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More "Metempsychosis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the ideas dear to Pierre Leroux was that of immortality, but an immortality which had very little in common with Christianity. According to it, we should live again after death, but in humanity and in another world. The idea of metempsychosis was very much in vogue at this epoch. According to Jean Reynaud and Lamennais, souls travelled from star to star, but Pierre Leroux believed ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... put it to him in such an abstract form. Instinctively, when he talked to the boy, he adapted himself to his mode of thought;—ancient legends, the material and profound fancies of old cosmogonies were called to mind: half in fun, half in earnest, he spoke of metempsychosis and the succession of countless forms through which the soul passes and flows, like a spring passing from pool to pool. All this was interspersed with reminiscences of Christianity and images taken from the summer evening, the light of which was ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... to be the temperature itself; Trismegistus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Homer, Pindarus, Phaerecides Syrus, Epictetus, with the Chaldees and Egyptians, affirmed the soul to be immortal, as did those British [997]Druids of old. The [998]Pythagoreans defend Metempsychosis; and Palingenesia, that souls go from one body to another, epota prius Lethes unda, as men into wolves, bears, dogs, hogs, as they were inclined in their lives, or participated ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... this comment, ere it wrote, Thou hast so spirited, elixir'd, we Conceive there is a noble alchymie, That's turning of this gold to something more Pretious than gold, we never knew before. Who now shall doubt the metempsychosis Of the great Author, that shall peruse this? Let others dream thy shadow wandering strays In th' Elizian mazes hid with bays; Or that, snatcht up in th' upper region, 'Tis kindled there a constellation; I have inform'd me, and declare with ease THY ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... epistemai gignontai). That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us—the doctrine namely of metempsychosis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Zerffi, too, whose varied orations on history and other topics have filled our Crystal Palace with his advanced wisdom for fifteen years. There is Birch the sculptor, author of the "Godiva" and "The Last Call," exhibited here, and well appreciated by me as another Durham,—really a metempsychosis of character. Among literary ladies here I may mention as my friends Madame Zerffi, Miss Mary Hooper, and Miss Ellen Barlee,—all noted in their several departments, the first as an eloquent lecturer like her husband, the second known by her domestic essays, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... some strange way to be dominated by the shade of Cleopatra. Now, if I believed in metempsychosis, I should think you were Mark Antony brought down to date. There, with that present sober air of yours, you'd pass anywhere for such an anachronism. But to be serious, and to give you advice which is positively bilious with ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... Plato, in his own way, represented the individuality of a man as a free act.[1] He represented him as coming into the world with a given tendency, which was the result of the feelings and character already attaching to him in accordance with the doctrine of metempsychosis. The Brahmin philosophers also express the unalterable fixity of innate character in a mystical fashion. They say that Brahma, when a man is produced, engraves his doings and sufferings in written characters on his skull, and that ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... with the stupendous change which is literally wrought. It is true, the soul may remain the same, but a new body is actually given to it by the interposition of vestiary talent: and this is what we have always believed to be the genuine meaning of the metempsychosis ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... about to die. In the same way, from the grave of one unjustly executed white lilies are said to spring as a token of the person's innocence; and from that of a maiden, three lilies which no one save her lover must gather. The sex, moreover, it may be noted, is kept up even in this species of metempsychosis[31]. Thus, in a Servian folk-song, there grows out of the youth's body a green fir, out of the maiden's a red rose, which entwine together. Amongst further instances quoted by Grimm, we are told how, "a child carries home a bud which the angel had given him in the wood, when the rose blooms the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... at Lhassa the Dalai Lama told me that a virtuous cow-hippopotamus by metempsychosis might, under unfavourable circumstances, become an undergraduate of the Calcutta University, and that, when patent-leather shoes and English supervened, the thing was a Baboo. [This sounds very plausible; but how about the prehensile tail which the Education Department finds ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... that to be sentimental, and for sentiment of every kind he has a profound abhorrence. His view of himself is, I suppose, of a brilliant and capable man who holds his own and makes himself felt. The only result on the mind, from contemplating him, is that one revels in the possibility of metempsychosis and pictures him as being born again to some dreary and thankless occupation, a scavenger or a sewer-cleaner, or, better still, penned in the body of some absurd and inefficient animal, a slug or a jelly-fish, where he might learn ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... therefore, I came, as to a new world, so completely had I been separated from it during the two last years. It was as if one of the spirits in the metempsychosis imagined by Fourier, had returned to the brilliant sphere from which death had driven him in temporary exile. I was at first enchanted, intoxicated. The mental activity which had seemed so intense in the sluggish province, needed to be quickened fourfold to keep abreast of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... let me 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the oriental dreams of metempsychosis—that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of immortal souls into divers creatures. This confusion was worse confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and the North, by shadowy remnants of a symbolical worship ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... No, 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 ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... it. In literature, as in music, there is at times a certain indescribable tone of absolute reality which carries the reader away and for the moment absorbs him into the mind of the writer. Some metempsychosis takes place. It is no longer a man or a woman turning the pages of a book, it is a human being suddenly absorbed by the book itself, living the very life which it records, breathing the spirit and ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... him to revisit the glimpses of the moon; and soon after his demise, a great raven actually flying or hopping in at the Duchess of Kendal's window at Twickenham, she chose to imagine the king's spirit inhabited these plumes, and took special care of her sable visitor. Affecting metempsychosis—funereal royal bird! How pathetic is the idea of the duchess weeping over it! When this chaste addition to our English aristocracy died, all her jewels, her plate, her plunder went over to her relations in Hanover. I wonder whether her heirs took the bird, and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of George Herbert's intellectual and moral character repeat themselves in Emerson that if I believed in metempsychosis I should think that the English saint had reappeared in the American philosopher. Their features have a certain resemblance, but the type, though an exceptional and fine one, is not so very rare. I found a portrait in the National Gallery which was a good specimen of it; the bust of a near ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... decree, which he handed to Miao Shan. It read as follows: "I, the august Emperor, make known to you this decree: Miao Chuang, King of Hsing Lin, forgetful alike of Heaven and Hell, the six virtues, and metempsychosis, has led a blameworthy life; but your nine years of penitence, the filial piety which caused you to sacrifice your own body to effect his cure, in short, all your virtues, have redeemed his faults. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... The house belonged to a great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a flight from the troubles, in his own cook's dress, and got across the borders. A mere beast of the chase flying from hunters, he was still in his metempsychosis no other than the same Monseigneur, the preparation of whose chocolate for whose lips had once occupied three strong men besides the ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... resplendent and gone down grotesque in these last thirty years. Mrs. Hobart had no end of old relics,—bandbaskets packed full of venerable bonnets, that in their close gradation of change seemed like one individual Indur passing through a metempsychosis of millinery; nests of old hats that were odder than the bonnets; swallow-tailed coats; broad-skirted blue ones with brass buttons; baby waists and basquines; leg-of-mutton sleeves, balloons, and military; collars inch-wide ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... admitted to most frequent intercourse with him. He was the favourite animal of superstition, and a few tales of him are still current. These, however, are not of much interest or variety, the leading ideas in them being these: That the great seal is a human soul, or a fallen angel in metempsychosis, and that to him who is remarkable for hostility to the phocal race some fatal retribution will ensue. I can easily conceive the feeling of awe with which a fisherman would be impressed when, in the sombre ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... mourning; to breathe day after day the atmosphere of wretchedness; to grow familiar with suffering; to look upon humanity disrobed of its pride and glory, robbed of all its fictitious ornaments, —weak, helpless, naked,—and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosis from its erect and godlike image, the living temple of an enshrined divinity, to the loathsome clod and the inanimate dust. Of what ghastly secrets of moral and physical disease is he the depositary! There is woe before him and behind him; he is hand and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... aver that, although Bruno did not enforce the doctrine of metempsychosis, he held it to be very well worthy of consideration. There is perhaps a distinction without a difference between the terms "immortality of the soul," and the "indestructibility of the monad," an expression dear to Bruno's followers, and frequently ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... texts. The want of it in the latter has been a stumbling-block in the way of all previous translators. Remusat says in a note that "the heretics limited themselves to speak of the duties of man in his actual life without connecting it by the notion that the metempsychosis with the anterior periods of existence through which he had passed." But this is just the opposite of what Fa-hien's meaning was, according to our Corean text. The notion of "the metempsychosis" was just that in which all ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... fish—see, many are still moving; you must let them die quietly. Is it not a sin to kill any living thing?" "Go and bake your bread," we replied, "and leave us alone. Have you not got rid of your ideas of metempsychosis yet, eh? Do you still believe that men are turned into beasts, and beasts into men?" The features of our Dchiahour relaxed into a broad grin. "Ho-le! Ho-le!" said he, slapping his forehead; "what a blockhead I am—what was I thinking about? I had forgotten the doctrine,"... and he ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... prefer staying just where I am. Beulah, put down that window, will you? Mary must think that I have been converted into a Polar bear; and, mother, have some coal brought up. If there is any truth in the metempsychosis of the Orient, I certainly was a palm tree or a rhinoceros in the last stage of my existence." She shivered, and wrapped a heavy shawl ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... pass into a succession of other bodies, of animals or men. From the nakedness and desolation of unclothed spirit, and the possibility which this notion held out of some close contact with a holy and just judge, the soul shrank back to the hope of the metempsychosis, and hoped rather to dwell in the body of a brute, than be utterly unclothed and mingle with spirits. This is the delusion cherished by the people of India and many other lands to this day. How unsatisfactory to the dying sinner this uncertainty. "Tell me," said a wealthy Hindoo, who had ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... of metempsychosis, 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 ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... see De Guignes, tom. ii. p. 416, 417, the Index Geographicus of Schultens and Tavernier, Voyages, p. i. p. 308, 309. The Ayoubites descended from the tribe of the Rawadiaei, one of the noblest; but as they were infected with the heresy of the Metempsychosis, the orthodox sultans insinuated that their descent was only on the mother's side, and that their ancestor was a stranger ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against. This character had come upon him through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him. The discovery—aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be married ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... would be just as like as each other too, and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have to be another—their enemies are not ours. There is a moral metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of us—not less, but more—more, as we are again and again told on Sundays from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... found uncoloured by fables which illustrate it and lend it a motive by which it can justify itself verbally. Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ's suffering for every sinner, are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth everywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate, although they ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... to life in this world first as a worm or insect, then successively as a higher animal and a human being, first diseased or maimed and finally perfect. No parallel has yet been quoted to this account of metempsychosis. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... particular originality in this part of his teaching. It all depends on the doctrine of transmigration or rebirth (παλιγγενεσια {palingenesia}), which is often incorrectly designated by the late and inaccurate term 'metempsychosis'. There is no doubt that Pythagoras taught this, and also the rule of abstinence from animal flesh which is its natural corollary, but such ideas had been well known in many parts of Greece before his time. The real difficulty is to see the connexion ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... combined with the brute, as in the winged bulls of Nineveh and the sphinxes of Egypt. Man is regarded simply as a part of nature, he does not rise above the plane of animal life. The soul has its immortality only in an eternal metempsychosis—a cycle of life which sweeps through all the brute creation. But in Grecian sculpture we have less of nature, more of man; less of massiveness, more of grace and elegance; less repose, and more of action. Now the connection ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... influence of Rousseau—and from it Fourier's discovery is the clue to lead humanity forth into the epoch in which harmony begins to emerge. But men who have lived in the bad ages need not be pitied, and those who live to-day need not be pessimistic. For Fourier believed in metempsychosis, and could tell you, as if he were the private secretary of the Deity calculating the arithmetical details of the cosmic plan, how many very happy, tolerably happy, and unhappy lives fall to the lot of each soul during the whole 81,000 years. Nor does the prospect end with the life of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... or punishment according as his works are good or bad. It is easy to see that scattered ideas like these with regard to the destiny of the soul of man according to the sacrifice that he performs or other good or bad deeds form the first rudiments of the later doctrine of metempsychosis. The idea that man enjoys or suffers, either in another world or by being born in this world according to his good or bad deeds, is the first beginning of the moral idea, though in the Brahmanic days the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... "That is metempsychosis," interrupted Sonia, with a reminiscence of her early lessons. "The Egyptians believed that our souls had once inhabited the bodies of animals, and would return to animals again ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... soul must suffer for my sin, Impose some end to my incessant pain; Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last [263] be sav'd! No end is limited to damned souls. Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why is this immortal that thou hast? O, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true, This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd Into some brutish beast! all beasts are happy, For, when they die, Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements; But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell. Curs'd be the parents that engender'd ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... horrible. In the horrible occasionally is the sublime. To Gotama it was merely absurd. He blew on it. Abruptly, the categories of the infinite, the infant gods, shapes divine and demoniac, the entire phantasmagoria of metempsychosis, seemed really absorbed and Brahm himself ablated. For a moment the skies, sterilized by a breath, seemingly were vacant. Actually they were never more peopled. Behind the pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods were ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... belief in individual immortality any criterion. Theosophists, rejecting vicarious atonement so sternly that they insist that the smallest of our sins brings its Karma, also insist on individual immortality and metempsychosis in order to provide an unlimited field for Karma to be worked out by the unredeemed sinner. The belief in the prolongation of individual life beyond the grave is far more real and vivid among table-rapping Spiritualists than among conventional ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... destruction within himself of all human passions and inclinations. His self-torture is undertaken for the object of absorption into Nirvana, only to be reached by reducing the mind and heart to absolute indifference to every animal desire, and thus to escape the eternal revolution of metempsychosis. "No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself," is a maxim incomprehensible to a Buddhist. As Mr. Landon says: "The spiritual brigandage of the Lamas finds its counterpart in many other creeds, but it would be unjust not to record in the strongest ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... activities. Not only primitive man, but those also who are often far advanced in mental development, attribute souls to animals, and find it difficult to believe otherwise—as witness the totemistic systems followed by theories of metempsychosis. And Darwinism, far from destroying these old ideas, has simply furnished a scientific ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... intend to write the following pages entirely for my own amusement, and as they will most probably never meet the eye of mortal man, who alone can decipher them, it is unnecessary for me to make any observations on the doctrine of metempsychosis, to which indeed my reader (if there shall ever be one) may perhaps not be inclined to give implicit belief. It is unnecessary for me, therefore, to begin by alluding to my former visit to this earth. I shall not even hint, whether if it ever took place, it was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... destruction of the body, give rise, along with the presentiment of another life, to the first idea of God. Death teaches eternity and proves irrefragably the existence of a power superior to that of man. The belief in metempsychosis, in the migration of the soul, in other spheres, in reward and punishment according to the works done by men in the flesh, arose among nations in accordance with the degree of civilisation which they had attained. Among the least civilised these doctrines exist ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... human events, and from which it was impossible to escape. In India Fate was rather an inevitable consequence of actions done in births antecedent to one's present state of existence, and was therefore connected with the doctrine of metempsychosis. A misfortune was for the most part a punishment, an expiation of ancient faults ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... He pawed, he hawed, he kicked, all the while glancing at the sons of Jerusalem, and braying louder and more discordant every moment. I could not understand the mule's idiosyncrasies. Possibly, I thought, the doctrine of the metempsychosis may be true, and this brute, in the early stages of its development, once have been in love. He has a fit on him now, I fancied—he is once more possessed of a petticoat. Why not? If love converts men into ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... 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 ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... that there were at first no other gods than the dead. Even when Japanese ancestor-worship evolved a mythology, its gods were only transfigured ghosts,—and this is the history of all mythology. The ideas of heaven and hell did not exist among the primitive Japanese, nor any notion of metempsychosis. The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth—a late borrowing—was totally inconsistent with the archaic Japanese beliefs, and required an elaborate metaphysical system to support it. But we may suppose the early ideas of the Japanese about the dead to have been much [56] like those of ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Evolution of Souls becomes possible only by the process of Metempsychosis (pronounced me-temp-si-ko-sis) which is more commonly known as Reincarnation, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the Old Testament. For instance, it is a disputed point whether the immortality of the soul is taught in the Hebrew canon, but in the Kabbalah it is taken for granted, and a complete and consistent psychology is propounded, in which is included the Oriental theory of metempsychosis. This account of the human soul, as distinct from the human body, treats of the origin and eternal destiny of man's immortal part. On the other hand God and Nature, and the connection between the Creator and the creation, are most exactly treated of in detail. God is the En-Soph, the ...
— Hebrew Literature
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