Virgil believed that our death is not annihilation, but that it is a separation of two sorts of matters, the one thereof remains here below, and the other reunites to the sacred fire of the stars, as soon as the matter of which our soul is composed has reacquired all the purity of the subtle matter, from which it had emanated, _auræ simplicis ignem_. Nothing, Servius says, is lost in the great whole, and in the pure fire which constitutes the substance of the soul. Virgil says of the souls: _igneus est ollis vigor, et coelestis origo_; that they are formed of the active fire that shines in the heaven, and that they return thither when they are separated from the body by death. The same doctrine we find in the dream of Scipio: "It is from there," he says, speaking of the regions of the fixed stars, "that the souls descended, thereto they shall return; they were emanated from those eternal fires we name stars. What ye call death is but a return to true life; the body is but a prison, in which the soul is momentarily chained. Death breaks her ties, and restores her to liberty, and to her true state of existence." From this pantheistic doctrine, it followed that man's soul is immortal though material. Upon this sort of immortality of our soul, the rulers built a system of punishment, called Metempsychosis, or transmigration of the souls. This system was so much the better adapted to the then received religion, that all the souls being simply different emanations from the same fire ether, the consequence was that all the souls were homogeneous, and differed only in appearance, and by the nature of the bodies to which the fire-principle, which composed their substance, united. Virgil said that the souls of all animals are an emanation of the fire ether, and that the difference of their operations on earth is to be ascribed only to the difference of vases, or organized bodies, which receive this substance; or, according to the words of Servius, the lesser or greater perfection of their operations is in ratio of the nature of the bodies. The Indians, among whom, even in our days, the system of Metempsychosis prevails, think that man's soul is absolutely of the same nature as that of other animals. They say that man is superior to them, not in his soul but in his body, whose organization is more perfect and more apt to receive the action of the great Being, viz., of the universe, than theirs are. They ground their opinion on the example of children and of old men, whose organs being too weak yet, or having been weakened, do not permit their senses to have the same activity which is displayed in a mature age.