelids, though she heard what ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... is so complex and so dominant, that the animal is too merely an animal to him. To Indians the idea of the transmigration of the soul from animal to man, and man to animal, does not seem strange, and so from our scriptures pity for all sentient creatures has not been banished as a ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... or 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 ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... peculiar 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 ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... 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 its ecstasy,—and I tremble lest I have slain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... son of Panthous, a Trojan hero, who first wounded Patroclus, but was afterwards slain by Menelaus. Pythagoras, as part of his doctrine of the transmigration of souls, is said to have claimed to ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... work if there was carrying enough to accomplish that. This finished then and there was no more of that provision. The experience of this piling was such that to sit in front of more means enough to use all the time. This does not indicate research and it does not indicate transmigration. It indicates more than any obliteration. The whole example is such that if there is a way to ride there can be a stable and if two are not there they can travel. Three are separated and more are enough to use a casual bath. This meant every day and also exercise. One bed was ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... of penance, which was supposed to confer on the person practising it not merely personal sanctity, but even great supernatural powers, was very generally entertained among the Hindoos, and is often alluded to here; as is also transmigration, or the birth of the soul after death in a new body, human or brute. Sufferings or misfortunes are attributed to sins committed in a former existence, and in more than one story two persons are supposed to recollect having many years ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... of transmigration will hardly fail, after they have read this story, to think that the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe is once more ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... old man 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 ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... see our sport, Now find us tossed into a tennis-court. These walls but t'other day were filled with noise Of roaring gamesters and your dam'me boys; Then bounding balls and rackets they encompast, And now they're filled with jests, and flights, and bombast! I vow, I don't much like this transmigration, Strolling from place to place by circulation; Grant heaven, we don't return to our first station! I know not what these think, but for my part I can't reflect without an aching heart, How we should end in our original, a cart. But we can't ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... people don't sleep at a moment like this. Only I am consoling myself. Needs must, eh?... And then I am thinking of what is to come after.... Exactly. I have a little theory of my own about that. You wouldn't think it, to look at me, but I believe in metempsychosis, in the transmigration of souls. It would take too long to explain, however.... I say, boy ... suppose we shook hands before we part? You won't? Then good-bye. Good health and a long life ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... Nanaksa's thrice repeated laugh, also, could retain its vitality only in an atmosphere pervaded by a belief in the transmigration of souls. Buddhistic apologues have sometimes passed into legends of Christian Saints. But it would be difficult to perform the operation in the case of an account of how a woman, who had tormented to death her husband's sister, was justly punished by the reappearance in ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... the night 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 soul ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... another to-day to unadopt him 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 time, ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... 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 ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... done well here. Many sought the mysteries. I have been unusually successful in Riverbank." He stopped short and looked at Philo Gubb suspiciously. "You don't believe in transmigration, do ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... 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 to the initiated, and ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... But the stars also, which are treated in great detail in [Greek: peri archon] I. 7, belong to the number of the angels. This is a genuinely Greek idea. The doctrine of the preexistence of human souls was probably set forth by Clement in the Hypotyposes. The theory of the transmigration of souls was probably found there also (Phot. Biblioth. 109). In the Adumbrat., which has been preserved to us, the former doctrine is, however, contested and is not found in the Stromateis VI. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the reflection for ever, I should not have recognized either my form or visage. I thought my soul had undergone a real transmigration, and not carried to its new body a particle of the original one. What appeared the most singular was, that I did not seem even to myself at all a ridiculous or outre figure; so admirably had the skill of Mr. Jonson been employed. I overwhelmed ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... creation. It follows that all action tending to the reproduction of animal life is to be avoided, so that marriage was strongly discouraged. To the earlier views was added the doctrine of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, which, acting as a means of reward and retribution, seemed fully to account for man's sufferings. These views together explain the avoidance as food by the Cathari of everything which was the result of animal propagation, and ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... and the Society in the lifetime of its founder was subjected to persecution and dispersed by angry mobs. Pythagoras possessed a prodigious mind. He is best known for his teaching in reference to the transmigration of souls, but he was also a great mathematician and astronomer. He taught that "number is the essence of everything," and his philosophy recognized that the universe is governed by law. God he represented by the figure 1, matter by the figure 2, and ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... 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 ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... arose among them, these were settled in duly constituted courts of justice, presided over by a trained lawyer, called a brehon, instead of being settled by the stern arbitrament of force. Druidism was their pagan creed. They believed in the immortality and in the transmigration of souls; they worshipped the sun and moon, and they venerated mountains, rivers, and wells; and it would be difficult to find any ministers of religion who were held in greater ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... eminent 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 idea of the soul's immortality ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... never truly relish'd myself before. Give me your ears. Breeches Pythagorical, by reason of their transmigration into several shapes. ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... gentlemanly cat. A friend of mine, who believes in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, was convinced that he was Lord Chesterfield. He never clamoured for food, as other cats do. He would sit beside me at meals, and wait till he was served. He would eat only the knuckle-end of a leg of mutton, and would never look at over- done beef. A visitor of ours once ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... embraced the views of Pythagoras respecting the transmigration of souls, a doctrine which made the eating of animal food little better than cannibalism or parricide. But, even if any of his followers rejected this view, Sotion would still maintain that the eating of animals, if not ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... essential features Complexity of Egyptian polytheism Egyptian deities The worship of the sun The priestly caste of Egypt Power of the priests Future rewards and punishments Morals of the Egyptians Functions of the priests Egyptian ritual of worship Transmigration of souls Animal worship Effect of Egyptian polytheism on the Jews Assyrian deities Phoenician deities Worship of the sun Oblations and sacrifices Idolatry the sequence of polytheism Religion of the Persians Character of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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. For as long as the Self dwells within a body, it is a knower, doer, enjoyer, and so on, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... 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
... over this gulf Impassable, impervious; let us try Adventurous work, yet to thy power and mine Not unagreeable, to found a path Over this main from Hell to that new world, Where Satan now prevails; a monument Of merit high to all the infernal host, Easing their passage hence, for intercourse, Or transmigration, as their lot shall lead. Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn By this new-felt attraction and instinct. Whom thus the meager Shadow answered soon. Go, whither Fate, and inclination strong, Leads thee; I shall not lag behind, nor err The way, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton |
