This belief in transmigration, with the pessimism which is its inevitable concomitant, was wholly absent from their ancient Vedic faith. At intervals from the times of Pythagoras it has infected the religion and philosophy of the Western Aryans, but never to any extent or with any serious result. Its true habitat and breeding-place, like that of the cholera, is among the degraded and broken-down populations of the East. It was communicated from the native Indian races to the Hindus, who unfortunately were prepared to receive it through the depressing and degenerating influences of tropical life on a northern-born family. Anyway, while their more fortunate brethren were eagerly groping after, in their westward progress, the truth of immortality, and thirsting for more life and fuller, they in their fat Gangetic plains, wearied of life as something not worth having, yet dreading death because it was appointed unto man not once but many times to die, were seeking some way of deliverance from this inherited curse. And the Brahmans professed to point to it. Their earliest popular conception of deliverance was simply that of re-birth in a happier world, perchance secured by sacrificial rites and religious acts, but such a conception could not long satisfy, and eventually it gave way in the higher class of minds to nobler views. In India, as elsewhere, men soon became conscious of the more solid security of merit procured by a life of justice and mercy. Man’s future was in his own and not in the hands of a priest: its happiness or misery would be no accident, but the sure result of good or evil done here and now. Therefore the wise man endeavoured laboriously and continuously to collect merit by good deeds, “as the white ant builds her house, for with these as his guide he could hope to traverse a gloom hard to be crossed.”